Historical Features of the Ovens Mouth Preserve

Out of Our Past

Boothbay Region Historical Society

Barbara Rumsey

The following appeared in the Boothbay Register on January 16, 2003.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

I have two favorite land trust properties. One is the Porter Preserve on Barters Island, acquired in 1983, and the other is the Ovens Mouth Preserve, acquired in 1994, both accessible to all comers. While I've written about the watery part of Ovens Mouth, I haven't written about the land bordering it, which of course doesn't change twice a day the way the water does. The land on the east side of the up-jutting Boothbay peninsula is called Dover and is bordered by Ovens Mouth River on the east. The west side is called Back River bordered by the Sheepscot's Back River. Uppermost Dover is the subject here.

The Cellar Hole

The principal historic feature of the land trust property is a house foundation—it's south back about a quarter mile from the water. The first known occupant of the land was Nathaniel Lampson. His land ownership and a house shown on the 1772 map place him just where the current cellarhole is. However, his house was log in 1771—not the structure that was there in living memory, which, being timber-framed, predated the 1840s. 1790s? 1810s? 1820s? The disappearance of many of the town's early valuation records prevents a good guess at its construction date.

In 1791 Lampson sold his parcel to Benjamin Hutchins, a member of a family who owned land in Boothbay first in the 1780s. If you lived up at Dover, you generally married Tibbettses (as did the Lampsons), and that's what Benjamin Hutchins did in 1779.

By 1813 Benjamin and his wife Abigail were evidently feeling their ages. They gave their 21-year-old son John their land in return for, as long as both or one of them should live: "10 bushels good rye, wheat, or barley; 15 bushels good Indian corn; 200 weight good pork; 200 weight good beef; 5 pounds good souchong tea; 20 pounds good coffee; 100 weight good brown sugar; 10 gallons molasses; 50 weight butter; 2 bushels bean; 20 bushels potatoes; during the summer a competency of green sauce, such as beans, peas, carrots, cabbage, etc, and $10 cash."

It sure sounds like a lot to me, and John bowed under the pressure. By 1821, the deal was off and the homestead was sold to 20-year-old son Frederick instead. Benjamin was dead by 1828, drowned while warping a vessel into Ovens Mouth.

The Hutchins family farmed the land, a lifestyle that was the way for most region families until nearly 1900—doing for themselves. Usually the Hutchinses had half a dozen cattle, oxen (the tractor of that day), sheep, and pigs. Since water was hauled by hand in buckets, the well was fairly nearby, about 200 feet southeast of the house.

The Hutchins House into the 20th Century

The Hutchinses sold most of the land in 1865 and it soon went to Tibbettses, and then Welshes. Remember I said that if you lived at Dover you married Tibbettses? That's just what the Welsh family, who lived at Dover, did. In the early 1990s John Welsh III, a past historical society trustee and past land trust director who recently died, described the Hutchins land use, "By World War I, brother Preston had come into the land and he worked at restoring it to how it had been. Preston liked farm life and he eventually ran the farm at the correctional institution in Windham. He left there much later, running the Welsh store at the Center."

When Frederick Hutchins sold the big piece, he did keep back a three-acre houselot, including the current cellarhole, until 1877. Then the house and its lot went to Enoch Stover Jr. In 1910 Stover deeded the houselot to Frank P. Dow, who deeded it to Preston F. Welsh in 1927. The Hutchins house was used as a farm outbuilding by the Welshes for hay storage and so on.

The Welshes Recycle the House

The house was probably dismantled soon after 1927, its lumber recycled for the Dover Road Welsh farm. John's nephew Bill Welsh, also a past land trust director, wrote me in February 2002: "My Uncle John said that when the house was dismantled the lumber went to build the ice house that was attached to the north side of the barn and sheds at our Welsh farm. You could access the ice without having to go outside in the winters--most of it was used in a walk-in cooler in the shed just off the kitchen where the milk was cooled, separated, and they made butter, etc. I can recall that every evening after the supper dishes were finished the cream, milk bottles and separator parts had to be washed and sterilized in the kitchen . . . some production.

The ice house was a large structure, double walled with sawdust inside the walls for insulation. My grandfather John II had about a dozen dairy cows and ran a small dairy so there was a need for a large quantity of ice. Of course the ice house, barn and sheds were lost in the 1950s fire. John III said he bemoaned the loss of the interior wood from the Hutchins house since it was such fine panelling."

The Dam and Ice Pond

North to the water from the house foundation is Ovens Mouth. Located there is the other most obvious historical feature on the property, a stone dam. It was constructed in late 1879 by nephew Giles Tibbetts and uncle William Decker (Welsh relatives of course!) to impound fresh water for an ice pond. Refrigeration was ice in the 1800s, and there was a big business in cutting ice off lakes and ponds, storing it in insulated buildings, and shipping it south in coasting schooners. Tibbetts & Decker built an ice house beside the 12-acre pond and a wharf that had deep water to 24 feet at any tide.

The height of the ice boom in Boothbay took place in 1880. In 1882 Tibbetts & Decker formed or joined a corporate entity in Boston, the Oriental Ice Company, and deeded the dam and pond and rights to build and maintain the iceworks. They, being the only corporate members in 1886, dissolved the corporate interest, and took back individually the dam and pond they'd deeded. The larger ice companies quickly drove the smaller ones out of business, and if icecutting continued at Ovens Mouth past the 1880s, it would have been for local consumption. The strong currents and tight quarters in Ovens Mouth might also have been a discouraging aspect of the location. The Boothbay records show that the ice company was a taxable entity from 1880 to 1888, but at a minimal amount from 1886.

When you visit Ovens Mouth Preserve, watch for the cellar hole and ice dam and move back a century or two for a moment.

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