Jim Gould passed away last Saturday: March 13, 2021 at the age of 97.
His obituary spares me from trying to condense nearly 100 years of an incredibly accomplished life into a scant paragraph or two. I learned more about the man from reading it than he ever told me himself.
That was Jim. It wasn’t about himself, he wanted to know what was new with you, and always had a question for me that would occasionally brighten my inbox such as “Do you have any records of the Job Handy shipyard at Little River?” or “I’m working on a piece about captain’s wives who went to sea with their husbands on coastal schooners. Do you know if Chatfield brought his wife Florrie with him?”
I knew Jim Gould most of the last half of his life, first meeting him in the mid-1960s but more closely after I moved the family to Cotuit year-round in 1991 where he had retired with his wife Anne. He was involved in a number of projects to capture the history of the village he loved. Early on in the 9os he offered to come by the house and go through the old family photos with me, identifying nearly every forgotten face of my great-great uncles and cousins-twice-removed with delightful anecdotes about nearly all of them. A few years later he borrowed some of those photos for his book about Cotuit and Santuit which he and Jessica Rapp-Grassetti published in 2003.
Jim’s devotion to pacifism and Quakerism grew from his D-Day experience on the beaches of Normandy. His career in the foreign service and his professorship at Claremont College were preludes to his passion for promoting diplomacy and non-violence and diving into the history of Cape Cod and Cotuit
Jim was my mentor as an amateur historian. He put up with my questions patiently, corrected my facts, and genially reminded me of the factual ethics of primary historical research (using only first-hand accounts or records whenever possible vs. being lazy and quoting other historians). He did more primary research than any Cape Cod historian, and there have been several. Jim applied the academic rigor of a college professor to the cataloguing of dozens and dozens of old Cotuit homes through hours spent at the county registry of deeds, cataloguing old photographs, and doing lots of detective work in the field. Mention a barn and Jim knew the year it was floated on a barge around the Cape from Brewster to its first resting place in another village before landing next door. His memory was almost photographic and I can only hope I retain a fraction of the mental acuity he had well into his ninth decade.
Thanks to Jim no walk today through the village is boring. He was influential in creating the Cotuit Historic District in 1987, putting in a massive amount of legwork for the Town of Barnstable Historic Commission to inventory Cotuit’s old homes and get them listed in the National Register of Historic Places. He was an ardent preservationist, using stories about the old captains who had built the homes as an effective tool against over-development and thoughtless tear-downs, vanity piers and docks and sprawling subdivisions eating away at the village’s remaining open space.
After I moved to town he recruited me to join him and some others on a study group studying the possibility of having Cotuit declared a state historic preservation district, an rigorous and controversial process where the legislature passes an act declaring a neighborhood such as Beacon Hill in Boston, old Edgartown and Nantucket and even a long stretch of road such as the Old Kings Highway (Route 6A) from Sandwich to Orleans a special district subject to rigorous historical and architectural review before any old structures can be demolished or modified. The concept can be controversial, with a citizen review board given the legal authority to give its thumbs up or down to things like satellite TV dishes or the color of shutters. Jim’s intention was to put in place a mechanism where the village could have a say in the tear-down of old homes and present options to a new homeowner or developer that would preserve the historic character of the village at large. The razing of the Cotuit Inn — the former hotel owned by Congressman Charles Gifford and his wife Florence — that once stood on the hill above the center of the village with its beloved watering hole, Hack’s Bar. had broken a lot of hearts, especially after a generic mass of condos took the place of the old rambling hotel. I supported Jim for trying to put a protection in place, but the horror stories from other historic preservation districts of neighbors feuding with neighbors and review boards acting like overweening dictators soured me and other Cotusions on the idea. Jim bravely made the case of the district before a packed crowd at Freedom Hall, and gracefully folded his tents when it was obvious Cotuit wasn’t ready to add a new layer of bureacracy. As one friend said, “I’ll paint my damn house pink and purple if I want to. House paint is a matter of free speech!”
Though defeated, Jim was indefatigable. He was a pillar of the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit. The first paper he presented to the HSSC was in 1971: The Lowells and Literary Cotuit. His second, presented twenty years later, was a History of the Little River District of Cotuit , followed by A History of Santuit with Ken Molloy in 2001, and the following year on the Mansard Ladies of Cotuit.
The biggest test of his research skills required a lot of off-Cape research in the archives of Plymouth and Boston: his 2007 paper on the history of Colonial Cotuit. The country courthouse fire of 1827 destroyed all the earliest land records of the colony from the 1630s onwards, but Jim was undeterred and dove deep into the land deals negotiated by Myles Standish, and the subsequent “Kings Grants” of land to the first colonial settlers of Cotuit in 1648.
He did most of the research himself, in person, at the archives and libraries where the past was stored in paper — none of it digitized or converted into searchable online databases. Where I can send an email to the librarian at the Nantucket Historical Association with a request for a whaling log, Jim had to write a letter or take the boat. Where I can now do a full grantor-grantee title search on a property from my PC. Jim did it in person. I can find every mention of some old Cotusion like Braddock Crocker or Hezekiah Coleman online thanks to the Sturgis Library’s digital archives of the Barnstable Patriot. Jim had to visit in person, request microfilm, and spend hours squinting at a screen looking for the clues which he accumulated into great stories of the forgotten past.
Jim’s love of history was infectious. I majored in American History in college with a focus on 19th century spiritual and philosophical thought and a minor in maritime history. Jim was an expert in both and he revived my love for the topic, inspiring me to dig into the history of Cotuit/Mashpee relations and the Woodlot Revolt of 1833 (which he referred to as “The Troubles”), to use his initial research to delve deeper into the history of colonial Cotuit, hurricanes and gales, and Sampson’s Island and Dead Neck. In return I helped him set up his blog, a rich archive of much of his research over the past twenty years.
Jim led a walking tour of Mosswood Cemetery every Halloween. Every stone prompted a story about a person he could connect from memory to most of the other tombstones in the graveyard. Genealogy was his forte, and he was tireless in tracking down family trees long before tools like Ancestry.com existed. Jim loved the “story” in history, and the crowds who followed him through the graveyard heard his tales of Baby Ella, the infant who died on a whaling voyage and was pickled in a cask of rum with a little window so her grieving mother, Rosilla Nickerson, could mourn her baby; or to hear him recite, from memory, in his distinctive mellifluous voice, the epitaph of Azubah Handy, the first person to be buried in the cemetery under a slate tombstone engraved with the dolorous and oft-quoted epitaph written by Mr. Elisha Holmes:
My bosom friend, come here and see,
Where lays the last remains of me.
When I the debt of nature paid,
A burying yard for me was made.
I’ll miss the familiar sight of Jim on his daily walk picking up litter and stuffing it into a plastic grocery bag which he’d dispose at the Post Office before collecting his mail. He was the only person I’ve ever seen pick up roadside trash who wasn’t wearing an orange jumpsuit under the supervision of a sheriff. Years later, when he wasn’t making the walk any more, I started bringing a bag along with me on my lunch hour walks. His passing is a huge loss.
