Martha's Vineyard—This is an off-shore island reached by a half-hour's boat ride from Woods Hole. A poet has said of it, "a little bit of Heaven dropped from out the sky one day" which aptly describes it. Oak Bluffs, Edgartown. Vineyard Haven, Tisbury, Chilmark and Gay Head are its principal villages. The island presents all the best features of an ideal summer vacation spot away from the mainland, yet possessing all the essential features which go to make life comfortable. Its hotels are many and excellent.
Nantucket—Further at sea, a two and a half hours' steamboat ride from Woods Hole. Unique is a word that inadequately describes it. All over the United States there are people who assert that there is no place like Nantucket on the face of the globe. It has a large summer population and tourists are adequately cared for. It has the most regular climate of any place along the New England coast, the temperature averaging 76 degrees during the summer months. It is cooled by the Atlantic breezes.
Onset—This is a busy and thriving summer resort located in a beautiful spot on upper Buzzards Bay. It attracts many thousands of people during the summer months, who come to spend a few weeks, days, or the season there. It is a cottage colony supplemented by hotels and boarding houses that fit the purses of all classes.
At some of these places, either on Cape Cod itself or the islands, every person can find conditions suited to his or her individual taste.
Edward L. Smith
Cape Cod has many fine distinctions that make it stand out from a commonplace world and Wellfleet, as a town name, marks the Cape with a place-name known all over the globe, but in no other locality than on the coast of Barnstable Bay. It is true that a misguided, homesick, and ill-advised denizen of the Cape, roaming the arid, inland sand wastes of Nebraska, foisted the name of "Wellfleet" on his townsite. But as it has to date remained "unwept, unhonored and unsung," so is it quite unknown to sailors or to the sea, being about fifteen hundred miles from salt water and an immeasurable distance from being appropriately named.
The origin of the name "Wellfleet" has always been a source of lively interest to those who delight to delve to the roots of things historical. So many of our early towns in Massachusetts were named by the Englishmen who settled them for English towns familiar to them before they came oversea, that England is the natural source from whence such a Saxon-English name as Wellfleet might come.
After forty years of desultory search by the writer, the problem is yet unsolved, though a good Yankee guess may not come very far out of the way.