Gloucester Harbor

The Eastern Point summer colony, situated on a narrow, picturesque peninsula alongside Gloucester Harbor, was nearly twenty years old by the time of Henry Davis Sleeper’s arrival. In 1887 a group of investors named the Eastern Point Associates purchased Thomas Niles’s 450-acre farm on the Point, subdividing the land into 250 plots. Within two years, eleven Queen-Anne style cottages sprouted up on the peninsula, and by 1904 this area once considered beyond civilization featured the colossal, 300-room Colonial Arms Hotel.   

On August 13, 1907, Sleeper bought Lot 101 from George Stacy, developer of the Colonial Arms. The fact that such a choice harbor-side lot remained available was likely due, in part, to its uncomfortable proximity to Stacy’s sprawling hotel. Yet for Sleeper the location could not have been more desirable. The closest available property to Piatt Andrew’s Red Roof, it lay separated from his home by just one owner, Caroline Sinkler, who became a close friend to both men. Like a portent of Beauport’s future prominence on the Point, on New Year’s Day 1908 the towering Colonial Arms burned to the ground. Sleeper’s home, still under construction, lay unscathed.