John Keenan pulled the door closed to his driftwood cottage at Black Rocks, descended the three steps, and turned slowly to follow the sandy lane away from his modest home. The retired mill laborer fixed his gaze on the uneven pathway, and tugged on the tattered brim of his flat cap, his fondest article of clothing and a nod to his Irish immigrant roots. In an effort to shield his body from the wind sweeping in from the direction of the ocean, he simultaneously raised his shoulders and tucked his chin into the shawl collar of his worn but heavy wool jacket, which hung a little more loosely on his body of late. The day’s weather wasn’t any colder than an average mid-December day, and he took little notice of the recent dusting of snow on the ground. But John Keenan, the “Black Rocks Hermit”, was feeling every one of his 84 years. Of late, too, a persistent, as yet undiagnosed pain was worrying him, and for that reason he resolved to visit Salisbury’s most trusted and beloved physician, the Reverend Dr. Jacob Spalding, at his hospital at Brown’s Park, off the town center.
Before setting off on foot, (it being off-season, the “electric” was not running between the jetty and the beach center,) John stopped in at his neighbor’s cottage to let him know that he was heading to the hospital. Carl Barck was a fisherman who also ran a ferry service between Plum Island, Black Rocks, and Newburyport’s downtown. He was a good neighbor to John, likewise an immigrant — in his case, from Sweden, and when several days had passed without signs of John’s return, he followed up with Dr. Spalding, only to learn that John had never arrived at the hospital. He alerted the public, resulting in an anxious appeal in the Newburyport Daily News, December 16, 1914.
“’Black Rocks Hermit’ Missing” headed the brief article that had intercepted my attention while browsing an archival edition of the Newburyport Daily News. Hmmm. . . interesting, I thought. I’m always fascinated by people’s stories, and the spareness of detail further fueled my curiosity. I instantly launched myself into research about my curious new subject, John Keenan, on two fronts: archival newspapers and genealogical platforms. As you can well imagine, someone dubbed a hermit is not going to give it up freely, so a good deal of my searching was marked by frustration. Most of John Keenan’s story can be supported by verifiable records; some is just me determining what is plausible and fleshing out the details, and some of it - when wide gaps are revealed - is sheer imagining.
One early take-away was that Keenan’s story closely resembled my ancestors’. Through federal census records, I learned (to the extent that one can “learn”, given the fluidity of the information supplied to, and recorded by, census takers) that Mr. Keenan immigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1845 at the age of fifteen. For those unfamiliar with patterns of Irish immigration, 1845 marked the first in a succession of devastating years that were collectively - and variously - called the Great Famine, The Potato Famine, and the Great Hunger. The recurring seasons of widespread blight of their staple food - the potato - caused unspeakable tragedy in the form of death, disease, and the famed Irish Diaspora. New York City, Boston, and Quebec were popular U.S. ports of entry during this time period, but in John Keenan's case I was unable to pin down precisely where he arrived.
Keenan had a child with Margaret Gill (likewise an Irish immigrant); their son James was born in 1857 in Lawrence. It wasn’t until 1863, however, that the couple married, and when James came of age, he joined his father as a textile mill worker. James, along with John’s sister-in-law, Ann Gill, were considered “fancy weavers”. (What is of interest from the historical angle is that there is good reason to believe that the family would have been “touched” – at least peripherally – by the widely-reported Pemberton Mill collapse and fire of 1860, a disaster that disproportionately impacted Irish immigrant mill workers of Lawrence. Coincidentally, my great-great grandfather had migrated to the “Immigrant City” at this very same point in time.)
Keenan was typical of so many up-river mill workers. They rented apartments close to the factories in which they worked, and genuinely lived for the one day a week that they could venture as a family down the river aboard a steamboat, disembark at the wharf at Black Rocks with thousands of other like-minded day-trippers, eager to while away the entire day close to the ocean, breathing in the sweet, fresh air, listening to the soothing sounds of the waves, and snacking contentedly from the picnic basket that they would have carefully prepared early in the day at home. It was a pronounced contrast with the toxic air they breathed in and the deafening sounds that battered their ears all week long inside the factory walls.
For a span of several decades in the latter half of the 1800’s, there was a welcoming attitude toward these visitors to Salisbury Beach on the part of the Beach Commoners, who held title to the entire area. The commoners’ interests at this point in time were not in opposition with the vacationers’. The former were interested in preserving their longstanding right to harvest salt marsh hay, and sell sand; the latter, to enjoy the June-to-September “season” at the beach, even if in their hopes of making more permanent arrangements, they were denied the option of actually purchasing lots. (The best that a cottager could wrangle was a lease option that was predictably renewed over and over.) However, as the end of the century drew near, the value of oceanfront property was trending skyward. Elsewhere along the New England coast, where “sweepage lots” had typically been under the ownership of Massachusetts Bay “commoners” dating back to the earliest years of settlement, most of the land by 1900 had been deeded over to private interests. Salisbury was one of the last communities to alter the common arrangement.
The occasional hammering together of cottages turned into the steady rush of construction in the last two decades of the 19th century. The attraction, too, felt by real estate developers desirous of acquiring title mirrored, in a way, the magnetic pull that the cottagers had felt, but the motivation couldn’t have been more incompatible. The two sides were thus unwittingly galloping along a collision course; the fallout would be tragic, at least for many of the Black Rocks cottagers.
Part II
In 1903, after quietly securing the approval of at least two-thirds of the beach commoners’ heirs (or at least the approval of two-thirds of the descendants he had succeeded in locating), Edward P. Shaw of Newburyport, one of that city’s darlings, engineered a constitutional “coup”; in other words, he succeeded – quite controversially – in having the state legislature alter the terms under which the “common” property at Salisbury Beach could be bought and sold. Many men had tried this before, but Shaw exhibited the requisite tenacity and convincing artfulness, thus setting the stage for a showdown. Rather than conclude that Shaw’s actions were motivated purely by greed – he was, after all, a shrewd and ambitious businessman, it is better to view his role in the broader context. Shaw had a vision for the Beach; in his mind’s eye, rather than discrete parties of visitors converging on our shores, whiling away the hours, and then vanishing without having really been a part of anything, he reflected on an alternative image. The Beach should be purposefully designed with a sense of cohesion and, importantly, permanence. The “common” arrangement that had been in effect since the Town’s inception in 1638 had always made such a notion difficult, if not impossible. Evidently, it had served the needs of the citizens for centuries. Changing preferences for land use, however, dictated a new way of looking at the space. The new arrangement, structured by Shaw, was called Salisbury Land & Improvement Company; Shaw, himself bought up several lots, placing some in his name, and many in his wife’s name.
Although it might seem a contradiction, E. P. Shaw’s vision was ruinously short-sighted. Between 1903 and 1910, an agreeable arrangement hummed along between cottagers, as lessees, and Shaw, as landowner. However, the esteemed Newburyport investor hadn’t limited his real estate acquisitions to shorefront property (for the sake of renting or leasing beach lots). He also had invested heavily in real estate positioned along high-traveled routes; his development of trolley lines throughout the region was significant, to say the least. When Shaw found himself overextended and filed for bankruptcy in 1909, his “Salisbury Land and Improvement Company” went into receivership.
The new landowners were not compassionate men. In fact, despite their intentions of addressing larger infrastructure needs, they showed a cold detachment where it concerned the cottagers, especially the ones occupying the south end of the beach. They – the south end cottagers – tended to be of the humbler sort, mostly mill workers, tradesmen and fishermen. Many were foreign immigrants; the principal country of origin was Ireland, with a lesser number having arrived here from Canada, and one – Carl Barck, Keenan’s closest neighbor – having immigrated from Sweden. The lease agreements that the south end cottagers had struck with Shaw were emblematic of hard-earned, yet fragile dreams. They instead viewed the machinations of the new landowners, the Salisbury Beach Associates, as an “unmitigated steal”. (Newburyport Daily News, Mar 6, 1912)
Who were the men behind the scurrilous Salisbury Beach Associates? They were three Lawrence men: Walter Coulson, lawyer; Portal Black, real estate dealer and mining company investor; and James Simpson, banker and investor. The three men had one thing in common – an unfaltering commitment to amassing wealth, and the biographical details of two of them – Coulson and Simpson – offer similar abstracts. They were contemporaries; they were both sons of immigrants, Coulson’s father having immigrated to Lawrence from Ireland, and Simpson’s father arrived here from Scotland. Both fathers ran highly successful and lucrative retail grocery businesses; it is conceivable that their paths crossed as a consequence of this commonality. Coulson and Simpson grew up in refined circumstances in which the families regularly retained young, single, female servants. Moreover, the parents placed an emphasis on higher education; as such, Coulson earned his law degree through Harvard University, while Simpson followed through on a university level engineering program. It would appear, then, that the lawyer and the banker were accustomed to some of life’s advantages.
Portal Black’s trajectory through life bore little resemblance to that of his SBA cohorts. A generation older than his business partners, he was just as ambitious, propelled by an acquisitive hunger; by the age of 30, he had amassed real estate holdings and a cozy sum of money, all on a mill operative’s earnings. Black progressed from mill operative to rooming house overseer to rooming house owner/landlord. The slow and steady pace that defined the early stages of his career path gave way to a more intensified (and reckless) pursuit of wealth, eventually placing him in the crosshairs of a grand jury indictment after he was accused by several stockholders of swindling them in a much-publicized mining company stock manipulation case in 1902.
One can’t help but feel exasperated with the harsh tactics of “The Three Associates”, as the SBA came to be known. Any reader of this particular chapter in my version of Salisbury’s history will note my personal bias. Indeed, as with so many David and Goliath stories, my sympathies are with the underdog, the downtrodden. While the real estate partners were being lavished with all kinds of praise by the press for their plans to “improve” Salisbury Beach (and later, even, Seabrook Beach), they were simultaneously re-writing leases for cottagers with impossible terms that were transparent efforts to evict them. If they seemed tone-deaf in the face of their lessees’ plights, that’s because their calculus left no room for compassion; it was business, not personal. And if they had had cause early in their lives to interact with people occupying society’s lower rungs, they were left unaffected by the experience. They had no understanding how arduous life was for some.
John Keenan was one of the few cottagers who emerged from the fray ostensibly unscathed. What he no doubt observed must have made his heart heavy. All around his cottage at Black Rocks, neighbors were being systematically squeezed by the new landlords. Those who either refused to surrender to the new terms or were financially unable to continue leasing found themselves in a most untenable predicament; if they couldn’t remove their cottages and personal possessions from their lot – and they mostly could not because at that point in time there were no roads upon the shifting sands, then the landowners would take possession. It wasn’t unheard of for an aggrieved evictee to set his cottage on fire before departing. There were also several cottagers who entered into mortgage agreements with the Salisbury Beach Associates, choosing to buy the land on which their cottages sat. For a significant number of them, it ended badly, as well, in the form of foreclosure. In at least one case, it is interesting to note, a long-term cottager used the courts to fight back. After being served with a breach of lease conditions, a Mrs. Sarah White was issued eviction orders by the landowners, the Salisbury Beach Associates, who proceeded to sell the lot to a Lowell interest. In Superior Court it was resolved (in March of 1916) that, while the landowners – new and old – may have had title to the land, they had no legal rights to the cottage. Damages were assessed, and it marked one of the few clear victories on the part of the cottagers.
Part III
How had John Keenan set himself apart from so many of his neighbors who found themselves in a no-win position? How had he escaped the eviction process? Without being able to positively assert, we can surmise that throughout his life he handled his earnings carefully, dutifully saving so that he could buy his cottage. It’s easy to read too much into the information that is provided to census takers, but it can’t be without some importance that on the part of the 1910 census where it indicates occupation, “carpenter” was crossed out, and the words “own income” were inserted. A rumor at the time was that John Keenan was a wealthy man. There may be validity to the claim. It’s also possible that this immigrant mill worker who succeeded in buying his own cottage, ultimately owning it outright – when so many of his neighbors with similar profiles failed the test, offered his fellow citizens an unrestrained opportunity to speculate wildly. Rather than draw the logical conclusion, that he earned a secure living and saved judiciously (because sometimes what appears to be the case, is just exactly that), their reasoning took them in a more imaginative and romanticized direction. They fancied an Ebenezer Scrooge-like character, steadily amassing a fortune, yet all the while living in a driftwood cottage (or “dugout”, as one journalist called it).
The brief mention in the Newburyport Daily News, dated December 16, 1914, that the “Black Rocks Hermit” was missing makes evident that although Keenan preferred his own company, his welfare was clearly on others’ minds. The article revealed that he hadn’t been well, and he let a neighbor know that he was setting out for Dr. Spalding’s hospital; with his whereabouts still undetermined for a week, he had everyone concerned. It’s quite plausible that Keenan, en route toward the center of town, changed his mind, preferring not to learn a bleak diagnosis. Instead, according to the Daily’s version of a happy ending a week later, Keenan re-appeared after having visited friends in Haverhill.
Three years later, it was reported once again that Keenan had gone missing. According to the Boston Globe, March 6, 1917, the ailing 87-year-old disappeared from Dr. Spalding’s Hospital, and was unaccounted for for three days. The search party, consisting of Dr. Spalding and Capt. Willard Charles of the Salisbury Beach Life Saving Station, fought their way across thigh-high drifts of snow to reach Keenan’s shack. You have to marvel at the fortitude, not to mention stubbornness, of a sick 87-year-old walking several miles through high snow drifts. I’m the first one to romanticize the details of someone’s life, but the Globe’s version of events struck me in a wry sort of way; in the article entitled “Aged Hermit Goes Back to Die by Sea”, Keenan’s departure from the hospital was described as “the longing for lost solitude and the call of the roaring breakers…”. Our hermit of Black Rocks survived his ordeal, but lost the greater battle, finally succumbing to “cancer of the face” in 1919.
Despite all the research that I conducted, I’m not really substantially closer to understanding how John Keenan came to be known as the Black Rocks hermit. The Pittsburgh Press (March 13, 1917) claimed, “So far as known, he has associated with no one for more than 40 years and has seldom spoken with anyone.” As I see it, he may have kept his own counsel, but he held a factory job as a laborer until his retirement, and in post-retirement worked part-time as a carpenter. Neither of those occupations seems compatible with a reclusive lifestyle. Moreover, for a time – while his wife was still alive, her sister was living with the family. His son, too, came to live with him at the Beach in his later years. My hypothesis is this: after John’s wife passed away, he moved from Lawrence to the Beach permanently. Finally, when his only son died from consumption in 1907, he was quite alone in the world. He did have grandchildren, but how active a role they had in his life I’ve been unable to suss out.
I’ve scrutinized the census records for the south end of Salisbury Beach for the decades just prior to and after the turn of the century. Even though it might appear to present inert data, there’s life behind the information; they’re beginnings of stories about families, neighbors, livelihoods. They tell of origins, arrivals, departures, those things that suggest transience or permanence or relationship building. They hint at larger actions – in this case, the controversial turning over of the Beach Common to real estate developers, and the dramatic consequences that that series of events would produce in the first two decades of the 20th century. In trying to solve the mystery of the “Black Rocks Hermit”, the man who went by the name of John Keenan, I may have failed in providing you – and myself – a satisfactory explanation for the moniker. I remain convinced that he was an ordinary man who kept most people at a safe distance. Along with countless other factory workers from upriver, from June to September, he felt that same magnetic pull to leave the city after a hard week of work, journeying down the Merrimac to profit from the cleansing air and waters at Black Rocks. Unlike the vast majority of his peers, Keenan was able to buy a piece of his heaven, and make it his permanent home. And if I’m not mistaken in my calculations, he most likely preferred the winter months.
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