John’s Church, most of whom are marked in the cemetery records as “unknown.” She found William Holland’s name neatly written in the Cemetery Log on Mawith cause of death listed as drowning. Mélie Spofford read Pierce’s article and thought that William Holland might be buried in the Fishers Island Cemetery, since there are a number of drowning victims in the cemetery next to St. He was known on the Sound from New London to New Haven as “The Lone Fisherman.” Pierce found an obituary in the Maedition of The Hartford Weekly Times that reported that he had drowned off of Fishers Island. This spring, Pierce Rafferty wrote an engaging article for the Fog Horn about William Holland better known as “Uncle Billy,” the hermit who lived on South Dumpling in the late 1800s. He had accumulated property.” At least it wasn’t poison.įollow up August 2013: William “Uncle Billy” Holland, The South Dumpling Hermit He formerly lived on a hummock in Fisher’s Island Sound, but believing that the well on the little sand heap had been poisoned he had latterly made his house in a little fishing boat that he owned. He had gone to the island with two passengers, and probably missed his way and fell off the wharf. The Hartford Weekly Times of Maprovides details of the hermit’s demise: “’Uncle Billy’ Holland, who is well known along the Sound from New London to New Haven was drowned at Fisher’s Island Monday night. No better sailor or more cunning fisherman can be found than ‘Uncle Billy,’ and, as he says, the fish all seem to know him.”
I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.’ So it was he burned his two houses, a large net that he thought was poisoned, and a boat, and left the island. Why, they even put poison on the roof, and I had to burn the whole thing down.
Fishers island fog horn full#
After I got up I threw away the rest of the stuff, and the crows came and ate it up, and the next day here was a dead one and there was a dead one, and the whole Dumplin’ was full of dead crows. ‘I had a fine place there,’ he said, as we stood over the ruins one day, ‘but that ‘ere keeper of the big Dumplin’ tried to poison me: what he did it for I can’t imagine… but he came over one day and put arsenic in the food for 10 days I laid on the floor and didn’t move or eat a thing.’ ‘Wasn’t something else the matter with you, Uncle Billy?’ his visitor asked. On the little Dumpling are the remains of two houses built by him, and destroyed by his own hands. The reporter summarized the problem: “His weakness is displayed principally in his fear of being poisoned, and if for any reason he takes a grudge against a man, that man is sure to be accused of trying to poison him consequently, not a few of the inhabitants of the island are murderers in the eyes of the old hermit. His one and only flaw was a major one: he exhibited the tendencies associated with acute paranoia. Liked by all, “Uncle Billy” made his livelihood selling lobsters and taking small groups out to fish for blackfish in the surrounding waters. The hermit had once been a successful seafarer, but “trouble” of some non-defined type had rattled his mind and caused him to re-treat to unoccupied South Dumpling, just off Fishers Island’s north shore. Rather below the medium height, a face running wild with wrinkles and black with exposure, surrounded by a white ring of whiskers, and out of all, from under an old sou’wester, peer a pair of white eyes, the expression of which defies all description.“ He is well known the length of the Sound and might be said to be the original of the famous ‘Lone Fisherman,’ as he is the exact representative of his prototype on the stage. “‘Uncle Billy’ Holland is the most renowned of the inhabitants. The hermit’s formal name was William Holland, but he was called “Uncle Billy” by all. The man of interest was a full-fledged hermit who had resided on South Dumpling Island for many years, but was living on a small boat anchored off Fishers Island at the time the article was written. While the unidentified reporter appeared somewhat ambivalent about the place, calling it pleasant but “desolate in the first degree,” he appeared quite taken by a local character named “Uncle Billy” who became the focus of his piece. 1895Ī lengthy New York Times article, published on July 13, 1880, reviewed the new resort on Fishers Island. Man standing at spot on South Dumpling where “Uncle Billy” burned his shanty.
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