WampaGate

Horsing around at Maushop Stables

Early in the twentieth century a wealthy New York City investment banker bought property on Cape Cod. One piece was a few acres on the shores of Prince Cove in Cotuit including an eighteen room Victorian "cottage" with a half-acre Japanese water garden but another was a large farm in Mashpee on the banks of the river that separates Mashpee from Cotuit. The farm was called Maushop and in addition to facilities for pigs, sheep, cattle and assorted fowl it had barns for horses. Inheritance, divisions and shifting lifestyles reduced the original farm to 29.1 acres still in family ownership when Jill Slaymaker, last of the Ackerman family to own Maushop ground sold out for $675,000 on September 29, 2000.

Slaymaker erected an indoor riding rink where she gave instruction and boarded horses in two barns on either side of the old country road that crossed the river from Cotuit into Mashpee. She believed she was selling the farm, which she had operated for years as a boarding stable and horse farm, complete with a resident manager in the old farmhouse, to the Mashpee Wampanog tribe. The lawyer who handled the transaction for both buyer and seller was Frederick C. Grosser. The name of the buyer was Maushop, LLC. The tribe placed a manager in charge of the farm's operations, rented barn space to horse owners and claimed to be intent on operating the Mashpee Wampanoag Riding Facility.

Grosser was quickly named manager of the farm and it was discovered that the actual purchaser of the farm was Herbert Strather. Strather is the Detroit real estate developer and gambling entrepreneur who claims to have injected, as he says invested, $15 million into the Mashpee Tribe to help it achieve full federal recognition as a sovereign Indian tribe. It was Glenn Marshall, pretend war hero and convicted rapist, who was controlling the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council at the time and it was Marshall who represented to Ackerman that it was the tribe who purchased the family farm from her.

Three interesting things followed the purchase: Strather mortgaged the farm for $682,000 (a quick profit of $7,500), the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council executed a ten year lease from Strather for $5,000 per month and on December 29, 2000 Herb Strather claimed to have assigned all "rights, title and interest" in the property to the tribe.  Strather even claimed to have done so publicly at the annual 'Wamp Ball'. But, in September of 2007 he still owned it, according to town records in Mashpee. (Stay tuned for an updated ownership report).

Now boarders of horses at the farm are being told they must remove their animals and leave the premises. The question now arises, what will happen to the property? At 29.1 acres it is .9 acres shy of requiring review by the Cape Cod Commission for a subdivision. 29.1 acres of farmland with mature trees and open fields on the banks of a tidal river adjacent to the Willow Bend development....and who really owns it and what benefit will the tribe receive from "their" purchase?