The Cape’s Transformation
The Cape Cod that Thoreau visited nearly a century and a half ago was a rural, semi-isolated peninsula with a distinct maritime culture. Villages were small; most food and materials were obtained locally; travel by land over sand roads was slow and difficult; and, although many a local shipmaster had visited Singapore and São Paulo, most native Cape Codders spent their lives within a few miles of their birthplace, except when they went to sea to fish. Language was local, not only in its flat Cape accent, but in a host of names and phrases attached to local plants, animals, and weather.
Off-Cape visitors were rare and often regarded with suspicion. Thoreau and his traveling companion, William Ellery Channing, were initially mistaken for bank robbers. Though a steamboat ran regularly from Boston to Provincetown, travel elsewhere on the peninsula was still difficult. Aside from a few hardy, curious souls like Thoreau, the only regular summer visitors to the Cape in the mid-19th century were those attending the Methodist camp-meetings, such as the one described by him at Millennium Grove in Eastham. “At present,” he said of Cape Cod, “it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world.” Yet Thoreau was perceptive enough to realize that “The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside”—though even he could not have imagined how complete that transformation would be.
After the Civil War, the Cape entered a period of economic decline that lasted for more than half a century. With the decline of the merchant marine, whaling, and fishing fleets, and the opening up of the rich western prairies, many of the Cape’s younger people left to seek their fortune elsewhere. Hundreds of acres of farmland were abandoned. The Cape’s population, which reached a high of 35,990 in 1860, reached a low of 26,670 in 1920. Wellfleet lost 65 percent of its population, and Truro nearly 75 percent.
In 1851 trains ran in the summer between Boston and Sandwich. The fare was $1.50, one way.
Ironically, it was the railroad—which initially contributed to the decline in the packet boat and merchant marine trade—that subsequently helped revive the Cape’s economy. The Cape Cod Branch Railroad first arrived at Sandwich in 1848. Rails were gradually extended down-Cape, finally reaching Provincetown in 1873. The completed railroad linked Cape towns to the rest of New England and made inland resources such as coal and lumber widely available. More importantly, for the first time the Cape itself became accessible to the region’s urban population.
Oddly enough, the first railroad advertisements enticed Cape Codders to Boston, rather than the reverse. But it was not long before the “fashionable world” began to discover the charms of Cape Cod. “Summer folk,” including President Grover Cleveland, began building substantial homes with imported lumber along the shores of Buzzards Bay, Nantucket Sound, and Pleasant Bay.
Bird shooting became a popular sport on the Cape, and several gunning clubs were established for vacationing sportsmen from Boston and New York. These clubs, combined with the commercial hunting of waterfowl and shorebirds for the food market and millinery trade, took a tremendous toll on the Cape’s bird populations from the Civil War until the passage of the Federal Migratory Bird Treaties of 1916. According to one report, 8,000 golden plovers and Eskimo curlews were shot on the Cape in one day! (The former species is now a rare migrant, the latter presumed extinct.) At the same time, much of the most valuable shorebird habitat was being destroyed. Hundreds of acres of salt marshes were dredged to expand harbors or filled in for development, agriculture, and mosquito control.
A different kind of transformation began in Provincetown in 1899, when Charles Hawthorne opened his Cape Cod School of Art, officially initiating the emergence of the Cape-tip as a major art colony. By 1916 there were five art schools operating in Provincetown. That year also saw the formation of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important small theaters in the history of American drama. Its founders—which included George Cram “Jig” Cook, playwright Susan Glaspell, and author Mary Heaton Vorse—produced original plays in a shack on a harbor wharf, plays that included the early works of a then-unknown dramatist, Eugene O’Neill.
Walter Smith, 1849-1932, retired in 1930 as at least the seventh in a long line of town criers that lasted into the late 1980s in Provincetown. Traditionally they gave out news of village events, antiques sales, church suppers, and the like. For a fee, they also advertised products for local merchants.
Since then the towns of the Outer Cape have been seasonal and year-round homes to a host of artistic and literary figures. Edward Hopper, Edwin Dickinson, Karl Knaths, Ross Moffett, Henry Hensche, Hans Hoffman, Ben Shahn, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell, Alice Stallknecht, and Arnold Geissbuhler are a few of the influential painters and sculptors who have worked and lived on the Outer Cape. Literary figures have included John Reed, William Daniel Steele, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Provincetown’s “Poet of the Dunes” Harry Kemp, Norman Mailer, Howard Nemerov, Alan Dugan, Stanley Kunitz, Marge Piercy, and Annie Dillard.
A particularly rich vein of the Cape’s creative activity has been the literary treatment of the landscape itself. Thoreau’s Cape Cod (1864) was the first recognized classic of this genre. Others have included The Outermost House by Henry Beston, The House on Nauset Marsh by Dr. Wyman Richardson, The Great Beach by Brewster author John Hay, and the poetry of Provincetown’s Pulitzer-Prize winner Mary Oliver.
After World War I the first paved roads were constructed down-Cape. With the arrival of the automobile, the second wave of the Cape’s transformation began. The weekender appeared. Cottage colonies began to spring up in the towns and on the beaches. Golf courses were built, including the Highland Links in Truro and the Nauset Links in Eastham. The Nauset Links fairways today are a cedar forest through which the visitor can walk on the Seashore’s Nauset Marsh Trail.
The Cape’s summer population began to mushroom, and Provincetown in particular took on a distinctively Bohemian ambience during the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the descendants of the Portuguese immigrants came to dominate Provincetown’s fishing fleet. Even today nearly a third of its permanent population claims Portuguese descent and continues to give a distinctive Old World flavor to this community’s cuisine, culture, and local festivals.
As the number of summer visitors increased, inns and cottages such as these in Wellfleet were built to take in lodgers. In 1911, Provincetown’s Commercial Street, right, had restaurants, lodgings, ice cream shops, and other facilities for tourists arriving by car as well as by boat.
Having lived with change throughout their history, Cape Codders adjusted to these outside influences with philosophy and pragmatism. As Cape historian Henry Kittredge observed in 1930: “If whales no longer visit their shores, rich city folk do, and with easy adaptability Cape men and women take the goods the gods provide them.” Some local residents began to rent out rooms in their old Cape houses, while others added on a front porch for a restaurant, set up a gas station or a beach plum jelly stand in the front yard, or an antiques store in the barn. Some took advantage of less legal commerce of the era; during Prohibition a number of trawler captains turned to the more lucrative sea-trade of rum-running.
At least one native industry survived, in fact flourished, during these years of decline and transformation. Cranberries had been commercially raised on the Cape’s bogs since the early 1800s, but the coming of the railroad opened off-Cape markets for the crop. The cranberry, as much as the cod, became the symbol of Cape Cod. In recent years, because of the success of modern marketing, many small bogs that were abandoned over the last half century have been put back into cultivation. One of these old bogs, established by James Howe in the 1880s on North Pamet Road in Truro, has been partially restored by the National Park Service.
The third and unquestionably the most sweeping transformation of the Cape’s culture and landscape has occurred since World War II. With the building of the Mid-Cape Highway and the expansion of the post-war economy, the first waves of modern “washashores,” or permanent immigrants, began to arrive over the Bourne and Sagamore bridges. From 1940 to 1990 the Cape’s year-round population increased from about 30,000 to more than 175,000, with a summertime population that swells to 500,000 or more. Each year from 1970 to 1990 an average of 5,000 acres (roughly the size of Provincetown) was developed for residential and commercial uses.
Though the Cape has been technically an island since 1914, it continues to be increasingly a part of the mainland. The old, indigenous, rural maritime culture of the Cape is irretrievably gone, though small fishing fleets continue to go out of local harbors and inlets. Cape Codders now live in a cosmopolitan contemporary culture, sharing more with their urban counterparts than with the sea captains in whose 200-year-old houses they may dwell or spend the night.
With this staggering growth and its resultant pressures on the Cape’s resources and natural habitats, there has been an increasing movement to protect the Cape’s fragile landscape and its wildlife. The most dramatic and sweeping manifestation of this was the Congressional authorization of the Cape Cod National Seashore itself in 1961, but a number of homegrown environmental research, conservation, and educational organizations have also been established. These groups include the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, the Wellfleet Bay Audubon Sanctuary, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, the Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod, and the Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts.
In part because of the work of these and other groups, general environmental awareness has also grown. The Cape’s salt marshes are no longer regarded as wasteland to be dredged for marinas or filled for development but as one of the richest and most productive marine habitats in the world. Local kettle pond shores, once built up with little regard for environmental impact, are now recognized as important buffers protecting water quality and as important habitat for certain flowering plants, some of which are found in only a handful of sites worldwide.
No longer are local whales driven ashore or hunted with harpoons. Instead, today’s Cape Codders ply a lucrative trade running whale-watching trips out of Provincetown and other ports, and a Cape Cod Stranding Network has been established to aid stranded whales and other marine animals.
Shorebirds, too, have ceased to be slaughtered by the thousands on our beaches and in our marshes. Instead, areas such as the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge and the National Seashore provide protected feeding and resting stations for thousands of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. Each summer sections of beaches and dunes within the Seashore and elsewhere are roped off and patrolled to insure the survival of such local nesting species as terns and piping plovers, and park talks and walks stress to visitors the importance and fragility of these breeding areas.
Besides changes in human attitudes and practice, natural changes in wildlife populations continue to take place as well. As ocean waters warm, cold-water species such as cod and halibut have moved farther north, while warmer-water species such as striped bass and bluefish seem to be increasing. Sizable numbers of wintering harbor seals have appeared in the Cape’s estuaries and offshore beaches in the past 20 years, and during the winter of 1989-90, for the first time ever, some rare gray seals gave birth to several pups on Monomoy Island. Willets and oystercatchers, after a long absence, are nesting on Cape beaches once again, and ospreys, responding to artificial nesting platforms, have returned to Cape bays and ponds after their disappearance during the 1960s from DDT poisoning. Other recent self-arrivals on the Cape’s wildlife scene include opossums, house finches, and even coyotes.
What do all these changes and transformations teach us? It may be, most importantly, that we still confront what the First Comers faced: the land itself, sea-born and sea-shaped. When we learn its history and observe the age-old forces that continue to work today, the lesson seems to be that any human occupation of the Earth is, at best, tentative and transitory, and particularly so here. The waves, beaches, dunes, and trees of the Cape continue to dance, and we have begun to learn to dance with them—to understand and adapt to the land’s rhythms, tempos, and limits—so that we and those who come after us may continue to enjoy all that it has to offer. For it is we, residents and visitors alike, who are today’s Cape Codders.
Wildflowers
White water lily
Pink ladyslipper
Dewberry
Purple aster
Seaside goldenrod
Beach plum
St. Johnswort
Sheep laurel
Bittersweet nightshade
Prickly pear cactus
Creeping bellflower
Star-flower
Beach heather, or poverty grass
Beach-pea
Canada mayflower
Cypress spurge