14 JL 



100 \'EARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988 



I 





T/ie Nantucket sidewheel ferry 

 boat in Woods Hole Passage, 

 with Devil's Foot Island in the 

 foreground. MBL Archives. 



rooming and boarding at one of the few houses willing to take in strangers 

 that first year. Or as Clapp reported, some took their meals in the "dark, 

 dingy hole" of a dining room at the railroad station. They then picked their 

 way through the glacial boulders toward the simple wooden building with 

 its general open laboratory. 



By 1902, in contrast, when student Beamon Douglas spent the summer 

 at the MBL, it seemed to him that nearly every house in town eagerly took 

 in boarders. He reported that "the modest sum of three or four dollars a 

 week secures a large room, comfortable though simply furnished, with 

 sufficient lamp oil, bed linens, and water for the most exacting." By then, the 

 homeowners were often so glad of the opportunity to take in additional 

 income for a few months that they rented out all available space to the busy 

 and generally well-behaved scientists and themselves occupied the unrent- 



William Procter in front of Old Main, 1923. Photograph by 

 Alfred F. Huettner, MBL Archives. 



