Fairhaven Historical Overview

Fairhaven Historical Overview For thousands of years before European contact, the area that is now Fairhaven was part of the territory of the federation of Wampanoag people or “People of the Dawn.” The local tribe of Native people, the Acushnet, wintered near the large inland lakes to the north in Lakeville and spent their summers along the shore of Buzzards Bay on the Acushnet River and Sconticut Neck. Locally they cleared land and farmed, raising corn, beans, and squash, and fished and dug shellfish through the summer. When English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold visited here in 1602, he was greeted by Native people, who offered furs and other goods to trade. In 1652, thirty-six Plymouth colonists purchased a 115,000-acre tract of land known as “the Second Place” from Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and his son Wamsutta. Among the purchasers were Mayflower passenger John Cooke, his father Francis Cooke, his mother-in-law Elizabeth Warren, his cousin Philippe De Lanoy (Philip Delano), and Sarah Jenney, whose families would settle on the east side of the Acushnet River. The territory was first settled in 1659. In 1664 it was incorporated as the town of Dartmouth. John Cooke settled here with his family about 1662. He was the only one of the original Pilgrims to move here. His homestead was located on an elevated area overlooking the river in what’s now North Fairhaven. Through the Revolutionary War the Fairhaven area of Dartmouth was primarily farmland, with a fledgling maritime economy developing in the small village of Oxford, Fairhaven, on the harbor at the mouth of the Acushnet River. On May 13-14, 1775, the first naval battle of the American Revolution took place when a group of the Fairhaven militia, in the sloop Success under the command of Nathaniel Pope and Daniel Egery, captured two enemy vessels in the waters of the outer harbor. That summer construction was begun on a fort on a rocky point on the harbor south of Fairhaven Village. When the British raided the harbor in September 1778, the fort was destroyed, but was later rebuilt and named Fort Phoenix. In 1787, the eastern part of Dartmouth broke off and was incorporated as the town of New Bedford, which included present-day Fairhaven and Acushnet. The whaling industry began to have an increasing economic impact, though most of the property in the town was farmed. The three Selectmen governing the town were generally a resident of the New Bedford section, the Fairhaven section, and the northern Acushnet section. As the War of 1812 brewed, political differences developed between the New Bedford Quakers, who were primarily engaged in maritime pursuits on the west shore of the harbor, and the residents on the east side, who were employed in agricultural occupations. On February 22, 1812, Fairhaven incorporated as a town, which included Acushnet Village and the land north to Freetown. Following a virtually commercial shutdown during the war, whaling grew during the 1800s to be the region’s primary industry, bringing prosperity to ship owners, ship builders, sea captains, and oil refiners, as well as to supporting tradesmen engaged as blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, and sail and rope makers. Just before the Civil War, during the time Pennsylvania petroleum started overtaking whale oil as a lubricant and fuel, Acushnet separated from Fairhaven in 1860. The combination of changing political geography and economic factors resulted in Fairhaven losing about 39% of its population between 1850 and 1870. The 1800s were a period of Fairhaven’s history filled with notable figures. Warren Delano II, the grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was active in town, creating Riverside Cemetery in 1850. Manjiro Nakahama, the first Japanese person to live and work in America was a resident for a time after being rescued from an island in the Pacific by Fairhaven whaling captain William H. Whitfield. Fairhaven Historical Overview - Chris Richard 2020-12 1 Fairhaven resident Joseph Bates Jr. became a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Capt. Joshua Slocum rebuilt the sloop Spray here and in it became the first man to sail around the world alone. And Henry Huttleston Rogers was John D. Rockefeller’s right-hand man at the top of Standard Oil. A turnaround by 1900 was brought about by a boost in civic pride and activism inspired by the positive influence of the town’s weekly newspaper, the Fairhaven Star, the benefactions of Standard Oil executive and Fairhaven native Henry H. Rogers, and the formation of the Fairhaven Improvement Association. Rogers’ gifts to the town included a modern grammar school (Rogers School), the public library (Millicent), the Town Hall, the high school, the water company and sewer system, and a large industrial factory, churches, Masons Hall and more. The Improvement Association cleaned up and maintained public parks, installed historical markers, and advocated for tree planting and historical preservation. The newspaper served as a cheerleader and booster of local business with its pride inducing editorials and its slogan, “Push Fairhaven.” Still, through the 19th Century and early 20th Century, the majority of homes and businesses were clustered close to the harbor with its easy access to factories and businesses in New Bedford via the New Bedford Fairhaven Bridge and the more recently opened Coggeshall Street Bridge. East Fairhaven, which at that time was most of the land between Adams Street and the neighboring town of Mattapoisett, was sparsely populated farmland. The availability of jobs in textile mills and industrial plants in New Bedford resulted in population growth in the northern and central part of Fairhaven and in the building of more homes and elementary schools. At the same time, the fishing industry grew along the harbor, replacing the extinct whaling operations. A change came in the 1930s with the construction of US Route 6, which extended Huttleston Avenue from the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge, running east to Cape Cod. This highway connecting southern Connecticut to the Cape and the introduction of property zoning in Fairhaven brought about a commercially zoned travel corridor through town that was relatively slowly developed during the next 25 years. The post WWll baby boom brought more residential building, school expansion, and business growth. By the late 1950s, regional supermarkets were looking to expand in town, requiring more land for larger building and parking lots than could be found in the residential neighborhoods, which had been served previously by smaller locally owned stores. The 1960s brought the prospect of I-195 running through town with an exit designed to bring travelers to Route 6 near Sconticut Neck. This spurred the sale of some large parcels of private farmland and the Fairhaven-owned Town Farm to commercial developers. In 1968 Berdon Plaza opened at Route 6 and a redesigned Alden Road with the town’s first “big box” retailer Mammoth Mart as the anchor store. Between then and the early 1990s, the commercial districts in the vicinity of Route 6, Alden Road, and Bridge Street expanded with few restrictions. Supermarkets including Almacs, Shaw’s, and Stop and Shop, and with national retail stores and food chains such as K-mart, Walmart, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut filled the landscape. Zoning has kept most of the modern commercial development to those business districts, leaving the older residential areas relatively untouched. A few neighborhoods have a substantial number of well-maintained historical homes dating from the 1760s to the 1840s. These clusters of early homes are surrounded by traditional single and multi-family homes of later vintage. Despite its stock of historical homes and a number of buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, the Town of Fairhaven has no local Historical Districts, due to the reluctance of property owners to support efforts to establish them. Fairhaven mixes historical seaside charm, beaches and a working waterfront with the convenience of commercial businesses. Fairhaven Historical Overview - Chris Richard 2020-12 2 .

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