Beyond the western point of Suconeset headland, looking off to the light-ship on the Shoals and to the shining bluffs of Martha’s Vineyard, lies, on the sea, a tract of neglected land called the “MacGrego Farm.” It is encircled by a dike, now overgrown and not more than three feet in height, although originally six feet high. On the eastern side, where the cart-road runs, is an opening in the wall, and inside this are a few fruit-trees, now grown wild, and a bit of sward, which plainly mark the former seat of a dwelling. The “MacGrego Farm” has a story. Among the prisoners captured in the Revolution was a young fellow named MacGregor, the son of an English clergyman, who, after getting a classical education, ran away from home, from love of adventure, and shipped on an English privateer. Being captured, he was held as a prisoner until the close of the war, and on regaining his freedom he came from Boston, with some of the Hessians, to look after salt-works on this shore, in the interest of Boston merchants. Among the Indians was an orphan girl of sixteen, tall and good-looking, called Mercy Moses. The late Captain Peter Lewis, of Waquoit, a very intelligent man, who knew both her and Thomas MacGregor in their later years, said that when advanced in age Mercy was as straight as an arrow. Some persons now living at Mashpee also knew her, among them Deacon Matthias. Amos and his wife, who, before her marriage, taught school near Mercy’s wigwam.
Mercy Moses had inherited this tract of which we have spoken and another parcel of land upon the sea, on Suconeset headland. Thomas MacGregor succumbed to the charms of the Indian girl, and married her, and they made their home upon the “MacGrego Farm,” as it came to be called. He was a man of great bodily strength and activity; his farming was celebrated all through the region, and people used to come from other places to see his crops. About 1812, we are told, the farm was flooded by an unusual tide. Probably it was in 1815, when the tides, helped by a tremendous gale, rose so high in Buzzard’s Bay as nearly to overflow the isthmus and make the Cape for the time an island, lodged a schooner in the woods, and set a sloop down like a foundling—a perfectly natural foundling for Cape Cod—before the door of a house. Although the tide did not flow so high in the Vineyard Sound, the MacGrego farm, low lying, was flooded; and, for fear of another deluge, MacGregor threw up, by his own labor, a dike six feet in height around the whole forty acres.
Although he staid at Mashpee all his days, and built a barn for his cattle, he himself lived in a wigwam to the day of his death. The neighboring ministers (who were probably all college-bred men) used to visit him.
Mercy MacGregor survived her husband, and died about forty years ago. The land has lately been reclaimed by her heirs, who, to make out their title, had to go back a hundred and twenty years, and prove that she was the daughter of one Jude Moses and so the sister of one Samuel Jude Moses, from whom, in different branches, they were descended. One of the most interesting things with regard to the relations between the whites and the Indians is the occasional appearance, to this day, in the Massachusetts law reports, among street-widening cases and controversies turning on steam and electricity, of suits relating to Indian titles.
The descendants of the Indians have fallen into the sea-faring ways of their white neighbors, and you will find in almost every house in Mashpee a man who can tell you of voyages. It is worth while to have a chat with Solomon Attaquin, who keeps the excellent inn in Mashpee village, and to visit Deacon Matthias Amos, one of the leading men and a good story-teller, and hear this descendant of King Philip give the dramatic story of how he first heard of the late war, by the capture, in the spring of 1861, by the cruiser John C. Calhoun, of a whaler of which he was first mate, and of his romantic escape with his crew from New Orleans, by the connivance of a domesticated Southerner from Cape Cod.
Like all the rest of the New England coast, Cape Cod is becoming familiar with the aspect of the summer visitor. Where only a dozen years ago the beaches lay deserted, now the poles of sketching umbrellas are planted in the sand, and the red roofs of English cottages peep out between pitch-pines along the bluffs. For many years a number of Boston families have had summer-houses at Cotuit, and more recently city people have been establishing themselves on Buzzard’s Bay, at Wood’s Hole (which has attempted to become fine by changing its honest sea-board name to Wood’s Holl), at Waquoit, at Osterville, and at Hyannis Port, and summer-boarders find their way to the lower towns. The bluffs of the Indian town of Mashpee have not yet been invaded.
While this current of city visitors disturbs to some extent the natural charm of simplicity of the villages, still the people of the Cape, already familiar with the outside world, are not disturbed as most communities would be; and there is every year a growing market for garden produce, and a good deal of work is brought, in one way or other, to those who need it. Osterville has gained a benefit from the summer colony in a public library, erected partly by home effort, but at the instance and largely by the generosity of Mr. W. L. Garrison of Boston, a son of the great reformer, aided by others who have summer cottages there.
THE LIBRARY AT OSTERVILLE.
One of the chief attractions in summer of the shore of Cape Cod, both on Buzzard’s Bay and on the outer southern coast, is the exquisite climate, not particularly bracing, but cool, and remarkably equable. The prevailing breeze is from the south-west, from off the Vineyard Sound, and the harshness of east winds is seldom felt. The water, too, is warmer by some twenty degrees than at Swampscott or Manchester, for example, and the sea-bathing, on that account, attracts a good many people. And although in landscape this region has nothing like the richness of the Beverly shore, it has, nevertheless, not a little rural beauty, with a wild, peculiar charm that is all its own.