South Wellfleet, Massachusetts

In this summer of 2018, as town officials figure out where Wellfleet’s now legal marijuana retail outlets will be located, it seems like the perfect time to remember the exciting night nearly forty years ago when the world of pot smuggling sailed into Blackfish Creek.

The summer of 1979 was proceeding as usual with many Wellfleet summer residents ensconced in their cottages. The notable issue of the day was the price of gas with headlines proclaiming “dollar gas is here.” Wellfleet employees were asked to walk or bike to work on Fridays. Chief Olsen of the National Park Service issued an order that the Rangers were not to carry guns during daytime hours. Plans to build a new library were proceeding with an easement sought through the Congregational church parking lot.  The biggest social issue in the town was the young people hanging out on the Town Hall lawn and allegedly harassing everyone. Selectmen were ready to declare the space illegal until a committee was set up to see if a compromise could be arranged.

The Saturday night of July 15, 1979, was one of “pea soup” fog in Wellfleet. On Friday night, a 51 foot ketch* came into Blackfish Creek.  Later, many said they wondered why a vessel of this large size was in the creek.

Its name Shango may have implied that perhaps this venture was one of many planned or already carried out. “Shango” refers to a western Nigerian religious cult, practiced in parts of the Caribbean and, today, is a Portland (OR) brand of marijuana with a medical dispensary in Las Vegas of the same name. Santana also had an album “Shango” in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, over on Cannon Hill’s neighborhood, the neighbors were wondering why two cars had been parked near a summer rental cottage, even though no people seemed to be in residence for two weeks. On Saturday morning, July 14^th, a Cannon Hill resident had been awakened very early by a motorboat and people talking near her cottage. She listened through the dawn hours as a boat arrived and departed several times. After 9 AM, she called the Wellfleet police. An officer drove over and took down the plate numbers of the small red camper parked in the empty cottage’s yard where, at high tide, the water was within twenty feet of the structure. Later on Saturday evening, a group of neighbors sitting around on the deck of another Cannon Hill cottage, heard a motorboat and wondered why it was operating on such a foggy night.

The mysterious appearance of the ketch and the empty cottage with vehicles was enough for the Wellfleet PD to dispatch two officers to the Creek in a borrowed boat at around 4 AM on Sunday morning, July 15^th. Simultaneously, a patrol car with three officers were sent to Cannon Hill Road. The officers in the boat, Chapman and Brintnall, witnessed a 16-foot Boston Whaler and three Zodiac rafts ferrying 2½ X 3½ foot bales of something from the Shango to the shore. Four men were working on the job. When confronted, three immediately ran and the fourth, a man named Paul Block who turned out to be the owner of the ketch, stayed and was the first arrest.

Mr. Block said he was surprised when the two officers, in civilian clothes, turned out to be local police. Over on Cannon Hill, the officers gave chase to other men who were around the cottage, along with a woman who emerged.  Now there was another camper and a blue truck in the yard.  Eventually, in addition to Mr. Block, seven others were arrested, some after a chase through the South Wellfleet woods as far as the intersection of Route 6 and Pleasant Point Road, near the Candlewood Cottages. The Massachusetts State police picked up one running man on Route 6 near the First National Store.

No guns were fired during the incident and no one was injured except for one officer who suffered a sprained foot later when he slipped while he was in the cabin of the Shango. The Wellfleet Police Department’s morale was described as “sky high” the next day as law enforcement officers from the state and federal agencies gathered in the police station, along with the press.

After all the excitement of the early morning hours, the legal processes took over, and the police counted eight bales of marijuana in the ketch and the rest in the two camper vehicles, for a total of just under two tons. At that time, the street value of a single ton of marijuana was about $1 million.  After many had trooped to the shore to see it, the Shango was brought over to the town pier later on Sunday. It became a bit of a tourist attraction throughout the summer while the legal actions were worked out.

The eight arrested people, none of them from Cape towns, were all arraigned in Barnstable County Second District Court in Orleans, initially charged under state laws. For some, federal indictments were made, and so more serious charges were brought.

Nevertheless, there was to be much more to this story as it unfolded in the Boston and Cape newspapers that July. On the very same night, in Orleans, a similar incident, also with reporting by local residents, occurred near “Snow Shore,” a public landing in one of the points of land in Nauset harbor. There, men on a local lobster boat were unloading bales of marijuana into campers on shore, with a couple in a vehicle with radio equipment standing guard. The couple was caught, but three people escaped in the fog. Four perpetrators were arrested and another load of pot confiscated along with the lobster boat and the campers. The lobster boat was held but eventually not confiscated because the contraband had been removed and less than ten pounds remained. All the campers were “stuffed to the gills.” The police measured the bales by taking the campers to the Cape Cod Ready-Mix Concrete Plant in Orleans, and measuring them with-and-without their cargo to get their weight.

The Orleans and Wellfleet smuggling incidents turned out to be separate operations with the July 15^th discoveries just an odd coincidence. This conclusion was based on the fact that the bales were wrapped differently, and the Wellfleet marijuana declared to be of “inferior” quality, although the news account did not report how that was determined. At one point, the Orleans bales were said to be labeled “Industria Colombian” and “Medellin,” a branding that indicated pretty powerful weed.

The Orleans story stayed in the news a bit longer, as law enforcement officials were sure that the lobster boat had been loaded from a “mother ship” off the coast. Indeed, a few days later, similar bales washed up on the shore of Scituate, on Massachusetts Bay. After days of the Coast Guard watching, another 50-foot ketch, Dominique, was found abandoned at the Boston Yacht Club in Marblehead. That ketch was eventually donated to the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. All of the marijuana captured on July 15^th was destroyed. Other coastal marijuana smuggling stories took over the news.

But in South Wellfleet, some still remember that foggy night of “the marijuana boat” operation around Blackfish Creek.

*Many reports called it a schooner. But this was a ketch, defined by a foremast taller than the mizzen.

Sources

The Cape Codder, online at the Snow Library, Orleans

Boston newspapers online at GenealogyBank.com.

Indian Neck developed much later than the other South Wellfleet neighborhoods surrounding Wellfleet Harbor. Its sandy edges were just waiting for the city people who began vacationing in Wellfleet in the 1890s. Lieutenant’s Island, Old Wharf Point, and Cannon Hill were already prepared with development plans, but it took until 1922 for the “Indian Neck Heights” land plan to be offered.

The Indian Neck development is really the story of two families, the Crowells and the Bakers—not the other prominent Wellfleet Baker, banana importer Lorenzo D. Baker.

But before we get to Luther C. Crowell, who had extensive land holdings on Indian Neck around his mansion and all the way to the sandy beach land overlooking the Bay, another investor assembled land there. Starting in the 1870s, Dr. Henry Hiller who had made his money selling patent medicines, and his wife, Dr. France Hiller, purchased numerous tracts of land from Wellfleet residents. The mackerel fishing was in a downward spiral and many people were leaving the Cape for Boston or its suburbs, selling the “worthless” family land to raise some cash.

Dr. Hiller emigrated to the United States from Bavaria in 1865, and married France Buryace De Sepora Bereford in Detroit in 1868. He became a naturalized citizen in 1870. The couple were living in Wilmington, Massachusetts, in 1880 when the federal census was taken; other records indicate that she was either from Latin America or the West Indies. The Hillers impact on Wellfleet must have been significant; in 1883, a new schooner named “France D. Hiller” was built in Essex, Mass., and launched with plenty of bunting draped on the Central Wharf, the schooner’s owner. She may have paid for it.  In a book about Wellfleet in the 1920s, Mrs. Hiller is noted as the owner of the beautiful home “Morning Glory” overlooking the harbor.

Dr. Henry Hiller died in 1888 of Bright’s disease according to the death certificate issued by the state of Massachusetts. France Hiller continued to buy and sell Wellfleet land, purchasing much of Griffin Island. Her husband “Henry Hiller” mysteriously continued to be named in the deeds.  A review of newspapers reporting her death in 1900 solved this mystery: she had married again, and insisted that her new husband change his name to Henry Hiller. She was 54 at the time of their marriage, and her 28-year-old new husband, Peter Surrette, was an illiterate Nova Scotian who served as her “coachman.” Her behavior—and reported use of morphine and liquor—caused her will to be contested, but the young husband inherited eventually. By the time this happened, however, the Hiller land had been sold: two large tracts of Indian Neck land totaling more than 200 acres in 1895 to Crowell, and the Griffin Island land to Lorenzo D. Baker. The Crowell sale gave him nearly all of the “Neck” with its bay views and proximity to the beach.  (See an additional note on the Hillers at the end of this blog post.)

Luther C. Crowell, from West Dennis, Massachusetts, married Margaret Doane Atwood Howard, in 1864. She was a widow, thirteen years older than he was, who had grown up in Wellfleet.  In 1874, Luther Crowell purchased his first land (and house) in Wellfleet, from John and Hannah Smith, Margaret’s sister and brother-in-law. Eleazer Atwood, named as an abutter in the deed, was Margaret and Hannah’s father. Several additional purchases led to the Crowells assembling a significant amount of land.

Luther Childs Crowell became a resident of Wellfleet in the mid-1890s and lived there until his death in 1903. Margaret Crowell had three children with her first husband, Jeremiah Howard, and subsequently had three children with Luther. A daughter, Elizabeth, died when very young, but their sons Luther F. and Edgar D. Crowell, her son Robert Howard, and her daughter’s son, Mr. Mitchell, all played roles in the development of Wellfleet real estate.

Luther Crowell had become famous before he built his mansion in Wellfleet.  After a few years as a merchant seaman, he moved to Boston and became an inventor. His early work, 1867-1879, produced patents for a square-bottom paper bag, the work he is most famous for and the work that Wellfleet claims as a noteworthy part of its history. His interest in paper folding and production led to patents involving the printing press, in particular the rotary folding machine that produces multiple-page newspapers as a complete product. A company in New York, R. Hoe & Company, developing similar processes, purchased his patents and put Crowell on their payroll for $10,000 a year to supervise their production. He worked there for the rest of his career.

The Barnstable Patriot reported regularly on the Crowell family’s visits to Wellfleet, first as summer visitors and then as permanent residents. The earliest article, in 1888, reports that the Crowells moved the Ebenezer Cole house to “Pilgrim Spring” and used it as a summer residence. The mansion they eventually built was far larger than any other developed by the city people who were beginning to spend leisure time in Wellfleet, often buying an old original house or putting up modest cottages. The Crowell mansion had a windmill for pumping water and a three-level barn. The road off Paine Hollow Road, today’s Baker Road, was the rose-lined driveway to the mansion which looked out over Indian Neck to Wellfleet Harbor. The Crowell’s oldest son, Luther Francis Crowell, was the architect, and John Bettison the contractor.

Crowell Mansion before it became the Indian Neck Inn — photo from the collection of the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum

The earliest mention of bottling the fresh spring water at “Pilgrim Spring” —a feature of the landscape between Route 6 and Indian Neck—was reported in 1882 when The Barnstable Patriot reported that the machinery for bottling the water had been installed and would be up and running under the direction of a Mr. C. Walker, Superintendent. There’s no further report on the company until 1893 when the Patriot announced the partnership of John Smith and Samuel Atwood (Margaret Crowell’s brother and brother-in-law) to manufacture ginger ale and sarsaparilla from the “famous Pilgrim Spring water” during the summer of that year. Soon, a “fine wagon” for the company was seen around the town. In 1901 The Barnstable Patriot reported that the Adams Pharmacy in Provincetown had a display of the “Ye Cape Cod Pilgrim Spring Company” of South Wellfleet.  Luther Crowell’s youngest son, Edgar Doane Crowell, got involved with this venture of bottling the mineral water. One of Luther Crowell’s last patents was for a bottle labeling machine, perhaps invented for the company. One writer notes that the high cost of sugar during the War caused the shut-down of the operation, and it was completely destroyed by fire around 1921. Four bottles are in the collection of the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum.  

Mineral Spring on Indian Neck photo from the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum

Luther C. Crowell died in 1903, followed by Margaret Crowell’s death in 1911. The first mention of M. Burton Baker, the new owner of the Crowell Mansion, was made in The Barnstable Patriot in December 1913 when an announcement in its South Wellfleet column reported that the Bakers would be staying in the mansion for the winter. Baker purchased Edgar Crowell’s interest in the Crowell estate in 1913, and Luther F. Crowell sold some portion of his interest in 1915.  A number of additional sales of Crowell land to Baker followed.

Marcus Burton Baker was from Brockton, Massachusetts, the son of a Civil War soldier. He and his two brothers grew up there—his brother Horace became Mayor in the 1920s. In the 1900 Federal census, M. Burton Baker was working at one of the city’s shoe factories. Mr. Baker and his wife, Ruth Ella Baker, were married in 1895, and had three children: Richard, Kenneth, and Dorothy.  A fourth child, a daughter, died at two years old, in 1908.

Sometime after 1915, the Crowell Mansion became the “Indian Neck Inn” with many mentions in The Barnstable Patriot of guests staying there during the summer seasons. At some point, a dike was built across the marsh separating the property from the sandy Indian Neck beach. There is a postcard image of the Crowell Mansion labeled “Indian Neck Camp for Girls,” but there is no record of such an operation. In a few Barnstable Patriot articles in 1916 the reference is to the Baker’s “Indian Neck Camp.” In that same year, the Chequessett Camp for Girls was also operating closeby, and the postcard-maker may have confused the two.

Advertisement for the Indian Neck Inn

Events at the Indian Neck Inn were regularly reported. In 1927, the year Dorothy Baker graduated from Wellfleet High School, she had an 18^th Birthday party where her guests danced to music from the Bakers’ radio, one of the first in Wellfleet, with dance music coming from the strong Davenport, Iowa station. Dorothy went on to study at the Boston Conservatory of Music. The Baker family also regularly purchased new Studebakers, as reported in The Barnstable Patriot. Both Richard and Kenneth Baker lived in Wellfleet with their wives.

A sad event occurred at the Inn in 1930 when a young man, Ernest Meads, shot and killed himself after leaving a note to Dorothy, who appeared to be an unrequited love interest. Dorothy Baker later married John Snow, a police officer. They lived in Wellfleet for a while, but later moved to Marblehead to run his family’s grocery store.

Indian Neck Inn Postcard

Burton Baker died in 1933 of tuberculosis; reports in The Barnstable Patriot announced that he had gone to the sanitarium in Pocasset a few years earlier. The Great Depression was in full swing. It appears that the Indian Neck Inn did not survive those years, and the family lost it to foreclosure. There are two different stories of what happened to the building. One is that it was taken down, and parts became cottages at the corner of Hay Road and Route 6 in Eastham, and another portion became “a house in South Wellfleet.” Another version of its demise is told in a note regarding a painting from Wellfleet resident Edwin Dickinson who had painted “South Wellfleet Inn” in 1955-60. The note indicates that Dickinson had made a sketch of the building in 1939 “before it burned down.” However, no other indication of any such fire has been found.

Image of drawing of the Indian Neck Inn by Edwin Dickinson

South Wellfleet Inn by Edwin Dickinson

The twenty acres of Crowell estate property that was lost reverted to other owners who acquired it for $250 at a foreclosure sale.

INDIAN NECK HEIGHTS

Burton Baker became a Selectman of Wellfleet and expanded his real estate interests while he ran the Inn. In the early 1920s he hired George F. Clements to develop a plan for the northernmost part of Indian Neck, calling it “Indian Neck Heights.” Baker had acquired this part of Indian Neck from the Crowells. In honor of his role in developing this Wellfleet neighborhood, the public beach to the north of the Heights was named for him in 1961 when Dorothy Baker Snow donated the land.

George F. Clements was a Civil Engineer based in Hyannis with projects involving “high grade land development” in Yarmouth, Centerville, and Dennis on the Cape and in several Boston suburbs. By 1926, according to The Barnstable Patriot, he had developed over 2,000 acres of land.

The mapped streets of Indian Neck Heights were each named for “famous Indians,” not all of them with any relationship to Cape tribes and native people. There was also a Crowell Road.  However, Tecumseh, Ione, Hiawatha, Pocahontas, and Cheyenne were surely out-of-place with King Phillip, Nauset, Massasoit, and Samoset. There were restrictions in the deeds of the lots sold: any structure put up had to cost at least $1500 (later changed to $3,000); structures had to be fifteen feet back from the edge of the sand bank overlooking the bay, and toilet facilities had to be part of the cottage or garage—no outhouses were allowed.

In 1927, a Trust organization purchased the southern portion of Indian Neck from Luther F. Crowell and M. Burton Baker. Mr. Clements designed another Indian Neck neighborhood south of Indian Neck Heights.  Given the timing so close to the beginning of the Great Depression, it’s not clear if any sales took place, and the history of the Trust is difficult to discern.

In a multi-part article in The Cape Codder in the 1970s, Holman Spence wrote about the development of Indian Neck Heights’ first cottages and his boyhood summers there.. The Holmberg family built the first cottage, and the Spence family the second one.

Carl and Greta Holmberg purchased their lots of Indian Neck Heights in 1924, and acquired additional lots later. The next Holmberg generation appears to have made this their permanent home, and the original cottage appears to be there still.  A family tragedy occurred in 1971, when the Holmberg children were playing on an ice floe that moved away from shore, causing the 10-year-old son to drown.

Holman Spence’s parents traveled to Wellfleet from Springfield in 1922 to look at land on the ocean, but found the raw landscape not to their liking. They spent the night at the Indian Neck Inn, meeting Mr. Baker, who showed them the Indian Neck Heights location the following day and made the sale. Since the Spence parents were teachers and a writer, they were able to spend the summer, making a 14-hour trip on their 1922 Buick touring car with “isinglass side curtains.” Spence captures the feel of the family’s arrival after dark with Mrs. Spence lighting the oil lamps, and Mr. Spence hiking back to Pilgrim Spring to get fresh water to prime the pump.  Spence also mentions the pastime of collecting “arrowheads and other Indian artifacts” along the beach, further evidence that there had been other inhabitants there before.

The third family to build at Indian Neck Heights was Harold and Jennie Stevens, who later sold to a family that is still there.  A fourth cottage built by the Buckman family is also still standing.

By 1940, there were ten structures on Indian Neck, as shown by the dots on the topographical map of Wellfleet of that year. The next wave of development came in the 1950s when there were numerous sales of land by Dorothy Baker Snow.  The next four decades saw an ever-increasing intensive building throughout the Indian Neck area. Thankfully, in the 1980s, the Wellfleet Conservation Trust (WCT) was established and a way to preserve open space for the enjoyment of all. From 1998 to 2008, the WCT was able to acquire contiguous parcels, resulting in the largest public conservation property on the Outer Cape—the Fox Island Marsh and Pilgrim Spring Woodlands Conservation Area and Trails. See more information about this area here:

https://wellfleetconservationtrust.org/what-you-can-do/conservation-land-and-trails/fox-island-marsh-and-pilgrim-spring-woodlands-conservation-area-and-trails/

Fox Island Marsh

*NOTE

In 1889 France Hiller put on public display in Boston two mammoth coffins that were elaborately carved and trimmed in gold, a project she and her husband had initiated but not yet finished when he died. Even at a time when Victorian society paid extraordinary attention to death, her display was over the top, and widely reported.  You can read more about the Hillers here: http://homenewshere.com/wilmington_town_crier/news/article_6c0cace8-1ad5-11e2-913b-0019bb2963f4.html

Sources

The Cape Codder available online at the Snow Library, Orleans

Federal Census collection at www.ancestry.com

Barnstable Patriot (various) online archive: www.sturgislibrary.org

Barnstable County Deeds available at www.barnstablecountydeeds.org

Newspapers available online at www.genealogybank.com

Rickmers Ruth Wellfleet Remembered Volume 1, 1981

Ward, John L. Edwin Dickinson: A Critical History of His Painting Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2003.

Introduction

Indian Neck in South Wellfleet has one of the best “origin” stories of the South Wellfleet neighborhoods covered in this blog. While other locations around Wellfleet Harbor were seemingly uninhabited until tourism developed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Indian Neck has a long history, stretching way back to a prehistoric time when native people inhabited this spit of land. There is no extant archive about this era. Later history can yet be understood by studying the following period when the Europeans moved in, took over the lives of the natives, and established a new order.

There are few references to the Indian Neck settlement in South Wellfleet during the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, so we must be content with simply understanding how the English from Plymouth Colony interacted with the native people. To understand how the native people of the Outer Cape lived, we have had to wait until modern archaeologists discovered them. Fortunately for our understanding of this history, one of the most astounding discoveries was on Indian Neck.

This page on the site for the Cape Cod National Seashore links numerous documents that detail the archaeological work occurring since the Park was established:   https://www.nps.gov/caco/learn/historyculture/the-archaeology-of-outer-cape-cod.htm

Before the Park Service archaeologists began their work in the 1970s, the Outer Cape had a rich history of vacationing gentlemen and local amateurs hunting for Indian artifacts. Many of their finds are at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, now a part of Harvard University. Since much of this material was simply dug up without specifying a location, it is of little use. Today  contractors digging for new homes makes them the effective excavators of ancient artifacts. Human bones were found recently in Chatham where a contractor digging a new swimming pool, and there were more discoveries recently in Eastham where the temporary trailer for the Library was set-up in the Town Hall parking lot. Massachusetts now has a process for handling such discoveries which both allows their study and then proper re-internment.

Indian Artifacts

When Indian Neck was Tuttomnest

As told in a previous blog post the Pilgrim men who came from Plymouth in 1645 to expand their settlement on the Cape, purchased the native Nausets’ land from Sachem George, encompassing today’s Orleans and Eastham, to the current Indian Brook (today’s Hatche’s Creek) that marks the borderline of Eastham and Wellfleet. When the “Purchasers” inquired about the land beyond the creek, today’s towns of Wellfleet and Truro, they were told that “no one” claimed ownership, so they just added the land to their holdings.

Later, in 1666, Lieutenant Anthony—the Sachem of the Billingsgate Indians who were also known as the Punonakanits—appeared and claimed ownership. The Punonakanits were one of the Wampanoag federation of tribes. It’s estimated that there were about one hundred living around Wellfleet Harbor in 1620, survivors of the 1615 epidemic that had wiped out so many of the natives just before the Mayflower arrived. A number of these same native people may have been those who met the Pilgrims exploring the area December 7-10, 1620, when they had their “First Encounter.”

The Eastham Pilgrims purchased the Billingsgate land again, with the exception of land the Lieutenant held for his tribe’s use, on James’ Neck, so named by the English, but named Tuttomnest by the natives. The area once held by Lieutenant Anthony is today the peninsula in Wellfleet Bay is known as Indian Neck.

Various maps of Indian Neck show this north/south spit of land surrounded by salt marsh with just a narrow causeway linking it to the South Wellfleet mainland. On the southern portion of Indian Neck, there is an inlet punched into the land called Sewall’s Gutter. On the northern side, the beach wraps around what is called Chipman’s Cove. Near today’s road to the Indian Neck shore there is a fresh spring in the marsh known as Pilgrim Spring, which became a special Wellfleet feature early in the 20^th century.

“Sewall’s Gutter” has been so-named for a long time; there is no known Sewall family owning nearby property — so why this name? Justice Sewall who was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Superior Court might possibly be the source, as he supported a number of native men who became “Praying Indians” and represented their people. Although not a minister, he was a commissioner of the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and Parts Adjacent (1699-1730). But nothing definitive was found for this place-name on Indian Neck.

INDIAN NECK on 1944 topographical map of Wellfleet

The Outer Cape native people interact with Europeans

The first written account of Outer Cape natives is Champlain’s 1605 description of the Nausets, along with a sketch map of their homes. Champlain’s account in 1606 reported around 150 native people around Nauset Harbor and 500-600 around Stage Harbor in today’s Chatham. No record exists for the settlement on Indian Neck. Another early record is the Pilgrims written account of their “First Encounter” in North Eastham as they explored the Outer Cape December 7-10, 1620.

The Plymouth Colony records of the seventeenth century tell the story of the Cape Indians, the Nausets, helping rescue a Plymouth boy, John Billington, who had wandered away, in 1621. We also know that the Nausets helped save the starving English colonists in 1622 by selling them crop surpluses.

The Eastham Town records document the Town’s dealings with the native people who lived there.  The Town paid both the English and the native people to kill wolves, giving particular encouragement to the natives. This was an urgent need, since the colonists needed to eradicate this predator of their growing herds of cows, horses, sheep and pigs. The Town notes in 1655 that four wolves were killed and mentions wolves’ heads again in 1686, when they set the rate paid to both “Indians and Englishmen” 20 shillings for adult wolf heads and 5 shillings for a young wolf, although paying half in cash and half in “Indian corn.”

We also know from early writing that the Cape natives showed the Europeans how to catch and slaughter the drift whales that were brought to shore and harvested for their blubber. Later, when the Europeans began pursuing the drift whales, the native people were paid to take positions in the whaleboat, giving them a means of participating in the “new economic order” of the Outer Cape.

The Reverend Samuel Treat, the Eastham minister who arrived in the 1670s, learned the native language and preached to the converted known as “Praying Indians” while also serving the European congregation. Treat referenced four distinct “villages” within his purview. One was Potanumicut, in today’s south Orleans, around a pond by the same name, but known as Arey’s Pond today. The second area was Meeshawn, the home of Truro’s Pamets, where the Wellfleet Punonakamits also worshipped. The third was Monomoyick in today’s Chatham, and the fourth the Satucket in today’s Brewster. There are Plymouth Colony records of censuses of the “Praying Indians” during the seventeenth century; in 1674, Truro and Wellfleet congregations numbered 72 people.

Treat trained native men to preach, meeting with them to dictate what to say in their sermons and overseeing their civil life as well. This relationship is held up today as one of great affection, so much so that when Treat died in the winter of 1717, the native people asked for the honor of taking his body to his church for the burial service, although held up some days due to the blizzard that had enveloped Eastham at that time.

The Cape Cod tribes did not engage in the bloody King Phillip’s War of 1675-76, but instead pledged their support to the Plymouth Colony, and sometimes worked as scouts for the English. At this time, the tribes of southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut were not united as one group, having had a history of disputes between each other that may have been the reason the Cape Cod natives did not join the War. The Eastham Town records of 1671 mention an oath of fidelity signed by the Nausets and the Pamets, not naming the Billingsgate group, which may be an indication of their diminished number.

Other rules in the Eastham records give orders that deal with the diminishment of native rights. In 1665, the Town ordered that no one was to buy “quarters” of whales (drift whales that arrived on shore) from any Indians, as any such whale belonged to the Town. There were other references to restricting use of common land — which was also diminishing, as the English moved to a landscape of private property. In 1680, there was a law passed to “stop Indians from setting down their dwellings on the Town’s commons.” Other laws of the Town mandated severe penalties for selling intoxicants to the native people.  In 1691, Eastham decided to build a Meeting house at Potanumicut for the Praying Indians, another indication that the diminishing number of native people now needed only one place of worship.

Indian Neck history in the Early Eighteenth Century

In 1715, when much of the Eastham common land was undergoing assignment to private owners, the Eastham Town recorded a document that set out lands for the “use and benefit of such Indians as are the proper natives of said Town to set their houses on and for firewood to burn in.” One of the places the document names is the land at “Jameses Neck” at little Billingsgate and gives a topographical description as commonly given at that time, starting the description as many deeds do with “a certain pine tree.” The upland of the peninsula was included, but not the meadow and marshland between the neck and the mainland, as that was most likely already in use by the English for making salt hay and grazing. The native people had freshwater at Sewall’s Gutter, and access to the rich shellfish beds in Chipman’s Cove. Still another two small parcels, about twenty acres south of Fresh Brook in South Wellfleet were reserved for the natives.  At an Eastham town meeting in 1716 the nominal grantees for the James Neck land were designated: Pepas Frances; Frances Frances, James Mark, Sam Tripp alias Tuis, and Nacan Jones, alias Abram Jones. These were leaders who represented their groups, although no records show how many native people were living on James Neck.

Later, in 1734, the Town traded some portion of this land with Samuel Smith, and this was probably the end of the designation of Indian Neck as a set-aside area for native use. There is no record of the inhabitants at this time. Samuel Smith also owned tracts of Great Island where his tavern was located.

In the National Park Services’ Cultural Landscape Report for the Atwood Higgins House , “The Provincial Census of 1765” reported 928 inhabitants of Wellfleet, including 14 African Americans and 11 Native Americans. By 1792 the Punanokanits numbered less than half a dozen. Numerous local histories name Delilah Sampson Gibbs, who died after 1838, the “last Wellfleet Indian.”

 The Indian Neck Ossuary

The connection of the Billingsgate natives to Indian Neck was reinforced in September 1979 when a contractor, digging for a new septic tank at a modest summer cottage on Indian Neck Road, unearthed a collection of bones.  At this time, National Park Service archaeologists were working in the area on a survey of prehistoric remains on the land of the Cape Cod National Seashore. They were able to get to the site quickly and determined that the bones were historic. While the contractor destroyed as much as half of the site, the remainder then was carefully excavated. After the material was taken to a laboratory for study and analysis, the unexpected discovery came to be known as the “Indian Neck Ossuary,” a technical term for such a deposit of bones.

Today, this ossuary site is known as one of the best-documented outside of northern New York and adjacent parts of Ontario, and around Chesapeake Bay. It has added to the knowledge of New England’s native people by providing evidence that the coastal natives were more settled than previously thought. Until this discovery, Cape Cod natives were thought to be seasonal visitors, much as many of us are today, enjoying the bounty of the land during the warmer weather. However, the ossuary indicated permanent habitation.

The deposit on Indian Neck turned out to be a multi-layered find. Under a few inches of topsoil, archaeologists found a “midden,” an ancient rubbish dump of animal bones, shells, and broken stone tools. A piece of metal indicated that the midden had been in use after the Europeans arrived. The stone tools were dated to the “late Woodland” period which began about AD 900 and ended with the arrival of the Europeans. Carbon-14 analysis of the cremated bones gave an estimate of 900 years plus or minus 200 years.  Thus, we have Indian Neck firmly established as a site of human habitation in the late 10^th or early 11^th century A.D.

Sources

“The Indian Neck Ossuary” Scientific American Volume 258, Number 5, pp 98-105. May 5, 1988

“Decades Later, Questions Remain Over Indian Neck Ossuary” The Cape Codder, September 29, 1989

Dolores Bird Carpenter Early Encounters-Native Americans and Europeans in New England, Michigan state University Press, 1995

The Cape Codder online at the Snow Library in Orleans

Durand Echevierra, A History of Billingsgate, Wellfleet Historical Society, 1991

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

Cape Cod National Seashore website: http://www.nps.gov/caco.

When Route 6 became a modern highway after World War II, its change from a winding two-lane country road to a wide modern highway made a major impact on the Wellfleet landscape. The road was widened from 18 to 36 feet, and its surface modernized with bituminous concrete. The new road brought cultural and economic change as well, bringing more and more seasonal tourists to the little Cape town. Leisure-time vacationing had started at the turn of the century, but now Wellfleet blossomed into a town that was part of the Cape’s important tourist economy.

These two photos from Ruth Rickmers’ book Wellfleet Remembered (Volume 2, 1982) show the visual and spatial impact. The previous rustic two lanes with prim white fencing is now an expanse of asphalt. 

Route 6 before and after

In 1938, Route 6 in Eastham grew to four lanes “…of hard bituminous macadam and its course north of the center straightened.”  Edward Hopper’s painting “Route Six, Eastham”, painted in 1941, shows only two lanes, but in an article about Hopper’s use of images of the road, Nicholas Robbins reviewed sketches that Hopper made, and which show that there were four lanes.  Together with his painting “Gas” in Truro, and “Orleans” with its Esso Station sign, Hopper makes the highway part of the Cape landscape. Robbins notes that Hopper came to Truro initially in 1930, acquiring his house in 1934, and thus “saw the beginnings of Cape Cod’s shift from a semi-remote outpost to the commercial landscape that accommodated an increasing number of automobile tourists.”

“Route 6” by Edward Hopper

“Gas” by Edward Hopper

“Orleans” by Edward Hopper

Route 6 continues to demand our attention today with its tragic accidents, the worrisome state of its drivers, and the high-traffic months when even the simplest errand demands detailed planning. But in 1948, this was the future of these small Cape Cod towns: the development of a strong tourism economy, with everyone arriving in a car as quickly as possible.

Dorothea Lange photo of an American family on the highway

The world was fast-changing in 1948. The Cape Codder reported the new plans to dredge Wellfleet harbor that year, the rebuilding of the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank next to the Catholic church on Main Street, and that a Boston station was working on sending a television signal to the Cape. Discussions began to take place at the annual Town Meeting about zoning regulations and creating a town planning board, with both topics meeting with resistance. Residents worried about “preserving the character” of the town, a concern that still exists.

Route 6, a part of the nation’s highway system since the 1920s, was renamed the “Grand Army of the Republic Highway” in 1937 to memorialize the Union Army forces of the Civil War.

GAR Road sign, Route 6

Route 6 was created from an earlier County Road which wasn’t even fully paved, as described in this earlier blog post.  More and more “autoists” traveled to the Cape as the automobile became a favorite form of recreational touring. Tourism rescued towns like Wellfleet from years of economic depression that had started in the 19^th century when the fishing industry diminished.

The outer Cape’s representatives urged the continuation of the Route 6 rebuilding, continuing the work completed in Eastham. But starting in 1940, road-building to accommodate the Army became the state’s priority, particularly around Camp Edwards on the upper Cape. World War II put the continued redevelopment of Route 6 on hold.  Finally, on January 31, 1946, on the first page of the first edition of the newspaper, The Cape Codder, announced the highway project would start again.

Charles Frazier, head of the Selectmen of Wellfleet, recently returned from Navy service in the Pacific, had been fighting for the Route 6 project since 1940. When the decision to rebuild past Eastham came in 1946, Mr. Frazier was given great credit for pushing the Massachusetts Highway Commission. The state and federal governments shared the costs of the roadbuilding at that point, before the Eisenhower-era federal interstate highway program.

The towns from Wellfleet to Provincetown felt like second-class citizens of Barnstable County, with their bumpy pot-holed road holding them back from full participation in the tourism economy. Even the Lieutenant Governor, Mr. Bradford, had complained about the roadway on a recent trip. Bradford was elected governor in 1947, serving one term until 1949, and oversaw a part of the rebuilding project.

Memories of the old road and the rebuilding project remain. In my family, there was always a summer trip to Provincetown. We had to hope that we would not get stuck behind a smelly fish truck—passing safely was extremely difficult on the curvy two lanes.

My childhood friend, David Sexton, remembers the excitement of taking a trip during construction when one of the lanes would be closed. The flag-men, who worked without communication, had a clever system: the flag would be given to the last car allowed through, as a signal to the next flag-man that the lane could be opened for cars going in the other direction. His summer of 1948 memories as a five-year-old are of fervently wishing that his family car would be the one to carry the flag. My brother, an older boy, remembers collecting the empty soda bottles the workmen tossed aside along the highway, and turning them in for cash from the General Store proprietor, Mr. Davis, no doubt causing his scowl at these bothersome transactions.

The road-building announcement in January 1946 was overly optimistic.  Mr. Lawrence Gardinier of the Wellfleet Board of Selectmen made the estimates. He said the work would begin in July of that year, and that the planned cutoffs would take about six months’ work, guessing that it would be completed the next year. The engineering drawings appear to have been completed. The new road was expected to follow the current road from the Eastham/Wellfleet town line to Mr. Davis’ General Store in South Wellfleet, where it would “branch off and rejoin the current highway near the fire tower.”

This 1946 description also notes that the new highway would bypass the town centers in both Wellfleet and Truro. In Wellfleet, the road would “veer off” almost opposite Mr. Holbrook’s (gas) station and “pass in back of the Holiday House” (named “The Wagner at Duck Creek” today). The wetland behind the Inn was to be partially filled in. There would be an overpass at Long Pond Road, thus protecting the children on their way to Wellfleet School. It would reconnect with the old road “this side of Gull Pond Road,” where today’s Briar Lane meets the highway.

In an interview reported later, Charles Frazier said that bypassing the Wellfleet town center would help preserve the character of the town. Widening the two lanes into Wellfleet, lined with some of the town’s oldest structures, would have been impossible.

Despite the 1946 optimism, the rebuilding of Route 6 did not begin until the spring and summer of 1948. That year, four miles were competed from the town line to Daniel Mandeville’s house, near the fire tower. The legal work of taking portions of many property holders through eminent domain proceedings is recorded in detail on the Barnstable County deeds database. The delay may also have been the need to move both Mabel Doane’s house and Earle and Sadie Atwood’s house.

Mabel Doane’s house had to be moved across the road, and is now located at the corner of Cemetery Road in South Wellfleet. Mabel was Ikey Paine’s sister, a Wellfleet resident discussed in an earlier post. The current owners told me the story of the move. Mabel Doane loved sitting in her window and watching for the traffic on the old two-lane road. When the house was moved, it had to be turned around so her road-watching could continue.

Earle and Sadie Atwood’s house may have been near the area where today’s Way 112 (a part of the old road) emerges back onto the highway.

The end of the road work in 1948 was at Daniel Mandeville’s house. Mr. Mandeville moved to Wellfleet in the 1920s, buying an old house and some land. The history revealed in the deeds shows that this house is still in existence, and near a new road “Designer’s Way” off Route 6. Mr. Mandeville is mentioned a few times in The Cape Codder newspapers as having a “clam tree” in his front yard: a tree that he decorated with clamshells.

An article in the Provincetown Advocate described the new highway as 36 feet wide, with three lanes, that were eventually shifted to the two lanes with wide shoulders we have today. There were no sidewalks and curbs “as were included in some sections in Eastham,” but there would be “curbs where there are traffic islands.” The article describes “… four inches of hardening clay or loam will first be laid, and on top of this, three inches of crushed stone penetrated with asphalt … a surface of bituminous concrete will finish the road.”

The Cape Codder reported in August 1948 that the new highway was completed over a long stretch starting at the Eastham line, and it was “smooth as velvet.” The workmen kept the traffic moving efficiently and created lots of goodwill by chatting with the visitors “from all parts of the nation.”

In South Wellfleet the Route 6 roadwork seems to have been pretty routine. Many trees were cut down on both sides of the roadway, and the distinctive white fence (as pictured above) taken down.  However, when the road workers got to the curve at Blackfish Creek, there was news about the excavation over the creek.  On May 13, 1948, The Cape Codder reported a conversation with the crane operator who had to dig thirty feet down to get to a solid bottom. Tractors were pushing “tons of sand” into the excavated parts. The supervisor of the crew reported that he had discovered “the keel of some old hulk farther on in Blackfish Creek.”

Newly built Route 6 crossing Blackfish Creek and separating from the old road

By September 1948, the Governor announced that the 1949 work on the highway, to extend another three miles, would be put out to bid. The 1949 season would see the road finished to a point near the Truro line. The diversion around the Wellfleet town center would require “some filling in of the pond behind Holiday House” and that the curve beyond Gull Pond Road would be eliminated. An October column noted that “townsfolk can drive to Orleans in twenty minutes now.”

There were new concerns raised as the highway project moved along. The raw landscape alongside the road raised concerns about plantings to improve the appearance of the roadway. Frank Sargent, then the Director of the State Division of Marine Fisheries, was sent to inspect the culvert over the Herring River and found there was “no serious obstruction” to the anadromous fish. Further, when the state erected the “Welcome to Wellfleet” sign, they got the wrong date on the town’s founding, and created a flurry of comments.

By 1950, the work on the highway moved to Truro. In 1951, bids were sought to build out three miles, “spanning the Pamet River, going behind the Truro Memorial Library and rejoining the present highway near the cemetery in North Truro.”

In the early 1950s, the highway building reached Provincetown, and a lengthy debate on how to get to the end of the Cape ensued.  Initially, the plan was to follow the railroad tracks. An esplanade on the bayside was also considered. Finally, the decision was made to build “via the sand dunes” with great concern about the construction. A group that had a shack for iceboating on nearby Pilgrim Lake (East Harbor) noted that the moving sand covered their building within a short time of its erection, burying it under the moving dunes. This did become a problem for the roadway, with the state of Massachusetts spending thousands of dollars each year to keep the road clear, using snowplows and road gangs. The double-barreled roadway was finished in 1954/55, ending at what was called New Beach, later renamed Herring Cove Beach.  In 1957, the state gave Provincetown permission to name the new Route 6 the “MacMillan Highway” in honor of the town’s famous Arctic explorer, Rear Admiral Donald MacMillan.

Here is the famous “beginning of Route 6” sign, noting the mileage first to Long Beach, California, and now to Bishop, after California relocated the road.

Route 6 sign in Provincetown

Note

A second road project that has changed the Cape is the Mid-Cape Highway, a new four-lane freeway, with the first section built 1950-1953, taking traffic from Sagamore to Exit 6 (Route 132). It was labeled “Route 6” when it opened, and the old County Road renamed “Route 6A” causing great consternation from the businesses and the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce who felt pushed aside. In 1966-1971, the road was extended from Exit 6 to Exit 9 in Dennis, and then a “Super 2” built from Dennis to Orleans. After 36 people were killed (over several years) on the Dennis-Orleans two-lane portion, the berm and reflectors were put in place and all passing prohibited. Adding the parallel roadway was abandoned in the 1970s due to environmental and land-use concerns.

Post-Script

Thanks to the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum’s recent project to digitize all the photographs in their collection, we now have access to many postcards and other work that documented how Wellfleet looked in the earl years of the 20^th century. One popular topic was photographs of the “improved” State Road that was created in the 1920s. Here are a few of them.

Sources

The Cape Codder online at the Snow Library in Orleans

The Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum, Main Street, Wellfleet – photo collection

Provincetown Advocate online at http://advocate.provincetown-ma.gov

Barnstable Deeds database online at https://enthusiasts.ciachef.edu/cold-carrot-bisque-soup-recipe/

Robbins, Nicholas “The Road” in Hopper Drawing ed. Carter E. Foster. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013

Rickmers, R. E. Wellfleet Remembered, Volume 2, Wellfleet, Blue Butterfly Publication, 1986.

Starting in 1914, and lasting through the 1920s, South Wellfleet had a tea room, The Sign of the Pine, a business that had all sorts of social implications.  Tea rooms were a popular seasonal business for the growing recreational area that was developing on Cape Cod. Hyannis had the Pink Geranium Tea Room and The Windmill Tea Room and Gift Shop; Barnstable had the Gray Shingles Tea Room; and West Yarmouth had the Bayberry Lodge Tea Room. One newspaper reference in 1917 mentions another one in Wellfleet: the Martha Washington, operated by two Boston women, but there’s no record of its location.

Tea rooms developed during the first two decades of the twentieth century when women were becoming less shackled to home, and to Victorian rules that limited their movements outside the home. Tea rooms were an acceptable place for single women —or a group of women without a male escort—to visit. There was no liquor served, making these restaurants a “safe place” for women.  Many operated during Prohibition, so of course there was no need to even think about serving liquor. In the city, they offered a place for women to eat while shopping or taking a work break. In New York’s Greenwich Village, they became part of the bohemian environment.

Tea rooms also developed along the new roadways where Americans were driving their cars for recreational touring, particularly in the nineteen teens. This leisure-time pursuit coincided with the development of tourism on the Cape, where newly paved roads encouraged  the “autoists” to travel. In addition, tea rooms were an acceptable business for a woman to own and manage. Many had gift shops attached.

The owner of The Sign of the Pine was Anne Wells Munger, an artist from Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1910, Mrs. Munger purchased an old home on what is today’s Old County Road. The deed shows that Edward Paine sold it; it had been purchased by Winslow Paine from Ebenezer Cole in 1852. There is a record of the Greek Revival style house available at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum, indicating that one earlier wing was built in 1808, and the main house in 1850. The record also indicates that the house may have been an early “coach stop” since it was on the main road to Wellfleet, and that there was a bus stop there in the 1930s. Today Old County Road has lost its importance as a route to Wellfleet.

The only evidence of the house’s use as a tea room, as noted in the historical record, was a “peephole” in one of the doors that may have divided the kitchen from the serving area.  However, we also have advertisements that the Mungers placed in The Barnstable Patriot, along with a 1914 Patriot story:

At South Wellfleet, on the right, are to be seen the towers of the Marconi Wireless Station, about one mile off the State road, on the shore of the ocean. Not far from this place on the corner of the road is a sign directing one minute in to the Sign of the Pine, one of the most fascinating places on the Cape, where all sorts of unusual and interesting arts and crafts work are to be found. There are odd things from Russia, the Philippine Islands and Japan, hand made pottery, metal work and baskets, beautiful printed, dyed and hand-woven textiles, a novel and varied collection where one can always find a dainty gift for a friend, or souvenirs of Cape Cod which are worth while. At this place also are made the Dame Standish novelties. In the tea room delicious tea is served with a delicate lunch.                    

Advertisements for The Sign of the Pine appeared in The Barnstable Patriot in 1914 and 1915, and in the Cape Cod Magazine in 1915. There are no advertisements after this time, but there were news stories about the shop and tea room.

from Barnstable Patriot

In the 1920s, Mrs. Munger posted a newspaper notice seeking to get back her “studio” sign that had disappeared from the corner of her road and Route 6. From this, we know that she was notifying motorists that there was an artist working there, something that would surely have been of interest to Wellfleet visitors as they motored through to Provincetown’s artists’ colony.

In the advertisements for the shop, “Dame Standish” products are mentioned. There was no connection found for this article to a company making products under this name — the only other reference is to the Dame Standish Candle Shop on Wellfleet’s Commercial Street in the 1940s and 1950s. A newspaper mention in 1929, however, describes Mr. Munger’s manufacturing his “remarkable satin cream” made with bayberry wax.  This may be the same product called Dame Standish Satin Cream ($1.00) in 1915; there was also offered “Dame Standish Bayberry Balm for 50 cents.*

Anne Wells Munger owned other properties in Wellfleet. She bought the house on Cannon Hill known as “the Ark” in 1912, owning it until 1923. That property was the mainstay of the guest houses clustered on Cannon Hill covered in an earlier post.  Jennie Hamblett would come to Wellfleet each season to open the “Cannon Hill House” and accommodate many visitors in this guest house environment. There is no record of Mrs. Munger’s role in this business. Mrs. Munger also purchased a cottage in the Pleasant Point neighborhood, and may have rented it during this same period. She sold this property in 1927.

There is some evidence that the Mungers were friendly with another South Wellfleet couple, Lillian Burk Meeser and her husband, the Revered Spenser Meeser. The Meesers bought their home on the State Road near Old Wharf Road in 1913; Mrs. Meeser was also an artist and created a studio there. Lillian Burk Meeser and Anne Wells Munger had been part of the Worcester art community in the late 1890s,  according to news articles. The Meesers will be covered in a separate post.

Anne Wells and Willard C. Munger married in 1882 in Worcester, when she was 20 and he was 26 years old. By the 1890s, Anne Wells Munger was presented as an artist, according to the listings in the various editions of the Worcester City Directories. There are a couple of brief newspaper mentions of her in the 1890s, as participating in the Worcester Art Student Club.  These reflect a more Victorian-influenced time, as she was opening her studio, and serving tea to visitors. The couple is listed in the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses. Mr. Munger is employed as a bookkeeper; in his obituary, he was given the title of Treasurer of National Ware Goods Company.

Anne Wells Munger photo from the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum collection

In the 1913 Worcester Directory, both Mungers are listed as “removed” —Anne to Boston, and Willard to South Wellfleet. Perhaps this was the time she studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School, as mentioned below. By the time of the 1920 federal census, both are living in South Wellfleet, and engaged in ”novelty manufacture.”

One of Anne Wells Munger’s biographies mentions her studies with Philip Leslie Hale at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He was an American Impressionist, and had studied in Paris with summers in Giverny where he was influenced by Claude Monet. Hale taught in Boston after 1893. She also studied with George DeForest Brush at the Art Students League in New York City; his interest in pottery may have influenced her also, since she also sold pottery in her shop. The Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum has one or more pieces of her pottery.

Anne Wells Munger painting of Provincetown fishing pier

In the 1920s, the social column of The Barnstable Patriot mentions the Mungers leaving the Cape in the winter months to settle first in New Orleans, and then in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Pass Christian was a small town on the Gulf Coast that had served wealthy New Orleans residents as a resort for many years. The Mungers purchased a home there, and shuttled between their two seaside towns for many years. According to an article in the Provincetown Advocate, Mrs. Munger even established an “information bureau” in her southern home and studio —with brochures on the Cape supplied by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.

Willard C. Munger died in 1940 and Anne Wells Munger in 1945. Both are buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Gulfport, Mississippi.

NOTE

In the process of researching Mrs. Munger’s bayberry products, I found a company located in North Truro, called “Cape Cod Products, Inc.” A 1912 article in The Barnstable Patriot noted with delight the opportunities for children and adults to gather buckets of bayberries “for quite a good deal of cash.” In the poor outer Cape economy, this must have been a bonus. The article continues, “The little berries, of which it takes hundreds of thousands to make a bushel, are boiled and steamed, then made into bayberry candles, ironing wax and other products for the holiday trade.” Another article mentions a fire at the company’s location in Fairhaven in 1913.  A Massachusetts record shows the corporation dissolving in 1917, but another article notes that its products were at the 1922 Barnstable County Fair. I did not find the bayberry candles branded as “Dame Standish.” In an ad in Cape Cod Magazine, the company offered canned goods: kippered herring, cranberries, or spiced mackerel.

Sources

Whitaker, Jan. Tea At the Blue Lantern Inn, A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America. New York. St. Martin’s Press, 2002 U.S.

Historic house forms and photographs available at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum

Federal Census collection at www.ancestry.com

David Kew’s Cape Cod history site: www.capecodhistory.us

Barnstable Patriot (various) online archive: www.sturgislibrary.org

Barnstable County Deeds available at www.barnstablecountydeeds.org

Newspapers available online at www.genealogybank.com

Provincetown Advocate available at http://advocate.provincetown-ma.gov.

For the past thirty years, the South Wellfleet wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship under the command of Captain Sam Bellamy, has provided a steady stream of news. In 1984, the wreck was discovered 500 feet offshore, material was brought to the surface for identification and preservation, and their concretions removed. A small museum was established in Provincetown and, in 2016, a more permanent Whydah Museum in West Yarmouth.

The story of the Whydah running aground on the night of April 26, 1717, during an intense storm, is a Wellfleet legend, often mentioned in early writings about the town. In 1794, the Reverend Levi Whitman said, “At times to this day, there are King William and Queen Mary coppers picked up and pieces of silver called cob money.”   When Henry David Thoreau walked the back shore in the mid-nineteenth century, he wrote about the wreck, although the coin he picked up was a French one, dated 1741.

This article focuses on the visit of Captain Cyprian Southack to South Wellfleet, then part of Eastham, as the representative of the Massachusetts Colony’s Governor, determined to recover the wreck. This imperial representative and the rule of law ran up against stubborn Cape Codders, certain that they had rights to the remains of the wreck. Southack’s visit gives us a glimpse into the life of the area in 1717.

The Whydah (also written as Whida, Widdo, and other names) was a large 1715 London-built galley, designed to serve as a slave ship, with a compartment to hold six hundred captives.  It was named for the West African slave trading port of Ouiday (pronounced WHY-dah), in today’s Benin.  The early eighteenth century was the height of the ”Triangular Trade,” connecting England, the west coast of Africa, and North America. The captain of the Whydah, Lawrence Prince, had surrendered the ship near the Bahamas with the customary little resistance, as those who did so were treated well by the pirates. The slaves had already been traded and the Whydah was on its way back to England with a sizeable load of treasure, pieces of eight, pouches of gold dust, gold doubloons, and jewels. Descriptions of the captured cargo also included sugar, indigo, Jesuit’s bark (a remedy for malaria), and elephant’s teeth, or ivory. After the ship was recovered, one if its treasures was West African “Akan Gold,” the pieces local people made for the slave traders.

In 1717, Wellfleet wasn’t “Wellfleet” yet. Separation from Eastham had been discussed, as the people of Billingsgate, or the North Precinct of Eastham, considered having their own minister, but it wasn’t until the next year, 1718, that the Reverend Josiah Oakes came to Billingsgate under the patronage of John Doane. He began preaching in a small meetinghouse located at the corner of a burying ground on Chequessett Neck, where Doane had buried his son Joshua, who had drowned in 1716, and Joshua’s wife, Mary, who had died in 1715.

Meanwhile, in Eastham, the long-time Reverend Samuel Treat had just died in the midst of a heavy snowstorm in March 1717. Eastham town-fathers were working on a plan to create two new parishes, and to build two new meetinghouses, one for the south part of town called Pochet (today’s Orleans) and one “a little to the northward of Herring Pond” replacing the old meeting house near Town Cove.  But it wasn’t until 1718 that they were able to attract a replacement for Reverend Treat. Furthermore, it was in that year that the inhabitants of Billingsgate petitioned the General Court to separate politically from Eastham, initiating the local battle that lasted for the next forty years, ranging from the morality of their ministers, to the fishing and shellfishing rights of the towns.

In the spring of 1717, the people of Eastham were in the first 25 years of being part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, combining their old Plymouth Colony with the wealthier Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Province of Maine, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into British North America’s crown colony.   Plymouth Colony had never achieved the economic status of Massachusetts Bay Colony, and perhaps there was a lingering resentment as they had been joined together by King William and Queen Mary in 1692.

The Governor in 1717 was Samuel Shute who was determined to recover the Whydah’s treasure for the Crown, as the law determined.  Citizens who found any wreck were supposed to report it to the Town Clerk, and then assist in getting it returned to the owner. But the locals in coastal towns everywhere considered the salvage washing ashore from a wreck as theirs to keep.

On Sunday, April 28, Shute had received a note from Colonel William Basset of Sandwich telling him that the “pyrate” ship had gone aground at the shore at Eastham, “man’d with about 130 men, 28 guns, who had not any commission from any Prince or Potentate.” Basset noted that only two men had been saved. This information had come to Basset from Justice Doane of Eastham who had arrested the pirates from the Mary Anne, the ship accompanying the Whydah that went ashore near Pochet.*

This was the atmosphere in which the Massachusetts Bay Governor attempted to rescue what was sure to be a valuable prize for the Crown.  Soon, he dispatched Captain Cyprian Southack to the site to recover anything of value, and to recover from the local townsfolk anything they may have already taken. Fortunately for us, Southack left a journal of his days spent on the outer Cape, a document available today at the Massachusetts State Archives. The letters he wrote to the Governor are also there, providing us with fairly extensive documentation. Barry Clifford consulted these documents when he did his research more than 250 years later, to pinpoint the spot where he would search for the wreck.

Cyprian Southack (1662-1745), the son of a British naval lieutenant, came to Boston in 1685. In 1696, he was appointed the commander of the first Province Galley, a small vessel of ten guns built by order of the Massachusetts General Court and used against the French and Indians in skirmishes in Maine and Nova Scotia. He commanded a second and larger Province Galley until 1714. Later, he commanded ships that guarded the coast against privateers and pirates.

However, Cyprian Southack had another role in the Massachusetts Colony: he was a mapmaker, preparing more than twenty maps charting the ocean waters, and the Saint John and the St. Lawrence Rivers, to diminish navigation dangers. In 1694, he prepared The New England Coasting Pilot and traveled to London to present a copy to King William, whereupon he was awarded a sum of fifty pounds “to be paid to him for the Buying a Gold Chain and Medal, as a Mark of his Majesty’s Royal Favour.”  Later the book was published, and served mariners for many years. His appointment to oversee the recovery of the Whydah showed his importance to the colony. He lived on Tremont Row, in a house once owned by Governor John Endicott. (This area became Boston’s Scollay Square in the 1920s, and today is the Government Center area.)

While the Whydah occupied Southack, there were two additional stories playing out nearby. While sailing northward, the Whydah had captured another ship, the pink Mary Anne, off Nantucket. (In the Atlantic, the word pink was used to describe any small ship with a narrow stern, having derived from the Dutch word pincke.) An Irish ship, the Mary Anne was on its way to New York with a cargo of Madeira wine. The pirates on board, as the story goes, enjoyed the wine as they ran aground off Pochet (Orleans) and managed to come ashore. Word got out that they were there, and Justice Doane arrested the six men, who were eventually brought to Boston where they were hanged after a trial—with plenty of opportunity for Reverend Cotton Mather to preach against their wicked ways. The Madeira wine not consumed ended up in a number of Eastham homes. A second story line from the wreck of the Whydah involves the much-written-about romance between a local Eastham girl, Maria “Goody” Hallett, and Captain Bellamy who, it was surmised, was headed in the direction of the Cape Cod coast to see her again.

There were two men who survived the Whydah wreck, Thomas Davis, a Welsh carpenter who had been forced to work for the pirates, and John Julian, a Moskito Indian from Nicaragua or Belize, who had served as a pilot for Bellamy. They managed to get from the beach to Samuel Harding’s house in South Wellfleet, giving Harding the first word of the wreck. At the November trial in Boston, Davis was acquitted, and Julian was sold into slavery. When Barry Clifford was researching the recovery of the wreck later, Wellfleet’s Slade Associates helped him by determining the location of Samuel Harding’s house as “A mile from Whitecrest Beach or one quarter mile southwest of Duck Pond.” Earlier writers had placed Harding’s house in “Freshbrook Village,” the small settlement south of Marconi Beach that has now disappeared.

Samuel Harding shared the news of the wreck with his brother, Abiah, and his neighbors Edward Knowles and Jonathan Cole.  Others included by Southack in his reports were Joseph Collins and Samuel Horton. The Harding family had come to Plymouth from England; Samuel and Abiah’s father was a “ward” of Deacon Doane. An older brother, Amaziah Harding, gained some fame when he murdered his wife of many years, Hannah, in 1734.

On May 2, 1717, Captain Southack arrived from Boston aboard the sloop Nathaniel at “Cape Cod Harbor” as Provincetown was then called. He had hoped to round the tip of the Cape and find the wreck, but the weather was still rough, so he stayed in the harbor. He quickly learned that the wreck was well known and that many of the local Cape Codders had already been to the site. The ability of the locals to strip a ship was well known, and Southack knew that he had to get to the site as soon as possible. He dispatched two men, Cutler and Little, to the site to protect it from further looting. They went to Truro, hired a horse and wagon, and went to the site.

Another horse was not made available to Southack, perhaps intentionally, causing great irritation. Instead, he hired a whaleboat and a crew, and decided to cross the Cape at a “canal” that he knew from his mapmaking—the passage called “Jeremiah’s Gutter”—that runs along today’s Eastham/Orleans border, from Boatmeadow Creek to Nauset Harbor/Town Cove. Luckily for him, the high spring tides allowed him to pass, and he duly noted the passage on his now-famous map.

Southack’s Map of his search for the Whydah wreck on the outer Cape

After fourteen hours of rowing, Southack and his crew reached the wreck and found that, while there were bodies (“54 white men and 5 negroes”) on the beach and some wreckage, the ship itself was still breaking up in the heavy surf offshore, impossible to reach. He reported (his spelling shown here) to the Governor:

“May 2 at 2 After noon I sent Mr. Little and Mr. Cuttler to the Rack. They got their that night and Capt watch till I came the next morning. At my coming their I found the Rack all to Pices, north and South, Distance from one a Nother 4 miles. Sir, whear shee strock forst I se one anchor at low water, sea being so Great Ever sence I have ben here, Can not come to se what maye be their for Riches, nor aney of her Guns. She is a ship about Three hundred tuns, she was a very fine ship.”

The crew of the whaleboat picked up what little was left, and took it by cart to Billingsgate where it would be taken later to Boston; the whaleboat returned to Provincetown, carrying Southack’s letters to the Governor.

It appears that Captain Southack stayed at Justice Doane’s home during his stay, as he wrote about Doane’s wife giving him a “plum Posset” to soothe his “soar throte,” and the Justice loaned him an “Indie-kachoo bandanie” (West Indian bandana) for his sneezing. The raw wet Spring weather kept him from the work he had hoped to do to bring the treasure in from the wreck.

“All that I Can find saved Out of her is her cables and som of her sailes, Cut all to Pices by the Inhabitants here. Their has been at this Rack Two hundred men at least Plundering of her, sum saye they got Riches out of the sand but I can not find them as yet.

The Governor and Captain Southack had the Crown law behind them as they not only took over what was left of the Whydah wreck on the beach, but could also demand that anyone who had removed material must turn it over. Southack issued the following “advertisement” on May 4 which was posted all around the area:

“Whereas there is lately Stranded on the back of Cape Cod a Pirate Ship & His Excellency the Governor hath Authorized and impower’d me the Subscriber, to discover & take care of s. wreck & to Impress men & whatsoever Else necessary to discover & Secure what may be part of her, …with orders to go into any house, Shop, Cellar, Warehouse, room or other place, & in case of resistance to break open any doors, chests, trunks& other package there to Seize & from thence to bring away any of the goods. … And all of his Mjoesty’s officers and other his loving Subjects are Hereby Commanded to be aiding and assisting me, my Deputy or Deputys In the Due Execution of S. warrant or they will answer if Contrary at their utmost peril. These are therefore to notify all persons that have found or taken up any thing of S. Wreck on what was belonging to or taken out of S. Wreck vessel that they make discovery thereof & bring in the same to me at Mr. William Browns In Eastham or where else I shal order Or they will answer the Same at their Utmost peril, and then all officers and other persons will give information of any thing of S. Wreck taken up by any persons of Suspicion thereof, that they may be proceeded with and a Discovery made pursuant to my powers & Instructions. Eastham, May 4^th 1717. Cyprian Southack

On May 6, Governor Shute published a similar notice in The Boston News-Letter that citizens who took items from the wreck of the Whydah did so at their own peril. The Cape Codders who kept and hid their Whydah wreckage were demonstrating quite a strong independence in an era of authoritarian rule.

Captain Southack had the power to conduct house-to-house searches, and commanded all those upright Puritans of the outer Cape to reveal their fellow wreckers. The records of the event show that a few people did in fact bring their “treasure” to the Captain or to Mr. William Brown. (We know from earlier research that Mr. Brown had received 16 acres of land in 1672 near Silver Spring in what became South Wellfleet.) In general, though, the locals pretended that they had not heard of the wreck and must have worked hard to cover-up.

Samuel Harding had a special excuse. He told Southack that he taken items from the wreck, but had promised to hold it for Thomas Davis until after his trial in Boston, and could not renege on his promise. Southack was furious, and wrote to Governor Shute “I find the said Harding is as Gilty (sic) as the Pirate Saved.”

All that week, the cold, windy weather kept Southack from getting off shore to the Whydah to see if he could attempt a dive to bring up the treasure. The bodies continued to come ashore, and part of this legendary tale is that the local citizens would have stripped them of their clothing and anything in their pockets while they still had access to the beach. During this week, Southack reported that there were 79 bodies. The overall number of men on board was 102, plus the two who were alive, so bodies must have continued to wash ashore for some time, a phenomenon that is reported in other accounts of shipwrecks.

Samuel Freeman was the local coroner. He had a pit dug (we do not know where) to bury the many pirate bodies, and billed the Southack for eighty-three pounds. What Southack had gathered was worth about eighty-two pounds, so Freeman had the “Coroners Jury” put a stop upon it for the expenses of the burial. This only increased Southack’s frustration and anger at the locals. He wanted to arrest the entire population, but realized that was impossible.

By May 13, Captain Southack gave up his search and returned to Boston. Stories circulated later that he had made a secret fortune, taken a Creole mistress, and returned to England, but historians have never found any evidence that he did. Shortly after he returned to Boston, he ran an advertisement in the Boston News-Letter describing “two Anchors, two Great Guns and some Jonk that came from the Wreck Whido” that would be sold at Public Auction by the Admiralty Marshal. The rest would wait more than 250 years to be recovered.

*In researching this article I was happy to find the definition of an area near Pochet called Slut’s Bush, a place-name I’d wondered about. This for a swampy area off Nauset had been named in 1626 when the Sparrow Hawk ran aground. One of the passengers, a Mr. Fells, had brought a woman with him to the New World, described as his maid or housekeeper. But when it became obvious she was pregnant, the couple was ostracized and forced to camp out in this section of Nauset, forever called Slut’s Bush.

Sources

Martha J. Ehrlich: “Early Akan Gold from the Wreck of the Whydah”

African Arts, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Aug., 1989), pp. 52-57+87-88

Southack’s biography in http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/southack_cyprian_3E.html

Reynaud, Elizabeth. This Narrow Land Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962

Clifford, Barry with Peter Turchi. Discovering the Priceless Treasures of the Sunken Ship Whydah New York: Simon & Schuster 1993

Clifford, Barry with Paul Perry. Expedition Whydah New York: Harper Collins 1999

Vanderbilt II, Arthur T.  The Fortunes and Fate of the Pirate Ship Whydah Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1986

Levi Whitman quote from “A Topographical Description of Wellfleet in the County of Barnstable” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society for the Year 1794, Volume 13,  page 117

Echevierra, Durand. A History of Billingsgate, Wellfleet: Wellfleet Historical Society 1991.

An article from the Boston Daily Globe on February 29, 1896, caught my eye as I scrolled through a new database of historical newspapers: IS IT MURDER? Wellfleet Man Found In A Boghole.

The man was Manuel Leo, an immigrant from Portugal who had moved to South Wellfleet from New Bedford ten years previously. Manuel, who sometimes used the alias “John”, purchased one-half of a house on “a knoll not far from the bay shore, overlooking the road two miles south of the South Wellfleet depot.” The owner of the house was Frank Joseph, also Portuguese, who kept the other half. The two men established their separate spaces within the house, “a stone’s throw from a little brook.”

That description places the house in the area of the salt marsh surrounding Lieutenant’s Island where the Audubon Society owns a significant portion today. Fresh Brook and Silver Spring meander through the land to the east, and empty into what once was Silver Spring Harbor.  I found a deed dated July, 1877, whereby Sarah A. Smith of Provincetown and her husband S. Smith transferred ownership of land and buildings for $1,000 to Frank Joseph and Frank Case of Provincetown. However, even three years later, these two men are not listed in the 1880 federal census that covers South Wellfleet homes between the Eastham border and the depot/general store.

The reporter from the Globe must have talked to the neighbors, to get so many details about the life of Manuel Leo.  Both he and Frank Joseph did odd-jobs “felling and chopping trees in the pine forests, cultivating asparagus, hay making, and work of like nature.”  The writer made strong judgements too, describing Manuel Leo’s life as “an existence full of drudging toil.”

According to the article, Frank Joseph died in the autumn of 1895. Actually, the Massachusetts death record shows his death occurred on May 18, 1895, when Francis Joseph, a Portuguese single male of 60 years, living in Wellfleet, died of pneumonia. There are no parents listed, and his place of birth is listed simply as “Fayal.”  There are other “Francis Josephs” listed in the federal censuses, living in Provincetown. One, of the same age, married a woman named Mary Center, in February 1859, but there’s no way of knowing if this is the same man who died in 1895.

I found a record for Manuel Leo also. The name, age and year of immigration agree with a record for a man named Manuel Garcia Lui, born in 1851. He is on a passenger list for a ship named Sarah, which arrived in Boston in 1884, departing from Fayal in the Portuguese Azores. The late nineteenth century brought many Azorians to New England as immigrants. For many years, Azorian men had come to Massachusetts after being recruited by the New Englanders who re-supplied and picked up more seamen in the Azores before embarking on their whaling voyages.

Fall River, New Bedford, and certain towns on the Cape were popular destinations for the “Western Islands” immigrants, as those from the Azores were called. Provincetown had become a haven over the years, with the Portuguese immigrants settling into the West End while the Yankees lived in the East End. In the 1890s, the Barnstable Patriot ran a column “Letter from the Azores” by Pedro Miguel about life in the Azores.

Because the Portuguese immigrants had darker skin, there was a measure of discrimination, but that does not seem to have been a factor—so far as we know—in the disappearance and then possible murder of Manuel Leo. In fact, the South Wellfleet residents organized a search when he went missing.

Before we return to the story, there’s one more significant fact about Manuel Leo: he was an epileptic. His ”fits” occurred at irregular intervals. Mr. Washington Pierce, who employed Leo during the cold weather for some years, told the reporter that Leo sometimes had two or more fits a day, and then would be free of them for 10 days or a fortnight. When seized, he would fling off his coat and vest before falling. Upon recovery, he would go wandering around the area, “taking extremely long walks through the forests and along the beach.” Others said that he had not had many fits, and they had never seen him disrobe. They indicated that when he was “free of epilepsy” he was “good-natured and industrious.”

The reporter also learns that the family of “Venie” Dill did the cooking for Manuel Leo  at their home on the bluff, just across the road. This would be Sylvanus Dill who lived in South Wellfleet for most of his life. Mr. Dill was born in 1827, in Eastham, and had recently (1894) married his third wife, Lucinda Lewis Higgins, a young widow with two sons who were in the Dill home in the 1900 census. When Mr. Dill died in 1906, she married Stephen Paine a few months later.  Mr. Dill’s son Leonard and his wife, Kate, lived next door. It’s not clear which Dill household was preparing Mr. Leo’s meals.

Manuel Leo disappeared in mid-December 1895. Some said he had last been seen on December 14, but others said it was the following day, Sunday the 15^th.  Although his door was found unlocked, and the key in the sink, no one looked for him until three weeks had gone by. It’s not clear in the article if one or two searches were done, but six on January 18, about 25 men from South Wellfleet organized a search party, and fanned out over the landscape, 20 feet apart, going toward the ocean, “making a most rigid examination.”

Turning to neither the left nor right, they waded creeks and sloughs, climbed hills, pushing their way meanwhile through thicket and grove, snowbanks and ice fields until they had penetrated to the margin of the sea, having during the trip made a thorough examination of a vast amount of territory.

Then, on February 7, the body was found by Joe Brown, another South Wellfleet resident, who was hunting turtles in the marsh.  Cape Cod’s diamondback terrapins, although not as popular as those in the Chesapeake Bay region, were hunted as a food source. Turtle soups and stews became a high-status food during the late 19^th century, so Mr. Brown was picking up a few extra dollars by plunging a pole down through the mud at the edge of the marsh, and capturing the hibernating turtles. At some point, making a few bucks came to be known as “turtle thumping.” All of that is hard to imagine in our era when the turtles are so very well protected and cared for.

In his search, Mr. Brown had “moved along the brook which, sweeping down the long hill on which stand the homes of Venie Dill and Matthew Mayo, passes the spot known as the ‘Try Yard,’” that name giving us another check on the fact that much earlier, whales were brought to shore and cut up, near and on Lieutenant Island.

Mr. Brown found Leo’s body on the northern edge of the creek, with its legs in the crevasse of a bog hole, described as six by ten feet. Brown left his turtle hunting, and “a message was hurried to Deputy Sheriff Linnell at Wellfleet.”

Mr. Linnell did not arrive until several hours later, bringing with him Washington Pierce and Theodore Crocker. Mr. Linnell had a number of jobs in Wellfleet. He had been trained by his father at his shop in South Orleans to be a marble carver of gravestones. After moving to Wellfleet, he had expanded his business to also be the undertaker. In addition, he was one of the deputy sheriffs of Barnstable County, and the closest law enforcement officer, since there was no Wellfleet Police Department until the 1930s. Washington Pierce did numerous odd jobs, including taking the census in 1880. Theodore Crocker was the son of a widow, Sarah R. Crocker, who had purchased the old Smith House and 15 acres in 1883, and may have been operating there as a chicken farm, according to one reference. That house was later purchased by Victor Wolfson, and is one of a few designated as “historical” in the South Wellfleet area in the survey done in the 1970s.

According to the Globe report, the men moved the body, fully clothed with even his Scotch cap in place, but with a swollen and discolored eye, and a bloody wound “at the junction of the nose and forehead.” The hair was dry as a bone. The report goes on to surmise that if the body had been in the marsh for a long time, and had drifted about the canals, the jagged ice there would have torn away the clothing and “torn the head.” A later medical examination showed that the lungs were free of water, so death was not declared to be from drowning.

Mr. Leo’s death record shows the cause of death “supposed to be caused by violence.” The date is recorded as unknown, entered into the record between February 24 and 28, probably when the medical examination of the body was made. Mr. Leo was a single Portuguese male, age 45, from Western Island, parents unknown. There is no note as to where Mr. Leo was buried. Perhaps he is in a grave in the South Wellfleet Cemetery.

The condition of the body, and the fact that the earlier search had not found it, led to speculation that someone had placed the body in the marsh only a short time before its discovery. In a grim final paragraph, the reporter wonders why the person who conveyed it from its hiding place had not sunk it into one of the many bog holes. “A body shoved deep in most any part of the bog land might well remain undiscovered until the crack of doom.”

A second news article about the death of Manuel Leo appeared in the Boston Daily Globe on March 7, 1896. This one covered the inquest concerning his death, and took place in the 2^nd District Court of Judge Hopkins in Provincetown’s Town Hall. Two “state detectives,” Letteney and Dexter, appeared and gave testimony as to their work on the case. In addition, several “Wellfleet people” were summoned, and came to court on the noon train from South Wellfleet. The list included Joseph R. Brown, who found the body, Washington R. Pierce, Frank Brewer, Mrs. Boynton (sic), Sylvanus Dill, Lucinda Dill, Kate Dill, Leonard Dill, Elisha Mayo, Mrs. Theodore Crocker, Mrs. Galligan, and Joshua W. Lincoln.

Detective Simeon F. Letteney was based in Hyannis and was in the news often as the state detective for the Cape District. He is mentioned in other Cape investigations around the turn of the century, including Edwin Ray Snow, and Nurse Jane Tappan. Authors have written books about their murder cases.

I could not find out who Mrs. Galligan was.  Frank Brewer was a young farmer from Eastham, possibly living close to the murder scene. Joshua Lincoln was from a family that had settled in the area generations ago; eventually their land became a part of the Wellfleet Drive-In Theater. Mrs. “Boynton” —who was in fact Mrs. Boyington—was John Boyington’s wife. They had come back to their family farm in South Wellfleet from Boston in 1884; John worked for Mr. Stubbs’ shell fishing operation. The Boyington’s home still stands, and, like the Crocker house, is listed on the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s survey of the historic homes in South Wellfleet. Elisha Mayo is also from a long-standing South Wellfleet family, and lived in a house near the Dills, as the first news article mentioned.

The news reporter wasn’t able to add much more to the story of Manuel Leo, as the depositions were given in secret, and no one would speak about their role. The only news reported was that Mrs. Boyington had fainted but recovered—and was able to complete her statement. The event was over by 5:25 pm.

Nothing more was written about the case. No one covered the story in the South Wellfleet columns in the Barnstable Patriot which reported so many small details of the comings and goings of the local residents. Perhaps the idea that this death was a murder was just too unseemly to report, in these early days of the area opening up to become a charming vacation spot. The sales of cottage lots along the bay were already in progress on Lieutenant’s Island, Pleasant Point and the Old Wharf.

The Manuel Leo case was forgotten, unlike other more contemporary unsolved cases, such as the “Lady of the Dunes” from the 1970s, which still gets attention. Manuel Leo came from the Azores, lived a difficult life, perhaps was murdered in his sparsely populated community, died, and was forgotten.

Sources

www.newspapers.com

Federal censuses on Ancestry.com

Barbara Brennessel Diamonds in the Marsh: A Natural History of the Diamondback Terrapin

Barnstable Patriot online at the Sturgis Library

Massachusetts Historical Commission survey of Wellfleet historic homes, 1970s.

Isaac (Ikie) Paine, born in 1867, was the son of Alvin Paine and Eliza Foster. Alvin Paine had a successful career as a sea captain, and then became the owner of the South Wellfleet General Store in 1880. Eliza’s father was the well-regarded Captain Scotto Foster. Alvin Paine purchased the second Arey home in 1877, right next to the home where Eliza Foster grew up. Both houses are still with us today.

Isaac (Ikie) Paine married a Stubbs daughter(see below). His sister Mabel married Fred Doane, who lived close by — their home was moved to the east of Route 6 when the road was widened in the late 1940s.

The Paine, Foster, Doane, and Stubbs families have all been covered in previous blog posts. They all lived between the South Wellfleet Cemetery and the General Store.

Ikie Paine—a name my aunt remembered from her childhood South Wellfleet summers—sometimes appears as Ikey, but I have adopted Professor Hicks’ spelling here.

Ikie Paine married Mary Stubbs, daughter of the successful South Wellfleet shell fisherman, Joseph A. Stubbs, who brought his shellfish company and family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it grew and became quite successful. The Stubbs family had their company’s operation at the head of Blackfish Creek (Stubbs’ Landing) and spent their summers in South Wellfleet. Mary had married Thomas Attner of Cambridge, but he died, leaving her with a daughter, Bernice.

Isaac Paine and Mary Stubbs Attner married in 1905, when he was in his late thirties and Mary in her forties. Ikie must have known her as a young woman when she and her family came to South Wellfleet from Cambridge. This was after the death of Ikie’s mother, Eliza, who had her own mother in their home in 1900, with her two children, Isaac and Mabel, in their thirties, living there too.

In the federal censuses of 1910 and 1920, Isaac Paine is noted as a grocer in the occupation column. From my earlier blog post about the South Wellfleet Store, we know he sold it in 1923.

Professor Hicks moved in next to Ikie Paine in 1936 or 1937, and over the years of his South Wellfleet summers became a friend to his closest neighbor. My previous post notes Professor Hicks’ stroke which he suffered late in life. He begins this 1953 essay by noting that, after sixteen summers, he was writing about his friend and neighbor. Although this seems to contradict my note that Professor Hicks was unable to write after his stroke, the essay came to me as a typewritten document with editorial notes made in Professor Hicks’ distinctive hand, but may have been typed by someone else.

Professor Hicks ends his essay with the sad tale of Ikie’s death from a fire that started in his barn. Hicks refers to the fire as a December 1943 event. However, the Boston Herald reported his funeral on September 16, 1943, and Ikie’s Masonic record shows his death in that month too.

Professor Hicks also wrote a short piece (printed here also) that noted the garbage collection arrangement with Lewis Hatch, who lived in the area of Wireless Road, past the South Wellfleet Cemetery. As covered in a previous post, Mr. Hatch died in a fire in December 1939, during weather conditions that were like the ones described here by Professor Hicks. I must wonder if Professor Hatch confused the circumstances of the fires that killed the two old South Wellfleet men.

SOURCES

Federal census data on www.ancestry.com

Family trees on www.rootsweb.ancestry.com

Newspaper articles on www.genealogybank.com.

Professor Hick’s 1952 essays about his neighbors in South Wellfleet

When we bought our place on Cape Cod, we thought we were just getting a summer place in which to relax and recuperate. We didn’t think of it as a community the members of which were worth knowing for their own sake. We already know some of them, “natives” as well as Summer people, but we didn’t come here because of them. We came because of the climate and the scenery and the swimming, and the little side roads leading down to the “hollows” to the ocean, or to the beaches on the bay-side. Now, after sixteen summers, we still love these same things, but we love the people even more. We have neighbors here, even though the houses are few and far between.

Our nearest neighbor used to be Ikie. You could just see his old house, pretty much rundown, through the trees. They were locust trees with a few apple and pear trees. The latter were relics of a shipwreck off the ocean shore, many years ago, in the time of Ikie’s father. The ship was loaded with fruit trees destined for Boston and vicinity. When the ship broke up, the shore was littered with slips of trees of varieties unknown then to Cape Cod, and the inhabitants took their pick, and planted them near their dooryards. They never grew to be large, nor were they very fruitful, but they lived. Besides the locusts and the fruit trees, there were willows. These willows dwarfed Ikie’s house and the barn back of it. Their branches spread out to cover a diameter of nearly a hundred feet, and their trunks were massive. Underneath one of them there was a well, and prior to that there was a bubbling spring. The spring was there before the trees were – in fact that was why the trees came to grow there. It came about in this way. So many years ago that no one now living can vouch we now live, drove his father’s cow over to the spring, as was his nightly custom. In his hand he carried a willow with, and while the cow was drinking, he stuck a willow with into the soft wet sand at the edge of the spring, and left it there. Miraculously, no one ever removed it, the cows did not trample it, and the winter’s snow and frost did not kill it. It took root, it grew and flourished like the Cape willow tree that it was, majestic and sheltering. Ikie loved that tree and the others which grew up around it. It sheltered him for sixty years, from the time when he brought his young bride from Boston to live in the old house under the shade of the old tree, until he died. The tree lasted only two years longer than Ikie did. It also had run its span of life.

The first time I saw Ikie was when I came down to look over our place with a view to buying it. We had admired the house many times as we drove by on the highway, five hundred feet away, but we didn’t know how much land went with it, or where the boundaries were. “Ask Ikie Paine,” people said,  ”If anyone knows, he will.”  And he did. “I certainly hope you will buy the place,” he said. “Nobody has lived in it for twenty years, except a few months in the summer, and we miss seeing a light there. There’s nothing so cheering as seeing a neighbor’s light on a dark night.” Ikie put on his rubber boots and we went out in the searching November wind and walked the limits of the seventeen-acre plot, struggling through huckleberry and beach plum bushes, pitch pine trees, and low-growing hog-cranberry vines, following the lines of old rail fences down to the marsh meadow on the bay-side. Keeping to the edge of this meadow, we came to the corner of Ikie’s land, from which the dividing line of the two places ran straight East to the main road. Here it became evident that the entrance to what was to be my driveway trespassed on his land. And so I proposed, in case I bought the place, to buy from Ikie a strip of his land running back the whole space from the road to the bay. He agreed that that would be a good thing to do. The next summer we consummated the plan. At the main road, we measured off twenty-five feet running due north, and at its end placed a stake and stone. At intervals w repeated this process, but adding tall stakes along which we could sight. As we approached the bay, it was seen that this strip, because of the lay of the land, would give me a swale where Ikie pastured his cow. So we ran the line off at an angle, from that point on, to the satisfaction of Ikie and his cow, and without any disadvantage to me, but Ikie had many misgivings whether he ought to accept the change of plan, since he had given his word. The last stake and stone that we placed was between high and low water at the edge of the salt meadow. We didn’t get the deed drawn up until eight o’clock that night. It was Saturday night, and Ikie had to go to Orleans to his lodge meeting. I said, “well, we can sign it tomorrow morning, and then I can start for home.” “That is one thing I can’t do,” said Ikie. “I never do business on Sunday, but if you can be here before midnight tonight, we can sign it.” And that is what we did, in the brief interval between Ikie’s arrival from his lodge and the stroke of twelve. Two weeks later I was again on the Cape, and Ikie came over to see me right away. “I’ve been worrying since you left,” said he, “about something I’ve done. I have sold you some land that I don’t own. That last stake we put in down at the meadow is below highwatermark, andmy land runs only to highwater. I didn’tmean to do this. Do you think I will get into any trouble?” I set hismind at rest by assuring him that I intended to put the place through the Land Court,and that all such details would be straightened out. I had begun to learn that here was an honest man.

When we finally got the old house repaired and had begun to live there, Ikie and his wife began to shower us with little attentions. If their son-in-law brought them a catch of mackerel, or a bucket of quohogs, Ikie would come struggling through the tall grass, across the field to our side-door, and leave them for us. Or he would bring us a head of lettuce or some ears of sweet-corn. Not to be outdone, Mary would send over a bunch of roses accompanied by a penciled note,

“These are grown across the way —

I send them to you

For your bouquet.”

And when Helen was ill for a few days, Mary sent her a pie:

It makes no difference

If sick and on a bed you lie,

You sure must have

A piece of pie.

So open your mouth and take a bite,

And ten to one, you’ll

Come out right.”

On a morning we could hear singing coming through the trees. It was Ikie, we soon learned, singing at his chores, or working in his garden. The only songs he knew were hymns, which he sang in a high tenor, at the top of his voice, “There shall be showers of blessings,” or “Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore.” Or “Come all you faithful.” His cow was a pet, and every hen was named, not forgetting the rooster. Three days a week, Ikie got out his old beach-wagon, loaded it with vegetables and eggs, and started on his round of summer houses. It was his only source of income, and that only for a short season. Either the Model T beach wagon was out-of-order or Ikie had lost confidence in himself, for he didn’t turn it around except in case of dire necessity. He didn’t back and fill, but drove around in chosen places where he could take a wide sweep. He used to have confidence enough when he drove a delivery horse and wagon for his father’s general store at the Old Wharf. In those days, the Old Wharf was a thriving settlement where a packet landed from Boston, and where dozens of fishing boats came to discharge their catches and to refit. Here Ikie learned the lingo of fishermen which he used as naturally as if he had been bred to the sea.

Talking about the world war, he said, “the trouble is, they’s throwed God overboard, and the Devil’s walked aft and got the wheel. Like many another Cape Codder, he was a Republican, and he didn’t like Roosevelt. “When any man thinks he can run this whole country alone, he’s lost his head. He thinks because he’s got HARVARD COLLEGE stamped on the seat of his pants, he’s a superman. “Education?” he continued, –“Now you take honey. Honey is good, but if you ate nothing else, you’d spew it all up, wouldn’t you? Same way with education. It’s all right, but you got to have something else too. You got to have common sense. If you want a school of mackerel, you’ve got to throw bait. The foolishist thing we ever did was to elect Roosevelt President.” Despite these remarks, Ikie revered education and was proud of the fact that his father had gone to an academy and “knew more than twice two.” He used to quote his father as saying,

“Live and larn

Die and forget it all.

I never thought I’d take

Up ashes in a sasser.”

I have no idea what the last two lines mean, but they meant something to Ikie.

He was cautious about predicting what the weather would be. On a cloudy day with the wind blowing hard, he would squint at our weather vane, made for us by Fred Doane in the form of a black-fish, and say,”If she backends up into the East, we’re going to have a spell of weather.” Or, in answer to an inquiry whether it was going to clear up, he would quote the seamen’s rhyme,

“Long foretold

Long last.

Short notice

Soon past.”

A thunderstorm was always referred to as a “tempest,” and a morning fog which burned off by noon as an “Easterly mull.” After a long spell of rain, he would say, “It aint a going to clear up till the moon changes.” One calm day, hot and sultry, he would announce, ”The breeze came up with the tide.” Observing a leaning tree, he would say, “That tree must have been in a breeze of wind; it’s canted over as though it was like to fall.” Most of his prognostications were prefaced  by “I wouldn’t say it will, I wouldn’t say it won’t.”

Tall stories are told about mosquitos on the Cape, and Ikie had his share of them. He remembered when they weren’t any worse here than anywhere else. When farmers raised salt hay for their cattle, they would keep the meadows ditched so that the hay would not rot, but when their sons gave up farming and there were fewer cows and horses to need hay, ditching was given up, and nobody knew what to do about the mosquitoes. They would settle so thick on the side of a horse that couldn’t see the horse at all. In a carry-all, going to the train, you couldn’t see the roof for mosquitoes. Everybody wore big hats with mosquito nets tied over their heads. People would come down on one train to stay for the summer and go right back on the next. Then the Mosquito Control came along, and solved the problem by doing just what the farmers used to do, they ditched the meadows.

When I complained about the wood-ticks,a seasonable though harmless pest which infests the Cape inJuly and early August, he rected some verses that he had learned from a newspaper clipping

I sing of the little wood-tick

The Cape’s own rural pet,

Though he’s intimate and loyal

I’ve not learned to like him yet.

I sing of the little wood-tice

Clinging closer than a brother,

The rural vamp of field and camp

Than which there is no other.

I sing of the little wood-tick.

A-sitting on a log.

I waged a battle with him

(line does not finish)

And that unhappy puppy,

Most miserable of ours,

Found the unwelcome insect

His ‘tic doloreuse!

I’m praying now for August

When his family will increase

And leave the clock of allmy hours

Inquiet, tickles peace.

Our dog, Brownie, would have joined in this prayer if a dog could pray. It was a daily job to “tick” her. Ikie would sometimes watch me, and say, “”She likes that like all get out, don’t she?”

Oystering and fishing used to be the chief industries in Wellfleet when Ikie was a boy. The fishing fleets would be away six or eight weeks, and fishing went seven days a week. But in the fall, when mackerel were running in Cape Cod Bay, the Wellfleet fleet would come home on Saturday night to lay up over Sunday. For this reason, the Gloucester fishermen, who fished on Sunday, called the local fishermen “Bible-faces.” The Wellfleeters used to oyster in winter and mackerel in summer. Ikie had a simple explanation why the oyster business here declined and final died. The mackerel ceased to come here, and so the men were out of work in summer. They moved away, and then there were not enough men to carry on the oystering.

A famous character that Ikie loved to tell about was John Cheever, who lived toward the Old Wharf, and was a jack of all trades including fishing. He spoke spontaneous-in doggerel verse. Once when he came home at two a.m. after being away for six weeks, he knocked a Jacob Rice’s door expecting Rice’s wife Betsy to let him in. He knocked again louder still, and when a window was raised, he called out,

“Betsy Rice

I called you twice

While you lay in bed and snore.

Why don’t you awake

And see Uncle Jake

Just home from Bay Chaleur?”

He was a big clumsy man, always behind and always happy-go-lucky. He raised hens and traded his eggs in at Ikie’s father’s store. When Ikie opened the store in the morning, he would find notes telling what Cheever wanted delivered to his house during the day. Ikie remembered one of the notes:

Mr. Paine, please bring to me

A quarter pound of your good tea,

One of rice, and two of bread,*

Of Munroe’s tobacco please bring one head.**

An empty barrel

A bag of corn

When your team at noon

Comes along.

Take my eggs

If I’m not there.

Your humble servant

John Cheever, Esquire.”

*Pilot Bread ** Plug tobacco.

On board ship, there wasn’t much variety in the way of food. The fishermen used to tell about eating what they called “hog’s back son-of-a-bitch,” a combination of salt pork, stale vegetables, with stale bread on top. These were cooked covered in a spider. (Note: A Spider is a cast-iron pan with feet.) The hard bread was softened by the steam, but the result wasn’t very palatable.  When the men got home, the first thing they wanted was a good meal of vittels. A favorite with them, according to Ikie, was fried huckleberry pie, You covered the bottom of an iron spider with pie-crust, you filled it with huckleberries, put on a top crust, and fried the pie with lard. When it was nearly done, you poured hot molasses on top and finished the cooking. It was very sticky and sweet but satisfying.

These are some of the things I remember about Ikie and talks we had together when he came over to our house. He was a little bit shy and almost timid in manner, as though he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t intruding. When he had brought us something, he was ready to leave as soon as he had made his little presentation speech. But if you made it plain that you wanted him to stay, he was glad to talk.He liked companionship and didn’t have much of it. Nevertheless she didn’t want to force himself on the “strong-bean eaters.” When he was a boy, that is what the natives called the Summer visitors, because they were here only when string beans were in season. He would try to turn the conversation to subjects in which he thought you would be interested, rather than to talk about his own affairs. But we would inquire about Mary, and then about his daughter and her husband, and finally he would get started on some story of the old days on Cape Cod. Then a pleasing glint would come in his eyes, and the weather beaten wrinkles about them would deepen, and he would be relaxed and happy. But soon his expression would change, and he would say, “I must be getting back. Mary isn’t very well, as O told you, and she forgets things. She knows I came over here, but she’ll be wondering where I am. She’ll be saying I’ve gone off with another woman. “That was one of the perpetual jokes in Ikie’s household.

Sometimes we went over to Ikie’s house to see Mary. We could drive all around his house in one side and out the other. One of the drives was only a right-of-way which, after fifty years, was contested by a new occupant next door. An obstacle was placed in the way. Ikie didn’t say anything, but drove around it. After a while the obstacle was removed. We would park our car under the old willow tree, and go up on the old back steps to the kitchen door.(The front door hadn’t been opened in years.) There were trumpet vines about the door, as if to herald a welcome, and Mary’s exclamations would complete the illusion. From the kitchen we were led with royal ceremony into the dining room where there was a great stove with isin-glass windows, and then into the sitting room. Here was another stove. All the chairs and furniture were old from years and old from use, but clean in spite of their rather forwsly (sic) appearance. In a bedroom opening off this room was a beautiful Franklin stove.

On a couch near Mary’s chair was a place for the cat, and often, there was a litter of kittens. Salutations over, Mary would bring out her treasures, old pieces of china and lustre-glass, and photographs of her family. This would start her telling us again about her home in Boston, and the prosperous days of her youth. She had lived with Ikie on the Cape for more than thirty years, but she didn’t consider herself a Cape Codder. She was still a Bostonian. “You know,” she would say, “those queer Cape Cod stories they tell aren’t exaggerated a bit.” Then Ikie would smile an indulgent smile, and Mary would laugh. It was an old argument, and from repetition Mary became more convinced that Ikie and all Cape Codders thought they were a little better than people down Boston way. That was strange because Mary’s father was born on Cape Cod, and got his start in business by selling buckets of clams on Boston Common. From this beginning, he built up a great fish and shellfish business, the successor of which is still going strong. Every day, we see the great refrigerated trucks go by on the way from Provincetown to Boston. Mary’s remembrance went back only to the prosperous days after the business was started, and her first knowledge of the Cape was when the family came down for the Summer. Her father bought her a pony which pulled her over the deep, sandy roads, in a pony cart, to the envy of all the native children. I don’t know how Mary and Ikie met. Maybe it was when he was delivering groceries from his father’s store, when she was a “string bean eater,” and he was a “native.” She was the sophisticated city girl, well educated, and talented, while Ikie got all the learning that he had from hard knocks and in the old school house which is now the Social Union Hall of the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association and Social Union. (How the association got this name is a story in itself.)

I don’t know when or where they were married, but I do know that Ikie was the happiest man in the world. His wife was young and beautiful. She was the life of the community, and of every party. She gave readings as was the vogue of the time, and she got up plays and entertainments using local talent. Everybody liked her, and Ikie was very proud.

After the business at the Old Wharf died out, along with the fishing industry which had centered there, Ikie went into business for himself. His store was on the knoll just south of the present South Wellfleet Post Office. It was right alongside the Railroad Station, which for some years now has been a thing of the past. Now, only two freight trains, and no passenger trains, come through every week –not enough to keep the rust off the tracks. Long before the trains were stopped, business except for Summer had declined. And Ikie and Mary were getting old. The store was given up, and Ikie took up the task of making a living off of his land surrounding the old house and the willow trees. It wasn’t much of a living but they got along. He made his garden, he fed his cow and his hens, he did his milking and gathered the eggs, and in summer he pedaled his surplus to his regular customers. There used to be quite a settlement in their neighborhood, but the old families had died off, and the children had moved away, and the Winters, when the Summer people were away, were pretty lonely. But you wouldn’t know from Ikie that the going was tough, and he was never sad, never too downcast to sing hymns when he was doing his chores, never worried except when he referred to Mary’s waning health, and compared her present forgetfulness with the clever quickness of her youth. Neither of them wanted to leave the old place and go live with their daughter. They wanted to live out their last days together in their old house. And Ikie wanted to live to take care of Mary. The last time I saw them was in the Fall, just before we were leaving for the Winter. We had had a long visit in their sitting-room, and had come out on the back porch. It was in the morning because it was the only chance for a last talk. Mary had her working dress on and a cloth tied about her hair. As she stood in the doorway, frail-looking and bent over a little, she was a picture to remember. I said to her, “I’d like to take your picture just as you are. I have my camera here. Will you let me do it?” “In this dress, looking the way I do? No Sir. And besides, do you think I want Ike showing my picture to his second wife?” “He wouldn’t do that,” I replied, laughing. ”Yes he would,” said she, “you don’t know Ike.”

Sad news came to us that winter. No one knows just what brought on the disaster, but the following facts are known. On a December night, about two o’clock in the morning, something woke Ikie. He partly dressed, lighted a lantern, and went out to the barn. A little while later, he was heard by Fred Doane, who lived directly across the road, calling out in great distress, “Come Fred, right away, I’m burned. The barn is on fire.” Fred pulled on his trousers, put on his shoes, and an overcoat, and hurried over. He found Ikie in the house, on the couch, writhing in pain. Most of his clothing had been burned off him. At that time, there was no doctor in the town, so Fred telephoned to the district nurse. In the meantime, sailors at the naval station had seen the blaze of the burning barn, and had come over. Learning that no doctor was available, one of them went back to the station, and brought back the navy doctor, who gave Ikie an injection of morphine. As soon as possible, the district nurse took Ikie in her car to the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. Ikie died the next night.

Mary lives with her daughter now, and, very mercifully, she does not remember how Ikie died, or any of the events of that terrible night.

II.

To go to Hatchie’s house, you turn off the main road just opposite Ikie’s place, between Fred Doane’s house and the cemetery, and across the railroad track, and then along a sandy road which looked too deep for automobiles, until you came to a little group of buildings. If you went a little further you would come to a cedar swamp, and if you looked back from Hatchie’s you would see the top of Fred Doane’s house, a quarter of a mile away. The distance wasn’t great, but on account of the lay of the land, the location seemed more isolated than it really was. As you drove in between the house which stood on the left, and the out buildings which flanked it close by on the right, you felt as if you were ten miles from nowhere. But there was plenty of life right there. The old sow was grunting in the pig-pen, and the little pigs were squealing, and the chickens were running away from the strange car, and the fat little mare was stomping and switching the flies away, and a fierce-looking dog was coming out of the house, growling. A voice from the house commanded the dog to be silent, and then Hatchie appeared calling out roughly “What are you coming here for? I’m eating my breakfast. Who are you anyhow?” Shoes, pants and shirt were all he had on, and his gray hair was touseled. Blinking in the sunlight, he said again in a different tone, “who are you, anyhow?” I explained my errand which was to ask him to come twice a week at least to get our garbage. I had seen him driving about with his wagon loaded with several foul smelling barrels in which he gathered “swill” for his hogs. He was an important person in the economy of our community, for there was (and still is) no public convenience here. We had already dug a large hole in the tree well back from our house in which to dump cans and other refuse, and we had discovered that this had been the practice for generations past. Digging almost anywhere on the place you might come upon such a cache with no sign of it showing on the surface. When you dumped garbage in such a hole you were supposed to cover it with sand, and this gradually fill up the hole. If you didn’t cover the garbage with sand, you were leaving an extra attraction for skunks. It was a nuisance, the whole business, and Hatchie was the answer. He was the sanitary department of our community.

By the time Professor Hicks bought the oldest of the Arey homesteads in 1936 he had become an accomplished professional. Born in Auburn, New York, October 14, 1875, the son of an immigrant English gardener, Professor Hicks graduated from Colgate University in 1898. His first position was in the Map Division of the Library of Congress, an assistant at first, and then as Assistant Chief of the Division. While working there, he studied at Georgetown University’s Law School, receiving his degree in 1901.

He returned to Auburn to practice law, but soon moved back to librarianship when he took the position of librarian at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. While there, he also attended Brown University, where he earned a Master’s Degree in 1907. In 1908, he became the Assistant Librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. In the 1910 federal census, he is living in Brooklyn. Soon he moved to Columbia University, where he was Superintendent of reading rooms, and then promoted to Assistant Librarian. By 1915, he was promoted to Law Librarian of Columbia Law School, beginning his career as one of America’s premier law librarians.

Hicks married Susan Morgan on April 24, 1912. In the 1920 federal census, they are living at 530 West 123 Street on Manhattan’s west side, near the University. In 1924, on his passport application, he notes a two-month European trip in 1912, perhaps a wedding trip. On his 1924 trip to a number of European countries he both represented the University and traveled for pleasure.  Professor Hicks and his wife traveled to Europe several times in the 1920s.

In 1928, Hicks was appointed Law Librarian of Yale University’s Law Library, and also appointed a Professor of Legal Bibliography; later, he was promoted to Professor of Law.

Professor Hicks is known today as “The Dean of Law Librarians.”  He recognized early in his career that law students needed assistance in their work as the casebook system of legal instruction developed, and lawyers became university-trained instead of apprenticing to a practicing attorney. A 1913 Hicks publication “Aids to the Study and Use of Law Books” became, by 1923, his important book, “Materials and Methods of Legal Research” published through three editions. You can still find the 1942 edition on Amazon today.

Hicks wrote many other books – more than twenty in all. He also wrote 52 journal articles that appeared in more than twenty publications. Furthermore, he developed a course that taught legal research.

A Renaissance man, Hicks had many other interests as well. His photographs won several prizes in the New Haven Camera Club competitions. He was a skilled painter in both watercolors and oils, and he played the flute in the Business and Professional Men’s Orchestra of New Haven. A glowing essay on his life, cited below, describes Frederick Hicks as “a quiet gentleman of Napoleonic stature but minus the pomp, imbued with human interest and understanding, and with a kindly nature. He was a man of zeal for learning and progress.”

Professor Hicks married twice. Susan Morgan Hicks died in 1926. In 1930, when the federal census was taken again, Frederick’s wife is listed as Helen Morgan Hicks, and they have a son, F. Morgan Hicks, noted as adopted.  Possibly Hicks had married his first wife’s sister, but this could not be verified.

With his busy work life, and steady employment through the Depression, Frederick and Helen Hicks were able to purchase the oldest of the two South Wellfleet Arey houses, across from the South Wellfleet Cemetery. The owner at that point was Albert Arey of Roslyn, New York, the son of Oliver Arey, whose father was Reuben Arey. The Arey family was the subject of an earlier blog piece.

Professor Hicks and his wife made their purchase in January, 1936. For a total of $2300, they now owned the house, its furnishings and its outbuildings, over eight adjoining acres, and another parcel of eleven acres! The label of the adjoining land as “the Taylor lot” suggests that this was the land that Lydia Ward Arey Taylor (second wife of the first Reuben Arey) owned with her second husband.

In a 1938 letter to Albert Arey, Hicks states that he had “spent a great deal of money” to restore the Arey home, and was taking a “great deal of pride in the place.” He had become curious about the exact year the house was built, and was urging Arey to get back to him with more information about the dates of the two Reuben Areys, so he could figure out the date when the house was built. Arey had told him that the house was built in 1808 “of timber cut on the premises and the floor boards as well.” But others who had examined the house thought it was older. Hicks was trying to find the answer, but there’s no record if he did.

As I’ve researched South Wellfleet, several historians have noted that the original timber growth on the outer Cape was pretty much used up by the early eighteenth century for houses, boats, fuel, and wood for the fires for trying whales. Telling the Professor that local timber was used for the house sounds like a sales pitch.  To answer the Professor’s questions about the two early Reuben Areys, the first was born in 1750 and died in 1801. This first Reuben Arey married for the first time in 1773, and married his second wife, Lydia, in 1777. He is on the Wellfleet tax roll for 1798. This house was probably built for either his first or second marriage, but definitely earlier than 1808, unless it was a replacement structure.

The Hicks’ next-door neighbor was Isaac Paine, known as Ikie, and his wife, Mary. Ikie lived in the second Arey home, built for the second Reuben Arey.  A number of years later, Professor Hicks wrote an essay about Ikie which will be posted here soon. (My thanks to a couple of neighbors who passed this essay along to me.)

Professor Hicks became an active member of South Wellfleet’s summer community. He was one of the founding members of the South Wellfleet Neighborhood Association in 1938. Their booklet includes a photograph of the Arey house, which Hicks named “The Bowed Roof.”  I have an early memory of its green sign posted on Route 6, just before the turn onto Old Wharf Road. That sign is now in the old barn/garage still on the property.

Thanks to our neighbors, I had a tour of the Arey house. Its beautiful restoration includes the traditional central chimney providing fireplaces on three sides. A very steep stairway climbs to the upstairs rooms. It’s a very snug Cape Cod House that would have been close to the South Wellfleet church and its graveyard, and not far from the Kings Highway, east of the cemetery.

Another of our neighbors remembers going to the Hicks house as a boy when musical evenings would be offered, with Professor Hicks playing his flute.

Professor Hicks also played a role in the effort in 1939 to create a “Marconi Park” on the site where Marconi sent his first wireless message to England in 1902. This effort did not succeed, as the military use of the site increased in the 1940s, and the site was kept inaccessible to the public. Finally, with the installation of the Cape Cod National Seashore, this part of South Wellfleet’s history could be visited at last.

Professor Hicks’ hobby as a photographer seemed to blossom as he explored the Cape landscape. The Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum has several Hicks photographs in their newly-digitized collection.

Professor Hicks also took photos of his home and surrounding places. He made a brochure about his home, and may have rented to roomers for a while. Here are a few photos I have:

HICKS brochure on his home

HICKS photos of his home

HICKS photo of Cook’s Camps

Hicks also took a number of photos in other towns. Here is an image of the Orleans Movie Theater in 1946 when this Tarzan movie dates from.  Looks like there was a gas station across the street then, as there is now, but the building now houses the CVS store.

HICKS Photo of Orleans Theater 1946

Professor Hicks also sold a number of his photographs to Boston’s Tichnor Company which produced thousands of images printed with a linen texture from the 1940s to the 1960s. His images of “the Thoreau House,” Main Street Wellfleet, Holiday House, “Captain Tim’s Bridge” (now Uncle), the Wellfleet Congregational Church, and Our Lady of Lourdes Church are part of the Tichnor collection. His photo of “The Colonial Hall” in Wellfleet gives us a picture of the former South Wellfleet Congregational Church, after it was moved to Wellfleet and restored, but before it became the Town Hall.  He also photographed the Old Mill in Brewster (which we now call “the Grist Mill”), the Sturgis Library in Barnstable, and the Nauset Coast Guard Station for the company. The Boston Public Library owns the collection but has made it available here.

Hicks printed many of his Wellfleet photographs as small images on heavy cream stock, possibly looking to sell them to vacationing visitors.

Helen Morgan Hicks died in 1947. In that year, Professor Hicks had a stroke. He was never able to speak again, and lost the use of his right arm, so he could not write. He spent the last years of his life with these severe disabilities, and died on April 30, 1956, at age eighty.

His obituary in The Cape Codder in early May that year noted his multiple accomplishments as ”a student, lawyer, author, legal biographer and bibliographer, editor, musician, painter and outstanding contributor to the progressive advancement of the legal profession.” His adopted son, Morgan Hicks, was living in Seattle, Washington at that time. He died in 1989, and is buried in a cemetery in Westerly, Rhode Island, alongside his mother, Helen, and his wife, Mildred. Professor Hicks is buried in the Soule Cemetery in Sennett, Cayuga County, New York, with his parents nearby.

Sources

“Frederick C. Hicks: The Dean of Law Librarians” Stacy Etheredge. Published by Association of Law Libraries, 2006, and available www.aallnet.org

www.findagrave.com

The Cape Codder online at www.snowlibrary.org

Barnstable County Deeds available at www.barnstablecountydeeds.org

Newspaper account online at www.genealogybank.com

U.S. Federal Census and U. S. Passports collection at www.ancestry.com.

This post explores my memory of a small plane flying over Blackfish Creek’s marshes, creating a cloud, while spraying for mosquitoes. There’s a new focus now on mosquitoes as the Zika virus spawns the current global health crisis. Here are some highlights of the mosquito’s history in Wellfleet and events that led to the spraying.

There are more than 3500 species of mosquitoes. In the Cape Cod towns that are surrounded by extensive marshland meadows it is the common eastern saltmarsh mosquito (Aedes sollicitans – later reclassified as ochlerotatus sollicitans). With the numerous freshwater ponds and wetlands, there are other species also, but distinguishing one from another was not done until the science of entomology developed. Until the late nineteenth century, these pests were simply something to be endured, although it was common knwledge that they were breeding in the marshes. The saltmarshes also produced the greenheads that become pesky by early summer.

Mosquito at work

Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford wrote about mosquitoes and their effects on people in his history of the colony, although his comment was a bit of a sarcastic remark: “They are too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies who cannot endure the biting of a mosquito. We wish such to keep at home until at least they be mosquito proof.”

Endurance lasted for more than two hundred years, although there may have been some useful efforts to follow native people’s solutions of smoking the area or the application of bear grease. The Barnstable Patriot suggested that a camphor bag hung in “an open casement” was a solution (1861) and an open bottle of Penny Royale in a room created the fumes to drive the mosquitoes away (1872).

For the greenheads, the marshes would be burned in the fall after the salt hay was brought in. The greenhead females lay their eggs on the tall marsh grass. Perhaps the name our family called them, “horse flies”, came from the early farmers’ knowledge to not bring their horses close to the marsh when the flies were hatching, since the animal would become uncontrollable when the pests started to bite. The familiar blue boxes in the marsh that we see today were first set out in 1970 by workers from the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project. The boxes trap female flies prior to their mating, seeking a “blood meal” before laying their eggs.

In the late nineteenth century, Dr. Walter Reed and the entomologists confirmed that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. Malaria had been worked on somewhat earlier by British doctors, and the connection to mosquitoes was established. Dr. Reed’s work was spurred on by the 114-day Spanish-American War when more than 5,000 men died, but fewer than 400 in actual battles. Malaria, yellow fever, typhoid and dysentery caused most of these deaths, and now the United States had tropical islands to manage, as well as the Panama Canal Zone.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were also a period when leisure time became available, for some people, and tourism developed, especially around mountain and coastal towns. It took a little longer for the tourist economy to reach the outer Cape towns. In Wellfleet, it was supported by Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker, whose banana-importing business provided the capital to develop Wellfleet in this new way. He opened the bayside Chequessett Inn in 1902.

Much of the land Captain Baker owned was along the bayside, so the solution was to dyke and ditch the two thousand-acre Herring River marsh, a project undertaken in 1909 and just today is being “undone.” Captain Baker donated the land, with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Town of Wellfleet splitting the remaining $20,000 needed to build the dike. Even The New York Times reported in 1909 on this successful effort in Wellfleet.

Captain Baker, with his international interests, would have been knowledgeable about the urgent work around the world to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes. In 1903, the American Mosquito Extermination Society was formed, with the help of Henry Clay Weeks, a sanitary engineer working in New York City. In New Jersey, an entomologist from Rutgers University helped create success stories along the Jersey Shore, an effort reported in Massachusetts. In 1905, Henry Clay Weeks produced a short report on how to eradicate the mosquitoes in Wellfleet—this appears to be a study Captain Baker paid for, to help convince Wellfleet’s Town fathers to support this work.

In addition to eradicating mosquitoes, dike-builders saw their efforts as “reclaiming” useless marshland for potential agricultural uses, including cranberries and other fruits. In the United States, the urgent work to stop the spread of disease became strongly tied to the effort to increase “personal comfort.”

For more information on the re-working of the Herring River in Wellfleet, the Friends of Herring River website has an excellent paper on the importance of saltmarshes, and the natural processes that create and sustain them, as well as the history of the Herring River project in Wellfleet.

There were two other methods for eradicating mosquitoes: ditching and draining the marshes, and the application of kerosene to the marsh pools where the insects breed. At first this effort was town-by-town, as reflected in the appearance of mosquito-eradication funding in the annual Wellfleet Town Reports, beginning in 1903.

Ditching the salt marshes wasn’t a new strategy. There’s evidence that a modest effort was made by North American native people. But after European settlers arrived and saw the potential for pasturing livestock in the midst of the salt hay, more extensive ditching was adopted, especially in places where “gondolas” were used to gain access for harvest. (Here’s my earlier blog post on salt hay.)

By the late 1920s, mosquito control measures became a county-wide concern. In 1930, all the Barnstable County towns joined in an effort called the Mosquito Control Project, raising $200,000. By December of that year, the Barnstable Patriot reported that 216 miles had been ditched, an effort worked on by 28 men. They were digging trenches 100 feet apart, 10 feet wide, and 24 inches deep, believed to drain low places and prevent breeding. In addition, heavy oil was applied to the pools of water that collected in the marsh.

The privately funded effort became part of the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture’s Division of Reclamation during the Depression years, with the work providing much-needed jobs for Cape men. Some of the marsh-ditching work may have been done by the federally-funded Civilian Conservation Corps, as was the building of Nickerson State Park in Brewster. One report implied that the ditching took on a life of its own, and was directed more at creating jobs than eradicating mosquitoes. This effort peaked in 1934, with over 3,000 linear miles of ditches dug in the Massachusetts marshes.

While I cannot verify it, it seems that the marshes of Blackfish Creek must have been worked on. In the 1950s, my older brother would maneuver our dory through the marsh to tie it up near the highway, probably on an old post left at Stubbs landing, where we would cross over to the General Store. He remembers that we were following a channel in the marsh. However, by the time of this childhood adventure, the ditches of the 1930s may have already been filled in.

During this period also, the kerosene applied by hand by several Wellfleet workers would have been a seasonal activity. The oil on the water’s surface prevented the mosquito larvae from emerging from the water.

The Audubon Society in South Wellfleet reports that their marsh was never ditched, due to an agreement between the Massachusetts Project and the original owners, Oliver Austin and his son, who established the Sanctuary in 1930. (Here’s a blog post I wrote earlier about the Sanctuary.) Of course, now the Audubon-owned marshland is greatly expanded from what once was Lieutenant Island saltmarsh.

Mosquito eradication methods changed after World War II. A Swiss chemist, Paul Muller, looking for a way to protect woolens against moths, discovered an insect-killing chemical. His company shared it with a Department of Agriculture entomology research station in Orlando, Florida, that was charged by the U.S. Army to find new pesticides. In 1942, these scientists experimented and discovered that DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was not particularly harmful to humans. The Army was desperate for pesticides to help control the lice that carried typhus, and the mosquitoes that carried yellow fever and malaria. DDT appeared to be the “miracle drug” right up in importance with penicillin and the vaccine for polio. One of the stellar achievements of World War II was the U.S. Army’s successful effort to prevent a catastrophic typhus epidemic in Naples in 1944. More than a million people were dusted with DDT powder. In 1948 Paul Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize.

After the War, DDT was the wonder product for controlling pests. That was how the plane with the dusting cloud came to be flying over Blackfish Creek. On May 4, 1950, The Cape Codder posted a brief note in their “Wellfleet” column that the C-47 would be resuming operations “from where it left off last year.” The article notes that a wind sock meant to be used by the crew was placed high in a tree. The Cape Cod Mosquito Control workers would also be busy “down in the meadow and the marshes.”

Even by the late 1940s, however, some were warning about the dangers in the growing use of DDT. After the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, it was yet another ten years before the federal government banned it use, although Massachusetts had put some controls on its use prior to that. Massachusetts’ Silent Spring Institute, organized in the early 1990s, has paid particular attention to the Cape Cod population who may still be dealing with the consequences of the DDT spraying on its marshland, cranberry bogs, and golf courses. Since development occurred in these same places, lasting effect of DDT in the soil is a subject of their studies. According to the Silent Spring Institute, Wellfleet was sprayed in 1950, confirming the newspaper account noted above.

Wellfleet Pesticide use, a map from the Silent Spring Institute website

Today, the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project, one of nine districts in Massachusetts, is still actively working. (Their contemporary methods are spelled out here.) For four generations, the Doane family has led the Project. Their ancestor, John Doane, helped settle the Plymouth Bay Colony, played an active role in the settlement of Eastham, and became an assistant to Governor Bradford. Hopefully, he was able to withstand the mosquitoes as the Governor demanded.

Now, mosquito control in the salt marshes involves controlling water flow and making sure that fish that eat mosquito larvae can gain access to pools. They also implore everyone to eliminate containers that allow for any standing water, and urge homeowners to keep their screens in good repair. Most organizations—from the Audubon Society to the National Park Service—recommend spraying yourself with a repellent containing DEET before you take that summer hike.

Sources

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, available online at: http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/bradford.html

The Cape Codder available online at www.snowlibrary.org

Barnstable Patriot (various) online archive: www.sturgislibrary.org

Malcolm Gladwell’s article “The Mosquito Killer” written for The New Yorker in 2001 and posted on his website: http://gladwell.com/the-mosquito-killer/

Patterson, Gordon, The Mosquito Crusades: A History of the American Anti-Mosquito Movement from the Reed Commission to the First Earth Day (partially available on Google)

“Sensory Guide” publication of the Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary, Massachusetts Audubon Society

Paper “Massachusetts Mosquito Control: Open Marsh Water Management Standards” May 2010 published here: http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/agr/mosquitos/docs/open-water-marsh-management-standards.pdf