Trailer Park Queen

She’s a far cry from the Trailer Park Boys, worthy though they are.

On our homepage, you’ll see a link to “Shacking Up," a really stunning photo essay on Carpenter’s Beach Meadow , the summer campground in Matunuck that’s one of the last of the neighborhoods of beach shacks and trailers once such a big part of middle-class summers in the Ocean State.

This is the kind of thing that really doesn’t translate well to the web, so I’d urge anyone interested to check out the July print issue to see Ron Cowie’s gorgeous photography at its best. Props also to associate art director Dean Welshman for the stunning, low-key layout.

Visiting Carpenter’s was a highlight of last summer and this spring for me, and best of all was meeting Mary Carpenter herself. She was 16 years old when her dad first realized he could rent camping spaces for more money than he could harvest in hay from his ocean side fields. A few years later, looking ahead to a summer to be spent helping out at the campground instead of having fun like her college friends, she realized she was sick of not being “allowed to associate too much” - her parents wanted her to be proper around the clients. So she told her mother that she didn’t want to work there anymore. Her mother replied “Well, I guess you’ll have to.” And that was that.

Mary has spent her life running the campground, living in a succession of houses nearby. She’s 91 now, and this spring she was there one day in the pouring rain, checking in at the office, using a walking stick now and a little slow sometimes to remember the details of her history, but her eyes still bright blue and her voice still a quick Irish brogue.

More about her:

• Mary was first violinist at URI. She also plays piano. She misses playing, but her arthritis won’t allow her to now.
• When she first worked at the campground, she was parking cars. Later, she used a car as her office.
• She loves going to Theatre By The Sea.
• The Hurricane of 38 took one of the fancy houses on Matunuck Point – they all had chauffeurs back then – and swept the top floor into a field, the rest into the ocean. The owner wanted to get rid of the ruins, so Mary’s daddy took it and put it on the campground, making a little house out of it. So was Matunuck’s beach cottage tradition born. It’s still there; a maintenance guy and his wife have it now.
• Mary has owned two houses right on the ocean front – storms took them both.
• She now lives in a house with a view of the salt pond on one side, the ocean on the other. She owns another five houses that she rents out. At least one is sandbagged against the relentless erosion of the encroaching waves.
• Nearby Carpenter farm is still in the family. I stopped there and bought some compost and habanero plants; they’re thriving in my garden.
• The shacks went for $3,000 or so in the 60s and 70s – people buy the structures, but not the land beneath them, which still belongs to Mary and is merely leased by tenants on a yearly basis. Each of the nearly 300 campsites commands about $2,500 in lease fees a year. A typical cottage now commands between $50,000 and $90,000, a lot of money for a building that could be evicted from its land in a year. But the people who come here are loyal and spaces come up rarely.