MAP OF CAPE COD. Struthers, Servoss & Co., Engs:, N.Y.
In many places on the more exposed coast-line, the shores are slowly washing away. Where there are woods immediately on the bluff, trees are often seen lying along the beach, with their uptorn roots exposed in the bank where they were undermined in a winter’s gale. Sometimes, on the other hand, a storm makes beach, by throwing thousands of tons of sand upon a low stretch of coast and burying out of sight the marsh-bank.
In Eastham, large stumps may be discovered nearly a mile from land, and ancient peat-meadows now lie under water. At another place in that town is a peat-meadow which was buried in remote times by sand, but has been washed out again by the waves, and fuel has been taken from it.
While there is much barren country on Cape Cod, there are in tillage, including hay lands of all kinds, eleven thousand acres, and of woodland there are some thirty thousand acres. There is good land in almost every section, and in many places there is productive soil. Even in Truro there is good farming, and in the upper towns fine crops are often raised. On the inner side of the Cape, the soil is generally better than on the outer; but there are some marked instances of profitable farming on the outer shore. The lighter soil is warm, and being free from stones it is easily worked, and there are many crops which flourish in it. The yield of English hay, by the last State census, was four thousand one hundred and seventy tons from three thousand eight hundred and fifteen acres.
It has been proposed, at different times, to dike-in the vast salt-marshes and convert them into dry land. The soil is deep and rich, and there is little doubt that, if they could be so protected, heavy crops of English hay or of grain could be raised upon them, and, as they are level and of great extent, they could, by coöperation, be tilled by machinery, like prairie farms of the West. If other avenues of activity were not freely open, it is more than likely that these meadows would be reclaimed.
The great feature in Cape Cod agriculture is cranberry raising. No other part of the country can compete with the Cape in this. Everywhere lie the cranberry meadows, or bogs, as they are properly called. They form one of the most characteristic features of the landscape. You see them from the car windows, spreading out over level acres, or skirting, with varying width, the running streams; you see them in winding valleys, far below the carriage road; you come upon them suddenly in the woods,—strangely trim, rectangular clearings, darkly shut in by a dense swamp growth. The culture of the cranberry has been reduced to a science. A swamp is cleared of its wild growth of trees and bushes and leveled like a floor; six inches of clear sand are carted on, to cover the heavy bog soil; numerous trenches for the flow of water are cut; a dike is thrown up about the field, and a brook is turned to run through it, with gates, so that the land can be “flowed” in spring to kill insects, and in the fall for protection from frost. Vines are set out at regular intervals, and spreading, they mat the ground. It costs on the average perhaps $400 an acre to transform a rough swamp into a cranberry meadow in bearing condition. One marsh in Barnstable cost $30,000. The profits, however, are large. One meadow, of two or three acres, has repaid six weeks’ annual labor with $1000 a year for twenty years. Another, of half an acre, belonging to Mr. Emulous Small, of Harwichport, an expert in this culture, has yielded ninety-eight barrels in one season. A meadow of sixteen acres, at Marston’s Mills, netted in one year $8000, and another of forty-eight acres, at Newtown, in Barnstable, has yielded in one season, within a year or two, forty two hundred barrels, netting a profit of eighty per cent. There are probably on Cape Cod some thirteen hundred acres of cranberry meadows, from a few rods to fifty acres in size, and the acreage is constantly increasing. The whole crop is from thirty to forty-five thousand barrels, worth from $250,000 to $300,000 on the ground. The picking time is an era in the year. Schools are often closed, and the boys and girls, with many of their elders, turn to gathering the crop; rakes are seldom used, for fear of damage to the berries, which are best picked by hand. The price of picking is not included in the figures given above, and on the whole a substantial amount of ready money is distributed in a thousand tiny rivulets from this industry.
There is more forest on Cape Cod, it is said, than there was fifty years ago. Extensive tracts that once were tilled have been left to run to wood, their former names still clinging to them. You will hear of a piece of woodland known as the “Thomas” field or “West New Field.” A farmer dies; his sons have all left home to follow the seas, to keep store in Boston, or to practice law in San Francisco. The first year, the fields are neglected: withered stubble of the year before alone remains to tell of cultivation. Another year, a feeble crop of grass comes stealing in; another summer, unless the land is fated to remain as an “old field,” you will see miniature pitch-pines all over it; another summer yet, and they are bushes; and before you can realize it, the whole field is rejoicing in a vigorous growth. Even in many of the roads you hardly leave the woods. It seems as if a chief business on Cape Cod from the time of Noah had been the making of roads. The village streets and the county highways are often wide; but there are numberless wagon roads that began existence merely as unofficial cart-paths, and by stealthy inroads gradually found favor and wound into the affections of the public until they gained recognition. They are very narrow often, and the trees meet overhead. Sometimes you are tempted to pursue such a way until it turns out a “blind road,” and you can go no further, and can with difficulty turn back. In some of them it is the rarest thing—we might almost say illegal—for two vehicles to meet; if there is a meeting, it takes a certain Yankee planning sometimes to effect an interchange of position. But a man who has passed a score of years or more in riding up and down high-rolling waves thinks nothing of urging a wagon, loaded with cord-wood or oysters, up the steepest bank, or of driving over saplings six feet high, to make a circuit.
In many places, the woods run along the coast to the very edge of the sandy bluff. For many miles upon the southern shore, in Osterville and Cotuit, and on the headlands of Mashpee, for example, one can stroll through the pine woods on an August day and enjoy the fragrance and the dense shade, listening all the while to the steady breaking of waves upon the beach.
