Cape Cod (Mass.) -- Description and travel; Cape Cod (Mass.) -- History -- Anecdotes; Cape Cod (Mass.) -- History, Local
At South Dennis, in the old cemetery on the hill, and hard by the Baker
memorials, there is a plain white stone which reads, “Chinese Woman;
Brought from Hong Kong by Captain Alpheus Baker, Jr.; April 5, 1872 at
31 years.” Not far away is a monument to the memory of Captain Baker,
inscribed, “His sun is gone down while it is yet day”. For the Captain
had outlived the Chinese woman by only two years and had died at the
age of thirty-six. Strangely enough, he too had died in a foreign land
and was buried in Sourabaya, Java, where another white monument denotes
his final resting place.
The old cemetery on the hill at South Dennis is a quiet resting place,
watched over by sentinel cedars and the towering steeple of the
Captain’s Church. In summer there is the exotic perfume of wild roses,
of fern, of sweet grass and of pine. It is very Cape Cod and, standing
by the Baker plot in June sunshine, one feels the Orient is very far
away. Still, if one took to the gleaming seas, and rode the wings of
the clipper ships, Hong Kong was nearer than Chatham--at least if one
had business there.
OF CAPE COD FENCES
Sometimes, riding around the highways and byways of the Cape, you
become so conscious of the mass impression of uniqueness and beauty
that you lose sight of some of the finer details that have gone into
it. Of such details is the Cape Cod fence, a very important part of
our landscape, but one that frequently goes unnoticed. Cape fences add
to the air of security and independence and snugness that all Cape
houses wear. They were the product of an age of hand craftsmanship and
artistic imagination, and many of them were designed, and even whittled
out, aboard ship, in all the four corners of the earth. Needless to say
they bear no resemblance to the poor products of mass production which
are labelled “Cape Cod Fences” and sold over the counters of department
stores many miles from the Cape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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