CCB MEDIA PHOTO
Sally Gunning of the Brewster Historical Society talks about the society’s purchase of the Captain Elijah Cobb House.
BREWSTER – Brewster has long been known as the “Sea Captain’s Town,” but soon the town will have a museum set in a sea captain’s home.
Sally Gunning, vice president of the Brewster Historical Society, said the society has been renting its headquarters for more than 50 years. But this year, the society has purchased the Elijah Cobb House, a historic sea captain’s home on Lower Road in Brewster. After a renovation, the old home, built in 1799, will serve as the new headquarters of the society.
Gunning said the society’s president Steve Jones was driving down Lower Road last year when he saw that the classic captain’s home was for sale.
The next board meeting, Gunning recalled, had as an agenda item: What about the Elijah Cobb House as our new museum?
The society had already set up a five-year strategic plan and at the top of the list was to try to find a permanent home for the society, Gunning said.
Gunning said, “It’s absolutely a perfect match. We have quite a collection of sea captain’s navigational tools, their portraits, their wives’ portraits, ship’s portraits. We have a whole China Trade exhibit.”
The society purchased the house for $575,000 in February and is restoring and renovating the house to serve as a museum at a cost of $365,000. The society is looking for just $50,000 more in funds to complete the project of restoring the home and the museum is scheduled to open by next summer, Gunning said.
Captain Elijah Cobb led quite an interesting life, Gunning said.
“He landed in France at the time of the French Revolution. He happened to have rice and flour on board so they snagged that to feed the starving populace. He ended up finagling a meeting with Robespierre in order to get out of there with his reimbursement and his ship,” she said. “He stuck around long enough to see Robespierre and over 900 other people guillotined. He did a little rum-running off the coast of Ireland. He traded gold and ivory in Africa. At one point he was a prisoner of war in Canada during the War of 1812.”
“He got around,” Gunning said.
In the year 1850 alone, there were 50 clipper ship captains living in Brewster. “They weren’t ordinary men who could captain a clipper ship, so we’re kind of proud of that,” she said.
Gunning said the sea captains who lived in Brewster at same the time as Captain Cobb were all connected. “If you did grow up in Brewster, you would have seen the sea captains coming into town and throwing some change around and it probably looked like a pretty good way to make a living,” she said.
Gunning writes historical fiction and that is what brought her to the historical society and led to her being on the board.
She said one of the treasures of the collection is a number of turn-of-the-century glass negatives both taken and collected by Caro Duggan, the great granddaughter of Captain Cobb. She kept a diary and there are records of her life in the Captain Cobb House, which will now be the new home of the society.
“We can sit in that very parlor and just imagine it back in her day,” Gunning said.
To read more about the Captain Cobb House, click here.
To listen to Sally Gunning talk about the Captain Elijah Cobb house, click below.
