August in Cotuit: Week One

The girls and I are spending the month of August in Cotuit. Sam will be here on and off, and Chris will come on weekends until our family vacation at the end of the month. This summer our house is much more organized and we have some (not all!) of the kinks worked out.

This week we have some friends of mine visiting from Washington DC. My friend, Joey, is in historic preservation as a profession, and she and I spent a good part of the day yesterday trying to get a better understanding of the history of our house. She crawled around many corners of the old part of the house with a flashlight looked for hand-sawn boards, hand made nails and other hardware that would help her date the oldest parts of the house. She found clues that would put the oldest areas between roughly 1860 and 1880 which is consistent with what I have been told. We also did a lot of research on line, looking for information about the property and the Lowell family that originally owned our land and the adjacent property. The house began as a one-room fishing shack built from part of a shipwrecked schooner. This is why the house has been known as the "caboose," a name used for part of a ship, often the galley area. The shack was eventually expanded into a few rooms before the turn of the century, and used by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the son-in-law of the family who owned the large property at the end of our road. He used what is now our "little living room" as his study. Abbott Lawrence Lowell was the president of Harvard Univerisity from 1909 to 1933. While he was responsibile for implementing many positive changes for the university, he was described on line as anti-semetic, racist and homophobic. Thankfully, these are views NOT shared by the current occupants of the house! Joey and I also figured out by looking at hardware and windows how the house was added to between in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and then again the big addition in 1960. It was really fun sleuthing, and I have more work to do at the Cotuit historical society this summer.

Yesterday, we visited Sandwich and a lovely boardwalk that crosses the salt marshes to one of the beaches in Sandwich. Sandwich is the oldest colonial settlement on the Cape and it is a gorgeous town. Here are some photos of the girls:







This last one of Edie is so pretty. I had to crop out Gemma, however, because she insisted on sticking her finger up her nose for the majority of this series of photos. She is a dainty little thing, our Gemma...