Boating on Bare Hill Pond in the early 20th century. (Photo courtesy of Harvard Historical Society)
At the March Town Meeting, Harvard residents voted to spend $5,000 to study building a boathouse on the site where the old boathouse used to be. If the old foundation is sturdy enough, design plans for a new structure will be drawn up. The location, a narrow piece of land at the eastern end of the town beach, has an illustrious history: its former buildings were far more than just boathouses.
In his Reminiscences of Harvard (1924), Frederick S. Savage talks of Haskell’s grove at the pond where town picnics were held and “it seemed as if everyone in the town turned out.” He asks, “Do you remember the large wharf Mr. Haskell had built out into the pond and the then-large boats with awnings over them that would hold at least 20 or more comfortably?” He goes on to say that Charles Haskell lived in the house that was called Orchard End, and was later owned by Fiske Warren. The house, no longer standing, was located on Tahanto Trail, down toward the pond from the Hutch on Bolton Road, which Warren later built as his own residence. Haskell “had many large boats, swings, a dancing pavilion, and small cook house, enabling parties to go there and enjoy a pleasant day.” The pavilion evidently was “a dance hall then with roof over it, and the town would hire a band for the day.” From this information given by Savage, it seems likely that the wharf and pavilion he speaks of were precursors to the “old boathouse” and located on the same site.
Warren, a well-known businessman from Boston, came to Harvard in 1894. His dream was to buy up land and lease it, establishing a single-tax colony. He purchased the Haskell farm, had two tenants by 1909, and later “built the large house on the side hill, called the mansion.” By the early 1930s Warren had purchased 818 acres of property, mostly for the Tahanto enclave, much of which was occupied by people who used their houses near the pond just during the summer months. He had also built “a large stock barn, ice house, boathouse, hermitage, reservoir and water works and the roads through the property.” The late Joan Schaffer, Warren’s granddaughter, talked about the boathouse her grandfather built in an interview with Ann Levison in 1980. “Rather than just build a boathouse he thought he might as well build a second floor with a ballroom, too.” In actuality, the room was rarely used for balls, but rather as a place for meetings of the colony. With Warren’s death in 1938, the experiment came to an end and the land that had been in the trust was eventually sold back to the original owners.
The boathouse, now in private ownership, was reputedly the scene of “good times” during the 1940s and ’50s. The upstairs, no longer used for colony meetings, hosted gala parties and dances. Downstairs was nicely furnished, complete with a pool table. Unfortunately, the isolated nature of the structure—at the edge of the pond, surrounded by woods—proved a temptation to vandals. With the owners gone for two years in the ’60s, trespassers threw furniture out the windows and generally vandalized the building. After that, it fell further and further into disrepair, continuing to be a target for destructive forays.
In 1983, a heated dispute began over the fate of the boathouse. The owners had offered the structure to the town as a gift, and the town accepted it at town meeting. A Boathouse Study Committee was formed to determine how the property could best benefit the town. However, it was learned that a deed restriction accompanied the boathouse, limiting its use to private ownership for 22 years. The committee members could not agree on whether to keep or return the gift. Some members wanted to return the gift to the previous owners; others wanted to accept the gift in order to obtain the one-sixth-acre strip of waterfront property to add to the town beach and then tear down the structure; still others wanted to save the building and find a town use for it. The question of taking the land by eminent domain was also raised, because that would eliminate the deed restriction. Finally, the deadlocked committee brought the issue to a Special Town Meeting in June 1984. Voters were presented with five warrant articles connected to the boathouse. The first of the articles regarded taking the boathouse and land by eminent domain and the article passed, 158–16. Next, the town was asked whether or not to tear down the existing structure. By a vote of 116–53, townspeople approved $8,000 to tear the building down. The remaining three articles were rendered moot by the first two.
Paul Lierhaus, president of the Bare Hill Rowing Association, says his primary objective with a new boathouse is to have a place to store boats for townspeople. In addition, he said, rental boats might also be housed here, and the Bromfield crew teams could use the facility for their boats as well. There are other possible uses for a boathouse building, Lierhaus said. “It [just] depends on what the town wants and what people are willing to pay for.” Now the town needs to decide how much history it wants to bring back, and whether to build something strictly utilitarian or a more versatile structure with room to gather—and dance.
