Having lived with change throughout their history, Cape Codders adjusted to these outside influences with philosophy and pragmatism. As Cape historian Henry Kittredge observed in 1930: “If whales no longer visit their shores, rich city folk do, and with easy adaptability Cape men and women take the goods the gods provide them.” Some local residents began to rent out rooms in their old Cape houses, while others added on a front porch for a restaurant, set up a gas station or a beach plum jelly stand in the front yard, or an antiques store in the barn. Some took advantage of less legal commerce of the era; during Prohibition a number of trawler captains turned to the more lucrative sea-trade of rum-running.
At least one native industry survived, in fact flourished, during these years of decline and transformation. Cranberries had been commercially raised on the Cape’s bogs since the early 1800s, but the coming of the railroad opened off-Cape markets for the crop. The cranberry, as much as the cod, became the symbol of Cape Cod. In recent years, because of the success of modern marketing, many small bogs that were abandoned over the last half century have been put back into cultivation. One of these old bogs, established by James Howe in the 1880s on North Pamet Road in Truro, has been partially restored by the National Park Service.
The third and unquestionably the most sweeping transformation of the Cape’s culture and landscape has occurred since World War II. With the building of the Mid-Cape Highway and the expansion of the post-war economy, the first waves of modern “washashores,” or permanent immigrants, began to arrive over the Bourne and Sagamore bridges. From 1940 to 1990 the Cape’s year-round population increased from about 30,000 to more than 175,000, with a summertime population that swells to 500,000 or more. Each year from 1970 to 1990 an average of 5,000 acres (roughly the size of Provincetown) was developed for residential and commercial uses.
Though the Cape has been technically an island since 1914, it continues to be increasingly a part of the mainland. The old, indigenous, rural maritime culture of the Cape is irretrievably gone, though small fishing fleets continue to go out of local harbors and inlets. Cape Codders now live in a cosmopolitan contemporary culture, sharing more with their urban counterparts than with the sea captains in whose 200-year-old houses they may dwell or spend the night.
With this staggering growth and its resultant pressures on the Cape’s resources and natural habitats, there has been an increasing movement to protect the Cape’s fragile landscape and its wildlife. The most dramatic and sweeping manifestation of this was the Congressional authorization of the Cape Cod National Seashore itself in 1961, but a number of homegrown environmental research, conservation, and educational organizations have also been established. These groups include the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, the Wellfleet Bay Audubon Sanctuary, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, the Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod, and the Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts.
In part because of the work of these and other groups, general environmental awareness has also grown. The Cape’s salt marshes are no longer regarded as wasteland to be dredged for marinas or filled for development but as one of the richest and most productive marine habitats in the world. Local kettle pond shores, once built up with little regard for environmental impact, are now recognized as important buffers protecting water quality and as important habitat for certain flowering plants, some of which are found in only a handful of sites worldwide.
No longer are local whales driven ashore or hunted with harpoons. Instead, today’s Cape Codders ply a lucrative trade running whale-watching trips out of Provincetown and other ports, and a Cape Cod Stranding Network has been established to aid stranded whales and other marine animals.
Shorebirds, too, have ceased to be slaughtered by the thousands on our beaches and in our marshes. Instead, areas such as the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge and the National Seashore provide protected feeding and resting stations for thousands of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. Each summer sections of beaches and dunes within the Seashore and elsewhere are roped off and patrolled to insure the survival of such local nesting species as terns and piping plovers, and park talks and walks stress to visitors the importance and fragility of these breeding areas.
Besides changes in human attitudes and practice, natural changes in wildlife populations continue to take place as well. As ocean waters warm, cold-water species such as cod and halibut have moved farther north, while warmer-water species such as striped bass and bluefish seem to be increasing. Sizable numbers of wintering harbor seals have appeared in the Cape’s estuaries and offshore beaches in the past 20 years, and during the winter of 1989-90, for the first time ever, some rare gray seals gave birth to several pups on Monomoy Island. Willets and oystercatchers, after a long absence, are nesting on Cape beaches once again, and ospreys, responding to artificial nesting platforms, have returned to Cape bays and ponds after their disappearance during the 1960s from DDT poisoning. Other recent self-arrivals on the Cape’s wildlife scene include opossums, house finches, and even coyotes.