Notes From an Environmentalist. The Shipwreck Ada Damon.
Ada Damon has been in the Globe recently. Attached is a view from Plum Island. Excerpt from my book Plum Island, 4,000 Years on a Barrier Beach.
The Lawsuit
1883
Winslow Pettingell: “God damn that Boynton Moody! Who the hell does he think he is?”
Roger Pettingell: “Moses wouldn’t like to hear you cuss like that!”
“Yes but it was grandfather who bought Plum Island. Remember him standing in the house on Bromfield Street peering through that 20 inch telescope at the island as his men on pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of sand up a narrow plank then dumped it into the sand schooners?”
“What did they do with all the sand?”
“They sold it to builders in Boston who were making all those elegant houses in the Back Bay.”
“Too bad so many of them are falling down.”
“Shush, don’t say that!”
“Why not?”
“The reason they are crumbling is that the Plum Island sand contained too much salt which made their mortar unstable.”
“ Did grandfather know that?”
“No, nobody knew it at the time.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well remember those storms back in 1839? They cut right through Salisbury Beach so there were two islands of sand with channels in between them.”
“I think I read that the early settlers found the same thing back in the 1600’s.”
“Yes some think that every few hundred years waves push enough sand up the beach so it seals off the mouth so the river jumps north.”
“How does it do that?”
“Well first some storms wash through the beach so two channels are formed but a two channel system isn’t very stable. Then over a few years, sand flowing up from the south starts to fill in the southernmost channel and the northern channel starts to dominate and become the new mouth of the river.”
“So you mean that what we call ‘The Basin’ used to be the old mouth of the river?”
“Exactly, but what gets Moody’s goat is that when the new channel formed, about half a mile of Salisbury Beach was added to grandfather’s end of Plum Island. But Boynton claims he bought the beach from the Salisbury proprietors.”
“Does he have a case against us? "
“Not a bit of it. According to good old colonial law if a beach attaches to your property, it is your good fortune but if it washes away it is your loss. You see you can never really own a beach you simple own an area where the sand is resting for awhile until it continues its journey to somebody else’s area. So you own a process, not a piece of land.”
“So haven’t we become quite the lawyer! But what does British law say about the land beyond low tide?”
“Oh that is the ‘Queen’s Bottom,’ anyone can scratch clams off the ‘Queen’s Bottom!’”
“Hah! Good one, good one!”
"‘That’s what a year of law school and no degree can get you, a smattering of legal trivia, excellent fodder for cocktail parties, but not nearly enough to make an honest living!”
"Speaking of cocktails, shall we join the ladies and hoist one to good old Grandfather Pettingell?”
(Exit laughing.)
