Grape Island, sometimes known as Grape Island, Ipswich, is a part of Plum Island, in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the United States. For nearly two centuries, Grape Island was a small, but thriving community of fishermen, farmers, and clam diggers, until the land was purchased by the US Government and turned into a wildlife refuge in the middle of the 20th century. Its last resident was Lewis Kilborn, who lived his entire life on the island until his death in 1984.
Though often considered a part of Plum Island, Grape Island is separated from the larger barrier island by a creek. It can be seen from Ipswich's "Great Neck" which provides an excellent view across Plum Island Sound. It can still be accessed by boat, or perhaps less easily by land at low tide from the marshes of Plum Island State Park.
Local histories record that fishermen and farmers settled on Grape Island throughout the 18th Century, and like Plum Island, Grape Island had a somewhat sizeable population by the 1870s. By the late 1800s there was a hotel, operated by the MacKinney Family, a school where Grape Island's children attended class from April to November, and a number of small cottages and houses owned by seasonal and year-round residents. Some of the more prominent families on the island were the Smalls, Baileys, MacKinney's and Kilborns. Summer on the island saw additional seasonal residents and the island and its surroundings were popular with duck hunters, fishermen, lobstermen, and clammers.
The island witnessed considerable decline beginning in the 1920s as more and more families left for the towns of Ipswich, Rowley, Newbury, and Newburyport and elsewhere. By the 1930s, only the Kilborn Family and one other family remained and soon thereafter the Department of the Interior took possession of the island and it became part of the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. John Kilborn and his son Lewis Kilborn refused to leave however and paid the Government monthly rent of $10.00 a month to stay on the island. John Kilborn died in 1946, and for the next 38 years the only residents on Grape Island were Lewis Kilborn and the area's wildlife.
Well known in the area, and sometimes referred to as the "Hermit of Grape Island" (a reference he hated), Lewis Kilborn continued to live on the island much like earlier generations had, collecting rain for his water supply, heating his house with a wood stove, fishing, and heading into town in his boat for groceries. He listened to the world's events through a transistor radio and would read any and all books and newspapers that friends and relatives would bring him. He died in March 1984.
Little remains of the houses, cottages, school and the hotel on Grape Island. What wasn't torn down, or removed by the Government was long ago reclaimed by nature. Numerous magazine and newspaper articles about Grape Island have appeared in Yankee Magazine, and the local papers, some of them written by former Representative John F. Dolan of Ipswich (Lewis Kilborn's nephew) who lived there as a boy in the 1920s.
Burhou is a small island about 1.4 miles (2.3 km) northwest of Alderney that is part of the Channel Islands. It has no permanent residents, and is a bird sanctuary, so landing there is banned from March 15 to August 1. The island's wildlife includes a colony of puffins and many rabbits.
Essex is a coastal town in Essex County, Massachusetts, 26 miles (42 km) north of Boston and 13 miles (21 km) southeast of Newburyport. It is known for its former role as a center of shipbuilding. The population was 3,675 at the 2020 census.
Ipswich is a coastal town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 13,785 at the 2020 census. Home to Willowdale State Forest and Sandy Point State Reservation, Ipswich includes the southern part of Plum Island. A residential community with a vibrant tourism industry, the town is famous for its clams, celebrated annually at the Ipswich Chowderfest, and for Crane Beach, a barrier beach near the Crane estate. Ipswich was incorporated as a town in 1634.
Barnegat Bay is a small brackish arm of the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 42 miles (68 km) long, along the coast of Ocean County, New Jersey in the United States. It is separated from the Atlantic by the long Island Beach State Park, as well as by the north end of Long Beach Island, popular segments of the Jersey Shore. The bay is fed by several small rivers, including the Toms River, the Forked River, the Metedeconk River, Cedar Creek, Oyster Creek, Mill Creek, the Westecunk Creek and the Tuckerton Creek which empty into the bay through small estuaries along its inner shore. The communities of Toms River, Silverton, and Forked River sit along the river estuaries on the bay.
Plum Island is a barrier island located off the northeast coast of Massachusetts, north of Cape Ann, in the United States. It is approximately 11 miles (18 km) in length. The island is named for the wild beach plum shrubs that grow on its dunes, but is also famous for the purple sands at high tide, which get their color from tiny crystals of pink pyrope garnet. It is located in parts of four municipalities in Essex County. From north to south they are the city of Newburyport, and the towns of Newbury, Rowley, and Ipswich.
The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1974 to help protect and preserve a portion of the Great Dismal Swamp, a marshy region on the Coastal Plain of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina between Norfolk, Virginia, and Elizabeth City, North Carolina in the United States. It is located in parts of the independent cities of Chesapeake and Suffolk in Virginia, and the counties of Camden, Gates, and Pasquotank in North Carolina.
Pleasure Beach is the Bridgeport portion of a Connecticut barrier beach that extends 2.5 miles (4 km) westerly from Point No Point. Prior to June, 2014, when Pleasure Beach re-opened, the area was Connecticut's largest and most recent ghost town after it was abandoned in the late 1990s due to a fire on the bridge connecting it to the mainland. It is surrounded on three sides by water.
The Plum Island Range Lights are a pair of range lights located on Plum Island in Door County, Wisconsin. They were part of the Plum Island United States Life-Saving Station. Plum Island was transferred to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 2007 and became part of the Green Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The life-saving station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. Plum Island is seasonally open to the public for day-time use.
Ipswich River is a small river in northeastern Massachusetts, United States. It held significant importance in early colonial migrations inland from the ocean port of Ipswich. The river provided safe harborage at offshore Plum Island Sound to early Massachusetts subsistence farmers, who were also fishermen. A part of the river forms town boundaries and divides Essex County, Massachusetts on the coast from the more inland Middlesex County. It is 35 miles (56 km) long, and its watershed is approximately 155 square miles (401 km2), with an estimated population in the area of 160,000 people.
The Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge is a 950-acre (384.5 ha) National Wildlife Refuge in ten units across the U.S. state of Connecticut. Located in the Atlantic Flyway, the refuge spans 70 miles (110 km) of Connecticut coastline and provides important resting, feeding, and nesting habitat for many species of wading birds, shorebirds, songbirds and terns, including the endangered roseate tern. Adjacent waters serve as wintering habitat for brant, scoters, American black duck, and other waterfowl. Overall, the refuge encompasses over 900 acres (364.2 ha) of barrier beach, intertidal wetland and fragile island habitats.
Bonackers is the name for a group of people from the East Hampton Town area of East Hampton, New York.
Sandy Point State Reservation is a coastal Massachusetts state park located in the town of Ipswich at the southern tip of Plum Island. The reservation is managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation and is an important nesting area for the piping plover and the least tern. Access to the reservation is through the adjoining Parker River National Wildlife Refuge.
Crane Beach is a 1,234-acre (4.99 km2) conservation and recreation property located in Ipswich, Massachusetts, immediately north of Cape Ann. It consists of a four-mile-long (6 km) sandy beachfront, dunes, and a maritime pitch pine forest. Five and a half miles of hiking trails through the dunes and forest are accessible from the beachfront.
Broadkill Beach is an unincorporated beach community in Sussex County, in the U.S. state of Delaware, located on the Delaware Bay north of the mouth of the Broadkill River. It is part of the Salisbury, Maryland-Delaware Metropolitan Statistical Area. The word kill is from the Dutch word kil.
The Potawatomi Islands is the most common historic name given to the string of islands that delineate the transition from Green Bay to Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes. The archipelago is also termed the "Grand Traverse Islands".
The Bay Circuit Trail and Greenway or Bay Circuit is a Massachusetts rail trail and greenway connecting the outlying suburbs of Boston from Plum Island in Newburyport to Kingston Bay in Duxbury, a distance of 200 miles (320 km).
Parker River National Wildlife Refuge is a wildlife sanctuary encompassing the majority of Plum Island in northeastern Essex County, Massachusetts, 5 miles southeast of Newburyport. It was established in 1942 primarily to provide feeding, resting, and nesting habitats for migratory birds. Located along the Atlantic Flyway, the refuge is of vital stopover significance to waterfowl, shorebirds, and songbirds during migratory periods.
Choate Island, also known as Hog Island, is an island located in the Essex River Estuary in Essex, Massachusetts. It is part of the Crane Wildlife Refuge, which is owned and managed by The Trustees of Reservations. The 135-acre (0.55 km2) island is a refuge for a variety of birds and animals. It is surrounded by a salt marsh and has a spruce forest which was planted in the 1930s and makes the island easily visible from much of the surrounding area. The island has been inhabited by the Native Americans of the area, and was visited by early Europeans, who established farming on the island. The Choate House, built around 1730, remains relatively unchanged.
Galilee is a fishing village on Point Judith within the town of Narragansett, Rhode Island, USA, and is notable for being home to the largest fishing fleet in Rhode Island and for being the site of the Block Island Ferry. The village is directly across the harbor from Jerusalem, Rhode Island. Galilee, Rhode Island is named after the Biblical Galilee, which was the original home region of Jesus Christ, who grew up in Nazareth, a village in the Galilee region of Israel on the Sea of Galilee. Four of Jesus' disciples, Andrew, Peter, James and John, were fishermen from Galilee.
John F. Dolan (1922–2013) was a longtime member of the Massachusetts State Legislature and an advocate of conservation. During his tenure in office as a State Representative, Dolan helped create groundbreaking legislation for the conservation of natural resources in the State of Massachusetts.