Historic Boathouse Back In Home Port

CHATHAM – Following a stormy few years that felt like a cruise to nowhere, a key piece of Chatham history has finally returned to its home port of Stage Harbor. 

The historic Coast Guard boathouse that stood guard over the harbor for more than 70 years was barged back to Chatham Tuesday in preparation for its second life as a centerpiece of the town’s working waterfront.

 Famous as a base of operations for the historic Coast Guard lifeboat 36500, which made its name in the rescue of 32 men from the stern section of the stricken tanker Pendleton in 1952, the boathouse is to be hoisted to its new home atop a pier at 90 Bridge St. There, it will be preserved as a home for the town’s shellfish growing operation, part of an $11 million multi-use waterfront project. 

Ultimately, visitors to the pier will be able to visit the boathouse and learn about its history, while observing the shellfish upweller inside, accessing their boats from attached floats or just enjoying the view of Stage Harbor.

 Having left a work yard in New Bedford Tuesday morning, the barge holding the boathouse was tugged across Buzzards Bay, through Woods Hole passage and across Nantucket Sound, arriving at Chatham Roads in the early afternoon. It made its entrance to Stage Harbor slightly ahead of schedule, and was gingerly nudged to the worksite at 90 Bridge St., where it tied up at about 3:45 p.m. The crew from Robert B. Our’s Marine Division seemed to handle the delicate job without any difficulty.

 On Wednesday, after press time, the delicate process of lifting the boathouse from the barge to the new pier was expected to take place, depending on tide, weather, daylight and equipment positioning. 

 “The team has been planning around those conditions for months, and every step of the move has been carefully staged, including removing the floor and preparing the sill before transport,” Chatham Natural Resources Director Greg Berman said. “This building has probably been lifted more often than any other in the state, and the team has put a great deal of thought into making sure this final lift goes smoothly as it is placed onto its permanent home.”

 The building will next undergo tracks of work; one will renovate the building with electricity, stairs, utility platforms and other necessary elements, and the other is the specialized installation of the plumbing and upweller system. Work at the site will continue at a brisk pace, Berman said, with a new extension pier — separate from the one that will support the boathouse — slated to be open to the public in the next month or two. 

 “Restrictions will continue on [the] upweller pier during the final phase, but we wanted the public to be able to use at least a portion of the site over the spring and summer,” he said. “Work is now shifting to the interior work and seawater system installation, with the goal of having the Shellfish Division move in and begin propagation in the new facility in spring 2027.”

After it was decommissioned in the 1970s, the boathouse was sold to the developers of Stage Island and sat vacant for decades. When the land shoreward of the boathouse was slated for development in 2009, David Doherty, Jack Farrell and others stepped in to try to find another location for it in town. Although they scoured the shore, intent on keeping the boathouse in Chatham, the effort proved unsuccessful.

A number of plans emerged, but each one ultimately fell apart. The boathouse might have been a museum on Chatham Bars Inn land, but the idea faced opposition; it was rejected as a bathhouse for Harding’s Beach and as a clubhouse for Pleasant Bay Community Boating at Jackknife Harbor. It was briefly under consideration for use as a base for college rowing crews on the Charles River.

Through his work with the Chatham Conservation Foundation, Doherty had developed a relationship with developer Jay Cashman, who leases land on Strong Island from the nonprofit. Cashman agreed to move the boathouse to his shipyard in Quincy. Plans to use the boathouse in conjunction with a student boating program in Quincy fell through, and it remained in the shipyard until 2019, when it was taken to Hull, where it was going to be restored and used for storage and other marine activities. But property owner Michael McDevitt failed to get permits from the town and ended up in court, which ordered him to either remove or demolish the boathouse. Doherty stepped in again and purchased the structure, once again storing it at Cashman’s shipyard.

Saving the boathouse proved to be a real tug-of-war, “and David was the anchor man,” said Frank Messina of the historical commission, who pushed for a plan to reuse the structure as a means of preserving it.

Doherty said he always believed the boathouse would be preserved.

 “I was certainly very disappointed that we were unable to find a place for it in Chatham, but felt that it would eventually find a home on the waterfront in the Greater Boston area,” he said in an email Tuesday. “When two alternative possibilities failed to come to fruition, our commitment was challenged but not defeated.” The turning point, he said, was an article in The Cape Cod Chronicle describing the proposed new upweller which was the exact dimensions of the boathouse. “Pure serendipity.”

 “We thought, we have a 30-by-60 building,” Messina said with a chuckle. The project team enlisted the support of the late Dr. Robert Duncanson, the town’s project leader, who saw the value of reusing the historic building instead of erecting a new one.

 “Dr. Duncanson was key,” Messina said.

While the historical commission long had plans to seek to have the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Dr. Duncanson advised them to wait until the structure made its way back to Chatham and was restored for its new purpose. It was sound advice, Messina said, and as soon as the renovation is complete, the historical commission will make the case for a National Register listing, using a history largely compiled by the late commission Chair Donald Aikman.

 “It’s important,” Messina said. Like Chatham’s Old Village, the Marconi campus in Chathamport and South Chatham, the boathouse deserves a National Register listing. “It’s a national recognition that something significant happened here,” he said.

Preserving the town’s maritime history is important, Doherty said, but it hasn’t always been possible. The former Old Harbor Lifesaving Station was moved to Provincetown, and the 36500 is owned by The Orleans Centers for Culture and History.

 “So when I learned that the Boathouse was to be demolished to make way for a new single family residence, I felt compelled to do something to save the building,” Doherty said. He gave credit to Cashman for providing the means to save the structure. “He saved this important part of Chatham's maritime history,” he said.

 Among those who will be there when the boathouse is installed on its new pier will be Paul Ledwell, Sr. In 2009, Ledwell and his son, Paul Jr., were working for Jay Cashman on the crew that removed the boathouse from its original home on Stage Island. Ledwell remembers what a struggle the job was, jacking steel beams in place to support the structure, running picking cables through the roof to attach to the beans, “and then going underneath and cutting every single wood pile” to free the building. “We had to wait for one of the highest tides to get in there,” he said.

 The job failed at first when an estimate of the building’s weight proved to be too low. With the tide running out and the barge not close enough to do the job, Cashman did some on-the-fly recalculations. 

 “On a napkin, he figured out the weight of that building by pen and paper, basically just using his brain,” Ledwell said. With some reconfiguration, they were able to hoist the boathouse aboard, but not before Ledwell lost his footing and took an unceremonious dip in the harbor. A photographer from the daily paper caught him emerging from the mud, and put the shot on the front page. “My 15 minutes of fame turned into 15 minutes of shame,” he said with a laugh.

 It’s one of the many big jobs that Ledwell and his son worked on together, and one his son would have loved to have seen come to completion. Tragically, Paul Jr. died late last year in a crane accident on a job site on the waterfront in Everett.

 “He has two young sons, and I would like to put something together for them, to show them what their father really did for work,” Paul Sr. said.

 Many of the longtime supporters of the boathouse, along with town and Coast Guard officials, are also expected to be present Wednesday when it is lifted onto its new home.