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ing of the Gloucester Branch of the Eastern Railroad in 1847, gave new facilities, and now the Gloucester directory includes a long list of prominent houses engaged in the fish trade, houses which fit out each year a number of stanch little vessels. The valuable and

Rev. John Murray.

comparatively safe and comfortable mackerel fishery followed the shore fishery for cod; and bank fishing for halibut has succeeded to a position of importance and of profit. The constant shifting of fishing grounds makes the industry a changeable one; but the undaunted Cape Ann spirit faces every change with unfailing resource, and at times it has even been proposed to try the distant Norwegian. coast in the search for profitable finny crops.

There has been a noteworthy development in fishing vessels, and the ancient banker shows a striking contrast to the beautiful schooners now building or recently put in commission, vessels which in lines and spars and rig bear favorable comparison with the finest yachts afloat. They are stanch, fast, seaworthy, and handsome. They are larger than the older craft, running in the neighborhood of one hundred tons and carrying from fifteen to eighteen men. A large major ity of the 481 vessels (average tonnage 67.03) registered in the Gloucester district were built in the little town of Essex, while some were built in Gloucester, and several on the Maine coast. An outfitting establishment is a marvel

lous collection of stores and supplies of all kinds, and a wharf is a busy place when vessels are going out or have come in with their fare.

The granite business, the second industry of the Cape, was first developed for purposes of trade at Sandy Bay, in 1824. The business was of gradual but steady growth from that time, and now the constant succession of quarries of all sizes, with shipping wharves wherever available, are a noteworthy part of the panorama of the shore from Bay View to Rockport. Scotch and Irish workers are largely employed in the quarries, while in the fisheries, Portuguese and Scandinavians, with many from the maritime provinces of Canada, are in a majority. The population of the Cape thus becomes curiously cosmopolitan, numerous nationalities being more or less represented on the Gloucester vessels, in addition to those mentioned.

The newspaper press, unhampered and patriotic, is justly recognized as a great factor in the intellectual and material progress of this country. As regards its

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Gloucester Daily Times, published by Procter Bros., and the Cape Ann Evening Breeze, published by the Cape Ann Printing Co., Sidney F. Haskell, manager. These papers maintain a high standard of morals and general excellence, and constitute an important agency in advancing the best interests of the community.

Gloucester's first permanent grammar school was opened in 1711. The schools of the town and city, since the incorporation of the latter in 1873, have always been well supported and cared for, and show a remarkably good record of attendance and work. Indeed, this old fishing town, suffering as it always has from losses and misfortune, never wealthy, has yet shown an intelligent ideal of life, a respect for knowledge and its benefits, and a liberal willingness to advance in every way the cause of knowledge, which reflects the highest credit upon its people. Few places, even with much greater apparent advantages, can show better public schools or a more diligent cultivation of private and voluntary means for culture and improvement.

Like all the old seaport towns along the New England coast, Gloucester possesses a quaintness and individuality which are its great attraction. There is an indescribable likeableness about the old town. Circling its harbor are the numerrous fish wharves, with their flakes, their storehouses, and their vessels outfitting or unloading. Climbing irregularly over the rocks and about the hills are ancient highways, or narrow, crooked lanes, with houses touched with age, some large, some small and suggestive of the presence of the little family of some absent fisherman; possibly of one who will never return, for we are in the city of the fatherless now, and each season adds to the list of orphaned children and widowed wives. Here and there newer streets and broader spaces greet the eye, and on the heights

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A Bit of Annisquam.

at the western side of the city, fine residences, with airy piazzas and fair outlooks, mark a residence section of modern growth. Gloucester is a port of entry, and the custom house is in the brick government building on Main Street. Near the heart of the city are three notable public buildings, the City Hall, with the Soldiers' Monument in its handsome grounds; the fine new High School building; and the Sawyer Free Library, which occupies a large house, originally a private residence. This library, which has been largely aided and endowed by the munificence of Samuel E. Sawyer of Boston, formerly of Gloucester, is a valuable and growing institution, which has been made forever free to the inhabitants of the town. grew out of the Gloucester Lyceum, established in 1830, the successor of the Gloucester Social Library, an association organized in 1796, which lost its collection of books by fire, in 1830. The Sawyer Library now has above ten thousand well-chosen volumes, is intelligently

Gate-House, Eastern Point, Gloucester.

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managed, and when its large funds are available will be a power in the culture of the city. There is another institution for the advancement of culture and knowledge, that deserves especial mention, the Cape Ann Literary and Scientific Society. This society has rooms, with an excellent cabinet ; provides classes in various branches; maintains regular lecture courses, and a choral society; and is altogether the centre of considerable intellectual activity and the source of much good. Organized in 1875, this society may fairly be considered an established institution, and the high order and earnest purpose of its work justify its existence. There is also a prosperous horticultural society.

To turn again from the intellectual activities of Gloucester to its winding ways, we may go to the eastward to the picturesque Bass Rocks, with their great hotel, or through the fishing hamlet of East Gloucester to Eastern Point, where beyond an attractive gate lodge are extensive drives and beautiful summer homes amid the woods and rocks of this point, that with its lighthouse guards the eastern side of Gloucester Harbor, "the beautiful harbor" that Champlain saw and admired nearly three centuries ago. There is sailing out at morning and in at evening, parties going out for pleasure in small sloops, or schooners containing men bound far away from land, men whose lives are in their work. Of the treacherous catboat, so common waters from Newport south, we see few about Gloucester. The rig finds little favor, even for pleasure sailing, on this bluff, exposed coast.

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attracted poet and painter. Off Magnolia shore is the "cruel rock" of Norman's Woe, which Longfellow has made classic in "The Wreck of the Hesperus." The road to Gloucester lies through the sweet fragrance of Magnolia woods, and may perhaps suggest to us what the Cape may have been when the early discoverers found it, wooded with various trees. Magnolia derives its name from a rare variety of that beautiful flower, which is found only in West Gloucester. Indeed the Cape region is rich in the variety and beauty of its flowers.

Something has already been said of the geologic character of the Cape. It is the extreme projection of a ridge of syenitic rock, skirting the coast from Dedham in a northeasterly direction and running into the sea at Cape Ann, where it makes a sharp descent to deep water. The granite mass which forms the body of the ridge is here ribbed with dikes of diabase and quartz porphyry, worn and rubbed into strange forms by the powerful action of the great glacier which moved across it in the far distant ice age, and overlaid with extensive deposits of boulders and smaller rocks brought by the same tremendous agency. Striking into deep water so near the shore line as it does, the Cape has been peculiarly subject also to wave action. Its rocky shore is broken by little coves and frequent little beaches of sand and pebbles, presenting a continually varied panorama to the eye as one skirts the Cape. Across Annisquam Harbor are the broad silver reaches or Coffin's Beach, with its monumental sand dunes, standing in the landscape like some great monument, massive and fair. From the hamlet of Bay View, on the northwestern shore, around to Rockport, is a constant succession of granite quarries, large and small, and shipping wharves. From its rocks and hills, Pigeon Cove looks out over the broad Atlantic, that rolls in with all its majestic power upon the curious benching of the shore. The pleasant village of Rockport looks down on Sandy Bay, off the southern point of which lies Straitsmouth Island with its brilliant light. Rockport, including Pigeon Cove, became a town in 1840, when it was set off from Gloucester, and

it now has a population of over four thousand, does a thriving granite business and some fishing business, and shows the characteristics of an intelligent community which might be expected of a daughter of old Gloucester.

South of Straitsmouth, east of Long Beach, and marked by its unmistakable twin lights at night from almost any point on the eastern or southern coast of the cape, lies Thatcher's Island, celebrated for the tragedy which its name to this day recalls. It is the largest of the islands off the cape, the middle of the Three Turks' Heads of John Smith. Its name comes down to us from 1635, when Anthony Thatcher and the Rev. John Avery, with their families, sailing from Newbury to Marblehead at what seemed the call of duty, were wrecked off this island, which then bore no warning lights, in a terrible storm, and all but Thatcher and his wife were lost. In the curious narrative which Thatcher has left to us

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The ear of God was open to his servant's last request;

As the strong wave swept him downward, the sweet hymn upward pressed,

And the soul of Father Avery went singing to its rest."

The island still bears the name of Thatcher, though not "Thatcher's Woe," as he sadly entitled it; and near the south shore of the island lies the Rock of Avery's Fall, where the soul of Parson Avery "went singing to its rest."

As inevitable as it was that the dwellers on Cape Ann should go down to the sea and fish, or should open the vast deposits of granite that wealth might be gathered therefrom, so inevitable has it been that dwellers in cities should seek on the rocks of the Cape, within sound and sight of the great, cool, mysterious sea, that escape from dust and heat, that

rest for weary brain and nerve, that can be found in such a place. It is many years since men of brain sought Magnolia and East Gloucester and Annisquam and Pigeon Cove for the annual revival of mental and bodily vigor; and now, as the tide of summer travel to the North Shore rises to always greater height, Cape Ann receives continually more summer visitors and summer residents. Parks are being developed by enterprising companies, in which beautiful villas and comfortable hotels arise. This increasing cultivation and artificialization, if I may use the word, of the face of nature, may not be wholly pleasing to many of us; but on the Cape it has been done, in general, with good taste, and certainly those who take advantage of their means in this way can hardly be criticised for so rational and satisfactory use of wealth. Cape Ann is too near the populous centre of the Commonwealth to remain a wilderness; but its two enterprising municipalities have an opportunity which they should improve for adding to the health and beauty of their territory.

This opportunity has already been pointed out by Professor Shaler, on sanitary grounds. The suggestion is that the extensive interior lands of the Capecommonly known as Dogtown Commons

should be utilized for a reservoir, to be the source of water supply for the cape, and for a great public park. The City of Lynn, as already shown in this magazine, has availed itself of a similar opportunity in the utilization of extensive wooded land of rocky and uneven surface, waste lands so far as other purposes are concerned, with profit to the city. Gloucester and Rockport have a noble opportunity of the same kind. The settled portions of the cape are around its shore. The Commons, rocky, with an uneven surface; with excellent basins for a water supply, basins underlaid with solid bedrock; with hills furnishing fine observatory points, and all the features of a natural park and woodland; are in the heart of Cape Ann, touching all its settlements, and therefore an admirable delivery point for a water supply. What Lynn has done, these two communities can do at comparatively small expense

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