By J. Dennis Robinson | Seacoast Online | | Jan 9, 2017
Reprinted in full by permission of the author.
Rosamond Thaxter was old school. She was born in 1895 on her beloved Cutts Island in Kittery Point, Maine, and died there at age 94. “Aunt Rozzie” is best known for her philanthropy. She parceled out her fortune in small doses to the local libraries, to history and preservation groups, to actors and artists, to schools, to her church, to the Girl Scouts and to the Isles of Shoals.
Despite her inherited wealth, her summer cottage on Smuttynose Island, one of two surviving buildings, is little more than a one-room shack overlooking the scenic cove. “Gull Cottage” remains unlocked to this day, stocked with emergency supplies, as a refuge to stranded sailors. A charitable fund set up in her name in 1964 continues to support her favorite causes.
Rozzie Thaxter never married. She traveled widely, volunteered endlessly and wrote occasionally. She is best known for one book titled “Sandpiper.” It is a loving biography of her famous grandmother, poet and painter Celia Thaxter, who died the year before Rozzie was born. But there is another book, rarely seen, that tells the story of an independent girl, admittedly privileged and spoiled, who lived by her own design and made her community a better place for others.
At age 86, Rozzie sat down at her Cutts Island home to dictate a brief memoir for her family. As Rozzie talked, Carolyn Marvin sat across from her at the dining room table and typed. Marvin, now reference librarian at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, recalls how Rozzie would occasionally drift off, then wake and continue her lively narrative.
“She was bird-like with wispy gray-brown hair,” Marvin says, “but always had a twinkle in her eye and often a bit of a bite in her tongue … never mean, just very astute. If she liked you, she was delightful and fascinating.”
How it all began
The 40-page booklet, titled “Aunt Rozzie Remembers,” offers a unique peek into the philanthropist’s life. Rozzie begins her story in the mid-1600s when Francis Champernowne, a nephew of the founder of Maine, built a house at Kittery Point. He married the widow of Richard Cutts, owner of a fishing operation at the Isles of Shoals. Legend says the original house on Cutts Island (formerly Champernowne Island) was burned by a jealous woman who rode by on horseback and tossed a torch through an open window.
Two centuries later in 1879, Celia’s estranged husband Levi Lincoln Thaxter purchased the property. Levi died five years later and his son John farmed the seaside acreage. John Thaxter fell for a girl whose family summered at his mother’s Appledore Hotel at the Isles of Shoals. Mary Gertrude Stoddard, Rozzie’s mother, was the daughter of the mayor of Worcester, Massachusetts. When the high society city girl asked John Thaxter what Kittery was like, he shocked her, saying: “Oh, it is a nice little village full of good-hearted simple people. It is quite generally considered all right if a couple is married only two or three months before their baby is born.” John persisted in his courtship, eventually wed Mary Stoddard, and the couple settled in at Champernowne Farm.
“The great event of my birth,” Rozzie writes, came on Easter Sunday in 1895. Growing up on an island as an only child, she recalls, was “solitary, but not lonely.” Instead of friends, her playmates were animals. A calf named Pinta protected baby Roz, she writes, and butted away anyone who approached her cradle. Cows and sheep were as familiar to her as people, “maybe more so,” she says. Little Rozzie wandered her family’s 200-acre farm, played with dolls, and tunneled in a sandbox under a mulberry tree.
Each summer Rozzie’s cousins stayed in a house nearby. And at 11 each morning, her Uncle Roland Thaxter, a Harvard professor, and her father, John, went skinny dipping in the frigid ocean. “Woe to the lady artist who happened to be sketching nearby!” Rozzie wrote.
Kittery kids
Rozzie’s colorful description of her youthful adventures is the highlight of the memoir. Many of the region’s great hotels were in decline, but public transportation was cheap and accessible. Tourists were everywhere. A summer ferry chugged continually from Portsmouth to the Champernowne Hotel, to the Kittery post office dock, to the Pocahontas Hotel nearby, over to New Castle, and back to the city. Rozzie and her cousin Mollie loved taking trips to the cinema in Portsmouth, smoking cigarettes and dining at Freeman’s Oyster House.
She describes life on Gerrish and Cutts islands, where the Jennison and Goodwin families feuded over “dog and sheep troubles.” She charts the decline of the Pocahontas Hotel where she and the owner’s daughter played the piano, danced the kick step, and dressed as fortune tellers. The owners, she writes, lost their hotel in a failed lawsuit against the federal government that began target practice at nearby Fort Foster. The noise literally knocked the old ladies at the hotel out of their chairs.
Rozzie’s flickering memory moves on to York, which, like Caesar’s Gaul, she writes, was divided into three parts – the Harbor, the Village and the Beach. “The people of the Harbor come most in the summer,” she writes, “and think a good deal of themselves, as the more wealthy usually do.” She both adores and pokes fun at life among the entitled families who frequented the beach on Sundays to show off their finest church clothes. The founder of the exclusive local country club, she notes wryly, fell dead on his own golf course.
The budding philanthropist saw her first play at The Music Hall in Portsmouth. It was only actors in a “moth-eaten” camel suit walking through a fake dust storm in the desert, but she was enchanted. During the dedication of the memorial to writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich (now part of Strawbery Banke Museum) in 1908, a young Rozzie saw Mark Twain – with his white hair, white suit, and red carnation – deliver a short speech on The Music Hall stage. Years later, sitting in the same seats, she watched silent films starring Jean Harlow, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
A life well lived
Rozzie Thaxter’s memoir is a rambling reflection of changes along the Piscataqua River over much of a century. She observed bigotry against African-Americans and chronicled two world wars. She watched the decline of the Parkfield, Pocahontas and Pepperell hotels. Her family’s own Appledore Hotel at the Isles of Shoals burned in 1914, in a blaze visible from the mainland. She rubbed shoulders with fascinating families of her favorite neighborhood – Howells, Decatur, Frisbee, Frost, Pepperrell, Bellamy – everyone knew Rozzie.
But she did not stick to home. “I love traveling and have had my share of it,” she writes. As a girl she spent months in Paris and wintered in Florence. She and her mother liked to attend the theaters in Boston and New York.
“I’m afraid I was a disappointment to my grandmother,” she recalls, “being a simple farm girl who was not very good at anything.” But that did not stop Rozzie. She traveled with relatives and friends, visiting California for the first time via the Panama Canal. She cruised through Italy and France to London, where she saw a young Queen Elizabeth heading back to Buckingham Palace after her coronation. Rozzie traveled alone in 1952 to visit a rich friend in Japan. There were trips to Spain, to South America, back to Sicily, and many more. She last visited Rome at age 82.
Yet her greatest joy – her “whole life” – she writes, was dedicated to 50 years as a Girl Scout leader. Her philanthropy extends far and wide. She was a founder of Strawbery Banke Museum, a savior of environmental causes, a benefactor of Portsmouth Hospital, Theatre by the Sea, Kittery Land Trust, the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Portsmouth and Rice libraries, St. John’s Church, Warner House, Shoals Marine Lab, Star Island Corporation and more. A parcel of ocean-front land near Sea Point Beach is preserved in her honor by her descendants.
Spoiled and cherished as an only child of means, Aunt Rozzie never lost sight of her responsibility to give back. She adopted an entire community. Throughout her little memoir, Rosamond Thaxter repeats her favorite quote and guiding mantra: “More good than I deserve, God gives me every day.”
NOTE: A few privately printed copies of “Aunt Rozzie Remembers” are available from the Kittery Historical & Naval Museum. Leave a message at (207) 439-3080, or check special collections at Portsmouth Athenaeum, Portsmouth Public Library and Rice Public Library.
Copyright © 2017 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Robinson’s history column appears in the print version of the Portsmouth Herald every other Monday. He is the author of a dozen history books on topics including Strawbery Banke Museum, Privateer Lynx, and Wentworth by the Sea Hotel. His latest book “Mystery at the Isles of Shoals,” is available in stores and online. Dennis can be reached at dennis@seacoastnh.com.