from the June, 2026 newsletter of the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit
Cotuit was the epicenter of American psychiatry in late 19th and early 20th centuries when it was the summer home of several eminent psychiatrists and psychologists; pioneers who were instrumental in the modern treatment of mental diseases and the development of important theories on psychological development.
Dr. James Jackson Putnam
Dr. James Jackson Putnam (1846-1919) was the psychiatrist and professor who first introduced the revolutionary Vienna psychiatrists — Dr. Sigmund Freud and Dr. Carl Jung — to America in 1909. His home in Cotuit was the Captain Andrew Lovell house, located on the corner of Lowell and Putnam Avenue (which is named for him), abutting the Ropes Field. Putnam graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, studying in Europe before returning to America to open the first neurology clinic at Harvard Medical School, founding the American Neurological Association in 1874, serving as its president in 1888, and then founding the American Psychoanalytical Association in 1911 before retiring from teaching in 1912. Putnam wrote the introduction to the translation of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a book considered very controversial after its publication in America. The Pulitzer Prize winning author, and one-time Little River summer resident, J.P. Marquand wrote about the book’s reception in stuffy Boston in his 1937 satirical novel, The Late George Apley: “At dinner your sister suddenly began discussing psychology. To my amazement, she seems to have been spending a great deal of time in the Athenaeum lately reading the works of a certain doctor named Sigmund Freud. Have you ever heard of this man? … I am writing by this same mail to the Trustees of the Athenaeum asking that all works by Freud be put into the locked room. They are certainly too strong for public consumption and certainly not the books with an Athenaeum Proprietor wishes to have exposed for an unmarried girl’s perusal.” Putnam’s daughter — Dr. Marion C. Putnam — was a pioneering child pediatrician and psychologist, who, like her father, trained as a psychoanalyst in Vienna under Freud. She also summered in Cotuit and the Putnam summer home remained in the family until 1977.
Dr. Stanley Cobb
Dr. Stanley Cobb (1887-1968)spent summers at his home overlooking the Narrows on Old Post Road. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Cobb was a professor of neurology there beginning in 1919. In 1930 he was appointed director of the Harvard Neurological Unit at Boston City Hospital, moving to Massachusetts General Hospital in 1934 where he founded the psychiatry department. Cobb was an early proponent of psychoanalysis, lobbying for it during a time when many in the conservative medical establishment disapproved. Dr. Cobb’s treatment of veterans of World War I suffering from shell-shock attracted the attention of Dr. Edith Banfield Jackson, a professor of pediatrics and psychology at the Yale School of Medicine. Jackson, who also trained in Vienna under Freud and his daughter Anna, referred her brother Everett, a traumatized veteran of World War I suffering from acute shell shock (post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD) to Cobb for treatment. To help Everett continue his treatment under Cobb during the summer months, her brother Gardner Jackson Sr., first rented, then purchased the Jackson summer home, the former home of Captain James Coon at 709 Main Street. Cobb was a passionate ornithologist who studied avian neurology after his retirement in 1954. In the early 1960s, although nearly blind, Cobb wrote a passionate letter to the Barnstable Patriot after a helicopter belonging to the local mosquito control project sprayed the saltmarsh in front of his home with DDT. The letter was republished in the Audubon Society’s magazine in May 1963 and stills stands as one of the first and most strident alarms sounded against the pernicious effects of pesticides on birds, a cause later picked up by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring. Cobb’s descendants still live in Cotuit and his home remains in the family. Dr. Sidney Issac Schwab (1871-1947), followed Dr. Putnam as the president of the American Neurological Association, and like Putnam, also studied at Harvard where he received degrees from the college and medical school. A native of St. Louis, Mo., Schwab studied in Vienna before returning to America where he was a professor of clinical neurology at Washington University. Schwab was a major in the U.S. Army in World War I, serving as a military neurologist at bases near the battlefield, and like Dr. Cobb, was a pioneer in the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. Schwab rented the Fremont Smith house at 110 Vineyard Road, becoming the first of several psychiatrists to spend summers at the quiet neighborhood beyond Oregon Beach. Schwab was soon followed to the peace and quiet of Cotuit by Dr. William Herman (1891-1935), a Jungian neurologist who built his home next to Schwab at 90 Vineyard Road. According to the late Cotuit historian James Gould, Herman’s home was inherited by his daughter Marybelle, wife of Dr. William D. Cochran, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School who retired at Cotuit in 1993. Herman’s grandson, Tod Cochran, recalled: “My grandfather was one of the first psychoanalysts and he built an office/therapy room on the side of the house with a separate entrance. It has a slate floor built right on top of the earth which was a technique (we guess) of connecting the room directly to the earth for therapeutic purposes. No doubt that was a Jungian thing.” The essayist Helen Howe wrote of Dr. Herman in her memoirs, The Gentle Americans: Biography of a Breed :“It was only shortly before our own span at Cotuit had run out, in the early thirties, that the first Jewish summer visitor bought property — and a Freudian psychoanalyst at that!— and became a brilliant addition to the life of the generation that followed my parents. The fact that Father [Mark Antony deWolfe Howe] came to like the charming Dr. William Herman as he did was a triumph over prejudice … concerning the mere existence of psychoanalysis, which caused in him an instinctive recoil as from something vaguely “slimy.”
Erik Erikson
Finally, perhaps the best known of all the Cotuit’s psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and neurologists was Erik Erikson (1902-1994) who, like Dr. Schwab and Herman, also spent summers below Oregon Beach at 45 Vineyard Road beginning in the early 1960s. Erikson, ranked one of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century by the Review of General Psychology, is most remembered for his theory on the psychosocial development of human beings — the concept known as the “Erikson Life Stages — and for coining the phrase “identity crisis.” Erikson was the first child psychoanalyst in Boston and held teaching positions at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In the 1950s he taught at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he treated, and became friends with the painter Norman Rockwell. Erikson also taught Dr. Benjamin Spock and Fred “Mister” Rogers. Erikson’s son Kai Erikson and his grandchildren continued to spend summers in Cotuit after his Erikson’s death in 1994.
Chris Cunningham, an editor at WoodenBoat Magazine, asked me to submit some photos of my Cotuit Skiff, the Snafu II, for the magazine’s “Launchings/Re-Launchings” section. Here it is thanks to Dan Delvecchio and my brother Henry.
Every afternoon the dog appears beside my desk and starts nudging my thigh with his snout. His daily walk along the shore is all that matters to him. It makes all the difference between a dismal and a joyous dog day. Deny him and he mopes around all evening, casting hurt looks from beneath the dining room table. But if the tide is right and I’m not on deadline, I usually accede and heave myself out of my chair and out the door with a tennis ball hidden in my pocket and a wriggling schnauzer taut on the end of his leash.
We walk down Old Shore Road, taking our time so he can micturate on every pole and interesting looking tuffet, kicking up a flurry of dead leaves in satisfaction, obsessing on patches of ivy that are, to him, the canine equivalent of catnip. An embarrassed poop by the boat ramp, dutifully collected in a green bag for depositing in the poo bin at Hooper’s Landing, and we proceed at a good clip to cross the marsh on the arched footbridge, pausing to sniff the reeds and hispid bank of mussels poking out of the peat.
Across the yacht club beach, stopping to drop off the warm bag of dog doo I prefer to call a “Cotuit Handwarmer,” the leash is unclipped, the ball is fished out of my pocket, and the real joy begins. I huck the ball down the berm and he sprints after it, grabbing it, shaking it, then carrying it above the wrack of the high tide line to hide it in the tick infested spartina grass.
We amble along the gentle curve of the cove, beneath the sagging bluff, walking on a beach with a twinge of guilt that has lingered since the 1960s when it was strictly forbidden to ever walk there because mean Mrs. Ropes forbade the yacht club sailors from taking the shortcut to Harriett Cabot’s finger pier. Past the dark combe and its steps to Mrs. Cabot’s former home, a refuge where a shy great blue heron spends the winter, leaving its pterodactyl foot prints on the sand and occasionally squawking its coarse complaint if the dog and I disturb its solitude.
The dog loses interest in the ball and roots along the base of the bluff, peeing on the collapsed black locust trees that fell during a fierce southerly gale on a king tide a few falls ago.
The walk ends at Little River, the stream that connects Cotuit Bay to Lovell’s Pond, wending through the woods and a buggy saltmarsh beside Handy Point and the quaint hamlet arrayed around the Cotuit Oyster Company. At the turnaround beside the sluggish steam the dog approaches for a pat on the head and some kind words before we head back home.
In the mud on each bank of the “river” pokes two parallel row of old cedar posts. Someone, sometime, more than a hundred years ago, built a footbridge over the river to spare the inhabitants of the house on Handy Point from walking the long way around on Old Post Road and up Putnam Avenue beside the cemetery to get to the village of Cotuitport. Did Mary Nickerson Handy, widow of James Harvey Handy, use that bridge to visit the stores in the village in the middle of the 19th century? Or was it built after she sold the house and moved to the center of the village at the end of the Civil War?
There are no pictures of the bridge, just the salt-preserved caries of the cedar posts on either side of the stream near a granite post that evidently marks a corner of the old Handy homestead. Yet there was a footbridge there until the 1930s at least, probably destroyed in either the hurricanes of 1938 or 1944.
The house on Handy Point was owned by Mark Antony deWolfe Howe, the Pulitzer-prize winning biographer and assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His daughter Helen Howe wrote a memoir of the family’s summer life in Cotuit in her 1965 book, The Gentle Americans. In a chapter entitled; Cotuit — The Calm of the Oyster Beds, she describes the bridge and one of its users, Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell:
“President Lawrence Lowell of Harvard manifested himself on our children’s horizon in the shape of a periodic Sunday afternoon call. We would sight him approaching on foot, across the tiny wooden bridge that spanned Little River, in his Sunday blue-serge suit, low stiff white collar, and large-bowed bow tie, head under its white leghorn hat bent forward, and leaning on his tall, rough wooden staff that would have done credit to Wotan. He was followed by his reigning cocker spaniel whose trademark was a waving plume of unclipped tails — first Mowgli, then Phantom — and by his wife (who was also his second cousin), Anna Cabot Lowell Lowell.”
A. Lawrence Lowell, 1935 -by Lawrence Wills Baker
The Howes and the Lowells were good friends. Mark deWolfe Howe accompanied Lawrence Lowell to the Brahmin’s woodlot on Canaumet Point on Mashpee-Wakeby Pond, where they would chop wood for exercise in the morning. Lowell, who died childless in 1943, bequeathed the 135 acres in Mashpee to the Trustees of Public Reservations, where it is known today at the Lowell Holly Reservation. During the summer, the Lowells and the Howes would dine together at least twice — Once at Lowell’s mansard mansion atop Lowell Point, once chez Howe on Handy Point — each couple walking the half-mile of shoreline and crossing the footbridge if the tide was low enough to permit them to. On Sundays, both families worshipped at the Federated Church, for “They all felt they owned it to the community to “stand for” churchgoing.” After the services, still wearing “his Sunday blue-serge suit,” Lowell would walk to Handy Point with his wife (and second cousin) Anna to spend the afternoon conversing with the Howe’s.
Helen Howe recalled, “As for dinner parties — once a summer Mother and Father walked along the beach at low tide, or through the woods at high by the light of an electric lantern, to dine with the Lawrence Lowells approximately a mile away; and once a summer the Lowells dined with them.”
Mark Antony deWolfe Howe, portrait by Polly (Ethel) Thayer
In the early 20th century Cotuit was then known as the “Summer Harvard” because Lowell had attracted, like a social magnet, a coterie of professors who came to Cotuit because, as Helen Howe wrote, “There was no club at Cotuit — yacht, country, or golf; there were no cocktail parties and no lunch parties.” The absence of anything other than catboat sails over the oyster beds of Cotuit Bay and the chopping of wood in Mashpee was prized by the professors, who wanted their children out of their hair while they spent their summer vacation working on their next academic paper or book,
“Of all the inhabitants of Cotuit who passed the summer months in a state bordering on somnambulism only two groups were active: the small children and the Harvard professors. Each professor had his own little shed or shanty in which he spent many hours a day absorbed in his own particular scholarly pursuit. President Lowell called his “The Caboose.” – Helen Howe
Today there are no Howe descendants living in Cotuit (that I know of), but the Lowell name continues to live on in the village the clan adopted as its summer home for generations, giving the village its ball park, library, and park.
Yesterday a friend with good taste in boats asked me if my Tashmoo 18 skiff was for sale. I can understand why he might think so, as it’s been sitting in the middle of the yard for two weeks awaiting a warm day for me to crawl beneath the trailer and slap on some bottom paint before launching for the spring season. Over my dead body I thought. Tashmoos have been out of production since the late 1990s, a Martha’s Vineyard boat built in Vineyard Haven from a mold taken off of a Jonesport lobster boat from Maine. Now they are back.
I bought mine in 1992 after falling in love with the look of the boat in a full page ad that ran in the back of the Eldridge table tables. I needed a little boat to get young children to the beach, something for clamming and fishing, a boat that could handle Vineyard Sound on a bad day. So I placed a call, paid a visit to the Vineyard, took a test ride, and put down my deposit — all in the boat cost me something in the neighborhood of $5000 including a terrible 30-hp Johnson outboard which tormented me until the day it thankfully died.
As my cousin once told me years later: “That boat doesn’t owe you anything.” I should say not. Thirty-four years and three engines later, and I consider my Tashmoo to be the single best purchase I’ve ever made.
Over the years I’ve basked in many compliments about the boat. There’s something about the look of the boat — the sweep of the sheer line, the tumble-home stern, the rugged, non-nonsense interior — that inspires admirers to leave notes on the boat as she rides on her mooring asking me if I ever decide to sell her to please give them a call.
After the company went out of business the only way to get a Tashmoo was to keep an eye on the classifieds and grab a used one locally. There were quite a few on the Vineyard, where they were once given away as grand prizes in the annual Martha’s Vineyard Bluefish & Striped Bass Derby. Islanders nicknamed the boats “Splashmoos” because of their notoriously wet ride, and Nelson Sigelman, the fishing writer for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, wrote a story about adding splash rails to the hull to try to keep himself dry. Even with the rails, mine still soaks me down.
Soundings editor Bill Sisson was a Tashmoo owner, and wrote about the skiff in that newspaper’s pages. In “When the Boats We Own Become a Part of Us“, Sisson wrote:
More than a decade ago, I sold my 18-foot Tashmoo lobster skiff to the town of Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. It was another one of those bittersweet partings, but I was happy she was going back to her home waters.
That simple, surefooted “seagoing miniature” was a direct descendant of an old wooden skiff that Dan West had found in a salt marsh on the island. He pulled a plug off the tired workboat and started producing them in glass.
Vineyard Haven harbormaster Jay Wilbur saw my ad, knew the boat’s pedigree and put her to work in the harbor earning her keep. Every few years I either hear from Jay or I check in with him just to keep track of the old boat. “I just got out of it,” Jay told me when I called in mid-July. “We have a new high-deck patrol boat that’s also wonderful, but in the summer, I spend my time in the Tashmoo. It just fits me better. They’re just great boats.”
Now, after 30 years, the Tashmoo is back. I just got off the phone with David Reiter. He revived the design after tracking down the original molds in Portland, Maine and hauled them down to Florida. He’s started Tashmoo Boatworks and is preparing to go into production with a very new take on the old classic.
The new and improved Tashmoo Skiff’s debut at the 2026 Palm Beach Boat Show
Talk about boat bling. The new Tashmoo is a serious gem. I love mine because it thrives on squid ink, bluefish blood, and black clam mud. The Florida version is all teak and shiny goodness. Here’s a story in Soundings, “Tashmoo Skiffs Return” heralding the rebirth of the boat.
The artist Bethany Collins was the subject of a recent (2026.03.04) story in the New York Times about her four-month transcription of Moby Dick with a nib pen on onionskin paper.
As an occasional transcriber of whaling ship logbooks, and having “digitized” The Reminiscences of Captain Thomas Chatfield” twenty years ago, I can relate to her comment that the process “It felt ritualistic, like meditation.”
The process of writing out another author’s work — to learn or to be inspired — is known as “copywork” and has been used by many authors to learn the rhythms and language choices of the greats.
Hunter Thompson re-typed The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, according to John-Paul Flintoff, writing “Why I Copy Out Great Writing By Hand” in Idler. Jack London copied Kipling’s work. Like Thompson, Joan Didion copied Hemingway to explore how his sentences were crafted.
Thanks to Jim Forbes for sharing Elly Fishman’s story in the New York Times.
Beginning this spring, most operators of a motor boat in Massachusetts must pass a boating safety class and have in their possession a certificate/license. The law, known as the Hanson-Milone Act, was signed into law by Governor Healy on January 8, 2025 and goes into effect for boaters born after January 1, 1989 on April 1, 2026. Enforcement won’t begin until September 2026, meaning boaters under 37 years of age will probably be given a warning if caught without a license during the 2026 summer boating season. All boat operators must comply by April 1, 2028. (kids under 12 may not operate a boat unless accompanied a certified adult over 18). The law only applies to motorized watercraft, including “personal watercraft,” (e.g. JetSkis) – meaning that sailboats without auxiliary engines, rowboats, canoes, and kayaks are exempt.
The law, filed by a state representative from Kingston, is named in memory of David Hanson of Kingston, who drowned when his 15-foot fishing boat capsized off of Plymouth in early May, 2010. The law is also named in honor of the late Paul Milone, the former Weymouth harbormaster. The law was widely supported by the state’s harbormaster and marine trades associations.
There are two ways to get a certificate. The “free” way involves attending an in-person course that lasts from 10 to 12 hours. and is usually conducted over multiple days. The more convenient way to take the course and obtain a license is to do it online via the state-approved provider, Boat-Ed. That will cost you $45, and, depending on your experience and prior knowledge, can be completed in a few hours if you skip the inane story line about a bunch of clueless teens setting out to solve a mystery involving mutant insects and an irrelevant boat theft on an inland lake.
Now for my opinion on the whole matter (and you know I have one). Putting aside any libertarian resentment of the nanny-state, hand-wringing state reps, and my utter loathing of the inane content that Boat-Ed forced on me during its puerile online course, there is no question that the general nautical IQ on the water has plummeted in recent years, especially since sailing seems to be dwindling and motorized boating rising. The majority of motorboat operators are morons. Always have been and always will be. They buy or rent a boat, turn a key, cast off, and hit the high seas with zero knowledge of the rules of the road or basic safety measures. They can’t read a chart, depend on a GPS, and generally treat a boat as a floating version of a car. They head out of the harbor in 15-foot open boats in early May, get swamped, and die of hypothermia. They pound a cooler full of White Claws in the August sun and drag the kids around on inflatable rafts. Most of their equipment is still wrapped in plastic after they bought their boat at the boat show.
The average nautical IQ plummeted during the Covid summer of 2020 when the masses headed to the high seas for some social distancing. Suddenly center consoles with four outboard engines were de rigeur. These were not salty people who grew up on the water, took sailing lessons as kids, and could tell a sheepshank from a bowline.
Yes, boating licenses make sense. But if you have sixty years of experience on the water and find yourself sitting at a computer taking a boating safety course designed for mouth breathers you are going to clench your teeth, and realize that what passes for competency on the water is little more than knowing how to use a fire extinguisher and staying on the right side of a channel marker. One example of the course’s glaring shortcomings: the online course made zero mention of the dangers of “bow riding” where a passenger dangles their legs over the prow of the boat and becomes propellor bait.
I predict this new law will accomplish nothing more than give the Massachusetts Environmental Police and local harbormasters an excuse to board boats and issue a demand to “show me your papers.” It can’t replace experience and common sense, and will definitely instill a false sense of confidence in people who have no business being on the water in the first place. The only upside of the new license is that you only have to pass it once for the license is good for life.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Sunday New York Times (2026.02.08) published proof that A.I. has finally found its true calling:
Ms. Rompoti began writing romance novels with the help of artificial intelligence in 2024, using the program Sudowrite. As a plus-size woman, Ms. Rompoti wanted to see heavier-set heroines she could relate to in romance fiction.
A.I. supercharged her writing process, enabling her to produce 10 novels in little over a year, including “The Billionaire’s Curvy Match” and “Curves to Own: Pregnant by the Billionaire.”
I wanted to put a plug in for Cindy Nickerson’s “Curator’s Corner” in the monthly newsletter of the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit. The latest edition, dated February 1, 2026, has a wonderful essay: “Death and Danger at Deep Hole” which explores the history of shipwrecks off of Cotuit in the 19th century.
In the piece, Cindy describes the “Melancholy Death by Drowning” by Captain Oliver A. Nickerson of Cotuit Port in April 1852; the 1867 wreck of the Hannah Martin; and the tragic February 1829 wreck of the Hyannis packet sloop Caroline which went ashore off Cotuit Bay in a snowstorm, forcing her crew ashore on Sampson’s Island where the captain’s sons, 13-year old Ebenezer Scudder and 19 year-old James died of exposure.
Cindy’s fascinating piece is just one of many benefits of membership in the HSSC.
David Hill, Lenovo and IBM’s former head of design and brand identity, and the man who redefined corporate blogging twenty years ago with the late, lamented Design Matters blog, has a new website.
ThinkNextDesign reflects the man’s impeccable design taste and showcases his greatest hits in a graceful gallery of everything from minicomputers to Trackpoint caps for the pointing stick on Thinkpads.
It also revives some of his best writing from Design Matters, the Lenovo blog the two of us reminiscenced about last month with Thomas Rogers, host of the podcast Laptop Retrospective.
Design is far more than form or function. It’s the tangible expression of a brand’s identity, values, and promise. While a brand defines what a company stands for, design gives those aspirations form and substance. Design uniquely delivers value: visually, physically, and experientially.
