When my family lived in Weymouth, the route we would take to my grandparents in Rochester was Rte.18 to Rte. 105 and then down North Ave. and then Snipatuit Road. My mother always called the part of 105 that ran through Lakeville into Rochester the “hills and holes.”
When I was teaching third grade Massachusetts history in Weymouth, we would go on two or three field trips a year. One year, I decided it was time that our third graders knew that there was more to Massachusetts than the South Shore and Boston. Consequently, we took a trip to Acushnet to pick apples, and we took the same roads my family drove, except that we stayed on 105. The children loved the trip (in part because they thought you had to go to New Hampshire to pick apples), especially the ponds we passed and the Wampanoag Cemetery site. The bus driver, on the other hand got more and more nervous the further down Rte.18 that we went and wanted to turn around in Bridgewater.
This is a long digression from the actual topic for this week. There are two photographs with this article and another mystery to be solved. One picture shows the shoreline across from the New Bedford Waterworks and the other shows a woman in a boat. The shoreline behind her matches the shoreline in the picture from the waterworks. On the side of the boat it says, “Steamship Assawompsett.”
So here is the mystery. There is no inscription on the back of the picture, so we don’t know who she was and when she went boating. Was this just one boat or were there more? Did they take people on excursions? Her clothing would seem to be from the late 1800s to early 1900s.
If anyone can shed some light on the mystery of this picture, please, let me know at eshbach2@aol.com
By Connie Eshbach
