Beach House, Spring 2024

12 | Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | Spring 2024
At Home on Pochet Island
Hidden in the folding shores of
East Orleans’s Little Pleasant Bay is
a true rarity — a privately owned
but publicly accessible island within
the boundaries of the Cape Cod
National Seashore.
By Stephen Orr
Nancy Barrington can’t remember
the first time she
visited Pochet Island. “I’m
sure Mom and Dad brought me
when I was just a few weeks old,”
she says, “and it’s been home ever
since.” Barrington’s ancestor Gilbert
Russell Payson Sr. purchased
the 150-acre island, which is pronounced
“poachy,” not “poachet,”
in 1886. He also bought two other
neighboring estuarine islands, Hog
and Sampson, both uninhabited
(the latter not to be confused with
the Sampsons Island bird sanctuary
near Cotuit). Wealthy from cotton
mills he owned in New Hampshire,
Payson wanted the islands as his
private duck hunting grounds.
That same year, Payson contracted
a local shipbuilder to construct
a large main house, the
building materials brought over at
low tide on horse-drawn buckboard
from the outer beach at Nauset. It
was called the New House, to distinguish
it from an older structure,
a full Cape now called the Old
House, that was brought to the island
in the early 1800s. These and
three cottages built later are now
used by his descendants.
According to family lore,
Payson was faced with tremendous
debt after being swindled by a business
partner and was forced to sell
his properties in Watertown and
Brookline. “But nobody wanted to
buy three islands on Cape Cod at the
time,” says Barrington, “so they
stayed in the family.” After Payson
died in 1891, ownership went to his
children, whose descendants, now
numbering in the hundreds, still
manage the island as a trust.
Barrington says the island’s
name derives from a Wampa noag
word that means “the dividing
place” because it was an in-between
meeting location for members of
the Monomoyick and Nauset tribes.
By the time her ancestor purchased
the land, it was a sheep farm and
barren of all trees and large shrubs.
Later the family would plant hardwood
trees and do controlled burns
to keep the meadows intact. But after
a fire nearly took out the New
House, that practice was stopped in
the early 20th century, and over the
decades thick copses of pine, oak,
holly, poison ivy, and bittersweet
grew to cover much of the island.
When the National Seashore
proposed to take over the family’s
land in 1961 to guard against future
resort development, the descendants
made the case that the
islands are difficult to access and
an awful lot of work to maintain.
The officials agreed, and the land
was put into a perpetual conservation
easement owned by the family,
who promised never to develop the
islands and never to build another
structure or even replace one if
it burns or is destroyed in a storm.
In return, the family maintains the
paths and meadows against the
rampant growth of invasive plants
while welcoming the public to walk
the trails.
“Keeping Pochet going is still
very much a Payson family project,”
says Barrington. “There are
four miles of trails to tend and some
40 acres of meadows; each acre
takes a day to mow by my brothers
and cousins.”
With hundreds of bird species
on the island, Pochet is a favorite, if
remote, destination for birdwatch-