This Was Then: The Pawnee House

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The Pawnee House. – Courtesy Chris Baer

The Pawnee House is occupied today by Ben & Bill’s, Eastaway, and other Circuit Avenue shops, albeit just a stump of its former four-story glory. Known in the late 19th century for its reasonable prices, spring beds, good food, and lofty locale (“situated on the highest point on the bluff, commanding a fine view of land and water”), the Pawnee accommodated up to 200 guests each night, second only to the Sea View.

The establishment of this grand Oak Bluffs hotel about 1872 is usually credited to Hyannis restaurateur and hotelman Russell Sturgis. Sturgis died barely a year later, following his bizarre attack upon a New Bedford music professor he had invited into his Hyannis home to tune his piano, only to assault him with a club and jackknife. (The knife was turned fatally back upon the attacker.) The Pawnee was then bought and sold by a series of Brockton owners, when another murder mystery pulled up to its steps.

Late on a stormy Saturday night in August 1874, Oak Bluffs residents raised an alarm when a team of frightened horses pulling a wagon full of bloodied feathers and tar appeared outside the Pawnee House, without any sign of a driver. Additional clues gleaned from its contents directed authorities immediately to the cottage of Samuel Elliott on Tuckernuck Avenue. In the field outside his door, they found the dying form of Tisbury farmer Caleb Smith, dressed in his haying overalls, lying in the dark on the wet grass with a bullet in his chest. He died within minutes of being discovered.

The whole story quickly came to light. Earlier that summer a scandal erupted when Vineyard residents Almar Dickson and Ira Dexter returned to the Island from an extended sea voyage to find that their wives, sisters Lizzie and Phoebe (née Smith) of Edgartown, had moved in with new boyfriends: Worcester realtor (and ex-con) Samuel Elliott, and the deputy sheriff of Dukes County, John Vinson. The furious Mr. Dickson recruited Caleb Smith (brother of both women) and a gang of their friends, and during the fierce rainstorm that August night, they raided Elliott’s cottage with the intent of tarring and feathering the male inhabitants. One of Dickson’s mob entered wielding a revolver and handcuffs, and managed to force Elliott into the wagon, but Elliott drew his own revolver, shot Smith, and escaped. All of the men were quickly located and arrested. It was the first homicide case on Martha’s Vineyard in nearly a dozen years, since the unsolved axe murder of a Vineyard Haven storekeeper in 1863.

Elliott was soon released without charges, although the Boston Globe reported that “threats of assassination are in the air.” Two days after the shooting, a hundred men reportedly assembled again at the cottage in an attempt to lynch Elliott, but he managed to slip away unharmed. Elliott, ex-Deputy Sheriff Vinson, and the two sisters left the Island in great haste, and after a round of divorces, they each married their new partners. They never returned to Martha’s Vineyard.

Chris Baer teaches photography and graphic design at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. He’s been collecting vintage photographs for many years.