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07/16/2019 04:38 PMFor some people living on Westbrook’s waterfront, a mystery is simply the kind of book to read on the beach. Not so for Gail Colby, who, when finding a gap in her community’s history, dug deep after the facts, only to find more mysteries and more stories, which she is now sharing in a book to benefit the Westbrook Historical Society.
About three years ago, Colby and a business partner purchased property on Bellstone Avenue in the West Beach neighborhood of Westbrook, where Colby has a home. The parcel contained two cottages that, according to the town assessor, were built in 1935. According to her Uncle Sam, however, the cottages didn’t exist when his parents—Colby’s grandparents—bought their land in 1946.
This friendly dispute led Colby, a former realtor, to turn to the Westbrook Historical Society for more information. When she learned that there was little available, she embarked on a three-year journey to research not just her newly purchased property, but her neighborhood.
Personal Stories
The result is People and Places of West Beach, an informal but detailed account that reaches back to the late 19th century, telling stories of the inns, bakeries, and cottages that built the neighborhood’s character. Some are long gone, some still stand, although they’ve occasionally been put to other uses.
The second part of the book is a series of personal stories contributed by West Beach residents, often with additional details by Colby. The work is illustrated throughout with copies of photographs, many historic, some more contemporary.
“I started with the landmarks. I started with the pier—and the bakeries and the hotels and the old houses and the boarding houses and then got into the neighbors,” Colby said. “Some people were interested in telling their stories. They would write up something and stick it in my mailbox or email me.”
The book, produced simply on 8 ½” by 11” paper and spiral bound, will be sold at the Westbrook Historical Society’s Day on the Green Arts & Crafts Fair on Sunday, July 21. At $15 per copy, the funds will defray Colby’s printing costs with a little extra donation to the historical society.
Research Rabbit Hole
Colby’s research led her to became a near fixture at Westbrook Town Hall.
“I was probably there as much as the staff,” she said. “Almost every day.
“I tried to research... back to the original owner or if I could find when it was built or who built it—many times we don’t know who built it,” she explained. “In deeds it might just say ‘property.’ It did not say what the property consisted of. Was it a dwelling? What was on there?”
In order to find out, Colby moved from deeds to tax records, which are kept in a vault in the Town Hall basement, where the general public is not permitted. Colby would request records from particular years.
Following the Trail
Older records are handwritten, Colby explained, “and it was really was interesting because you’d see 1905 taxes: They’d have all these columns and it was taxes paid on a horse or a cow or chickens, a barn, and then if it said dwelling, I’d just keep researching back on this particular owner to see if there was always a dwelling there.”
It helped that Colby is known at Town Hall for volunteering with the historical society’s plaque project, through which Westbrook residents with older homes can obtain a plaque bearing the name of their home’s original owner and the year it was built. Volunteers follow the trail of ownership back into antiquity, sometimes having to pay visits to Old Saybrook Town Hall—the area known today as Westbrook was formerly the Oyster River Quarter of Old Saybrook (or “the Quarter”) until it was incorporated in 1840.
Westbrook Historical Society President Catherine Neidlinger Doane helped enormously with Colby’s research, Colby said. Doane’s grandfather William Neidlinger, who moved to Westbrook from Brooklyn in 1902 and established a pharmacy, was a well-known photographer whose pictures adorned contemporary postcards. Many images from Doane’s large photograph collection illustrate Colby’s account.
Colby also gathered information by posting on the People of Westbrook Facebook page and, through that, connected with David Bradley, a Westbrook resident with a subscription to newspapers.com, a service of ancestry.com that provides articles from U.S. newspapers going back to the 18th century.
“Once I found the names [of property owners], I would send this out to my friend,” she said. “And wow—he would come back with two pages of email,” including birth places and dates of immigration to the United States.
“This never would have gotten to print without all his research,” she said.
Unraveling Mysteries
As a former realtor, Colby is fascinated by the provenance of buildings, and it shows: throughout her account there are several of what she calls chains of ownership.
“I think it is important to keep the history of this beach community alive and hopefully pass it on to future generations,” she writes in her introduction, and her work is a trove of information that could be used for further research.
Interesting stories abound, such as that of the pier formerly stretching into the Sound from Cottage Avenue, the former name of Bellstone Avenue.
In 1909, residents “voted to install a concrete seawall along the shore road to protect the cottages” from hurricanes and flooding, Colby reports. This was followed with plans for a pier, for which the West Beach Improvement Society raised funds by holding a dance in July 1910 and selling “stock certificates” to cottage owners. A grand celebration that August for the completed 767-foot pier included performances by the Westbrook Drum Corps and the Chester Band.
On Sept. 9, 1938, Colby writes, a hurricane “hit with great force at 140 miles per hour,” and “destroyed the pier and many cottages along the shore front.”
Dragonwyck and the Syndicate
Although it was technically located on neighboring Quotonsett Beach, Colby includes the story of the Dragonwyck Inn, no longer in existence. Colby found stories in The Hartford Courant that first mention an inn on the site in 1868; a lumber tycoon purchased the property in 1906 and built a new inn that in 1946 would be purchased and renamed Dragonwyck. The Elks Club purchased the property in 1964 for $400,000 and eventually demolished the Dragonwyck, replacing it with its current building, which was constructed in 1969.
Colby was able to collect and reproduce in the book several photographs and postcards depicting the Dragonwyck, with its gardens that were “absolutely gorgeous.” But she doesn’t recall seeing it herself.
“Everybody keeps saying, ‘How can you not remember? You were here,’” Colby said, referring to her childhood summers spent at her grandparents’ West Beach home. “I didn’t really go down that end of the beach. Wherever you lived, you went to the end of your street and that’s kind of where you stayed.”
Extensive research led Colby to stumble across a mystery: the repeated mention in town records of something called the Syndicate.
“This sounds like something from the New York mafia,” Colby recalled thinking. “It got to the point where... I couldn’t wait for Town Hall to open.”
In 1900, she discovered, the Syndicate sent a letter to the town declaring that it was in the process of physically relocating houses from what is now Quotonsett Beach to West Beach.
“We have proof of at least four or five houses” that were transplanted to Post Avenue, Colby said.
The Syndicate turned out to be a group of prominent Westbrook homeowners, Colby wrote in her book. Its letter stated the Syndicate’s intention of building a new community in the Quotonsett Beach neighborhood, which, at the time, comprised areas known as New York Beach and Hartford Place. The group “purchased land to the rear of Hartford Place with intentions of opening a road between Seaside Avenue and Magna Lane,” as well as possibly building a hotel, Colby writes. In the Syndicate’s vision, the new road would be populated with “all these handsome villas that they were going to erect,” Colby said, adding that she believes the Syndicate “didn’t think the houses that were already there were to their standards. I have some photographs of them and they were spectacular.”
While there is evidence that several houses were indeed moved, the road was never constructed, said Colby.
Endings are Beginnings
Colby’s book is an important addition to the town’s history, said Doane. The historical society’s 1976 book, Westbrook History Happenings and Hearsay, “referenced the beaches but didn’t really go into great detail.
“I live near Quotonsett Beach and my parents, the Neidlinger family, owned a large parcel on Quotonsett Beach,” Doane said. “So I knew some of the people there and I had started my own research on that.”
Doane plans to complete that project in the future.
“Gail’s book is of great value because it’s one of the first that’s been written specifically about one of our beach areas,” she said. “It’s not the first one—the first was Grove Beach,” which published a book for its residents.
Doane has great interest in reproducing it for Westbrook residents in general and has encouraged other beach communities to produce their own histories.
Doane herself learned from Colby’s book.
“I was really surprised at what a going place West Beach was in that era, in the late 1800s,” she said. “It was very social and the hotels were filled with people.”
Contemporary newspapers included descriptions of what people wore when they arrived from Hartford to visit family and friends.
“It was a lot of fun to read,” she added.
Colby hopes her work will inspire further digging.
“Research will continue in this area,” she writes at the end of her book, “as I feel there are still unanswered questions to solve and more facts to uncover...Perhaps in a few years there may be a supplement to add to the book, provided I live that long.”
The Westbrook Historical Society’s Day on the Green Arts & Crafts Fair will take place on Sunday, July 21 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.