The Crosby Who Left the Cape

Of the seven unique villages that make up the town of Barnstable on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, there is one that enjoys, if such a thing is possible, an over-abundance of geographic blessings. In addition to 5 miles of Nantucket Sound coastline, Osterville abuts or encompasses seven ponds, a river, and four bays. The most important bays relating to this story are North Bay and West Bay, for it is on the passage connecting these two enticing bodies of water, fringed with trees, marsh grass, and sand, that the Crosby boat shops once flourished.

It is a pleasant exercise, now, to imagine Osterville as it was during the latter decades of the 19th century. The village was then home to perhaps 400 residents, but it was also attractive to increasing numbers of summer visitors who arrived by train at the West Barnstable station and then took an hourlong stagecoach ride to their destination. Osterville was, and remains, a genteel place of tree-shaded streets and, especially in the years before the automobile, it offered a full measure of peace and quiet. At night, nothing detracted from the darkness and starlight except for the oil lamps of neatly kept homes and inns. Summer visitors relaxed and socialized, went bathing, or visited the reading room in the shingle-roofed library that, in 1882, had a collection of 1,209 books.

For many, though, the waterfront represented Osterville’s picturesque centerpiece. This was the place to rent a rowing skiff or hire a skipper to take you fishing or for a pleasant daysail around the bays in a catboat built by one or another of the Crosbys, whose shingled boatshops fringed a wide swath of the shore. Here, catboats of all varieties lay alongside boatyard docks, were moored, or hauled out on the sand. Among these shops was Horace Manley Crosby’s. According to the yachting historian William P. Stephens, it was in 1892, “when the business was growing, that a steam power saw was installed in the shop…and he was the first to use steam-bent oak frames in place of the grown pitch pine.” Manley, who Stephens would come to know to some extent personally, was just 20 in 1892, but in the years ahead he would further prove himself to be both a versatile and innovative designer and open to new technologies.

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