By BILL HOUGH
“I come to Cape Cod to spend my vacation because of all places within my knowledge it is the most comfortable and convenient. So far as my location is concerned, extreme summer heat is unknown. Boating and bathing are all that could possibly be desired and the drives about me are full of interest. The fishing, which to me is a most important consideration, is excellent. All manner of sea fishing is here at hand and when one tires of that he has but to turn his back to the sea and within easy reach are numerous fresh water ponds where all sorts of fresh water fishing is to be had. I like my residence, too, because my neighbors are of that independent sort who are not obtrusively curious. I have but to behave myself and pay my taxes to be treated like any other citizen of the United States.”
So wrote President Cleveland of his summer home in Bourne.
He was between presidencies, having served from 1884 to 1888, when he lost re-election to Benjamin Harrison. In 1891 he bought a home from Horace Crowell of Boston at what was then called Monument Neck where the Monument River emptied into Buzzards Bay. A newspaper in 1898 described it as “a desolate tract of land on Buzzards Bay,” but acknowledged that later, when the economic boom came, “Buzzards Bay has come into prominence as one of the choicest localities on the Atlantic coast for summer homes.”
The newspaper reporter probably had it a bit wrong.
“Mr. Cleveland goes fishing” was the caption under this drawing by T. De Thulstrup, published in Harper’s Weekly in July 1892. Brad Wright of Bourne is standing on the catboat Ruth.
Joseph Jefferson, then a well-known actor, lived in Buzzards Bay and was a friend of Cleveland. It was Jefferson who recommended in 1886 that Cleveland buy a farm that occupied a point extending into the Monument River river opposite the village of Buzzards Bay.
The house, which Cleveland called Gray Gables, sat on a point with marshland on either side. It was described as modest.
“His home is one of the simplest kind of seaside cottages,” reported a newspaper in 1895. “It is just a plain oblong building, with broad piazzas running around it. The finishing and furnishing are almost meager. No plastering is used, for the walls are all sealed up with soft wood. The furniture is nearly all wickerwork.”
Gray Gables was perhaps modest compared to the summer “cottages” of the wealthy in Newport. But it was not small. It had living accommodations for 30, a cocktail lounge for parties of 50 and a dining room that could seat 80.
The house was on a point of land at the end of a narrow neck so that it was almost an island.
At the end of the point was a floating dock, which was particularly important to Mr. Cleveland.
At the foot of the neck was a lodge that was the home of Bradford Wright, who was skipper of the president’s catboat and caretaker of the property. He also bought an adjacent lot to the north for pasturage for eight head of cattle, which afforded him more privacy.
President Cleveland in the painting by Eastman Johnson that hangs in the White House
The president’s house was visited regularly by the public. Wagon loads of people from all around would drive into the president’s grounds, pull up directly in front of the north piazza—the favorite gathering place of the family—and stare at the people who happened to be sitting there in a way that was, to say the least, embarrassing. Not only would they stare but also point out to each other the various members of Mr. Cleveland’s household, and in stage whispers make such remarks as:
“That fat man’s Cleveland, sure. You’d never think he was president to look at him.”
And: “There, that’s Mrs. Cleveland over there in the corner, with the light dress on. Don’t look so pretty as her picture, does she? Kinder nice lookin’ though.”
Their interest in Mrs. Cleveland may well have been piqued by the fact that the president married Frances Folsom in the White House during his first term. He was 49; she was just 22, the daughter of the president’s deceased law partner in Buffalo.
After a year of that sort of thing every day, Cleveland established the “deadline,” a demarcation at the foot of the point over which no one was allowed to pass without permission.
Frances Folsom Cleveland in a photograph taken in 1886, the year of her marriage to the President
Cleveland felt the people had every right to see him, but he also objected to having his family and himself put on exhibition like so many freaks in a museum.
Later the Secret Service guarded the entrance to the estate from a small knoll that commanded views all around. There were no trees and the land was otherwise fairly flat.
The people of Buzzards Bay accepted the “deadline.” They did not view it as a gated privilege or an assumption of superiority, but as a necessary precaution. And Cape Codders of that day were not ones to brook anyone who “put on airs.”
Cleveland lived up to their expectations. His usual dress was an out-of-shape gray tweed suit and a battered straw hat. “His entire mode of life at Gray Gables is democratic in the extreme,” the newspapers reported.
Cleveland was known as a hard worker. It was said “he made a pleasure of business and a business of pleasure.”
His Cape Cod neighbors said he made business out of pleasure not in a wearing, laborious way, but as a cheerful, contented and persistent business.
At no time was that more true than when the president was fishing. He was, as it would be put today, a hardcore fisherman.
He was often up at 4 AM to fish. He fished Wakeby lake and Peters Pond among many others. He fished the Mashpee River for sea-run trout.
His frequent partners were Joe Jefferson and Richard Watson Gilder, who was managing editor of Scribner’s Monthly and Century Magazine.
Gilder said of Cleveland, “He is immoderate in only two things – his desk work and his fishing.”
Gilder said that Jefferson and Cleveland were more than enthusiastic fishermen; they were “inveterate.”
There was the “hour limit,” in which, once their boat was anchored, it must remain in one place for at least an hour, regardless. Conversation may always be interrupted by good fishing, but fishing must never be interrupted for conversation.
The Cleveland estate at Gray Gables. The house stands on what almost an island with marsh on either side. The “Deadline” was established to keep out gawkers.
Another fishing friend was the Reverend Nathan H. Chamberlain. He was a distinctive-looking man of over six feet tall with a full, flowing beard. He had worked his way from poverty to eminence in the Episcopal church and as a man of letters. Chamberlain in those years was editor of the Falmouth Local, which in 1895 was renamed The Enterprise.
George E. Dean, cashier of Falmouth National Bank at the time and a friend of Chamberlain, delighted in telling the story of three men in a wagon with broken axle and sagging wheel that had pulled up on a sandy Monument Beach road. From the window of a neighboring house he watched the three with fishing rods climb from the wreck. There was a bulky fat man, a tall, thin-faced man and a six-footer with luxuriant whiskers. The fat man pulled a flask from his pocket. In turn each took a swig.
“There they were,” related the window-peeker. “The president of the United States, the country’s greatest actor, and a minister—drinking right in front of my house where my wife could see them. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they had gone behind the barn.”
With Bradford Wright at the helm, Cleveland enjoyed bottom fishing in Buzzards Bay. His favorite spot was a ledge off the shore of West Falmouth. Even before the century closed the president’s favorite fishing spot acquired his name and to this day is known as Cleveland Ledge. A lighthouse was built on it in 1940.
Cleveland’s love of fishing in Buzzards Bay may have led to a commonly held belief that he was responsible for a ban on commercial fishing by draggers. That is not so. Buzzards Bay was closed to draggers in 1889, two years before Cleveland bought Gray Gables. The ban was meant to put “pogy pirates” out of business. Pogy, or menhaden, were sold for fertilizer. It was wealthy sportfishermen who saw that menhaden were food for gamefish and lobbied successfully for the end of dragging in Buzzards Bay.
Gray Gables was the summer White House, although no one used that term back then. Cleveland was frequently visited by dignitaries and officials. His secretary of state, Richard Olney, owned a summer home in Falmouth at the corner of Mill Road and Surf Drive.
But there was also family life. The Clevelands had five children; two of their children were born at Gray Gables. There were birthday parties and visits with friends, one of them being George Briggs.
Mr. Briggs was a long time Bourne selectman and a good friend of the president.
Presidents and their families were not protected the way they are today. One summer, when there was a possibility of violent unrest in Washington due to the panic of 1893, Briggs gathered a group of constables and special police to protect Mrs. Cleveland at Gray Gables.
Mercy McDermott, Briggs’ daughter, later remembered the Clevelands vividly. In an Enterprise interview in 1931 she told of the president’s visits to their home on Sandwich Road.
The president and his wife generally drove around unescorted. Mrs. McDermott often saw the president drive by in his carriage on his way to Buzzards Bay to pick up his mail.
Mrs. Cleveland drove the same route, County Road to Bridge Street, which crossed the Monument River and on to Buzzards Bay, to visit with the Jeffersons.
Mrs. Cleveland selected her personal friends with a firm disregard for social or economic status, a quality that would have endeared her to Cape Codders of the day.
Cleveland’s second term ended in 1897. The Clevelands continued to spend summers at Gray Gables until 1904.
Cleveland died in 1908. Mrs. Cleveland went on to marry James B. Walker Jr., whom she had known since she was in college, in 1913. She died in 1947 at the age of 83.
Gray Gables became a hotel under various ownerships. It burned to the ground in 1973.
Once Mrs. Cleveland was asked, “Did you choose Buzzards Bay for your summer home, or did Mr. Cleveland?” She replied, “I did, but you mustn’t tell him I said so.”