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.