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rode on the ocean lone
And precious was the freight,
Two loving souls transfused in one
With bounding hope elate.
Two hundred years have sped apace
And wrought in man’s behoof;
And thousands now their lineage trace
To John and Mary’s roofe.
The first of Westerly’s natural assets is bluish granite, considered by many to have the finest texture in the world. In the nineteenth century when the Smith Granite Company, Westerly’s first and largest quarry, was buzzing, skilled stonecutters from northern Italy were imported to carve Civil War monuments and gravestones. Eighty percent of the memorials for both Yankee and Confederate soldiers are built of Westerly blue granite, and the masons who carved them established the roots of an Italian community that remains strong to this day. Westerly’s other natural asset is the Pawcatuck River, which allowed mills to flourish.
George C. Moore, Geoffrey’s grandfather, arrived in town at the start of the century. He was an Englishman who had deserted his horse artillery regiment and fled to America. Oversize in all things except height, Moore was a man of quick wits (he filed almost as many patents as Thomas Edison) and quick fists. Being packed into steerage with hundreds of other fugitives and optimists did nothing to curb his temper, and before he reached the end of the gangplank, he was brawling with a fellow passenger twice his size. An English gentleman, embarking from a first-class cabin, witnessed the fisticuffs and hired Moore as a bodyguard. The two toured the Wild West together.
When he came back East, Moore worked in various New England towns as a weaver, finally settling in Westerly about 1912. He was in his early thirties by then, a widower with five children and enough capital saved up to invest in a small mill. He also invested in a horse and buggy and set about to win the affections of Elizabeth Fahey, an Irish bricklayer’s daughter. Elizabeth was just as feisty as George and several inches taller. To offset her natural advantage, Moore wore high-heeled shoes. In their later years, after her husband had made a fortune, Elizabeth liked to keep him in check by saying that she married him because he was the only young man with his own buggy, and since her other serious suitor was a man with one leg, George seemed a catch by comparison.
Elizabeth and George had four sons: Thomas, Harold, Geoffrey, and Cyril. Their father put them to work in the mill as soon as they were big enough to operate the equipment. Elastic webbing was in demand as a substitute for whalebones in ladies’ corsets, and George C. Moore Co. prospered. The First World War brought a further business boom, because the same elastic webbing that gave a woman an hourglass figure made gas masks a snug fit. By 1938, the Moores were the wealthiest family in Westerly. They lived in splendor in Elmore, a mansion built by Stanford White on a private street named Moore Lane. Two of George’s sons, Jeff and Cy, built summer homes on nearby Napatree.
A summer idyll on the very edge of the ocean, Napatree was “sunshine, surf, and salt air blown over a thousand miles of open sea.” Those who lived there called it heaven on earth. They came back summer after summer, the well-to-do with live-in help, and their children grew up, married, and returned with their children. They surf-cast for flatfish from the rocks at the point, raced one another in their sailboats on Little Narragansett Bay, and occasionally lamented the fact that in all the years they’d been coming to Napatree, they’d never weathered a real lollapalooza of a storm.
Hurricane
was a foreign word in New England. People didn’t know how to pronounce it. They didn’t know what it meant, and whatever it meant, they were sure it couldn’t happen to them, until September 21, 1938. On that last perfect beach day, a maverick storm sprinted a mile a minute up the Atlantic seaboard. Like a giant Cyclops, the storm had a single, intense,
And precious was the freight,
Two loving souls transfused in one
With bounding hope elate.
Two hundred years have sped apace
And wrought in man’s behoof;
And thousands now their lineage trace
To John and Mary’s roofe.
The first of Westerly’s natural assets is bluish granite, considered by many to have the finest texture in the world. In the nineteenth century when the Smith Granite Company, Westerly’s first and largest quarry, was buzzing, skilled stonecutters from northern Italy were imported to carve Civil War monuments and gravestones. Eighty percent of the memorials for both Yankee and Confederate soldiers are built of Westerly blue granite, and the masons who carved them established the roots of an Italian community that remains strong to this day. Westerly’s other natural asset is the Pawcatuck River, which allowed mills to flourish.
George C. Moore, Geoffrey’s grandfather, arrived in town at the start of the century. He was an Englishman who had deserted his horse artillery regiment and fled to America. Oversize in all things except height, Moore was a man of quick wits (he filed almost as many patents as Thomas Edison) and quick fists. Being packed into steerage with hundreds of other fugitives and optimists did nothing to curb his temper, and before he reached the end of the gangplank, he was brawling with a fellow passenger twice his size. An English gentleman, embarking from a first-class cabin, witnessed the fisticuffs and hired Moore as a bodyguard. The two toured the Wild West together.
When he came back East, Moore worked in various New England towns as a weaver, finally settling in Westerly about 1912. He was in his early thirties by then, a widower with five children and enough capital saved up to invest in a small mill. He also invested in a horse and buggy and set about to win the affections of Elizabeth Fahey, an Irish bricklayer’s daughter. Elizabeth was just as feisty as George and several inches taller. To offset her natural advantage, Moore wore high-heeled shoes. In their later years, after her husband had made a fortune, Elizabeth liked to keep him in check by saying that she married him because he was the only young man with his own buggy, and since her other serious suitor was a man with one leg, George seemed a catch by comparison.
Elizabeth and George had four sons: Thomas, Harold, Geoffrey, and Cyril. Their father put them to work in the mill as soon as they were big enough to operate the equipment. Elastic webbing was in demand as a substitute for whalebones in ladies’ corsets, and George C. Moore Co. prospered. The First World War brought a further business boom, because the same elastic webbing that gave a woman an hourglass figure made gas masks a snug fit. By 1938, the Moores were the wealthiest family in Westerly. They lived in splendor in Elmore, a mansion built by Stanford White on a private street named Moore Lane. Two of George’s sons, Jeff and Cy, built summer homes on nearby Napatree.
A summer idyll on the very edge of the ocean, Napatree was “sunshine, surf, and salt air blown over a thousand miles of open sea.” Those who lived there called it heaven on earth. They came back summer after summer, the well-to-do with live-in help, and their children grew up, married, and returned with their children. They surf-cast for flatfish from the rocks at the point, raced one another in their sailboats on Little Narragansett Bay, and occasionally lamented the fact that in all the years they’d been coming to Napatree, they’d never weathered a real lollapalooza of a storm.
Hurricane
was a foreign word in New England. People didn’t know how to pronounce it. They didn’t know what it meant, and whatever it meant, they were sure it couldn’t happen to them, until September 21, 1938. On that last perfect beach day, a maverick storm sprinted a mile a minute up the Atlantic seaboard. Like a giant Cyclops, the storm had a single, intense,
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