FAIRHAVEN

Dartmouth, divided and redivided

In 1787, the eastern portion of Dartmouth seceded and formed a new settlement called New Bedford. This new town included areas that are the present-day towns of Fairhaven, Acushnet, and New Bedford itself. Fairhaven eventually separated from New Bedford, and it was officially incorporated in 1812. At that time, Fairhaven included all of the land on the east bank of the Acushnet River. The northern portion of Fairhaven, upriver from Buzzards Bay, formed another independent town, called Acushnet, in 1860. Thus, what had once been a single town, Dartmouth, with a substantial land area, became, in less than 75 years, four separate municipalities. (The western portion of the original Dartmouth land-purchase eventually became a fifth town, Westport.)

Fort Phoenix

Fort Phoenix, owned by the Town of Fairhaven, is located in Fairhaven at the mouth of the Acushnet River, and it served, during colonial and revolutionary times, as the primary defense against seaborne attacks on New Bedford harbor. It is adjacent to the Fort Phoenix State Beach and Reservation operated by the state.

Within sight of the fort, the first naval battle of the American Revolution took place on May 14, 1775. Under the command of Nathaniel Pope and Daniel Egery, a group of 25 Fairhaven minutemen (including Noah Stoddard) aboard the sloop Success retrieved two vessels previously captured by a British warship in Buzzards Bay.

On September 5 and 6, 1778, the British landed four thousand soldiers on the west side of the Acushnet River. They burned ships and warehouses in New Bedford, skirmished at the Head-of-the-River bridge (approximately where the Main Street bridge in Acushnet is presently situated), and marched through Fairhaven to Sconticut Neck, burning homes along the way. In deference to the overwhelming force approaching from the landward side, the fort was abandoned, and it was destroyed by the enemy. An attack on Fairhaven village itself was repelled by militia under the command of Major Israel Fearing, who had marched from Wareham, some 15 miles (24 km) away, with additional militiamen. Fearing's heroic action saved Fairhaven from further molestation.

The fort was enlarged before the War of 1812, and it helped repel an attack on the harbor by British forces. In the early morning hours of June 13, 1814, landing boats were launched from the British raider, HMS Nimrod. Alerted by the firing of the guns at Fort Phoenix, the militia gathered, and the British did not come ashore.

The fort was decommissioned in 1876, and in 1926 the site was donated to the town by Cara Rogers Broughton (a daughter of Henry Huttleston Rogers). Today, the area surrounding the fort includes a park and a bathing beach. The fort lies just to the seaward side of the harbor's hurricane barrier.

Whaling

Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, whale oil was the primary source of fuel for lighting in the United States. The whaling industry was an economic mainstay for many New England coastal communities for over two hundred years. The famous whaling port of New Bedford is located across the Acushnet River from Fairhaven. Fairhaven was also a whaling port; in fact, in the year 1838, Fairhaven was the second-largest whaling port in the United States, with 24 vessels sailing for the whaling grounds. The author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, departed from the port of Fairhaven aboard the whaleship Acushnet in 1841.

However, once New Bedford's predominance in the whaling industry became apparent, Fairhaven's economy evolved into one that supplemented the New Bedford economy rather than competing directly with it. Fairhaven became a town of shipwrights, ship chandlers, ropemakers, coopers, and sailmakers. It also became a popular location for ship-owners and ship-captains to build their homes and raise their children.

Henry Huttleston Rogers

Among Fairhaven's natives was Henry Huttleston Rogers (1840–1909), a businessman and philanthropist. Rogers was one of the key men in John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust. He later developed the Virginian Railway. Rogers and his wife, Abbie Gifford Rogers, another Fairhaven native (who was the daughter of the whaling captain Peleg Gifford), donated many community improvements in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century, including a grammar school, an extraordinarily luxurious high school, the Town Hall, the George H. Taber Masonic Building, the Unitarian Memorial Church, the Tabitha Inn, the Millicent Library, and a modern water-and-sewer system. These structures were erected to top-quality construction standards, a trademark philosophy of Henry H. Rogers; some are still in regular use more than one hundred years later.

In 1885, Rogers built a huge and modern (for the times) elementary school and, in 1893, a memorial to his beloved daughter, Millicent, in the form of an Italian-Renaissance palazzo that serves as the town's free public library to this day. On February 22, 1894, when the Fairhaven Town Hall, a gift of Abbie Palmer (Gifford) Rogers, was dedicated, Mark Twain delivered a humorous speech to mark the occasion. Less than three months later, on May 21, 1894, Abbie Rogers died in New York following surgery for stomach cancer.

Rogers befriended a number of the high and mighty; he also became a friend, advisor, and patron to a number of the less-well-off. Among his friends were Booker T. Washington, Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller, and Mark Twain, all of whom came to visit Rogers in Fairhaven, sometimes for protracted periods. Late in Twain's life, he had managed to impoverish himself; Rogers lent him a helping hand, and Twain did whatever he could to return the favors.