Did You Know? (Hodgkins Cove, Bay View)

That in the early 1850’s, Mr. Beniah Colburn at one time operated the quarry at Hodgkin’s Cove, originally opened by Richard W. Ricker and Kilby P. Sargent, and later known as the quarry of the Cape Ann Granite Company?  Mr. Colburn made the first blocks now known as New York blocks, and sent them to Boston, where they were laid in Exchange Street, near the Merchants’ Bank Building.  These blocks were the first to be laid on the edge instead of on the flat. (History of Essex County, Massachusetts, volume 2, part 1 by Duane Hamilton Hurd, J.W. Lewis & Co. 1888)

Now, thanks to a partnership between the state Division of Marine Fisheries and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the old research station at Hodgkins Cove in Bay View — once the site of the loading dock for shipping Gloucester granite, and more recently a UMass seafood research laboratory — is about to become the new, permanent home of a small but globally influential research laboratory dedicated to the study of bluefin tuna and other long-distance marine travelers.

These photos are of the old research station, and an old fishing shack at the end to the right of Hodgkins Cove.

E.J. Lefavour

www.khanstudiointernational.com