Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown Sketchbook

by Frances Lester Warner

Therefore, since it is so unsafe to generalize, we are resolved to make no sweeping statements about the Cape Cod house. You cannot be too sure even about your own. You discover this when you take its measurements for curtains and wall-paper; no two apertures and no two surfaces are alike.

But, with due reservations, there is one sort of old house that was most nearly standardized by the early builders: the low-studded, story-and-a-half house, with its long gable roof, its many little windows tucked up under the point of the gable, its front to the south, its "West Entry" at one side, and its six-panel door, with a row of little square glass panes above it—-sometimes a row of four lights, sometimes five. More rarely there is a fan-light over the door, curving out to the pilasters at each side.

All this varies a little, and most of the houses have been altered more or less by subsequent generations. But whenever you come upon the regulation, unspoiled Cape Cod house, there is a general plan that you recognize at once.

For example: the term "West Entry" is no idle phrase. West Entry means west entry, regardless of your angle to the road. Your house faces the south, and your side entry faces west, though the road may run at random on a wild slant, and though your west entry open on the midst of the sea. It does not matter whether you face the highway or not, does it? A road is a perishable and human thing at best; but the points of the compass mean business on the Cape.

Our own house is a perfect illustration of the results of this theory: if you should ever wish to reach our West Entry, you would have to circumnavigate our Point, and scale an all-but-inaccessible bank to the unused door. Because of this inconvenience of our "entry," we always expect callers to come in at the door of our kitchen—our porch. For the benefit of the uninstructed it may be well to say that when we speak of our "porch" on our part of the Cape, we mean the same thing as an ell. Our porch is an ell with an attic over it, a kitchen chimney, our stove, and our pump and major equipment for the industries of the day. It opens into the "winter kitchen," where they did their fireplace cooking years ago, before there was a stove in the porch.

The outside piazza arrangement, unroofed, we call our platform, or walk. Ours is very neatly made of matched planks, with one part at the end cleverly arranged to slide, so that you can draw out the planks a little and get down into the manhole that incloses the pipes from pump to drilled well. On cold winter nights, you let yourself down on the ladder twelve feet underground, to turn off the water in the pump, if you are afraid that the pipes are going to freeze. I shall never forget the sensation of usefulness that filled my beating heart when I disappeared down that hatchway one clear cold night and opened the little faucet far below. When you go down that neat, perfectly smooth tube, with the winter stars shining solemnly down on the top of your head, you feel like a more slender Saint Nicholas making his way down a sootless chimney.

The Cape Cod cellar is also interesting to a newcomer. It is a small circular dungeon-keep, solidly built of masonry, usually under the "east room." You go into it down a short flight of steps on the outside of the house, through a small entry which has the outer aspect of a tall dog-kennel, and the inner aspect of a Dutch interior, perfectly spotless. Some authorities say that the Cape cellars were made circular to prevent the heavy sand from breaking through by undue pressure on any one wall, as would happen in a four-cornered cellar. Others imagine that seafaring men made their cellars circular on the principle of the half-barrel in the sand. An old stone-mason says that they did it because firm corners of field-rock are so hard to make. But when you stand in these spick-and-span circles of solid masonry,—an interior like the inside of a bowl,—you suspect that the tidy housewives planned the rounded walls so as to leave no odd corners for spiders and cobwebs.

There may be square cellars on the Cape, and there certainly are some west entries that point the wrong way. But in general, when you enter a Cape Cod "three-quarters" house, you go in through the porch-door, you sit and visit in the winter kitchen, and you have your wedding in The Room. Porch, winter kitchen, pantry, east bedroom, The Room, the west bedroom near the west entry—it is a charming and compact arrangement for a little house, with regard for space and views and corners. Unless your "sight" from the windows is cut off by trees or hills, you have views of ocean dawns and sunsets framed in delicate white moulding, and seen through small square panes. The world outside appears like a series of pictures seen through an artist's finder. If your house tops a dune on the narrow part of the Cape, you may see the sails on the horizon of the Atlantic on the east, and the sails on the horizon of the Bay on the west; a clear view of the salt water straight across the Cape in both directions.

As you go down from Barnstable to Provincetown, in automobile or by train, you notice that there are more windows than you expect to see in the triangle under the slope of the roofs. Commonly, you see two large windows in the middle of the upper half-story, and on each side of these, under the slope of the roof, two much smaller windows in the corners. Perhaps there is even a fifth window, sometimes triangular, sometimes elongated, under the very peak of the roof. Thoreau was mightily pleased with these. He said that it looked as if every member of the family had punched a hole through the upper half-story, the better to see the view—large windows for Father and Mother, small windows for children, on the principle of large door for the cat and small door for the kitten. The two large windows light the one square room finished off under the peak of the roof. The other smaller windows are to ventilate the "open chambers"—the slope-roofed spaces left on either side of the finished room, under the rafters. In large families, in the early days, some of the children had to sleep out in these open chambers, under the slope of the roof. There is at least one noted man of affairs in the United States to-day who affirms that there is one rafter in the open chamber of a certain house on Cape Cod that has a slight but clearly defined hollow worn in it, where he used to collide with the roof when he got aboard his trundle-bed in the dark.