Cape Cod

THE OLD MILL.
By F. Mitchell
Illustrated by George F. Edwards and Walter J. Fenn
The Century Magazine.
Vol. XXVI. SEPTEMBER, 1883. No. 5.
The most striking feature of the New England coast-line is Cape Cod. Standing far out, lonesome, into the ocean, it gives, from the map, the impression of a sand-bar. In looking at other sea-coast reaches, the imagination flies at once to a sheltered inland: to village streets and peaceful farms and bush-fringed ponds and wild flowers; but looking at this weird projection, it seems impossible to conjure up an inland.
There are wastes, in fact, along this stretch of sea-board. The farthest town has not a farm, and the soil of its gardens is brought in the holds of vessels. Nothing could give a stronger impression of desolation than the wild sea of shifting sand-hills lying open to the Atlantic on the outer coast of Provincetown, and the sand-hills on the harbor side, which crowd two miles of houses to the water. The open plain between Provincetown and Truro is wild and barren; its vegetation is for the most part little more than moss; although in favored spots is seen the mock-cranberry’s red-berried creeping vine and some recent plantations of pine, all making headway.
When the Pilgrims entered Cape Cod harbor, this stretch of country was all covered with soil, and bore a forest growth of oak and pine. Woods and soil, like the Indians, have given way before civilization, and, under the white man’s rule, sand has beaten in and swamped the vegetation. Even now, in Provincetown, one can see the process of desolation going on. In every violent gale, the looser sand is drifted about, and after the storm is over, here and there peep out the tops of newly submerged bushes.
All through the Cape, too, are barren stretches of “old fields,” crossed by decayed rail fences or stone walls gray with moss: such fields as are seen through the whole of eastern Massachusetts. The last generation of farmers beggars the land and leaves it. It is hard to realize now that Eastham was once the granary of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth; that the sandy tip of the Cape was covered with trees; that the “old fields” once waved with substantial crops. Nevertheless, such are the facts.