In 1727 the Precinct of Cape Cod was incorporated as Provincetown, with important reservation of rights to the Government in exchange for which the inhabitants were held exempt from all but local taxes and from military duty. The Province held title to the land; and it was not until 1893, when the State surrendered its holdings in the village that a Provincetown man could be said to own his home, or give more than a quitclaim deed for its transfer. In 1740 Provincetown seems to have added some grazing to her activities by sea, and is presented for so carelessly herding cattle that the “beaches were much broken and damnified, occasioning the moving of the sands into the harbor to the great damage thereof.” The French wars were working havoc in the fortunes of her fishermen and the population melting away until, in 1755, there were not more than three houses in the village and then increasing until the Revolution, when there were twenty. In 1763 that part of Eastham known as Billingsgate—Poole it never was to be—became Wellfleet. And a year earlier the Mashpee Indians, feeling the push for fuller political rights, petitioned for and obtained their Mashpee District, eight miles by five or six, comprising two hundred and thirty-seven souls and “sixty-three wigwams.” To the Yarmouth Indians had been granted the greater part of South Yarmouth on Bass River. Mr. Freeman records that 1749 was known as the year of the Great Drought which destroyed the early crops of hay and feed; but in July the weather broke, the bare earth miraculously put forth its green, and there were as many thanksgivings as there had been intercessions for Divine aid. Martha’s Vineyard had been found particularly adapted to sheep-raising, and wool was ferried over to Falmouth to keep the Cape women busy at their looms. In 1738 a Barnstable man founded Marston’s Mills, and a letter from Newport in a later year speaks of the woollen factory at Barnstable which receives from the spinners it employs sometimes five hundred skeins a day and clears in a year three thousand dollars, “which is the most profitable of any business now carried on in America according to the stock improved in it”; broadcloth “selling for three dollars a yard in London may be had here for a dollar and a half.” This public industry supplemented the one that a family conducted on its own account: for nearly every farm had its sheep, and homespun was the wear. The moors of Truro were dotted with sheep, and very likely some of its surplus wool was sent to the Barnstable mills.