Rebuilding on a historic site

Thirty years after a mysterious fire destroyed a Bourne landmark, a Worcester couple plans a home that will evoke some past grandeur.

GRAY GABLES - The weed-strewn lot where President Grover Cleveland's summer White House was destroyed by fire nearly 30 years ago won't remain vacant much longer.

The town of Bourne has issued a building permit for a 4,456-square-foot house to be built on a promontory overlooking Buzzards Ba the Cape Cod Canal.

Shortly after 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 10, 1973, employees at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers station across the canal alerted Bourne firefighters to the blaze, which erupted in the Gray Gables Ocean House restaurant and hotel.

The fire was well along when firefighters arrived, said William Wright Jr. of Pocasset, now 70, who was a call firefighter then like his late father, who also responded to the fire at 217 Presidents Road.

"It was all wood," Wright said. "It went up pretty fast."

It took 100 firefighters from Bourne, Falmouth, Sandwich and Onset three hours to extinguish the fire, their efforts hampered by low water pressure to the remote site that forced them to pump water from the canal.

The fire was deemed of suspicious origin but no charges were ever brought. Once the charred remnants of the nation's first summer White House were removed, the waterfront lot with its panoramic view would remain empty for three decades.

Now a Worcester man is about to change that.

Building permit grantedFrancis W. Madigan Jr., who owns a summer house next door to the old Cleveland property, received a building permit in November for a three-bedroom house with a detached garage.

The two-story house will have a wraparound deck, porches, a half-dozen gables and be built to resemble Cleveland's summer hideaway, which the president used in the late 19th century until 1904.

"It's not a complete replica but it's going to be similar to it," said Madigan, who owns a construction compan bought the property in 1982.

The contractor, Halliday Builders of Bourne, will not seek out plans for the Cleveland house as a guide to the new one, Madigan said.

Cleveland's summer house, about twice the size of the new structure, could not be built now at the site due to septic, zoning and construction restrictions enacted over the years, Madigan said.

The town health board told Madigan he could have three bedrooms in the house, not four as planned, in order to reduce wastewater. Madigan must also install a new septic system to replace one built before the stricter state regulations took effect in 1995.

Madigan wants to start building by spring and expects the work to be done within a year. "It's not going to be rushed," he said. He plans to sell the house or move there with his wife, Mary Jane.

Mary Jane Madigan remembers how upset she was by the fire that destroyed Cleveland's former summer residence, then still widely known by an earlier business name, the Gray Gables Inn.

"We hated to see it come down because it was such a historic property," she said.

Bar railing relicOne of the few artifacts to survive the fire intact was the brass foot railing from the bar, which graces the bar in the finished basement of the Madigans' current house in Gray Gables.

The old Cleveland house was built in 1880 on the shores of the Monument River and named "Tudor Haven," after the Tudor family that first owned it.

Cleveland, the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms, bought the "many gabled, gray shingled" dwelling and 100 adjoining acres in 1890 while between stints in the White House.

Cleveland renovated and renamed the house "Gray Gables," as the neighborhood is known to this day.

Cleveland, along with his wife, Frances, spent their first summer together at Gray Gables in 1891. Their oldest child, Ruth, was born in October 1891, a week after the couple left Cape Cod for the season.

Cleveland, an avid fisherman, spent many hours on the waters near his home with his close friend, Joseph Jefferson, a popular actor who owned a house overlooking Buttermilk Bay.

"It is possible that Cleveland spent the happiest days of his life at Gray Gables," wrote biographer Allan Nevins. "He went to Buzzards Bay each summer with the eagerness of a city-jaded boy escaping to the woods."

Cleveland once told a friend that "I never saw a place I liked so well ... and I never was so well ... and I never was so contented and happy," as he was at Gray Gables.

The Clevelands eventually had five children, two born at Gray Gables. The family spent a dozen summers on the Cape until 1904, when 13-year-old Ruth died of diphtheria.

Devastated by the loss and unsettled by rumors of a canal to be built past his front lawn, Cleveland rented the house the next summer and the family never returned. Cleveland died in 1908 and his son, Richard, sold the property in 1920.

The Gray Gables house was eventually converted to a restaurant and hotel, which it remained in different incarnations until destroyed by fire in 1973.

Bourne village resident Dudley Jensen tended bar at the inn for two summers in the 1950s and remembers it as a quietly elegant place that drew a regular following.

"A lot of them would come here and spend a week," Jensen said.

Bourne Conservation Commission member and Gray Gables resident Paul Bushueff, who owns one of the few remaining houses built by the 19th century architect of Cleveland's house, said he was happy to hear of a new house being built on the site.

"There should be a house out there," Bushueff said. "It's a great location. As long as it's a good house."