Workers flood and then corral floating ripe cranberries in the annual fall harvest.
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.