Charles Maxson

Always referred to in the Charles Potter Maxson family as "Chicken Charlie". This was I suspect a nickname he picked up in his later years when he was hauling lobster traps for a living ("Chicken" is small lobster, probably undersized by today's standards). He was only 48, divorced, no children, when he built a small hut around a derelict hull that had washed up on SixPenny Isl in the Mystic River during a storm. He cut a door in it and roofed it for shelter. He would row out in his dory to tend his pots around Mystic Island. One day they found his empty dory afloat, and assumed that one of his pots had hauled him instead. He was found several days later floating off Montauk Point. I remember my grandparents (Wheelers/Maxsons) talking about picnics at the hut in the years after he was gone. Hurricanes in the 1950's removed any trace of the hull/hut. See sources: