Hat’s the spirit: Salty the seahorse gets new headgear

MATTAPOISETT — Salty the seahorse, Mattapoisett’s fiberglass marine sculpture at the crossroads of North Street and Route 6, donned a new holiday accessory Saturday. 

The Mattapoisett Land Trust has installed a Santa hat on the sea creature for years, and a replacement for the aging old one was placed on the statue Dec. 6.

Resident Mary Dermody said she noticed the hat was in bad shape last year, and looked too dirty and worn to reuse.

“The hat had spots on it, and because the band was fuzzy, it had turned completely gray,” Dermody said. “So I said, ‘I really think we need to look into getting a new hat.’”

When she brought the old one to Sperry Sails in Marion, they recognized it and told her it had been fabricated by the company. They offered to make a replacement, and patterned it directly from the first hat they had made. 

The only original part of the new hat is the buoy dangling like a pompom from its top. Dermody said her retirement hobby is deep cleaning, and she used her stain-removing expertise to return the buoy to its original white color. 

Once it was assembled, she said the last step of preparing the hat for installation was marking where each part should lay. 

She said she was nervous to transfer the markings correctly but her daughter, who works in theatre and had experience with large-scale projects, offered to help

“I was a little nervous about transferring all of it and getting it right,”  Dermody said. “My daughter and I laid it out on our floor — the old one and the new one — and she transferred everything over.”

G. B. Knowles, who owns GBK company, a landscaping company in Fairhaven, installed the hat. He said he was used to installing the old one, but the instructions inside guided him as he secured the new hat with straps to hold it on top of the statue. 

For Knowles, the day was a family affair. He said his wife is related to the family who built the original statue that once stood on the same area the current one does. 

The statue was built in the 1950s, when Route 6 was the main thoroughfare to Cape Cod. Henry Dunseith commissioned it to attract tourists passing by to his gift shop. 

When Interstate 95 was built the shop lost business, and Dunseith’s family gave the property to the land trust upon Dunseith’s death.

“We drive by it all the time, and you see it, and it's neat that somebody in your family — not my direct family — built a landmark, if you will, and it's been rebuilt and still up there.”

The trust’s operations manager, Sarah French Storer, said he has been installing the hat for several years and was part of the group’s efforts to make the area festive around the holidays. 

She said while people might not notice the tradition’s absence if they didn’t adorn the seahorse with a hat each December, it puts a smile on their faces and adds a festive atmosphere to the town. 

“We like to make this corner festive,” French Storer said. “Salty is a big deal in this town. He's sort of an icon, so we like to celebrate him.”