South Wellfleet, Massachusetts

In December 1931, the Hyannis Patriot newspaper covered the birthday of South Wellfleet resident Mrs. Mary Newcomb who was celebrating her 85^th birthday. Although she had a bit of rheumatism, the reporter found her cheerful and engaged with an interest in current events as she listened to her radio.

Mrs. Newcomb was born Mary Hinckley, and her home was the house that still stands today at South Wellfleet’s Hinckley’s Corner. In 1931, it was located on the “State Road” (Route 6). Today that road is named “Way 112” a byway to Route 6. The house—and the corner—are where Way 112, Paine Hollow Road, and Drummer Cove Road converge.

The Hinckley Family

Mrs. Newcomb had her family genealogy handy on the day the reporter interviewed her, perhaps reflecting the veneration of Colonial times in her day. She began with her first-generation ancestor in Plymouth Colony, Thomas Hinckley, who came to Plymouth in 1635 with his parents and went on to become a leading citizen, serving as the Colony’s last governor from 1680 to 1692. The Hinckley family followed their pastor, Reverend John Lothrop, who had come to the Colony from England to practice his religious freedom. He settled his congregation first in Scituate and later in the newly established Barnstable village.

Thomas Jr. made his family life there, marrying twice and leaving seventeen children. He played an important role as Governor in keeping Plymouth Colony as part of Massachusetts Bay Colony instead of part of New York. The 1691 Charter signed with King William and Queen Mary, created three counties, Plymouth, Bristol, and Barnstable. from the old Plymouth Colony.

Thomas Hinckley’s rather brutal time is reflected in an old record of his role as a judge in a case involving a burglary committed by a Native American who was then enslaved as a punishment. Hinckley is buried in the old Lothrop Hill Burying Ground in Barnstable.

The Hinckley family spread out over Cape Cod, and we can still see their name today as place names, business names, and the names of old houses. Fifth general Moses Hinckley, born in 1772 in Falmouth, came to Wellfleet and married Mary Chipman. In 1790, he was recorded in the first federal census in Wellfleet where he served a term as Selectman. A record of his family is in the hand-written Wellfleet birth records of that period where his daughters Mary, Nabby, Martha, Betsey, and Lavinia are recorded along with his sons Sylvester, Chipman, and Moses. Moses Hinckley is buried in Duck Creek Cemetery in Wellfleet. Sylvester, born in 1816, was Mrs. Newcomb’s father. 

The Hinckley family lived upstanding lives, participating in the life of the town. Mrs. Newcomb told of her father’s teaching at the Pond Hill School when she was a child, during the winter months, and then earning a living by fishing the rest of the year. Sylvester served as the Town Auditor for many years.  When he was 89 years old in 1905, The Boston Globe printed an article about Sylvester’s delicious Wellfleet-grown vegetables, coaxing his crop from the sandy Cape soil.

Mary Hinckley married Cornelius Newcomb in 1866 and, in 1871, had their only child, Herbert Newcomb.

Mary’s brothers, Moses and Sylvester, both left the Cape to pursue work as so many young men did in the latter years of the nineteenth century as the fishing from Wellfleet diminished. Both died rather young, Sylvester of suicide in May 1895, and Moses a few months later. Sylvester left a wife, Annie, and a child, Grace Hinckley.

Hinckley’s Corner

The Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum has a copy of the postcard labeled “Hinckley’s Corner” which was produced during the Golden Age of Postcards (1895-1915) when many Wellfleet locations were captured. This card is posted at the beginning of this post.

There is another postcard of Hinckley’s Corner that was only labeled “Street View South Wellfleet.

Using the Wellfleet Assessor’s Map I was able to follow the trajectory of the camera’s lens to identify the house on the right as the Hinckley family’s and the one in the distance as the Robert Paine house further up the hill. In her 1982 book Wellfleet Remembered (Volume Two), Ruth Rickmers used the same image but called the house on the right the “Cornelius Newcomb” home. By the time she produced her fourth volume of Wellfleet Remembered in 1984, Rickmers had a wonderful photograph by Gordon Spence of Hinckley’s corner with the house, the store and its Jenny gas, and several automobiles of that time. I don’t have permission to reproduce that photo here but the Rickmers books are the Wellfleet Library.

Hinckley’s Corner and the Hinckley house appear to have had their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Cornelius and Mary’s son, Herbert Newcomb, left the Cape and had a grocery store in Brockton, Massachusetts.

In the 1920s, as more summer residents came to Wellfleet, Herbert established a food store and a gas station next to his parents’ house. One newspaper account attributed three businesses to Herbert: Newcomb ‘s Food Shop, The Economy Wood Company, and The Tourist Chambers.  The Hinckley/Newcomb house had become what we would call a “Bed and Breakfast” today.  There are many mentions of The Tourist Chambers in the South Wellfleet column of the Hyannis Patriot and Barnstable Patriot naming their many guests. Annie Hinckley, Sylvester’s widow, and her daughter Grace Hinckley Austin and her four children were frequent summer visitors.

In one of his memory pieces in The Cape Codder, called “Only Yesterday,” Holman Spence remembers:

A grocer opened a store at “Hinckley’s Corner” across the street from the intersection of the King’s Highway and Paine Hollow Road. The store was called “The Palace of Sweets,” and Herbie Newcomb started it. Herbie was quite a man in the grocery business having been in it all his life in Brockton. His was an orderly place that only sold groceries and simple household goods.  … He sold ice cream cones he called “five cent” or “ten cent” horns, fresh fruit, and vegetables. Jenny gasoline; kept the milk out of the sun in a cooler, and provided loafing space on the front veranda for the locals to gather upon.

At Herbie’s we kept up with old South Wellfleet friends and made a number of new ones. My oldest brother worked for Herbie driving his Model-T Ford delivery truck out across the dunes where “Wellfleet By the Sea” finally took hold and sprouted a few cottages. Herbie Newcomb was a restless sort and soon sold out to a man named Parker who, in turn, sold to people named Baumgarten. Next, he (e.g., Herbie) appeared in the center of Wellfleet in a new store called “The Trading Post” where the lawn in front of the Town Hall is now. This establishment continued until almost the second war and both my sister Marjorie and my wife worked for Herbie for a couple of years. Later it was converted to a clothing store on the second site.

(Herbert Newcomb’s Trading Post should not be confused with “Newcomb’s Soda Shop” on Main Street, owned by Cecil Newcomb.)

When Herbert Newcomb sold his South Wellfleet business to Baumgarten in 1932, it was reported that he was returning to his business in Brockton. However, once the Trading Post was established on Main Street in Wellfleet by 1936, he appears to have become a full-time Wellfleet citizen. 

Hinckley’s Corner Today

Today, the term “Hinckley’s Corner” is rarely used. However, it’s commemorated in a 1998 listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The cover sheet to the application notes that “Hinckley’s Corner Historic District” is the preferred name, with “Paine Hollow North Historic District” as a secondary name. Three properties are in this District, numbers 0 (now 85), 25, and 40 Way 112. The Hinckley House and its outbuildings are number 40.

Here, the Hickley House, built in 1790, is called by the name of its original owner and builder, Jonathan Young. Mr. Young (1720-1799) inherited his land in the Paine Hollow area. The Wellfleet researchers from the 1980s indicate that he probably served on Wellfleet’s Committee of Correspondence, Inspection and Safety. He served as Town Clerk in 1781. His grave is in the South Wellfleet Cemetery.

In 1804, the Young children sold their father’s house to Moses Hinckley, identified in the deed as a carpenter.

In the National Register form, and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s “Form B” related to the Young/Hinckley House, the 1804 buyer is identified as “two brothers from up Cape,” Moses and Sylvester. However, the deed shows the only buyer to be Moses Hinckley who was the father of the two. He was probably glad to find a house in Wellfleet for his growing family. In the 1804 deed, there is a dwelling house, a barn, and land, and a “cartway” mentioned. In an 1856 newspaper account, the Hinckley House is mentioned in a description of how the new County Road should be laid out.

A 1932 description of the house in the Yarmouth Register praised its attractiveness, noting that the fireplace that was once blocked up had been re-opened. It had a parlor, a dining room, and one bedroom downstairs, with a kitchen and an ell at the back. The 1981 “Form B” noted that there is a sample of its wallpaper at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum. The house had an organ that entertained the neighborhood young people who would gather there to sing. Mrs. Newcomb and her husband were married there.

The Young/Hinckley/Newcomb house at Hinckley’s corner is somewhat hidden from view with trees and shrubs providing protective covering. It’s more visible during the winter season when the trees are bare. The best photos are those in the National Register of Historic Places Form 10-90, linked below. You can scroll through the form to view the photos.

National Archives NextGen Catalog

Sources

Thomas Hinckley – Wikipedia and publication: Five: “New England in Old England” 1681–1691 – Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum photo archive

Hinckley’s Corner, South Wellfleet, Mass. – W0900 | Wellfleet Historical Society (pastperfectonline.com)

Postcard of “Street View, South Wellfleet” in a private collection and a color version online at

Massachusetts Historical Commission Form B for 40 Way 112 (WLF )

National Register of Historic Placess catalog of forms online

The Barnstable Patriot online at the Sturgis Library

The Cape Codder, online at the Snow Library

Hinckley family genealogy at Ancestry.com

Wellfleet’s Assessor’s Database

Deeds at the Barnstable County Deed database

Rickmers, Ruth  Wellfleet Remembered, Volumes 2 and 4   Wellfleet, Mass., Blue Butterfly Publications, 1982 and 1984

Recently, a friend asked if I could identify the South Wellfleet house pictured in this early 20^th century postcard.

The postcard was printed in Germany by Leighton and Valentine Company, New York City. This company was formed in 1909 when the Valentine Company of New York and Boston merged with the Hugh C. Leighton Company of Portland, Maine.

Using the photo archive at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum, I identified the “weird old house” as the David Wiley house (photo W2032), based on a comparison of the window placement and the tree growing in the front. A lucky find, helped by a useful digital collection.  

Thanks to my friend’s question, and the photo match, we now know that the old house was photographed in 1905 when it was still on the south side of Blackfish Creek near Old Wharf Road. According to the Historical Society’s record of the photograph, Abbot Paine took it apart and re-assembled it after that. The photograph was taken by Clem Baker who has only one other photo in the collection. The identification was by David Ernst, former Wellfleet Selectman and a major supporter of Wellfleet’s conservation projects, sadly no longer with us.

Turns out, I had written about this house and the Wiley family back in 2013.  Based on more than one source, my post on the Wiley family identified a house moved in 1866 across Blackfish Creek and now located at 165 Paine Hollow Road.

When I wrote that post in 2013, it was before the Wellfleet Historical Society developed its photo archive. Now I know there is a second Wiley house that Abbott Paine moved in the 20^th century.

I contacted my friend Irene Paine who has written about the Paine family, remembering that her grandfather was Abbott Paine. Indeed, she knew all about his project, carried out after he returned from military service in World War One. She knows that he added the dormer windows fairly soon after moving the home and made other additions later.

The house that was moved in the 1920s is now at 60 Pleasant Point Road. So many changes have been made, if it was once the Wiley house, you can’t identify it now.  It’s also possible that Mr. Paine moved another old house, or that the Historical Society’s identification is wrong.  Possibly, the house that was moved in 1866 was not a Wiley house —- the most recent Massachusetts Historical Commission’s Form B, updated recently by Lynn Smiledge, does not identify it as such.

We’re leaving this topic as a bit of a mystery.

Sources

Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum photo archive

The David Wiley place. – W2032 | Wellfleet Historical Society (pastperfectonline.com)

Massachusetts Historical Commission Form B for 165 Paine Hollow Road (WLF 335)

The Wiley Homestead in South Wellfleet | South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (south-wellfleet.com)

The Hugh C. Leighton Co., Manufacturers — Dumbarton Oaks (doaks.org)

With the 250^th anniversary (the Sestercentennial) of the Boston Tea Party coming up on December 16^th, I thought I’d celebrate it by sharing the story of the Wellfleet connection to the event. This is not about South Wellfleet history.  Stories about this event have recently appeared in the Provincetown Independent and the Journal of the Cape Cod Genealogical Society.

It’s only recently that I learned the tale of John Greenough and the tea that he rescued from a shipwreck off Peaked Hills Bars. In early December 1773, the brig William was on its way to Boston with the other three tea ships but got caught in a storm and went ashore. The 19^th Century Cape Cod historians mention Mr. Greenough but seem to frame his venture as that of a naïve schoolmaster who thought he’d make a little money with his “side hustle” but got in trouble with his neighbors over selling the tea which had become a symbol of America’s growing fight over unfair taxation. Recent research presented a far more complicated series of events on the outer Cape.

Contemporary historians have researched the sinking of the brig William and Greenough’s role in the aftermath of the wreck in much more detail. Mary Beth Norton, a historian at Cornell University, wrote an article (and later, a book) on the topic that I recently discovered.  Professor Norton relied upon the work of other historians, newspaper accounts, and the Greenough papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Using newspaper databases, I read contemporary accounts of the growing ill will about the British Parliament’s tax policy. Considering his actions, one wonders if Mr. Greenough was aware of the sense of his fellow citizens. Did he have access to the Boston papers?

Before we get to the story of the shipwreck, Norton makes sure we understand how important the tea was to Americans. She described it as having an addictive quality. It was not only popular, it was part of the culture, as upper-class women took pride in their tea service and socializing over tea parties. The best tea was shipped from China by the East India Tea Company (EIC), a monopoly established by the British government, and the tea that was taxed. However, there was an active market for smuggled tea, commonly called Dutch tea.

In 1767 the Townshend Duties were enacted by Parliament. These custom duties on tea and other commodities caused the Americans to boycott products, so Parliament retreated somewhat in 1770 but kept the duty on tea. Philadelphia and New York kept up their active boycott of EIC tea, but Boston had returned to drinking it and paying the duty. However, in May of 1773, in an effort to rescue the EIC from financial disaster, Parliament imposed an additional tax on the tea. Americans interpreted this act as Parliament’s seeking to establish its authority over the British colonies. In the fall of 1773, seven ships were launched from England with tea shipments: one each for Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, and four to Boston.

John Greenough of Wellfleet was the son of Thomas and Martha Greenough of Boston. Born in 1742, he was educated at Yale and also received a Masters degree from Harvard in 1763. He married Mehitable Dillingham of Harwich in 1766 and settled in Wellfleet in 1768 when he was hired as the schoolmaster of the grammar school. In Massachusetts, grammar schools taught Greek and Latin, to prepare students for college and careers in the ministry, the law, and medicine. Greenough also became a Wellfleet merchant and, in 1771, a Justice of the Peace.

 The trouble that erupted in the Boston Tea Party started in November 1773. Historian J.L. Bell who writes a daily post on his “Boston 1775” site, covered the November events recently. There were five merchants in Boston who were the consignees for the EIC tea. Knowing that the EIC tea was coming their way, the Boston Sons of Liberty made an attempt to get them to refuse the tea shipment which is what had happened with the shipments in Charleston and Philadelphia. The New York City shipment got caught up in a storm, hunkered down in the Caribbean, and did not arrive until the spring of 1774, but it was also refused.

Richard Clarke was one of the Boston consignees and owned the William. Like the other tea consignees, he had not responded to the request to refuse the tea in early November. A mob of some 100 men had shown up at his warehouse in Boston. The crowd was menacing but a few of Clarke’s friends intervened and convinced the crowd to back down. However, for protection from the mob, Clarke and his family moved over to Castle William, the island in Boston Harbor under the control of the British military. The situation in Boston culminated on December 16th when what would become known as “the Boston Tea Party” occurred at Griffins’ Wharf as the tea cargo on three ships was destroyed by a large group of men dressed as Indians.

It was in this atmosphere of unease, menace, and dissension that John Greenough went to Provincetown to investigate the wreck of the William on December 13, 1773. He first took an official statement from the ship’s captain, Joseph Loring, about the details of how the ship had run aground. Then he hired local men in Provincetown, and together with the crew of the William, they removed the cargo from the wreck onto the beach. Besides the EIC tea, the cargo included a shipment of street lamps for Boston and some miscellaneous items, medicines, and pepper.

Eventually, they had to get the cargo from the beach over the dune and onto wagons to move it into Provincetown. It must have been hard work: a crate of tea weighed 350 pounds, and there were 58, including four crates that were damaged. By the time they got the wreck unloaded, one of the Clarke sons, Jonathan, a personal friend of Greenough’s, had traveled overland to Provincetown. After the cargo was unloaded, the wreck was burned in order to salvage the iron fittings. This occurred on December 18^th.

Greenough had to undertake several additional chores regarding the cargo. First, he had to get it to Boston. He easily found a ship to take the streetlamps and other items. (The lamps were installed in the spring of 1774.) But no captain on the outer Cape would touch the tea. While the tea was in storage in Provincetown, Samuel Adams accused “the Mashpee Tribe” of “being sick at the knees” for not destroying it. Luckily for Greenough, a ship from Salem, the Eunice, had taken shelter in Provincetown harbor, and the captain, Mr. Cook, agreed to take it to Boston. By the time this arrangement was made, the destruction of the tea on the other ships had taken place, and the tea from the Cape was put into storage at Castle William in early January 1774. Later, Captain Cook was brought before the town meeting in Salem to explain his action but he was able to plead “ignorance” and was not punished. The owner of the Eunice, Mr. Bickford, was also threatened by a mob “dressed in an Indian manner” but fortunately he was ensconced in the Salem smallpox hospital having his inoculation followed by quarantine, and could not be found.

With Clarke’s permission, Greenough had divided one of the damaged chests of tea and used it to pay the Provincetown workers for their labor. When word got out about this payment, several laborers’ homes were broken into and searched by men dressed as Indians and the tea was destroyed. In another incident, a Wellfleet man who purchased some tea from Atwood was accosted “in the Wellfleet woods” by three men in disguise.

Greenough was also given two chests of the EIC tea to sell as an agent of the Clarke firm. Before he left Provincetown, he sold a portion of it to Stephen Atwood. In January 1774, Atwood’s home was also broken into, and the tea burned. In the Spring, 100 pounds of tea showed up with a peddler from Martha’s Vineyard in Lyme, Connecticut. Based on the amount, it was thought to be some of the Atwood tea. That tea was burned also.

Greenough had gone over to Boston with one of the ships moving the cargo and reported later that he had consulted with “Boston gentlemen” about keeping the untaxed tea and selling it. He indicated that the gentlemen were in agreement with his view. But Greenough’s brother, and then his father, who happened to be on Boston’s Committee of Correspondence, both sent angry letters to him when they heard of his plan, telling him to stay away from the “cursed tea.” In a letter to his father, Greenough asserted that “the actions of your Indians were more dangerous than any Act of the British Parliament.”

In Wellfleet, a special committee was assembled to deal with the issue.  Greenough was taken aback by his neighbors’ outcry about the tea. Asserting his privileged position, he accused Wellfleet men with private “pique” against him of manipulating the news of the events in Boston on December 16^th so that it encouraged the rage of the people of Wellfleet.  He got very defensive and even insulting to his Wellfleet neighbors. He was, he said, guided by rational principles, that it was the tax, not the tea that was the issue and that those who opposed his plan to sell it” knew nothing of the dispute with the Mother County.” 

At a meeting in January 1774, the Wellfleet Committee rejected his argument and that’s when he agreed to put the remaining tea in their care until they got a response from an inquiry they sent to Boston, asking “gentlemen” there for advice about selling the untaxed Greenough tea. The Wellfleet men seemed to be concerned about how the sale of the tea might affect their other business dealings in Boston, perhaps giving the town a bad name. They did not get a response for two months.

Meanwhile, the town of Eastham was also having problems with the tea. Before relinquishing his supply, Greenough had sold another portion to Colonel Willard Knowles, a leading citizen and the man in charge of the Eastham militia and its arms in storage. At the January 1774 Eastham town meeting the selectmen accepted Knowles’s possession of the tea, and indicated that he could sell it. But in February 1774, another meeting was called, including a group of dissidents who insisted that Knowles should be stripped of his duties regarding the militia and its store of weapons because he could not be trusted. Since there were people at this meeting who did not have the right to vote, others considered it illegal.  

In early March, a group of “barbarians with blackened faces” accosted one of the Eastham Selectmen and threatened to tar and feather him. They were talked out of their plan because he argued successfully that he would die from such action. The threat of another attack by the “Eastham Sons of Liberty” caused the Selectmen to assemble quite a large crowd of local militia and their officers to defend Knowles, and the Sons of Liberty backed off. At a meeting later in March, Knowles got the town’s official approval for selling the untaxed tea.

Back in Wellfleet, the special Wellfleet Committee heard from their Boston gentlemen in April about the Greenough affair but got an unsatisfactory answer telling them they just needed to “use their own good sense” about what to do about the tea. There also appeared to be no memory of having given Greenough approval of the tea sale, as he had claimed. At an initial meeting in Wellfleet, set up by Winslow Lewis, Greenough was still defensive and difficult, but at a more conciliatory meeting with Vaaman Holbrook, the situation seemed to smooth out, and the Wellfleet men returned the tea and Greenough sold it. At the same time, Greenough made his apology for having caused such disruption to the town.

As 1774 unfolded, other events moved to center stage. Parliament adopted the Boston Port Act. As of June 1, the Boston port would be closed except to local food and fuel traffic until the EIC had been compensated for the destroyed tea. Three other Acts limited the Massachusetts government, by taking control of town meetings, making British officials immune to prosecution, and requiring colonists to house and quarter British troops on demand.

Late in the year, John Greenough made a formal apology to the Town of Wellfleet, saying he was “heartily sorry” for bringing tea into the district and that he “had never intended to injure the liberties of my country.” At this point, Greenough was also recognizing the authority of the Wellfleet Committee, now under the aegis of the Continental Association, created by the First Continental Congress. Greenough became the Wellfleet Town Clerk and by 1777 was representing the town in the Massachusetts legislature. In 1778, his expertise was used to oversee the removal and dispersal of the contents of the British Man-of-War Somerset when it wrecked in just about the same spot as the William.  Later, in 1784, John’s brother David Stoddard Greenough, married Anne Doane, the widow of Wellfleet’s Elisha Doane. The house they lived in in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, is still standing and operated as a museum and cultural center by the Jamaica Plain Tuesday Club.  And the tea from the wrecked William? It’s assumed that the British at Castle William enjoyed it during their time in Boston, and whatever was left was blown up as the British withdrew from Boston in March 1776.

The historians who write about John Greenough and the local reactions to the EIC tea use this story as an example of the wide range of opinions that existed in the American colonies before the outbreak of the Revolution as citizens shifted their views as to the right actions to take as the nation evolved.

Sources

Bell, J. L. www. boston1775.blogspot.com

Freeman, Frederick The History of Cape Cod  Boston, 1862

Norton, Mary Beth “The Seventh Tea Ship” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol 73, No 4 (October 2016) pp. 681-710.

Norton, Mary Beth 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020

The next time you pick up your croissants and coffee at the PB Boulangerie on LeCount Hollow Road, and head for the ocean, you’ll pass the first two houses on the right side of the road.  Both are official Wellfleet historic structures with the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s “Form B” designating them as such.

Recently, Cynthia Blakeley, who grew up in one of these houses, sent me a few old photos her mother had saved.  I’ve added a copyright designation to them as Cynthia retains the ownership. They are attached at the end of this post.  From one of the notes on the back of these wonderful old photos from the 1930s, I learned that LeCount Hollow Road was once “Wireless Road,” a designation I hadn’t realized before.  

The first house on the right side of LeCount Hollow Road, just past the Bike Trail, is known as Squire Cole’s House. The house has no specific construction date, according to the “Form B.” But we know it was there in 1828 when the first bridge was built across Blackfish Creek, positioned “south of Collins S. Cole’s house.”  Squire Cole was also one of the owners of the South Wharf which operated at what we call today “the Old Wharf” on the south side of Blackfish Creek.

I’ve written about Squire Cole before as I told the story of the South Wellfleet General Store and its development over time. Collins Cole was the first to build a store in South Wellfleet, with his residence close by. His house has its back to the store, facing what was then the main road through Wellfleet that had to stay on the dry land at the head of Blackfish Creek.   

Squire Cole’s house was sold in 1889 by the Cole family members who had inherited an interest in it. The buyer, who paid $375.00, was Phillip Fawcett, an Englishman who came to the U.S. in 1872, settled in Boston as a house painter, married, and had two children. In the 1900 federal census for Wellfleet, he is listed as a widower, with two boarders in his house. In 1908, he married Mary Ann Jackson of Lowell — perhaps they met in Wellfleet, since she had purchased a lot of land in 1904 on Lieutenant’s Island, as had Mr. Fawcett.  The Barnstable Patriot regularly covered the Fawcett’s comings and goings in the decade or so after their marriage.  In 1913, the Town of Wellfleet voted to spend $100 to “improve the road near the home of Philip Fawcett to the Wireless Telegraph Station.”

Mr. Fawcett died in 1919. Mrs. Fawcett continued to live in South Wellfleet. In 1929 she sold the land and buildings her husband had purchased from the Cole family to C. Peter and Helen Clark. Mr. Clark was the son of Charles P. Clark who was the President of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, the owner of the Old Colony line that ran through Wellfleet. The older Mr. Clark had died from overwork in 1901. Mrs. Fawcett also sold a portion of her land to Mrs. Elmena Davis, wife of Emmanuel Davis, who built the South Wellfleet General Store we know today.

Cynthia Blakeley provided this description of Squire Coles’ house which the Clarks called “the Binnacle.”

The roof sports a weather vane topped with one of my uncle’s hand-carved geese.  The interior is a sketch of other centuries. Tiny rooms offer liminal spaces between larger rooms. The downstairs half-bath is shoehorned behind the rounded, plaster back wall of the steep circular staircase. Underfoot are wide, irregular pine planks. The sitting room has nine doorways.  Upstairs three of the bedrooms lead into one another without the courtesy of a hallway, while the other two are carved out of spaces under the eaves and behind the top of the curved stairwell. 

The Clarks had enough land next to their old Squire Cole house to add another house next door on LeCount Hollow Road. Their son, Lancaster Clark, moved the old South Wellfleet store, owned at that time by the Paine family, to the site next to his parents, naming the house “Storaway.”  Mr. Clark also moved the separate building in the back end of the store to the same lot. Cynthia Blakeley remembers the separate building as their “Summer House” which her mother rented out in the busy season.

Originally Squire Cole’s store, the two-story frame building had later become Alvin Paine’s store, and then the store of his son Isaac Paine, known as “Ikey Paine.” I’ve written about Ikey Paine here. By the 1920s, Ikey gave up he store, selling to other owners, and finally it went to Mr. Davis, who was able to build on an empty lot, for we now know the store was moved and became Lancaster Clark’s summer home.

Cynthia Blakeley’s uncle, Kenneth Blakeley, and his first wife, Ruth Anne Kemp, bought the “Squire Cole” home from the Clarks in 1946. Kenneth Blakeley moved to the Cape after the war to become a pilot at the Eastham Airport. Side story: yes, there was an airport in Eastham, operating on the “old Higgins estate” on Massasoit Road. The airport was the project of two veterans of the 3^rd Air Force, Mike Diogo of Provincetown and Walter Myszkowski of Chicago. They planned to use their three Piper Cubs for rental, emergencies, flight instruction, and as a cargo flying service, flying freight to Boston. Their airport lasted until 1953.

Cynthia Blakeley’s mother and her first husband bought “Storaway” in 1955. he was a radio operator with the Air Force, stationed at Truro AFB. He used the little room as a “radio den.” Cynthia’s father, Robert, was Kenneth Blakeley’s brother. The home was sold in 2014 after Cynthia’s mother passed away.

Now that the story of the two houses is told, here are the Blakeley photos. Some have a note that they were taken in the early 1930s so I think we can assume they are Clark family photos, documenting their summer homes.  One photo is from the 1950s. The final photo had a lot of white space around it so the title is far below the image.

Note: The “Form B” for Squire Cole’s House confuses South Wellfleet’s two Isaac Paines.  Squire Cole’s daughter, Mary Ann, married Isaac R. Paine. He is not Alvin Paine’s son, Ikey Paine, who owned the South Wellfleet General Store.

 Sources

Emails from Cynthia Blakeley

The Barnstable Patriot online at the Sturgis Library

The Cape Codder, online at the Snow Library

Ancestry.com

For many years, Maurice’s Campground has been one of the first sights on Route 6 as you cross the Eastham Town Line into South Wellfleet. The recent announcement that the Town of Wellfleet has successfully negotiated a purchase-and-sale agreement to acquire the 21 acre site for affordable housing development is good news. But there’s some sadness too as a long-time South Wellfleet business enjoys its final season with the Gauthiers. There’s a plan for six more as a transition time with perhaps another camp operator hired by the Town. The purchase has to be authorized at a special Town Meeting in September this year.

Maurice and Ann Gauthier acquired the site in 1949, purchasing 21 acres from Everett Osterbanks who had assembled considerable land in the 1920s from South Wellfleet owners, the Lincoln and Gill families. An old house doing business until recently as “Farmhouse Antiques” remains there. That building is designated 1850 on the Wellfleet Assessor’s Data Base. The Massachusetts Historical Commission Form B for the property designates it as the home of J.W. Lincoln and later owned by the Gill family.  

Maurice and Ann Gauthier and their three sons, Martin, Maurice Jr., and John, ran an upstanding business. Initially, they built “Ann’s Cabins” and later added units that made them a “Ann’s Motor Court.”  Eventually, in 1959, they cut down the trees in the back of their land and developed what became a campground accommodating 125 campers.

The Gauthiers were lucky in the timing of their application for the campground. In 1959, the Town had just approved two other sites: Robert Paine’s for tenting and Harry Parkington’s for trailers, adding to the one camping site already approved. Because there was no zoning, the Wellfleet Board of Health could give approval for a site so long as it met health and sanitary regulations.

Charles Frazier, who led the Town’s Selectmen, was concerned about too many campgrounds securing approval and wanted the Town to establish zoning. He was also fighting the federal national park. Frazier did get the Selectmen to come to a general agreement that four sites for tenting and camping were enough.

A recent newspaper search of the Gauthier’s business revealed nothing more exciting than Wellfleet refusing for five years to give them a license for a package store as part of their small grocery store. The package store owner at the South Wellfleet General Store seemed to be able to hold off this competition. Eventually, the Gauthiers got a beer and wine license.  In recent years, the family has received kudos for their delicious lobster rolls at a reasonable price.

Looking back to the Gauthiers’ arrival in South Wellfleet in 1949, I thought I’d see what else I could find on South Wellfleet business and places in the late 1940s and into the 1950s.  First, I found many places that were NOT there.

There was no Cape Cod National Seashore in 1949 and no Rail Trail bike path. Route 6 had just become widened in 1948 as far north as the Fire Tower. The 1949 season would see the road reconstruction by-passing Wellfleet Center and meeting the old State highway near Gull Pond Road. That Wellfleet history is covered in this post.

The Massachusetts Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary was not there until 1959.  In 1950 a portion of the land Audubon would acquire was owned by the Austin Ornithology Research Center.

The Wellfleet Drive-In Theater on Route 6 at the Town Line wasn’t developed until 1957. That iconic Wellfleet business has also been covered in an earlier post.

Two other projects were under discussion in Wellfleet in 1949. The Wellfleet Board of Trade, along with the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association and a group called Wellfleet Associates (an organization of summer people) were discussing the best place to put a monument to Guglielmo Marconi. At the Wellfleet Town Meeting that year, discussion was underway to create a “seaside highway” from Cook’s Camps Road to Cahoon Hollow Road —- the road that became Ocean View Drive. Also in 1949, Wellfleet purchased its first police cruiser, a new sedan with the town seal on its doors.

In 1948, the New York New Haven and Hartford Railroad made a stunning announcement that its Old Colony line providing service to the outer Cape would cease operations on October 1. Subsequent advertisements for the railroad almost begged people to take the train, not just on rainy days when they did not want to drive. Something must have happened to keep service running, however, as the schedule for the summer of 1949 included the new “fast Boston train” but only as far as Hyannis.

Looking back, Wellfleet had only one “highway” restaurant, at the “State Road” (Route 6) and Old County Road, owned by Joseph Atwood and his partner Charles R. Adams, and called “Adam’s House.” In 1939 Lancaster Clark bought the site and called the restaurant “the Big Dipper.” 

The building was moved to Chequessett Neck Road where it still exists today.  In the 1939 Phone Directory covering Wellfleet and several other Cape towns, this is the only Wellfleet restaurant in the classified pages.

In the 1949 Cape Codder the Lighthouse Restaurant in Wellfleet Center is mentioned, along with a new one, the Orchid Grill. Newcomb’s Soda Shop on Main Street was in its 23^rd year.

In the late 1940s two other restaurants opened on Route 6. First, “Ma Downer’s” was built in 1947/1948 across from the entrance to Camp Wellfleet, now the entrance to Marconi Beach and the National Park headquarters. The Downer family purchased the Rapp house on Pleasant Point in 1944. In 1947 they purchased the restaurant site from William Fleming which included quite a bit of land from a William Fleming.

My search found only one reference to “Ma Downer’s.” In 2013, in the book by Theresa Mitchell Barbo and Captain W. Russell Webster on the Pendleton disaster, Webster tells of taking his new girlfriend, later his wife, to Ma Downer’s in 1950 in South Wellfleet, describing it as “just a shack” where you could have a coffee or a beer, and one of the only spots open on an evening.

After Mrs. Downer died, in 1954, the land changed hands again, and eventually was purchased by Giulio Segnini, who established “Guilio’s Isle of Elba” in 1955.

In 1968 the restaurant and land went to the Hall family who owns it today doing business as Van Rensselaer’s. 

Before he sold to the Downers, Mr. Fleming made small transfers of a portion of his South Wellfleet land to Gertrude Hodges and Leah Joy. Both women had jelly stands. Mrs. Hodges, the sister of Clarence Hicks, may have had an ice cream stand at one point. Leah Joy, who owned one of the houses out on the Old Wharf point, had a Route 6 jelly stand for some years. The Wellfleet Historical Society has one photo of “Gertie Hodges” at her jelly stand, although its location is not named. 

The second restaurant I found on Route 6 in South Wellfleet was called “Wade’s” and was owned by Ralph N. Wade. A search for land ownership turned up a George Wade, who was Ralph’s father. The family lived in Wellfleet for a few years in the 1930s, and were mentioned in the columns of the Barnstable Patriot. I have not been able to definitively place the location of the restaurant. In 1945 and 1946, Wade had purchased a significant number of acres in South Wellfleet from the Baker Estate, land that was around Trout Brook and the land of early South Wellfleet owners, including the Lincolns, the Boyington family, and the South Wellfleet Cranberry Association. He sold land to Manuel Thimas in 1951.

In the 1950 federal census, Ralph Wade is living in South Wellfleet with his business partner, Mr. Long, and family members.  In 1964, Wade transferred his seasonal liquor license to Enio Cipriano, who re-named the location “C-Side.” Both advertised in the Cape Codder.  Today, there is a restaurant called C-Shore on the east side of Route 6, perhaps the next generation of C-Side.

Thanks to the recent release of the 1950 Federal census, I was able to look at Wellfleet’s population in April 1950. For the first time, the census enumerator noted “vacant” houses (separate from “no one home” listings); no earlier census had done this. In the two census districts for Wellfleet, Numbers 66 and 67, there are 558 dwellings noted as “vacant.” Our family summer cottage on Prospect Hill must have been included in the count. Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Barker who lived nearby year-round are listed, but no one else living on or around the sand roads surrounding Old Wharf Road.

Camp Wellfleet is listed as a “Naval Training Facility” and is enumerated on a separate page in 1950 with an Army man, Russell Temple, living there with his wife and three children, handling “maintenance and repair.”  I think that ownership of Camp Wellfleet had passed back to the U.S. Army but perhaps was under Naval ownership when the census documents were constructed. Along Route 6 in South Wellfleet there these families: Irving Hultberg, Mr. Wade and Mr. Long (partners in Wade’s Restaurant), Albion Rich, Oliver Austin, Mr. Cheney on Lt. Island, and Cecil Newcomb.

Looking at the occupations of Wellfleet residents, there seem to be as many listed as plumbers, electricians and carpenters as there are shellfishermen. There are also many residents working at the Wellfleet Curtain Factory.

Wellfleet in the 1950s is a small village with a growing summer population.

Sources

Newspaper articles from the The Cape Codder on-line at the Snow Library

Newspaper articles from The Barnstable Patriot on-line at the Sturgis Library

Newspaper articles from the Provincetown Independent

Wellfleet’s Assessor’s Database

Deeds at the Barnstable County Deed database

Barbo, Theresa Mitchell and Captain W. Russell Webster The Daring Coast Guard Rescue of the Pendleton Crew Charleston South Carolina, The History Press 20013, downloaded May 4, 2022.

An old article in The Cape Codder about the burning of Wellfleet’s Town Hall in 1960 recently came to my attention. That fire totally destroyed the building. I’ve already written briefly about the history of Town Hall in a post about South Wellfleet’s Second Congregational Church. Now I wanted to expand that history of the movement of the church to the center of town, its re-naming to Colonial Hall, and its eventual conversion to Wellfleet’s Town Hall.

Charles F. Cole’s 1941 booklet “History of Colonial Hall” provided a good beginning. Mr. Cole dates the sale of the building to 1913, and the actual move to 1919. He names Harry B. Swett as the new owner, a trustee of the DAR. 

Another important fact regarding the movement of the church building is that empty space was created on the north side Wellfleet’s Main Street in 1909, when John Swett’s house and several other buildings were consumed in a large fire.  While the Barnstable Patriot usually reported such events, no mention was ever made about the fire, nor did two other newspaper databases.

Thanks to the work of Ruth Rickmers in her series of booklets about Wellfleet history, that she produced in the 1980s, there are significant details about the fire. The fire burned on the night of November 9, 1909. It burned John Swett’s home to the ground, along with several businesses in smaller buildings: a barber shop, a bakery shop, a grocery store, an ice cream parlor, the telephone office, and the Wellfleet Free Public Library.  The Library moved to temporary quarters on the second floor of the Payne Higgins store on Main Street. The Library soon purchased the building and established itself on the first floor. Today, this building houses the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum.

John Swett was Harry Brooks Swett’s grandfather. Harry B. Swett was the force behind saving the old church building and its move to the Town center. The Swetts were an old Wellfleet family of sea captains and businessmen. Harry B. Swett’s father, Horace Swett, and his wife, Nellie Baker, had died when he was quite young. Harry was born in 1885; his father died in 1887, and his mother in 1896.  

In the 1900 federal census, Harry is in Wellfleet, living with his grandmother, Ellen Baker. In 1902, Harry’s official guardian, his uncle John A. Swett, sold Harry’s interest in several of the properties the Swett children were left by their father when he died in 1901. Perhaps he did this to pay for Harry’s education. In the 1910 federal census, Harry is living in Boston. In 1913, he is listed as an “architect” in a Harvard Alumni Directory.  Harry Swett is also listed as the architect on a 1915 project to expand the Hyannis Public Library beyond its initial historic cottage.  

The Hyannis Library project was noted in the 1916 journal published by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. The Society was advocating for the preservation of the old cottage, and that any new building should be designed to compliment it.  The Society was founded in 1910 by Bostonian William Appleton for the purpose of preserving New England’s built heritage. In New England and the other original American states the “Colonial Revival Movement” was underway. Many were seeking to highlight the heritage of Americans whose families had been here since the nation’s founding at a time when increasing immigration was seen as a threat. The movement also underscored a time of increasing tourism when towns and villages began to think about their old buildings as an attraction to visitors.

Finding the mention of Harry B. Swett in the Society’s Journal Old Time New England also led me to an article dated July 1920:

In the town of Wellfleet, down on Cape Cod, is a quaint old Meeting House which, on an isolated plateau in the cemetery of South Wellfleet village, for many years survived the chances of change and decay. The shifting centre of population having made the location less and less convenient, the Meeting House was final abandoned and for lack of repairs was to have been destroyed. Mr. Harry B. Swett of Wellfleet, architect, determined that this loss if possible should be avoided and consulted a representative of our Society to make sure that his own opinion of the structure was not unduly high. The building proved to be decidedly worth saving, the interior arrangement of gallery, pews, framing, etc., being particularly quaint and pleasing, one of which the writer knows of no other example. Mr. Swett was accordingly encouraged to proceed with his plans, and through his efforts the Cape Cod Colonial Society was formed to save the building, and acquired a valuable site in the centre of Wellfleet village. The old Meeting House was carefully taken apart, removed to and resurrected on this site, where it now stands in an unfinished condition, a monument to Mr. Swett’s public-spirited energy. Much money must be raised to complete the repairs and put the Cape Cod Colonial Society on a permanent foundation and doubtless many Cape Codders and former residents of Wellfleet will wish to do their share in helping. The Sociey is fortunate in having Lieutenant Governor Channing Cox as its President, as well as an excellent Board of Directors.

In Mr. Cole’s brochure about Colonial Hall, he states that Harry B. Swett purchased the old church in 1913, but it was not moved until 1919. The Church’s parsonage had been sold as a private home in 1902. In 1914, a Frank A. Kendall sold some land and buildings in or near Wellfleet Center to Swett; this deed confused me as it was well before 1919 when the building was allegedly moved. As one of my key advisors pointed out, the sale of the church building would have been represented in a bill of sale, not a deed. I concluded that Kendall may not have owned the church building, but the deed to Swett may have been his effort to secure ownership of land in the Town center.

After this 1914 deed, there were no other documents about the church building until 1917. These were the years that the United States fought in World War I. Harry B. Swett was a young man and, indeed, I found a record of his service in the U.S. Navy in those years, given in great detail in a book of Harvard University graduates and students’ service in the War.

The Cape Cod Colonial Society was founded in 1917 according to its Massachusetts incorporation papers.  In 1919, several Swett family members turned over their Main Street Wellfleet property to the Society. One of the pieces of land had a store standing on it. The deeds list names the Trustees of the Society: Henry Trainor, Fred W. Chipman, and George Higgins. Harry B. Swett also signed over his land that he had bought from Kendall in 1914.  The deeds giving the Cape Cod Colonial Society ownership of the building also declared that if the Society could not keep the building in good order, the ownership would change to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.

I never found any evidence of Harry B. Swett’s relationship to the DAR as mentioned in Mr. Cole’s booklet. He did appear to have a relationship to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, although I found no mention of his holding the position of Trustee.

The Cape Cod Colonial Society Trustees were well-known Wellfleet men. Trainer was a Selectman and Chipman from an old Wellfleet family. George Higgins was to inherit his grandparents’ home on Bound Brook Island and add other buildings to the site to create a kind of mini-Williamsburg village. Eventually the old 1730 house became today’s Atwood-Higgins House, one of the key sites in the Cape Cod National Seashore. In the article quoted above, Channing Cox is named also; he married into the Young family which owned the house next to the John Swett property that had burned. The Young house is still standing in Wellfleet, now a restaurant called Winslow’s Tavern.

Whatever the plans were for the development of the Cape Cod Colonial Society and its building in the 1920s, nothing much seems to have happened. In 1922, the Provincetown Tercentenary Commission placed a granite boulder with a bronze tablet in front of the building with a note that the Pilgrims explored Wellfleet Harbor on December 6 and 7 in 1620, naming the men who participated in the event.

In 1922, Wellfleet’s Eight Busy Bees Girls’ Canning Club held an exhibition of their work in Colonial Hall on October 9^th and 10^th.  Other exhibitions and eventually high school sports events took place there regularly. No historical exhibitions were ever reported in the local news.

In 1925, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities received a set of architectural drawings of “the land surveyed for the Cape Cod Colonial Society. These plans are in their collection today.

On February 16, 1928, the Hyannis Patriot reported on the highlights of the annual Wellfleet Town Meeting, giving a brief history of the Town’s Colonial Hall, and how the conversion into a Historical Society did not seem to be possible. Now the Town’s citizens were eager to have a Town Hall of their own like other Cape towns. The Town Clerk, Arthur H. Rogers, complained about having to keep his records in multiple locations. At that time, Wellfleet had the rooms above the Public Library, having moved from the old Lyceum building which was located where the Congregational Church parking lot is now located. The Lyceum building had served a number of purposes, ending up as the movie theater in the 1920s. It was razed in the 1950s.

The actual purchase of Colonial Hall was on the warrant for the Town Meeting in 1929. A copy of “Highlights of Wellfleet Town Meetings,” sent to me by the Town Clerk, lists an appropriation of $5150 for the project. However, later that year, in an October 24, 1929 article in the Hyannis Patriot, it was reported that the Colonial Hall was to be auctioned. The article stated that neither the Cape Cod Colonial Society nor the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities wanted it, as there was no possibility of the building becoming a historical society. Mr. Frank Dudley of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, became the owner. The following October, 1930, a newspaper report noted that Mr. George Dudley and friends were staying at the building while they enjoyed a seasonal gunning trip.

Another reference reported Frank Dudley as the man who helped move the building from its location in South Wellfleet. Indeed, as I checked on the Dudley family, I learned that Frank Dudley and his brother Fred were general contractors. It may be that the payment for his work was tied-up in the building, as one report referred to unpaid bills of the Colonial Society.

Despite the now-private ownership, a 1932 newspaper report noted that Colonial Hall was being renovated for use by the high school for athletics and sports. 

In July 1940 Colonial Hall was in the news again. Now the Town wanted to create more parking in the center of the village. The Town appropriated funds to purchase the land needed, but realized that the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities held “reversion rights” to the property and that the Society would only sell if “some organization guarantees to restore and preserve Colonial Hall.”  A later article that summer worried that another organization might take the Colonial Hall from Wellfleet and transplant it. The writer noted that at a time when Europe’s heritage buildings were being destroyed, Wellfleet’s preservation if its heritage building should be considered.  Soon, a petition to save the building was circulated with “several hundred” signing it.

By November 1940, a Special Town Meeting was set to consider the project. Selectman Charles Frazier Jr. promoted the project. The meeting voted to acquire the land needed for parking and the Colonial Hall. A Committee was appointed to plan the construction of Town Offices. Selectmen Frazier and Gardinier were appointed to take the property by eminent domain, putting it officially in the hands of the Town.

In January 1941, the Town Offices planning committee recommended removing the store that stood in front of the Colonial Hall so that the land in front of the building could be landscaped and a suitable path from Main Street to the building established.  The store was Herbert Newcomb’s Trading Post.

In March 1941, the Town Meeting voted unanimously to fund the cost of the Colonial Hall conversion to Town offices and the landscaping. Opposite the Post Office (today’s AIM Thrift Shop), the Hall’s exterior and belfry were preserved, and plans made to create five town offices and a conference room on the first floor. The basement would have a vault for the town records, welfare and other quarters, and “conveniences.”  The description goes on: “The long windows of cathedral design will be repaired and as far as possible the old fashioned ‘ripple glass’ will be replaced. On the front and west sides, the ample grounds will be graded with drives around the building with parking spaces and shrubbery.” The architect is Harold Wrenn of Baltimore and Wellfleet.

A May 1941 news report included a note that Bill Newcomb was constructing a new Trading Post. This change would leave the Town Hall “alone and unobstructed, commanding the landscaped grounds and parking place.”  In July, the contract for the interior work was awarded to Horace Little of Chatham. Selectman Lawrence Gardinier volunteered to construct a new weathervane, modeled on the original. Finally, in late August, the news reported a “Wellfleet Fair”, attended by 3500 persons, with the Town Hall opened for inspection. All the businesses in town were decorated with bunting for the occasion.

It wasn’t until November 1941, however, that the Town Offices were actually relocated to their new space.  At an open-house on a Friday afternoon, more than 200 residents of Wellfleet dropped by to see their new offices.

In May 1942, the news reported a flag-raising ceremony on the grounds of Town Hall. While this article did not refer to the flagpole itself, an article much later in The Cape Codder noted that the flagpole at Town Hall was originally at the site of the old Lyceum Hall where the Town Offices were once located. Edwin P. Cook had donated the pole which he had previously removed from a wreck.

The Town Hall stood until the night of March 4, 1960, during a nor’easter when the building burned to the ground. The fire was said to have been started in the wiring. Only the vault was left. Wellfleet’s Public Library, located on the second floor, lost all of its books once again. Very soon after the fire, the Town decided to rebuild its distinctive Town Hall as a replica of the old South Wellfleet church, expanded by eighteen additional feet.

Sources

Cole, Charles F.  “History of Colonial Hall, Wellfleet Mass.”  1941

Massachusetts Historical Commission Form B for “The Parsonage, South Wellfleet

Rickmers, Ruth  Wellfleet Remembered, Volume 6   Wellfleet, Mass., Blue Butterfly Publications, 1986

Ancestry.com “Harvard’s Military Record in the World War” accessed March 7, 2022

Swett Family genealogy on Ancestry.com

Newspaper databases on newspapers.com. The Barnstable Patriot and The Hyannis Patriot accessed at www.sturgislibrary.org

The Cape Coder archive accessed at www.snowlibrary.org

Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities website: https://www.historicnewengland.org/

Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities “Old Time New England” (Journal) Vol XI, No. 1 (July 1920), pp 27-28 and Vol VII, No 3 (December 1916) p 14.

The tide mill on Mill Hill Island has been on my list of South Wellfleet sites to be investigated for a long time. A short note posted on the Wellfleet Historical Society’s e-news this fall caught my eye: someone in Truro was looking for information on it too. Soon, we had an email exchange going, and I started researching the site.

Like many Cape towns, Wellfleet has the reminder old mills, both wind and water-driven, in street names and water bodies.  Wellfleet’s map shows Mill Hill Road, Old Mill Way, Mill Creek, and Mill Creek Lane.  A South Wellfleet pamphlet printed in 1938 refers to the “Mill Ditch” near Cannon Hill. Mr. Deyo’s book written in the 1890s describes the old Wellfleet house, now called Morning Glory, which was the former windmill on Mill Hill. The other old mills, like the Tide Mill on Mill Hill Island, have disappeared.

Mapping the Old Mills

In 1793, Levi Whitman, Wellfleet’s minister, wrote “A Topographical Description of Wellfleet” that is preserved today in the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He wrote about Wellfleet, “The inhabitants do not raise grain sufficient for the town. The common method is to import it from the southern states. We have for grinding it into meal, five windmills and one tide mill.”

On the 1795 map of Wellfleet   (https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:2227nh08z)   there is our tide mill (labeled water mill) on Loagy Bay in South Wellfleet and also windmills on Bound Brook Island, east of the Meeting House on Duck Creek, east of the County Road, on today’s Mill Hill, and further north, south of Herring Brook. In addition, there is a water mill on South Wellfleet’s Drummer Pond which turned out to be a fulling mill, a topic covered in an earlier post.

In Everett Nye’s Wellfleet history book written in 1920, he describes another tide mill “located in the creek below the Hamblen place” built by Thomas Holbrook, but no year is mentioned.

The tide mill in today’s South Wellfleet may have been built when the area was still a part of Eastham. Early in the town’s history, in the 17^th century, mills were part of the business of the town, and there are numerous references to them in the town meeting notes that have been reconstructed up to 1692. According to an article in the Cape Cod Genealogical Society’s magazine, the oldest mill in town was a tide mill in the stream that connect Salt Pond to the harbor. It was built by Thomas Paine Sr. who became well-known as the town’s millwright, training his sons in the same occupation. One source cites some ten mills the Payne/Paine father and sons built on Cape Cod, tide mills, water mills, and windmills, from 1641 to 1711.

The South Wellfleet Tide Mill

There is no recorded image of the South Wellfleet tide mill.  To understand how our mill might have looked, or how it operated, I looked for information about tide mills in general, and old photographs of extant tide mills to gain an understanding. This led me to the Tide Mill Institute, accessible here: https://www.tidemillinstitute.org/

About Tide Mills

The Tide Mill Institute has this definition of a tide mill:

A tide mill is quite simply a water mill that derives its power from the rise and fall of the tides. It is almost never referred to as a “seawater” or “saltwater” mill because the chemical composition of the water driving the mill wheel is not important. What counts is that the water impounded behind a mill dam can only be put to work after the water level outside of the dam has sufficiently dropped during the ebb tide.” [The Tinkham Brothers’ Tide-Mill by J.T. Trowbridge. Edited and with Commentary by Richard A. Duffy. Arlington, MA: Arlington Historical Society, 1999]

The definition continues,

The following description comes from the exhibit brochure moinhos de maré do ociente europeu 2005:

“A tide mill comprises the building which houses the milling machinery, the mill-pond, where the tidal water is retained, and the dam or causeway which confine and controls it.

Sea water enters the pond through large sluices or “sea gates” which open under pressure from the rising tide, and close automatically after high water. By opening the internal sluice gate, the pressure of the water from the mill pond can be controlled as it flows through one or more narrow channels before hitting the paddle blades and setting the water wheel and the milling machinery in motion.”

There were tide mills all along the east coast of North America, from Newfoundland to Georgia, according to one writer about historic mills, Theodore Hazen, who wrote a detailed description in an article cited below. He notes that there were some mills specially constructed to operate on low level tides. He suggests that tidal mills may have been better than stream or water-powered mills because they don’t freeze as readily as a stream-operated mills. Tide mills are not subject to flooding events or low water periods that make operation difficult. With a tide chart, the mill operator can predict the time of operation, although, Hazen suggests, that time could be at four in the morning.

Indeed, the 1795 Wellfleet map shows a small mill pond next to the mill on Loagy Bay. The same writer notes: “Since the head of the water was low, these mills needed an undershot wheel and a dam had to be bult to achieve the desired head of water.”

Recently, the Tide Mill Institute released a video of the tide mills of Kittery, Maine. It is accessible here:

https://www.tidemillinstitute.org/new-tide-mill-video-not-just-for-locals/#more-2320.

One undated photograph of an old tide mill in Yarmouth Port, along with the photo on the Institute’s home page, show the type of building that might have been erected on Mill Hill Island in South Wellfleet.

These visual tools helped me understand how our tide mill might have looked in the landscape. After looking at various maps (pictured below), particularly the Miles Merrill Plan/Map of 1890, and hearing descriptions of old stones, it may be that there was a “road” of stones approaching the Island from the northeast, as all the owners of the mill and island were located there. Other stones, between the nearest upland and the island, may have served as the mill’s dam. The 1790 map, showing a mill pond located to the right of the mill’s location, where the water created by a dam would have been stored.

I was able to discuss Mill Hill Island with several people who are familiar with the area who describe the old stones as part of the landscape. One member of the Eastman/Barker family whose property is still to the north, remembers jumping on the old stones to get across to Mill Hill Island where they played as children. Another person remembers stones that formed a road to the Island. A Paine family member recalled that she was told that the old millstone was moved into Blackfish Creek to serve as an anchorage for one of the fishing boats.

Ownership of the Tide Mill

The earliest deed found (so far) is the October 6, 1789, document filed in Barnstable on October 9, 1789, when Ezekiel Harding sold his “homestead, meadow and buildings” to John Witherell (spelled “Withrel” in the deed) for 220 pounds lawful money. Like other 18^th Century Barnstable deeds, it is labeled 999121-244. There are two additional deeds near the same time moving other property from Harding to Witherell.

These deeds are rich with neighbors’ and geographical names that help us locate property today. Since these handwritten deeds are indexed only by the property owner’s name, finding landscape designations such as “tide mill” requires careful document examination. Fortunately, I was guided by an article in the Cape Cod Genealogical Society’s magazine written by Mary Magenau in the 1980s, and a list of deeds Chet Lay provided. The tide mill and Mill Hill Island continue to be mentioned in 19^th century deeds transferring the property between neighbors, but there’s no indication of a building still in existence. Once the mill stopped working, the building’s wood may have been re-purposed for something else, as was typical in Wellfleet. When John Witherell died, in 1838, he was in debt, and his wife sold off much of his property to meet his obligations.

Various members of the Harding family moved to Maine. As Mrs. Magenau pointed out in her article, the Harding family benefitted from the allocation of land in Maine to the families of the men who fought in the 1677-1678 King Philip’s War, particularly the “Narraganset tract” which became Gorham, Maine. Ezekiel Harding’s grandfather, Joseph Harding, was in that battle and was granted land. One of Ezekiel’s brothers, David Harding, became one of Gorham’s leading citizens. In a very detailed history of Gorham, however, there is no mention of Ezekiel Harding.

Harding family members went to other towns in Maine in the mid-18^th and early 19^th centuries, but I could not find a definitive record of Ezekiel Harding. On the other hand, he is not listed in the 1790 Wellfleet census, nor is there a burial record for him in either Wellfleet or Eastham. When he transferred his property to John Witherell, he was nearly 70 years old and may not have lived much longer. There is an “Ezekiel Harding” in Bucksport, Maine, in 1790 but he appears to have a young family from the household ages, although it’s possible that this is the man from South Wellfleet. A number of family trees on Ancestry show that the Ezekiel Harding born in 1719 (the son of Abiah Harding) has a son Ezekiel born in 1768, who was buried in Bucksport in 1843, but the sources for this information are not well-documented.  One other interesting fact about Ezekiel Harding is that he was a Baptist, as mentioned in Enoch Pratt’s book about the history of Eastham and Wellfleet. Ezekiel Harding was relieved of his payment to support the local church. This religious persuasion was still rather radical in New England at this time.

Ezekiel Harding’s father, Abiah Harding, may have been the owner or even the builder of the South Wellfleet tide mill. Since mills may have been under public permit, or were even subsidized by the towns, I looked through many pages of the 18^th Century Eastham Town meetings, but did not find any such record. (I learned that the early mills were so important that millers were exempt from military service.) Work on searching town records will continue.

In this search I did find the inventory of Abiah Harding’s property when his estate was settled in 1744. However, there was no mention of particular tools that might have served his work as a miller; most of his possessions appear to be related to farming. The inventory also named numerous neighbors to whom he owed money, including his son Ezekiel. I have not found (yet) a recorded will in which he transferred his real estate to his sons, although the existence of the inventory suggests that his estate settlement was well-recorded. In another deed, his son John Harding refers to South Wellfleet land left by his father “Obior.”  This reference confirmed my assumption that Ezekiel owned his land and the tide mill through a grant from his father.

There is more research to do once our Pandemic is over and we can access public records that are not already online today. I’m hoping to be able to spend some time in the basement of Town Hall looking at the Wellfleet records for the latter part of the 18^th century, and will continue looking at Eastham property as well.

Mill Hill Island today

Mill Hill Island passed through numerous owners during the 19^th Century. In 1842, Ruth Witherell, John’s widow, sold it to Robert Y. Paine to help settle the Witherell debts. Paine sold it to David Wiley and Ephraim Stubbs in 1862.  When the Wiley children sold off his estate in 1890 to George Baker, the island was included. Baker re-sold it to Miles Merrill who developed the plan for the “Wiley Estate” then described as eleven acres, and today various owners of land there are all designated as part of the Merrill Plan. One owner recently donated property to the Wellfleet Conservation Trust.

The Merrill Plan map, pictured below in an upside-down view, shows how relatively far to the southwest the Island and the mill were from the property owners. For me, this made the references to a stone bridge and a stone road understandable.

Mill Hill Island was never developed. Bruce Eastman remembers playing there as a child and sent this description:

Here is what little I know of the mill:  There is a hill (essentially an island) we called Mill Hill which abuts our old property to the south.  We were told there used to be a tidal mill on the east side of the hill, and there were still some remnants of pilings remaining when we were kids.

My compass directions are approximate. The hill faces Loagy Bay to the west, and the Lt. Island bridge to the south.  There is a channel that runs between the east side of the hill and the “mainland”.  There is tidal marsh between the hill and our property to the north.  There used to be a “stone bridge” over a tidal ditch in the salt marsh between our property and Mill Hill.  I believe there was reference to this “bridge” in the old documents describing the bounds of our property.  There were still remains of this bridge, pretty well sunken into the marsh, when we were kids.  We used to jump over the ditch on these remains to go over to play on Mill Hill.  When we were kids someone had built a duck blind on the beach on the west side of the island, and it fell into disrepair as we grew up.

Denny O’Connell of the Wellfleet Conservation Trust was kind to send emails to me confirming that Mill Hill Island today is jointly owned by the Wellfleet Conservation Trust and the Town of Wellfleet, and is under the care of the Conservation Commission. He provided the map below.

In addition, he introduced me to Michael Parlante, who owns a portion of the flats on the southeast edge of the Island and who is familiar with the area. Michael and I chatted one day about his memory of the site and the stone road that crossed the marsh to the east side of the island.

Stay tuned for more on the tide mill of Mill Hill Island.

Sources

Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society Volume IV 1795, available at Google Books

The Tide Mill Institute at https://www.tidemillinstitute.org/

Deyo, Simon. History of Barnstable County, New York, 1898

Nye, Everett History of Wellfleet from Early days to Present Time 1920 (online at Google Books)

Dennis-Yarmouth Register old photograph of the mill in Yarmouth Port, available on the Register Archive at the Sturgis Library

Eastham Town Meeting records available at the Eastham Library’s website

Jeremy Dupertus Bangs, editor, The Town Records of Eastham During the Time of Plymouth Colony 1620-      1692, (Publication of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, 2012)

Hazen, Theodore R. “Preservation of Historic Mills” found here:  http://www.angelfire.com/journal/millrestoration/historicmills.html

1790 Map at www.digitalcommonwealth.org

Mary Stubbs Magenau “A Vignette of Wellfleet History” Cape Cod Genealogical Society Bulletin VOL XIV no 2, page 37.

Cape Cod Genealogical Society Bulletin Volume III, No 3 re: tide mill on Salt Pond, Eastham

Conversations and Emails with Denny O’Connell, Wellfleet Conservation Trust, Michael Parlante, Irene Paine, Tim Richards, Bruce Eastman and Chet Lay.

 

It’s easy to think of Wellfleet as an isolated village on the Cape Cod peninsula, especially in the 18^th century. Recently, however, I found a set of documents that reveal the close ties certain Wellfleet men had to Colonial Boston. At this time, Wellfleet was changing from the “North District” of Eastham, a part of Plymouth Colony, to become an incorporated town in 1763.  Before the Revolution, many of Wellfleet’s citizens were third and fourth generation Cape Codders.

 The documents I found are contracts assigning poor Boston children as apprentices to Wellfleet “masters,” demonstrating an important role the town played in the life of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There are two types of documents: first, a signed agreement between the Wellfleet Selectmen and the Boston Overseers of the Poor vouching for the character of the proposed Wellfleet master, described as “a man of sober life and conversation.”  One of these is pictured here:

 

The second set of documents are the indentures, naming the Overseers, the Master, the Apprentice, and the expectations of all. These were pre-printed, with the particulars filled in by hand. One of these is pictured later in this post.

The Boston Overseers of the Poor, in legislation in 1692 and again in 1735, were assigned the task of dealing with Boston’s poor people who could not support themselves. From the 1740s to the 1760s the number of poor increased due to population growth, economic inflation, and the 18^th Century wars, particularly the French and Indian War, that lasted from 1754 to 1763. It is during this period of increased poverty in Boston that the poor apprentices came to Wellfleet.

In Wellfleet and in other towns the poor and others unable to care for themselves were the responsibility of the Town Selectmen. First, in these villages, a person had to establish residency in order to get help. This made the “town fathers” very careful as to whom was admitted to live in the town. Those who were not yet residents were watched and formally “warned out” if their residency was a problem. No town wanted the responsibility for taking care of needy persons.  In addition, families were legally declared responsible for their family members. Parents had to care for their children and children had to care for their parents and grandparents. When family structure broke down, the town would pay another family to provide care. This arrangement lasted a long time, as the town reports into the 20^th Century show the expenses for such care.

Another solution for the town was to establish an almshouse. Wellfleet had one, although there is scant information about it. There’s a note on what I’ve found at the bottom of this post.

I also found one record of a Wellfleet town warning. An 1803 newspaper advertisement placed by “The Overseers of the Poor of the Town of Wellfleet” (e.g., the Selectmen) warned the reader that Sarah Bunting of Wellfleet “taken out of the Almshouse in Boston and brought to Wellfleet” is now gone from us” and forbids “any person in any city, town or village whatever harboring, entertaining and trusting her one cent as we are determined not to pay any debt that she may contract with any person.”

Boston had its Almshouse and also a Workhouse, both reflecting adoption of the British Poor Laws of 1601 on managing the poor.  Conditions in these institutions were never made comfortable giving poor people a reason to avoid them. People who were mentally ill or addicted were included along with those who had no support. The overall poor conditions, withholding food as punish­­ment, along with whipping those who would not work were all management techniques.

For the Massachusetts Colonials, poverty had both a financial and a moral aspect. They believed that a well-regulated family was of vital importance, but this came after the religious and secular needs of the community. Consequently, the children of parents who needed poor relief or who were not being raised according to religious or social standards were removed from their home and bound out to a master who would provide daily maintenance and basic education in exchange for labor. A female child would be bound out until age 18, and a male child to age 21. As poverty became more of a problem in the mid-18^th Century, there was less focus on removing children because of bad parenting, and more on dealing with the economics of poverty.

After the French and Indian War ended, and shipping became safer again, there was more demand for masters who would teach the maritime trades which is reflected in the number of 1760s Wellfleet apprenticeships. The Boston Overseers of the Poor also found coopers who made barrels and cordwainers who made new leather shoes there. The age of the children assigned in Wellfleet at the time of binding reflects the average age of all poor apprentices of between five and nine years.

The listing of records I first found for Wellfleet were in a 1958 Master’s Degree thesis written by W. Graham Millar College of the College of William and Mary.  Millar had access to microfilmed copies at the College where early American history is still a focus. The Boston Public Library has boxes of 1,212 of these indenture documents where several of them are in digital version at the Digital Commonwealth section on the Library’s website. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts also has records of the apprentices contained in a 1962 paper by Lawrence Towner.

An additional number of apprentices are mentioned in the Wellfleet birth records 1763 to 1844, organized by family unit, online at Ancestry. The Town Clerk added in an apprentice’s name and birth date as part of a family record. However, we do not know if these apprentices were from the Boston system or another source. They may also have been “craft apprentices” under an arrangement their family made for them to learn a trade.

There were no girls assigned to Wellfleet masters, although I did find one in Truro. Generally, girls were apprenticed in the 1760s to learn “housewifery.” Girls were about a third of the overall number of Boston poor apprentices.

In his essay, Mr. Towner discusses the lack of information on what happened to the apprentices after they completed their service. I was curious about that too, and did a few brief searches where a distinctive name helped define a particular individual and have incorporated my notes into the following listing. It’s possible that boys who reached age sixteen by the time of the Revolutionary War were allowed to enter military service.

Pulling all these sources together, the list below includes the names of the apprentice and the Wellfleet master, the dates of the contract, and any additional information I found on the people involved. I did not find any record of a Wellfleet apprentice running away. Newspaper databases for this period have many advertisements from masters describing their runaway apprentice in great detail and usually giving a reward for their return.

Benjamin Lemoine was bound to Robert Stetson on November 16, 1766, to learn the craft of cordwainer. Benjamin’s indenture was to last for 14.2 years, to January 10, 1781 when he would be 21 years old.  He was seven years old when bound. I found a birth record for a child of this name born to John and Mary Lemoine in January 1761, and baptized at New South Church. He was given the middle name “Derby” when baptized. A man of the same name married in Hardwick, Massachusetts in Worcester County in 1786. He died fairly young, in 1813, and is buried in a cemetery in Lake County, Ohio. Of interest is Robert Stetson’s death record, in January 1814, in Hardwick, Massachusetts, which seemed to confirm the link between the master and his apprentice.

Thomas Cloud Reed was bound to Barnabas Atwood on October 17, 1772, to learn to be a cooper and a farmer. Mr. Atwood was referred to in the agreement as a “gentleman.” The indenture was to last for 13 years until Thomas was 21. He was eight years old when bound. There is a possible marriage record for Thomas’ parents in Boston in 1766 when a Thomas Reed married Elizabeth McCloud.

Samuel Myrick was bound to Wellfleet’s famous Elisha Doane on January 20, 1764, to learn to be a cooper. His apprenticeship was to last only two years, which makes it seem like a family action, but the document is made by the Boston Overseers of the Poor. Samuel was to be released in January 1766. Mr. Doane, known as Colonel Doane for his service in the militia. He and Thomas Boylston were estimated to be the two wealthiest men in Massachusetts Bay. When Doane lived in Wellfleet, he bought his wife a coach, the first in town, but it could not be used on the roads there. Later in life, he moved to Boston where he died of apoplexy in 1783 and is buried in the Doane Tomb under King’s Chapel. There are many Myricks in New England, so I could not make a confirmed link between this Samuel and others. In the reference made to this document, the writer refers to an “Elijah” Doane, but after finding no such person, and finding the original document when the letter “S” was elongated, I have concluded this was “Elisha.”

Stephen Burgis was bound to Samuel Basset(t) on July 2, 1766. No trade was listed. He was eight years old, and was bound for nearly 15 years to May 5, 1781.

Joseph Gray was bound to Joseph Higgins (and his wife Hannah) on March 17, 1768, to learn to be a navigator or mariner. He was five years old when bound for 15 years until April 15, 1784. He may have been the son of a Joseph Gray who died in Boston in 1762.

Nathaniel Corbett was bound to David Howse (and his wife Eliza) on March 19, 1768, to learn to become a navigator/mariner. His indenture was to last 16 years, until May 25, 1782.

James Morris was bound to Ezekiel Holbrook March 28, 1770. No trade was listed. He was bound for nearly eight years until March 16, 1778.

Henry Welch was bound to Reuben Newcomb (and his wife Mehitable) on April 7, 1772. His records mention two trades, cordwainer and mariner. He was eight years old when bound. His indenture was to last slightly more than 13 years, to August 9, 1785.

John Watson was bound to Joshua Atwood (and his wife Joanna) on October 29, 1767, to learn to become a cooper. His indenture was to last for 14 years until November 7, 1781.

Richard Warren was bound to Samuel Hatch on May 7, 1766, to learn to become a cooper and a mariner. He was bound for over 15 years to December 20, 1781.

William Smith was bound to Jeremiah Hawes (and his wife Huldah) on March 11, 1768, to learn to become a navigator/mariner. He was 12 years old when bound for nine years, to March 24, 1777.

Edward Taveneaug was bound to James Brown on June 4, 1766, to learn to become a cordwainer. He was bound for 14 years until August 23, 1780.

Samuel Smith was bound to Edward Smith on May 24, 1766, to learn to become a cordwainer. He was eight years old when bound, and would serve for over 12 years until December 27, 1778.

Richard McGrath was bound to Isaiah Holbrook on July 1, 1767, with no trade listed. His indenture was for 17 years, ending May 6, 1784.

Found in the Digital Commonwealth records but not mentioned in the thesis:

Elias Cox bound to Thomas Holbrook on October 3, 1763 until March 5, 1779.

The Wellfleet birth records that were compiled by family unit starting in 1763 mentioned an apprentice from time to time. This practice, mentioning a non-family member, started in the 1780s, and lasted to the 1820s. These apprentices may have been sent to Wellfleet to learn a craft. Only their name, their master’s name, and their birth date are recorded. The records I found are:

Gideon Spooner, apprenticed to Isaac Pierce, born in Boston September 2, 1780.

John Barns, apprenticed to William Chipman, born July 11, 178 (no last digit given).

John Battis, apprenticed to Joseph Holbrook, born October 15, 1781.

Joseph Wales, apprenticed to John Stubbs, born January 17, 1787.

Jacob Treat, apprenticed to William Cole, born June 11, 1792.

James Trout, apprenticed to Jesse Smith, born March 10, 1796.

John Odin, apprenticed to “Herzekiah” Rich, born December 25, 1795.

Richard Murphy, apprentice to Benjamin Holbrook, born 1797.

Benjamin Oliver, apprenticed to Benjamin Holbrook, born October 13, 1798.

William H. Greenough, born March of 1807, served his time with Simon Newcomb.

John Smith, apprenticed to Captain Thomas Higgins, born July 2, 1818.

Peter Rich, apprenticed to Silas Rider, born September 7, 1826.

The Apprenticeship Binding Document

These forms, stored in the Boston City Clerk’s Office until they were moved to the Boston Public Library, were pre-printed forms with the names and dates filled in for each case. The agreement was between the Boston Overseers of the Poor, by name, and the Master, with the consent of “two Justices of the Peace.”  The Master’s name was written in, followed by “with his wife and their heirs” which implied a sort of family arrangement. The name of the apprentice was noted “to dwell and serve from the day of these presents” until the date of his or her freedom, at age 21 for males.

The original documents I found usually referred to “the District of Wellfleet” even though it had become a town.

In the pre-printed portion of the document the Master “doth hereby covenant and agree for himself, his said wife and heirs to teach the said Apprentice or cause him to be taught the art, trade, or mystery of blank to be filled in, and to read, write, and cipher.” It goes on to charge the Master “shall provide wholesome meat and drink, with washing, lodging, clothing and other necessaries” during the term. Further, “at the end and expiration shall provide the said Apprentice with two good suits of wearing apparel filling for all parts of the body the one for the Lord’s Day and the other for Working Days suitable to his degree.” This was known as the “Freedom Dues” or “Freedom Suit.” One writer noted that in 1761 a “freedom suit” was worth five month’s wages.

Another portion of the document named the responsibilities of the Apprentice. In summary, he was to avoid gaming, taverns, fornication, and marriage. All of this was expressed in 18^th Century language, along with other promises. “Said Apprentice well and faithfully shall serve said Master and Mistress …their secrets he shall keep close, the Commandments lawful and honest he shall gladly obey …He shall do no damage to Master or Mistress nor suffer it to be done by others without letting or giving reasonable notice thereof. He shall not waste the goods of Master or Mistress nor lend them lawfully to anyone. At cards, dice, or any other unlawful games he shall not play. Fornication he shall not commit. Matrimony during said contract he shall not contract. Taverns, Ale Houses or places of Gaming he shall not haunt or frequent. At all times he shall behave as a good and faithful Apprentice to the utmost of his ability.”

 

Note

In 1804, the Wellfleet Town Meeting records show an action to “enlarge the Poorhouse.” In 1839 the Town Meeting voted to move the Poorhouse to the “land of Giles and Benjamin Holbrook, lying to the westward of Lemuel Pierce’s dwelling house, and adjoining his house lot of 1.5 acres.” An 1887 report by the state of Massachusetts reports on a visit to the “Wellfleet Almshouse,” a mile from the railroad station, with a note that it was to be closed that year as there were “few paupers.” In 1927, Wellfleet voted at its Town Meeting to “sell the almshouse” to the Cape and Vineyard Electric Company for a substation. This was at the point where the town was contracting with the company to provide electric service. A 2019 news report referred to the “substation on Gull Pond Road” when it was hit by lightning.

Sources

Graham Millar, “The Poor Apprentices of Boston: indentures of Poor Children bound Out by the Overseers of the Poor of Boston, 1734-1776” (M.A. Thesis, College of William and Mary, 1958)

Ancestry.com database “Wellfleet Births, Marriages, Deaths 1763-1844”

Dawn Rickman document “Highlights of Town Meetings” (Wellfleet)

Boston Public Library digital resources at “Massachusetts Digital Commons” online at http://www.bpl.org

Lawrence W. Towner “The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices, 1734-1805” online at the website of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts www.colonialsociety.org/node/938.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just after Labor Day this year (2019), the Wellfleet Conservation Trust Annual Walk took participants to two “gunning camps” near Great Pond. Men with their rifles and fishing gear began coming to Wellfleet in the early spring and late fall, even as summer tourism developed, when the whole family came to enjoy the seaside. This blog post will concentrate on the coastal sport of shooting migratory birds.

Wellfleet visitors began building “gunning camps” as a place of very simple accommodation for those who came to shoot birds, hunt deer, and pursue both salt- and freshwater fishing. Local Wellfleet reports about visitors who came to the gunning camps never mention females, although there are photographs in other regions of the country of female hunters dressed in deerskin outfits.

Hunting as sport developed early in the 19^th Century as a way to counteract the expectations of men as the country industrialized and more men were in cities working in factories and at desks.  Hunting, shooting, and fishing became respectable activities of the new “leisure class.” Cultural crusaders in the mid-to-late 19^th Century promoted male physical fitness, competitive sports and outdoor activity. These activities were antidotes to a somewhat-feared “feminization” of American culture where women became the rulers of the home and also found more roles outside the home, including pursuing the vote.

In the late 19th Century “market hunting” became necessary as the increase in immigration put demands on the country’s food supply. The menus of fine-dining restaurants reflected the popularity of game birds: snipe, woodcock, plover, and partridge, along with several varieties of ducks: teal, mallard, canvasback, and ruddy. Further, the plumage of the coastal birds was much sought-after for women’s hats. Sometimes a whole bird appeared on top of a woman’s head!

 

On the Cape, market-hunting provided work for many men. Numerous references in the 1940s issues of The Cape Codder newspaper often refer to men who served as guides to sport shooters as “a former market hunter.” In an article describing a local Wellfleet duck hunter in the 1920s, the writer refers to the man as a former “market hunter” who “in the days before licenses and bag limits had sent four or five barrels of shore birds a week to the Boston market”. In his book, I Remember Cape Cod, E.C. Janes writes about fishing trips to Gull Pond during his summers in Wellfleet in the early 20^th Century. “Local gunners then in the spring and the fall with their live decoys, bagged hundreds of geese, many of which found their way to the Boston market where they brought twenty-five cents apiece.” By the time he wrote his book, market gunning had been banned.  Janes’ description of how live decoys worked is described later in this post.

After live decoys were banned, wooden carved decoys served duck hunters. Elmer Crowell of Harwich, a prolific carver, produced them in his work as a hunting guide further up the Cape. When he died in 1952, his estate was valued at $200; today, his carvings bring in many thousands of dollars at auctions. In 2007, two pieces were auctioned at more than a million dollars.

The popularity of shooting is also found in the history of the Goose Hummock store in Orleans. Founded after World War II, it got its name from a hummock on the Nauset Marsh. In a piece quoted in The Cape Codder many years later, Frank Sargent, one of the founders of the store, writes, “It was at the Goose Hummock that the market hunter crouched shivering behind cakes of ice, waiting for a sight of these great water fowl, outlined before a bright full moon. Goose Hummock has seen teams of young geese, reared in captivity and trained as live decoys, released as flyers to lure the flights of wild geese within range of the hunter’s gun.” Eventually, the Goose Hummock was destroyed by high seas during a winter storm.

This commercially-sanctioned slaughter of birds by market hunters eventually led to recognition of the need for regulations in order to preserve various species.  The first was the weak 1900 Lacey Act; after which a stronger 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act was signed by the United States and Canada. Conservation organizations, including the newly organized Massachusetts and National Audubon Societies, helped lobby for passage of the Act. By the 1920s most states had game regulations that preserved wildlife, and certain areas were to be set aside for recreational use.

Grover Cleveland Shoots and Fishes in Wellfleet

Grover Cleveland was U.S. President for two terms, the first from 1885-1889 and the second from 1893-1897. He established a Cape presence in 1891 when he bought Grey Gables, a large cottage on Monument Point near the village of Buzzards Bay. Between his two terms as President, he worked as an attorney in New York. He would take the train to Boston, then switch to the Old Colony line for the rest of his journey to the Cape, then travel the four more miles through the woods to his summer home. Eventually, the railroad set up a flag stop near his property. Grey Gables became the “summer White House” during his second term as he continued his fishing and sailing ventures.

Cleveland didn’t visit Wellfleet until after he left the Presidency. In 1901, the Barnstable Patriot reported that he was in Wellfleet for a “fishing and gunning” trip hosted by Solomon Atwood. On the 1910 map of Wellfleet, “S. Atwood” is noted on the southern part of Lieutenant’s Island—perhaps this was his gunning camp.

In September, 1902, the Boston Herald reported that the ex-President and friends “visited the blind” in Wellfleet but in two days shooting only “succeeded in getting down six birds,” but remained enthusiastic about shooting “good snipe and yellow legs later.” Gunning trips were also made in 1903 and 1904.

After 1904, the Cleveland family gave up Grey Gables when their eldest daughter died of diphtheria there. In 1906, Cleveland published a book on hunting and fishery, remembering his days shooting on Cape Cod and his heightened awareness of wind and weather needed to be a successful gunner. President Cleveland died in 1908.

When Mr. Atwood’s home in Paine Hollow partially burned in the 1940s, the news reported that he was a good friend to President Cleveland, and that a poem and a set of decoys given to him by the President were lost.

Solomon Atwood’s son, Alton Atwood, continued hosting gunning parties for several years. The 1938 booklet of the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association notes Alton Atwood’s prized possession: a fishing rod given to him by President Cleveland.  Although not related to gunning, the South Wellfleet Arey family also connected to the President.  When he was serving as a pastor in Buffalo, the Reverend Doctor Charles Arey, who was well-acquainted with Cleveland, defended him during his first campaign from the scandalous statements about his supposed out-of-wedlock child.

Wellfleet Hosts Hunters, Gunners and Fishermen

The Cape’s newspapers regularly reported on the arrival of sports hunters, gunners and sometimes fishermen, although the latter reporting was minimal. One of the first mentions of sport hunters came in 1857 when one of the Selectmen, Benjamin Oliver, ordered two hunters off his property, and the ensuing altercation found the three men in court. In 1882, William G. Townsend “opened a gunners camp” in South Wellfleet, in a spot north of Blackfish Creek.

There were gunning camps built on Lieutenant Island as the land there was developed in the 1890s. In one of his Cape Codder columns from the 1970s, local historian Earle G. Rich wrote about his father and a local carpenter erecting a gunning camp for a group of Boston men in 1908 on Beach Hill, the last island on Wellfleet’s western shore before Billingsgate.   He called the camp “Steel Shanty” since corrugated steel sheeting covered the structure. Mr. Holbrook, who operated Wellfleet’s livery stable, built another camp nearby.  The Barnstable Patriot’s local column mentioned two other camps: Dr. Paul Haley’s on Lieutenant Island and another in South Wellfleet at Mrs. Boynton’s.

In his “Only Yesterday” columns in The Cape Codder in the 1970s, Holman Spence provided a detailed description of duck hunting on Indian Neck in the 1920s, an experience with a Wellfleet man he calls “the Walrus,” someone who had been a market hunter in earlier days.  The Walrus set up his blind near the Spence cottage, on a certain sandy beach on Chipman’s Cove:

This consisted only of a gray blanket and a piece of drift timber at the high tide line to sit upon. He would bunch up a few pieces of seaweed and algae at the water’s edge for decoys and then go up to the drift timber, sit down with his shotgun and pull the gray, rock-colored blanket over himself. He would peer out at his decoys through a hole in the blanket and when some ducks came in he would thrust the gun out through another hole and shoot. It was a pretty good system and he always got himself a number of ducks each time he went there. … He explained how a duck resting on the water exposes only its head and back … the pellets from a shotgun, therefore, would not hit the meaty area of the bird. … The old Walrus would take his dead birds, pick the feathers and down from their breasts, slit the skin and peel it back and with his fingers remove the two slabs of breast meat. He would wrap the meat in waxed paper and pocket it to take home.

The South Wellfleet Fishing Camp

When summer visitors started coming to the Cape, fishing trips with a retired sea captain would often be a part of their summer experience. As Mr. Janes writes in his book, his father and local Mr. Hopkins often spent a day at the northern Wellfleet ponds fishing for pickerel and perch. But in 1900 a much bigger fishing operation was established.  Richard Freeman, the son of a prominent Wellfleet family, established a private, membership-only 84-acre fishing camp around Fresh Brook in South Wellfleet. He stocked the stream with brook trout to supplement the native salters. In the 1910 map of Wellfleet, the Brook’s name was changed to “Trout Brook.” No contemporary news reports of Mr. Freeman’s organization were found, nor is there any evidence of buildings erected to serve the fishing club members.  Recent research by a group seeking to bring back the anadromous, sea-run or salter trout that once provided fishing in the Brook opened a new line of inquiry for this writer.

Frank W. Benson was an American Impressionist artist who also became known for his black and white wash sketches of duck hunting made around the turn of the 20^th Century displaying the Nauset marshes, where he shared property with his brother-in-law, Dr. Maurice Richardson. In a 2000 book, “The Sporting Art of Frank W. Benson,” author Faith Andrews Benson quotes from a logbook of his Eastham farm: “All drove to Fresh Brook, South Wellfleet, to try for trout. Tied the horse and fished downstream from the Railroad [bridge]. In the pool above the track F.W.B. caught a half-pounder, then another half-pounder, then a one pounder. The others arrived and we caught from the pool 13 more fine trout. The 15 fish weighed 17 pounds after then were brought home and weighed.”

Dr. Maurice Richardson

My research turned to the Benson/Richardson relationship and found that the two men, plus “Uncle Ned” who was Benson’s brother, purchased an old Doane farmhouse (on the “Nauset Road”) in 1892. This is the same house that gained fame in the 1950s when Richardson’s son, Dr. Wyman Richardson, published memory pieces about the house and its surroundings in a series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly. Later, these pieces were published in a 1955 book “The House on Nauset Marsh” which became one of the most iconic books on the outer Cape, often named with Thoreau’s work, “Cape Cod,” and Beston’s “Outermost House” as our best regional writing.

Dr. Maurice Richardson was a wealthy Boston surgeon, a professor of anatomy at Harvard Medical School, and an expert on the human body that made him the first chief of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. His land purchases in Eastham and the “Great Pond Camp” that he established there are an important part of North Eastham’s history. Eastham had six such hunting camps before 1910, located there to access the seasonal bird migration on the great Nauset Marsh and the various other water locations in the town.

Richardson originally established just a warming hut near Eastham’s Great Pond while his guests stayed in the “farmhouse” on Nauset Road. Richardson also bought some land on Nauset Beach. The Eastham Camp grew when friends bought abutting property, and structures were added by Dwight Blaney, also an American artist, and Matthew Luce.  The Barnstable Patriot covered the Richardson family’s arrivals and departures, along with the other property owners, referring to the place as a “camp” or the “gunning cottage.” A scene from the English countryside unfolded there in December, 1905, when twenty members of the Norfolk Hunt Club of Dedham rode in, “the horses and dogs with men in their red coats a handsome sight.”

E.G. Janes, in his book mentioned earlier, describes a fishing trip to Eastham’s Great Pond when he explored the shore of the pond, finding Richardson’s “Once-elaborate goose-hunting set-up … a lattice wall about sixty feet long, painted green and thatched with pine boughs and pierced with loopholes spaced six feet apart. At either end of the wall were located pens for the live decoys – the callers, the fliers, and the runners. A camouflaged trench ran from the wall to a large, squat, gunning camp on the bluff above the shore.” Janes describes the work of a guide who would watch for a flight of geese over the Pond, the release of the flier geese who were trained to circle the pond, calling loudly, and then return to the blind where corn awaited them.

Meanwhile the guide pressed a button alerting the gunners, perhaps relaxing and playing cards, who hurried to the trench to take their positions. If the wild geese did not come in close enough, the trained runner geese went out and mingled, bringing them closer to shore. Mr. Janes later became the editor of Outdoor Life, which may have been why he provided such a detailed account of the gunning camp. Of course, by the time he was an adult, the use of live decoys was banned.

Richardson also played a role in Wellfleet history. In 1897 he bought Billingsgate Island from the Smith children for $350 and $435 for two lots, a place that measured around 15 acres at that point. Richardson owned whatever structure was there. One description of the site refers to the building having a cupola. The Lighthouse Board owned another part of the island, six acres they purchased for the second light in 1857, although we do not know how much was left when Richardson became their neighbor. There were news reports in 1898 and 1900 that the Richardsons—father and sons—were at Billingsgate Island.

Dr. Richardson died in 1912 while in his early sixties. His sons, two doctors and one attorney, kept portions of the property in Eastham, but sold the Billingsgate camp to Robert Barlow. The Lighthouse was abandoned in 1913 with the bricks —it is said—going to many homes, including my family’s where they lined an area under our cottage that kept dairy products cool.  For a while Billingsgate was a bird sanctuary, helped by Dr. Austin of the sanctuary he had founded in South Wellfleet, today’s Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary.

While Dr. Richardson was still alive, John Southward became the superintendent of all of the Richardson property. No photograph has been found (yet) of the Richardson property at Billingsgate, but Southward’s 1908 log provides a sense of the place at that time. (This is copied from a 1930 article from The Springfield Republican.)

The article quotes from various notes in the log:

One of the accompanying photographs shows one of Dr. Richardson’s houses beginning to careen, its foundation yielding to the ceaseless gnawing, and, in due course, the structure tumbles into the waves and vanishes.

Further: On reaching the house we saw quite a lot of beetleheads and other large birds on the flats, although the tide was too far out for shooting. Heard them whistle before light next morning.

The mosquitos visited us in force one hot still night and we had to turn out at 5 am to smudge them out. The next night we were ready for them with nets around the beds and slept in peace.

July 30, 1901: This shanty was nearly washed away last winter and the winter before. The tide took out the foundations as far as the chimney. The original frontier was W/S/W of this on the edge of the bank. The view was glorious and the frontier every way superior to this. The N/W. angle of the island has changed tremendously and is steadily growing.

We went fishing in the morning. Filled the car and left for home at noon after having a fine time. No telephone messages, and the best tautog in the world. 45 birds. Oodles of tautog. Saw many horse mackerel chasing sand eels.

One last day is here! And that day has been a day! We are leaving at 11 this morning for Wellfleet; we have had very good luck. There have been lots of birds and if we had shot better our score would have been more than doubled. Our total score of birds: 29 beetleheads, 65 chicken plovers, 2 winter yellowlegs, one summer yellowleg, 2 greybacks, 20 sanderlings — total 119 birds and 16 flounders.

Billingsgate on the sea

Our hearts all turn to thee

               On sporting days

And when your owner’s nigh

May plover hover by

Darkening the western sky

               In southward flight – and now

Farewell – goodbye.

 

Southward’s 1908 log:

Been here most two months and have had the most enjoyable time, and leave with some regrets, for certainly old Billingsgate is a lovely place to stay during the summer months. Every year makes some serious changes to the island by way of washing the banks away. Mostly done in the winter months by high tides and N.W. gales and ice. In 12 years there has been a most astonishing change made, but we, the lovers of the place, hope that the island will endure while we last if not longer. The island has quite a fishing history in the past century, for the people that made fishing their business. Some 30 to 40 came on the island from east to west and remained during the fishing season. They had a school teacher that used to teach during the week and preach on Sundays. Theirs must have been a happy life – in those days all kinds of fish could be taken from the waters around the island. I sincerely hope that I may be spared to come here again and that our owner, Dr. Richardson, may live many years to enjoy the island and to eat of the many products of the place. A fine display of northern lights during the evening.

Sources

E.C. Janes I Remember Cape Cod,”  Brattleboro, Vermont, The Stephen Greene Press, 1974

South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association booklet downloaded in 2012 from David Kew’s Cape Cod History site, now defunct.

The Cape Codder available at the Snow Library, Orleans www.snowlibrary.org

The Barnstable Patriot available at the Sturgis Library www.sturgislibrary.org

This summer, the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum presented an exhibit on Wellfleet’s waterfront, about the many ways that waterfront land, structures, and businesses supported the economic life of the town.  One of the operations was the manufacture of salt by evaporating salt water, a growth industry in the early years of the nineteenth century in Barnstable County. The exhibit included a model of a typical saltworks, showing details of the wooden structures that dotted the bayside shoreline until they disappeared by the 1850s.

These cobbled-together structures sprouted up all over town, using wind and water to produce bushels of salt. I found three owners in South Wellfleet.  The 1937 brochure of the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association provided the only written reference to South Wellfleet’s role in salt production:

Arey’s at the foot of Cannon Hill on Blackfish Creek, known as the Mill Ditch and used today by the Summer people as a bathing beach. Townsend’s was at the foot of Paine Hollow, and Lewis’s was East of the Highway.

Saltworks were located close to the homes of owners, since the family provided the labor. That may explain why there were no saltworks located on Lieutenant’s Island shores since no one lived there until much later.

Various reports of salt-making in Barnstable County cover Wellfleet’s participation; these annual numbers for Wellfleet show the growth and demise of the industry:

 

Year	Number of saltworks
1802	2
1831	35
1837	39
1845	28
1855	13

 

The number of bushels in the most productive year in Wellfleet, noted in several accounts, is 10,000. Wellfleet’s fishing industry was also growing during this time, creating a strong demand for salt in the era before refrigeration, although bushels would have been shipped over to Boston as well, helped by the packet boats that began regular operations after the War of 1812.

William Quinn’s excellent book, The Saltworks of Historic Cape Cod, explores the history and town-by-town description of this early-American “manufactory” as operations were called then. These two photos in the Cummings collection at the Snow Library in Orleans show the ruins of a saltworks in Dennis.

 

Another photo from an old book shows the saltworks in operation on Billingsgate, although here located erroneously in the town of Eastham.

 

Long wooden vats were nailed together for the three-part evaporation process. They were covered with wooden or canvas superstructures or roofs on moveable rollers used to cover the vats when it rained. Windmills pumped the water into a first vat where, depending on the weather, the saltwater would evaporate in four to six weeks. The concentrated brine then went into a “pickling” vat where evaporation continued. Once crystals started forming, they would be skimmed in the salt vat (or “salt room”) for final production. Glauber salts or Epsom salts could be made from the by-product of the process. Records for Brewster and Dennis show production of these salt products, but Wellfleet appears not to have produced them, according to reports in an 1835 Massachusetts Business Directory.

The wood for these saltworks structures had to be brought in from Maine.  South Wellfleet’s Cedar Swamp, some portion or all of which was owned by the Arey family, probably provided the hollowed-out logs that moved the evaporating water from one vat to another. Those without cedar logs used pine.

The Revolutionary War played a role in developing saltworks in Barnstable County and other locations in southeastern Massachusetts. During the war, when imported salt was halted, there were some efforts to make salt by boiling seawater in large vats. On the Cape where trees had been substantially removed by the early 18^th century, firewood was scarce.  Captain John Sears of Dennis, the inventor of the evaporation process used on the Cape, started work on his process by 1776. When the British man-of-war Somerset was wrecked on the outer Cape in 1778, Captain Sears had obtained one of its bilge pumps in the process of stripping the wreck. He used this to pump the water into his saltworks, and continued perfecting his process.

When the President of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, made his excursion to the Cape in the early years of the 19^th century he got quite excited about the possibilities of “salt manufactories” as he observed the Cape landscape. The Cape was viewed by him as a place of “gloom and solitude” and “everlasting desolation.”  He hoped that the saltworks to come would provide “a mighty change” for the towns and villages of the Cape.

Saltworks were relatively easy to build, requiring a relatively small investment. Retiring sea captains who had capital to invest often chose this home-business. Labor costs were minimal and could often be operated by family members.

The chief reason given by most writers for the demise of the saltworks in the 1840s and 1850s was the competition from salt manufacturing in New York state, around the town of Syracuse, where brine springs were developed into an industry in the late 1700s.  In a 2013 article, William B. Meyer cites another reason: the change in tariffs that the U.S. government imposed on imported salt from the early days of the country through the 1840s. He makes the point that the collection of tariffs early on was done to raise money for the new U.S. government, but had the consequence of protesting the nascent salt manufacturing. When tariffs might have been removed after the turn of the century, they were kept in place because of uncertain situations on relations with England, and then the War of 1812 cut-off all imports. In fact, the saltworks of various Cape towns were threated during that war with destruction by British ships that sought to collect a ransom from the town to save the salt-making structures.

Tariffs played a role in national politics, sometimes creating a crisis as states’ rights were asserted over national tariff policies, particularly in the agricultural southern states where they depended upon imported manufactured items. Meyer argues that it was the removal of tariffs in the 1840s that pushed the Barnstable County salt manufacturing into its final throes.

The placement of saltworks in South Wellfleet is shown on two maps. The 1831 Hales map, written about HERE recently showing three places on Blackfish Creek where there are saltworks. On this map, Drummers Pond is referred to a “Cohog Pond.”

As discussed .below, I believe that the saltworks near Cohog Pond were owned by the Lewis family, and the Arey family owned the two on the south and north side of the end of the Creek.

The 1849 topographical map of Wellfleet, with its South Wellfleet section shown here, has two saltworks marked by the long rectangles with hatch-marks, one near today’s Pleasant Point, and the other in the location north of Drummer’s Cove. Two other locations near the eastern end of Blackfish Crook are noted (circled) showing long rectangles with no markings. These are probably saltworks that are no longer in operation, an informed guess provided by Chet Lay, Wellfleet civil engineer and a friend to this writer. I would suppose that these are the Arey saltworks, no longer in operation.

 

 

Using the 1858 Walling map of Wellfleet which shows property owners in Wellfleet, and various federal censuses, along with deeds and family records, I’ve determined that the John Lewis family were the owners of the salt works north of Drummer’s Cove. In 1850, both John Lewis Senior and John Junior headed households in that area, just to the east of Moses Hinckley. Deeds show they owned property upland from Blackfish Creek, on the north side.

The same type of search determined that James Townsend (1808-1884) owned the salt works near his home at the end of (today’s) Paine Hollow Road. His home had been built by his father, Dr. James Townsend (1780-1812), when he married Hannah Doane. In his handwritten will, Dr. Townsend left all of his property to his wife when he died in 1812. If Hannah remarried, the property would go to his two children, James Junior and Nancy Beals. It appears that the children did indeed get their inheritance, and James Junior, married in 1831 to Desiah Smith, is listed as a carpenter on various censuses that cover the period of his life, a useful occupation to have when building a saltworks. The appearance of the saltworks on the 1849 map fits with James Townsend Junior’s lifespan.  The Townsend house, today located at 290 Paine Hollow Road, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Arey family’s ownership of saltworks can be more definitively determined, since the saltworks are mentioned in Reuben Arey’s will of 1839. He left “one-half of a string of saltworks” to each of four of his heirs, which may imply two such structures, perhaps the ones on the south and north sides of Blackfish Creek at its eastern end.  Perhaps the saltworks were already not in operation, since they appear to have less value than other pieces of property left to his children. The four heirs receiving the saltworks were Charles Arey, his youngest child, born in 1822, who left the Cape and became a minister; Miranda Davis and Ruth Dodge, two married daughters; and Sally Chapman, a granddaughter whose mother had died. None of these children seemed to be in a position to take over a manufacturing operation, so perhaps all that was left might have been the wood, always recycled on Cape Cod.

In the past ten years or so, a few small business ventures have sprung up on the Cape, to produce boutique salt made from salt water evaporation, including the Wellfleet Sea Salt Company www.wellfleetsaltco.com.

 

Sources

Quinn, William P. The Saltworks of Historic Cape Cod Orleans, Massachusetts,  Parnassus Imprints 1993

Holmes, Richard, Carolyn D. Hertz, and Mitchell Mullholland Historic Cultural Land Use Study of Lower Cape Cod University of Massachusetts, Amherst, accessed on archive.org August 2019.

www.capecodhistory.us

Meyer, William B. “The Making and Unmaking of a Natural Resource: The Salt Industry of Coastal Southeastern Massachusetts” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol 15 (2013), pp.123-150

“Saltworks Ruins-East Dennis (circa 1880)” Snow Library H.K. Cummings collection, accessed August 1, 2019, https://localarchives.us/snowlibrary/items/show/161

Reuben Arey will, 1839

Walling, Henry F. The 1858 Map of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, & Nantucket On Cape Publications, 2009

Hales map:   https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:25152j103.