The McDonnell Family

A History of the Plum Island Beach House

The beach house at Plum Island has been an important part in our lives, so I thought you might like to know how the whole thing came about.

How It All Started

About 1935 or 1936, before I met your mother, I was one of a group of young blades who rented a cottage at the northern end of Plum Island for a couple of weeks.

It was a two apartment house situated on the basin and the other apartment was rented by a family with six kids from Dorchester. We became friendly with the family played ball with the kids, and in return the mother sent in a kettle of fish chowder for our group.

When it was over I had memories of a splendid vacation and began to realize that Plum Island was a great place to raise a family.

So the germ of the Plum Island idea was born.

When your mother and I decided to get married, we immediately began to think about where we would live. I had a dread of living on the top floor in a hot, crummy apartment in Haverhill during the summer months of July and August. So I began to consider other options.

One Sunday afternoon in April or May of 1941, your mother and I took a ride to the Island and as we came to the center, there was Ira Webster, the Newburyport milkman with a real estate sign near his car. We asked what he had for sale and he took us to the Columbia cottage at the corner of 24^th St.

It was completely boarded up, cold and dreary inside and rundown, but I became so intoxicated with the idea of having a place of our own that I fell in love with it.

The price was $1,000, which seemed like an enormous amount of money in those days.

We talked it over. I borrowed $400 from my mother and we arranged a mortgage for $600 from the Institution for Savings at 5% interest. On May 24, 1941, I became the owner of the cottage. The title of the house couldn’t be put into both our names because we weren’t married until June 7^th.

Bessie and I didn’t get a good look at what we had bought until we returned from our honeymoon and began to live in the house. Then we discovered its faults.

The kitchen sink was where it is now but it was an old black sink with a hand pump on the side to supply water. The drain was nothing but an ordinary gutter pipe, which emptied onto the sand under the house. After a week it began to sink.

There was a big, old, coal-burning stove in the kitchen and a small kerosene stove for cooking. We immediately threw out the kerosene stove and bought a three-burner gas plate, which we hooked up to a bottled gas tank. Between the sink and the dining room was a huge closet full of china with a swerving slot about where the door is today. The closet was full of old china and chamber pots; most of which we threw out. I’m sure that some of these would be of value today as antiques.

On both sides of the house was a run-down piazza but on the basin side was a beautiful screened-in porch complete with hammock. The porch was a foot wider than it is today and it was the big screened in porch that sold us on the place.

On the south side, the porch ran back to a two-stall garage, which faced the street. Where our bathroom is today, there was a window, which looked across the porch to the door of the back house.

The back house was a two-seater – smelly -- with storage space for shovels, rakes, etc.

The porch on the north side was so dilapidated that Barbara Cosio, then four years old, went through one of the floorboards and nearly hurt herself.

It was at this time that Frank Cosio came on the scene and helped us much more than we can ever repay. First, we tore down the porch on the northern side. Then we put in a metal septic tank from Sears so that we would have a place for the drainage from the sink. Then we took out the hand pump and installed an electric pump. But the well which was okay for the hand pump was not strong enough for the electric pump and we had to drive a new well. The china closet was torn down and the entire kitchen area opened up to give us more light.

It’s difficult to say when all this happened. It didn’t happen all at once. We tried to do a little each year but it was difficult because I went into the Navy on October 26, 1942 and wasn’t discharged until August 20, 1946. During the war there wasn’t much work done on the house.

I can’t say for sure when we got rid of the backhouse. It probably was about 1949 after I had been out of the Navy for a while and we had a chance to get on our feet.

While I was in the service, Ma rented the cottage to at least three families to give us a little income. One family paid $40 a week and, of course, that included the use of the backhouse. The little rent we received helped greatly.

For the record, our mortgage payments were $12.50 per quarter plus interest at 5%. This may not seem like a great sum today but between October 1942, when I went into the service, and October 1944, Ma was not able to pay anything on the principle??. We stayed above water by paying the interest only.

By 1954 the mortgage was paid, but by this time our family had grown and the cottage was becoming cramped.

So we borrowed another $1,000 from the Institution for Savings (also at 5%) and we used the money to tear down the old, screened porch that had become dangerous from being exposed to the weather. While we were repairing the porch, we built two bedrooms over it. Frank Cosio did the work and by buying lumber at marked-down prices and not charging us much for his labor we were able to do the complete job for $1,000.

In 1969 we hired Neal Wilson to panel the kitchen, dining room and living room, and later (probably 1970 or 1971) Demers Plate Glass installed the windows on the porch. At that time we again had to protect the porch from the weather. During the winter, snow and rain would accumulate on the open porch and the flooring had begun to rot again.

I decided that the windows were the perfect answer and that turned out to be correct.

In 1975 we moved the pump and the water pipes into the house and installed the wall furnace in the living room and the heater in the bathroom.

The chimney and the wood burning stove were installed in 1978 and about the same time Peter completed the very difficult task of insulating the underside of the house. That just about takes care of the improvements to this date (1981).

Past Owners

Now, for the previous owners of the house.

We bought the cottage from Edward H. and Catherine V. Burke of Newburyport. He was a disabled veteran of World War I, sickly and unable to keep up the payments on the house because of the Depression. They had purchased it from George and Bessie Moulton, also of Newburyport, sometime after 1937.

The Moultons had inherited the Columbia and also the Essex, the cottage in the rear now owned by the Nicolosi’s, from Samuel Brookings, who I believe was a relative of Mrs. Moulton. Brookings died in 1932 and the property was transferred on October 26, 1933.

Samuel Brookings was the Assistant Postmaster in Newburyport at least from 1884 until 1915.

In tracing the history of the cottage back further, I ran into trouble for on July 28, 1920, Samuel Brookings bought the land from the Plum Island Beach Co., but the deed specifically states that it does "not include the buildings thereon to which the grantee claims present title."

Evidently Brookings owned the buildings but leased the land. Years ago that’s the way things were sometimes done. Today in Hampton Beach, no one owns the land outright. It is all leased for 99 years. Brookings probably leased the land before he bought it in 1920.

Chi-Chi

So there you have it. A little bit of the history of the beach house. Looking back, I think I was right about one thing - Plum Island is a great place to raise a family.

William J. McDonnell, Jr.   1981 (circa)