Cape Cod : $b its natural and cultural history : a guide to Cape Cod National Seashore, MassachusettsUnited States. National Park Service. Division of Publications
History
Cape Cod : $b its natural and cultural history : a guide to Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts
United States. National Park Service. Division of Publications
Cape Cod National Seashore (Mass.) -- Guidebooks
A particularly rich vein of the Cape’s creative activity has been
the literary treatment of the landscape itself. Thoreau’s _Cape Cod_
(1864) was the first recognized classic of this genre. Others have
included _The Outermost House_ by Henry Beston, _The House on Nauset
Marsh_ by Dr. Wyman Richardson, _The Great Beach_ by Brewster author
John Hay, and the poetry of Provincetown’s Pulitzer-Prize winner Mary
Oliver.
After World War I the first paved roads were constructed down-Cape.
With the arrival of the automobile, the second wave of the Cape’s
transformation began. The weekender appeared. Cottage colonies began
to spring up in the towns and on the beaches. Golf courses were
built, including the Highland Links in Truro and the Nauset Links in
Eastham. The Nauset Links fairways today are a cedar forest through
which the visitor can walk on the Seashore’s Nauset Marsh Trail.
The Cape’s summer population began to mushroom, and Provincetown
in particular took on a distinctively Bohemian ambience during the
1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the descendants of the Portuguese
immigrants came to dominate Provincetown’s fishing fleet. Even
today nearly a third of its permanent population claims Portuguese
descent and continues to give a distinctive Old World flavor to this
community’s cuisine, culture, and local festivals.
[Illustration: _As the number of summer visitors increased, inns and
cottages such as these in Wellfleet were built to take in lodgers.
In 1911, Provincetown’s Commercial Street, right, had restaurants,
lodgings, ice cream shops, and other facilities for tourists arriving
by car as well as by boat._]
Having lived with change throughout their history, Cape Codders
adjusted to these outside influences with philosophy and pragmatism.
As Cape historian Henry Kittredge observed in 1930: “If whales
no longer visit their shores, rich city folk do, and with easy
adaptability Cape men and women take the goods the gods provide
them.” Some local residents began to rent out rooms in their old
Cape houses, while others added on a front porch for a restaurant,
set up a gas station or a beach plum jelly stand in the front yard,
or an antiques store in the barn. Some took advantage of less legal
commerce of the era; during Prohibition a number of trawler captains
turned to the more lucrative sea-trade of rum-running.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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