USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts : a guide to its places and people > Part 37
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For nearly a century after the Pilgrims left, Provincetown drew a strange assortment of transients. The Indians - Pamets, of the tribe of Wam- panoags - came here often, but had no permanent settlement. Prov- incetown was thus a sort of aboriginal Coney Island, where they gambled and drank with visiting fishermen. One imaginative historian writes of their 'bacchanalian carousals, which were continued sometimes for weeks with unrestrained license.'
In 1714 'the Province Town' was put under the jurisdiction of Truro, as a precinct. But pious, respectable Truro wanted no part of it, and after a long campaign, the horrified goodmen of that town succeeded in getting rid of the 'Poker Flats of Cape Cod,' as historian Shebnah Rich terms it. Provincetown was thus incorporated in 1727.
Deepwater whaling began at about that time, and the fleet grew rapidly. Provincetown and Truro took the lead. The whalemen and the Banks fishermen gave the Lower Cape a fair start toward prosperity in the latter half of the eighteenth century. At the same time the business of 'wrecking' was pursued with uncommon diligence.
Mooncussing and beachcombing - now synonyms meaning recovery of goods from the beach, chiefly cargoes drifting ashore from wrecked ships - were wreckers' work. This was a recognized means of liveli- hood - certainly recognized by the good citizens of 'Helltown,' as part of Provincetown came to be called, if not by the law. The legend of false lights hung out on moonless nights to lure unwary mariners of those days persists in the Cape's oral traditions. Rum-running and other smuggling were facilitated by long, deserted beaches, hidden from the village by the dunes.
About 1800 the Cape began making salt by evaporating sea water, and this discovery gave the fishery a new impetus. Provincetown became more prosperous and somewhat more respectable. A settlement grew up on Long Point itself, to be nearer the fishing. In lieu of lawns these peo- ple had patches of seaweed at their front doors, and children were cau- tioned against crossing the road at high tide.
Shortly before the Civil War the people at Long Point moved across- harbor to the main part of town. They loaded their houses, stores, church, and schoolhouse on scows and casks, and poled them across. The only structure one sees on the Point today is the lighthouse.
Fishing went on, however, and expanded, reaching a peak in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune
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visited the town in 1900, and wrote back, 'Fish is bartered at the grocery stores, shoe shops and bread stores for all the commodities of life .... The main business street is paved with rock cod. The women use the hind fin of the great halibut for brooms. Awnings shading the store fronts are made from the skin of the sportive porpoise. The bellrope in the church is made of eels, cunningly knotted by some old sailor. Over the altar was the picture of a whale. The collection plate was the top shell of a turtle. After the choir had sung "Pull for the Shore," the crew passed down the port aisle. Provincetown ladies trim their hats with red gills of the mackerel. Dog-fish often lie around the shore at low tide and bark and howl in a frightful manner.'
However, in the yellowed scrapbook in which this clipping was found, in Provincetown, is a notation by its one-time owner, 'A damned liar's description of Provincetown.'
Provincetown is still essentially a fishing village, and the majority of its people are fishermen and their families. They fish aboard the trawlers, the draggers, seiners and trapboats, and they work in the 'freezers' - fish-packing plants, of which there are five.
The industry, however, is long past its heyday, and many an old skipper who once hung out his sidelights and stood out for the Banks now hangs out a sign on his porch - 'Tourists Accommodated' - and sits down to wait for the summer people.
Beyond the first of June, they do not keep him waiting long. Artists at their easels begin to dot the wayside - and block the traffic; clicking typewriters join the nightly chorus of the crickets; and poets chirp from studio attics at all hours. These are Provincetown's trusty peren- nials - the yearly flowering of its 'art colony,' which, for all the con- fusion, has nevertheless produced many of the nation's foremost painters, playwrights, novelists and poets.
The founding of the Cape Cod School of Art here in 1901 by Charles W. Hawthorne was the real beginning of the art colony, though a few painters had visited the town before that. Hawthorne's own pictures of the Portuguese fisherpeople did much to build up the colony's prestige. Since his death in 1930, other schools have carried on, and the Province- town Art Association's annual exhibit is an event of widespread interest.
Prominent painters who have been associated with the colony include, besides Hawthorne, Arthur Diehl, Heinrich Pfeiffer, Edwin W. Dickinson, Ross Moffett, Frederick Waugh, George Elmer Browne, Richard Miller, John Noble, Mrs. Max Bohm, John Frazier, Gerrit A. Beneker, Hans Hoffman, Jack Beauchamp, Karl Knaths, W. H. W. Bicknell, William Paxton, Tod Lindenmuth, John Whorf, Henry Hensche, Jerry Farns- worth, and Charles J. Martin. Among sculptors here have been William Zorach and William F. Boogar, Jr.
In 1915 the Provincetown Players gathered under the leadership of George Cram Cook. They later took a theater in New York City, where they carried on until 1922. Drama on Broadway, at the time they set
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themselves up, was stilted and heavily encrusted with outgrown tradi- tions. The Players broke away from the timeworn formulae, offering plays with a fresh outlook, a new simplicity of method. The pioneering work done at that time has had a lasting influence, and has made the organization long remembered.
Among writers and dramatists who have lived in Provincetown are John Dos Passos, Susan Glaspell, Mary Heaton Vorse, Edmond Wilson, Harry Kemp, Frank Shay, George Cram Cook, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Max Eastman, and two winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, Eugene O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis.
Many of the artists and writers of reputation return each summer, and with them come large numbers of young unknowns. But to the old skipper of Provincetown who has retired from the sea and hung out his tourist sign, these are merely the forerunners of an even greater throng - the summer vacationers. By July I all is in full swing . the painters painting, the writers writing, tourists buying, and the traffic policemen perspiring.
On Labor Day the season ends. The Boston steamers whistle a last farewell, the 'accommodation' (street bus) is converted back into a fish truck, the dealer in 'Antiques' turns his sign around, the landlady cleans the cigarette butts out of the potted plant, and Provincetown settles down again to a 'nice quiet winter.'
'Summer people' are estimated at about Sooo. Of the 4000 'year-round people,' at least three fourths are Portuguese - 'Azoreans' (from the Azores), 'Lisbons' (from the mother country), and a scattering of 'Bravas' (descendants of Cape Verde islanders who came over in the whaling days). The other 1000 are principally the 'old Yankee stock,' who have lost the town, politically, to the Portuguese; who deplore the influx of the 'off-Cape furriners'; and to whom a volume of genealogy is a piece of escape literature.
The Provincetown sea-food cuisine is justly famous. In these kitchens few fish are allowed to enter their third day ashore. The world knows many ways to cook a fish, and Provincetown claims to know an improve- ment on every one. To conventional recipes are added many methods of the Portuguese; and sea cooks have contributed their best inspirations.
Provincetown favorites are baked haddock, cooked Portuguese style with a sauce of tomatoes and spices; fresh mackerel, fried or baked in milk; tuna (horse mackerel) or sea catfish served vinha d'alhos, which involves a pickling process before frying; 'tinker' mackerel, which are baby fish pickled with a variety of spices, to be served cold or fried; and stuffed fish, baked. Favorites cooked English style include all manner of chowders, and such delicacies as sea-clam pie, broiled live lobster and salt-water scallops, sliced and fried or made into a creamy stew.
The Portuguese are fond of linguica, a form of pork sausage, and of trutas, small pastries served at Christmas and other feast-days. These
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are stuffed with a sweet potato preparation, and fried in deep olive oil and coated with honey.
Beach plums grow in profusion at this end of the Cape, and housewives make the famous beach plum jelly. Skully-jo, once popular, is no longer made by any but a few Portuguese families. This is codfish or haddock cured in the sun, 'till it's hard enough to bend lead pipe around.' When fish was plentiful the Portuguese made barrels of it and the children carried it about in their pockets and chewed it instead of candy. It was said that 'the longer you chewed on a junk of skully-jo, the more you had.'
People at the Cape-end have always been willing warmers of the yarner's bench. Among them live many a legend and tall tale from seafaring days. There are still in Provincetown a few old-timers who can remember stories their own parents told them about the 'witch with red heels,' for example, who cruised in a cozy cabin inside a great whale. She played cards there with the Devil himself, and the stakes were the souls of luckless mariners whose vessels had run aground on Nauset shoals or the Peaked Hill Bars. To provide 'chips,' a light was hung from the flukes of the whale, and he would swim through the shoalest of the Cape waters.
There is the story, too, of the Whistling Whale, with a snore like a siren whistle, caused by an old iron embedded in his spout. Several times his whistling brought out the volunteer fire department. And when he was apprehended and finally harpooned - after weeks of serenading the town - some of the citizens declared they had become accustomed to the whistling, and were afraid they would never sleep again !
'Professor' George Washington Ready, town crier in 1886, one day solemnly deposed that he had seen a sea-serpent - not a common, run-of-the-mill sea-serpent, but a monstrous one, a reptile three hundred feet long and twelve feet in the beam, with three red eyes to port and three green eyes to starboard. The serpent came ashore, the Professor said, breathing sulphurous fumes and searing the beach-plum bushes at Herring Cove, undulated overland to Pasture Pond, and slowly went in, head first, never to be seen again! And the Professor made 'affidavy,' too, that he was 'not unduly excited by liquor or otherwise.'
Provincetown has too many such tales for space here, and the stuff of which these old yarns were spun would make a nautical glossary necessary equipment for the average listener of today. Even that would not clear up some of the local idiom. A ship bunk's mattress was a 'donkey's breakfast.' The 'apple-tree fleet' was the class of coasting schooners, with skippers who never sailed out of sight of the orchards alongshore. Molasses was 'Porty Reek long-lick,' or 'long-tailed sugar.'
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FOOT TOUR -3 m.
NE. from the Town Hall on Commercial St.
I. Town Wharf, a long, wide-timbered pier, is the heart of Provincetown's summer life. For many years it has been the landing stage of the daily Boston steamer in summer, and it is used by fishermen at all seasons.
The harbor view from this pier is a gay scene. Trawlers, seiners and draggers mingle with slim white yachts, low-lying cruisers and gray battleships. The short wharf on the left is littered with nets stretched to dry, lobster pots, kegs and coils of tarry rope. On the beach, artists are often at work, some singly, some in classes. Gulls wheel overhead, ever on watch for tidbits from the fishing boats.
Retrace Commercial St .; R. from Commercial St. on Ryder St.
2. A Mayflower Memorial Tablet near the Town Hall gives the wording of the Mayflower Compact, which was drawn up and signed in the cabin of that vessel while she lay at anchor in Provincetown Harbor. The names of the signers are appended.
3. The Compact Memorial, a large bas-relief by Cyrus F. Dallin, depicts the signing of the covenant. Fifteen by nine feet, it is set in a broad granite wall flanked by stone benches.
R. from Ryder St. on Bradford St.
4. Another Mayflower Memorial Tablet, at the junction of Bradford St. with the steep unmarked road leading to Pilgrim Monument, is in memory of 'the five "Mayflower" passengers who died at sea while the ship lay in Cape Cod Harbor.' The names include that of Dorothy Bradford, wife of the Governor.
L. from Bradford St. up the unmarked road to the Pilgrim Monument.
5. Pilgrim Monument (open daily 8-5, Mar. 1-Nov. 30; closed in winter; adm. 25g) is constructed of gray granite, 252 feet high and 352 feet above sea level. It is visible many miles at sea. Storm signals are flown atop this hill from one of the steel towers of the U.S. Signal Service. The monu- ment commemorates the landing of the Pilgrims at Provincetown, Novem- ber II, 1620, and the signing of the Compact. The view from the top is spectacular; to the north and east lies the open Altantic; to the west, across Cape Cod Bay, are Duxbury and Plymouth; to the south, the Cape, in bold relief, curves away in a tawny half-circle. The town below appears like a toy hamlet.
Retrace unmarked road; R. from unmarked road on Bradford St .; L. from Bradford St. on Ryder St .; R. from Ryder St. on Commercial St.
6. The Town Hall is a Victorian frame building housing art treasures, seafaring trophies and items of local interest. In the entrance hall are murals of Provincetown industries, by Ross Moffett. The offices on the
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ground floor contain a painting, 'Provincetown Fishermen,' by Charles W. Hawthorne. In the same suite is Sir Thomas Lipton's $5000 gold and sil- ver 'Fisherman's Cup,' won in 1907 by the schooner 'Rose Dorothea,' of Provincetown, Captain Costa. In the basement is an ancient horse- drawn fire pumper, with wide wheels, especially constructed a hundred years ago for use on the hard sand of the town beaches.
7. The Church of the Redeemer (Universalist) is a white frame edifice, with a steeple.
8. The Historical Museum (open June-Oct .; adm. 25g), 230 Commercial St., a square brown Victorian building, houses an Arctic Exhibit con- tributed by Donald B. MacMillan, the Provincetown Arctic explorer, and also Indian relics, old glassware, ship models and whaling imple- ments.
Straight ahead from Commercial St. into unmarked Tremont St., up Chip Hill.
9. The 'Norse Wall House' (private), 15 Tremont St., is a small cottage built above an embedded wall (not visible) which is sometimes men- tioned in support of the theory that the Norsemen came here. In 1853, Francis A. Paine began excavating for a cellar. At a depth of five feet (30 feet below the original level of the hill) a stone wall was encountered, three feet high and two feet wide, laid in shell-lime mortar. Later 'a hard earthen floor composed of peat, clay and fine white sand, hammered and pounded together,' was discovered, with the remains of a fireplace. These discoveries have been linked conjecturally to the visits of the Vikings to this country, where they saw the 'Wonder Strands' referred to in the three ancient Copenhagen manuscripts which tell of the early voyages from Scandinavia. In the vicinity of Provincetown there are no stones to be found of the size used in this wall. The Norse, it is said, carried such stones as ballast.
Retrace on Tremont St .; R. from Tremont St. on Commercial St.
IO. The Wharf Theater is a remodeled gray-shingled fish shed on a harbor pier. A summer stock company plays here.
II. One of the oldest houses in Provincetown, the Seth Nickerson House (open as hooked rug shop), is at 72 Commercial St. The structure is estimated to be about 200 years old, and looks it, with its white clap- boarded front, its shingled siding, its hip roof, broad central chimney and small-paned windows, around which climb rambler roses. When this house was built, the street did not exist and the residents of this district traveled to and from the village along the beach.
From this point on, prevailing features of the dwellings are gray-shingled walls, white picket fences, and gardens bright in summer with scarlet poppies, blue delphiniums and masses of white Easter lilies.
R. from Commercial St. on any of the lanes, all of which lead back to Brad- ford St .; two blocks back of Commercial St. and parallel to it; R. on Brad- ford St.
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12. Bradford Street is the only other throughfare in Provincetown. The two streets run parallel, the length of the town, and all others are little more than interesting lanes.
MOTOR TOUR - 8 m.
W. from Town Hall on Commercial St.
13. The Site of the Pilgrims' First Landing, at the juncture of Commercial St. and Beach Highway, is marked by a bronze tablet on a low granite slab. To the left at a bend in the sandy isthmus, are Wood End Light and Wood End Coast Guard Station and at the tip-end, Long Point Light. Just outside, off Wood End, occurred one of the most horrible disasters of modern times, the sinking of the submarine 'S-4,' Dec. 17, 1927, when she breached under the bow of the coast guard destroyer 'Paulding' and went to the bottom with 40 men. Naval authorities were bitterly crit- icized on this occasion, both locally and throughout the country. A marked course off Wood End is still used as a proving ground for sub- marines, and occasionally battleships come to anchor in the harbor. Provincetown is a lively scene when 'the fleet is in.'
R. from Commercial St. into Beach Highway.
14. New Beach was the location, a generation ago, of a colony of fisher- men's shacks known as Hell Town. Its white shelving sand and its safe exposure on Cape Cod Bay make it now the finest bathing beach of the town. From here on the drive is one of unusual beauty, wild and desolate. The billowing sand dunes shift eternally, driven by gales that sweep in from the Atlantic. From time to time these sandhills have been planted by the Federal Government with scrub pine, beachgrass and other shrubs to stem their march. The co-operative bayberry grows wild. The cross- raftered poles which appear at intervals are spindle ranges used by the navy. In late afternoon the light over the dunelands is of many hues, sometimes a clear, soft golden-mauve, compounded of the slanting rays of the westerly sun, the tremendous open horizon, the sea air, the sage green of the grass, and the gold of the sand.
L. from Beach Highway on road marked, 'To Race Point Coast Guard Station.'
15. Race Point Coast Guard Station (open to visitors at any daylight hour; drills Mon., Tues., and Fri., 9) becomes visible a long distance ahead, a two-story square white frame building with a red roof and a skeleton observation tower, standing upon a sandy bluff above the open waters of the Atlantic at one of the most dangerous spots to shipping on the eastern seaboard. It is a typical station, spotlessly clean, with a crew of ten men who do all the cooking and housework in addition to their seafaring duties. Chiefly interesting are the surfboats, 24 feet long. The shooting of the line for the breeches buoy may be seen at scheduled drills.
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On the beach below the station is the wreck of the 'Spindler,' a rum- runner 125 feet long, which was cast ashore in 1922. A few years ago she stood high above the sand. Masts, riggings, even the bowsprit, are gone and the hull is deeply embedded now.
Retrace side road; L. from side road on Beach Highway; L. from Beach Highway on Bradford St .; R. from Bradford St. on Commercial St., un- marked, but evident as the last junction on Bradford St.
16. Eugene O'Neill's Former Lodging (private), 577 Commercial St., is the right-hand half (as one faces the dwelling) of the upper floor of a re- modeled sail loft with business offices on the first floor. Here the dramatist began his career. On the beams of the living-room of the apartment is written, 'Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears.'
17. The Church of St. Mary of the Harbor (Episcopal) is a one-story, rambling frame structure, with a clapboarded front and gray-shingled sides. It has a small Mission bell. The simple and pleasing interior, with its alternating dark timbers and white plaster, and its white painted un- cushioned pews, is adorned with a small statue of Christ in cream-colored glazed terra-cotta. The figure stands upon a wooden cross beam, with arms outstretched, and is flanked by kneeling angels.
18. The Figurehead House (private) is a square yellow house with a ship's figurehead of a woman, surmounting the porch. The figurehead was found afloat in the Indian Ocean in Civil War days by Captain Ben Handy of Provincetown, who placed it where it is today.
19. The Home of Commander Donald B. MacMillan (private), 473 Com- mercial St., is a modern white frame house with a small lawn at the side and a large studio window in the north gable.
QUINCY . Iron Ships and Great Men
City: Alt. 42, pop. 76,909, sett. 1625, incorp. town 1792, city 1888.
Railroad Stations: Atlantic off Hancock St .; Montclair off Montclair Ave .; Norfolk Downs on Newport Ave .; Quincy in Quincy Square; West Quincy on Willard St .; Wollaston on Beale St .; and Quincy Adams on Presidents Ave. for N.Y., N.H. & H. R.R.
Accommodations: Six hotels at reasonable rates.
Recreation: Swimming and bathing at Wollaston Beach on Quincy Shore Drive. Yachting at the Squantum and Wollaston Yacht Clubs (adm. by invitation). Information: Chamber of Commerce, 1535 Hancock St.
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QUINCY is one of the commercial centers of Massachusetts, known for its granite quarries, shipbuilding, machinery, and radio-transmitting stations WNAC and WAAB, part of the Yankee Network. Quincy owes much to the Italians, Jews, Finns, Scots, Greeks, and Syrians who came to work in the quarries and shipyards and who contributed generously toward the city's artistic, intellectual, and civic development. Thirty- two churches may be credited in part to a fund left to the Quincy churches by the King family to 'aid the breaking down of religious prejudice [in the belief] that a better understanding of the religious faith of one an- other is one of the most important movements in the world.'
In 1625 Thomas Morton, the 'pettifogger of Furnival's Inn,' as Governor Bradford contemptuously called him, arrived at Mount Wollaston and took part in establishing the settlement later to be known as Ma-re Mount or Merrymount. Morton traded with the Indians, taught them the use of firearms, and supplied them with liquor in exchange for furs, thus cutting in on the Plymouth trade. Bradford, further irked at Mor- ton's celebration of May Day as a pagan feast and fearing that Mor- ton's Merrymount would become a refuge for lawbreakers, dispatched Miles Standish and eight men from Plymouth, where a council was held, some members of which pressed for his execution. Instead, however, he was sent to England. Eighteen months later he returned to Merry- mount, was again arrested, his house burned, and he himself again sent a prisoner to England. His 'Newe English Canaan,' published about 1637, gave excellent descriptions of New England scenery and bird and animal life, and scathingly exposed what he claimed to be the hypocritical pretenses to morality of the Pilgrims and Puritans.
Quincy was not separately incorporated till nearly one hundred and seventy years after the earliest settlements in this section. In 1789, while it was still the north precinct of Braintree, local consciousness was brought to a high pitch by the election of a native son, John Adams, to the Vice-Presidency of the United States. Eight years later, in 1797, he took the chair of President. His son, John Quincy Adams, was regarded as the finest diplomat in the foreign service. Later he, too, became Presi- dent. When men with whom they had played as children were making history, Quincy's inhabitants felt it was high time to assert their right to an individual existence. The town was called Quincy in honor of Colonel John Quincy, an eminent and able citizen who had occupied Mount Wollaston.
Until 1830 the town was mainly a farming community, but from that date onward agriculture gave precedence to industry, a transition brought about by the expansion of the shoe trade, a natural outgrowth of the tanneries on the town brook; and by improved facilities for quarrying granite. Men had learned how to use iron instead of wooden wedges in splitting the rock.
In 1752 King's Chapel in Boston was built with Quincy granite. This sudden demand frightened the town fathers. Fearful of the supply of
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rock giving out, they passed an ordinance prohibiting the use of granite boulders for outside purposes. In spite of this, Quincy's trade in granite continued to expand until it was known the world over. In 1825 the Quincy quarries received a contract to supply the stone for the Bunker Hill Monument, and a railroad was built to convey the granite on horse- drawn wagons from the quarry to the wharf on the Neponset River.
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