USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > Eastham > Eastham, Massachusetts, 1651-1951 > Part 4
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O blessed old days, ye shall ne'er be forgot! The memories that cling to that hallowed spot Shall be green like David's whereof he told When he said "I remember the days of old."
I have seen splendid temples with lofty steeples, With soft-cushioned seats filled with fashionable peoples, But none in the tablet of memory will stay Like the old gray Church by the King's highway.
THE EASTHAM METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
But this house, too, went the way of all mortal things, in 1830 -which event evoked Mr. Doane's verses. It was replaced by a fourth and last meetinghouse, situated on the main road a mile and a half north of the third; its site is still marked by the Congregational Cemetery.
Next after Mr. Treat's death, Samuel Osborn came as pas- tor in 1718. Mr. Osborn next year chose to go to the newly organized south parish, and some years later figured in a cele- brated doctrinal controversy; he also, so it is writ, taught East- ham citizens the use of peat. Benjamin Webb was then called and served the Eastham flock for twenty-six years; Edward Cheever came in 1751 and served to his death in 1794; Phil- ander Shaw, ordained in 1795, followed Mr. Cheever and
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UNIN CHAPEL AND LIBRARY, EASTHAM I
CHURCH AND LIBRARY-The Universalist Church, built in 1889, and beside it the Eastham Public Library.
served forty-two years, to 1838. Saving the one year of Mr. Osborn, Eastham had just four ministers of her first church be- tween 1672 and 1838-certainly a notable record of faithful service.
Good men, these early ministers, and human, too. Mr. Shaw, an old Puritan as it was said, did not join the temperance societies which flourished early in the last century. When William Mason Cornell, a young minister new on the Cape, lectured Mrs. Shaw on it, she replied: "Oh, fiddlesticks, Mr. Shaw wouldn't think he could preach in the afternoon unless he had his dram." After him came several pastors for shorter stays, among them Enoch Pratt, 1842-46, who wrote the town's history, and Ebenezer Chase, 1851-59, last minister of the Con- gregational Society in Eastham. Mr. Shaw had recorded in 1802 that there was not an individual in town who did not be-
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EASTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS
long to the society; yet by 1864 the meetinghouse had been sold and the society's active life of more than two hundred years had come to an end.
While it probably unfairly pictures Mr. Shaw, the home- spun verse of Peter Walker, Eastham's rhyming blacksmith of the last century is oft quoted:
A learned Treat, a pious Webb, And Cheever-all no more; Mr. Shaw then took the helm And run the ship ashore.
Eastham's second religious society, the Methodist Episcopal Church, was organized in 1820, it being one of the direct re- sults of camp meeting held in Wellfleet the previous year. "It was the first camp meeting ever held on Cape Cod, and was attended by a number of persons from Eastham, many of whom returned feeling deeply convinced of their need of salvation, which fact they made known to their neighbors, with the re- sult that the awakening became extensive ... " wrote a church historian. Next year the meeting house was built, where, Mr. Pratt wrote in the 1840s, "nearly two-thirds of all the inhabi- tants of the town" attended services. A larger meetinghouse was built in 1851. This was destroyed by fire in 1920, and in 1926 a third, the present church, was dedicated.
Eastham's other religious group, the Universalist Society, was organized in 1889 and its new meeting house dedicated in 1890. These two denominations, Methodist Episcopal and Universalist, continue in the town today, the former having services the year around, and joining with Wellfleet in one pastorate, while the Universalist services are held in summer only.
1651
1951
IV Some 19th Century Happenings
In the march of time for the Town of Eastham the years from its founding to the early 1700s were the pioneer years; the eighteenth century brought both steady growth and division of the old town; the nineteenth century witnessed a succession of happenings noteworthy in the town's annals. When the century began there was a brave endeavor to open the first Cape Cod Canal; a great epidemic fell on Eastham; the Camp Meeting years began, waxed, and then waned; the town pro- duced poets to sing its history; and it saw the era of packets, stage coaches, railroads and improved highways, all in one cen- tury.
OF EASTHAM'S CANAL
Captain Cyprian Southack's chart of 1717 indicating where he crossed from bay to ocean in a whaleboat shows a channel across Eastham wide enough to float any ship. Of course the way from Boat Meadow Creek across to Town Cove was never that much of a channel, but for many years men did try to keep a canal open here. Even before Bellamy's pirates brought Southack down, the depression connecting creek and cove was known as Jeremiah Smith's Gutter-sometimes re- ferred to as Jeremiah's Dream, a mistaken version of Jeremiah's Dreen, or drain-and now shortened simply to Jeremiah's Gut- ter.
"It is conjectured by many, that in the process of the years the Cape will here (at Eastham) be rent in sunder by the vio- lence of wind and seas," an anonymous writer in Massachusetts Magazine in 1791 noted, and he advanced the novel theory that, "This being the narrow part of the Cape, and nigh the bend, the westerly winds shoot across with amazing violence,
Frçev
JEREMIAH'S GUTTER-Here, at the Eastham-Orleans town line, was the link between Boat Meadow Creek and Town Cove, by which small boats crossed between Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic, in times long past.
being accumulated at this point, as they blow down the bay."
Despite this fancied peril the outer or lower Cape has never here been rent asunder. In 1804 Eastham and Orleans men did join in digging through a way so that small boats could pass, but they had trouble keeping it open and petitioned the Legislature for permission to operate a lottery to support it. Such permission was not forthcoming. The project was re- vived again in 1817 and this time the Proprietors of the East- ham and Orleans Canal were chartered, "for the purpose of opening, and keeping open a canal from Norset Cove to Boat Meadow Creek." The incorporators were Michael Smith, Ne- hemiah Smith, Asa Higgins, Freeman Hopkins, Richard Sher- man, Barnabas Doane, Edward C. Clark and associates. The Proprietors promised to keep the canal in repair and build suf- ficient bridges over it. Tolls were fixed in the charter for boats, rafts and other water craft as follows: "Every boat, of the burthen of one ton, ten cents; and same proportion for vessels of larger size; lumber twenty-five cents per thousand feet; salt or grain one cent per bushel; for each barrel, six cents; and in the same proportion for all other kinds of lumber or merchan- dise."
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
Nothing came of all this and when the Proprietors of the Eastham and Orleans Canal failed to open Jeremiah's Gutter in three years, their charter expired. The channel gradually filled, although a high course tide as late as 1844 broke through. Only traces are visible now. Late in the last century when agi- tation for a Cape Cod Canal was well stirred up, the Eastham route was among those proposed. N. S. Shaler, the great geol- ogist, thought it and the Bass River route were the logical ones, but the Monument-Scusset route prevailed. One who looks carefully just beyond the Eastham-Orleans line can see where the Cape might have had its first canal, or shall we say, did have its first canal.
THE GREAT EPIDEMIC
In 1816 Eastham, Wellfleet and Truro suffered an epi- demic long remembered for its awful mortality, and remem- bered also because of the visits of a "celebrated" and somewhat controversial physician of the day, Dr. Samuel Thomson, known as a "botanic" physician from his practice with herbs and vegetables only. Called the cold plague or spotted fever, the epidemic proved deadly between January and May, taking young and old.
"It was melancholy times," notes the Truro church record of the Rev. Jude Damon. "The grave was daily opened to re- ceive the dead ... Seventy-two persons died in Eastham; about one-eleventh of the population. Five were buried in one day and there was seldom a day during the fifty days of sickness, without a funeral. It required the services of all the well to care for the sick."
As to Dr. Thomson, he wrote in his biography, a best- seller of the day, of being called to Eastham and here treating with great success-his own estimate-some thirty-four cases, only one of which died. By his figures forty-six died in East- ham in the same three months. His system convinced many of its efficacy, and he sold rights to use it. Sound or not, Dr. Thomson received testimonials from the Rev. Philander Shaw,
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EXHORTATION AND PREACHING AT THE CAMP MEETING AT EASTHAM.
*.- ( 2378 2518
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
Obed Knowles and Samuel Freeman, two of the selectmen, Harding Knowles, justice of the peace, and Joseph Mayo, post- master.
OF CAMP MEETING YEARS
Once upon a time, beginning in 1828 and for some thirty years thereafter, in an hallowed plot of ten acres which came to be known as Millenium Grove, in North Eastham, thousands came each summer to worship. They came not only from all around Cape Cod but from all over New England, and then, as one church historian put it, "God's glory cloud of grace filled the place and made it a sanctuary of holy things."
The first Methodist camp meeting on Cape Cod and one of the first in New England was held at South Wellfleet in 1819; after three years there, three years at Bound Brook Island, and two years at Truro, it was removed to the attractive grove of pines and oaks at North Eastham. For a week every Au- gust Millenium Grove became a leafy temple resounding with happy laughter and solemn prayer. In its liveliest years, five thousand came to North Eastham. They came on foot and by horse and buggy, by packets from Provincetown, Wellfleet, Brewster, Dennis, Barnstable and Sandwich, along the bay shore of the Cape, and from Plymouth and Boston. For many years the old steamer Naushon made regular runs to camp meeting. Its passengers first debarked in small boats to be carried further inshore, then were taken off in horse and cart
CAMP MEETING SCENES
A Boston artist passed a day at the Eastham Camp Meeting in 1852 and drew these impres- sions and those on the following page. From the paddle-wheel steamer Naushon he stepped into a small boat roomy enough for 20 into which, he said 67 passengers were crammed. Away it ran for shore until a horse-drawn pill-box with a "jolly looking driver, in brown Holland coat and cloth cap" loomed up. Passengers transferred again, "stowed like bales of cotton," and then away, "helter-skelter, the horses stumbling, water splashing around us, some quarter mile through the receding tide ... drenching the nether portions of our per- sons." Then to Millenium Grove, to evening exercises and exhortations; a night of rest, morning prayer, and then back to Boston by steamer again.
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LANDING AT EASTHAM FOR THE CAMP MEETING.
PRAYER MEETING IN A TENT.
to the beach and thence walked nearly a mile through the sand to Millenium Grove.
"Tents were arranged in a circle," wrote the camp meeting historian. "Many of them were large. On one side was the Preacher's stand, a wooden building of two stories, on the floors of which the preachers at night slept on straw. The seats on the ground were planks and without back supports. There was but one well on the ground. The water was raised through a large wooden pump. A man was employed to do the pump- ing for all who came. Every morning witnessed scores of per- sons with pails, pitchers and bowls waiting their turn to be served."
Three sermons were preached from the stand each day; prayer and exhortatory meetings were in the center of the camp, and in tents during intermission. There was fun, too; joy in singing, and pleasure in eating the plentiful shellfish and lob- sters and great baskets of food families brought for the week. Preachers were many of the leading Methodist divines of the day. One such was Father Edward T. Taylor, the sailor's preach- er, long pastor of Seamen's Bethel in Boston, who attended East-
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
ham camp meetings from first to last. Camp meeting was a sacred event, to him. When a friend in Boston once remarked he thought he should attend at Millenium Grove, Father Tay- lor, "thinking of the burning bush, said, 'Wash your feet! Wash your feet!'" One night when all had retired save a happy band who continued to sing songs of praise, Father Tay- lor was despatched to quiet them. Soon his powerful voice was heard, not quieting the band but leading it with loud gusto, "We'll feed on milk and honey . So much did he love camp meeting here that he once remarked, "I wouldn't thank Gabriel to come down with a coach and four and take me up to glory." Still another occasion he preached at a Sabbath Morn- ing 'Love Feast,' "If I could choose my place in which to die, it would be right here for it would be such a little way to go to be in heaven.'
The name Millenium Grove, wrote its historian, " "was un- doubtedly suggestive of the character of the blessings there ex- perienced by multitudes of people." Perhaps Thoreau was right in calling camp meeting a combination of prayer meet- ing and picnic. The fervor waned in the 1850s, and when the railroad got as far as Yarmouth, it was decided that more would be attracted there, and so Millenium Grove was abandoned in 1863.
TWO EASTHAM POETS
During the last century Eastham had a citizen who com- bined being a poet and historian with being town clerk for many years-Heman Doane. Born in 1808, he contracted a curious illness at fifteen which he celebrated in a slender vol- ume, now rare, bearing the title: "A Sketch of the Life and Singular Sickness of Heman Doane-Who lay perfectly speech- less, thirteen months, without moving a limb or opening his eyes." It contains not only his own account of his harrowing illness, but certificates of the Rev. Philander Shaw attesting to its truth, and of Dr. Benjamin Seabury, giving medical details and closing with, "It is not in my power to describe the suffer-
Perlman Loan
HEMAN DOANE "Drawn by himself," at age of eighteen.
ings of this interesting youth fully."
While slowly recovering young Mr. Doane felt an "in- clination of mind to making poetry, which came into my head in abundance." So astonished were some Eastham folk that the youth was composing verse that they thought him "laboring under the delusion and tortures of witchcraft," he wrote. He told them off in many verses such as:
Why do ye marvel at my case, Or wonder at my pleasant face; The time makes haste when God will send And put your clamors to an end.
Now at this time I do not know That there is any one my foe; But by some actions I can see That some have no regard for me.
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
He closed this particular set of verses with,
Once more, and we'll conclude the whole, Let patience now possess the soul, I am contented with my lot, And so must you who feel it not.
With some of the dolefulness of verse found on many a slate stone in old Cape Cod burying grounds, young Mr. Doane composed several dozen hymns, elegies, invocations, and the like. Oddly as it seems now, tea drinking among the youth of Eastham particularly bothered him and he warned both in prose and verse against " ... the unreasonable and too frequent prac- tice of what you call tea parties." In verse, he began,
Dear Youth, now take my good advice, And shun the way of sin and strife; As these tea parties sure are wrong, Do keep your feet from them among.
If the quoted verses and others of the like were all Mr. Doane had written perhaps their lot would be only kind for- getfulness, but not so. He published in 1841 a long poem dedicated to the old pear tree planted by Thomas Prince, then nearly two centuries old and still blooming. Thoreau quoted it at length, "partly because they are the only specimen of Cape Cod verse which I remember having seen, and partly because they are not bad." The complete version has an Eastham flavor well worth preserving. Here it is:
Two hundred years have, on the wings of Time Passed with their joys and woes, since thou, Old Tree Put forth thy first leaves in this foreign clime,
Transplanted from the soil beyond the sea.
Whence did our pious Pilgrim Fathers Come, To found an empire in this western land, Where Freedom's sons might find a peaceful home, A Safe retreat from Persecution's hand.
That exiled band long since have passed away, And still, old Tree! thou standest in the place Where Prince's hand did plant thee in his day,- An undesigned memorial of his race.
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Ancient Pear Tree in Eastham.
THE PRENCE PEAR TREE-This old woodcut, done by an unknown artist while the tree Eastham's eminent citizen planted still survived, appears in Barber's Historical Collections, 1839. Ten years later at the age of two hundred, it was blown down in a storm.
And time of those, our honored fathers, when They came from Plymouth o'er and settled here; Doane, Higgins, Snow, and other worthy men, Whose names their sons remember to revere.
Full many a summer breeze and winter blast, Through those majestic boughs have roared and sighed; While centuries have with their burdens passed And generations have been born and died.
There didst thou stand in days of bloody strife- When stood and flourished Boston's famous tree* And when our patriot fathers sold their life, To buy their country's glorious Liberty.
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
Old Time has thinned thy boughs, but yearly still In hoary age, the mellow fruit they bear; And when thou wilt the day of life fulfil, No human tongue may venture to declare.
But if, as some predict, "the end" is nigh, When Time will cease, and Earth will find a tomb- Till then, perchance, old Tree, thou wilt not die, But bud and bear until the Day of Doom.
H. D.
* Liberty Tree.
By the time Thoreau read The Ancient Pear Tree, Mr. Doane had completely altered the final two verses to these:
Old Time has thinned thy boughs, Old Pilgrim Tree And bowed thee with the weight of many years Yet, mid the frosts of age, thy blooms we see, And yearly still thy mellow fruit appears.
Venerable emblems of our sires of yore! Like them, thou hast performed life's labors well And when, like them, thy days are passed and o'er These lines may help thy lengthened stories tell.
Mr. Doane later became Eastham's town clerk. In 1870 his brief history of Eastham's early years, 1644-1776, was pub- lished in The Barnstable Patriot. He died in 1892.
Eastham in the last century had another bard, or rhymster, besides Heman Doane. He was Peter Walker, called by his friends the rhyming blacksmith. Not much of his verse is preserved but what is, is interesting. Perhaps the best is a toast attributed to him by Michael Fitzgerald in his narrative, "1812-A Tale of Cape Cod," being the story of Hoppy Mayo's exploit. The author has Peter Walker, in Crosby's Tavern one night, pay his respects to Obed Sparrow's good wife. "Well, neighbors, it isn't very good poetry (said Peter), but it's good rhyme and it's a tribute to Mistress Sparrow's accomplishments." Whereupon he recited:
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EASTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS
This good old town of Eastham boasts Of gallant men and true, Who never shirked their duty when The call of country blew; Who carried sail thro' many a gale To meet upon the sea The British foe, and strike a blow For home and liberty!
And foremost in the battle's van Bold Obed leads his crew; He's always there his part to share In deeds of derring-do! And when he brings his prize to port Thro' storm and flying foam, He'll proudly tell he'd conquer hell On the grub he gets at home!
And while on the subject and in the mood of verse it seems appropriate to add here lines from a very old sampler quoted by Edith and Frank Shay in their new book, Sand In Their Shoes:
Sarah Palfrey is my name, Cape Cod is my station; Eastham is my dwelling place And Christ is my salvation.
TRAVELS BY LAND AND BY SEA
Packets connecting Eastham with Boston and New York ran irregularly through the 1700s and regularly through the first half of the 1800s. Early packet captains included David C. Atwood, Samuel Snow and Scottow Cobb. Captain Atwood put the sloop Clipper on a regular run to Boston in 1821, and Captain Snow soon after began running out of Nauset harbor in summer and the bay side in winter, in the New York. Cap- tain Cobb put on the first schooner, the Young Tell, using the flats at low tide to take on and discharge passengers. He later bought the Brewster packet, Patriot, and his son H. K. Cobb, the A. C. Totten and Bay Queen, the latter remembered as both the largest and the last of Eastham packets. For seventy-five
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
cents each way one could go to or return from Boston; the run took about six hours, depending on wind and weather.
Eastham was on the weekly mail route established between Yarmouth and Truro in 1797. Its first postoffice was estab- lished in 1798 with William Myrick as first postmaster. Mail came twice weekly about 1820, still by post-rider, and then stage lines were gradually extended down Cape, carrying both mail and passengers. As the railroad line was extended, stage lines went out. Eastham stops were at the postoffice at the center, and in North Eastham at Horton's.
The railroad reached Orleans in 1865 and an extension through Eastham to Wellfleet was authorized by the Legisla- ture in 1868. Construction was begun the next year, and the 11.8 mile line to Wellfleet was completed in December, 1870. Two stations were built in Eastham, the first being described as located on "Know Nothing road, west of E. E. Knowles dwelling" and the other at North Eastham near Horton's Ho- tel. A welcoming banquet to celebrate completion of this line was held December 26, 1870, at Wellfleet, and many Eastham citizens attended. Jonathan Higgins, when his turn came to speak, reminded all present that "Old Eastham is the mother, and Orleans and Wellfleet her daughters."
Dr. Thomas S. Stone, the Wellfleet physician-poet, got off a nice conundrum: "Of what crime will our good mother be judged guilty, after today, by our courts of Law?" The answer was: "Bigamy, for
She who of old is the lawful wife Of the solemn sounding sea Is wedded with an iron ring The mainland's bride to be."
The Rev. A. J. Church also read some verses well remembered, of which here are samples:
The great Atlantic railroad, for old Cape Cod, all hail!
Bring on the locomotive, lay down the iron rail, Across the Eastham prairies, by steam we're bound to go, The railroad cars are coming, let's all take up and go.
# 21
Finished at Eastham May 22. 1795 By Josiah Rogers Elijah Knowles Simeon Kingman
Committee of the Town of Eastham to take a Survey of the Same
Note the Islands are discribed with the Meadow adjoining within the lines. Note that the lines marked thus --- are the Roads and the ground dotted thus is beach and sand heaps. The dark dotted lines are drawn between the Land and Meadow, and the salt water within the Beach on the back side.
The distance from
Myrick Tavern (the supposed Center of the Town) is 20 miles to the Shire Town, Barnstable.
Here wellfleet joins from the Bay to the back side Sea. Leaving the Estate that formerly belonged to Silvanus Snow as excepted in the act of incorporation of the Town of It ellfleet
Não y Frisaño Di
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Great Meadow River For Meadeas
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Rack Harbour River
(Perler Pone
Snows Pond
Jide Mill
gofind nice 01
South Meeting House
1
Fresh Pond
Pond
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Coles
Pond
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Island
Wind Mill
Pleasent Bay
Little Scaket River
Great Seaket River
of Eleazer Rogers as
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Line. excepting the Estate
Pleasent Bay to Chatham/
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Copy of a part of Archives plan No 1028 by Schofield Bros. Orleans Mass. Nov.1950
Town Love Of ...
1
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And
...... Myrick Tavern:
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SOME 19TH CENTURY HAPPENINGS
The busy dogs in Dogtown will wag their little tails
They'll think that something's coming, a-riding on the rails; The blackfish may throw up their flukes, finbacks may spout and blow But the railroad cars are bound to come, though everyone says no.
After half a century of regular service to Eastham and the lower Cape, the railroad which came down the Cape in long jumps, began retreating in like manner. Some ten years ago passenger service between Yarmouth and Provincetown was cut off, and now only a weekly freight is operated. Packet, stage and railroad have all given way to the motor vehicle and modern highway.
Old Eastham lay along the Indian trail which led from Yarmouth through the land of the Nausets. Early settlers soon improved it. In 1683 a jury of twelve Eastham men was drawn to widen and straighten it from Eastham to that part of Harwich now Brewster. Even then it followed in part "the old way" and the Indian trail. In 1719 the County way was extended from Eastham to Truro. In 1829 nearly a mile of it entering Eastham, from "the drain" (Jeremiah's Gutter) near Polly's (Polly Smith's) Peat Swamp, to Elisha Mayo's dwell- ing, was relocated. This took a slice from the old burying ground and cut right through Thomas Cobb's salt works-but he was given ten years, or until they were useless, to remove the works within the way. It also cut out the old road by "the Rev. Mr. Shaw's meeting house."
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