Lakeville Tower: Mundane or Mystery?

LAKEVILLE (WBSM) — If you’ve been to the Heritage Hill golf course in Lakeville, you’ve likely seen the stone tower that sits just to the left of the clubhouse entrance and wondered what it is all about.

Is it some sort of colonial-era relic? Perhaps a former windmill?

Well, there’s the mundane explanation, and then there’s the fantastical one. We will leave it up to you as to what you want to believe.

What Is the History of the Lakeville Tower?

The tower is officially known as the Lakeville Sailors’ Home Tower, according to Lakeville Historical Society President Brian Reynolds.

The story begins with the Foster-Sampson property that once encompassed the entire Heritage Hill neighborhood. The Foster-Sampson House still stands on Highland Road, and at one point Sampson’s Tavern operated on the property. The land was originally owned by Thomas Foster, who sold it to Uriah Sampson in 1768. It passed through various members of the Sampson family over the years.

Reynolds said the tavern shut down in 1863, and was torn down in 1911.

In 1881, part of the Sampson farm was sold to the National Sailors’ Home Corporation.

“It was a group from Quincy that wanted to have a home for Civil War sailors. They built one in Quincy, built one in Marshfield or Duxbury, maybe one down the Cape,” Reynolds said. “They wanted to build one in Lakeville, but it never got built.”

Reynolds said that the company built a tower in Lakeville to serve as the water supply for the house they were going to build on the hill, but then an economic depression hit and the company ran out of money, so the home was never constructed.

What Happened to the Lakeville Sailors’ Home Property?

A family named Phillips eventually bought the land, and their daughter Jeannette later inherited it all. She married an English Army officer from World War I, Arthur Gibbs, and they lived on the property.

The family had multiple members who were also authors, and they would sit up in the tower – which at that time had a round wooden roof and windows – and would write their books. Sometime after World War II, an arsonist set fire to the tower and the wooden roof was burned off.

The tower is now under the care of the Lakeville Historical Society, donated by later property owner Basil Bartlett and his wife.

Could the Lakeville Tower Be Even Older?

While it sounds like the origin story of the Lakeville Tower as a water tower is pretty cut-and-dry (no pun intended), Reynolds said a local stonemason examined the tower and his opinion is that the mortar isn’t original and the tower itself may be much older than believed.

“If it is as he thinks it is, it’s pretty old,” Reynolds said.

The stonemason believes it was a pre-Revolutionary powder house for the Middleboro settlement.

“It’s a possibility, but it’s a real stretch,” Reynolds said. “Middleboro had a powder house, but where it was, I don’t know. It’s an open question: where was the Middleboro powder house? It doesn’t say in any of the histories. Was it a stone tower?”

After all, the next street over from Heritage Hill is called Old Powder House Road, so someone must’ve believed the powder house had been in the vicinity.

Could it be pre-Columbian? Something from early Norse visits to New England?

The hill on which the tower is located does not have any solstice alignments, Reynolds said, which would be a key reason for older cultures to build such towers.

The stone itself could be carbon dated, but of course that would only tell us when the stone originated, not when it was pulled together to erect the tower. Naturally, it would tell us that the stone itself is thousands of years old.

These same questions have been asked about the famed Newport Tower in Newport, Rhode Island as well.

The Newport Tower has also been linked to potential Norse or Portuguese explorers in the days before Columbus, yet others have settled on the more mundane explanation of it being a former mill.

Could the two towers be somehow linked?

“I can’t say I know it, but it’s a question that should be answered,” Reynolds said. “What I can say is that it’s an old stone tower and we do what we can to try and keep it there.”

READ MORE: Newport Tower, Mill or Mystery?

There Might Even Be a Stranger History to the Lakeville Tower

The Lakeville Tower is located in the Bridgewater Triangle, so you know there could be more to it than just a water tower.

It all depends on just how out there you want to get with it.

READ MORE: What Is Massachusetts' Bridgewater Triangle?

There is a spot nearby called King Philip’s Hill, where the Sachem Metacom (known to the English as King Philip) is said to have had a lookout. The hill was allegedly built up by the Native Americans, by hand, bringing basket after basket of earth over to construct it.

“There is another hill in Georgia that when the archeologists excavated it, they found basket marks impressed in the dirt. The Indians had brought the baskets up the hill and dumped it when the earth was wet, so it stayed molded to the shape of the basket,” Reynolds said. “The Indians’ story in Lakeville was that they built King Philip’s Hill basket by basket, so there’s probably some truth to it.”

However, Reynolds is also not afraid to believe in the unusual, either.

“Maybe there was some entity that helped the Indians,” he said. “We don’t officially say space aliens or pukwudgies (Native American trickster creatures), but maybe it’s somewhere down the middle.”