Update on the Pibbles Place Purchase

So if you read the comments from last week the Tourist Town post, you’ll know that there’s a new family that just bought Pibble’s place on the hill. It’s been vacant since 1969, but I guess Finch has a key or something and occasionally cleans up or pokes around the place. Either way, it got me to wondering what the history was, so I stopped in at City Hall and the library, and found a bit more about it.

The East Bay Observatory

Every town around here has a landmark. We have this one, and it’s better than most. The Observatory is the oldest building in East Bay and the only one left from when the town actually worked the water for a living. Technically it’s a maritime signal tower, which sounds boring, but the function is interesting. There’s one in Portland that works the same way. Theirs was built in 1807. Ours predates it. Both did the same job, which was to watch for boats coming in and get word to the town before the hull even cleared the point.

The reason you need a tower for that is the geography. The cove sits behind a point of land, so you can’t see the open water from the docks. A boat could come around the islands and be almost in before anyone at the wharf knew it was there. For a town that ran on what the boats brought back, that was a problem worth solving. So they built up high, on the best ground above the cove, where you could see straight out to open water.

It’s an eight-sided wooden tower on a stone base. The people who built it were shipbuilders, and you can tell. The joinery is the same kind you’d find in a boat hull. At the top there’s a watch room, and from there the watchman could identify a vessel miles out with a good telescope, long before anyone on the docks could see anything at all.

The way it worked was simple. A merchant or a fishing family paid into the Observatory each year. The watchman kept their flag, and when he read their boat coming in, the flag went up. The whole town could see it from the hill. A boat was home hours before it reached the harbor. People knew.

The radios made it obsolete, same as Portland’s. Once everyone had a way to talk directly, a flag on a hill wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. The watch room went quiet and stayed that way.

Most people know about the Observatory. It’s not something you can miss if you grow up here. But there’s one part of its history that everyone in East Bay actually knows, which is that Myles Pibbles disappeared from the watch room in the summer of 1959 and was never found. He went up to look at something through the old telescope, according to the people he was with, and then he wasn’t there anymore. The watch room door was still closed. Nobody heard him on the stairs. There’s no good explanation for it and there never has been, and the town has been turning that over ever since.

His family’s house is on the hill, not far from the Observatory. Some people from away just bought it.

---

So now word on the street is that some kind of rich family with the last name of Mandrake purchased the place. I enlisted Todd, Claire, and Priya to help me try and figure it all out, but we couldn’t find much other than they’re in the shipping business, which makes sense to buy a place like this. Seems like there are a lot of people out there with the last name of Mandrake, but it seems Google is focused on “Mandrake the Magician”. Not much help there.

Finch says he has to go meet them when they arrive in July. Guess we’re just going to have to wait until then.