York Town News
York members of IWCNE explore the history, charm of the Isles of Shoals
By Virginia L. Woodwell
Members of the International Women's Club of New England - almost half from the town of York - walked the footsteps of such historical figures as Capt. John Smith and Celia Thaxter as they toured the pathways and viewed the picturesque scenes from the past at the Isles of Shoals last week.
Photo by Virginia L. Woodwell
YORK - The International Women's Club of New England (IWCNE) exists in part to raise money for charities supportive of women and children.
But it also functions to provide its diverse membership with a companionable mix of cultural stimulation and fun, and it combines all these goals by staging a range of markedly different events across the year.
Last Thursday, Aug. 31, saw a novel one, a first, and one that neatly illustrated the meshing of the club's interests: a boat trip out to the Isles of Shoals with a picnic-luncheon layover at, and a guided tour of, Star Island.
A total of 14 IWCNE members participated, and a portion of the $40 that each kicked in for the trip represented a contribution to this year's IWCNE cause: Families First Health and Support Center of Portsmouth, N.H. Families First will be receiving a check for $5,000 from the IWCNE at the club's monthly luncheon meeting in January, and it's expected that two or three other charities still to be determined will also receive substantial cash gifts at that time, in amounts dependent upon the total raised by the club by the end of the year.
Other major IWCNE fund-raisers have included a recent yard sale, a fashion show held annually in April and a holiday bazaar, held annually just before Christmas. Additionally, the club sponsors home-based pot-luck dinners, restaurant luncheons held once each month with speakers, as well as mini-clubs for members interested in book discussions, or in speaking German, French or Italian.
Among those present for the Shoals trip was the club's current president, Lucille Gentsch, now in her second term. Gentsch is from Cape Porpoise, but almost half those present on Thursday were from York - a reminder that the club's founder, Anna Kristina Sawtelle, is a York resident, and that, though membership draws widely from southern Maine and beyond, IWCNE connections to York remain strong.
On Thursday, there happened to be another tie to the town. The 38-foot boat that carried the IWCNE members out to the Shoals formerly belonged to York resident Herb Poole, who used it to take clients on fishing charters out of York Harbor. Known then as the Blackback, she's been rechristened the Uncle Oscar, and her new owner, Capt. Sue Reynolds, has moorings for her both in Rye Harbor, in N.H., and in Gosport Harbor, at the Isles of Shoals.
Participants met Reynolds and boarded her boat at Rye Harbor, where the distance out to the Shoals, at 5½ miles, is the shortest from any mainland port.
On the trip out, Reynolds told of her own background. Just retired, this past June, from 38 years of teaching seventh-graders, most recently in North Hampton, N.H., she's been around the New Hampshire Seacoast from the time she was a youngster. Some 19 years ago, when she found herself divorced and with a nine-year-old son, she began providing sailboat charters from Rye Harbor to Gosport Harbor as a means of keeping her moorings in both those places. She also taught school, and she worked as a naturalist on a whalewatch boat.
When it was time for her son to go to college, she sold the sailboat and bought Poole's boat. On it, she now provides one-hour "lobster trips," in which she demonstrates lobstering while speaking to related subjects, as well as two- and three-hour Shoals tours, and Shoals charters.
Her son Pete is now 28, a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, and the owner and operator of his own 58-foot, 100-passenger boat. On it, he provides whalewatch trips out of Rye Harbor. His outfit, headquartered at the harbor near his mother's harbor site, is called Granite State Whalewatch.
Operating Reynolds' boat on Thursday, and delivering the on-board commentary, was a young man introduced only as Max. Max, 19, Reynolds said, had been with her on the job since he'd been her student in seventh grade. He had just earned his captain's license - 19 being the youngest age at which one can have it - and that day, she added, would be his last with her, for he would next be joining American Cruise Lines as a first mate, to serve on the Maine coast with them, and then head south with the line for the winter.
Aboard and underway, Max ably delivered appropriate running commentary about the scenery being passed:
Rye Harbor, once just a marsh, was man-made to serve fisherman as a W.P.A. project in the 1930s; granite blocks were stretched across its front to serve as a breakwater.
There are nine Isles of Shoals, the state line running among them, putting five in Maine and four in New Hampshire; Duck Island served as a target for bombing in the '50s and '60s but now is a nesting site for seals, among other creatures; Appledore, with 96 acres, is the largest, and there the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University maintain a laboratory and offer classes in marine biology; Appledore was once the site of a grand 19th-century hotel called Appledore House, founded by one Thomas Laighton, who came to the isles first as keeper of the White Island Light; his hotel became a big draw for summer visitors, including those of such eminence as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franklin Pierce, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Greenleaf Whittier; Thomas Laighton's wife cooked there, to great appreciation; their daughter, Celia, married her tutor, Levi Lincoln Thaxter, and became a literary eminence as a poet in her own right; one of her two brothers, Oscar Laighton, became the colorful Shoals figure universally known there as the "Uncle Oscar" for whom Sue Reynolds named her boat; he lived to be 99 years and nine months old.
On Star Island, where the Uncle Oscar docked at a long wharf under the brow of another huge and still-extant Victorian hotel, with countless old rocking chairs lined up behind the railing of its endless porch, Reynolds led the group on a foot tour and provided the commentary herself.
The tour led past the hotel, now owned - with the island - and run as a conference and education center by the Star Island Corporation affiliated with the Unitarian-Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, to the scene of what once was the village of Gosport, home to 1,200 souls in its fishing heyday.
The "shoals" in the islands' name, said Reynolds, referred not to reefs but to the "shoaling," or surfacing, of fish once abundant there.
Two houses remain from the 1700s, and are still occupied, and a replica of a stile in a wall reveals what once was a line between village and animal pasture.
Among the most prominent buildings on the island, a granite chapel, sparse and simple, erected in 1800 on its highest point, where two earlier ones, one built of a shipwreck's timbers, had stood. Nearby, other small, simple, stone buildings have been placed to replicate an English village, but they date, Reynolds said, from 1900, and from the 1950s and 1980s.
One serves as a museum in which the Laightons and Celia Thaxter figure prominently. Her home and famed garden were actually on the Shoals island Smuttynose.
In the distance, toward the island's west shore, a large granite obelisk memorializes an 18th-century island minister; another monument commemorates Capt. John Smith, who came to these islands in 1614 and named them, in his own map of the eastern seaboard, "Smith's Isles."
A last stop on the winding path of the walking tour: a freshwater, spring-fed pond that once provided ice to residents. Nearby, and now converted to another use, an icehouse.
On the voyage home, Max pointed out the Shoals' only lighthouse, White Island Light, which Reynolds has had a big hand in salvaging. She motivated her seventh-graders to adopt it as a project, and they and she are now halfway along in a multi-thousand-dollar project begun in the year 2000 to bring it back from disrepair.
Reynolds and her students' effort and success have garnered national attention. For more information, go to www.lighthousekids.org.
Disembarking, the IWCNE participants dubbed the trip "fantastic," and began making plans to repeat it next year.
