Changing of the guard

The history of the compound and of the family that bought and built its summer retreat here includes a Mayflower maiden, an early settler of Salem, a Revolutionary-era protester whose Charlestown home was burned by the British, a Lowell, a Sargent, and her father, who, with help from Frederick Law Olmsted, developed the Arnold Arboretum.

Now, 137 years after the Codmans bought the 25-acre peninsula for $800, the property will finally pass from the hands of one of the country's oldest families: It is for sale, for $7.7 million.

Codman Point has four homes, two of which were designed at the turn of the 20th century by renowned architect Guy Lowell. It has a deepwater dock, five beaches, a tennis court, and a boathouse.

When James Macmaster Codman and Richard Codman bought the land in 1872, the sole building here was a small hotel that provided shelter and food for fishermen. The two Codman families shared the building for several summers.

At the start of the 20th century, ownership was transferred exclusively to James Macmaster and his wife, Henrietta Gray Sargent. Henrietta also hailed from a prominent Boston family, she was the sister of noted botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arnold Arboretum. Their parents owned a massive estate in Brookline, near Jamaica Pond, that was famous for its plantings.

Since then, five generations of the Codman family have enjoyed the Wareham property as a summer haven.

"It's essentially an island you can drive to," said Terry Boyle, of LandVest Inc., the colisting broker of the property. There are protected sandy beaches on Bass Cove and Turtle Cove to the north and south, and rocky stretches of coastline along the southern tip that are exposed to tides and wave action of Buzzards Bay.

For more than a century, members of the Codman family would retreat from the Boston area to the property for the entire summer. The several mile trek into town was seldom ventured, except to pick up supplies. "Codman Point is frozen in time. People don't live like this anymore," said Boyle.

Ultimately, that's why the family has decided to sell the prop erty. One of the current owners, William Churchill, whose great-grandmother was a Codman, said that while the place was revered and enjoyed for generations, "In recent years it's been used less and less. Family members are spread out. With four houses and 25 acres, you need a fairly large amount of people to use it for it to make sense."

The family dates its hold on New England to 1637, when Robert Codman and his mother arrived in Salem from England. In the early 1700s, Charlestown-born John Codman married Parnell Foster, great-granddaughter of Mary Chilton, the first woman to step off the Mayflower. In 1774 their son, John Codman II, helped torch British tea in Charlestown Market - his portrait by John Singleton Copley hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

John Codman III expanded the family wealth through shipping and trade along the Atlantic. In the early 1820s, Codman's Wharf on the Boston waterfront was filled in for the construction of Quincy Market. John Codman III was the father of James Macmaster and Richard, the two original owners of Codman Point, as well as two other sons, Charles Richard and Ogden. His cherished country manor in Lincoln, the Codman Estate, is currently operated by Historic New England, a regional heritage organization, as a museum.

In 1905, James Macmaster and Henrietta set about creating a more elaborate summer haven on Codman Point, knocking down the old hotel and building two houses. To draft the plans, the couple turned to Henrietta's nephew-in-law, acclaimed architect Guy Lowell.

Lowell, educated at Harvard and MIT, was married to the daughter of Charles Sprague Sargent, Henrietta's brother. Lowell's most prominent commissions include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the New York State Supreme Court Building, and he founded the short-lived, but influential, landscape architecture program at MIT (1900-1910).

James and Henrietta had another nephew prominent in architecture whom they might have chosen to design their summer retreat: Ogden Codman Jr., the son of James's brother Ogden. Among Ogden Jr.'s noteworthy clients were John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt; he also famously collaborated with author Edith Wharton on the book "The Decoration of Houses."

Yet, according to Churchill, "There was a falling out in the family that prevented James and Henrietta from consulting Ogden Jr."

Lowell designed two distinct houses that managed to be both grand in scale and in harmony with the rustic setting. The red-roofed "Point House" is a 4,500-square-foot manse with stucco on the front, and shingles on the back, ocean-facing side of the house. Large common rooms make up the first floor, and upstairs there are eight bedrooms.

Designed to capture the southern exposure, the house has extra wide eight-paned windows that frame the magnificent ocean views. While the house has been scarcely updated, it has been well cared for: The walls have been repainted in bold hues regularly, and, in some areas, the dark hardwood floors even gleam.

Yet it's clearly from another era. The kitchen stove is an antique Glenwood range. The most startling aspect of the home's bygone nature is that it has no heat.

"When Lowell designed the house, it was intended to be used 10 to 12 weeks a year," said Churchill. Fireplaces were lit to ward off the chill.

The other Lowell house, "The Bungalow," is a rambling one-story, blue-trimmed, wood framed structure with an expansive wrap-around porch overlooking the ocean. Written up in several architecture books, the 4,600-square-foot house - also unheated - has an interior open-air courtyard with Tuscan style columns.

The main entrance of the house is through a brick-paved arched vestibule leading directly to the courtyard. The 10 bedrooms and living and dining rooms are accessible only from the courtyard. The courtyard served as the heart of the home, offering cool shade, symmetrical plantings, and the refreshing music of the fountain in the lily pool.

Out back is a more modern addition to the property - a hot tub atop a platform oriented toward the view, under a gazebo made of red cedar harvested from the property.

Between the two houses is another much smaller place built in 1945. Known as "The Next House," it was crafted for Churchill's grandmother as a heated structure where she could stay in the off-season. The design of the house exudes Modernist sensibilities and is fashioned somewhat after a ship, with wood paneling, curved ceilings, and several built-in compartments and cabinets.

Also on the property is a two-story, four-bedroom cottage where the caretaker - only the fourth one since the Codmans bought the land in 1873 - currently lives.

Ideally the property would remain intact as a family compound, and Boyle, the broker, said some prospective buyers have indeed been interested in keeping it that way. But given its price, and the cost of upkeep, such buyers are few.

More common are those interested in the compound's development potential. The property is subdividable into seven or eight lots, and it comes with few restrictions. The family seems resigned to Codman Point being a different kind of place in the future.

"While we started off thinking that it would be great to see another family take over the entire estate, we realized that the next era isn't about elaborate family compounds," said Churchill. "The buyer will probably want to divide the property into several lots, and we're fine with that."