By "Munchausen"
Hampton Beach News-Guide, August 4, 1922
A local real estate man has given out the story that a syndicate of foreign capitalists is endeavoring to secure title to a strip of beach land in front of the Casino for the purpose of erecting a giant helicopter hangar. The story, which reads like fiction, is claimed to be absolutely true and all that is needed is the co-operation of the local business men to make it true in every detail.
It seems that a French scientist has invented a wonderful flying machine of the helicopter type. The plane will carry seventy-five people besides the pilots and mechanicians. It will rise vertically in the air and can remain stationary in the ether for an indeterminable length of time. It seems that preliminary experiments, carried on in secret, have proven that the atmosphere, peculiar to Hampton Beach and found in only a few sections of the world, is necessary for the preliminary trials of this marvelous invention.
Foreign capitalists have toured both coasts of this country and have decided that Hampton is the ideal spot to conduct this enterprise, which is at once of an amusement and scientific nature. For, it is rumored, the company intends to operate two planes from the big Hampton hangar and take passengers into the air, guaranteeing their safety, at the rate of $1.00 a head.
The first difficulty which the promoters of the great scheme have run into concerns a title to the particular strip of beach land in question. It is understood that when the Rev. Stephen Bachiler, first settler of Hampton, sailed up the Hampton river in a shallop, he was met by the Indian chief Winnicummet, who, after the usual preliminary negotiations, handed the Rev. Bachiler what amounted to a deed of the beach land. This instrument, crudely written in the Indian sign language on birch bark, conveyed title to the beach land to the first settler.
The immediate question to be decided is what became of the birch bark deed. Rumor has it, that one day the Rev. Bachiler ran his canoe on a rock. When he went to patch it, through an oversight, he used the piece of birch-bark upon which was written the famous articles of conveyance. Although this has never been proven, the relatives of Rev. Bachiler, told this story to their fellow townsmen and for years a search was made through the old buildings of early Hampton for the remnants of the famous birch bark canoe. It is understood that the canoe was discovered, a copy of the deed made – the inscriptions having been made on the bark with a sharp-pointed rock and for that reason indelible – and the copy lost. It is for this copy that the agents of the European capitalist are making a thorough search.
Once title to the beach land is established, engineers will begin plans for the building of the giant hangar. This in itself is no mean feat and ranks with the building of the now famous Kittery-Portsmouth bridge. The proposition in itself is fully as interesting as the numerous pier ideas and the projected “park-on-the-marsh,” none of which have materialized up to date.
[Editor's note: To the best of our knowledge, this information on the Rev. Bachiler, an Indian deed, and the birch bark canoe, is found no where else in any historical information on Hampton, so should be taken with a grain of salt.]