https://lanecovehistory.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/history-of-lanes-cove.pptx
LCHA Blog
Local Efforts Make A Differance
During a time of political and racial division in America, where we’re divided into them vs. us, I’d like to acknowledge the community effort to restore the Little Shack at Lane’s Cove. Friends and neighbors, in cooperation with Gloucester City Officials, came together to restore the Little Shack. Those that participated came from different socioeconomic backgrounds with varying political views. Some were long time “Covers” others were relatively new to the Lanesville area. Regardless of our differences, we didn’t view ourselves as different or had a them vs. us mind set. We simply and brilliantly thought of ourselves as a group of like minded individuals doing something positive for the community. We had the mutual goals of historic preservation for future generations, respecting and recognizing past generations and adding to the beauty of Lane’s Cove.
Restoring a falling down fish shack isn’t an extraordinary accomplishment. We didn’t save any lives, we didn’t feed the poor, we didn’t receive national or local recognition for our effort. We did however, improve the backdrop of the Cove for current and future residents of Lanesville and visitors to the Cove. We also had a healthy and fun experience that brought us together as a community. An experience that strengthens us as a community and as individuals to better equip us agenst divisive influences.
Thank you to those of you that participated in this effort!
Dr. Phil
Dr. Phil Goldsmith, Director on the board of Lanes Cove Historical Association passed away on December 13, 2019. Dr. Phil contributed much to the Cape Ann community. In addition to his work with the LCHA he volunteered for the Thacher Island Association, at the Shalin liu performance center and other local organizations.
Phil was a kind, friendly gentleman loved and respected by those that had the pleasurer of knowing him. He had a wonderful sense of humor, a giving heart and contributed greatly to his community.
Rest in piece my friend. You will be greatly missed.
Lanes Cove Seawall Celebration
All summer the community watched as granite blocks were meticulously gathered around a concrete core to form the new sea wall at Lanes Cove. Amazingly this work was done with large excavating equipment that, to the average person would not be capable of producing such a precisely laid wall.
On December 14 a thank you lunch and reception were held to thank the Crew who did such a wonderful job at restoring the see wall. The community came togather to prepare a lobster and chowder lunch, followed by a public reception, music and community socializing. The celebration was a great success and very much appreciated by the crew and all those that turned out to thank them for their work.
In addition to the crew, the community recognizes and thanks Mike Hale (Director of Public Works) for his drive to make this project a reality. It’s very likely that the restoration project would not have happened without his leadership.
The Lanesville community also deserves recognition for caring about their community and those that help preserve it. Where else dose a community get together to recognize those that make public works efforts possible? Just another example as to why Lanesville is a unique, involved and captivating community!
Thank You To All That Volunteered For The Lanes Cove Clean-Up
The Lanes Cove Historical Society would like to thank the members of the community and Val Gillman (our Ward Council) for volunteering their time on Saturday May 12th for the Lanes Cove Spring clean-up. An impressive pile of trash was collected and kindly pick-up by city workers. We would also like to thank Mike Hale (Director of Public Works) for his support for this effort.
Attention Lanes Cove friends… Please join us at our monthly board meeting on Saturday December 2nd 2017 at 10:00. The meeting will be at the Fish Shack unless it is too cold. If the location is moved the board will post venue change on this site.
Damon Cummings
Brainy accomplishment trails Lanesville resident Damon Cummings like a wake behind a fast moving skiff. He studied at MIT in the 1950’s, delaying a cherished career in naval architecture because physics at that time was “too fun!” He went on to study in Delft, The Netherlands with legendary professor of naval architecture Laurens Troost. Cummings learned Dutch so that he could be a better friend to his classmates. He finished his academic career with a doctorate in naval architecture from MIT, after which he worked on destroyers and submarines as a specialist in sound and vibrations. Many around Gloucester know him as the man who runs the Club Sailing Team at Gloucester High School. He also officiates the Gloucester Dory Races. While at school in the Netherlands, he raced sail boats along the European coastline, and once sailed a 35’ sloop from Bermuda to Halifax.
This is the man who, with the rest of the quietly stellar Fish Shack crew, pounded nails into the renovating Fish Shack for two years of Saturdays This is the taker of minutes for the endless Fish Shack Building Committee meetings.
Cummings’ story is nautically and scientifically extraordinary, but I’ll make a full stop here and quote the Wikipedia post to which Cummings directed me about one quarter of the way into our interview:
USS Damon M. Cummings (DE-643) was a Buckley-class destroyer escort of the United States Navy, named in honor of Lieutenant Commander Damon M. Cummings (1910–42), who was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism on board USS San Francisco (CA-38) during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
Damon M. Cummings was launched on 18 April 1944 by Bethlehem Steel Co., San Francisco, California; sponsored by Mrs. D. M. Cummings; and commissioned on 29 June 1944, Lt.Cmdr. C. R. Millett, USNR, in command.
Clearing San Francisco on 8 September 1944 Damon M. Cummings escorted a convoy to Eniwetok and then sailed on to Port Purvis, Florida Island, arriving on 15 October. She served in the Solomons until 6 November, and on 19 November she arrived at Funafuti, Ellice Islands, from which she patrolled shipping lanes until 2 January 1945.
She escorted convoys in the battle of Okinawa, and remained there on patrol until the end of the war.
Many Gloucester residents know the tragedy that lies between the lines of this entry, that the Lanesville retired naval architect and pounder of Fish Shack nails was a first grader at the Punahou School when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and that the above Destroyer’s namesake was the Lanesville Cumming’s father.
There is so much to imagine here – how a young boy manages what was first the “excitement” of war; how his father is soon after heroically lost in a famous naval battle, how his mother almost simultaneously gave birth to her second child, and how the six-year-old Cummings absorbed the loss of his father and courage of his mother to go on. How his father was then reincarnated as a navy destroyer, going on to conduct significant war-time missions
Who knew such stories live in the imagination of a man who helped build the Lane’s Cove Fish Shack?
When I asked Cummings what were his favorite and least favorite moments about working on the Fish Shack, he said he didn’t know where to start with the favorites, but mostly it was working with the people. His least favorite, he said, of course, was losing Paul.
From his father’s loss in the Pacific Ocean, to an early determination to build sea-traveling vessels as a naval architect, to teaching high-schoolers to sail, Cummings’ heart seems filled with sea water. He and I talked about his civic involvement over the years, saving sections of Gloucester’s waterfront from poor development. The proposed development off of Rt. 128 came up, to which he answered, “If it’s not on the water I just can’t work up the enthusiasm to do something about it.”
Luckily, the Fish Shack’s northwest feet stand in six feet of seawater at a high tide.
By Heather Atwood
History Lessons
WANTED! – a photo of Lanesville resident Harry Lewis Johnson, born October 2, 1894, died February 26, 1982. Unmarried. Parents, Lewis and Sverina Johnson, immigrated to Lanesville from Sweden. At twenty-two years old, Harry Lewis Johnson registered for the World War I draft. He later worked at United Shoe in Beverly. His Lanesville address was 10 Viking St.
Harry Lewis Johnson was the last known owner of the recently restored Lane’s Cove Fish Shack.
The Lane’s Cove Historical Association is doing research. The ultimate goal in this chase is to understand who built The Shack and when, but any news about the Fish Shack is welcome. We know that Harry Johnson owned it last, and we’d love to see what he looked like.
Quarrying in the Lanesville woods, the Pier Company, in the late 1840’s, purchased much of the Lane’s Cove land from private families like the Haradens, the Sargents, and the Youngs. The Haraden family, one of the oldest in Lanesville, originally came from Annisquam. (Edward Haraden is registered living in the southern village in the 1600’s.)
According to LCHA president Russell Hobbs, Nathaniel Haraden and his brother Jonathan, in 1844, agreed to sell their land to the Pier Company with the caveat that the company build them
“the whole string of wall from the Gate to the bars near the Cove.” (Hobbs has copies of this deed.) Is that stone wall the one running along the hill above the cove or is it a version of a seawall? – No one knows.
The land in Lane’s Cove, after the mid 1800’s was therefore owned by the Pier Company, but the fishermen of Lane’s Cove – families who had been fishing there since the William Young and John Woodbury left the English Dorchester Company in Gloucester in 1623 and headed north – weren’t letting the Pier Company interfere with what they had been doing for two hundred years; the Lane’s Cove fishermen were the owners and occupants of the fish houses that once densely lined the northern edge of Lane’s Cove. They owned the shacks and The Pier Company owned the land upon which the shacks stood. As needs changed into the 20th century, these fishermen sold or moved their shacks to backyards all over Cape Ann. Many of the shingled wooden sheds you see in Lanesville backyards were once Lane’s Cove fish shacks.
President Russell Hobbs has already spent cumulatively weeks at the Salem Registry of Deeds and the Gloucester Archives. His copy of Barbara Erkkila’s History of Lane’s Cove is studded with post-its. His broad dining room table serves as a place holder for acres of old photos, older maps, deeds, and a hefty crate of files.
The oldest photograph of the Fish Shack dates to about 1880, well after the Pier Company was up and running. The Pier Company records, still to be carefully examined by the LCHA
subcommittee, definitely include discussions of multiple Lane’s Cove fish shacks. Was our Fish Shack part of these discussions? Was it therefore part of the original 1844 Haraden sale of Lane’s Cove land to the Pier Company? Is the Shack older than 1844? Was it ever rebuilt? (Hobbs believes it was.)
The Lane’s Cove Historical Association – historical sub-committee is on it. Watch this space for answers!
By Heather Atwood
Tireless Fish Shack Fundraiser
In some ways, Barb Jobe is best licensed to be a member of the Fish Shack Building Committee; she has been looking out her living room window at the Fish Shack for most of her life. Her parents moved into the solid gray house on Duley St. when Barb was three years old. She married, and moved 1.2 miles away to Quarry St., but then returned to the Fish Shack view to care for her mother in 1962. Barb has been looking out her picture window to all of Lanescove, punctuated on the right by the Shack, ever since.
(In the blizzard of ’78, she and her husband watched a cottage, seized by the roaring seas of that storm, bob in the cove like a lobster pot. The Fish Shack stood fast.)
But Barb’s authority extends far beyond her view: For two years she joined the Fish Shack crew every Saturday morning, her camera ready to document both the fun and the labor. Some winter days she had to pack six camera batteries; it was so cold the batteries froze, but the men kept working. Barb remembers Martin Ray shingling all day in frigid temperatures.
For two years Barb made sure the crew was not just fed, but well fed, soliciting lunches from supportive cooks. Carol Hong’s lamb stew is still famous among them; Brian Church’s seafood chowder is runner-up.
With Arnie Shore, Barb has been the tireless Fish Shack fundraiser, organizing silent auctions and art auctions to raise funds to rebuild the Shack, and that’s just he beginning. She still kindly marvels at the community’s generosity.
Of the Fish Shack project, Jobe has nothing but joy to report.
“We had more laughs than any other committee on earth; people had to close their doors because we were so loud! (And we had to have our doors open because it was an open meeting!)”
Jobe now sits with just pride on the executive board as treasurer of the Lanes Cove Historical Association. More importantly, she sits by her window and looks at the shining new Fish Shack everyday.
“Just about 3:00 in the winter it glows,” Jobe said of the Shack, with its young unweathered cedar shakes. Soon after that conversation I was driving through Lanesville around 3:30, and caught site of a golden box down the hill. The sun was low behind the trees to the left of the breakwater, and the Fish Shack caught every warm ray, shining like a prism on the edge of the harbor.
By Heather Atwood
Winter Cove
Snow blocks the entrance to the fish shack; lobster pots are relegated to sit in wintery piles on the pier and an icy coating holds the jetties in their frozen posture against the harsh northwesterly wind. Lane’s cove is a place of much noted summertime beauty. But the summertime beauty gives way to the contrasting elegance of the winter cove. The winter cove has a striking visual beauty contained in the accompanying photographs but it also has an unspoken inspirational beauty that provides the endurance not only to make it through a harsh, costal New England winter but to thrive. There’s a part of me that’s looking forward to red summer sunsets, kayaking on the calm sea and hearing the neighborhood children diving and swimming in the cove. But when sitting by the warm wood fire with the winter cove as a background, I’m happy to let the summer take its time returning. 
Lane’s Cove Historical Association, Inc. 