“‘I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!’
That’s how I threw cold water
on my Mother and Father’s
watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner.
. . . Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound. . . .”

Thus recalls Robert Lowell in “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow.” Lowell lived for a time in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a seaside town on the mainland shielded from the open Atlantic by the Elizabeth Islands and Martha’s Vineyard, on a blue harbor bobbing with catboats in Buzzards Bay. Summer residents and their guests can, and thankfully some still do, make a masterpiece of their Sabbath day. Following an early morning church service and walk along the pine path to the lighthouse, ride your bike into town for a game of tennis at the “Casino.” Hide from the midday sun on the porch with a book plucked blind from the shelf. Add a quick swim at the town beach, a sail and a cocktail on the bay before lowering the stars and stripes at sunset. You can look forward to fresh fish and corn on the cob before a night’s rest with the windows open wide to catch the seabreeze. In the Mattapoisett Casino Tennis Club hangs a poem from Andrew Oliver, the founder of St. Philip’s on the beach: “Oh for a bard to sing Mattapoisett’s praise, to love her in her fair and foulest phase, and to doubt not she’s the tomorrow of our yesterdays!”

It is painful to imagine Mattapoisett in the winter with her harbor stripped bare of boats and Elizabeth Stoddard’s “time stained houses of the sea-walled town” emptied of summer residents. But in yesteryears, the church auxiliary societies conspired to fill the town’s winter social calendar with dancing, whist, and book clubs. Society among residents was once so demanding that a townsman “proposed to organize a ‘home rest’ club, each member pledging himself to spend one evening a week at his own fireside.”

Mattapoisett is an old Indian word for “place of rest.” The moniker is well earned today, but the town was once the most famous whaling shipyard in the world. The hammers of the shipwrights had a “resonance that rang over the fields and woods for over a century, a sound so penetrating that woodsmen getting ship timber in the forest needed no watches to tell them when noon and suppertime had arrived,” writes local historian Charles S. Mendell, Jr. (There was no town clock but there were three ministers, each with a watch.) It was a sound so “all-pervading that old people still remember it as the dominant feature of Mattapoisett.” A local legend has it that a laborer applied to a master carpenter for a job in the shipyard and was asked to demonstrate his skill. The man stood barefoot on the edge of a wood beam, spread and curled his toes, and then swiftly from overhead brought his axe down between each of his toes. His skill was never again in doubt.

Whaling and shipbuilding were hard labor and harder business. The risk of loss due to pirates, storms, or navigation errors was enormous. Local churches often held services on board a whaling ship about to set sail. Short on circulating currency, all parties bartered. Shipbuilders typically bought long tracts of land that swept back from the harbor. They gathered timber from the forest further inland and farmed the open land nearer to shore. They added to their table and their income by fishing the plentiful herring shoals. They built iron works and evaporated salt. The last salt-maker continued until about the Civil War. During the war, most Mattapoisett whalers served in the Union navy.

Mattapoisett shipbuilders earned the highest esteem among whalers in Nantucket, Boston, Newport, Sag Harbor, and New York. Archelus Hammond scored the first whale in the Pacific. Mattapoisett ships sailed the salt trade route to North Africa and the wine trade routes to Italy and France. Some made it as far as the spice route to China. Most famously, in 1840, G. Barstow & Son built the whaling ship Acushnet, which carried Herman Melville on her maiden voyage.

Their surname once graced the old Barstow High School, recently remodeled into condominiums. A former Congregational meeting house, nineteenth-century schoolchildren were permitted to take their lunches and climb the ancient staircase to the belfry for a midday view of the sparkling harbor.

There was some controversy when Mattapoisett split from Rochester, but town politics retained the best of the New England spirit. One colonial politician succeeded in passing a law requiring all the men who owned swine to have their noses ringed. An amendment quickly followed making it clear that it applied to the animals, not the men.

These days Mattapoisett has a few extra full-time residents from Boston and New York due to the coronavirus. The winter of 1840–41 brought an epidemic to Mattapoisett, recorded in the diary of the Congregational minister Thomas Robbins:

Feb. 28. It is a solemn and distressing time with us. There were seventeen deaths in Mattapoisett in November and December; and in January and February the same number, seventeen.

Mar. 28. At evening had a meeting of prayer and humiliation in the meetinghouse in view of the divine judgments upon us. Oh that we may find help!

Town leaders were always interested in providing for the spiritual needs of the community. Congregationalists, Quakers, and Catholics each built places of worship. Prominent citizens spent significant time and money recruiting clergy from Boston to Mattapoisett, where they generally found a warm welcome. Two churches bid for one parson, who asked the advice of an Indian. He replied, “What are you going to preach for? If you are going to preach for money go where the most money is; if you are going to preach for souls go where the most devil is.” One minister, “Uncle” LeBaron, was beloved by all despite in his education having “never acquired the proper meaning of the word ‘finally,’ for Minister LeBaron having passed by his ‘fourteenthly’ or ‘fifteenthly’ used to then have a ‘lastly,’ a ‘finally,’ and a ‘to conclude,’ and the ‘to conclude’ was longer than all that had gone before.” Not all clergy succeeded. One Mr. Hovey enjoyed a brief pastorship and preached his final sermon sooner than he hoped. His farewell remarks disappointed “any children or youth who are rejoicing in the thoughts of their minister’s Departure in hopes they shall be under less restraint on Sabbath Days and other times.”

The eighteenth-century New England religious debate over church singing did not skip Mattapoisett. The issue was summarized by a writer in the New England Chronicle in 1717, “Truly I have a great jealousy that if we begin to sing by rule, the next thing will be to pray by rule and preach by rule and then comes popery.” Mattapoisett churches embraced the Bay Psalm book and moved on to the next debate on instruments in churches. Orchestral instruments appeared first, then the melodeon, and finally the pipe organ.

In 1843 Minister Robbins told his diary: “Read. Walked and visited. Mrs. Mayhew is in a distressed state. Puseyism makes bad work in England and perhaps will in this country.” First, pipe organs, then Puseyism, then popery? The Oxford Movement was washing ashore at Mattapoisett.

St. Philip’s Episcopal Church,  Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Photo: St. Philip’s Episcopal Church.

Founded in 1884, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church is marked with a sign announcing that it is “Free to All,” pairing High Church Anglo-Catholicism with an egalitarian spirit. The New York Churchman reported on its consecration: “The chapel was handsomely decorated by the ladies who make the town their home during the summer. . . .  The beauty of the day, with its delicious air, and the deep blue waters of Buzzards Bay within a stone’s throw of the chapel and on which at anchor rode several yachts, all contributed to make it one to be long recalled with much pleasure.”

The church fits at most two hundred people. St. Philip’s does not have high backed pew boxes, unlike many nearby Congregational meeting-houses, which sold box seats to raise funds. The founding rector—the Reverend Dr. Andrew Oliver—and his brother were among the first trustees. Oliver was a direct descendant of Samuel Seabury, the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in America. To avoid the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, Seabury traveled to Aberdeen, Scotland for his consecration as Bishop of Connecticut. The established church of Connecticut was Congregationalist, and when Oliver visited Yale there was some ecumenical friction. “The secretary, in something of a flurry, rushed to President Stiles and asked him if the Bishop should not have a place on the platform,” writes Dean Mendell. “‘We be all bishops here,’ he said grimly, ‘If a chair can be found Mister Seabury can sit on it.’”

Seabury fought for the Book of Common Prayer, and his descendent Dr. Oliver enjoyed the ascendency of the Oxford Movement at the Church of the Advent in Boston. One living parishioner describes her experience at St. Philip’s, nearly unchanged since the founding. “I particularly enjoy the 8 a.m. service which is traditional in form and substance, emphasizes brevity in sermons, permits no singing and does not exchange the ‘Peace’ . . . . I believe that even those who never attend gain comfort and strength from the presence of St. Philip’s in Mattapoisett.” The Actor Sam Waterston contributed to a fine history of the church in celebration of the quasquicentennial in 2009. “St. Philip’s remains a kind of seed-bank, preserving the code for a future time when these gentle social values may have a resurgence. It’s a physical reminder that they, and the sense of time required to find the pleasure in them, remain available and are as connected to the idea of living as sacrament, as baptism.”

John Henry Newman sailed on the wind of the Oxford Movement until he reached the edge of the Anglican world. He worried that those he left behind “cannot go on for ever standing on one leg, or sitting without a chair, or walking with their feet tied, or like Tityrus’s stags grazing in the air.” Neither can St. Philip’s and Mattapoisett go on forever sailing without wind, nor whaling without boats, nor drinking martinis without gin.

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