James Madison Beebe was a dry goods magnate from Boston and in 1866 Eben Jordan of the famed Jordan Marsh bought his business. James Beebe passed on in 1875 and his children created a hundred acre farm on Shore Street and built Waterside in 1876 overlooking vineyard sound. The farm was broken up for development in 1932.

Beebe’s daughter Frances married George J. Fiske, a former business partner of her father, and had two children, of whom we know very little. Frances, a widow by 1868, inherited a summer home off Shore Street in Falmouth from her father’s estate. It is the large red shingle-style “cottage” (Waterside) that still fronts Vineyard Sound today. There is no record that she had much else to do with the Beebe family.