I just read Robert Michell's article The Bridge House. I first saw the Footbridge and the house in 1964 when I came to see the Sprucewold cabin my folks had just purchased. It still could swing open to allow access to the inner harbor; I saw the various purposes the house served. There is one purpose younger people may not be aware of.

 

Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933; as usual with something banned that many people liked and wanted, spirits were still very available. The back room of the house had a large trapdoor or hatch that gave access to the water where small boats, dories, could unload cargo into the house. In this case the cargo was spirits from beer to whisky. The rum runners brought spirits from Canada by ship to the many places along the east Atlantic coast including Boothbay Harbor. This was unloaded to smaller boats which brought it into the harbor. There were two cabins on the shore of Linekin Bay in Sprucewold called Flotsam and Jetsam that served a similar function.

 

This commerce was run by mafioso like Joe Bonanno and Frank Costello; the wealth of the U.S. Mafia began during Prohibition. I'd long thought that Joe Kennedy Sr. the Kennedy family patriarch, made his original fortune from bootlegging; his biographies say this isn't true.

 

Doug Reilly

Sprucewold