South Wellfleet, Massachusetts

This is the fourth post in a series about life on the Outer Cape during World War II.

Wellfleet had two big projects in the summer of 1940. In July, the annual meeting of the Wellfleet Board of Trade, the Wellfleet Associates, and the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association took place at the Methodist Church, with a chicken pie supper.  The group listened to a presentation by Frederick Melcher, summer resident and editor of Publishers’ Weekly, about the importance of marketing to the town, although he did not call it that. He spoke about the importance of distinct symbols, revealing a sample sign he had made with a blue scallop shell and a place-name, “Shirt-tail Point.”

The groups began to discuss what to do with the Colonial Hall, the old South Wellfleet Congregational Church, covered in this blog post. The Hall had been moved to the center of town in the 1920s. Now it was in poor condition.  It was standing on land that the town wanted to take for parking.  Should it be repaired and turned into a Town Hall? Should it be moved? Destroyed? Reportedly, the Truro Neighborhood Association was considering buying it and moving it to the site of the Old South Meeting House, which had burned to the ground the previous winter. Wellfleet had just finished razing the old elementary school, as mentioned earlier. Should that site on Main Street be used for a new Town Hall? A vote was taken: saving the Hall was approved, but only by two votes.

Selectman Frazier then happened to mention that the town had recently sold the former school’s land to the New England Telephone Company for their plan to erect an attractive exchange building, like the new one in Orleans, for the time when Wellfleet is changed from its present system to the “crankless” method of calling the operator. Frazier emphasized the importance of the town taking the parking lot space to prevent private interests from buying it. The groups formed a committee to consider the options for Colonial Hall.

This discussion served as the kickoff for the project to save the Hall. The Preservation for New England Antiquities took a stand for preservation, arguing that at a time when Europe was losing its heritage to bombing, Wellfleet should consider preserving its heritage. Several hundred signed a petition to save the building, the land was acquired by the Town, and it would take most of 1941 to get the building ready for occupation as the town hall.

Also at this meeting, Selectman Lawrence Gardinier announced that Roosevelt had turned down the “improvement” of Wellfleet Harbor but held out hope that dredging the harbor still might be considered a defense measure project. However, the Town might have to build a dock.

Mr. Handy from South Wellfleet reported on two social events the Neighborhood Association would host over the summer: a card party at Cook’s Camps, and a garden party at Professor and Mrs. Frederick Hick’s South Wellfleet home, the “Bowed Roof.”

Finally, Frank Shay announced a plan for a Wellfleet “World’s Fair” to be held around and in Legion Hall, up and down Commercial Street, from Railroad Street to the Bank.

The summer of 1940 brought another celebration: the 150^th year of the U.S. Coast Guard. Open houses were offered at all the Coast Guard Stations, Wood End, Race Point, and Long Point in Provincetown, Highland in Truro, Cahoon Hollow in Wellfleet, and Nauset in Eastham. Visitors were encouraged to go to Cahoon Hollow, as the macadam road to the station made the drive easy.

The Wellfleet Congregational Church celebrated its 220^th anniversary with a dinner for 150 people.

Life Magazine did a photo spread on Cape Cod in its July 15^th issue. Some were upset in Provincetown when the town’s business district was referred to as honky-tonk.

Wellfleet’s summer ended with its first Town Fair, organized by Frank Shay. Shay was one of the Greenwich Village bohemians who came to Provincetown. In 1925, he closed his bookstore on Christopher Street, loaded his books into a station wagon, and settled in Provincetown, where he became a drinking companion of Eugene O’Neill and Harry Kemp. His adventures are detailed in John Taylor Williams’ book The Shores of Bohemia.

Shay and his wife had moved to Wellfleet in 1938. The 1940 Town Fair would be one of Shay’s first efforts on behalf of the town. Williams describes a poster Shay developed for the Fair, “Well, Well, Wellfleet.”

The Provincetown Advocate reported in detail about the Fair. Shay announced the “people will be amazed by the wealth of products of hand, land, and imagination” that would be exhibited at the Fair. No displays of products of the sea were planned.

The Fair took place on Friday, August 30^th, and was attended by 2500 people. A parade kicked off the day at 10:30 a.m., and the raising of the colors to open the Fair at 11 a.m. Admission tickets were sold out by 1 p.m.

Using the Legion Hall as a base, the Fair included exhibits both inside the Hall and along Commercial Street. Exhibitors competed for prizes for the “Best Of” pies, cakes, beach plum jelly, pickles, hooked and braided rugs, quilts, and clam and fish chowders. Some had booths to raise funds: Mrs. Crowell sold cake to support the South Wellfleet Cemetery. Wellfleet High School students sold bowls of clam chowder for fifteen cents to raise funds for their annual trip to Washington, DC.

Locally grown vegetables and fruits were judged. Four parcels of Wellfleet property were auctioned. In the afternoon, there were “pitch” games: Crasho, dart poker, and Beano, the game we know as Bingo, using beans on the cards. There was an oyster opening contest at 3 p.m. The towns of Wellfleet and Truro competed for the best at cribbage and checkers.

Painters and artisans exhibited their skills. There were wood-carvers, candle-makers, and coppersmiths showing their work. In the evening, the Legion Hall was cleared, and old-fashioned dancing was offered: the Portland Fancy, the Trip to Nahant, and the Virginia Reel.

The war in Europe continued. Germany began bombing the English coast in July and August. The popular British actress, Gertrude Lawrence, married to the founder of the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, formed the Gertrude Lawrence Chapter of the American Theatre Wing for War Relief. Provincetown and Truro established chapters, and women began sewing and knitting clothes for children and refugees in England, using fabric and yarn provided by the charity. When the bombing began in London in early September, more support would begin.

In late summer, the U.S. Navy announced that it had no plans to create a base in Provincetown. Citing the U.S.’s role in defending the Western Hemisphere, Provincetown resident Naval Commander Archibald D. Turnbull began a new project. Insisting that the U.S. must be made war-ready, he founded a volunteer organization, signing up Provincetown veterans who could respond quickly to any emergency that might befall the town. By early fall, he had 72 men signed up. He was operating under the newly announced Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety, named just like the Committees set up during the American Revolution. Massachusetts was the first state to set up its civilian defense effort.

Later in the summer, Provincetown’s Henry James, a retired fisherman and owner of schooners, was featured in a lead story in the Advocate about his book, German Subs in Yankee Waters, as he wrote about the German U-boats in the North Atlantic in World War I. He recounted the story of the sinking of the USS San Diego off Long Island in July 1918, the only US warship lost during that war. The ship struck a German mine, killing six crewmen. Mr. James urged the U.S. to be better prepared for the coming war and to protect the fishing industry.

Congress established the Selective Service Act in September 1940, the first peacetime draft established in the U.S. The Provincetown Advocate gave specific instructions in its October 8th issue: “all men who have passed their 21^st birthday and have not reached their 36^th birthday must register on October 16^th. There was no excuse: if you were out of town, you had to go to the registration where you were. If you missed this date, there were fines and possibly jail time. In Wellfleet, they expected about 100 to register, but that turned out to be 82, as reported later.

The Governor of Massachusetts issued a proclamation announcing the date and the rules.  All the Town Clerks had to travel to Boston for a two-day training session on managing the registration process. In Wellfleet, Town Clerk Mr. Kemp appointed George Rogers as the Chief Registrar. The Provincetown Advocate named “Boy Scout Hall on Telephone Road” as the place where registrations would take place. The Boy Scouts were using the High School for activities, perhaps it was there.

After registering, all the men received a six-page questionnaire seeking information about their lives, occupations, and health, which would be used to determine whether they would be inducted. If they were in a certain job or had a physical infirmity, they would not be called to service. Later, in 1942, the federal government would rule that fishing as a deferment occupation could be considered on an individual basis by each draft board

The Cape had two draft boards, one covering the towns of Falmouth, Bourne, Sandwich, and Mashpee, and another covering the rest of the Cape. Later in the Fall, an Advisory Board to the Draft Board was appointed, and Cyril Downs of Wellfleet was among the members.

In early October, Eleanor Roosevelt and her secretary, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, set out for an automobile tour, driving from Hyde Park through Connecticut, and then through Fall River, Fairhaven, and Buzzards Bay. Mrs. Roosevelt did the driving. She commented later on the “delightful atmosphere” of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown. They stayed at the Colonial Inn, now the Ship’s Bell, and dined at the Flagship restaurant, where Anthony Bourdain would launch his career much later.

The next morning, the Provincetown Advocate interviewed her while she was having breakfast at the Inn and reading the Boston papers. The reporter noted that she was known as “the absent mistress of the White House,” but she said she knew how her husband was faring and that he would enjoy the ship models on display there.

She wrote an article about her trip in her syndicated column “My Day,” published a few days later, sent to her publisher by telegraph as they passed through Buzzards Bay again, on their way through Plymouth and then to Nahant to visit her son John and his wife.

When they drove through Wellfleet on the return trip, she stopped at Anne Woods’ beach plum jelly stand and sent “several boxes” of the jelly to the White House.  In the 1940 census, Annie Woods is listed as an 18-year-old with a widowed mother, working as a telegraph operator. Her home was indicated as “on the State Highway, in a northerly direction.” Perhaps she had a jelly stand in the summer months, catching the tourists as they drove by.

On November 5th, Election Day, Roosevelt was re-elected for a third term as President. Wellfleet strongly supported Wendell Wilkie, with more than 570 people voting, the most ever. Wilkie received 406 votes, and Roosevelt got 124 votes. Wellfleet voters also held firm against licensing any liquor sales in the town. Wellfleet had an active W.C.T.U. Women’s Christian Temperance Union, as they had a Christmas party for children later in the year.

Congressman Charles L. Gifford was re-elected. He was a Republican but ran as a pro-British supporter against an opponent who was an isolationist.

October brought another announcement: the airports on the Cape—Falmouth, Bourne, Chatham, Hyannis, and Provincetown—would all be upgraded, as the Cape was a strategic defense area.

In Wellfleet in November, a special Town Meeting was held, at which it was decided to acquire the old Colonial Hall and to have a committee examine the possibility of turning it into a Town Hall. Charles Frazier saw this as an important step in the progress of Wellfleet, commenting, “For the first time, the people seem to want a Town Hall.”

The Barnstable Patriot continued a long-time practice of printing columns reporting social news from all the towns on the Cape. These began to report the military engagements of the town’s young men: in November, Charles Huntley joined the Naval Reserve, signing up to learn mechanics for Naval aviation. He had to check in “fortnightly” to his base until he was called to active duty.  James Berrio enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

In late November, there was a story about a military operation that did not seem to be under the censorship that would come later. The Barnstable Patriot ran a front-page story reporting that 20 to 30 experts from the U.S. Army Signal Corps would be coming to Truro with equipment worth $60,000 and would operate on a large plot of land on the high dunes there, leased from a Truro summer resident. The town offered them the Town Hall to serve as a barracks because it had a kitchen. The news reported that their exact mission was not announced, but they would be there for about six weeks.

The article stated that “clear Cape air” had brought the project to Truro, and went on to commend the air as the reason Mr. Marconi had chosen South Wellfleet, the reason the Coast Guard had recently moved a powerful communications center from Winthrop, Mass., and the reason why the RCA station in Chatham was there. It boasted about the number of radio “ham” operators on the Cape (although they were now silenced), and said the clear air was the reason for the success of the new radio station, WOCB, recently set up in West Yarmouth.

In mid-December, an Army truck overturned on one of the dangerous curves on Route 6 in Wellfleet. The three injured men had to be brought to the hospital in a bakery truck, as the outer Cape ambulance was in the repair shop in Provincetown. The other men were staying at the Holiday House in Wellfleet, now called the Copper Swan.

December also brought reports of who had killed deer during the hunting season and of several men vying to fill the vacant Selectman post left by Mr. Daniels.

There was considerable excitement in December when reports indicated that construction of Camp Edwards was nearing completion and that the possibilities for the Cape economy were promising, as 30,000 Army men would be there. There was no family housing for the officers, so they would need rental housing in some of the towns near the Camp. The soldiers would have time off when they were expected to become tourists in the Cape towns.

A chaplain at Camp Edwards asked Cape towns to consider adopting a battery of men to get used to having soldiers in their towns. Provincetown hosted a group of 100 men, giving them a tour, setting up a basketball game, and then a dance.

Just before Christmas, under the direction of Frank Shay, the citizens of Wellfleet assembled for a community party, gathered around a lighted tree, and sang Christmas carols to the organ playing of Oliver Austin, Jr. While they had coffee, cider, and doughnuts, Santa arrived in a sleigh drawn by a horse, and gave mittens to every child who wanted them.

This is the third post in a series about life on the Outer Cape during World War II.

With the Winter War between Russia and Finland in full swing in the first few months of 1939-40, Wellfleet’s Finnish community helped raise funds for the relief of the Finnish people, bringing the international situation to the notice of the people of the outer Cape. There was a settlement in March, when the Finns were forced to cede territory to the stronger Russians who had invaded their land. It was reported in March that Wellfleet collected more than $100.

It was a cold winter. Wellfleet Harbor was closed off due to packed ice. Mr. DeLory filled his ice house on Long Pond with 10-inch ice with the help of 30 men. Workers installed the new fire siren on a tower behind the Wellfleet curtain factory. Wellfleet and Nantucket High Schools played basketball, with each team hosting the other on an overnight visit. Two women were injured while ice skating on the pond in Paine Hollow.

In late January, there was some hope revived for the dredging project in Wellfleet Harbor that the town had been working on since 1937. The Army Corps of Engineers recommended the project, but final approval awaited. Wellfleet was also considering creating an inner basin to attract boatowners who might also consider building a summer house in town.

The arguments over finishing Route 6 continued, with Mr. Frazier expressing great outrage when state highway funds were allocated to building new roadways further up-Cape. In March, an attorney from Boston presented an argument for a Mid-Cape Highway serving the entire Cape, arguing that better roadways were needed to increase tourism on the Cape and to serve the fishing industry, as the railroad service was winding down. Perhaps reflecting the widely held belief that the Cape was a military target if war broke out, the highway would also be needed to support troop movements.

In February, the Wharf Theater in Provincetown was destroyed by a winter storm, a blizzard with 80-mile-per-hour winds. This famous outpost, where American theater was developed, was gone. The Provincetown Advocate editor reminisced about Eugene O’Neill’s emergence as a playwright in the summer of 1916, when his “Bound East for Cardiff” was produced at the old fish-house on the wharf turned into a 60-seat performing space. Wellfleet’s Frank Shay was one of the young bohemians of Provincetown in the 1920s, involved in theater production. Mr. Shay was to play a leading role in a Wellfleet event later this year.

South Wellfleet’s Charles E. Paine turned 83 in February. Mr. Paine was famous for driving his horse, Diamond, “like the wind” to the South Wellfleet Railroad Station in January 1903 to telegraph President Roosevelt that King Edward VIII had received and replied to his message, the historic reply to Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless message. Of course, Mr. Paine slowed his horse down as soon as he was out of sight of Mr. Marconi and got the message delivered as promised.

The Marconi Wireless Station had long been washed away over the dunes, but the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association made plans to make a memorial near its site, with the gift of the land from John Stone of Boston. The Town accepted the gift at the February Town Meeting. There were plans for a memorial park on site, with help from Italian American organizations.  Mr. Stone was a wealthy man from Boston who came to South Wellfleet every summer, living like a hermit on the dunes, a story covered in this blog post. While the gift of land was reported in many newspapers from “John Stone,” the man was named “Albert Stone,” as the property owner in the Barnstable Deeds database. He continued visiting South Wellfleet until his death in 1959.

Testing new submarines continued in Provincetown with the spring arrival of the new submarine Tarbor. A U.S. Navy destroyer-tender, Dixie, arrived in Provincetown harbor, and 400 men went ashore for “night liberty” to enjoy the shops, restaurants, and bars in the town.

A major issue in Provincetown was the lack of sewers or cesspools, leading to pollution along the bayside beaches. There was no capture of the waste because everyone assumed that the tide would just carry it away. The town was also in the process of determining the legality of requiring catch basins for the drains of shoreline houses. The beaches were also littered with junk, so the town decided to use WPA funds for a spring beach clean-up.

In a national story, the Town of Wellfleet reported that 4,282 visitors to the town had climbed the Fire Tower in the summer of 1939, visitors from 41 states and 12 foreign nations.

Many newspapers around the country picked up a Wellfleet story in March. Wellfleet had no arrests in the previous year, as reported by Selectman Chair John Daniels, who also served as the Police Chief, as there was no Police Department. Mr. Daniels turned over the job of Police Chief to Selectman Charles Frazier, Jr. In May, the Chief closed the lobby of the Wellfleet Post Office early because of the rowdy activity that was taking place there in the late afternoon.

In March, the Wellfleet Board of Trade hosted a debate between a “Communistic Party representative” and a “Finnish resident” of Wellfleet. I could not find a report of the actual debate, and the two debate participants were not named. In a later article, Frank Shay of Wellfleet reported that the Communist Party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, gave the Board of Trade credit for “doing some hard thinking.” Shay said that there had been criticism of the Board for sanctioning a talk by a Communist, but he declared, “This is a democratic country. With the Nazis and the Fascists both attempting the throttling of the methods of democracy, we cannot further it by beating them to the destruction of democratic principles. No one who heard the talk at the last meeting can go away with his American convictions anything but strengthened.”

Also in March, Truro’s Old South Meeting House, recently restored, was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. In April, Henry Atwood announced that he would be starting a Wellfleet Boy Scout troop that would meet at the High School.

The Board of Trade discussed at its April meeting that there was a need to define the town’s right of access to its ocean beaches and to Gull Pond. They were concerned about access roads to the beaches and to the beach itself, as in some spots, the bluff had become perpendicular due to erosion. The ocean beach in South Wellfleet was referred to as “Glider School Beach” in memory of the Glider School that was once there, covered in this blog post.

Gone With the Wind opened at the Orleans movie theater in April; from the advertisements in the Provincetown Advocate, it appears to have been a special event, with Howard Johnson’s and others encouraging movie-goers to have a special date night.

The three Wellfleet Selectmen, Daniels, Frazier, and Gardinier, who were also the Board of Assessors, announced that the property tax rate would be reduced for the year, from $35.50 in 1939 to $27.00. Mr. Frazier announced that they were working on a new assessor’s map and that all Wellfleet citizens should encourage more building in the town. The Provincetown Advocate editorialized that this “new thinking” in Wellfleet should be happening in all the outer Cape towns: “How can we raise our standards of civic service, develop our attractions, provide ample incomes for our people, and, at the same time, reduce the cost of property taxes?”

Germany invaded Denmark and Norway in April; the Cape Cod Red Cross chapter began raising funds for the “widespread suffering.”

The 1940 federal census was taken in the spring. Wellfleet had nearly 900 residents, a gain of over 50 since the last census, with a number of aliens, mostly from Canada. There were 40 men who listed their occupation as “fisherman,” including those who dragged for shellfish. Wellfleet’s curtain factory, actually a finishing factory for curtains sold by Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, employed 28 people. Later, it was a candle-making shop. Today, the Public Library is in that location.

The Wellfleet Board of Trade had a full agenda at its May meeting at the Congregational Church, which included a baked ham supper. Mr. Charles Walker, an economic journalist, had recently moved to town and gave a talk to the Board about the power of cooperatives. This prompted a discussion about forming cooperative marketing for Wellfleet’s two main products, scallops and beach plum jelly. They discussed the importance of branding their products to increase prices. For the beach plums, they envisioned buying sugar cooperatively and having special glass jars made in bulk for the jelly producers. A committee was formed to pursue the matter. The agenda moved on: it was reported that the town’s street and directional signs were freshly painted for the upcoming season. There was concern about drivers who fling burning cigarettes out of their car windows and how a forest fire could start. There was a $25 fine for this act, and the Board discussed placing warning posters around town.

The Board decided to give $15 to Henry Atwood’s plan to start a Boy Scout troop; the Board already supported both Boys’ and Girls’ basketball at the Wellfleet High School. They asked Selectman-Chief of Police Frazier to prepare a lecture for high school students on careless bicycle riding. And, finally, they announced that a special Wellfleet Fair would be presented after Labor Day, under the direction of Frank Shay.

Mr. Daniels, the Wellfleet Selectman Chair, died in June. That left Lawrence Gardinier and Charles Frazier as the two remaining Selectmen.

What we now call “the drums of war” began to beat in the United States in June 1940. France fell to the Germans on June 22^nd, and England prepared for an air invasion. Mary Heaton Vorse gave a talk in Provincetown at the Universalist Church about the fall of France, calling it one of the great turning points of history, and predicting that “we will be greatly affected.”

War planning began in the United States with several actions that brought the military to Cape Cod and would eventually affect Wellfleet’s citizens directly.

The U.S. Army leased Camp Edwards, the Massachusetts Military Reservation located in the towns of Falmouth, Bourne, and Sandwich. The Army began to plan a massive expansion to accommodate the influx of soldiers. The first peacetime draft, known as the Selective Service Act, was passed in September, and Wellfleet men would be registering by October.. To expand the Army, Congress federalized the National Guard in August. The Congress also appropriated the funds to build the training camps for the new Army, and work began at Camp Edwards in mid-September.

In the Wellfleet federal census of 1940, eleven men listed their occupation as “Carpenter,” as well as other men who listed their occupation as “Laborer.” The builders at Camp Edwards would construct nearly 1500 buildings: barracks, mess halls, officers’ quarters, chapels, recreational space, a hospital, and more. We know there were at least two Wellfleet men who worked on the project, as a November news story reported that they were unable to return to town in time to vote.

In June, the Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act, was passed by Congress, requiring every non-citizen over 14 years old to register. Aliens had to go to the post office to fill out a form and get fingerprinted. Part of the Act made it punishable for anyone, alien or citizen, to willfully advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government. It was thought that registering aliens was a good way to keep watch over Nazis, Communists, and Fascists. 

Aliens on the Cape, it was reported, often did not realize their status, since many had been in the country for some time and had never bothered to become citizens. Eventually, 358 Provincetown aliens registered. Wellfleet had 12 aliens in the 1940 census who presumably registered, since the fine for not doing so was a hefty $1,000 and could include up to 6 months in jail. During the pre-war and war years on the Cape, many people underwent the citizenship process and were sworn in at the Barnstable County Courthouse. For a while, there were citizenship classes in Provincetown.

In the June 20^th edition of the Provincetown Advocate, there appeared an editorial “Bearing False Witness.” The editor remembered incidents during the last war when “witch hunts” were conducted based on “wicked whispered slander.” He reported three recent events in Martha’s Vineyard, in Wellfleet, and in Provincetown.

In Wellfleet, a nasty rumor had impugned one of the town’s finest citizens, unnamed, who had to ask the American Legion to verify his previous military service. In his 2022 book, The Shores of Bohemia, John Taylor Williams tells a similar story, when Wellfleet artist Edwin Dickinson was accused of being a Nazi because two magazines from Germany were found in his home by police. Dickinson’s children were teased at school. Dickinson’s beard, like that of a German U-boat crew, and his habit of painting while on the beach, made him a possible Nazi spy. Williams did not give the year of the incident.

World War II began as the summer of 1939 came to a close; Germany invaded Poland on September 1, and on September 3, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Within days, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were also at war. The war with Italy was not declared until June 10, 1940.

In Washington, Roosevelt immediately stated the United States’ neutrality and asked Congress to repeal the arms embargo and amend the Neutrality Act. By November, the “Cash and Carry Act” was enacted, allowing warring nations to purchase arms for cash but requiring them to transport them in their own ships.

The Battle of the Atlantic began, with German U-boats hunting down merchant ships to destroy the supplies, food, oil, and war material that the Allies needed to fight the war. Roosevelt declared that the U.S. Navy was on “Neutrality Patrols” and was ordered to report sightings of German U-boats. It would take another year for the U.S. to arm its merchant ships and fully end neutrality.

A few days after the war began, news reports heightened unease about activity in the Atlantic. A fishing trawler off Georges Bank reported seeing a large airplane with a German swastika clearly visible. There were reports of the number of Allied ships that German U-boats had sunk. There was a flurry of excitement in Orleans when two life buoys marked “Bremen” washed up on a beach. The German passenger ship had been ordered to leave New York and return home.

The Massachusetts National Guard began recruiting for the Coast Artillery Corps, with plans to establish a “military reservation in Bourne.” The Daily News in New York wrote about the possibility of the Germans setting up a submarine base off Martha’s Vineyard, a place that would be able to provide fuel and supplies. The United States was losing its sense of being impregnable.  (It wasn’t until 1975 that an early 20th-century German plan to invade the United States, using Provincetown as a base of operations, would be revealed.)

Other news stories addressed the possibility that communication in the U.S. would need to be controlled and that the new medium, radio, would have to be included for the first time.

In mid-September, the Provincetown Advocate reported that the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard were investigating a mysterious vessel sighted near the Pollock Rip Lightship off Chatham, the east entrance to Vineyard Sound. It turned out to be the U.S. submarine Sea Dragon, undergoing trials out of Provincetown. The sighting was part of the new Atlantic patrols; in these early days, some coordination appeared to be lacking. The submarine trials in Provincetown continued, as reported in the Provincetown Advocate, with information provided by Mrs. Davis of Bradford Street, whose home hosted the Navy Trial Board and Electric Boat Company officials when they were in town.

The Advocate also reported in early October that two Navy destroyers had been at anchor at the entrance to Provincetown Harbor for two days, identifying them as the 395 and 397. The paper had not been able to learn whether they were part of the new patrol being established in the Atlantic. Formal censorship of war-related information would not be put in place until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It took a while for “loose lips sink ships” to be a guideline.

After the war, The Cape Codder would characterize the war years on the Cape as a time when Cape Codders lived in a state of siege with “all kinds of hush-hush activities going on in the inner and outer waters of the Cape.”

By late September, newspapers around the country were reminding Americans of the U-Boat incident off Orleans, now known as Nauset Beach, in July of 1918, when a U-Boat fired on a tugboat and barges, bringing the war to American waters. Chatham Naval Air Station sent two planes to bomb the sub, but it had submerged and disappeared. The wounded were brought to the Nauset Coast Guard station and then transported to hospitals in Boston.

An editorial in the Advocate welcomed FDR’s declaration of neutrality and appeared to try to soothe people with a prediction that Germany was in a bad economic shape and that the German people were against the war, so it would not last long —perhaps two years if “the French fight a defensive war.” Later in the month, the editorial focused on consumer goods, urging people not to worry or stockpile, as there were plenty of supplies available. It appears that some people, concerned about a lack of supplies and significant price increases, had been purchasing flour, sugar, and other staples, resulting in shortages in some areas and forcing store owners to limit purchases.

Another part of the war story was the effort to get all the Americans traveling in Europe onto ships and back home. On the third day of the war, the British ship SS Athenia was torpedoed by a German submarine near Ireland with the loss of 117 passengers and crew, including 28 Americans. This brought back memories of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1918, an event that led the Americans into World War I.

In Provincetown, the Advocate reported on September 14 that the Secretary of State had informed Mary Heaton Vorse’s daughter that her mother would arrive back in the United States in a few days. Vorse had been traveling and reporting in Europe for several years. In July of 1939, she’d written three articles for The New York Times about contemporary life in Germany, their economic recovery, the surge forward, and the strain it was putting on the German people.

In October, The Boston Globe published a story about a seven-foot apparition in a black cloak, chasing children through the streets of Provincetown and setting fires. The Globe reported that this “Black Flash” appeared every fall. Two days later, the Provincetown Advocate picked up the story with a Captain Blackstrap commenting that he’d met the Flash on the road to Helltown, a fishing community that was part of the town. In fact, there was an arson scare in the town, although the Police Chief was certain it was teenagers causing the trouble. The Black Flash remained part of Provincetown’s atmosphere throughout the war.

In November, South Wellfleet residents heard howling in Paine Hollow and named their apparition “Tarzan.” The men got out their shotguns and searched for it, but it was never found, although some people thought it was a steer that had gotten loose.

These incidents were perhaps a sign of the unease that began as the war got underway.

In November, one of Wellfleet’s newest residents addressed the Board of Trade, adding an international dimension to the Board’s regular work of making Wellfleet an attractive place for business. Paul Chavchavadze was a Georgian prince who’d been a cadet at Russia’s Imperial Cavalry Academy. When the Revolution broke out, he was ordered to join the “White Army” to defend the Czar. Paul’s father had been killed by the Reds. Paul had fled to London, where he met his wife, Princess Nina Romanov, a niece of the Czar.

Paul Chavchavadze and his wife, Nina, had moved to Wellfleet from New York earlier that year, purchasing the old home of a sea captain, Aaron Rich.  To fund the purchase, they used an old brooch that Nina’s grandmother, Queen Olga of Greece, had given them as a wedding present. In the 1940 census, the family also includes their 15-year-old son, David.

The Board of Trade’s evening program at the First Congregational Church was an effort to better understand the Soviet Union. Perhaps they were moved by the disturbance between Russia and Finland, as there was a small Finnish community settled in Wellfleet. At the end of November, Russia invaded Finland, taking a portion of its land, in what is now called “The Winter War.”

Chavchavadze addressed the group on the last days of the Romanovs and the importance of the Cossacks to the Russian state; he stated that the secrecy of the current government prevented him from being informed about current events. He said that he was “happy to be chopping wood in Wellfleet while Europe seems to be again going mad.”

After a reportedly excellent chicken pie dinner prepared by the church’s Ladies Aid Society, the Board of Trade turned to other matters, including the plan to have an Information Bureau in Wellfleet by the summer.

The Wellfleet Board of Trade was led by Oliver Austin, Jr., a successful Wellfleet florist who had recently opened another greenhouse and shop in Provincetown. Austin was also the ornithologist who, with his father, established the bird-banding station in South Wellfleet, which later became the Audubon Sanctuary.

In late November, Provincetown’s Police Chief received a letter from the “German Library of Information” located in New York City. In reporting this, the Provincetown Advocate asserted that it had also received regular mailings from the same source. The editor had received the German “White Book,” which asserted that British aggression was the reason the war had started in September. We now know that this agency was a part of the German government’s propaganda campaign that operated in the U.S. from 1936 to 1941 under Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.

Wellfleet’s year ended with two destructive fires, one at the Floyd Atwood house and one at Louis Hatch’s house. The Atwood father and son were saved by Mrs. Atwood’s return home from a meeting, ensuring their escape from the fire. The elderly Mr. Hatch, who lived alone, was not so lucky. He died in the fire, and his home and barn near the South Wellfleet Cemetery went up in flames. At that time, the Wellfleet firemen had to run hoses over to Blackfish Creek to get water. A second issue concerning firefighting was the lack of a siren to alert the surrounding area. The Truro firemen arrived at the Hatch fire only after someone used a short-wave radio to call them.

The two fires spurred the town to get its siren reinstalled. It had been attached to the old school at the corner of Main Street, but was removed when the school was demolished.

A Cape tourist industry spokesman looked to 1940 as a successful year for the Cape, as no one was traveling to Europe. There was concern that the World’s Fair that had opened in New York in the spring of 1939 might draw visitors away from a Cape vacation.

I’ve been curious for some time about what it was like to live in Wellfleet during World War II.

When I wrote this blog post about Camp Wellfleet, I shared the story of the family that had to temporarily relocate from their house so that the Army could conduct maneuvers on a nearby hill.

I was born during the war, so I was too young to have personal memories. My mother shared one: that during the war, you couldn’t take photos at “the Back Shore,” as she called the ocean beach, because there were military patrols there, and if you had a camera, it would be opened and the film exposed.

Another friend with a cottage on the dunes told me about the blackout shades there, still at the windows until just a few years ago.

I did not find a memoir written about those years in Wellfleet, although one may exist.  Recent books about the bohemians who settled in Wellfleet have covered that time and were useful.

All of these stories made me want to learn more. How did the war and the addition of the military affect the lives of the people of the Outer Cape? I did not find anyone writing about the military activity that surrounded them. I pieced together the radar work in North Truro; most of the available material focuses on the 1950s rather than the war years.

Books and articles about “the Home Front” help explain the many government rules people had to follow in their day-to-day lives. 

Since the war, there’s been a lot written about the Battle of the Atlantic, which affected Cape Codders, if not directly, then at least by causing unease about the possibility of an invasion.

Newspapers, thankfully digitized and online, were my primary source. I used The Barnstable Patriot, which regularly reported on town meetings and the military service of local young men. I could not find an online archive of The Cape Cod Standard Times, published from 1936 to 1975, though some microfilm is available at the Falmouth Public Library. There was some coverage of the Outer Cape in The Standard Times (New Bedford) that was available to me in the database newspapers.com. The Cape Codder did not start publication until 1946.

The Provincetown Advocate was the best source for reporting on the Outer Cape towns, from Eastham to Provincetown. The paper provided details of how the towns coped with the military presence, shortages, and the effort to provide for those fortunate enough to spend their summer vacation on the Cape. I was sadly surprised by the number of deaths in the Outer Cape area of young men in military training, events that the paper reported regularly.

During the war years, I also sensed a change in Wellfleet’s zeitgeist as the town of fewer than 1000 residents (1940), a fishing village, added layers of people from different walks of life. Bohemians, writers, artists, and intellectuals who may have moved to Provincetown earlier settled in Wellfleet. Different political views were expressed. There were a few immigrants, some exiles from other places in the world.

Over these years, town improvement projects were developed, and the town became more dependent on the tourist and summer-resident economy. The stage was set for the economic development of the 1950s.

I’ve widened my focus here, from South Wellfleet to the Outer Cape, Eastham to Provincetown, with a mention of Orleans if I found something of interest. Since I used the Provincetown Advocate, I learned a lot about that town; someone could write a book about the war years there. While I try to stay focused on Wellfleet, other towns get a mention when I find something interesting. Provincetown was much larger than Wellfleet and Truro, and so had much more to report.

I decided to organize this by year, starting in 1939, when the war broke out in Europe, and ending in 1945, when the war ended. Rather than summarize each year, I decided to report activities and events month by month, adding in war-related events as they happened. Each year is divided into two parts so that no one post will be too long. There were only a few contemporary photographs to share, so I added images of contemporary advertisements and movies.  

PART ONE: 1939. WELLFLEET DURING THE WAR YEARS

World War II began in Europe in September, so I’m starting my Wellfleet war years project at the beginning of that year.

As the 1940 federal census will show, Wellfleet had 890 residents. It was heavily Republican, with 660 registered voters. Organizations were important: the churches, the Chequessett Grange, the Masons for the men, the Order of the Eastern Star for the women. Men also had the American Legion and the Highland Fish and Game Club, covering both Truro and Wellfleet.

Wellfleet had a Board of Trade, formed in 1937, and a group of summer residents called Wellfleet Associates, formed that year, to allow these property owners to express their views about the town. One of the first requests they had was to have the town name more roads. The South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association (SWNA) was also formed in 1937.

Whist parties were popular, and at many meetings, full meals were served, prepared by Wellfleet’s hard-working women. In the summer of 1939, Wellfleet Associates had a dance at Legion Hall, today’s Left Bank Gallery, where many gatherings were held. The SWNA had a card party at the recreation room at Cook’s Camps at Dallinger Heights, the old name for the hill near LeCount Hollow beach.

Scallops were more important than oysters in 1939, reflecting the change that had happened in the 1920s. In the summer of 1930, an effort was made to form a local cooperative to stabilize scallop prices, rather than have each shellfisherman sell to out-of-town buyers for whatever price was offered. The project never moved forward.

The Barnstable Patriot printed an article in 1939 about all the Cape Cod beaches. Wellfleet’s new beach on the harbor front (today’s Mayo Beach) was highlighted, along with mentions of Town Landings at Commercial Street, Indian Neck, and one near the Chequessett golf links. There were landings at freshwater ponds, and at several points where “town ways touch the ocean” on the back side of the Cape.

Another 1939 article in the Patriot named the “villages” of Wellfleet: Briar Lane, Great Beach Hill, Great Island, Griffin Island, Lieutenant Island, Money Hill, Pamet Point, Pucker Town, and South Wellfleet’s Spring Valley. An advertisement in The Provincetown Advocate offered 500 acres for sale on Great Island. The historian at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum found one reference to Pucker Town, which placed it in South Wellfleet, but there was no reference as to where.

Lawrence Gardinier was re-elected as a Wellfleet Selectman in 1939. Born in 1900, Gardinier had grown up in Wellfleet. In 1913, his father, George Gardinier, murdered his mother, Agnes, in her family home above the grocery store. The father had served some time in prison previously, convicted for smuggling Chinese immigrants into the country, and his wife had divorced him. After his release from prison, he came to Wellfleet hoping to be reunited with her, but she had declined.

The now orphaned Lawrence was taken in by the Taylor family. After serving in the Navy in World War I, he returned home to Wellfleet and married one of the Taylor daughters. He was first elected Town Moderator in 1936, after leading Wellfleet’s American Legion post since the 1930s, when the American Legion Hall was built on Commercial Street.

Gardinier is remembered today for his installation of the Town Clock, which tells the time on the hour and the half-hour in ship’s bell time. Wellfleet named the junction of Main Street and Holbrook Avenue “Lawrence Gardinier Square.”

1939 was the beginning of Charles E. Frazier Jr.’s political career. He defeated Charles Rich for the position of Selectman in February 1939. He was 30 years old and lived with his parents, Hattie and Charles Sr. His mother was a member of the Wellfleet Holbrook family, and his father was Canadian, from Nova Scotia. Frazier was educated in Boston at Boston College, where he received both his undergraduate and law degrees. He was a practicing attorney in Wellfleet.

Frazier’s work for the town before the war and his military achievements during the war led the citizens of Wellfleet to hold him in high regard. Much later, Frazier would be characterized as “controlling the town,” like a Tammany boss. He served as Selectman for 22 years, Town Moderator for almost as long, and Legal Counsel for 40 years.

It was a very cold winter in 1939, since the news reported that Captain Simon Berrio and his crew of the dragger Marion had to break up the ice in Wellfleet Harbor to clear the channel so that the fishermen could leave for their fishing grounds. The news also reported that the Town Meeting in February was brief, with $66,173 appropriated for the coming year. The schools were the most expensive, at $15,555, while the police were funded at $300. There were no police officers, as one of the Selectmen served in that capacity.

Mr. Frazier made news a couple of times in 1939 as he pushed the state of Massachusetts to finish the widening and paving of Route 6, which had been improved as far as “near the Wellfleet/Eastham Town Line.” The bumpy, curvy old road ran right through Wellfleet, taking a sharp turn to the left at the end of Main Street, today where Main Street, Holbrook Avenue, and West Main Street meet. The state advertised a contract for the roadwork in March but had to re-advertise in October. The Governor’s office had delayed the process for unspecified reasons.

On that corner stood Wellfleet’s old elementary school, which was condemned by a building inspector in 1937. After securing state permission, the town financed a new school in 1938, built on the hill on Long Pond Road, where it stands today. In the meantime, the students had to be housed in temporary classrooms around town.

In the Spring of 1939, the lieutenant governor came to dedicate the new school, and that fall, the first students began attending it. As the 1940 census shows, there were approximately 80 school-age young people in Wellfleet.

Summer resident Phoebe Atwood Taylor, a member of the Wellfleet Atwood family, was a popular mystery writer whose books were serialized in newspapers across the country. Her Asey Mayo character was a plain-speaking Cape Cod fisherman who solved crimes.

The South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association announced plans to place a new marker at the site of Marconi’s Wireless Station, replacing a crumbling concrete slab.

On Memorial Day, 1939, an annual ceremony was held at the South Wellfleet Cemetery. Later, the news reported that the cemetery had been “desecrated” with headstones broken, as “motorists used the shell-paved avenues as speedways.”

In the summer of 1939, the Wellfleet Board of Trade, the Wellfleet Associates, and the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association held a joint meeting where the outlines their goals for the town: establish an Information Bureau to assist visitors, establish a new assessor’s survey map,  establish a comfort station at the bathing beach, gain better control over gypsy moths and tent caterpillars, organize a town meeting in the summer, move the old church on Main Street, now called Colonial Hall, back to South Wellfleet. The SWNA sought a new directional sign to the Marconi Wireless site. The Wellfleet Associates wanted rubbish barrels set out around town.

In August, the Coast Guard celebrated the 150^th anniversary of the Lighthouse Service, welcoming visitors to all the lighthouses: Highland (1798), Race Point (1816), and Wood End and Long Point (1827).

The Truro Neighborhood Association celebrated the restoration of the Old South Truro Meeting House.

The Provincetown Advocate reported proudly in August that Sinclair Lewis, the distinguished American author who wrote his first book while in Ptown in 1911, was at the Wharf Theater, rehearsing a role in the O’Neil play “Ah, Wilderness.” Lewis’s cautionary tale “It Can’t Happen Here” had been published in 1935.

In May, the Provincetown Library removed the works of John Dos Passos, allegedly at the request of the Catholic Daughters of America, because the books were judged to be “radical and obscene.”  Later, the organization stated that only one of its members had requested the removal, and the Library clarified that only the Trustees could remove a book; Dos Passos’ books had been placed on the reserved shelf. Do Passos lived in Provincetown and later in Wellfleet.

Provincetown’s Catholic Daughters also sponsored a motion for the March special town meeting that everyone show “common decency in costume in public places” by forbidding the wearing of shorts and halters. The issue received widespread public attention and ridicule in newspapers across the country.

Also in the Spring, Lancaster Clark announced that he had purchased the Adams House, located on Route 6 in South Wellfleet. The restaurant dated back to 1918, and was described as a “former rendezvous of famous Provincetown painters, writers, and actors.”  The restaurant’s name was soon changed to “The Big Dipper.”

The Fourth of July celebration in Wellfleet included a bonfire and a dance the night before, a morning parade on the Fourth that featured a Coast Guard delegation, the American Legion, and members of the Board of Selectmen. The Chairman of the Parade dressed as Uncle Sam, and Mrs. John Daniels appeared in a Statue of Liberty costume. Wellfleet schoolteacher Martha Porch dressed as Mrs. Washington, and Mr. Kemp was George.  There were sports and swimming events at Mayo Beach in the afternoon. In the evening, the high school band held a concert followed by a fireworks display.

In the background of 1939 was the state of the world: aggression in Europe with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and the beginning of World War II in Asia, as Japan was already at war with China. In his January State of the Union address, President Roosevelt called for strengthening the military and other American institutions. He submitted a $550 billion budget to Congress, which was later adopted.  

Several news stories in 1939, before the war began, signaled the impending expansion of military activity on the Outer Cape. In February, work commenced on the reconstruction of the Cape Cod Canal, widening it from 315 to 480 feet and deepening it to 32 feet. The Canal would become a crucial element in moving merchant ships and oil tankers from the United States to Great Britain, keeping essential products flowing to the British.

In the Spring, there was a brief announcement of plans for a National Guard Camp in North Falmouth. This marked the beginning of Camp Edwards’ development.

In January, in Provincetown, the business community responded enthusiastically to the possibility that the U.S. Navy would build a naval base there. The businessmen also believed that constructing a large anchorage and parking for 300 cars would help develop tourism in the town and attract wealthy yacht owners. Later in the month, the local V.F.W. chapter sent a letter to Congress, detailing the advantages of the protected harbor for Naval training, a place of refuge, and a useful base, if needed, against German submarine activities.

For several years, Provincetown had been the site of testing newly built submarines. The submarines were brought there from the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, and underwent a trial run. Provincetown was the site of the loss of the S-4 submarine in 1927, when 34 men were lost in the sunken submarine in the harbor, an event that is still commemorated every December.

In March, two one-ton torpedoes were “lost” in the testing of the submarine Saury S-8, found by fishermen, and safely returned to the Sklaroff Wharf, where they were loaded onto a truck and returned to Connecticut. Turns out, they were dummies.

Submarines and their safety were front-page news in May 1939 when the U.S.S. Squalus sank off the coast of New Hampshire with the loss of 26 men, although a new rescue technique had been used and helped save 33 lives.  In Chatham, the U.S. Naval Reserve held a ball to raise funds for the families of the lost men.

Note: 1939 will continue in Part Two

The Atlantic White Cedar Swamp (Chamaecyparis thyoides) within the Cape Cod National Seashore (CCNS) is popular with park visitors. While accessing the walk involves driving out to the parking area for Marconi Beach, the swamp and its boardwalk trail are relatively inland, not far beyond the Rail Trail as it winds through South Wellfleet. On a map, the swamp is just to the north and west of the South Wellfleet Cemetery.

The CCNS brochure describes how the cedar swamp was formed. Glaciers left a depression in the land; as the ocean rose, the freshwater table of land was lifted, and a “kettle pond” developed about 7,000 years ago. Some 5,000 years ago, Atlantic White Cedar began to grow in the depression, as it did in numerous areas around the Cape and southeastern Massachusetts. Today’s plant debris in the swamp makes a peat layer of 24 feet.

A few years ago, I heard from a neighbor that one of the National Park’s outstanding volunteers, Rusty Moore, had done some work researching the owners of the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp. Since this is a South Wellfleet landscape feature, it caught my interest. Recently, thanks to Bill Burke, the park’s Cultural Resources Program Manager and Historian, I received the materials Rusty left in a file at the Seashore offices.

As I reviewed Rusty’s materials and then did my research, I found myself following what may have been his thought process. Beyond the research on the swamp owners, which was discovered only by reading multiple deeds at the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds, there was a question: How was the cedar used as a resource?

The books and other documents typically used for Cape Cod history provide scant evidence of the use of cedar by the Cape’s settlers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Other natural resources are fully covered: whales, fish, shellfish, salt hay, cranberries, and salt-making.

The forests that were a resource for the Cape’s settlers were decimated by the early to mid-1700s. Cedar would have been one of the resources destroyed. According to a contemporary description, growing a new tree takes up to 50 years. According to the Seashore’s brochure, the original Cape builders used cedar for their farm buildings, for joists, frames, doors, rafters, floors, and for tanks to hold whale oil. They made fence posts to mark their property and to contain their cattle and sheep. 

In his 1939 study of Cape Cod’s forests, Alpeter notes that when the Pilgrims landed, 97% of the land surface of Cape Cod was covered in forest. The principal tree species were white pine, hemlock, pitch pine, red and white oak, white ash, yellow birch, beech, red maple, tupelo, sassafras, and holly. He notes, “Great stands of coast white cedar (his term) occupied the bogs.” In 250 years, all of this forest was eliminated through systematic burning, clear-cutting, excessive pasturing, and insects and fungi attacks.

Wood was a fuel source, and it was used for home building and ship building. Initially, salt was made by boiling seawater, and the fires were made by burning wood. Wood fires also supported the try-works where whale oil was processed. Cedar might have been used in the building of salt works in the late 18^th and early 19^th century; a 1992 newspaper article about dredging at Rock Harbor mentioned cedar pilings “that might have been related to saltworks construction.”

Rusty’s file included neatly typed quotations from three writers in the 19^th century who observed the lack of trees on the Cape. Timothy Dwight, the President of Yale College, wrote about the eastern United States in the 1790s, covering the outer Cape in 1800.  He noted that, from Orleans, there was no forest until he reached a point one mile south of Wellfleet line. From this point to Wellfleet Village was a stand “lower and leaner than any we had seen before.” Dwight was followed by Edward A Kendall who wrote about his travels in the northeastern states in 1809, covering North Eastham and South Wellfleet. Finally, Rusty included Henry David Thoreau’s writing about the lack of good-sized trees on his walk in 1849.

Altpeter also discovered that, shortly after 1706, the Reverend Samuel Osborn of Eastham began teaching local inhabitants to use peat for fuel, “proving that 65 years had been sufficient for the people of Eastham to complete the destruction of their forest.”

Another item in Rusty’s papers was a copy of a letter from Mary Magenau, whose home was near the South Wellfleet Cedar Swamp. Mrs. Magenau wrote to the University of Massachusetts Forestry Department concerning information she had promised them about uses of the cedar swamp, based on her review of deeds that mention the swamp. She cites references to uses of the peat in the cedar swamp as possibly to enrich garden land due to the very poor soil in Wellfleet. But might it be possible that the harvesting of peat was for fuel?

The 1839 deed transferring a portion of the swamp from Timothy Cole of Eastham to George and Timothy Ward of Wellfleet reserves Mr. Cole’s right to “get peat” in the three winter months. This may be noting a use of the peat for fuel, not for enriching soil.

A search for Atlantic White Cedar in the pages of The Barnstable Patriot in the 19^th century found plenty of mentions of cedar swamps all over the Cape. Most mentions were part of land sales descriptions, and several noted the conversion of a cedar swamp into a cranberry bog, a popular habit of the time.  I found only one noting the actual use of the cedar trees.

An article in 1847 noted that Mr. Lovell of Yarmouth had covered a cedar swamp with beach sand to create a cranberry bog. 

In 1888, it was reported that three gentlemen purchased four acres of cedar swamp in West Harwich to make into cranberry land. Also in 1888, Mr. Nickerson of South Orleans engaged a force of men clearing up a cedar swamp for cranberry culture.

In 1891, Mr. Phinney of Barnstable advised farm management, recommending that farmers “ditch the swamp and drain it, and turn it into a hay crop.”

In 1892, Mr. Frank Crocker of Hyannis received six horses from Boston to be used in draining the great cedar swamp “over east.”

In 1903, in one of the few mentions of cedar’s usefulness, Centerville’s Mr. Guyer “had a gang of men in the cedar swamp last week cutting and stripping poles to be used by the new Telephone Company.”

Finally, Rusty’s file included a page of a sketch of the cedar swamp land that he annotated with notes about owners. South Wellfleet neighbors shared the ownership: Timothy and George Ward, William Hatch, David Wiley, John Witherell, Noah Doane, and Ephraim Stubbs. Elbridge and Oliver Arey, sons of the second Reuben Arey, were left portions of the swamp in their father’s will. (As I worked on this project I discovered that Timothy Ward sold his home to William Hatch, which is the house that burned to the ground in 1939 that I wrote about here.)

Perhaps the number of owners helped “save” the swamp from being turned into a cranberry bog that a single owner might have pursued.

Rusty used a sketch of the swamp that was part of what appears to be a report on samples taken from the swamp. I may have identified this sheet as coming from a multi-university study of climate change. The study used samples from Atlantic White Cedar tree rings from 20 swamps to reconstruct temperatures in New England using radiocarbon measuring.

Another piece of paper in Rusty’s file was the 1850 “manufacturing census” part of the federal census, listing the men of Wellfleet who owned businesses. The first eight were carpenters, with George Ward, one of the cedar swamp owners, having the most extensive operation. While the others employed one man, he employed four and produced eight buildings yearly. This is the only link I found of an owner who may have been using the cedar.

That ended Rusty Moore’s papers and my exploration of Atlantic White Cedar in South Wellfleet.

In recent years, the Wampanoags have shared their use of cedar to build the frames of their traditional homes called wetus. My contact at the Truro Historical Society, where a wetu was recently built at the Highland House museum, thought that the source of that cedar was from Connecticut.  There’s also a wetu at the Atwood Museum in Chatham. It’s easy to imagine the cedar from South Wellfleet serving this purpose.

Robert Finch recorded his essay about South Wellfleet’s White Cedar Swamp in his weekly “In This Place, A Cape Cod Notebook” in 2014. He found the White Cedar Swamp “magical and full of wordless meaning … a deeply mythic place, encompassing a watery underworld, a silent and muffled Middle Earth, with glimpses of a celestial overworld.”

SOURCES

This is a link to the tree-ring study: web.whoi.edu/coastal-group/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2020/12/Pearl-2020-A-late-Holocene-subfossil-Atlantic-white-cedar-tree-ring-chronology-from-the-northeastern-United-States.pdf

Altpeter, L. Stanford “A History of the Forests of Cape Cod” un-published 1939 M.S. thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. npshistory.com/publications/caco/forest-history.pdf

Finch, Robert’s broadcast of his walk through the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp: Wellfleet’s White Cedar Swamp: A Walk Through the Brain of Nature | CAI

1850 Manufacturer Census for Wellfleet available at www.ancestry.com

Deeds for Barnstable County are available here: Barnstable County Registry of Deeds

Cape Cod National Seashore brochure “Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail,” undated

I only discovered the “other Wellfleet” when a Google Alert announced that a rodeo was coming to town. Wondering why Wellfleet, Massachusetts would be planning such an event, I clicked on the news, and there was Wellfleet, Nebraska. Recently, I decided to explore the other Wellfleet’s origin, the only other one in the United States far from the Massachusetts coast.

Wellfleet is in west-central Nebraska, in Lincoln County, about 250 miles west of the Missouri River. The Platte River flows through the county from west to east.

Cape Cod journalists have written about Wellfleet Nebraska. In 2006, the Cape Cod Times reporter Eric Williams told the story of Wellfleet’s founding by a “real estate man from Massachusetts” named Carroll Hawkins and a British investor named Dr. Frederick J Tompkins. The story is found in numerous places, making it the official origin story of the town.

As I began to research the story of these two men, I expected to find that Hawkins had a Cape Cod connection. However, I found a different and more complicated tale. So, while this story has nothing to do with our Cape Cod Wellfleet, I thought I would write about it here, just to offer another point of view.

Researching the origin of Wellfleet required a brush-up on U.S. History. Nebraska’s land is part of the Louisiana Purchase (1802) and Its history includes the displacement of native people. The route to the west through Nebraska’s Platte River Valley was already established. Nebraska became a territory in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act which increased the tension in the country as the white settlers were allowed to vote on whether to allow slavery. In 1867 Nebraska became a state. The Homestead Act of 1862 increased settlement, giving individual citizens 160 acres of land if they could “prove” it by building a home and farm at least ten acres for five years.

Nebraska began to be settled by Americans after Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 establishing the plan to build a railroad across the country to aid settlement. The Union Pacific’s Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869 and other railroads, including the Burlington, built interconnecting lines to move people and their farm crops. The federal government deeded thousands of acres to the railroad companies which they, in turn, could sell off to finance their operations.

Building railroads was at the forefront of everything from finance to technology in the mid-19th Century. Civil engineers were attracted to the industry just as high-tech is an attraction today. The profession developed its procedures for surveying and construction of tracks and bridges. As the roads were laid out, it was typical to designate a town every eight miles or so, as the steam engines needed water.

The railroads financed their operation by forming land companies that sold their land holdings, laid out the towns along their routes, and eventually “platted” or formalized the town by laying out the streets and blocks and defining property lines.  The land company for the Burlington was the Lincoln Townsite Committee.

In my search for links between Nebraska and the Cape, I found a small notice in The Yarmouth Register on March 12, 1880 that A. H. Knowles, a Civil Engineer from Yarmouth, was headed for Nebraska to work on the Burlington and Missouri Railroad.  A further notice was posted in June 1881 that Mrs. Knowles and their two children would join him. Knowles, the son of a sea captain, was pursuing a popular career choice. I matched Mr. Knowles’ stay in Nebraska with the fact that the Burlington Railroad was built through Lincoln County in 1880-1881, establishing stations in Ingham, Wellfleet, Somerset, Dickens, and Wallace.  The Lincoln Townsite Committee platted the towns of Wellfleet and Wallace in 1887 and Dickens in 1889.

It was not possible to determine if Mr. Knowles or his wife bestowed the name “Wellfleet” on the Nebraska town. I looked for some connection between the Knowles family in Yarmouth to Wellfleet but did not find a certain match.

The Barnstable Patriot reported in September of 1881 that Mr. and Mrs. Knowles had returned to Yarmouth where they made their home for the remainder of their lives.

Mr. Knowles was not the only Cape Codder I found working in Nebraska. Thomas Doane of Orleans went to Nebraska in 1869 to work on the Burlington after making his reputation in New England as the chief engineer of the Hoosac tunnel project in western Massachusetts. Mr. Doane settled in Crete, building a large mansion, and convincing Burlington to donate land to establish a college, today’s Doane University.

 Another engineer, Anselmo Smith, a civil engineer on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad named a town “Hyannis” in 1887, out in the sand hills of northwestern Nebraska. The Cape Cod Hyannis has regular news reports of people visiting the Nebraska town. In 1872, another engineer bestowed the name “Orleans” on a town in Harlan County.

With Wellfleet established, the newspapers began to cover the life of the town.  In November 1885 the railroad company erected a fine station building and a section house. There was a lumber yard in the town. Nearby Medicine Creek reportedly produced a fine flow of water. The report goes on to cover the status of Somerset, Dickens, and Wallace. 

In late 1887 the newspapers reported that the railroad was putting down a well in Wellfleet, and, in February 1888, building a water tower. There seemed to be some confusion in November 1887 whether the post office was open or not. Mr. A.L. Davis who owned a store there was working on building a boarding house. Mr. Davis would also provide a Christmas tree for the young people in Dec 1887. In February 1888 there was a report that a saloon would open, and, by March a complaint that the saloon was not properly licensed and that there should be a church instead. In June it was reported that Wellfleet was too small to have a Fourth of July celebration, so everyone would be in Wallace or Curtis instead. Two schoolhouses were covering the district. Farmers were “proving” their homesteads.

This is when Wellfleet’s other origin story begins. The story credits Carroll Hawkins and Dr. Frederick James Tompkins as either “founding” or “building” the town, although the town already existed. Hawkins is characterized as a “Massachusetts Real Estate Man” and Tomkins as a British barrister. It was popular for British capitalists to invest in the western United States during the land boom of the late 1870s and 1880s.

Carroll Hawkins was the son of an Episcopal minister, W.G. Hawkins. Born in Massachusetts in 1863, Hawkins came to Nebraska when he was 15 years old when his father was sent to Beatrice, Nebraska to be the Episcopal minister there. Hawkins first appeared in the newspaper in 1885 when his job as Deputy Clerk of the District Court in North Platte ended as the office did not have enough work to support his position. By 1886 he was elected as County Clerk. In the 1885 state census, he is in North Platte living in a hotel where he worked as the night clerk. North Platte is about 30 miles north of Wellfleet and the county seat for Lincoln County where Wellfleet is located.

There was no evidence gleaned from the local newspapers that Hawkins was “a real estate man from Massachusetts.” A historian from NE recently commented that perhaps he had become one later in life, and, indeed, in his obituary in 1941, Hawkins was a prominent citizen of Paonia, Colorado, a man with a real estate and insurance agency who had served his community for many years.  

Dr. Frederick James Tompkins was described in the newspapers as an eminent barrister from England. His obituary in 1904 when he was 90 years old described his career beginning as a Congregationalist minister who was sent to Nova Scotia in 1847 where he organized and built Gorham Congregational College in 1855. In 1859, Tompkins returned to England and studied law. He was admitted to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. During the Civil War in the United States, he was a war correspondent for the London Times and other British publications, reporting from General Grant’s headquarters. No mention was made in the obituary of his involvement in Nebraska.

In the spring of 1888, Dr. Tompkins was invited to give the commencement speech at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He was described as “one of the foremost barristers” of his country. He was in the U.S. attending an international law conference. There was no information found on what attracted him to Nebraska. Perhaps Tompkins envisioned himself as a British capitalist. in that role. Later, in October of 1888, Tompkins came to the state, visiting Lincoln where the state bar association asked him to speak. WE do not know if he was a friend of the Hawkins family before that time, or if they met in Lincoln.

The following year, In May, 1889, the local newspapers reported the founding of the Wellfleet Real Estate and Improvement Company, incorporated with the Secretary of State with a capital stock of $1 million, offering 10,000 shares at $100 each. Described as a powerful syndicate, the company was headed by Frederick James Tompkins. The Vice President was Reverend W.G. Hawkins, and the Secretary was Carroll Hawkins. The directors were from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and London, England. Another Hawkins son, Joseph, was on the board also. In this report Tompkins was credited with helping Birmingham, Alabama, get started on the road to prosperity with British capital, although my research showed no connection. Tompkins was described as a barrister at law for all the large steamship lines in England, a member of the historical society in New York, and a member of a council that sought to codify the laws of all nations. There is a kind of “hucksterism” around the reporting, making Tompkins a professional man of the highest order.

It was reported that the Reverend Hawkins and Tompkins had traveled around England together for the previous four months, giving lectures about Nebraska, and seeking to establish a colony of 100 Englishmen in Wellfleet. This fact appears to put the Hawkins-Tompkins connection between Carroll Hawkins’s father and the barrister.

The Wellfleet Real Estate and Improvement Company purchased twelve hundred acres in Wellfleet, announcing that they would build a townsite. True, other entities could build towns. But Wellfleet already existed. Their most significant project of the company was to be a beet sugar factory, but they also planned to build a hotel, and perhaps a flouring mill, a canning factory, a creamery, and a cheese factory.

In 1889 a beet sugar factory was in development at Grand Island, Nebraska, 150 miles to the east on the Platte River. Beet sugar was developed in the mid-19^th century as an alternative to the more expensive cane sugar. The factory opened in 1890 and was a success, with a second factory in Norfolk, Nebraska. There were numerous reports in the fall of 1889 of laboratory tests of sugar beets grown near Wellfleet as perfect for production at a factory.

Cheerful stories of the promise of Wellfleet continued through 1890 and 1891. However, there were contradictory stories too. In November 1889, while plans were underway for a dance in Wellfleet to raise funds for an Episcopal church building, there was another story in the Omaha papers about a young Englishwoman of some means, a portrait painter, who had given Dr. Tompkins a check from her brother that Tompkins was supposed to cash for her and give her the money. He did not. Further, the story continues, his associates in Wellfleet may have lost confidence in him.

In the winter of 1890, it was announced that the new head of the Wellfleet Improvement Company was George H. Edbroeke of New York City. Mr. Edbroeke was a prominent architect who had developed several buildings in Chicago and had relocated to New York. During that winter, Carroll Hawkins traveled to New York City to meet with the new president and review the plans for the beet sugar factory. In the summer of 1890, Mr. Samuel Chafen of London came to Wellfleet to help develop both the hotel, the factory, and the dam that was needed to provide the water power for the factory. Later, in the fall of 1890, Tompkins himself wrote a newspaper piece about how he was wrongly accused of this slander, and that the unnamed person who reported it added his name by mistake.

To bring the story to an end, none of the projects promised by the Wellfleet Company came to fruition. Further, there was a drought in 1891 that affected Wellfleet. In July 1891, the partially built hotel in Wellfleet was brought down by a cyclone, the term used then for a tornado. A newspaper story in 1892 called Wellfleet a “sad exhibit of a busted boom.”

Of interest to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is a report of the efforts of a Nebraska man named F.H. Crowell who lived in Beatrice. He was in touch with a church in Wellfleet, Mass, and had barrels of donated clothing and other goods sent to Nebraska for the “western sufferers.” Perhaps he had a connection with the Wellfleet Crowells, although his family was in Boston. 

Wellfleet continued. In 1908, a bank opened. In 1932, a dam was built creating a lake for flood control and recreation. The population dropped in the 1940s when many people found war-related jobs elsewhere. The high school and the bank were closed. When a highway to North Platte was paved in the 1950s, shopping moved to the larger town and businesses closed. The railroad discontinued passenger service in 1950 and closed the depot in 1958.

In 1987, The Barnstable Patriot reported that a group from Cape Cod Wellfleet visited Nebraska Wellfleet to help celebrate the town’s 100^th anniversary. Eric Williams also reported this event in his 2006 article; the visitors included a former Wellfleet Massachusetts selectman.

While the population is only 75 now, the September rodeo continues every year to celebrate the community, with horse races right down the main street.

Sources

Newspaper sources www.newspapers.com

Ancestry.com for family connections

The databases of The Barnstable Patriot and The Yarmouth Register are now at www.smalltownpapers.com

Nebraska State Historical Society “Railroad Development in Nebraska 1862-1980, A Historic Context,” June 2014. Downloaded August 2024.

Maywood Public Schools – Wellfleet, Nebraska (maywoodtigers.org)

1482 (arcgis.com)

If you are upset by killing animals please don’t read this.

This image may be the most widely distributed photograph of South Wellfleet.  It was taken by Provincetown photographer George Henry Nickerson (1829-1902) in November 1884 when a large school of blackfish was herded ashore in South Wellfleet.

Today we may experience a “blackfish stranding” when these pilot whales land on one of our beaches and breathe their last. But in 1884, the value of the oil in both the blubber and the “melon” in the blackfish’s head made these creatures profitable. Thus, when a school was glimpsed in Cape Cod Bay, all the local men jumped in their boats and tried to capture them. Cape Codders have many tales of such incidents happening, even on a Sunday morning while a church service was underway.

In a 1992 article in The Cape Codder, Eastham historian Noel Beyle wrote about the photograph and Mr. Nickerson. Mr. Nickerson was a Civil War veteran with photography studios in Chatham, Orleans, and Provincetown in the mid-19^th century.  Beyle spoke with Gordon D. Spence of Wellfleet about the location of the photograph, on the beach near Old Wharf Point on Loagy Bay.

Spence commented that the beach here was often called “Barkers.” The Barker family lived nearby and there were no houses at the top of the dune as there are today. Isaiah Barker was a cooper (barrel maker) which fits in with the job of moving mackerel catches from the wharf to the South Wellfleet railroad station. As mentioned below, Mr. Barker took part in the blackfish catch that day. He died in 1885 at 77 years old but must have been out and about on the day of such an exciting event so close to his home.

The Boston Globe wrote about the 1884 event on Tuesday, November 18, 1884. The adventure started in Provincetown on Saturday afternoon, November 15, at about 3 pm when the cry went out about the blackfish in the bay. A large group of men tried to drive them closer to shore to kill them but they came too close to the fish weirs, and it began to get dark, so they returned to shore with only a few captured.

The next day, Sunday, in the early morning, more men in boats found the school again and it was driven across the bay to Dennis and Brewster “but efforts to drive them to shoal water were of no avail.” They killed as many as they could with “case knives” and succeeded in capturing about sixty. The story goes on to report that the remaining blackfish “found deep water” and were chased across the bay assisted by several mackerel fishermen who joined in the pursuit.

The Globe did not mention whether the men stayed in the bay all night. It states that early the next morning (Monday) the fish were driven into Wellfleet Harbor with 150 driven ashore at Indian Neck and immediately killed by the boatmen assisted by many inhabitants on the shore. Now the remaining blackfish in the bay were unable to escape the harbor. The men succeeded in driving 1300 of the “sea monsters” ashore at Blackfish Creek.

The writer goes on, “Thus ended at dark last night the most exciting chase ever witnessed in these waters. The fish were attracted by the large quantities of squid and herring on which they feed. They are very valuable for the fine oil they make for watches and other delicate machinery.” This report valued the catch at $25,000 which would be divided among 500 participants of Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet who took part in the capture.

The article ends with a comment that a large number were purchased by Cook and Company of Provincetown and would be tried out at Cape Cod Oil Works at Long Point.

The Boston Globe’s description of the event was covered in many newspapers across the county in the two weeks following the event. A few newspapers added gory details to the description of the event. A paper in Indianapolis described how “vessels and boats of all kinds with men and boys of every trade and practice” went out on the bay on Monday. “Men of experience used harpoons and lances to make the kill and others used scythes, knives, daggers, picks, and axes.” A Maine newspaper stated, “Everyone big enough to handle a weapon was killing a blackfish.”

The writers added how the shore was lined with carriages and carts as men, women, and children came out to witness the event. All business was suspended. “Free use was made of the railroad which brought many from miles away to witness the excitement.” That report estimated the number of blackfish to be 1200 to 1500 to be divided into 500 shares, the value probably between $10-15,000. The fish are to be sold at an auction tomorrow.”

Later newspaper reports give a few details as to how the individuals involved in the event would benefit. On November 29, 1884 The Barnstable Patriot reported that the blackfish taken on the Cape recently were sold at auction to the following:

William Nickerson of Eastham, 24

Henry Cook of Provincetown: 512 and 24 porpoises

Harvey Cook of Provincetown: 200

S.S. Swift: 300

Isaiah Barker: 72 porpoises

American Oil of Wellfleet: 447

The article ended by noting there were 1498 blackfish (my addition comes to 1483) and 96 porpoises and that 400 to 500 claims had been filed.

(A quick check on how porpoises were used and it appears to be the oil in the blubber since eating them was not as popular as it once had been.)

The next article about the financial rewards from the event was found in The Yarmouth Register of December 6, 1884 reporting on a meeting of The Blackfish Company held in Union Hall with Captain Warren Newcomb moderating. Mr. Newcomb was a grocer in Wellfleet. The total amount to be realized from the sale was $15,353.75. “Everyone over 15 years should draw a full share; keelboats and dories a share, and those under 12 years a quarter share. A committee was named to settle the shares. The Treasurer’s Book had an accounting taken of “the time each man was employed.” No record was found of the company in Wellfleet as to whether it was an ongoing concern to handle the distribution of blackfish funds or established just for this event.

A later article on December 20, 1884, in The Yarmouth Register noted that at a meeting of The Blackfish Company” on December 10 decided to pay a dividend of $24 a share payable at Mr. William Tubman’s place of business.  The 1880 federal census lists Mr. Tubman as a blacksmith. The same paper reported in a separate piece on that date that American Oil of Wellfleet has sold and shipped 1000 barrels of blackfish oil in the past week. “The works are being run day and night as there is a large quantity of blubber still on hand.” On December 30, 1884 in their Wellfleet column, The Barnstable Patriot reported that the American Oil Company finished trying their oil on Saturday having gotten about 400 barrels.”

On January 13, 1885, George H. Nickerson announced in The Barnstable Patriot that he had six excellent views of the recent school of blackfish captured at Wellfleet and would send an image to any address on receipt of $1.50.

This stereopticon view may be one of those views:

Noel Beyle wrote in his 1992 article that Irving L. Rosenthal went into business with Mr. Nickerson and continued the studio after Nickerson died in 1902. Nickerson’s “Cape Cod Views” were highly collectible. The tourism industry on the Cape developed as the century turned. Postcards became very popular. The 1883 photograph was sold, first as a black and white image, and later a colorized image.

Mentioning the value of the blackfish catch on the postcard gave the event an added element of excitement, sharing with visitors the high value of the dead animals who landed on the beach. The $15,000 of 1884 would be worth nearly a half-million dollars today.

While not taken on that day, this image of a blackfish event at a later date gives another view of the slaughter that happened on our beaches.

Sources

www.newspapers.com

photos from Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth

The Barnstable Patriot at the Sturgis Library (the database not available for a few months while it transitions to a new platform)

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