Relief in Sight
In 1919, the Shelter Island and Greenport Ferry Company
was faced with a series of dilemmas. The double ended steamboat Menantic,
built in 1893, had been in service for over 25 years. She was a big, old
203 ton, 98 foot long clunker and required a crew of four for the run between
Shelter Island and Greenport. She was so expensive to operate that she was
only used four months of the year. The two naphtha (gasoline) launches,
the Neptune and the Prospect, which were used year round
and provided the only nighttime ferry service, could not carry horses and
carriages or automobiles. In the winter, to transport vehicles, they lashed
scows to the sides of the launches or pulled them behind. 
The Menantic pulling out of the Shelter Island slip in 1908. It had been white, but that year it was painted red. By 1920, after being in service for 26 years only during the summer months, from late May through September, she was no longer state of the art and was very expensive to run. |
The answer seemed to be to retire the Menantic and replace it with two much smaller double ended ferries. This would require extensive work on the ferry slip in the Heights and the two in Greenport: on Main Street and at the train terminus.
The Ferry Company was willing to provide daytime winter service with double ended ferries at a loss, but if the Winter residents wanted that service to be at the Town dock at the foot of the State Road on Dering Harbor instead of the already existing slip at the Heights three-quarters of a mile away, then it wanted the Town of Shelter Island to pay the costs of building and maintaining the new slip. It also wanted exclusive use of the Town dock and ferry slip for ferry service. Apparently, Captain Edward C. Rouse of Greenport conducted a summer launch ferry service, in competition with the Ferry Company, from the Town dock, without paying rent or with the benefit of proper licenses. This was a practice the Ferry Company wished to end at least from the Town dock.
The negotiations between the Ferry Company and the Town of Shelter Island frustrated all concerned. The core problem was that although Heights people and Town people had limited business relationships, there was little social interaction. They did not know each other, and, therefore, they did not trust each other.
Howard Edward Raymond
The president of the Ferry Company was Howard Edward Raymond, a single gentleman, who owned a house on Clinton Avenue (according to the Belcher Hyde map of 1915), but kept rooms at the Union League Club in New York City. He was a Brooklyn man. His life was filled with his enthusiasms which began in the mid 1890s with the cycling craze. In 1893, he was president of the American League of Wheelmen. Besides being an avid wheelman, he helped to write the rules for bicycle races. In 1894, after a banquet in his honor given by the wheelmen in New York City, he moved to Chicago to work for the Sterling Bicycle Company. While there he was a charter member of the Chicago Athletic Club. The following year he joined the B. F. Goodrich Company in New York City as sales manager. During his 25 year career with the company he directed the expansion of its business both domestically and abroad, including London, Paris, and Tokyo. The company became the largest producer of automobile tires in the country. When he retired in 1920, he was vice-chairman of the board.
Howard Raymond was no stranger to Shelter Island when, in 1905, then working for B. F. Goodrich and Company in Akron, Ohio, he purchased the house and all of its furnishings on lot 62 on Clinton Avenue in the Heights. He was forty years old.
Those from whom he purchased the property were all heirs of his grandmother Susan B. Gardner -- Joseph K. Gardner (his uncle), Anna K. Swalm (his mother), Henrietta Raymond (his aunt), and Margaret B. Walker (his aunt).
His uncle Joseph K. Gardner had originally purchased the property in 1885 (when Howard was 20) from the estate of Jesse Barker who had purchased the lot in 1872 from the Shelter Island Grove and Camp Meeting Association, one of the very first to invest in the new development.
In the 1880 Census, Howard E. Raymond, age 15, was living at 118 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn with his step-father William Swalm, a physician, his mother, his grandparents, David and Susan Gardner, and their daughter Margaret. Down the street were his mother’s brother and his wife, Joseph and Anna Gardner. Both his uncle and his grandfather were manufacturers of sashes and blinds. In 1910, Howard’s mother Anna Swalm and his uncle Joseph Gardner were living at 118 Lafayette Avenue with his uncle Charles Raymond, his wife Henrietta and their daughter, his cousin, Nettie.
There is no question that this was a very close-knit family, and one can conjecture that while he was traveling the world for his company, he would find time to visit his family at their summer cottage on Shelter Island.
It was only a matter of time before Howard Raymond would purchase the lots surrounding the house on lot 62, in order to create a proper gentleman’s summer estate. In 1911 he purchased the two lots directly across the street. In 1919, he purchased the lots with house to the south and east of his property that had belonged to the Cook family, and in 1920, he purchased the two lots to the north and the four lots to the north east. In 1921, he purchased the alley to the east of his property and in 1923 and 1924 two small slivers of land next to the path called Bay Avenue. Also in 1924, he completed his estate by buying the land from the alley to the Bay from the Heights Association.
When Mr. Raymond retired in 1920, he brought his management skills and enthusiasm to running the Shelter Island Securities Corporation, the holding company of all Heights enterprises, including the Association property, the ferry company, the hotel, the ice company, and the Sihaqua Company which managed the beach club. He was the president of the Board from 1920 to 1925 and a member of the Board from 1920 until his death from pneumonia on October 8, 1928. He oversaw the reinvigoration of the entire operation which had over time been in a decline. This included the complete 1920 renovation and renaming of the hotel from the Prospect to the Poggatticut, the retirement of the coal steamer double ended ferry the Menantic and the building of two new double ended ferries, the Poggatticut in 1920 and the Shelter Island in 1923, the rebuilding of the hotel after a fire badly damaged it and the bathhouses on August 11, 1922, and in 1923, the renaming of both repaired and refurbished hotel and ferry boat from the Poggatticut to the New Prospect.
In 1920 he helped to organize efforts to bring electricity to the Heights, and in the annual report for 1922, he wrote "We have emerged from the darkness." Electric lights were now on the Island. He was the president of the Shelter Island Light and Power Company, of which C. Pliny Brigham was vice president, and David Harries Young was secretary. On March 27, 1922 the Town Board granted the electric franchise to the company.
In the Annual Report of the Shelter Island Heights Association in 1928, the then president, Charles A. Angell, wrote:
On October 8th, 1928, we suffered an irreparable loss in the death of our former President, Howard E. Raymond. No one ever gave more generously of their time or effort than did Mr. Raymond. He was a man of outstanding ability and for five years worked day and night with untiring energy to restore both physically and financially the properties of The Shelter Island Heights Association. Every day reveals more and more the tremendous amount of work that Mr. Raymond did. It is almost unbelievable, even to us who have worked with him for so many years, that one man, almost unassisted, could accomplish so much. No history of our Association will be complete without a chapter devoted to Howard E. Raymond and his work, not only for the Association but for Shelter Island as a Community.
Your President enjoyed the friendship of Mr. Raymond for over 37 years, and no one will miss him more.
My regret is that words fail in adequately expressing my high regard and appreciation of Mr. Raymond as a friend, an executive and a man.
A resolution passed by the Board on December 8 stated that "... he gave untiringly of his effort and counsel -- made notably valuable by his experience in the upbuilding of a great business -- and contributed in great measure to the present excellent condition of their properties.
"He was alert of mind, sagacious, zealous, persistent and farseeing.
"In his intercourse with his fellow workers he was a source of cheer, and helpfulness and he inspired in each a feeling of personal friendship."
The Anna, moored in the slip that Mr. Raymond had built into his property. Henry Belknap's house, which had now been replaced, is in the background. |
In his will he left use of the property on Shelter Island (worth $45,700) to his aunt Margaret Gardner Walker, and his nearly $2 million estate to his cousins, Nettie Raymond and Bessie (Walker) Gateson of 246 Clermont Avenue, Brooklyn. In 1941, they sold the two lots across the street to Clarke A. Bedford and they remain the back yard of the house next to the tennis courts, and the collected lots between Clinton Avenue and Dering Harbor to George C. and Doris A. Prager.
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