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IMAGINING THE OLD COAST:
HISTORY, HERITAGE, AND TOURISM IN NEW ENGLAND,
1865-2012
BY
JONATHAN MORIN OLLY
B.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST, 2002
A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2008
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
MAY 2013
© 2013 by Jonathan Morin Olly
This dissertation by Jonathan Morin Olly is accepted in its present form
by the Department of American Studies as satisfying the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Date: _______________
________________________________
Steven D. Lubar, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council
Date: _______________
________________________________
Patrick M. Malone, Reader
Date: _______________
________________________________
Elliott J. Gorn, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council
Date: _______________
________________________________
Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School
iii
CURRICULUM VITAE
Jonathan Morin Olly was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on April 17, 1980.
He received his B.A. in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002, and
his A.M. in Public Humanities at Brown University in 2008. He has interned for the
National Museum of American History, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and the Penobscot Marine Museum. He has also
worked in the curatorial departments of the Norman Rockwell Museum and the National
Heritage Museum. While at Brown he served as a student curator at the Haffenreffer
Museum of Anthropology, and taught a course in the Department of American Studies on
the history, culture, and environmental impact of catching and eating seafood in New
England. Olly has additionally worked on public history projects in New York,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While writing is a solitary activity, this dissertation would not exist without the
support of mentors, colleagues, friends, and family over the years.
To my committee of Steven Lubar, Patrick Malone, and Elliott Gorn, I feel
privileged to have worked for each of them as a teaching assistant, taken their courses,
and had innumerable conversations in offices, hallways, on sidewalks, and through email.
They have generously given their time, read though voluminous chapters, tolerated my
ever-shifting deadlines, and made timely suggestions and edits that make this document
accurate, readable, and in dialogue with the relevant scholarship. It was with Steve that I
narrowed my focus on coastal New England to these case studies, and it was his careful
editing, public history experience, and questions that brought me back from many
tangents to think about the significance of the stories I was chronicling. From Pat I
benefited from his more than four decades of studying the American built environment,
and museum and archaeological work. His often personal knowledge of the places and
people I wrote about bolstered what I learned in my own research and site visits, and he
could always be counted upon to suggest a useful book. Elliott (now in Chicago at
Loyola University) provided encouragement and advice on the craft of writing history,
from how to pare down mountains of archival material to identifying the themes within
my chapters and their relevance to the larger story. I could not have asked for a better
trio of mentors.
v
In the Department of American Studies I have also benefited from two fellowship
years that allowed me to begin digging through archives and writing the first rough
chapters, and from the encouragement and support of Ralph Rodriguez, Bob Lee, and
Susan Smulyan. Ralph and Susan’s periodic check-ins, knowledge, and sympathetic ears
helped to keep me on track, and it was a final paper for Bob Lee’s class in the fall of
2006 that became the core of the first chapter of this dissertation. Working for Susan as a
research assistant this past semester proved informative, unexpectedly entertaining, and a
welcome, temporary distraction from dissertation editing. My thanks also to department
manager Jeff Cabral for his administrative assistance, and making the department an ideal
location to write much of this dissertation. From Karl Jacoby in the History Department
(and now at Columbia University), I received an important grounding in environmental
history that especially informed my writing on Cape Cod National Seashore.
My research on New England maritime public history brought me in contact with
individuals, businesses, libraries, museums, archives, and universities in New York,
Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Among these, I
would like to express particular gratitude to James Lindgren at SUNY Plattsburgh; Ben
Fuller at the Penobscot Marine Museum; Sarah Dunlap at the Gloucester City Archives;
Fred and Stephanie Buck at the Cape Ann Museum; Joanne Riley at UMass Boston; the
staff of the National Archives at Boston; Debbie Despres at Yankee Publishing; James
Claflin of Kenrick A. Claflin & Son; Dan Finamore and Carrie Van Horn at the Peabody
Essex Museum; Kurt Erickson at WCAT; Art Donahue at Chronicle; Jeremy
D’Entremont; Dolly Snow Bicknell; Jennifer Pino at Boston University’s Howard
Gottlieb Archival Research Center; Sean Fisher at the DCR Archives; Kevin Smith of the
vi
Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology; D. K. Abbass of the Rhode Island Marine
Archaeology Project; and Paul O’Pecko, Kelly Drake, and Maribeth Bielinski at Mystic
Seaport’s Collections Research Center.
Out on Cape Cod, Robin Smith-Johnson at the Cape Cod Times first helped me
navigate the paper’s extensive library in 2006 while researching whale strandings, and
again in December 2011 and January 2012 for national seashore research. The National
Park Service personnel at Cape Cod National Seashore were exceedingly generous during
my research trips there in 2011 and 2012, including two extended stays at Benz House
overlooking Nauset Marsh in Eastham. I could not have asked for a more beautiful and
productive place from which to research and write. For welcoming my project, providing
access to the seashore’s archives, free use of the copier, and answers to my many
questions drawn from their extensive knowledge of the seashore’s nature, history, and
infrastructure, I warmly thank Marcel Mousseau, Richard Ryder, David Spang, Hope
Morrill, and especially Bill Burke.
Dissertation research once again brought me to the New Bedford Whaling
Museum, a place I’ve admired since a year-long internship there in 2002-2003. I’ve
continued to rely on the knowledgeable and kind staff, most notably Laura Pereira,
Michael Lapides, Michael Dyer, and Stuart Frank. Many of my first significant lessons
in exhibitions, collections management, and archival research began with them. Stuart
Frank and Mary Malloy have over the past decade been important mentors, and were the
first to nudge me toward graduate school and Brown in particular – where they both
earned PhDs in the American Studies Department. I thank you for your encouragement
all these years.
vii
At Brown University, the staffs at the Rockefeller and Hay libraries have
accommodated my innumerable inter-library loan requests, database questions, and visits
to the Hay’s reading room during every year of my graduate study. I am thankful for
their reservoir of knowledge about American history and culture, special collections, and
seemingly superhuman ability to provide any publication I have ever needed. As the
headquarters of the Public Humanities program, the John Nicholas Brown Center has
served as a second home for much of my time in Providence. Ron Potvin, Jenna Legault,
and her predecessor, Chelsea Shriver, have shared their knowledge of museum
exhibitions, programs, and the inner-workings of the center. That the JNBC smoothly
functions as a classroom, meeting, office, and exhibition space is testament to their hard
work, long hours, and expertise.
Starting at Brown in the fall of 2006, I’ve been fortunate to have a supportive
community of colleagues and friends not only in this department and school, but in the
surrounding city, state, and region. With you I’ve shared classes, deadlines, TA
assignments, exams, workshops, coffee, brunch, lunch, dinner, drinks, walks, hikes,
parties, karaoke, camping, beach trips, barbeques, and yoga. I’ve benefited from your
feedback, encouragement, inspiration, enthusiasm, distractions, curiosity, and humor in
person and over email and phone. To try and list everyone who contributed to my
personal and intellectual growth would take the length of these acknowledgments, but I
would like to thank especially Michelle Carriger, Erin Curtis, Laura D’Amato, Sean
Dinces, Tony Evans, Tasha Ferraro, Sara Fingal, Alissa Haddaji, Ryan Hartigan, Anna
Hartley, Kathryn Higgins, Logan Johnsen, Amy Johnson, Jessica Johnson, Andrew
Losowsky, Lyra Monteiro, Sarah Moran, Cat Munroe, Stephanie Robb, Gosia Rymsza-
viii
Pawlowska, Hayato Sakurai, Robyn Schroeder, Sarah Seidman, Kara Vautour, Aleysia
Whitmore, Nora Wilcox, and Miel Wilson. Many of you have since left the area, but all
of you have helped make Providence, in ways small and large, feel like a home.
My longest and most dedicated supporters in this endeavor, and all that have
come before, are my family. To my father Allan Olly and mother Elaine Morin-Olly, that
I have made it this far is entirely the result of your love, guidance, and encouragement for
what is decidedly not a career path to fame or fortune. From my father’s knowledge of
history and my mother’s passion for collecting came my early interest in material culture
and awareness of the past in daily life. Both have worked extremely hard to equip their
three children for success. I admire my siblings Allison and Tristan for their hard work
and willingness to take risks in each of their pursuits, and I am grateful for your love and
interest. I have additionally benefited from the support of cousins, aunts and uncles,
great aunts and uncles, and grandparents. You have all influenced my life and inspired
me. I stand on your shoulders.
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………iii
Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………………iv
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………...v
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1
Chapter 1
Salting the Coast: Creating a Coastal Icon in New England…………………………….44
Chapter 2
Mystic Seaport: Reconstructing a Maritime Past to Safeguard the Present…………….112
Chapter 3
Edward Rowe Snow and the Distilling of Coastal Identity; or, Selling Sea
Tales by the Seashore……………………………………………………………….…..209
Chapter 4
Toward a More Natural History: Cape Cod National Seashore, 1955-1989…………...326
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...464
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....515
x
1
INTRODUCTION
There is nothing special about the New England coast. This is hyperbole, but
wave-swept granite rocks, traditional sailing vessels anchored in quaint harbors, seafood
shacks, museums celebrating the colonial era – nearly all of the individual things that
visitors and locals can photograph, buy, visit, or otherwise consume can each be found
elsewhere. Film and television crews know this as they add shots of famous skylines or
insert local props, accents, and building forms to movies and programs filmed largely on
studio lots or in more production-friendly cities and towns. Identity is malleable. What
we think of as typically New England is a compendium of sights, sounds, smells, tastes
and textures built from personal experience and sifted from popular culture. Knowledge
of the latter influences the former and vice versa.
What visitors and locals experience today is an intensely remembered coastal
landscape. Consider these four stories of the New England coast:

In 1916 writer Hildegarde Hawthorne (granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne)
toured New England’s historic seaports with a particular interest in old mariners,
whom she imagined possessed romantic stories and Anglo-Saxon heritage.

In 1941 a tugboat towed the rotting whaleship Charles W. Morgan into Mystic,
Connecticut, as the main exhibit of what would become the country’s leading
maritime museum.
2

In 1959 Edward Rowe Snow published perhaps his twelfth book on coastal lore,
combining his historian’s skill for rigorous archival research with the public’s
appetite for stories about pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and ghosts.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy signed legislation creating a national seashore
on Cape Cod, a property that the National Park Service would have to preserve
and interpret for the public.
These vignettes illustrate ways in which groups have participated in constructing a sense
of history along the New England coast. Its 6,130 miles of tidal shoreline stitch together
hundreds of towns and cities in five states and preclude, at least as of 2012, any single
top-down branding effort. But over the course of the twentieth century, individuals,
companies, museums, and governmental agencies have together created a composite
portrait of place that I call the “Old Coast.” I use this term as shorthand for the portrait of
the region’s past that individuals and groups contributed to during the first six decades of
the twentieth century: coastal people performing traditional occupations, groups and
individuals preserving historic artifacts, the collecting and sharing of coastal lore, and
preserving cultural and natural resources in situ. These cultural producers were using the
past to meet their needs, whether commerce, patriotism, education, entertainment, or a
combination of these.1
The “Old Coast” is not an actual brand, as no business, governmental agency, or
organization anywhere in New England has publicly used the phrase to promote the
coast. New England boosters, however, have launched branding campaigns on city and
1
Length of New England coastline from this pamphlet: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
U.S. Department of Commerce, The Coastline of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1975), http://shoreline.noaa.gov/_pdf/Coastline_of_the_US_1975.pdf (accessed November
11, 2012).
3
state levels for over a century, such as those of Salem, Massachusetts, (the “Witch City”)
and Maine (“Vacationland”). And outside New England, other states have coined terms
to describe parts of their coastlines, such as Florida’s “First Coast,” created by advertisers
in 1983 and which communities in northeastern Florida subsequently adopted. This
dissertation also does not engage the literature surrounding branding and advertising, but
rather that of public history and tourism studies for my exploration of how people
construct a sense of place. Lastly, in describing coastal New England’s vernacular
identity as the “Old Coast” I intend it to serve as a counterpart to historians Ian McKay
and Robin Bates’s characterization of Nova Scotia as the “Province of History” for the
way that cultural producers there crafted its public past during the twentieth century.2
Why write about the New England coast?
The New England seacoast is an ideal place to understand the relationship
between history, heritage, and tourism in creating a sense of place. Tourists have visited
New England for its natural and cultural attractions since the eighteenth century. And
since the late-nineteenth century these cultural attractions have increasingly focused on
the region’s historical features. In the twentieth century history became the dominant
theme of the tourism industry in alongshore New England. In focusing mostly on the
2
Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth and Memory (Boston,
MA.: Northeastern University Press, 2004). The editors have also set up a companion web site,
http://www.witchcity.org (accessed November 21, 2012). The State of Maine began using the slogan
“Vacationland” on its license plates in 1936. The slogan was originally the creation of publicists for the
Maine Central Railroad Company in the late 1890s according to George H. Lewis, “The Maine That Never
Was: The Construction of Popular Myth in Regional Culture,” Journal of American Culture 16, no. 2 (June
1993): 91-100. For more on the branding of Maine, see George H. Lewis, “Shell Games in Vacationland:
Homarus americanus and the State of Maine,” in Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in
North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan, UT.: Utah State University Press, 1997), 249-273. Christopher
Calnan, “The Birth of the ‘First Coast,’ Florida Times-Union, November 6, 2002,
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/110602/bus_10891102.shtml (accessed December 20, 2012). Ian
McKay and Robin Bates, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century
Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
4
twentieth-century coast, I argue in this dissertation that people, businesses, museums, and
government agencies collectively built this “Old Coast” vernacular identity – with
important consequences for visitors, residents, and the coastal environment. There are
many stories of the New England coast that I could have chosen. The windjammer fleet
of Maine, for instance (the largest fleet of traditional sailing vessels in North America),
are coastal icons offering an immersive experience in a Yankee past for tourists. And
Strawbery Banke, a living history museum created as a result of urban renewal in
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a place to explore the issues affecting a coastal
community from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. But I have chosen these four
examples because of their prior lack of attention by scholars, geographical coverage, and
strength of primary sources available in popular culture and archives.
The case studies in this dissertation have also each made a significant mark on
American culture as being distinctly New England. Old salts are a coastal icon with the
longest and most numerous presence in New England. Like Edward Rowe Snow they
straddle the individual and business categories of “Old Coast” contributors, as actual
people and their stories became adapted for quick, for-profit consumption. Edward Rowe
Snow is unparalleled as a coastal chronicler in terms of the number of publications and
his six decades of writing and giving lectures and tours. Mystic Seaport is one of
America’s oldest maritime museums, and during the twentieth century became its leading
one. And Cape Cod National Seashore within in its first decade of operation became the
single largest tourist attraction along the New England coast in both acreage and visitors.3
3
Maine Windjammer Association, “Frequently Asked Questions About Windjamming,”
http://www.sailmainecoast.com/cruise_planner/faqs.htm (accessed November 11, 2012). For tourists in
Newport as early as the 1720s, see Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs,
Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 40-42. For CCNS
5
The “Old Coast” is not a natural identity
But New England was not destined to become the “Old Coast.” As historians
such as Eric Purchase and Dona Brown have demonstrated in their works on regional
tourism, tourist sites are constructed, not natural.4 New England is one of America’s
oldest European-settled regions, and was a leader in certain chapters of American history
such as fishing, maritime commerce, and wooden shipbuilding. However, this economic
and historical importance, and the infrastructure of the coastal industries, did not
automatically lend themselves to becoming popular tourist sites (as the coal mining
industry of Appalachia has not). As Brown argues, tourism in New England during the
nineteenth century first became a business (infrastructure, guidebooks), then the
commodification of the tourist experience (how to best adapt what was there for
maximum “value”), and finally a mythical Old New England that selected parts of this
history and related sites and objects, and masked the rest. During the nineteenth century
tourism became commercialized, and the experiences that awaited tourists gradually
became transformed into commodities. New England was one of many American
regions romanticized and marketed – basically invented – for internal and outside
consumption. The landscape that today’s visitors and locals experience, whether miles of
empty beaches or carefully restored historic sites, is an intensely managed and often
contested space. The increasing number of these recreational sites makes New England
annual visitor statistics, 1964 through 2011, see National Park Service, “Cape Cod NS,”
https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park Specific Reports/Annual Park Visitation (All
Years)?Park=CACO (accessed November 10, 2012).
4
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the
White Mountains (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
6
representative of a global trend in which fishing-related industries withdraw from small
and remote coastal communities and consolidate into a few large ports, leaving tourism as
the most, and often the only, economically important industry in this space – with
important repercussions for the coast’s natural and human environments.
My focus
In four chapters I trace how a sense of history has been constructed along the
coast between the end of the Civil War and the 1980s through overlapping waves of
mythmaking, filiopiety, and preservation.5 Old salts emerged in the early twentieth
century as a popular coastal icon celebrating Anglo-Saxon heritage, but one that also
served to hide the increasingly diverse ethnic composition of the region’s fishermen.
Mystic Seaport developed during the nationalism and Cold War anxiety of the 1940s and
1950s into America’s premier maritime museum. Its founders needed to balance
presenting useful history while capturing people’s popular (and sometimes inaccurate)
fascination with the sea. Edward Rowe Snow relied more heavily on heritage (a blend of
fact and fiction rooted in personal or familial connections) than did Mystic as he combed
the region’s coastal lore for tales that would allow him to continue making a living as a
popular writer and storyteller for six decades. The National Park Service, meanwhile,
had political responsibilities to provide public access to the new national seashore created
5
I use the term “filiopiety” to mean a specifically American type of ancestor worship. Borrowing from the
work of anthropologists, Michael Kammen differentiates American ancestor worship from the forms
practiced in cultures in Asia, Melanesia, and Africa: “Americans used ‘ancestor worship’ primarily to
enhance the prestige of the living more than to honor the dead, and they pursued aspects of ancestor
worship in order to marginalize or exclude less ‘desirable’ inhabitants. In places like Japan and Melanesia,
especially Papua New Guinea, ancestors really are revered and become sources of inspiration for the most
significant works of art produced by the society.” Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The
Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991), 222.
7
on Cape Cod in the 1960s while protecting the history and nature there that millions of
tourists would inevitably alter.
Taken together, these narratives allow for a regional exploration of the ideas
about history, heritage, and tourism discussed in the writings of Lowenthal, Kammen,
Brown, and other scholars. Four case studies move alongshore geographically and
chronologically, showing how larger historical processes link the New England coast and
separate it from those that extend south into New York and north into the Canadian
Maritimes. I also show how each of these case studies either faced competition or met
with local resistance. Businessmen wishing to market the image of actual old salts first
needed to secure their cooperation. Mystic Seaport’s efforts to grow an audience in its
first twenty-five years needed to do so in competition with a growing number of other
nearby cultural attractions. Similarly, Edward Rowe Snow was not the region’s only
famous storyteller, whether in print, in person, or on radio and television. And the
National Park Service needed to negotiation the purchase of properties in order to build
the seashore, and then eventually accept public input on how these natural and cultural
resources should be preserved and interpreted.6
Versions of these case studies, whether the creation of a coastal icon or deciding
what history gets preserved, can be found throughout the United States and the world.
Other places such as the Spanish Southwest, Florida, and Virginia can claim longer
European settlement, and structures that are just as old, or older. And every state has
6
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York,
N.Y.: Free Press, 1996). Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991). David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the
Past in American Life (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Barbara KirshenblattGimblatt, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, CA.: University of California
Press, 1998).
8
Native American history that is older still. Several scholars have explored how New
England’s history became America’s preferred historical narrative. Among these,
historian Joseph Conforti argues that credit for New England’s dominance of the colonial
revival movement is due to the region’s early historical consciousness, a high literacy
rate, and, partly due to that literacy, New England’s emergence as a leader in publishing.
Historian John Seeyle, meanwhile, through his study on the rise and fall of Plymouth
Rock as a national political icon, shows how commemorations of the Rock from the
Revolutionary War through the Plymouth Tercentenary were part of New Englanders’
attempts to maintain the region’s hegemony as it steadily lost political and economic
influence during the nineteenth century. In part due to this manufactured national
historical importance, the New England coast provides an excellent geographically and
culturally compact region in which to study overlapping twentieth-century waves of
mythmaking, filiopiety, and preservation. I hope that exploring these narratives will
allow readers to draw comparisons to the transformations which have shaped, or are
shaping, other popular tourism regions around which they live.7
One of these twentieth-century waves is particularly affected by the region’s
economy and geography, as the coast is an especially harsh environment for the
preservation of historic structures. The linear arrangement of these facilities along the
coast makes for a narrow cultural region that’s vulnerable to development and natural
threats. Before the era of interstate highways and air travel, American ports were the
nation’s most dynamic and diverse places – resulting in land reclamation projects and the
7
Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the
Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6. John Seelye,
Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1998).
9
frequent demolition of older structures for larger, more efficient ones. Waves of
immigrants altered and expanded the coast’s businesses and housing stock. Nature also
taxes the coastal built environment with salt air, wind, erosion, and storms. Such forces,
though, can actually work in favor of creating a sense of alongshore antiquity in New
England. Harsh weather quickly ages the appearance of structures, and the concentration
of commerce in large ports throughout the region since the late-nineteenth century has
sent many small coastal communities into quiet economic decline. Despite its
devastating effects on people’s lives, poverty is an excellent preserver of historic
buildings.8
In focusing on issues of ethnicity, gender, heritage, and nature in a twentieth
century coastal region, my dissertation contributes to scholarship in public history and
tourism studies. Despite its status as one of America’s first tourist destinations, the
majority of scholarship on tourism has ignored the seacoast. And despite water being a
major theme of American history, maritime subjects are curiously bypassed by most
academics. Historians’ attention to the seacoast has for the most part been on single
communities, instead of more regional approaches.9 While these studies show how race,
8
Kingston William Heath, The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial
Landscape (Knoxville, TN.: University of Tennessee Press, 2001). Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful
Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998). Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA.:
MIT Press, 2003). John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994).
9
For works on single communities, see Connie Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on
the Monterey Coast (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2008); Karen Krahulik, Provincetown:
From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005); Martha
Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993); Carol McKibben, Beyond Cannery Row:
Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915-99 (Urbana, IL.: University
of Illinois Press, 2006); and Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic
Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). For regional works see Chris
Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994); Joshua Smith, Borderland Smuggling: Patriots,
Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida,
10
gender, class, and nature interact in these centers, it’s less clear how well these
communities represent the larger regions to which they are a part. Also, the vast majority
of coastal scholarship addresses the colonial period through the nineteenth century,
particularly for New England, making studies of the twentieth century long overdue. Into
this gap, much of the works on the seacoast are the product of journalists and amateur
historians. While informative and entertaining, these rarely engage larger issues of
gender, power, and race that anchor American studies scholarship.10
While investigating how people have constructed a sense of history at a place is
not a novel idea, in writing this dissertation I lastly hope to direct more attention to the
seacoast as a distinct cultural and environmental area worthy of study. Though built
largely within the past century, the sites and artifacts created for celebrating and profiting
from the region’s coastal history deserve recognition because they are also a part of that
history. They represent the latest chapter in which places become self-consciously
historic. More importantly, such sites have changed how people move through that
space.
Historiography
2006); Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England Women & the Whalefishery, 1720-1870
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Wayne O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries:
The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830-1890 (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1996).
10
See Mark Kurlansky, The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's
Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town (New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 2008). Kim Bartlett,
The Finest Kind: The Fishermen of Gloucester (New York, N.Y.: Avon, 1977). Raymond McFarland, The
Masts of Gloucester: Recollections of a Fisherman (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1937). Joseph
Garland, Eastern Point: A Nautical, Rustical, and More or Less Sociable Chronicle of Gloucester's Outer
Shield and Inner Sanctum, 1606-1990 (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 1999). For a popular
synthesis of many academic works, see Colin Woodard, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the
Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2004).
11
My project lies at the intersection of tourism studies and public history
scholarship. In New England, scholars have addressed coastal tourism as part of larger
regional studies or single-community case studies. I bring the seacoast to the forefront
and use four case studies that are indicative of processes shaping or affecting the entire
New England coast. Deindustrialization outside of major cities beginning in the
nineteenth century and ever-improving roads and automobiles in the twentieth century
contributed to locals finding more ways to commercialize their history and culture in the
new tourist economy. Professional writers and artists were in the vanguard of an
increasing number of visitors to coastal communities large and small. Their words and
images helped popularize not only individual places, such as Monhegan, but a more
general coastal realm containing sandy beaches hiding pirate treasure, weathered
mansions containing memory-laden Yankees, and rocky shores with crashing waves that
marked the edge of civilization. No coastal community has been spared from the
resulting gentrification. In an essay in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory,
Bruce Robertson discusses how painters and photographers have helped shape the
national image of New England’s coastal landscape and its people as rugged and heroic.
Robertson’s essay explores the important role in which artists and their works have
helped shape ideas about race along the coast, which I expand into other media and their
influence on coastal visitors.
Donna M. Cassidy has built on Robertson’s earlier biography of Marsden Hartley
to focus on the period of his career when he returned to his native state in 1937,
fashioning himself as the “painter from Maine.” It was an approach that followed other
modernists who in the 1930s embraced certain regions for their rural folkways and ties to
12
a preferred American past, but was also one that took advantage of the nationwide
commercial appeal of art referencing New England’s history and landscape. Hartley
depicted the rural folk (especially fishermen) of Maine and Nova Scotia as “simple,
earthy, and authentic” – a view of folk culture embraced in the 1930s and ‘40s by
nationalists in the United States, Canada, and Europe. While Hartley subscribed to a
racial hierarchy that put Anglo-Saxons at the top, he altered this popular conception of
the region’s residents with a focus in his art on sexuality (in the form of the working-class
male body) out of place in the reserved historical New England landscape. Both scholars
influence my understanding of how artists contributed to the construction of the old salt
as a coastal icon of the region, and to understanding their work in the context of
movements in art, consumer culture, and public memory.11
Moving south along the coast, Dona Brown’s Inventing New England: Regional
Tourism in the Nineteenth Century includes three chapters on the nineteenth-century
resort communities in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and southern Maine to illustrate the
commodification of the experiences of nostalgia, shared domesticity, and class and race.
Her epilogue uses Cape Cod as representative of the twentieth-century auto-based tourist
experience, and is an important start to addressing how the increasing numbers of coastal
tourists both alter and view the landscape differently than their nineteenth-century
predecessors. Karen Krahulik’s Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort
provides an important case study with which to compare against other coastal
11
Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William
Truettner and Roger Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 143-170. Bruce Robertson,
Marsden Hartley (New York, N.Y.: Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, 1995). Donna M. Cassidy, “‘On the Subject of Nativeness’: Marsden Hartley and
New England Regionalism,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 227-245. Donna M. Cassidy,
Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire, 2005), 12
[quote].
13
communities as she looks at the class, race, and sexuality-based tensions in the city of
Provincetown as it moved in the twentieth century from a fishing economy to one
centered on tourism. Her research is particularly complemented, among other works, by
Howard M. Solomon’s essay published that same year on the city of Portland, Maine’s
gay and lesbian culture in the twentieth century, and the History Project’s exhibition and
subsequent book on the lesbian and gay history of Boston. Lastly, James O’Connell’s
Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort chronicles the transformation of the
Cape from a poor backwater to a massive destination for vacationers. As a popular
history, he only skirts the deeper divisions between working-class locals and wealthier
visitors, such as those explored in Krahulik’s study of Provincetown. But he puts the
actions of old salts and their promoters, Edward Rowe Snow’s visits and stories about
Cape Cod, and the work of the National Park Service as it builds a national seashore, into
context.12
New England invites comparison with its geographical neighbor, Nova Scotia.
Since European settlement the economies and cultures of the two predominantly
maritime areas have been intertwined, with a steady exchange (legal and illegal) of
people, goods, and ideas across the border. More than any other scholar, historian Ian
McKay has explored the shaping of public history in twentieth-century Nova Scotia. In
The Quest of the Folk, McKay looked at the false but popular perception of the province
12
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). Karen Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort
(New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005). Howard M. Solomon, “Creating a ‘Gay Mecca’:
Lesbians and Gay Men in Late-Twentieth-Century Portland,” in Creating Portland: History and Place in
Northern New England, ed. Joseph Conforti (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005),
295-316. History Project, comp., Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to
Playland (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 1998). James O'Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside
Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003). An earlier version of Brown’s chapter 6
is in Sarah Giffen and Kevin Murphy, eds., “A Noble and Dignified Stream”: The Piscataqua Region in the
Colonial Revival, 1860-1930 (York, ME.: Old York Historical Society, 1992).
14
as the home of rustic, rural people of northern European descent keeping alive a folk
culture that represents the heart of authentic Nova Scotia. Cultural producers in the first
half of the twentieth century crafted this view to celebrate, instead of scorn, this supposed
primitivism, isolation, and distance from modernity. The consequences of this view for
Nova Scotia were to overlook the region’s urban history, capitalist society, and residents’
differences and conflicts surrounding class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. As a
vehicle for his exploration of the creation of Nova Scotia’s version of “the Folk,” McKay
uses the careers of folklorist Helen Creighton and handicrafts revivalist Mary Black to
represent two contrasting strategies – collecting (folklore) and teaching (handicrafts) – by
which this international concept became localized.
In the follow-up In the Province of History, McKay and co-author Robin Bates
use historian David Lowenthal’s exploration of the rise of “heritage” in the late twentieth
century to introduce a Nova Scotian precursor which they call “tourism/history.” By the
1920s tourism/history had replaced a kind of history favoring liberty and progress. In its
place, McKay and Bates trace the rise of tourism/history, a blend of fact and fantasy that
packaged Nova Scotia as a consumable “Province of History.” As the authors argue,
Innocence applied to history – in the form we call tourism/history – precluded any
sense of movement over time. History became more and more backward looking.
It was a question of saving remnants from a process of decay, of forestalling
entropy by isolating and preserving objects. Even as it became increasingly
objectified in this way, history also became more abstract, especially suited to the
commemoration of decontextualized moments and experiences. This process of
abstraction made history more amenable to consumerism, easy to access quickly,
momentarily enjoy, and then discard. Tourism/history did not really concern
itself with speaking to a community or honouring the dead, but with generating
profits.
Of its most persistent promoters, Bates and McKay focus on writers Will R. Bird and
Thomas H. Raddall, and Nova Scotian Premier Angus L. Macdonald as intellectuals
15
furthering the vision of Nova Scotia as innocent of the problems of twentieth-century
modernity. It was a myth attractive to business and government for its promise of profits,
revenues, and, hopefully, the prosperity of participating communities. It was a narrative
that served first for visitors from New England and then later for those coming from
central Canada as a “therapeutic outpost – simultaneously integrated into and distanced
from the cultural requirements of people undergoing accelerated capitalist development.”
The consequence of tourism/history, aside from turning the past into an assemblage of
decontextualized and easily consumable things, was to redefine the portrait of Nova
Scotia’s people. Building the Province of History was about building whiteness –
glorifying those of northern-European descent and ignoring recent immigrants and
communities of color facing poverty, segregation, and, for the Mi’kmaq, the loss of
ancestral lands. McKay and Bates are careful to point out that tourism/history’s
promoters were not intentionally plotting to subvert a critical look at Nova Scotia’s past,
but they were still influenced by the antimodernism of the early twentieth century and
practicing cultural selection as they strove to make provincial history marketable.
McKay and Bates’s scholarship provides an excellent model of how cultural elites
can repackage a region’s past to suit their own needs, and the consequences of such a
branding. Individuals such as Creighton, Bird, and Raddall draw comparisons with
Edward Rowe Snow, while the tourism industries of both Nova Scotia and New England
embraced old salts, though for different reasons. While outside the focus of this
dissertation, further scholarship is needed on the interconnections between the practice of
public history in Nova Scotia and New England in the first half of the twentieth century,
as both embraced separate but interlinked mythic pasts (one a historical playground, the
16
other a national cultural hearth), and people moved back and forth between the two for
labor and leisure.13
Moving beyond the seacoast, my project engages the larger literature on
tourism, preservation, and memory in New England. Eric Purchase’s Out of Nowhere:
Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains, in its exploration of how a landslide
disaster in 1826 helped galvanize tourism, is an important model for how all tourist sites
are cultural constructions. Similarly, Joseph Conforti’s Imagining New England:
Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century shows
that while historically and geographically grounded, regions and regional identities are
culturally constructed. Ancestors and places are exchanged or reinterpreted according to
whether they can meet present cultural and political needs – a concept I apply to the
seacoast. This mythic New England cannot be dismissed, as it is based in fact (but
popularly promoted as the whole truth), and continues to impact the region’s culture,
such as the stereotypes of New England fishermen that they and their families partially
accept and partially reject. Both James Lindgren’s history of SPNEA, and Thomas
Denenberg’s biography of Wallace Nutting’s nostalgia business are models for how non-
13
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova
Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994). Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In the
Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 17 (“Innocence applied to history…”), 374 (“therapeutic
outpost…”). For a sampling of borderlands scholarship, see Mary Elizabeth Beattie, Obligation and
Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870-1930 (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University
Press, 2000). Alan A. Brookes, “Family, Youth, and Leaving Home in Late Nineteenth Rural Nova Scotia:
Canning and the Exodus, 1868-1893,” in Childhood and the Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr
(Toronto, ON.: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 93-108. Gerald Ferguson, ed., Marsden Hartley and Nova
Scotia (Halifax, N.S.: Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, 1987). Stephen J. Hornsby and John G.
Reid, eds., New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons (Montreal, QC.:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). James H. Morrison, “American Tourism in Nova Scotia, 18711940,” Nova Scotia Historical Review, 2 (1982): 40-51. Joshua M. Smith, Borderland Smuggling:
Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of
Florida, 2006). Michael Wayne Santos, Caught in Irons: North Atlantic Fishermen in the Last Days of Sail
(Selinsgrove, PA.: Susquehanna University Press, 2002).
17
profit and for-profit institutions and individuals both shape the public’s understanding of
history and are influenced by it – which informs my chapters on Mystic Seaport’s
construction of a coastal village and Edward Rowe Snow’s chronicling of coastal lore.14
Outside New England and Nova Scotia, Stephanie Yuhl, Connie Chiang, and Hal
Rothman have created some of the regional tourism scholarship most relevant to my
project. Yuhl’s work shows the consequences of preservation efforts in permanently
shaping the understanding of place and race in Charleston for tourists and many of its
residents. While segregation was never practiced in New England, there’s still a shared
legacy of lower class whites, women, African Americans and other groups being largely
excluded from the history-making process. Connie Chiang is well aware of the silences
(to borrow a concept from Michel-Rolph Trouillot) in Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries
and Tourism on the Monterey Coast, as she is the first historian to integrate cultural and
environmental coastal history in a study of the competing tourism and fishing industries
in Monterey from the 1870s to 1970s. As someone also addressing the human and
natural environments of the seacoast, I explore the tensions between the burgeoning
tourism industry and declining farming and fishing industries and the effects on both the
natural resources and the human communities. Lastly, in Hal Rothman’s Devil’s
Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West his argument that modern
corporate tourism in the American West is a story of colonialism invites comparison to
tourism in New England, as local culture is undermined and hijacked by what Rothman
14
Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore, MD.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), James Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation,
Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Joseph
Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity From the Pilgrims to the MidTwentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and Thomas Andrew
Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press in
association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2003).
18
labels an extractive industry. It’s an open question as to how many tourists a region can
accommodate before their presence destroys what cultural and natural attributes made
them attractive in the first place, and how this decay has already manifested itself in the
most heavily visited parts of the coast.15
The scholarship on North American parklands has largely addressed the iconic
western ones, leaving the coast understudied.16 Within the past half-century Congress
has designated ten national seashores, in the process creating new preservation and
conservation challenges for the National Park Service. Aside from Connie Chiang’s
Shaping the Shoreline, the works of two historians are particularly informative for my
chapter on the creation of Cape Cod National Seashore and subsequent interpretation of
its nature and history. Lary Dilsaver’s Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History
of Conservation Conflict, provides a model for how to study the conflicts between
advocates of coastal recreation, preservation, and conservation, as well as situating a
park’s establishment within the history of U.S. environmental policy. There are also
important parallels between the seashores, as Cape Cod served as a proving ground for
ideas enacted on Cumberland Island, established a decade later. Alan MacEachern’s
15
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA.: 1995).
Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Connie Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism
on the Monterey Coast (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2008). Hal Rothman, Devil's
Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas,
1998). Martha Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey,
California (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993) also addressed public history in
Monterey, but she reaches the same conclusions as Yuhl, in that the present tourist landscape favors a white
past over a more democratic presentation of history and ethnicity.
16
See for example Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of
the National Parks (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Louter, Windshield
Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks (Seattle, WA.: Washington
University Press, 2006); Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the
Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2002); Janet Foster,
Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada (Toronto, ON.: University of Toronto
Press, 1978); and Tina Merrill Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth
Century (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).
19
Natural Selections looks at the creation of the first four parks in Atlantic Canada and
provides a transnational perspective on the conflicts between coastal nature and culture in
the creation of those parks.17
Apart from the national parks, my project is more generally in dialogue with
coastal environmental history scholarship. These works address how industries have
used rivers and larger bodies of water for commerce, power, resource extraction, and as
pollution sinks – with the resulting decline in the health and numbers of aquatic plants
and animals. Instead of a focus on the ecological effects of such human behavior, I look
at the cultural responses to the decline of the historic New England fishing industry.
However, this scholarship still provides an important background for understanding the
length and breadth of the fierce competition among various interests for the coast’s
natural resources, such as between fishermen and dam owners, Native American
subsistence fishermen and cannery owners, and the tourism and fishing industries.18
The final part of this historiography concerns works addressing the more
theoretical parts of my dissertation as it looks at memory, heritage, and the nature of the
tourist experience. As tourists explore the landscape, they consume and construct
historical narratives. As David Lowenthal and Michael Kammen have argued, these
narratives are not strictly a broad recounting of what happened in the past, but are that
17
Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict
(Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004). Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National
Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001).
18
Margaret Beattie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933 (Madison, WI.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); John Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and
the State, New England, 1790-1930 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001); Theodore
Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York, N.Y.:
Cambridge University Press, 1991); Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the
California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Joseph Taylor,
Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle, WA.: University of
Washington Press, 1999); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2007); and Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the
Columbia River (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1995).
20
past trimmed, amended, and resold as nostalgia, heritage, or tradition to suit current
needs. There is no authentic past to which we can return, but this does not stop the
creators and users of history from continually resifting and reinterpreting (and ignoring)
various pieces of it. And history alone cannot provide the sense of connection people
need or want with the past, which Lowenthal explores broadly in Possessed by the Past,
and which promoters of the past such as maritime museums quickly discover as they
work to remain in business.19
Kammen’s extensive exploration of the role of tradition in American culture in
Mystic Chords of Memory offers a framework for situating my case studies within their
historical trends. Mystic Seaport, for example, began in an era marked by the creation of
large private historical collections and subsequent museums (especially village museums)
that sought to educate the public by surrounding them with the artifacts and atmosphere
(in the case of village museums and period rooms) of the nation’s inspiring, and at times
sheltering, past. During World War II the museum’s staff increasingly began speaking of
a “sea-faring heritage,” and both Kammen and Lowenthal have traced the growing
frequency with which the word “heritage” is used in American culture from the mid
twentieth century onward. Both view it as a sugar-coated alternative to history devoid of
problems and creating an oversimplified account of the past that does disservice to those
included and excluded from it.20
19
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
and Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, N.Y.: Free Press,
1996); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
(New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991).
20
“Our Museum should become a mecca for visitors from all parts of the country who treasure our seafaring heritage and all that it stands for in our national life.” Unidentified writer in Marine Historical
Association, “To Members of The Marine Historical Association, Inc. Mystic, Connecticut.” Bulletin No.
24 – April 15, 1942. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 13.
21
According to Lowenthal in Possessed By the Past, heritage blends fact and fiction
to create a useful, deeply personal past. It shares traits with religion as it subscribes to a
mythic past that glosses over the complexity of history. There is nothing new to learn, no
troubling and complicated historical legacies to confront. Even exposing the myths upon
which heritage is built does not destroy them because they fulfill a present cultural need.
With increasing frequency in the late twentieth century, individuals and groups preferred
heritage over other methods of recalling the past (history, tradition, memory, myth, and
memoir). It is a significant positive and negative force, Lowenthal concludes, as it
“offers a rationale for self-respecting stewardship of all we hold dear; on the other, it
signals an eclipse of reason and a regression to embattled tribalism.” Writing from a
global perspective, Lowenthal fears that while heritage helps us to value tangible and
intangible parts of our past, heritage’s inherently exclusive nature will only foster conflict
between groups whether local, national, or international as they try to claim parts of the
past as solely their own. Kammen takes a more positive view in that while heritage “can
lead, and has led, to commercialization, vulgarization, oversimplification, and
tendentiously capricious memories,” it also popularizes and democratizes history; and
through this initial capture of interest, heritage may lead people to study history and
thereby discover a more complex and accurate past.21
This dissertation does not address heritage in the global extent of Lowenthal’s
study, but speaking from a New England perspective I would say that his greatest fears
will not come to pass. New England’s political and cultural elites have buried or
21
David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York,
N.Y.: Free Press, 1996), 3 (quote). Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of
Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991), 621-626 (definition of heritage), 628
(quote).
22
rewritten unwanted parts of the region’s past for centuries before the rise of what we now
call heritage. It is just the latest item in our collective historical toolbox. As nostalgia,
for instance, dominated Americans’ view of the past in the early twentieth century,
heritage will likely give way to another method of recalling former times in the next few
decades. And even within our present “heritage crusade,” public invocations of heritage
are less a metaphor of warring armies destroying one another than sports teams with
rapidly shifting membership and names playing one another. The ways that places
contribute to and are shaped by larger social, economic, political, and technological
forces affect not only the balance of power within communities, but also the composition
and variety of groups themselves. Seemingly fixed categories of identity such as class,
race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender do change across time and culture. A label such as
“Yankee” can have drastically different meaning over several generations, or cease to be
a relevant label altogether.
In my New England case studies covering most of the twentieth century, groups
and individuals invoking heritage at first are exclusionary, but eventually their tribalism
either undermines their success or they embrace a broader brand of heritage. Old salts in
the early twentieth century existed as examples of nostalgia instead of heritage, as
producers and consumers used them to evoke an earlier time – specifically one defined by
Anglo immigrants and heroic outdoor labor. They could, however, be included in
McKay and Bates’s “tourism/history” – their Nova Scotian precursor to heritage – but
still largely fade from American popular culture before the boom in the heritage industry.
Edward Rowe Snow rarely, if ever, described his collecting and disseminating of coastal
stories as heritage. But, his often Yankee focus (including his own frequent appearances
23
in them) in easily digestible tales detached from a larger understanding of how the
maritime past worked, would place them in Kammen and Lowenthal’s definitions of
heritage production. After his heyday in the 1950s and early ‘60s, Snow did not broaden
or deepen his storytelling and suffered the consequences of a narrowly-defined heritage
in a broadening literature market and increasingly diverse American populace.
When Senator John Kennedy introduced the first Senate bill in 1959 to create a
national seashore on Cape Cod, he described it in terms of preserving a “priceless
heritage” for the country and its people. It was about opening up Cape Cod’s landscape
to all Americans – a process to be replicated along stretches of seashore nationwide in the
coming decades. It was an attempt to bring often isolated and economically depressed
areas into the larger portrait of America’s geography, culture, and economy. And it
largely worked. By the half-century mark, CCNS could rightly claim that its
interpretation was reflecting its diverse national audience across class and race. And this
narrative will likely deepen in the future as additional groups press to be included in what
through Park Service promotion becomes the official collective portrait of coastal
heritage.
By comparison, Mystic Seaport’s earliest invocations of heritage were at a time
when Yankees were the intended audience. After World War II when the museum
sought to rapidly grow its membership beyond this Yankee base, the heritage on view for
visitors, however, remained white and of New England. But in taking a long view of
Mystic Seaport past its first twenty-five years, the future of heritage brightens. In the late
1980s and ‘90s as it embraced racial and ethnic diversity and a new national focus,
Mystic Seaport’s subsequent uses of the word heritage lost the implicit Yankee prefix.
24
While the collections, exhibitions, and programs will need to eventually reflect the
rhetoric of an inclusive national maritime past, this commitment to present accurate and
challenging history seems to check the concerns of Kammen and Lowenthal of heritage
being used to whitewash and simplify.22
Moving from language to geography, coastlines themselves present unique
challenges to the producers and consumers of history. Much of the region’s history took
place on the water, with the coast providing a complementary role with its wharves,
housing, warehouses, forts, canneries, shipyards, and other supporting industries and
institutions. Sites of memory for battles, fishing grounds, accidents and adventures on
the high seas, while these can be visited for those with the desire (and time and money) to
board a boat, there is nothing to see on the water that marks that history. The ocean
appears timeless. These stories have to be told remotely, ashore, which contributes to a
sense of distance between most members of the public and maritime history.
Into this breach is a greater chance for silences in the historical record, as most of
us can point to ancestors who worked on farms and in factories but who cannot provide
us with a diverse array of insights on the maritime world. Michel-Rolph Trouillot
cautions us in Silencing the Past that silences enter history at four points: when facts are
created (e.g. newspaper article, family photo), assembled (put into a library or archive),
retrieved (archival research), and finally disseminated to a broad audience through a
product (e.g. museum exhibit) As more than half of the American population now lives
22
Sen. John F. Kennedy (MA), introducing a bill to establish Cape Cod National Seashore Park, S. 2636,
on Sept. 3, 1959, 86th Congress, 1st session, Congressional Record 105, pt. 14: 17888. The bill itself also
echoes the Cape landscape being for the entire nation, opening with “Whereas the coastal and shoreline
area on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, possesses unique cultural, scenic, historic, scientific, and recreational
values; and whereas these values are an important and irreplaceable part of the heritage of the United
States….”
25
within fifty miles of the coast, there is an ever-growing market for these products
alongshore, whether consumed at home or during leisure travel.23
With tourism’s rapid growth in the twentieth century raising important questions
about how it operates and its impact on people and places, sociologists Dean MacCannell
and John Urry have produced some of the most important works theorizing tourism.24
MacCannell argues in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class that tourists are
seeking authenticity (the typical, the exact, the actual, the real, the original), which is a
modern quest for seeking what is sacred.25 The expansion of modern society is tied to
modern mass leisure, particularly international tourism and sightseeing. At the center of
such activities is a search for authenticity, which “moderns” believe is found in the past,
in other cultures, and in simpler or purer lifestyles. Authentic attractions gain their value
by the amount of people that journey far distances to see them. Seeing work is a
particular attraction for the worker on vacation, and guided tours of institutions are
appealing as they allow access to areas normally off limits to outsiders. However, the
guided tour is an example of staged authenticity or staged intimacy – you’re not really
given a behind-the-scenes tour nor are you really understanding what it’s like to work
there. What you’re getting is the appearance of openness or honesty.
23
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA.: Beacon
Press, 1995). National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “ Over half of
the American population lives within 50 miles of the coast,”
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html (accessed December 16, 2012). In 2001 the U.S.
Census Bureau estimated that 53% of the U.S. population lived in coastal counties in 2003. Kristen M.
Crossett, Thomas J. Culliton, Peter C. Wiley, and Timothy R. Goodspeed, Population Trends Along the
Coastal United States: 1980-2008, Coastal Trends Report Series (Washington, D.C.: National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, September 2004),
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/programs/mb/pdfs/coastal_pop_trends_complete.pdf (accessed December 16,
2012).
24
For an excellent overview of the literature theorizing tourism, see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure
and Travel in Contemporary Societies, 2nd ed. (1990; London, U.K.: Sage Publications, 2002), 7-15.
25
For the rise of tourists seeking the “sacred” in America, see John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American
Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1989).
26
By contrast, John Urry in The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary
Societies looks at how a “tourist gaze” is central to tourism, and how the gaze has
developed and changed over time in different societies and within social groups due to
cultural difference. Basically, Urry contends that instead of authenticity, at the heart of
being a tourist is a search for difference, whether real or perceived, compared to his or
her everyday life. What tourists consider different or out of the ordinary helps to reveal
normal, overlooked practices in their home culture. This difference comes through
seeing unique objects, typical cultural places, discovering unfamiliar aspects of familiar
things, people doing the ordinary in unusual contexts, and seeing signs which point out
the extraordinary about something that appears ordinary. Urry also discusses the “post
tourist” who takes delight in the artificiality of tourist destinations and clichés – travelers
who believe there is no authentic experience to seek.26
Both authors inform my understanding of visitor behavior. But of their two
approaches, MacCannell’s authenticity is the stronger thread running through these four
case studies. Though this dissertation focuses on cultural producers instead of consumers
(most of whom are Urry and MacCannell’s tourists), it illustrates a preoccupation among
each of these producers with presenting a portrait of coastal New England’s past that was
“true,” “actual,” “real,” “original,” or otherwise “authentic.” For old salts, the minority
of postcard images in which the photographer and subject are known feature actual old
fishermen instead of simply an actor wearing a costume. As the images were only
labeled and sold with “old salt” or “old fisherman” and any number of interchangeable
locations, this data suggests a preoccupation with accuracy separate from the purely
26
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books,
1976); and John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, 2nd ed. (1990;
London, U.K.: Sage Publications, 2002).
27
economic demands of the tourism industry and perhaps instead fulfills an expectation
among consumers for authenticity.
The tourist narratives that I have studied in chapter one, from Thoreau in the
1840s to automobile tourists in the 1940s, show an obsession with hearing directly from
coastal New Englanders about their lives. And not just any coastal resident (which would
support Urry’s claim of tourists primarily seeking those who lived and worked differently
than they did at home) but those who were Anglo-American and old – who had grown up
along and offshore, as their families had done for generations, and thus were as much a
part of defining the coast’s sense of place as the geography. Thoreau listening to an
elderly oysterman on Cape Cod tell stories about his life, and later writing down much of
his words, began a practice by coastal tourists to either capture the visage (in the form of
sketches or photographs) or the salty language of old mariners. When these images were
mechanically reproduced such as on postcards, MacCannell identifies this as one of the
stages in which a sight, in this case an old salt, becomes sacralized – and the stage which
compels tourists to seek the real thing. The title of tourist Clara Walker Whiteside’s 1926
book Touring New England: On the Trail of the Yankee, reads as an example of this
secular pilgrimage, with its destination being elderly loquacious Yankees.
Established three years after Whiteside’s book, the Marine Historical Association
from its incorporation concerned itself with amassing “real” and “original” artifacts, and
by the 1940s actively worked to display these in a re-created seaport to convey the
“actual conditions” under which their ancestors had lived and worked. They were
creating a tourist attraction from empty, marshy land. With rare exception the seaport’s
signature buildings were all historic structures with even the cobblestones, curbing, and
28
sidewalks salvaged from other coastal communities. As with the real old salts, these
details were not necessarily known to visitors, but the MHA perhaps felt that a greatenough concentration of historic artifacts would re-create a convincingly “real”
nineteenth-century atmosphere – and for some it did.27 Co-founder Carl Cutler even
expected the MHA to operate by the principles that they associated with their ancestors,
such as bravery, self-sacrifice for the common good, and self-reliance. As the destination
for what MacCannell describes as tourists’ search for the sacred, Mystic Seaport by the
1950s contained an actual chapel offering regular religious services as well as thousands
of “maritime relics,” while references to religion are peppered throughout the speeches
and correspondence of the MHA as it emphasized themes of faith, family, and industry
during the height of the Cold War.
As a writer for a national audience, Edward Rowe Snow was not directly guiding
tourists on a search for the sacred. But, he stressed in each of his books his rigorous
archival research, quoted from primary sources to add authenticity to his stories,
physically explored the places described in his stories, and regular referenced his own
seafaring Yankee ancestry that together qualified him as an authority on coastal New
England – as an authentic New England writer. That old salts, Mystic Seaport, and Snow
were dependent upon the public buying their coastal portraits through purchasing
postcards, admission tickets, and books, and all three succeeded for decades (old salts,
27
In the letters section of the Log of Mystic Seaport, visitor Elsa Pantzer enthusiastically wrote to Mildred
Mallory, wife of MHA president Philip Mallory, that the “priceless Seaport Street seems so real and living
that I felt the inhabitants were merely out for lunch and would return momentarily. At the Little Red
Schoolhouse I found myself turning to the door again and again in expectation of returning children.
Likewise at the Church. It’s an amazing thing to have achieved, for then one learns more thru the mere feel
of things than one could thru reading a thousand books.” “Letters,” The Log of Mystic Seaport, vol. 4, no.
3 (Summer 1952): 17.
29
Mystic Seaport, and a number of Snow’s books remain popular), is evidence for them
meeting the public’s standard for authenticity.
As a non-local organization setting up operations on Cape Cod in the early 1960s,
the National Park Service had a different set of standards to meet. The interpretation
within Cape Cod National Seashore was based not on ancestry or convincing recreations, but the application of the latest scientific and historical research to the natural
and cultural resources already existing within the park’s boundaries. As the federal
government set national guidelines for historic preservation and management of natural
resources, it held a level of authority in 1960s American society that most citizens
accepted. Within the delineated and now “national” seashore, the Park Service went
about what MacCannell calls “sight sacralization” as it codified the names of places and
things (such as a historic house or glacial erratic), set them apart as worth seeing through
interpretive trails and exhibit panels, and mechanically reproduced (e.g. model
lighthouses, toy lobsters) the choice icons for public consumption. In this way the federal
government brought nature into the modern tourism experience as a place for recreation –
creating bonds between people that a “man versus nature” approach once accomplished.28
Chapter outlines
This dissertation consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion.
Arranged chronologically, the chapters trace the interaction between history, heritage,
and tourism along the New England coast from the late-nineteenth century through the
1980s. Together they illustrate how locals, visitors, institutions, companies, and
28
For a definition of “sight sacralization,” and the tourism experience within nature, see Dean MacCannell,
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1976), 43-45
(sacralization), 80-81 (nature).
30
government agencies conceived of and helped craft the culturally distinct portrait of
historic coastal New England. The conclusion addresses four current public history
projects that update the subjects of the four chapters and the continuance of the “Old
Coast” as a useful identity for its residents and visitors.
Chapter one focuses on the creation of an icon found in America only in New
England: the old salt. Generally depicted as a bearded old fisherman, I argue that his
appearance and persistence in popular culture provides insights into the changes that have
affected the region since the mid-nineteenth century. Around the turn of the century,
writers, artists, photographers, and tourists increasingly described old salts as embodying
a lifestyle and heritage that elsewhere was being rapidly transformed through
industrialization and immigration. Some old fishermen took advantage of their
increasing marketability and posed for photographs or told stories. I look at guidebooks,
regional histories, travel narratives, artwork, articles, postcards, and even a gravestone as
sources for tracing the depiction of the old salt from the colonial revival to the late
twentieth century. Postcards in particular standardized and commercialized the image for
mass consumption, creating a coastal icon. The result was a caricature which tourists
rarely, if ever, found. Such media also shaped how tourists understood place. They often
saw quaintness in economic stagnation, and hard-working Yankees instead of old men
too poor to ever retire. More importantly, this chapter shows that the myopic focus in
words and pictures on “old time” people also allowed consumers to deny the racial and
ethnic diversity that have always been part of the coast. While by the 1930s this diversity
was finally acknowledged and beginning to be celebrated, the popular perception of old
31
New England had already shifted north, taking the old salt with it.29 In our popular
imagination, Vermont and Maine best embody the beliefs, practices, and physical
appearance of the region’s – and America’s – past.30 The Maine coast remains the last
redoubt of the coastal Yankee, the old salt, in the form of the lobsterman.
The second chapter examines Mystic Seaport’s creation from the 1930s to the
1950s of an idealized nineteenth-century coastal village. New England’s industrial
heritage has been ignored for much of the twentieth century in favor of an agricultural
and pre-industrial past. While many scholars have used the maritime records and
artifacts which the museum has collected, few have studied the museum itself – the
process of how it has collected and presented that history.31 Founded in 1929 by an
industrialist, a lawyer, and a doctor, the Marine Historical Association became a physical
museum in 1931 with the purchase in Mystic, Connecticut, of a waterfront property
containing a defunct textile mill. The decaying mill was demolished with the exception
of its smaller brick portions, and the now mostly cleared site became a canvas for
preserving and presenting the maritime history its founders and curators deemed worthy.
The museum followed the practice of other contemporary ancestry-based
organizations as it courted wealthy Yankees with maritime roots for their membership
29
An example of the improving attitudes towards recent immigrants can be found in a description of
Gloucester, Massachusetts: “The Anglo-Saxon population that dominated the city for more than two
hundred and fifty years has recently been given vitality and color by large immigrant groups of Portuguese
and Italians and a sprinkling of Scandinavians.” Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its
Places and People (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 236
30
As discussed in chapter 6 of Joseph Conforti’s Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional
Identity From the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina
Press, 2001).
31
See John David Smith, “Exploring Amistad at Mystic Seaport.” The Journal of American History 88, no.
2 (Sept., 2001): 749-750; Phyllis Leffler, “Peopling the Portholes: National Identity and Maritime
Museums in the U.S. and U.K.” The Public Historian 26, no. 4 (Autumn, 2004): 23-48; Peter Neill, ed.,
Maritime America: Art and Artifacts from America’s Great Nautical Collections (New York, N.Y.: Harry
N. Abrams, 1988); and James Lindgren is currently working on three books about American maritime
museums.
32
base and studied other museum villages, especially Colonial Williamsburg, on how to recreate a convincing historic landscape. Focusing on the early nineteenth century, the
MHA sought to depict the comparatively small and crude environment from which
Yankees successfully built and launched ships and men for global commerce. The point
of the re-creation was not historical entertainment, but to address a sincere belief among
the MHA’s founders that the collective character of Americans had degraded to a
dangerous degree since the Civil War, when the United States turned from being a
maritime nation to one focused on inland development. To be immersed among the
actual artifacts and structures of their collective Yankee ancestors, would, the MHA’s
founders hoped, inspire visitors to once again be bold, self-reliant individuals. Largely
erected between 1948 and 1952 using eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings and
artifacts (and a few modern examples as in-fill), the seaport became a cultural hearth
around which the museum promoted itself and emphasized themes of domesticity,
industry, and religion that carried significant ideological weight in Cold War America.
Beyond the goal of simply writing a history of a large museum, Mystic Seaport is
worth studying because as it brought the museum village model onto the water, it shaped
the public perception of New England’s coastal past and the nation’s cultural origins.
Through its collections, exhibits, programs, and scholarship it has not only influenced
museum practice at other institutions, but met the challenge of conveying maritime
history – in a blend of education, entertainment, and commerce – to an audience that
largely did not learn about it in school. As with the rise of the old salt as a coastal icon,
the seaport village was a sanitized portrait of a Yankee past: without class, race, or ethnic
difference, free of labor conflicts, sex, violence, or industrial consolidation and decline.
33
My third chapter switches from institutional to individual cultural production. In
1959 E. B. Garside gave a glowing review in the New York Times to Edward Rowe
Snow’s “tenth or twelfth book on the sea,” Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival,
praising his “fresh and simple style, spiced with just enough quaintly old-fashioned
allusion to ensure the evocation of the past.”32 The Massachusetts-based Snow had
begun writing books in 1935, and gradually gained a reputation as an author, historian,
folklorist, preservationist, and lecturer. On his death the Boston Globe called him
“something of a self-made legend in his own time.”33 This chapter examines how Snow,
in a career spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s, nurtured his own personal legend and
constructed a commercially successful image of New England’s past based on popular
notions of the New England coast. Snow made himself an organic part of the culture he
chronicled, and the truthfulness of both had to be taken on his word. He traced his roots
to three Mayflower passengers, claimed that most of his male ancestors were sea
captains, twice discovered buried pirate treasure, acted as a Santa Claus each Christmas
for New England lighthouse keepers and their families, and collected and shared tales
with an eye more to their value as entertaining stories than rigorous scholarship.
Snow was a public historian in the broadest sense, and carried on the practice of
earlier chroniclers of New England legends and history such as author Samuel Adams
Drake (1833-1905). He wrote newspaper columns, gave lectures, taught high school
history classes, appeared on radio and television, led historical organizations, participated
in memorial and preservation activities, and mined folklore and history for topics with
mass commercial appeal: pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and the supernatural.
32
Edward B. Garside, “Salty Yarns of Survival,” New York Times, January 25, 1959, BR16.
John William Riley, “Edward Rowe Snow, 79, Lecturer, Sea Author, Flying Santa Claus,” Boston Globe,
April 11, 1982, A1.
33
34
Apart from being the subject of a bibliographic checklist, an episode of a regional
television newsmagazine, and a documentary that aired on the public access TV station in
his hometown, no one has studied Snow and his influence on the popular perceptions of
the past along the New England coast or how he produced his material – which are both
goals of this chapter. And his contributions were not just in historical entertainment. He
helped draw public attention to the historic yet neglected islands of Boston Harbor, and
campaigned for their eventual preservation and rehabilitation as public parkland. For his
influence in shaping the public perception of a region, Snow invites comparison to
folklorist Helen Creighton, who helped define the twentieth century popular “Folk”
image of coastal Nova Scotia.34
One of the largest acts of preservation in New England is the subject of my fourth
chapter. In 1959 Massachusetts senator John Kennedy helped introduce a bill in the U.S.
Senate to establish a national park on Cape Cod, arguing that such a move “was the most
effective means of maintaining the historic way of life and scenic integrity on the
Cape.”35 The peninsula was then part of a nationwide postwar building boom as
governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals scrambled for the last parcels of
undeveloped coastal land. In arguing for a national park on Cape Cod, the National Park
Service cited its proximity to urban areas, compelling nature and geology, and iconic
history surrounding the Pilgrims and early settlement. This was a vision of regional
history that synched with the portrait of coastal New England then on view at Mystic
34
In Ian McKay’s The Quest of the Folk, he explores how Creighton (among others), contributed towards
the concept of “Folk” and how various individuals and the provincial government manipulated it for tourist
purposes. This resulted in a mythic image of coastal Nova Scotia’s people as rural, idyllic, and rustic -denying the working-class realities which coastal Nova Scotians faced such as class, labor, gender, and
ethnic conflicts. Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in TwentiethCentury Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994).
35
Sen. John F. Kennedy (MA), introducing a bill to establish Cape Cod National Seashore Park, S. 2636,
on Sept. 3, 1959, 86th Congress, 1st session, Congressional Record 105, pt. 14: 17887.
35
Seaport. In exploring the planning, construction, and interpretation of the park from the
1950s through the 1980s, I trace how the National Park Service attempted to carry out its
mandate of balancing preservation, conservation, and recreation.
The balance was always in the direction of nature. Creating the park was about
saving land, not history. In planning the park the NPS placed the human past within a
larger natural history. The park’s Modern architecture rejected the quaint Cape Cod style
as the agency was in the midst of an effort to grow and modernize the park system. And
with the rise of the American environmental movement, the once worshipped EuroAmerican ancestors received criticism for beginning a national story of environmental
decline. As the Park Service interpreted the outer Cape’s prehistoric and Contact periods,
its subsequent industries, and the federal government as a benevolent influence, it
overlooked Native history past the Contact era. This contrasted the efforts of local
Wampanoags who at this time sought greater public recognition of their status as
cohesive tribes with continuous histories and cultures through judicial and political
action, and participation in popular historical commemorations. Only in the twenty-first
century did they finally receive recognition in CCNS exhibits as a living culture.
Cape Cod National Seashore is important for launching a new model of creating
and managing parks, its massive role in shaping how the public perceives New England’s
coastal history and nature, and eventually the public’s contestation of that interpretation
in the successful campaign in the 1980s to save a cluster of beach shacks from
demolition. This action began the present era of shared authority between the Park
Service and the public in the preservation and interpretation of history. CCNS completes
the “Old Coast” by not only interpreting people practicing traditional coastal livelihoods,
36
preserving significant historic structures, and evocative maritime stories, but by keeping
this history and culture within the environment that shaped them – a practice that
combines those of historical and conservation organizations.
After these four case studies coalesced into the “Old Coast” in the late-1960s, it
has remained intact but in a modified form. My conclusion looks at four projects begun
in the 1990s and early 2000s that demonstrate the continued viability of the “Old Coast”
as a lens for viewing coastal New England, and also how the portrait has aged. The first
project concerns the image of the region’s famous fishermen. As popular culture in the
early twentieth century turned to northern New England as the last haven for
hardworking old Yankees, fishermen remained vital to the economies and self-image of
some southern New England ports. Two famous bronze sculptures, dedicated in New
Bedford in 1913 and Gloucester in 1925, memorialized young heroic men in classic poses
from the age of sail that were now becoming increasingly anachronistic as the fishing
industries modernized (or in the case of Yankee whaling, ended). Both of these projects
are examples of top-down public history, as each community’s elites chose how to
remember their maritime past.
Gloucester’s statue has since become a popular tourist attraction and an important
site of memory for the city’s fishermen – complemented in 2001 by an adjacent cenotaph
listing all known fishermen who died at sea, and a nearby statue honoring fishermen’s
families. While New Bedford’s statue was an epitaph for a dying industry, it did not
resonate for the city’s other fisheries that succeeded whaling in the twentieth century.
Efforts in the twentieth century to create a monument to New Bedford fishermen were
unsuccessful, but the sinking of a fishing vessel in late 2003 prompted the latest attempt.
37
Formed in 2004, the Fishermen’s Tribute Fund raised money among the fishing
community and its supporters for several years before launching a design competition and
eventually choosing a winner. When the project collapsed over disagreements between
the group and the artist over design and cost, the FTF made its own design, and worked
with a local sculptor to create the model. The result is a surprisingly humble and intimate
statue of a fisherman, his wife, and two children.
While the FTF continues to fundraise, the design shows fishermen and the
broader fishing community playing a significant role in their public image making. The
monument rejects the heroic lone man battling nature for a focus on family. So while
New England fishermen continue to be celebrated in popular culture for their bravery,
skill, and centuries-old seafaring heritage, the old salt is not an icon embraced by the
fishermen themselves. That community today is the ethnic and diverse portrait of New
England fishing that the old salt was once meant to whitewash. With the end of the
colonial revival movement and a subsequent cultural focus on youth and ethnic and racial
diversity, the old salt survives today in popular culture as a photogenic grandfatherly
figure divorced from his racially-charged roots. He’ll greet you from restaurant signs,
key chains, and within Hollywood films, but you won’t find him down on the docks.36
Another shift in coastal New England’s public history away from a narrow
Yankee past is the story of the construction of a replica of the schooner Amistad at Mystic
36
The character of Quentin in The Perfect Storm (2000) is a classic old salt and demonstrates the
continuance of the “Old Timer” character providing warning, comfort, or knowledge/historical perspective.
With his full gray beard and mustache, and clad in a black wool fisherman’s cap and worn blue denim work
coat, he sits at Gloucester’s Crow’s Nest bar and comments to the other patrons in a low voice, “They’re
out on the Flemish Cap. Heard it straight from Big Bob Brown. Yeah, the Flemish Cap. Went there, ‘62.
Lots of fish… And lots of weather… Hurricanes, squalls, huge seas-”. The bartender cuts him off with
“You’re full of shit, Quentin.” Recognizing that he’s worrying everyone, he replies “That’s right. I am,”
and takes a sip from his whiskey. The Perfect Storm, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Warner Bros.
Pictures, 2000).
38
Seaport. Since a group of enslaved Africans in 1839 seized the schooner transporting
them to sugar plantations, were eventually detained by an American warship, and finally
freed by American courts and returned to Africa, the story has remained in American
public memory. For some African Americans in the 1960s and ‘70s the story was a focal
point for discussing civil rights, public education, and religion. During its
sesquicentennial in the 1980s and ‘90s, the story gained greater prominence through a
number of fiction and non-fiction books, a monument in New Haven (site of the initial
trial and where the Africans were held), a Hollywood film, and, most dramatically of all,
the state of Connecticut and businesses funding a joint project by four historical
organizations to build a replica of the coastal schooner at Mystic Seaport.
The project fit with the museum’s efforts beginning in the 1950s to have a
working shipyard and teach traditional wooden shipbuilding skills, and its commitment
since the late 1980s to expand its focus on race and ethnicity as well as national maritime
history. Built between 1998 and 2000 in the museum’s shipyard, the schooner offered a
public setting to discuss a more inclusive maritime history. After its launching, the nonprofit Amistad America has sailed the vessel locally and abroad to teach about the history
and legacy of the slave trade, and challenges of racism and intolerance in host
communities.
The staff, volunteers, and supporting organizations commemorating the Amistad
story through building a replica at Mystic Seaport were part of a broader historical
reckoning about racial diversity in New England and its participation in American
slavery. While the Amistad story was not directly about American slavery (which still
existed in Connecticut at the time), it joined exhibits, documentaries, books, monuments,
39
and public commemorations since the 1990s that have created a dialogue for discussing
the region’s racially diverse but also conflicted past. The Amistad also demonstrated that
large public history projects were now collaborative (and increasingly expensive). Gone
is Mystic’s original goal of self sufficiency. In the wake of the replica, Mystic Seaport
remains committed to telling a diverse national maritime history, and is now preparing its
signature whaleship to also head to sea. Whereas its seaport village was about gathering
and preserving Yankee artifacts to tell one version of nineteenth-century New England,
Mystic Seaport is now breaking the bubble around the museum in planning to use its
collections in the outside world. In the replica Amistad and the historic Charles W.
Morgan, the stories and material culture of the nineteenth century remain vibrant along
the twenty-first century coast.
Another major proponent of New England’s coastal stories for much of the
twentieth century was Edward Rowe Snow. But in the wake of Snow’s death in 1982 no
individual has replaced him as the voice and face of New England’s coastal lore. In
2004, staff at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Department of Archives and
Special Collections launched a project that I posit as the successor to Snow’s efforts to
document and share local stories. The Mass. Memories Road Show (MMRS) is a public
history project that visits a Massachusetts community – at the invitation of local
sponsoring organizations – for a one-day event where citizens each bring in several
photographs and corresponding memories that they would like to share with the public.
Staff at the event digitally scan the photographs and often film contributors telling why
these images are meaningful to them. These images and stories are shared with everyone
40
at the road show, and later are uploaded by UMass Boston staff at the Joseph P. Healey
Library onto the MMRS’s online digital archives.
This example of twenty-first century digital public history is one of many
community and state-based online digital history projects nationwide. The MMRS
addresses a concern of local historical societies of the lack of twentieth-century material
in their collections, fosters community building as organizations work together to bring
the road show to them, and finally makes this material available for free on the Internet.
As of 2012 the MMRS has visited twenty towns and cities, collecting over 4,000 photos
and stories. While it will take decades at its current rate of funding to visit all 351 towns
and cities in the state, the result is a composite self-portrait of Massachusetts told by
thousands of its citizens.
In contrast to Snow, who decided what stories fit his brand of marketable
maritime history to share through lectures, walks, books, articles, radio, and television,
everyone can contribute images and their stories at a road show – with the single caveat
that they relate to the community in which the event is held, or a thematic road show such
as World War II or the Boston Harbor Islands. The result is not one singular narrative
but thousands of moments (each tagged with contributor, location, date, subject, and
other related information), from which people can assemble their own larger stories. The
popularity of the digitizing events reinforces the conclusions of Snow and other scholars
that the past is most meaningful when people have a personal connection to it. And the
stories that the MMRS has collected have already surpassed Snow’s lifetime output. This
collection of local lore offers more inclusive portraits of the state, as well as legitimizing
the value of personal history through public archiving.
41
The final story updating the “Old Coast” takes place within Cape Cod National
Seashore. In the 1960s it provided the final piece of the composite portrait by preserving
and promoting New England coastal history within its environment. But in the Park
Service managing cultural and natural resources, the distinction is not always clear;
humans have been extensively modifying the Cape’s landscape for centuries. During the
seashore’s first three decades the Park Service allowed much of the undeveloped land in
their care to revert to mature forest. In denuded areas such as the former site of Camp
Wellfleet, they planted beach grass or other plants to aid this natural process.
But by the 1980s, scientific advances in the wake of the American environmental
movement and extensive study of CCNS’s own flora, fauna, and environmental processes
led scientists to conclude that though saved from future development, significant areas of
the national seashore contained degraded ecosystems. In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries several local and state construction projects had diked and drained salt
marshes to accommodate transportation and development needs, and in the hopes of
reducing populations of biting insects. Now decades later, the Park Service wished to
restore the health of the salt marshes while at the same time preserving the cultural
resources the dikes were built to protect. Scientists now understood that healthy wetlands
and marshes were actually vital to local human communities through filtering pollution
and absorbing floodwaters, and by providing habitat for aquatic animals such as fish and
shellfish.
In a now-standard process of shared authority with regard to managing the
resources within CCNS, Cape residents, property owners, scientists, and federal, state,
and local officials gradually worked out a plan, raised money, and began the first tidal
42
restoration effort in 1999. At Hatches Harbor outside Provincetown workmen installed
large culverts in a dike to allow greater salt water flow between the natural and tiderestricted portions of the marsh. In the adjacent town of Truro eventual governmental,
scientific, and public consensus resulted in the opening of a culvert connecting Cape Cod
Bay with the formerly tidal East Harbor (but now landlocked and renamed Pilgrim Lake).
And since 2005 CCNS has been working with the town of Wellfleet and the state on a
complex plan to restore the Herring River estuary, diked almost a century prior.
These projects are part of a nationwide effort among governmental and
environmental groups to restore the health of aquatic ecosystems. Preserving the history
and nature on Cape Cod is not simply about saving blocks of natural areas from
development and preserving the historic sites therein. Rather, as our understanding of
ecosystems improves, so does the need to manage ostensibly wild areas in a way that
balances the needs of humans and nature. Pushing this management plan is the National
Park Service’s founding mandate to preserve historic and natural resources while
accommodating public use. Restoring the outer Cape’s tidal lands updates the “Old
Coast” by historicizing nature itself. To mitigate the ecological damage from century-old
dikes restores a resemblance of the environment that Cape Codders had lived in for
centuries prior. And restored habitat will similarly help revive the Cape’s historic fishing
and shellfishing industries.
*
*
*
In the following four chapters and conclusion I offer my conception of how
coastal New England’s sense of place has – for readers, residents, and visitors – centered
on its history. These four stories capture the trends that have reshaped the coast’s people
43
nature, geography, and material culture in the wake of the Civil War. What and who we
gather around us, the stories we tell, and how we physically modify where we live shapes
the lives of those around us and those who follow, as we trod the worn ground of our
predecessors. For every individual described in these chapters, there are many more who
also deserve credit for influencing the ways we see, think, and act alongshore. But those
I do address provide a sense of the coast’s array of cultural contributors – and areas for
further scholarship.
44
CHAPTER 1
Salting the Coast: Creating a Coastal Icon in New England
Introduction
In the summer of 1915, Hildegarde Hawthorne and a companion arrived in
Provincetown, Massachusetts, during their tour of the region’s historic seaports. They
were only the latest visitors to an increasingly popular destination. Eight years prior,
25,000 people had joined President Theodore Roosevelt in Provincetown as he presided
over the cornerstone-laying ceremony for a monument that would honor the Pilgrims on
the site of their first landfall in 1620. His successor, William Howard Taft, presided over
the dedication of the 253-foot granite Pilgrim Monument three years later.37 After
admiring the tower, Hildegarde and her friend set about seeing the rest of the town, with a
particular image of it already in mind:
“You are prepared to meet bearded captains with the roll of blue water in their
gait…. You expect slim maids with a Quaker demureness, and patient old women
who have looked in vain for the return of their man from his calling. But you are
not prepared to catch, at some lilac shrouded corner, the low laughter and soft
tongue of the Cape Verde or Azores Islands, to see the silhouette of a keen dark
face, the glint of blue-black hair under a brilliant shawl, and a round soft brown
throat decorated with coral beads. Yet here they are!”38
37
James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 2003), 81.
38
Hildegarde Hawthorne, Old Seaport Towns of New England (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co.,
1917), 228.
45
Hawthorne’s expectations and her actual experience in Provincetown were not unique
among coastal visitors of the time. And her description captures the myth and reality that
many tourists found along the seacoast.
An explanation for this false impression lies in the proliferation of an increasingly
common coastal image: the old salt. By the twentieth century, depictions of the New
England coast often focused on an aged man somehow connected with the sea. The
image of the old salt emerged as the perfect distillation of the coast: ancient, masculine,
and racially pure. His visage also allowed producers and consumers of the image to
obscure many of the region’s realities: the ethnic and racial diversity, and the poverty
faced by those living in geographical and economic hinterlands. The appearance and
persistence of the old salt in coastal imagery in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
parallels changes in New Englanders’ leisure, work, and identity, and the shift in the
coast’s dominant industries from fishing to tourism. A caricature of the former became a
potent brand for the latter.
In the scholarship on New England and the colonial revival, there is a small but
important group of works by historians who have focused less on old buildings and
artifacts and more on the people who inhabited such landscapes. Just as old furniture left
attics to become valuable antiques by the early twentieth century, a similar process
transformed formerly non-descript citizens into living images of the New England past.
Inland, Thomas Andrew Denenberg has written about how Massachusetts-born
Congregational minister Wallace Nutting became a successful author, photographer, and
businessman by creating and marketing his personalized version of the colonial revival
which he called “Old America.” In a fifth of his carefully composed photographs set in a
46
colonial past, Nutting employed young women in period costumes. Enlivening parlors,
kitchens, and doorways, the women demonstrate traditional female behavior as they
cook, weave, write, clean, and socialize. While this was the conservative Nutting’s
rebuke of the public, vocal, and independent New Woman of the twentieth century, he
also likely recognized that beautiful young women helped sell his products. But more
than young women lived in the old towns that attracted Nutting and other history-centric
visitors.39
Elizabeth Otterson Wiley writes in her 2005 dissertation that visitors to Maine in
the first half of the twentieth century came to seek the character of the Yankee, arguing
that this fixed type was attractive to men and women whose own sense of self was in
flux. In turn, locals adopted the characteristics to promote their communities – generally
as simple, primitive, and yet dignified people living according to ancient rhythms in a
modern world. The Yankee represented something missing in visitors’ lives – and
characteristics that they could appropriate. Wiley focuses on hunters and fishermen in
the inland woods, photographers documenting Franco-American families in the St. John
Valley on the Canadian border, and early modern painters along the coast.
In this latter set of encounters, painters Rockwell Kent and George Bellows in the
1900s and 1910s sought to insert themselves into coastal communities – to temporarily
become Yankees – and test themselves against the harsh landscape. Both men put
themselves at the center of their work. Kent sought to live as a coastal Yankee year39
Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: Yale
University Press, 2003), 55-77. Nutting was one of many photographers selling nostalgia at this time. See
also the work of Emma Lewis Coleman. Though not included in Denenberg’s book, Nutting did
photograph a fisherman in Gloucester, Massachusetts: Wallace Nutting, Massachusetts Beautiful
(Framingham, MA.: Old America, 1923), 99, 124. For details on these two photographs, see Rudy Parent,
Wallace Nutting Library, “A Gloucester Peter - Studio # 467/Old Salt - Studio # 467,”
http://www.wallacenuttinglibrary.com/wnp00467.htm and “Putting In Anchor Rope - Studio # 464,”
http://www.wallacenuttinglibrary.com/wnp00464.htm (both accessed January 7, 2013).
47
round on the island of Monhegan, and thereby see the environment as they did. He didn’t
paint portraits, nor represent individual islanders. Instead, they were small and indistinct
figures in scenes that more often reflected events in his life than his neighbors’. Bellows
painted Maine as a foil to New York. Mainers were clean and dignified in their labor –
and Bellows sometimes painted himself as that Maine Yankee. Later, Maine-born
Marsden Hartley particularly upon his return to Maine in the 1930s, complicated the
myth by sexualizing it, highlighting Maine’s young, ethnic people, and the state as a
place of industry, not idyll. Maine, by this point, had become a brand, which he coopted
by injecting its place names into his titles. Hartley largely ignored older folk in his
paintings, and old fishermen and laborers appear in the margins of Bellows’s work but
are never the subject. Kent’s indistinct characters are by contrast ageless, but through
their livelihood alone he still identified them as anachronisms in a modern world.40
In a chapter of his unconventional coastal history Alongshore, historian John
Stilgoe documents a cast of characters whom tourists beginning around 1880 sought
along the entire eastern seaboard – but especially in New England – for supposedly being
the purest descendants of the earliest English colonists. The local folk were supported in
their new status as living antiques by the decayed coastal environment of crumbling
wharves and salt-bleached houses in which they lived. Stilgoe is correct in identifying
tourist interest in local characters as surviving to this day, but includes the old salt as
40
Elizabeth Otterson Wiley, “Playing the Yankee: Visitors, Natives and the State of Maine in the First Half
of the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2005). See especially chapters two
and four. For more on Marsden Hartley, see Donna M. Cassidy, Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and
Nation (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire, 2005). A notable exception of Hartley focusing on
young people is his posthumous oil portrait in 1938 of fellow painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917),
whom Hartley admired and described his eyebrows, according to the painting’s current exhibit label at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, as “lichens overhanging rocks of granite.” Metropolitan Museum of Art,
“Albert Pinkham Ryder,” http://metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/210006224 (accessed
November 28, 2012).
48
merely one in a series of characters both young and old whom coastal writers
(particularly Joseph Lincoln) and visitors combined with the decay, quietude, and small
scale of the built environment to dub the entire coastal realm “quaint.”41
Karen Krahulik’s study of twentieth-century Provincetown complicates the
picture of quaintness that tourists expected to find. As elsewhere, Yankees founded
groups such as the all-women Research Club and the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial
Association to plant an Anglo past in the landscape at a time when immigrants and their
families were quickly outnumbering them. As white residents and tourists were forced to
navigate the Portuguese-owned businesses in order to do anything in Provincetown, they
refashioned the town’s non-white, Catholic residents as living, unintentional exhibits of
exotic and harmless local color years before whites in other coastal towns did so only
after the federal government’s passage of anti-immigrant legislation. Provincetown’s
isolation at the tip of Cape Cod may have eased fears among some whites of immigrants’
encroachment elsewhere along the supposed Yankee coast.42
Historian Dona Brown has explored the relationship between class and race in
two places along the New England coast in the milieu of the colonial revival. Beginning
in the 1870s Nantucket reimagined itself as a preindustrial island of rustic, sometimes
eccentric people clinging to old patterns of speech, dress, and behavior. To consumers
and promoters of this nostalgic tourism, it was a living offshore museum of Anglo-Saxon
continuity and quaintness. But by the 1890s Brown documents that this identity of
quaintness shifted from the island’s people to the island’s architecture, as buildings were
easier items to be “manufactured for the trade” than locals’ heritage and character.
41
John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 296-333.
Karen Christel Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York, N.Y.: New
York University Press, 2005).
42
49
Farther north at this time, in the Piscataqua region of New Hampshire and southern
Maine, wealthy vacationers embraced the region’s old houses as a way to link themselves
materially if not genealogically with the Piscataqua’s earliest Anglo residents. The
association was a way to distance themselves from the immigrants flooding into cities to
the south and pursue a fantasy of class reconciliation by bonding with local Yankees of
lesser means over their shared heritage.43
What Brown does not cover, as it is outside the focus of her study of nineteenth
century regional tourism, is that interest in quaint people did not fade along the New
England coast. In the twentieth century the focus on local characters – almost
exclusively old seafarers – only became more popular in the tourist industry at the same
time as (and, I argue, because of) unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in New
England. John Stilgoe thoroughly covers the rise of quaintness, but his lack of any
secondary sources and advocacy for social Darwinism (praising the resourceful and
healthy local folk over the overweight and ignorant summer visitors) invites a reappraisal
of the original literature and modern scholarship surrounding how coastal people shaped,
and were shaped by, the tourism industry during the colonial revival. During this time
the entire seacoast became a de facto historic attraction. The artwork of Wiley’s early
modern painters in Maine did not explicitly brand the coast as historic or Anglo Saxon,
but their focus on it as a place of tradition, of continuity, of difference to the heavily
populated places elsewhere in America, was a sentiment shared by hundreds of other
painters and thousands of visitors.
43
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 105-134, 169-199.
50
Even as Rockwell Kent painted a seemingly timeless environment and way of life
on Monhegan in the first decade of the twentieth century, he did so only by facing away
from the increasing throng of tourists and the infrastructure to accommodate them. Most
tourists lacked the ability to take long periods to study a place and craft their own
interpretation of it, as did Kent and his peers. While only some could purchase an oil
painting or take large-format photographs, even fewer could buy and restore an old
house. But every tourist or resident could materially share in the tradition-wrapped myth
of what the seacoast meant to them through consuming (and sometimes producing)
popular culture. And for many people, the fantasy of the “Old Coast” was best
represented in the image of an old salt.
In this dissertation chapter I argue that the image of the old salt served as a unique
vessel for an array of fantasies held by history-conscious producers and consumers of
material culture along the seacoast. That people create and used fake pasts is not a new
revelation. But what the production and consumption of that creation tells us about the
coastal realm in the twentieth century is worth exploring. In the above texts the old salt is
an ancillary figure if present at all. Focusing on him exclusively allows me to trace the
process by which people became commoditized artifacts, and the consequences of this
rewriting of history.44
Early tourism and the economic and social conditions that set the state for the old
salt to become an icon
44
For examples of groups reimagining their pasts see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: the
Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press,
1990). Allison C. Marsh, “The Ultimate Vacation: Watching Other People Work, A History of Factory
Tours in America, 1880-1950” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008).
51
New England tourism started well over a century before Rockwell Kent’s visit to
Monhegan Island, with Newport, Rhode Island, already a popular resort destination
before the American Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, wealthy citizens toured
regions of the country such as the northeast, eager to see all that made an area different
from their own. Early guidebooks and travel narratives described communities in terms
of population, infrastructure, natural features, and brief historical sketches. No single
interest dominated.45 Inspired by Romantic landscape painters such as Thomas Cole
starting in the 1830s, visitors increasingly focused on the beauty of the natural world, and
sought sublime views from mountaintop inns or seaside hotels.
Increasingly, though, tourists came to these places to escape the summertime heat
and congestion of growing American cities and towns. The image of New England
before the Civil War was one of progress and prosperity as small towns peaked in
population in the 1830s, and industrial cities began to grow. Tourists took advantage of
the improved infrastructure, riding steamboats and trains to a growing number of resorts
along the New England coastline. The growing industrial economy was also slowly
creating a middle class, who after the Civil War would increasingly join the wealthy in
coastal areas.46
45
See for example John W. Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections: containing a general collection of
interesting facts, traditions, biographical sketches, anecdotes, &c., relating to the history and antiquities of
every town in Connecticut, with geographical descriptions (Hartford, CT.: Durrie & Peck and J. W. Barber,
1836); Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, 4 Vols. (New Haven, CT.: T. Dwight and
S. Converse, 1821-1822); Theodore Dwight, The Northern Traveller: Containing the Routes to Niagara,
Quebec, and the Springs, with the Tour of New England, and the Route to the Coal Mines of Pennsylvania
(New York, N.Y.: G. C. Carvill, 1828).
46
Early sketch of New England tourism largely from Chapters 1 and 2 of Dona Brown, Inventing New
England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1995). The tourism industry began in the region as early as the 1720s in Newport, Rhode Island, according
to Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island
(Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001), 40-42.
52
Along the coast, progress sometimes interfered with tourism. J. C. Myers, in his
Sketches on a Tour Through the Northern and Eastern States (1849), observed that while
Gloucester thrived as a fishing port, he found few attractions, the whole town “being
rendered filthy and disgusting by the immense numbers of its fish.” At the southern end
of New England on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, the town of Edgartown also lacked
places of interest to Myers, “unless you would call fish and oysters, together with scores
of dirty, greasy and filthy looking fishermen, objects of attraction,” he wrote.47 At least
for Myers, a thriving and odiferous fishery had no particular allure.
Before the Civil War, coastal areas far from cities and rail lines, such as Cape
Cod, attracted few visitors. Those who did visit the region found it backward and
unattractive, with the possible exception of its old men. In 1853 traveler Nathaniel
Parker Willis called Cape Cod “the earth’s most unattractive region,” yet “I never saw so
many handsome old men in any country in the world,” he observed.48 Henry David
Thoreau, visiting in 1849, also found the region unsuitable for vacationers of the time –
though he personally enjoyed the desolation and solitude.49 As the region lacked any
tourist hotels, he and a friend boarded one night in a farmhouse in Wellfleet. Thoreau
detailed the experience in the chapter “The Wellfleet Oysterman” in his travel narrative
Cape Cod.
47
J. C. Myers, Sketches On A Tour Through The Northern and Eastern States, The Canadas & Nova Scotia
(Harrisburg, PA.: J. H. Wartmann and Brothers, 1849), 306 (Gloucester), 399 (Martha’s Vineyard).
48
Quoted in John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 309.
49
“The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish
to visit the seaside. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be
agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the
visitor is in search of, - if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport, - I
trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be more attractive than it is
now.” Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1896), 2: 203-204.
53
Seeking lodgings for the night, Thoreau and a companion were taken in by “a
grizzly-looking man” whom the visitors presumed was in his sixties, but actually turned
out to be eighty-eight years old.50 He was, as Thoreau recalled, “a strange mingling of
past and present….” The “old oysterman” had grown up during the Revolutionary War
and witnessed events that Thoreau had only read about in history books. With the
visitors seated around the fireplace, the man told stories of George Washington, the
Revolutionary War, shipwrecks, and his life as a fisherman. He was also a direct link to
the region’s Puritan heritage, as his great-grandfather had emigrated from England.51
Thoreau’s encounter marks the beginning of the old salt’s association with coastal New
England tourism. Though, as with many of Thoreau’s writings, he was ahead of his time.
It would be several decades before significant social and economic changes gave the old
salt widespread cultural resonance. The experience would be one that future travelers in
the twentieth century would try to match.
Thoreau in 1849 had met what most people would eventually call an “old salt.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines him as “an experienced sailor, esp. one who is
prone to talk loquaciously about the seafaring life.” It dates the word’s appearance in
print to a scathing 1828 review by a U.S. Navy sailor of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels
50
Historian Edward Rowe Snow identifies Thoreau’s companion as William DeCosta, and the oysterman
as Uncle Jack Newcomb. Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England
Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1943), 271; and A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod
(Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 123-126. Jack Newcomb and his wife Thankful both
died in 1856. Their house still stands, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Pages from
Thoreau’s manuscript detailing his discussion with Newcomb are at the Wellfleet Historical Society
Museum.
51
Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896),
1: 106-108, 121. This two-volume edition includes illustrations by Amelia M. Watson based on sketches
she made in the margins of her own edition “as she read the successive chapters amid the scenes
characterized by Thoreau. Thus she saw the sand, the lighthouse, the ocean, the sails, the fishermen, the
weather-beaten houses…” (v). At the end of chapter 5 (p.135) she includes an illustration of the Wellfleet
Oysterman, and though Thoreau never describes what the old man looks like other than being “grizzlylooking,” Watson has given him a long full white beard along with a vest, hat, and trousers. Holding a coil
of rope in his right hand, he sits in a chair in an open doorway.
54
The Pilot and The Red Rover in The Ariel, a gazette published in Philadelphia. The
anonymous reviewer singled out a character in The Pilot, Tom Coffin, as “a caricature,
and not a very good one of an ‘old salt,’ but terribly strained and stiff.” In Cooper’s first
sea novel, published in 1823, “Long” Tom Coffin was a nearly six-foot-tall coxswain (the
person in charge of a ship’s boat and crew) aboard an American ship operating off the
coast of England during the Revolutionary War. The veteran black-haired sailor was a
scion of two of Nantucket’s leading families, the Joys and Coffins, though he had been
born just offshore. Until his dramatic drowning near the end of the story, the former
whaleman carried a harpoon in his huge hands as his preferred weapon.
As the novel’s reviewer included no definition of an old salt, the term was
obviously in common use in conversation by the early nineteenth century. The review
also shows the disconnect already existing by the 1820s between how mariners spoke and
acted, and how the public imagined them. While Cooper had been a U.S. Navy sailor in
his youth, he was now writing for a general audience who enjoyed fanciful accounts of
maritime heroism. “Old salt” in American popular culture eventually came to include
any older man with some connection to the sea, whether as a deep-water captain or a
coastal fisherman.52
By the time Thoreau’s Cape Cod was finally published in 1865, three years after
his death, New England was in the midst of rapid and profound change. At the end of the
Civil War, New England had emerged as the most urbanized region in the country, with
52
"old, salt", OED Online, (Oxford University Press, November 2010),
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130955?rskey=P6W5e6&result=1 (accessed January 16, 2011). James
Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (New York, N.Y.: Charles Wiley, 1823). “Cooper’s Novels.
From a Marine’s Sketch published in the Providence Journal,” The Ariel: A Literary and Critical Gazette 2,
no. 9 (August 23, 1828): 72. By the mid twentieth century, the term had become part of American popular
culture, defined in Webster’s dictionary as “A sailor of long experience; - a landlubber’s phrase.” Webster’s
New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA.: G. & C. Merriam Company,
1947), 1696.
55
Rhode Island and Massachusetts as the first and second most densely populated states.53
An increasing number of middle and working class urbanites enjoyed coastal vacations
lasting from an afternoon to weeks, depending on one’s budget. Railroads, steamers, and
trolleys brought vacationers to places such as Nantasket Beach in Hull, Oak Bluffs on
Martha’s Vineyard, and even Gloucester, Massachusetts. On Cape Cod, the Old Colony
Railroad reached Hyannis in 1854, Falmouth in 1872, and Provincetown in 1873,
opening up the Cape to resort development. On average the Cape is ten degrees cooler
that Boston in summer, and lacking the latter’s pollution and congestion made the Cape –
and other areas along the coast – a welcome if temporary respite from urban life. The era
of the grand hotels served by steamer and rail lines would last into the 1920s.54
But industrial progress came at a price. Since the 1830s large factories had
steadily attracted people from the countryside to settle in urban areas and work as wage
laborers. In the process, factories depleted surrounding rural communities of their
vitality, both in siphoning off the young labor force and flooding the market with massproduced goods that increasingly put smaller manufacturers and artisans out of business.
Similar changes took place along the coast. Post-Civil War imports of cheap
Western beef, competition from other fish-catching regions, the elimination of
government subsidies for salted cod, and the growing popularity of fresh fish
consolidated the New England fishing industry into a few large ports.55 By 1880 New
53
Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum, “Changing New England: 1865-1945” in Picturing Old New
England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale
University Press, 1999), 2.
54
James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 2003), 13, 27, 80.
55
Benjamin Labaree et al., America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport
Museum, 1998), 393-395. The increased competition to get fish catches to market first to ‘set the price’
resulted in larger, faster vessels that unfortunately were also less seaworthy. The poorly designed craft
caused great losses of life between the 1860s and 1880s when better designs emerged. See also Joseph
56
Englanders landed the majority of their fish in Gloucester and Boston.56 Elsewhere along
the coast, New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket before the Civil War as the capital of
the whaling industry, owing to its deep harbor and access to railroad lines and cheap
labor. Nantucket’s last whaleship left in 1869.57 But even in a modern industrial city, the
whaling industry declined after the Civil War, as textile mills offered New Bedford
merchants greater margins of profit and an ever-expanding market.
In the factories of New Bedford, Fall River, Lowell, and elsewhere, Yankees
found themselves working alongside growing numbers of immigrants. Starting in the late
1840s, immigrants from Ireland began arriving in New England in the largest wave of
immigration since the initial Great Migration of 1620 to 1640. And the numbers were
only increasing. In the 1870s and ‘80s French Canadians arrived, followed a decade later
by immigrants from southern and eastern European countries including Italy, Portugal,
Poland, and Russia.58 The immigrants fled famine, poverty, war, and religious and social
persecution in Europe, attracted to New England’s booming industrial economy.
Thousands of new workers crammed into older city neighborhoods from Portland to Fall
River, Boston to Hartford. Dense clusters of new multi-family houses called three-
William Collins, “Evolution of the American Fishing Schooner,” (1898), reprinted in Frank Oppel, comp.,
Tales of the New England Coast (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1984), 127.
56
Andrew W. German, Down on T Wharf: The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of
Henry D. Fisher (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982), 4; Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum,
“Changing New England: 1865-1945” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H.
Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 3.
57
Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery (1876; reprint, Secaucus, N.J.: Castle
Books, 1989), 633.
58
Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the
Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 209.
57
deckers replaced older, single-family houses from past centuries, and fields that formerly
bordered the expanding cities became new neighborhoods.59
The drastic changes remaking the physical and cultural landscape worried
Yankees, who saw their heritage and political power threatened. As America approached
its centennial in 1876, an increasing number of people turned to the past as a way to
confront the chaotic present, a movement eventually known as the colonial revival. As
older buildings, people, and their associated artifacts and traditions disappeared in the
swiftly modernizing present, historically-minded residents sought to save cherished bits
of the past. Genealogical societies reconstructed and celebrated lineages to colonial
times; historical societies formed to preserve the artifacts of their ancestors, including
documents, paintings, textiles, and tools. Preservation societies formed to save and
restore old – now “historic” – buildings as museums of the colonial past. Other ways of
celebrating and preserving history included anniversaries, reenactments, pageants, and
historical tourism. Things once discarded when broken or obsolete, such as a spinning
wheel, gradually became historic and valuable to an increasing number of Americans.
The colonial revival would last into the 1930s, but certain sentiments of it survive today
in the popularity of antiques and colonial-style architecture.60
59
Distribution of three-deckers in New England from Kingston William Heath, Patina of Place: The
Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (Knoxville, TN.: University of Tennessee
Press, 2001), 127.
60
Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst,
MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009); Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (New York,
N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1985); William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, eds., Picturing Old New England:
Image and Memory (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999); James M. Lindgren, Preserving
Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.:
Oxford University Press, 1995); Sarah L. Giffen and Kevin D. Murphy, eds., “A Noble and Dignified
Stream”: The Piscataqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 1860-1930 (York, ME.: Old York Historical
Society, 1992); Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the
Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: the Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century
58
Though a national movement, New England came to dominate the colonial
revival. New Englanders wrote most of the nation’s history books from the seventeenth
through the twentieth centuries. Historian Joseph Conforti argues that credit for this
dominance is due to the region’s early historical consciousness, a high literacy rate, and,
partly due to that literacy, New England’s emergence as a leader in publishing.61 Long
before the colonial revival awakened a broader historical consciousness, groups in
Massachusetts had already founded the nation’s first historical society in 1791 and
erected monuments commemorating Revolutionary War battles and the Pilgrims.62 New
England’s preeminence in historical commemoration made its founding story – of
Pilgrims and patriots – America’s founding story as well. As antiquarian Samuel Adams
Drake stated in 1875 in Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, “Plymouth is the
American Mecca.”63 The vast majority of Americans agreed.
The old salt embodies the colonial revival movement alongshore, and becomes a
symbol of Anglo heritage and endurance
As the oldest settled part of New England, the coast for colonial-revival era
tourists was one of the best places to get a deep sense of history. Apart from designated
historic sites of buildings maintained by proud descendants and historical associations,
there were other cues in the environment that combined to make the area appear not only
time-worn, but perhaps best characterized as the “Old Coast” of America. First, New
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace
Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2003).
61
Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the
Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6.
62
Lexington, MA, erected the nation’s first war monument on the town’s green in 1799. The Pilgrim
Society erected Pilgrim Hall in 1824 as a museum to display relics of their Pilgrim ancestors.
63
Samuel Adams Drake, Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.: Harper &
Brothers, 1875), 261.
59
England had a natural advantage. Unlike most of coastal America save for parts of the
West Coast and Great Lakes, most of the New England shoreline is rocky instead of
sandy or marshy. Particularly north of Boston, large boulders or entire granite shorelines
mark the passage of time in their worn and craggy surfaces. Tourists watching waves
slam against the rocks, particularly during storms, witnessed a dramatic display of the
sea’s power and danger to centuries of water-borne travelers and coastal residents – a
display that artists have long depicted.
The connection between this ancient geological history and a beginning chapter of
our colonial history was made early on with the propagation of the myth beginning in the
late eighteenth century that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Two centuries later
nearly every American has a mental image of colonists stepping onto a rocky shore that is
almost unique in tying geology with American history. The example plants Anglo
history on the bedrock of America. On a less well-known level, other New England
boulders with historical connections or marks of a human past have attracted the curious
since the seventeenth century, such as the petroglyphs on Dighton Rock in the Taunton
River in Berkeley, Massachusetts.64
Decay represents another identifier of the “Old Coast.” Ruins have long been a
part of aesthetic appreciation in Western art and literature, marking the passage of time
and lessons in morality and mortality. While Europeans could draw on the crumbling
remains of ancient civilizations, coastal Americans applied this sentiment to buildings no
older than the seventeenth century and derelict or wrecked sailing vessels. Nature taxes
64
John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998). See also the “Westford Knight” carvings in Westford, MA. David Goudsward, The
Westford Knight and Henry Sinclair: Evidence of a 14th Century Scottish Voyage to North America
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2010).
60
the coastal built environment with salt air, wind, erosion, and storms. Such forces have
worked in favor of creating a sense of alongshore antiquity in New England. Harsh
weather quickly ages the appearance of structures, while the concentration of commerce
in large ports throughout the region since the late nineteenth century has sent many small
coastal communities into quiet economic decline. Poverty is an excellent preserver of
historic buildings, along with the patterns of living that surrounds them.65
A worn landscape of old sailing ships and buildings with historical associations
did not wholly capture the essence of old New England, for these things could be found
elsewhere in America. But there is a final element of the coastal colonial revival
movement which makes the New England coast distinct: the old salt. As historian Dona
Brown argues in Inventing New England, old New England had multiple meanings to
nostalgic visitors:
Travelers who felt stifled in their parlors and libraries might hope to experience
some of the dangers and difficulties once faced by hardy pioneers. Those who
were uncomfortable with the industrial order’s mechanization and regimentation
were drawn to places where independent farmers and artisans performed
traditional tasks with simplicity and dignity. Those beset by alien faces and
languages in their home cities might search for a place where “Anglo-Saxon”
purity still prevailed.66
65
See especially Priscilla Paton, Abandoned New England: Landscape in the Works of Homer, Frost,
Hopper, Wyeth, and Bishop (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003); and David C. Miller,
“The Iconology of Wrecked or Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” in
American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1993), 186-208. For more general scholarship on ruins see Paul
Zucker, Fascination of Decay; Ruins: Relic, Symbol, Ornament (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968).
Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago, IL.:
University of Chicago Press, 2009). Michel Makarius, Ruins (Paris, FR.: Éditions Flammarion/Rizzoli
International Publications, 2004). Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (New York, N.Y.: Rodopi,
2004).
66
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 107.
61
As a character indigenous to the coast, an old salt could meet all three of these
expectations of old New England. And no other region would so thoroughly pickle and
market its elderly residents.
With the Western frontier declared closed at the end of the nineteenth century, the
Atlantic Ocean represented another frontier – the original frontier – a place where man
fought the elements to make a living in an environment that could never be tamed, never
settled, and never closed. Fishermen were these aquatic pioneers, and should they fail in
one fishery or area, there were always more resources to harvest from the apparently
inexhaustible oceans. As local fishing and whaling grounds did play out, fishermen and
whalemen subjected themselves to greater hardship farther out to sea, making their jobs
among the most dangerous occupations in the world.67
As a schooner or ship embarked from a New England port on another voyage, the
coastal visitor could see in that vessel of wood, iron, and sail a traditional occupation that
appeared unchanged for centuries. Through the first half of the twentieth century,
tourists could observe the construction of wooden-hulled vessels in New England
shipyards, where men still worked with basic materials and hand tools.68 The fishermen
and sailors who eventually operated these vessels also made a living with their hands,
rowing dories, baiting hooks, hoisting sails. To an urban visitor who toiled in a factory
67
Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.:
2003), 83-84; Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory,
eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 144.
68
The town of Essex, Massachusetts, launched its last wooden boat in 1949 until Harold Burnham restarted
building traditional boats in 1997. Other shipyards, chiefly in Maine, have continued to build wooden
boats to the present. Dana Story, Frame Up! A Story of Essex, Its Shipyards, and Its People (Charleston,
S.C.: The History Press, 2004), 21. See also Nancy Beal, “Wooden Boatbuilding in Beals:
An Island Tradition Fading Fast,” Fishermen’s Voice 10, no. 3 (March, 2005),
http://www.fishermensvoice.com/archives/woodenboatbldg.html (accessed January 28, 2011). Julio Chuy,
“Isabella Takes Bow at Rare Schooner Launching in Essex,” Greensburg Daily News, August 8, 2006,
http://greensburgdailynews.com/archive/x518732638 (accessed January 28, 2011).
62
doing some repetitive task, the fishermen’s way of life must have stood in sharp contrast
to their own.
Heritage was the third meaning of old New England embodied in the old salt.
Since at least the 1840s, texts describing the New England coast pointed out the region’s
inhabitants as living descendants of the Founding Fathers. Now, in an era of massive
immigration, the coast took on special value as a place where Yankee stock still
prevailed. Thoreau stated in Cape Cod, “They are said to be more purely the descendants
of the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the State.”69 The anonymous
writer of an article for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1878 repeated and
emphasized Thoreau’s hearsay as fact. In “Along the South Shore,” he said of Plymouth,
“The people are mostly descendants of the early settlers, and are therefore more
homogeneous, more of the old English stock, than almost any other community in the
United States.”70 Travel writer Moses F. Sweetser in his New England: A Handbook for
Travellers (1883), referred more generally to people in the “remote districts of New
England” who still spoke “The English of Elizabeth.” In his section on Cape Cod, he
quoted Thoreau’s Pilgrim attribution, but swapped “Pilgrim” for “Puritan,” perhaps as an
error, or for the latter group’s greater presence in the genealogies of some of the
historically-conscious tourists reading his guide.71
Charles F. Swift’s 1897 history of Cape Cod was even more specific,
commenting, “Nearly 90 per cent of the population are of native birth, and are of purer
69
Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896),
2: 182.
70
S. G. W. Benjamin, “Along the South Shore,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 57, no. 337 (June 1878):
2.
71
Moses F. Sweetser, New England: A Handbook for Travellers (Boston, MA.: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1883),
xvii, 57.
63
descent from the first English settlers than in any other portion of the state.”72 The
placing of this fact in the first chapter of his book, “Topography and Natural Features,”
underscored the ancestral and natural connection of Cape Codders to the land; indeed, by
describing them in the same chapter as the chickadee and the cod they gain the same
permanence in the land that writers of today use when describing Native Americans.
Two years later, Karl Baedeker’s popular guidebook The United States with an
Excursion into Mexico (1899), embraced all Cape Codders as “genuine descendants of
the Pilgrims, [who] are still very quaint and primitive in many of their ways. They form
excellent seamen.”73 His observation brings full-circle a link Thoreau observed fifty
years before in the old Wellfleet oysterman whose ancestor came from England. No
history text or guidebook explicitly promoted the old salt as the best embodiment of
English ancestry. Yet as farmers typified the Anglo-Saxon heritage of rural inland areas,
an old fisherman or mariner, more than any other type of person, best represented the
glorious past still alive in the present.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Nordic’
sometimes replaced ‘Puritan’ or ‘Pilgrim’ as an ancestral descriptor for old-stock New
Englanders. In the struggle for political and cultural control in New England, elite
Yankees (people of British descent) adopted the term as a way to include other ‘older’
groups of immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Due to their shared Protestant
heritage, Yankees found them as acceptable to include under the new Anglo-Saxon
umbrella. However, newer immigrant groups such as the Catholic Irish and French
72
Charles F. Swift, Cape Cod: The Right Arm of Massachusetts (Yarmouth, MA.: Register Publishing Co.,
1897), 7.
73
Karl Baedeker, The United States with an Excursion into Mexico: Handbook for Travelers (New York,
N.Y.: Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 100.
64
Canadians, despite their Old World geographic proximity to the Anglo-Saxons, were
excluded.74 While left out of old New England, the new immigrant groups were
increasingly coming to dominate New England. By the twentieth century, Yankees (and
Anglo-Saxons) were numerically a minority in New England even as they remained the
exclusive subjects of its history.75
For some, this minority status was cause for alarm. In the New England
Magazine article “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” author Winfield M.
Thompson criticized the public’s oversight of the crisis named in the title, in contrast to
widespread alarm at the turn of the century over the plight of the New England farmer.
He praised the old fisherman’s reticence, morality, sense of family and community, and
work ethic, but also his tragic fate. “[T]he old fisherman in his green dory, rowing to the
post office for his newspaper, is a dark and pathetic figure that seems to stand for
something which is with us to-day but may be lost to view forever to-morrow.”
Elsewhere Thompson referred to those “of foreign birth” who would soon supplant him.76
The author’s alarming tone revealed contemporary Yankee fears of immigrants taking
their jobs as well as their roles as leaders in their communities. Thompson’s clarion call
74
J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919-1933 (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1959), 6-8, 12; John Hingham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American
Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 139.
75
J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919-1933 (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1959), 5. This sentiment would begin to change in the 1920s, with ‘AngloSaxon’ fading away, replaced by a more general category of ‘white’ that included many of the newer
immigrants. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the
Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 82-83, 91-98. In other instances, the
Anglo-Saxon term appears to remain, but is more broadly defined. See for example, Federal Writers’
Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937),
236. “The Anglo-Saxon population that dominated the city [Gloucester] for more than two hundred and
fifty years has recently been given vitality and color by large immigrant groups of Portuguese and
Italians….”
76
Winfield M. Thompson, “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” New England Magazine 19,
issue 6 (February 1896), 675, 686.
65
may have also highlighted the old salt as an important character to seek out during one’s
historical vacation along the coast – before it was too late.
During the colonial revival’s nostalgic embrace of the pre-industrial era, coastal
tourists increasingly saw such economic depression in a positive light that would have
puzzled earlier tourists admiring progress and industry. A writer for Scribner’s Monthly
reported in 1873 that, “if Nantucket has few attractions to offer such as arise from present
prosperity, there is so scarcely a seaboard town in America so quaint and so interesting
on account of the past which one constantly meets in every ramble.”77 A lack of
industrial growth had preserved some older structures that visitors and locals now used as
historic texts. However, they selectively restored and interpreted such buildings to reflect
an idealized past.78
The desire to experience and capture a part of that past took other forms besides
passive tourism. Artists, who had been painting the seacoast since the early nineteenth
century, focused more on the timeless and yet time-worn wharves, schooners, dories,
people, and buildings haphazardly clinging to the shore. The Impressionist style that
artists used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave even bits of
modernity – when they appeared at all – a soft focus that gently blended them into an
unspecified past.79 Art colonies flourished in various picturesque ports, among them
Provincetown and Gloucester80 in Massachusetts, Ogunquit and Monhegan in Maine, and
77
Henry M. Baird, “Nantucket,” Scribner’s Monthly 6, no. 4 (August 1873): 385. Reprinted in Frank
Oppel, comp., Tales of Old New England (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1986), 3.
78
James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking
of Modern Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 95.
79
Artists such as Neil Walker Warner, Emile Albert Gruppe, Winslow Homer, Frederick John Mulhaupt,
Willard Leroy Metcalf, Anthony Thieme, Rockwell Kent, John Sloan, and George Bellows painted along
the New England coast during this period.
80
Gloucester had become quaint by 1892. See Edwin A. Start, “Round About Gloucester,” New England
Magazine 12, no. 6 (August 1892): 699.
66
Old Lyme in Connecticut. Artists, too, were tourists, wishing to associate themselves
with the popular subjects they painted. Their popular depictions of the region and its
people created a blend of myth and reality that visitors and even locals soon found
difficult to tell apart.81
Most coastal communities that had become economic backwaters embraced their
new-found status as quaint and historic beginning in the 1870s. Nantucket took the lead
in promoting itself as an historical refuge of the ideal New England past.
Industrialization and urbanization had bypassed the island in the nineteenth century, and
instead it could offer not only historic buildings but also especially quaint people.
Guidebooks, travel narratives, periodicals, and artists from the 1870s onward, portrayed
an ethnically pure people of antiquated habits, speech, and dress who were depicted “in a
nostalgic light that emphasized their frailty and age, and the sense that they belonged to
another world,” according to historian Dona Brown.82
The factor of age is crucial in portraying mariners, whalemen, and fishermen as
examples of living history. These men didn’t obviously resemble a Quaker, Puritan or
Pilgrim Father – and if they did tourists wouldn’t recognize them as such. It is the factor
of age, with its identifier of gray or white hair – most obvious in a beard – which made
old salts the perfect actors in the colonial revival melodrama taking place on a coastal
stage. The promotion of Nantucket’s “characters,” among them old salts, helped remake
the island into a popular historical tourist destination.83 Yet quaint coastal characters
81
William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” and Bruce
Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H.
Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 94-95, 164-165 (art
colonies), 165-166 (myth versus reality).
82
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 119.
83
“characters” from ibid., 118.
67
were not only found on Nantucket. As the historian John Stilgoe writes in Alongshore, “a
rising tide of appreciative if saccharine ‘local color’ writing … introduced the coastal
realm – especially to readers of New England Magazine – as a time-forgotten, strange
place inhabited by odd locals, by characters. By 1910 the coastal people had become
specimens or characters, something they remain – in the popular inland imagination at
least – to this day.”84
A postcard from 1906 reveals both Nantucket’s success at promoting its quaint
history and people, as well as another trend of the era. On the front is a lithographic
image of a sailing vessel identified as the “Bark ‘Canton’ Oldest Whaler afloat, New
Bedford, Mass.” In the message space along the right edge, the anonymous sender wrote
to a friend in Burlington, Vermont: “This reminds me of the tales told by ‘old salts’ at
Nantucket.” It is likely that the sender had just visited the island, as New Bedford –
where this card was originally purchased – had long been a transportation hub for people
visiting Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. And as the successor to Nantucket’s whaling
industry, it still had, as the postcard demonstrates, an active fleet of whaleships sailing in
1906, providing a vivid, living illustration to old salt stories told on Nantucket.
Even without the text, the postcard of the Canton still fits into the colonial revival.
The movement broadly defined “colonial” to include history and its associated artifacts
produced into the 1840s.85 But it is likely that neither the person mailing the card nor the
84
John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 312.
Roger B. Stein, “After the War: Constructing a Rural Past” in Picturing Old New England: Image and
Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 19.
85
68
postcard’s maker knew that the vessel had been built in 1836 – and not in America but in
Swansea, Wales.86 It didn’t matter. What counted was that it looked old.
Success of historical tourism depended – and still does – on the availability of
historic places, buildings, and material culture for the public to see, enjoy, and purchase
in some form – whether as antiques or a postcard of something too large to bring home.
As a result, the commercial side of the colonial revival movement came to include
anything that appeared old. For example, a postcard made around 1940 shows two
derelict hulks leaning against rotting wharves, with the caption “Old Timer” at the
bottom. Though unstated, the setting is Wiscasset, Maine, and the two vessels were the
schooners Hesper and Luther Little, built in 1917 and 1918 respectively.87 Though less
than thirty years old at the time of being photographed, the vessels became
indeterminately ancient “old timer[s]” to postcard sellers and alongshore tourists.
New England’s whitewashed diversity
In this era of historical tourism, and commercialized quaint coastal decay, a
genealogically-focused Harvard professor named George Lyman Kittredge had an
unusual but revealing old salt encounter on Cape Cod. Recalled in the preface to Cape
Cod: It’s People and Their History (1930), written by his son Henry Crocker Kittredge,
the father came upon “an ancient and solitary fisherman” having lunch, and decided to
introduce himself. Part of Kittredge’s aim was to bond with the man over a presumed
86
American Shipmasters’ Association, comp., Record of American and Foreign Shipping (New York,
N.Y.: American Shipmasters’ Association, 1885), 253. Digitized version accessed from Mystic Seaport,
“Ship Register (1857-1900) Search,” http://library.mysticseaport.org/initiative/VMSearch2.cfm (accessed
February 6, 2011).
87
Giles M. Tod, The Last Sail Down East (Barre, MA.: Barre Publishers, 1965), 259-260, 262. The hulks
were finally removed in 1998 according to Andrew Toppan, “Maine’s Last Big Schooners,”
http://www.hazegray.org/features/schooners/ (accessed January 28, 2011).
69
shared heritage, as George’s mother was a descendant of the first settlers of Barnstable in
1639. Puritan blood also meant special bragging rights in the milieu of the colonial
revival and fears over ‘swarthy’ new immigrants. It also helped in the WASP social
circles around Harvard College. To the author’s surprise, he learned that he was beat: the
old fisherman descended from the “Hockanom Indians of Yarmouth.” Quoting
nineteenth-century humorist Artemus Ward, George remarked, ‘“He had me there!”’88
George Kittredge’s anecdote in the beginning of his son’s book reveals the
myopic vision many visitors – even, or especially, those of Pilgrims or Puritan descent –
held of the New England coast. After repeating the founding story over and over again, it
gradually eclipsed the region’s diverse history and heritage. Many coastal visitors found
their perceptions shattered upon arrival, especially in Provincetown.
At least since the sixteenth century, the New England coast has always been a
borderland, a place where different cultures and peoples met. European fishermen were
the first to make contact with the native inhabitants of what became New England. But
the native story didn’t end when the Pilgrims dropped anchor off what would become
Provincetown, or after the first Thanksgiving, or after King Philip’s War. They
continued as active and often vital members of the alongshore region’s culture and
economy. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the American whale fishery. As
early as the eighteenth century and continuing in the nineteenth century, Gay Head
88
Henry C. Kittredge, Cape Cod: Its People and Their History (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1930), v.
70
Indians from Martha’s Vineyard served aboard whaleships, and were especially prized as
boatsteerers, or harpooners, to use the common name for the position.89
They were not alone. At least by the 1630s, the first African slaves arrived in
New England, and both enslaved and freed blacks worked in the whale fishery.90 African
Americans and Native Americans even became captains in rare occasions, as in the cases
of Paul Cuffe and Amos Haskins.91 These were only two of the many peoples of color
that comprised the industry. Whaleships frequently lost crewmembers during their multiyear voyages, and made up the difference in foreign ports. A visitor to New Bedford in
1860 would encounter people along the waterfront from such diverse places as Africa, the
Azores, Cape Verde Islands, China, Australia, and Polynesia.92 Yankees dominated the
crew lists of early nineteenth century whaleships, but as they gradually left to pursue
better paying or safer jobs on land, people of color increasingly filled the ranks. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, people of color constituted the majority of men
employed in the fishery.93 The year the postcard of the Canton was mailed in 1906, the
89
James Templeman Brown, “Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus, and Methods of the Fishery,” in History and
Methods of the Fisheries, section V, vol. 2, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States,
ed. George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 219.
90
James Farr, “A Slow Boat to Nowhere: The Multi-Racial Crews of the American Whaling Industry,” The
Journal of Negro History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 160. For a more nuanced look at the racial identities of
whalemen of color in New England, see Russel Lawrence Barsh, “‘Colored’ Seamen in the New England
Whaling Industry: An Afro-Indian Consortium” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black
Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 76107.
91
Amos Haskins, a Wampanoag, became captain of the bark Massasoit in 1851. See a photograph and
short bio in Nicholas Whitman, A Window Back: Photography in a Whaling Port (New Bedford, MA.:
Spinner Publications, 1994), 16. Paul Cuffe was a whaling captain and shipowner in the eighteenth century.
See a silhouette portrait and short bio in New Bedford Whaling Museum, “Master Mariners,” Heroes in the
Ships: African Americans in the Whaling Industry,
http://www.whalingmuseum.org/library/heros/masters/cuffe.html (accessed February 6, 2011).
92
D. H. Strother, “Summer in New England,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 21, no. 121 (June 1860): 9.
93
“By the 1840s, Black sailors constituted about one-sixth of the labor force; and by 1900, African
Americans and Cape Verdeans had become a majority.” From the online exhibit New Bedford Whaling
Museum, Heroes in the Ships: African Americans in the Whaling Industry,
http://www.whalingmuseum.org/library/heros/index_h.html (accessed February 6, 2011). James Farr, “A
71
captain of the vessel was Nicholas Vieira, a man who had emigrated from the Azores.
His successor as captain the following year was Valentine Rosa, originally from the Cape
Verde Islands.94
A similar pattern occurred in the other fisheries. An exhaustive U.S. government
report published between 1884 and 1887 traced how early nineteenth century fishing
crews were predominantly Yankee, but rapidly supplanted by immigrants. The diversity
varied depending on the fishery. In the Gloucester halibut fishery of 1880, for example,
of 646 crewmen, more than half (393) came from Canadian provinces, with 187 nativeborn New Englanders and 103 “Scandinavians, and a very few Portuguese, French and
Irish” comprising the remainder. Some of the vessels had Swedish and Norwegian
captains, with crews of likewise national origin.95
In the Gloucester cod fishery, of
1200 men, about a third were American born, one-third Canadian, and one-third Swedish
and Portuguese.96
In Winfield Thompson’s 1896 article mourning the passing of the Yankee
fisherman, he looked at the death records in 1895 of all Gloucester fishermen who had
drowned at sea in the past thirteen months. The results indicated not only the extreme
hazards of the industry, but the low percentage of native-born Americans employed in it.
Of 122 fatalities, less than two and a half percent (3 men) were native-born Americans,
with the rest from Nova Scotia (35), Newfoundland (21), Sweden (15), Cape Breton (14),
Slow Boat to Nowhere: The Multi-Racial Crews of the American Whaling Industry,” Journal of Negro
History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 159-170.
94
Judith Navas Lund, Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports: A Compilation
of Sources (Gloucester, MA.: Ten Pound Island Book Co., 2001), 418.
95
George Brown Goode and J. W. Collins, “The Fresh-Halibut Fishery,” in History and Methods of the
Fisheries, section V, vol. 1, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George
Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 6.
96
George Brown Goode and J. W. Collins, “The George’s Bank Cod Fishery,” in History and Methods of
the Fisheries, section V, vol. 1, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George
Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 189.
72
Portugal (9), St. Pierre and Miquelon (8), Ireland (6), Norway (4), Finland (3), Iceland
(2), Germany (1) and Italy (1).97
In Provincetown, men of Portuguese heritage dominated the fisheries there by
1890.98 One representative Provincetown schooner cited in Thompson’s article had
nineteen of its twenty crewmembers originally from the island of Fayal in the Azores.99
Portuguese captains had been the majority in Provincetown since 1883.100 While vessels
in Gloucester or Boston fleets may have still had Yankees at the helm, this too, would
soon pass. Entering the twentieth century, vessels with names such as Mary E. Silveira,
Leonora Silveira, Walter P. Goulart, and Gertrude DeCosta reflected the increasing
number of Portuguese ship owners in Boston and Gloucester.101
As they became more successful, immigrants and their children were among the
first to embrace new technology, in the form of gasoline engines around 1905.102 At first
small engines only provided auxiliary power for schooners in slack wind. But now that
speed to and from fishing grounds was no longer dependant upon the wind, large motors
meant returning to shore faster and thereby getting the best price for fish. The growing
market for fresh fish also required a shorter time between catching fish and selling them.
Within two decades, specially designed draggers and trawlers were built specifically for
motor-power, retaining only a vestigial mast and sail. The modern vessels both required
97
Winfield M. Thompson, “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” New England Magazine 13,
issue 6 (February 1896), 679.
98
Andrew W. German, Down on T Wharf: The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of
Henry D. Fisher (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982), 63.
99
Winfield M. Thompson, “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” New England Magazine 13,
issue 6 (February 1896), 679.
100
Andrew W. German, Down on T Wharf: The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of
Henry D. Fisher (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982), 74.
101
Ibid., 28, 53, 72, 88.
102
Wesley George Pierce, Goin’ Fishin’: The Story of the Deep-Sea Fishermen of New England (Salem,
MA.: Marine Research Society, 1934), 271.
73
less crew and caught more fish in less time – swiftly replacing even the aging schooners
retrofitted with engines. Historically-conscious tourists and promoters continued to (and
still do) focus on the sailing vessels long after more modern craft had replaced them. In
1936 only one fishing schooner remained in Provincetown that could evoke the romance
of sail from generations past (albeit with truncated masts). But even nostalgic tourists
couldn’t overlook the modern heritage reflected in the vessel’s name: Mary P. Goulart.103
Yankee reaction to the dominance of immigrants in the fisheries and elsewhere
took many forms. In New Bedford in 1912, an eighty-two year old retired lawyer named
William W. Crapo decided to present a statue to the city to memorialize its rapidly
declining whaling industry. Known as The Whaleman, the statue was explicitly meant to
represent the Yankee harpooner of the early days. In the interest of historical accuracy,
sculptor Bela Pratt wanted an actual harpooner (boatsteerer in maritime parlance) as his
model. As the city newspaper reported at the time,
Accordingly a search was instituted to find an American whaleman of the Captain
Ahab type. Augustus G. Moulton of J. & W. R. Wing company was asked if they
could produce one, and responded by offering as a model a native of the Cape de
Verde islands. The whaleman of the statue, however, was to typify the early
Yankee courage … so the outfitters were asked to find a boatsteerer of the old
type – the type made famous in “Moby Dick” and other stories of the sea.104
In 1912 no such “old type” white boatsteerer existed, so Pratt settled for a retired one of
Celtic descent named Richard McLachlan, who had served as a harpooner from 1885 to
103
Katharine Smith and Edith Shay, Down the Cape: The Complete Guide to Cape Cod (New York, N.Y:
Dodge Publishing Co., 1936), 73. For the transfer from sail to engine-power, see Wesley George Pierce,
Goin’ Fishin’: The Story of the Deep-Sea Fishermen of New England (Salem, MA.: Marine Research
Society, 1934), 139-140, 156-157, 271, and especially chapter 19, “The Flounder-Dragger and BeamTrawler.”
104
Old Dartmouth Historical Society, “The Presentation of the Whaleman Statue to the City of New
Bedford by William W. Crapo and the Exercises at the Dedication, June Twentieth, Nineteen Hundred and
Thirteen,” Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches, no. 38. (New Bedford, MA.: Old Dartmouth Historical
Society, 1913), 39; and “The Model,” New Bedford Evening Standard, February 18, 1912, 24.
74
1895 – one of the few whites to do so in the industry at the time.105 While overlooking
the traditional role that people of color played as harpooners aboard whaleships, the
statue and its commemoration also whitewashed the dominance of people of color in the
industry at the time. Tourists visiting the city in the years after the industry folded in
1925 would encounter a memorial to what had presumably always been a Yankee chapter
of history.
Other responses to the changing American character were more vocal. Antiimmigrant sentiment reached its peak in the 1910s and ‘20s with the publication of such
vitriolic and alarmist literature as Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against
White World Supremacy (1920) and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race
(1916, in its third edition by 1923). Both books addressed Anglo-Saxon fears of being
replaced by recent immigrants of “Slavic and Iberic races,” as well as African
Americans.106 In response to the perceived threat, Congress passed the Johnson Act in
1924, setting immigration quotas based on the percentage of each group’s population in
America as reported in the 1890 census. By setting the preferred ratio of new immigrants
according to the 1890 census, it favored people from older areas of immigration, “the
stock which originally settled this country” according to a eugenics committee who
lobbied for the legislation.107
105
“As a rule the boat-steerers are foreigners, principally Portuguese, Indians [Native Americans], or
Kanakas.” James Templeman Brown, “Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus, and Methods of the Fishery,” in
History and Methods of the Fisheries, section V, vol. 2, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the
United States, ed. George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 218.
106
Reports of the Immigration Commission, Statements and Recommendations Submitted by Societies and
Organizations Interested in the Subject of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1923), 731, 757, as quoted in Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European
Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 81.
107
Original source unclear, but quoted in Jacobson, 83.
75
Passage of the act both restricted the numbers of newer immigrants and led to a
redefinition of race and ethnicity in America. As historian Matthew Frye Jacobson
argues in Whiteness of a Different Color, the year 1924 marked the start of a shift away
from “Anglo-Saxon or Nordic supremacy,” and towards a broader category of
“Caucasian” that included many of the newer immigrants. No longer perceived as
threatening to change the American character, the immigrants already here, and the
smaller numbers that would arrive later, would be easier to assimilate, especially after
they became parents of American-born children.108
This gradual change in attitude allowed for perhaps a friendlier outlook in the late
1920s and ‘30s towards the Italian and Portuguese fishermen, seeing them as adding a
harmless cosmopolitan European air to coastal towns. In 1937 the Federal Writers’
Project published Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. In Gloucester it
observed that, “The Anglo-Saxon population that dominated the city for more than two
hundred and fifty years has recently been given vitality and color by large immigrant
groups of Portuguese and Italians and a sprinkling of Scandinavians.”109 The newest
residents to the coast may have achieved newfound respect in the public eye for their
bravery and own seafaring heritage. But no travel narrative, guidebook, or postcard ever
recognized an old fisherman of Portuguese or Scandinavian descent as an old salt.
Standardizing the old salt image for mass consumption
108
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 82-83, 91, 93.
109
Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1937), 236.
76
Postcards would soon play a critical role in defining and refining the image of the
old salt along the New England coast. In turn-of-the-century articles and books focusing
on the quaint New England coast, old salts make appearances, but are usually briefly
described and often ambiguously illustrated. In Moses F. Sweetser’s travel guide All
Along Shore (1889), he described a hill in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where “the old
salts of the village delight in coming up hither, to smoke their pipes, and look off on the
blue plain and its islands and sails.”110 In Frank T. Robinson’s August, 1894, article
“The Quaint North Shore,” the author’s search for quaintness concluded in Newburyport
at the edge of a dilapidated wharf, where “a sailor, old and gray” surveyed the waterfront
decay and passing era, of which he was a part. An image of the man is included
elsewhere in the article, with the caption “The End of a Day, Newburyport.”111
However, portrayed in a rumpled jacket and hat, with his beard as the only visual
identifier of age, he lacks any nautical accessories that would flag him as a character
unique to the coast. Without Robinson’s description he could be anyone – even the
author himself in a scruffy self-portrait. Until photographs and color illustrations
appeared in periodicals and newspapers in the late 1890s, monochromatic etchings of old
salts required a bit of the reader’s imagination.
The new medium of postcards would give them a clearer sense of what to look
for. First introduced as souvenirs at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (a showcase
for new technology) in 1893, the printed picture postcard rapidly became a staple of
American popular culture. It marked the intersection of advances in literacy, printing
technology, tourism, and a thirst for information among Americans increasingly on the
110
Moses F. Sweetser, All Along Shore (Boston, MA.: Boston and Maine Railroad, 1889), 26.
Frank T. Robinson, “The Quaint North Shore,” New England Magazine 16, issue 6 (August 1894): 666,
668.
111
77
move. After relying for generations on prints and paintings as visual likenesses of people
and places, Americans embraced photography beginning in 1839 for its unprecedented
realism at increasingly affordable prices. Once printing technology could reproduce
images cheaply onto paper cards, the U.S. Postal Service started rural free delivery in
1896, and Congress reduced the mailing fee in 1898, the postcard grew in popularity.
The “golden age” of postcards, between 1901 and 1915, was a period of high image
quality and peak enthusiasm for the practice of mailing and sending them. In 1913 the
United States Postal Service processed almost one billion postcards – ten times the size of
the U.S. population. Women outpaced men as both senders and receivers of postcards,
but men dominated their production and sale.112
In New England, as everywhere, individuals and businesses created postcards
designed to promote their community or region to a mass audience. For an increasingly
mobile American public, they served as a fast, cheap way to keep in touch, and the
images made them collectable. Sold in nearly every community, postcards offered
tourists an easy itinerary of what they should see, or at least have pictures of. With the
practice of drawing largely extinct among travelers and most not yet owning cameras,
postcards neatly recorded the experience in a handful of selective views.
Postcards existed in souvenir shops alongside a hoard of three-dimensional
keepsakes also vying for the tourist’s attention and purse. For the old salt, his image also
appeared printed on cups and dishes, carved into wooden effigies, and cast into metal
bookends, doorstops, and paperweights. But the postcard remained the most portable,
112
Beverly H. Kallgren, “Postcards,” in The Encyclopedia of New England: The Culture and History of an
American Region, eds. Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press,
2005), 1490-1491. Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh, Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s
Photography (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 2, 5. The authors attribute the disparity to
women traditionally being in charge of social organizing and family communications.
78
common, cheapest, and easily transmitted (via mail) expression of his form. All of these
representations are part of what sociologist Dean MacCannell outlines as the five stages
through which a sight becomes noteworthy, or “sight sacralization” to use his phrase.
This process works best with artifacts such as Plymouth Rock, but it can also outline how
the old salt went from indistinctive to famous.
The first stage is when a sight acquires a name, or is marked off as worthy of
being saved. In the early nineteenth century seasoned mariners acquired the label of old
salt as a mark of experience and from the public’s perception of him having a colorful
persona and life. Being a person of advanced age lent a sense of urgency to his image, as
he couldn’t, like a relic, be preserved. The next two stages apply better to artifacts than
living people, but involve marking an official boundary around the object and then
making that boundary – such as a shrine or museum holding a famous relic – a tourist
attraction in itself. Subsequent literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries singled out the old salt as uniquely representing the seacoast due to his age,
masculinity, and heritage. He was now a piece of history living somewhere alongshore,
and his presence gave an added sense of history to the buildings, beaches, and streets that
he inhabited.
The fourth stage in sacralization is mechanical reproduction, and it is this phase
which MacCannell argues “is most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his
journey to find the true object. And he is not disappointed. Alongside copies of it, it has
to be The Real Thing.” Postcards, then, are cultural breadcrumbs leading tourists in
search of the old men who must live along that coastal marge. The fifth and final stage is
when the name of the attraction is adopted by local groups, communities, or regions.
79
Along the New England coast this is best represented in the businesses that incorporate
mariners into their names such as Fisherman’s Outfitter, Friendly Fisherman Fish Market,
and the Old Salt’s Appraisal Company. Often such businesses will have a rustic décor in
an attempt to match the old salt’s supposed tastes.113 These latter two stages also solved
the problem of how to preserve a resource that will eventually die. Photography allowed
old salts to live on visually for decades after their physical deaths, while advertising kept
words such as mariner, sailor, old salt, and fisherman visible in the landscape as echoes
of the types of people who once called those places home.
Surviving postcards from the early twentieth century reveal the codification of the
old salt image. Of ninety-two postcards picturing old New England mariners that I have
located on eBay, made between 1901 and the 1960s, forty-three are unique poses, with
the rest duplicate cards or recycled images. Sixty-two of the ninety-two were made
between 1901 and 1930, showing the popularity of the old salt firmly placed within the
colonial revival era. Of the forty-three poses (six of which are cartoons), an old salt
uniform emerges: thirty eight have beards, eighteen smoke pipes, twenty-two wear full
oilskin suits, while thirty-six wear at least their oilskin hats. Thirty-two are shown
working or posing with tools of their trade – and ten of the remainder are mostly close-up
seated portraits of them still wearing some or all of their foul weather gear – implying
that they still do something salty enough to require it.
Only twenty postcards are labeled with a specific community, with Gloucester
accounting for eleven of these. The rest center on the larger zones of Cape Cod (14),
Cape Ann (6), Maine (3), and New England (2). Curiously, the island of Nantucket only
113
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books,
1976), 43-45. These three businesses exist today in Plymouth, Eastham, and Orleans, Massachusetts,
respectively.
80
has one old salt postcard identified with it, despite being the first New England coastal
community to market its quaint residents. Three old salt images are used repeatedly for
different areas. Merepoint, Maine, Gloucester, and Cape Cod share a cartoon image of
two laughing old men resembling nautical Santa Clauses in their blue and yellow
oilskins. Shops in Cape Cod, Hampton Beach, Gloucester, and Bar Harbor
simultaneously marketed the same close-up portrait of a stern blue-eyed old fisherman
published by three separate companies. And one old salt seated on a barrel was in
circulation for over forty years, mailed from post offices from Eastport, Maine, on down
to East Dennis, on Cape Cod. The anonymity of most old salt postcards allowed any
community along the coast to participate in his marketing, making him at once
everywhere and nowhere in particular.
Two cards are noteworthy for how they connect the old salt to the past and to the
future. One, made between 1901 and 1907 and mailed in 1909 from Gloucester,114
includes a silhouette of a bearded old salt in yellow foul weather gear, against a
background image of waves crashing against a rocky shore. The caption, “Brace’s Rock,
Cape Ann Shore & Old Salt, Gloucester, Mass.,” compares the man’s age to the granite
bedrock. They are adversaries, yet both are equally evocative of the region and its past –
one historic, one geologic. Both are fixed to the coastline, immovable, permanent. The
craggy surface of the rock compares to the creases in the man’s jacket, his wrinkled skin,
114
The age of a postcard is determined as follows: the “undivided back” postcards of 1901-1907 have no
vertical line on the reverse of the card. The back is meant only for the address. The “divided back” era
from 1907-1915 has a vertical line down the middle of the backside of the card, allowing one half for the
address, the other for a message. The “white border” era from 1915-1930 has a white border around the
image on the front of the card, as well as the now standard divided back. The “linen” era from 1930-1945
shows cards with a textured “linen” finish. The “modern chrome” postcard era of 1939-present exactly
reproduces color photographs. See Beverly H. Kallgren, “Postcards,” in The Encyclopedia of New
England: The Culture and History of an American Region, eds. Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2005), 1491.
81
and his wavy beard. The breaking waves hint at the risks the man takes in his daily work,
his bravery, and his luck or triumph over the elements in living to an advanced age.
The other postcard shows one of the benefits of old age. Made between 1915 and
1930, and postmarked in 1935 from York Beach, Maine, it shows a well-dressed old man
in brown slacks, white shirt, vest and pocket watch, standing beside a boy in a white
sailor suit standing barefoot on a chair. Behind them is an open doorway of an old house
clad in faded gray shingles – the stereotypical old coastal home. The pair poses as
grandfather and grandson. The man holds up a large spyglass in one hand for the boy to
look through, while pretending to light his pipe with the other. The old salt’s left
shirtsleeve is rolled up, exposing his muscular forearm – the type of youthful vigor in old
age that first impressed Thoreau and Willis on Cape Cod a century before.
Incongruously, the man still wears his yellow rain hat or souwester, but it pairs with the
boy’s sailor cap, and further identifies the grandfather to the viewer as an old salt. The
title, “Boyhood’s Outlook,” shows the passing of the torch, in the form of the spyglass,
from one generation of mariner to the next. The whole image implies reverence for the
past and confidence in a nautical Yankee future.
Not all postcards were about respecting the old salt. A handful of cartoon
postcards specifically mocked tourists’ impressions of the seacoast. One, “A Bird’s Eye
View of Cape Cod” made during the Prohibition era, shows an aerial view of the Cape
populated entirely by old salts (now standardized in their white beards and foul weather
suits), and sprinkled with other popular yet misleading stereotypes of the region including
a “clam tree,” patched sailboat, rum runners, “always broke” artists, and a multitude of
signs for fried clams. A second postcard dating to 1911 titled “Some Peoples’ Idea of
82
Cape Cod” includes an old salt in blue oilskins, white beard, pipe, and the webbed feet of
a waterfowl.115
A third card mailed in July of 1936 repeats these ideas but brings the old salt
center stage as the largest of these misconceptions. Entitled “What Some Folks Think
Cape Cod is Like,” it shows the Cape Cod railroad traversing mountainous sand dunes, a
tourist studying the Cape with a magnifying glass, a thrifty local nailing down a coin,
cranberry trees, and, occupying the center third of the card, an elderly “native son” with
full white beard, pipe, webbed feet, patched trousers, oilskin hat, and posing with a fish
under one arm and a mended clam rake in the other hand. The month in which this last
card was mailed further places it in the tourist economy. Of the old salt postcards in my
collection with legible postmarks, 42% were mailed in the month of August, 63% in July
and August, and almost three-quarters, 73%, sent between July and September – placing
the old salt’s popularity chiefly in the summer tourist season.
The postcard buyers and creators both appear to accept and at times even have fun
with the depictions of the old salt. At least some local people helped promote the image,
as it provided economic support in what had long been depressed areas.116 Postcards
required their assistance, either as sellers or models. None of these are candid
photographs; all are carefully posed. Some men are jolly, others scowl – likely to the
photographer’s preference. Paired with salty quotes and captions created by publishers,
they became ideal spokesmen for the coast. According to the caption on the back of one
115
These two cards are pictured in James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 68, 89. John Stilgoe also includes a postcard of
an imaginary Cape Cod in Alongshore as part of his broader investigation of coastal quaintness. John R.
Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 321.
116
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 119; Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New
England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale
University Press, 1999), 165-166.
83
card, “a jolly old fisherman owes his happy philosophy of life to Cape Cod’s peaceful
atmosphere.” The same card also promotes “the health giving climate” supposedly
demonstrated in the portrait of the elderly-yet-energetic man still dressed for work.
“Abbie” and “Uncle Roy,” two tourists who purchased and mailed this old salt postcard,
in August, 1941, poked fun at the whole genre, and provide a rare sender’s perspective.
Writing from East Dennis, Massachusetts, to family in Radburn, New Jersey, they
remarked, “Haven’t seen anybody with a fake beard like this yet, but some of the summer
boarders look pretty queer to us (including ourselves).”
Actually the beard was real. While most of the men who performed as old salts
are unknown, several rare identified examples provide an important glimpse behind the
caricature and show both the mariners’ agency and how they manipulated their identity to
function/operate in the new tourist economy.
Old salts helping to craft their own image
Herman Winslow Spooner was not a native of Gloucester, but over several
decades he left a lasting imprint on the landscape and its people. Born in Boston in 1870
he took classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Gloucester
around 1890. In 1896 Spooner married Sarah Gertrude Nutting, who was likely related to
the photographer and antiquarian businessman Wallace Nutting. Starting as a clerk in the
city engineer’s office, Spooner eventually worked his way up to a position as engineer for
the Gloucester Water Works. There, he achieved professional fame for planning and
supervising the layout of the Haskell Pond Reservoir from 1901 to 1903, and a utility
tunnel beneath the Annisquam River from 1904 to 1905. According to his daughter
84
Dorothy, he worked as an architect and civil engineer on projects from Vermont to
Virginia, though most of his work was in Gloucester. His advertisement in the 1915 city
directory lists his skills as a civil and consulting engineer, surveyor, draughtsman,
architect, and a designer. With the latter skill he created maps and illustrations for books
and magazines, and designed ads for local businesses and the Gloucester-Rockport
Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism.
What the ad curiously left out was that he was also a skilled photographer. By
1897 he had embraced amateur photography and would eventually take over 600
photographs in and beyond Cape Ann, including of flowers, farms, factory interiors,
ships, and portraits of notable residents such as Howard Blackburn or visitors such as
Calvin Coolidge. The Gloucester waterfront especially caught his eye as he documented
the catching, unloading, weighing, and processing of fish. His interest in photography
led him to join other male photographers in founding the Cape Ann Camera Club in
1902. It was around the start of the Haskell Reservoir project that he began
photographing old salts. How he first met John Scott, Lemuel Friend, Oliver Emerton,
and David Stanwood is unknown, but David Stanwood’s son Addison was also working
on the reservoir project at this time. Perhaps Addison, who was also a member of the
Camera Club, introduced Spooner to his father.117
117
Gloucester Daily Times, “Succumbs After Long Illness,” January 16, 1941. R. L. Powers, “Death
Recalls Herman Spooner’s Fine Work,” Boston Globe, February 9, 1941. Paul B. Kenyon, “71 Years
Later, Gloucester’s Tunnel Beneath the Annisquam Still is Engineering Marvel,” North Shore Magazine,
April 2, 1977, 1. Barbara Erkkila, “Spooner photographs, believed lost, now are found, donated to
museum,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 4, 1985, A5. The Gloucester Directory, no. 24 (Boston, MA.:
Sampson & Murdock Co., 1915). Additional biographical details from letter from Dorothy Spooner
Cleveland to Cape Ann Museum Curator Martha Oaks, March 28 1985. All of this material is from the
Herman W. Spooner vertical file, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Examples of Spooner’s
photographs and design commissions can be viewed in the Herman W. Spooner binders in the library of the
Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Cape Ann Camera Club detail from Archive Collection
#32: Cape Ann Camera Club, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA.
85
The four retired mariners whom Spooner photographed in oilskins in the first
decade of the twentieth century likely already knew each other. Spooner, Emerton, and
Scott lived within a few blocks of each other in downtown Gloucester, while Stanwood
and Friend lived in the village of Riverdale two miles to the north. What is surprising is
that while it was possible for Spooner to dress up any old man to create a photograph of
an old salt, he sought out actual veteran mariners for his anonymous portraits. In the
surviving images in the collections of the Cape Ann Museum, Emerton and Scott are
each photographed in one pose, Friend in three, and Stanwood – clearly Spooner’s
favorite model – in eight. As he is the only one of the four recognized for posing as a
“typical Cape Ann fisherman” in his obituary – likely due to being the only one to have
his image reproduced on postcards – his life and late fame are worth examining.
Stanwood was a model old salt.118
The aptly-named David Wharf Stanwood was born in Gloucester in 1826 on
Stanwood Street to one of the city’s oldest families. His ancestor Philip Stanwood had
arrived back in 1652, only ten years after Gloucester incorporated as a town. After
attending local school Stanwood went to sea as a fisherman, eventually rising to captain
and commanding a number of vessels for over forty years before retiring. During his
fishing career he married twice (once widowed) and fathered seven children, the last of
whom was Addison. In true old-salt fashion Stanwood didn’t actually retire upon coming
ashore (likely because he couldn’t afford to) but “engaged in the clam industry and
118
Addresses and death details of Emerton, Scott, Stanwood, and Friend from e-mail correspondence
between Sarah Dunlap (Gloucester City Archives) and Jonathan Olly, November 15, 2010 to December 8,
2010. Scott last lived at 6 Procter Street, Emerton last lived at 44 Mansfield Street (before moving to Lynn,
MA), Stanwood last lived at 538 Washington Street, and Friend last lived at 35 Gee Avenue, all in
Gloucester, Massachusetts. See also “Lemuel Friend Dead at Age of 82,” Gloucester Daily Times,
November 4, 1920, 8. “Oliver S. Emerton Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, August 11, 1908, 6. “Capt.
David Wharf Stanwood Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 14, 1910, 8.
86
followed other pursuits in keeping with his years.” Throughout his life he was a member
of the Riverdale Methodist Episcopal Church, and spent forty years as a member of its
choir. In 1901 Spooner copyrighted two photographs of Stanwood, which gives us a date
for their collaboration. From around this time until Atwood’s death in 1910, Spooner
photographed him in foul weather gear, and often also with pipe and reading glasses as he
posed mending a net, reading a newspaper, playing checkers with Lemuel Friend, reading
alongside him, sewing a sail, inspecting a net for tears, and posing Santa-style with a boy
in a sailor suit. Particularly the latter two poses with the boy echo a statement in his
obituary that he was “of a most genial and kindly disposition and at times loved to relate
the experiences of his youth and tell of conditions in this city during that period.” After
reading the obituary, his life could perhaps best be summed up as a Yankee man of faith,
family, friendship, hard work, and humor. An advertiser couldn’t have created a better
profile.119
By 1903 a postcard records another image of Stanwood seated on a barrel with the
caption “An Old Fisherman, Gloucester, Mass.” Either Spooner was printing and selling
his own cards, or, more likely, he had joined the ranks of amateur and professional
photographers selling their images to postcard companies.120 By 1908 his pose of
Stanwood mending a net was being published by the Robbins Brothers Company of
119
“Capt. David Wharf Stanwood Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 14, 1910, 8. Stanwood’s
photographed poses can be viewed in the Herman W. Spooner binders in the library of the Cape Ann
Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
120
Postcard historians Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh state that it was less common for local merchants
and photographers to send their images to printers to have them made into postcards, as opposed to a
photographer coming from a postcard company to document local scenes and then take orders from local
merchants. But either way, for people such as Spooner taking photos for fun and profit, “Even at the height
of the postcard craze, the majority of postcard photographers had to find other sources of income out of
necessity. A few did postcard work as an auxiliary to a different occupation.” Robert Bogdan and Todd
Weseloh, Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s Photography (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, 2006), 7-8, 59-60.
87
Boston, but it was the first image that would become the most numerous and widely
distributed of all the old salts. Four decades after agreeing to sit in front of a camera,
Stanwood’s anonymous image had sold postcards in three states from the eastern-most tip
of Maine to the bent arm of Cape Cod. But Stanwood was long dead. Only weeks before
the release of the April 1910 issue of New England Magazine showing him playing
checkers with his friend Lemuel on the cover (inside was an article on Cape Ann for
which Spooner had taken the photographs), David Stanwood died at the age of eightyseven, leaving behind his ninety-year-old brother, wife, five children, seventeen
grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and a curious legacy as the most photogenic of
New England’s old fishermen.121
Four years after Stanwood’s death, Spooner took on a photography assignment
that provides a glimpse into the motivations of his elderly mariner models. As the
resulting publication by the Home for Cape Ann Fishermen explained,
In the month of December 1909 several old Gloucester Fishermen appeared
before the local District Court, pleaded guilty to the charge of vagrancy and asked
to be sent away to the Ipswich House of Correction, where they would obtain
food and shelter during the winter months. None of these men had a home, none
of them had relatives or friends who could care for them, they were without
money, the fishing season had been for them a poor one, they were in dire need.122
The judge complied with their request, and the resulting publicity sparked the
philanthropic sympathies of John Dixwell of Boston. He paid to have thirteen old
fishermen moved from the jail to a Gloucester boarding house, while fellow
philanthropist John Hays Hammond purchased and renovated a Gloucester house as a
121
“Capt. David Wharf Stanwood Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 14, 1910, 8.
Home for Cape Ann Fishermen, (Gloucester, MA.: n.p., 1914), 1-2. Collection of Cape Ann Museum,
Gloucester, MA.
122
88
retirement home. Opened on January 1, 1912, it offered a safe harbor for between sixteen
and twenty aged and indigent mariners of Cape Ann.
As a new charity it needed to advertise itself, and so Spooner contributed
photographs of the building’s exterior, interior, and residents for the slim 1914
publication. Away from the photographer’s studio with its nautical props and hearty
men, Spooner’s photographs of the home show that retirement for mariners was often far
from jolly. The accompanying text includes biographies of two men originally from
Ireland and Newfoundland, who worked hard their entire lives in Gloucester and
elsewhere for fifty years or more. But lacking the support of nearby friends and family as
Stanwood enjoyed, too infirm to work, and without savings – this was the life of many of
New England’s old salts. The home did provide some security, but it was limited. Many
former fishermen lived on Cape Ann, but few could expect one of the few berths at the
home. Those who were not white likely faced an additional barrier to entry. Instead,
they all had to rely on whatever skills they possessed, and luck.123
Old mariners navigated the new tourism economy through more than just selling
their image to photographers. Along the coast, those not wanting to continue fishing but
who were still physically able could make goods to sell, rent out recreational boats, act as
a pilot for visiting yachts, and a host of service jobs that required no maritime skills in the
hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, and stores. George Fred Tilton secured possibly the
rarest full-time job in becoming an exhibit of himself. In 1925 eccentric local millionaire
Edward Howland Robinson Green hired the retired captain to interpret and oversee
123
Home for Cape Ann Fishermen, (Gloucester, MA.: n.p., 1914). Collection of Cape Ann Museum,
Gloucester, MA. Spooner is credited on the back of the publication for providing the photographs.
89
maintenance of an old whaleship that Green had just preserved as a shore-based museum
on the grounds of his estate at South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
Born in 1861 in a house built by his great-grandfather in Chilmark, Martha’s
Vineyard, George Fred Tilton ran away from home at the age of fourteen aboard a New
Bedford whaling schooner. That was the start of a forty year adventure on whaling and
merchant vessels ranging from Alaska to Hawaii, Argentina, the Canary Islands, Europe,
Greenland, and many more points in between. Tilton endured land sharks, yellow fever,
hard drinking, desertion, attempted murder, blizzards, and mutiny. But these paled in
comparison to a several month period during the winter of 1897 to 1898 when he walked,
with two Siberian companions and sled dogs, along the coast of Alaska from Point
Barrow to Kodiak Island, from where they eventually sailed down to Portland, Oregon, to
bring word that the whaling fleet of which they were a part was trapped in the ice and
liable to not survive the winter without aid. In 1903 he finally became a captain, and
served as a whaling master of two ships on four voyages to the Arctic. After quitting
whaling he served four years in the U.S. Navy during World War I before finding himself
once again aground, until the organization that owned the Charles W. Morgan, Whaling
Enshrined, Inc., asked him to take charge of their vessel.
So beginning in May of 1925, Captain Tilton began his final command of a vessel
encased in a sand berth beside a purpose-built wharf on an estate across the bay from the
island of his birth. Over the next eight years he directed the regular maintenance of the
vessel and interpreted it year-round to hundreds of thousands of visitors who drove to the
estate and climbed aboard for a tour. After apparently much coaxing from visitors who
couldn’t get enough of his sea stories, and Harry Neyland, a local artist who had first
90
started Whaling Enshrined to save the Morgan and now helped run it (with Green’s
financial backing), Tilton wrote his memoirs, published in 1928 as ‘Cap’n George Fred’
Himself.124
When Tilton died in 1932 at the age of seventy-one, he was enough of a popular
local character that the New York Times published his obituary – a rare honor for a retired
New England mariner. In it, his legend had grown even beyond the salty tales in his
memoir. Aside from expected details about his childhood, the walk across Alaska, and
final position as Morgan caretaker, the anonymous author of the article credited Tilton
with command of no less than eight whaleships. It further attested (more plausibly) that
over the past decade his storytelling ability had put him in constant demand as a public
lecturer, and several artists had painted his portrait.
But to anyone who tracked down one of these portraits, or flipped to page 292 in
Tilton’s memoir, they were in for a surprise. In his modern, tailored three-piece suit and
homburg, he looks nothing like an old salt. But it doesn’t matter. For Tilton stands on
the deck of a whaleship where he spins yarns to the delight of visitors (and possible
confusion of fact-checking reporters). Whereas nearly all old salts who sought to market
their image needed to do so draped in the clothing and tools of their former occupation to
distinguish themselves, Tilton had brought ashore his maritime environment, and instead
welcomed people onto it. As a man who made a full-time career out of being an exhibit
of himself, he was perhaps unique along the New England coast, but not elsewhere in
America.125
124
Biographical details taken from George Fred Tilton, ‘Cap’n George Fred’ Himself (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928). For more on the whaleship Charles W. Morgan, see the
beginning of the next dissertation chapter.
125
“G. F. Tilton, Skipper of Whaleboats, Dies,” New York Times, November 2, 1932, 19.
91
Historian Joy Kasson has written about how William Frederick “Buffalo Bill”
Cody created Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883 and for the next thirty-three years
presented a carefully crafted version of the American West that “blurred the line between
fact and fiction, entertainment and education.” Cody’s performers were often actual
cowboys, Indians, or Army troops, but they often acted out stories more akin to pulp
fiction than reality. These performed memories mixed with the public’s understanding of
the West through popular culture to make, Kasson argues, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West into
America’s Wild West. While Tilton was a one-man operation, without a costume or
world-touring show, he still, like Cody, shaped the public’s understanding of history
through persuasive storytelling in print and in person.126
As Kasson demonstrates through Buffalo Bill, a narrative evolves once it leaves
its creator, as others tell and retell the story. Such is the case with a tale spun by an
octogenarian former mariner named Hanson Gregory. In 1916 a newspaper reporter
named Carl Wilmore sat down with the eighty-five year old former captain at Sailors’
Snug Harbor, a retirement home for seamen in Quincy, Massachusetts, run by a Bostonbased relief organization of the same name. In the interview Gregory claimed to have
invented the hole in the doughnut as a sixteen-year-old cook aboard a ship in 1847.
Supposedly he and his shipmates were tired of the dense and greasy cakes of dough that,
when fried, were often cooked along the edges but still raw in the center. His solution
was to take a lid and cut a circular hole in the dough’s center, allowing it to uniformly
cook. Upon returning from the history-making voyage to his Camden, Maine,
126
Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York, N.Y.: Hill
and Wang, 2000), 5.
92
hometown, Gregory taught the technique to his mother, who then shared it with others in
adjacent towns.
Apparently delighted with this quirky claim, Wilmore printed the tale in
Gregory’s own words, adding that the conversation took place in the company of a
“dozen … pipe smoking fellows who were all eyes and ears,” and that Gregory, despite
his advanced age and slight hearing loss, was otherwise “as sound as new timber.” Here,
Wilmore reaffirms the stereotype of the old salt as gregarious and of advanced age but
youthful vigor. The news story appeared in several publications that spring, and granted
Gregory belated recognition as the inventor of the doughnut hole.127
His fame continued after his death in 1921.128 Buried in a place of prominence in
the center of the small cemetery of the sailors’ home, the National Bakers Association
provided him with a headstone larger than all the others, with the eternal inscription
“Recognized by the National Bakers Ass’n as the inventor of the doughnut.” Despite his
nomination to the National Doughnut Hall of Fame in 1937 as the modern doughnut’s
inventor, this claim did not go unchallenged. Others fought for the title, including a New
Hampshire sea captain and a Native American from Cape Cod. The debate was “settled”
in 1941 during a meeting of the National Dunking Association, a publicity organization
created by the Doughnut Corporation of America two years prior. Gathered at the Hotel
Astor in New York City on October 27, seventy-five people listened to the testimony of
Wampanoag Chief High Eagle of Mashpee, Massachusetts, and Gregory’s great-grand127
Carl Wilmore, “‘Old Salt’ Doughnut Hole Inventor Tells Just How Discovery was Made and Stomach
of Earth Saved,” Washington Post, March 26, 1916. The story is also reprinted in “The Inventor of the
Hole in the Doughnut,” Literary Digest 52, no. 15 (April 8, 1916): 1016.
128
Gregory’s birth and death dates are unclear. In his 1916 interview he said he was born in 1831, but his
gravestone states 1832. And his gravestone lists 1921 as the date of death, but a New York Times article on
him from 1937 says he died fourteen years prior. The 1920 census lists Gregory as a 87-year-old widower.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Fourteenth Census, 1920, Quincy, Norfolk County,
Massachusetts, series T625, roll 723, p. 81, s.v. "Hanson Gregory."
93
nephew, Fred Crockett, before voting three to one in favor of the latter. In 1946 a former
sailor named Le Grand Henderson published a version of the winning story as the
children’s book Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the Doughnut.129
By the time friends and family gathered in Rockport, Maine, to commemorate the
supposed centennial of Gregory’s invention, the tale had taken a domestic turn. After
placing a plaque on the side of Gregory’s boyhood home, his second cousin, Charles
Gregory, told the crowd how it was here that the future sea captain invented the doughnut
hole by poking out the center of some dough before it was to be fried on his mother’s
stove. Gone was the doughnut’s salt-water birth, at least in the short account of the
dedication appearing in the Chicago Daily Tribune. But Charles Gregory’s version was
more useful to its audience. It gave the modern doughnut a fixed place of origin –
evoking not only the rugged and independent coast of Maine, but a mother’s kitchen.
During the Cold War the home and hearth were seen as powerful representations of the
American way of life that needed to be defended at all costs. Anthropologist Paul
Mullins, in writing about Hanson Gregory’s story, explains that his tale took hold
because it gave the doughnut industry an ideal face as the inventor of their product. At a
129
“Hailed as Inventor of Hole in Doughnut,” New York Times, January 31, 1937, 34. Captain Roger Q.
Shaw of New Hampshire is mentioned alongside Gregory as a potential doughnut hole inventor in Marian
Manners, “Savory Doughnuts Prove Boon to Cooking Artists,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1940, A6.
“The Compleat Dunkers,” New York Times, September 28, 1941, E1. “Dunkers Satisfied on Doughnut
Hole,” New York Times, October 28, 1941, 26. Le Grand Henderson, Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the
Doughnut (New York, N.Y.: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1946). Henderson wrote this story based on the
version that he heard “while serving as one of the crew of a down-East schooner off the coast of Maine,”
and says that this is the true story of the doughnut hole and not Hanson Gregory’s invention in his mother’s
kitchen. However, both stories seem to be derivations of the one (or ones) told by Hanson Gregory in the
Sailors’ Snug Harbor retirement home.
94
time when New England had a powerful cultural resonance in America, the old salt once
again came forward as the best link to the region’s coastal history.130
Whether through portraiture or storytelling, old salts in New England during the
first three decades of the twentieth century used their newfound cultural cache to
participate in the region’s growing tourist economy. Most lacked the luck of finding a
photographer looking for an ideal model, a tourist site looking for a caretaker, or a
retirement home willing to admit anyone in need. But of those who did achieve a bit of
exposure in popular culture, the sheer number of old salt postcards in circulation indicate
his popularity as an icon of the coast, and a collectable souvenir. Postcards in the first
two decades of the twentieth century commercialized and quickly standardized the image
of the old salt for mass consumption.
In this “re-imagining” process, photographers and illustrators (with the
collaboration of their subjects) built upon earlier magazine illustrations of old mariners,
turning what had once been non-descript elderly men into caricatures that tourists would
have a hard time finding in reality. This transformation happened largely during the
postcard’s “golden age” of popularity between 1901 and 1915. Importantly, this change
preceded the watershed moment beginning in the late 1910s, when tourists in
automobiles headed to the coast in record numbers. Having perhaps already received a
postcard of an old salt in the mail from a friend, or read accounts of old salts spinning sea
tales by the seashore, some tourists in subsequent decades would try to find this
seemingly omnipresent fixture of the coast, with varying success.
130
“Honor Sailor Who Invented Modern Sinker,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1947, 6. Paul R.
Mullins, Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida, 2008),
49-51.
95
Hunting the old salt
In the early years of the twentieth century, as the postcard-craze entered its peak,
travel accounts rarely mentioned encounters with old salts. Those that did often fell back
on experiences from decades earlier. Charles Burr Todd’s In Olde Massachusetts (1907),
for example, is a compilation of sketches written between 1880 and 1890. Still, his
experience matches those that appear through the 1940s: the story-telling old salt. As “a
nor’easter howled down the chimney and rattled the ancient casements,” the author and
other men crowded around a stove in a seventeenth century inn in Barnstable to listen to
some storytellers, among them “two ancient mariners.” One of them, “a lean old salt,”
delivered his tale in what Todd found to be such a delightfully quaint accent that he tried
to reproduce it in his book:
“But a nor’easter ain’t a sarcumstance to a nor’wester – not one that means
bizness. A nor’wester, you see, comes without warnin’; it pounces on ye, and it’s
so cold ye’d think it ud cl’ared the space betwixt this an’ the North Pole at a leap.
D’yer mind the the blizzard of 1826, Cap’n, wust ever known on the Cape, an’ the
wreck of the Almira? No? You was a boy then. …”131
Back in 1849 Thoreau didn’t encounter such a salty accent in his meeting of an old salt;
all of the old oysterman’s quotes, with few exceptions, were perfect in diction.
Todd’s experience was exactly what Hildegarde Hawthorne sought in 1915,
during her ill-fated pursuit of an old salt. On her way across the Cape towards
Provincetown and disappointment, she passed through the quaint towns of Sandwich,
Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Harwich, imagining herself among the “old houses sturdily
remaining where the centuries had met and passed them, and old retired seamen crammed
131
Charles Burr Todd, In Olde Massachusetts: Sketches of Old Times and Places During the Early Days of
the Commonwealth (New York, N.Y.: Grafton Press, 1907), 81.
96
with marvelous stories dominating the village life.”132 Had she stopped in the Lower
Cape to tour the houses, she would have been disappointed. In Porter Sargent’s
Handbook of New England (1916), he revealed that in Yarmouth, “half a century ago
every other house held a retired sea captain,” but now none remained. Further, the only
old salt the guide mentioned had just recently died: “The residence of the late Albert
Crosby, a former sea-captain, contains a notable collection of paintings, which is open to
the public.”133 As historian James O’Connell explains in Becoming Cape Cod, “The
more traditional seafaring Cape Cod receded into the past, the more writers, artists, and
tourists sought to recapture it. The modernizing decades between the two world wars
witnessed the elaboration of the myth of “olde Cape Cod” that the region lives off to this
day.”134
Clara Walker Whiteside completely embraced that regional myth, made obvious
in the title of her 1926 book, Touring New England: On The Trail of the Yankee. Living
in Pennsylvania at the time, Whiteside and a friend purchased their first automobile
specifically to tour old New England. Arriving in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1924,
the author immediately “wanted to walk along the wharves and perhaps find an old timer
who might be induced to talk, and I did.” The “old timer” turned out to be a local
blacksmith named Frank E. Brown, working in a waterfront “dingy little shop.” When
she address him as “Captain Brown,” he cut her off by saying, “‘They will keep calling
me ‘Captain’ Brown and I hate it, for I’ve never been out of port in my life, but if I can’t
132
Hildegarde Hawthorne, Old Seaport Towns of New England (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co.,
1917), 218.
133
Porter E. Sargent, A Handbook of New England (Boston, MA.: Porter E. Sargent, 1916), 547, 549.
134
James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 2003), 64.
97
stop the bunch, at least I can stop you….’”135 Though corrected, Whiteside subsequently
still used “Captain Brown” in every reference to him in her book. To her, he was still an
old salt. Brown’s anger was only in jest, and he humored Whiteside and her companion,
repeating stories first told to him by whalemen that visited his shop to buy supplies. It
likely wasn’t the first time he met nostalgia-seeking tourists.
Apart from Brown’s pleasant tales of whales and whaling, Whiteside found other
aspects of the city upsetting. On the wharves outside Brown’s shop, she observed that
the city’s “one-third alien population, chiefly Portuguese, meets you everywhere, and it is
curious to walk the streets of an American city and see so many un-American faces.”136
To experience old New England, and its old salts, clearly required selective viewing of
the modern New England coast.
Other accounts remained stubbornly myopic. By 1935, Joseph C. Lincoln had
made a career out of writing popular books and stories depicting the quaint and usually
antiquated locals of Cape Cod. More than anyone, perhaps even more than postcards,
Lincoln, according to historian John Stilgoe, “engineered what can only be called the
‘quaintifying’ of the New England seacoast.”137 Writing at least forty-six novels and
stories between 1902 and his death in 1944, Lincoln’s Cape Codders, introduced in
quaint titles such as Keziah Coffin, Blair’s Attic, Silas Bradford’s Boys, Cy Wittaker’s
Place, Cap’n Eri: A Story of the Coast, and Great-Aunt Lavinia, met challenges of the
135
Clara Walker Whiteside, Touring New England: On the Trail of the Yankee (Philadelphia, PA.: Penn
Publishing Co., 1926), 191, 196.
136
Ibid., 186.
137
John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 312.
98
present (usually problems brought on by summer people) with old fashioned wisdom,
skill, and character.138
By the 1930s, though, Lincoln’s readers who journeyed to the coast must have
noticed the increasing disconnect between his tales and contemporary Cape Cod. In his
Cape Cod Yesterdays (1935), he had to admit that his idealized present was mostly a part
of the past. In a conversation repeated in the preface, the author, illustrator, and
publisher reminisced over what was disappearing. The illustrator commented, ‘“Might as
well ask what has become of the old salts who used to sit on the benches outside those
stores and spin yarns. Or the retired deep-sea captains; every Cape town was full of them
when I was a boy. Well, they were antiques then and now we are getting to be antiques
ourselves.”’ Instead of mourning the loss of an era, in true entrepreneurial spirit they
decided to create another book. Yet this one was to be especially for “Cape Codders, the
descendants of Cape Codders, and to the many, many Cape Codders by adoption….”139
As the artist pointed out, the celebrated old salt of the Cape was increasingly a memory,
but certainly a memory worth perpetuating in print. If nostalgic locals or disappointed
tourists couldn’t find an old salt in the present, at least they could in a Joseph Lincoln
book.
Though increasingly rare, alongshore writers and visitors continued to pursue old
salts in southern New England as late as 1946, when Katharine Crosby wrote Blue-Water
138
Information on Lincoln from John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press,
1994), 312-318; and James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 2003), 65-66.
139
Joseph C. Lincoln and Harold Brett, Cape Cod Yesterdays (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown and Co., 1935),
ix-x, xiv.
99
Men and Other Cape Codders. Yet by this time, the popular perception of old New
England had already shifted north, taking the old salt with it.140
Cape Cod changed drastically in the years following World War II. In 1950 the
first stretch of Mid-Cape highway opened, beginning an era of unprecedented
development through much of Cape Cod.141 The infrastructure and technology
improvements of the 1950s, such as television, helped bring the region closer into the
national culture, as well as physically easier to reach. Between 1950 and 1960 the
population of the Cape increased by fifty percent, from 46,805 to 70,286.142 This number
does not include the additional flood of summer visitors arriving annually between
Memorial Day and Labor Day. In the postwar years, Americans shrugged off the
imposed frugality of the Depression and WWII, embracing modernity and conspicuous
consumption. On Cape Cod, tourists and tourism promoters increasingly focused on
natural beauty instead of nostalgic history, revealed in the types of guidebooks and texts
published on the region after the 1940s.143 The rapid development and destruction of
Cape Cod’s rural atmosphere had made it both less marketable as unspoiled history and,
in a slowly growing environmental awareness around America, the land, more than the
buildings, needed to be saved for future generations. The sentiment of preservation in the
1950s and ‘60s concerned open space, not history, and culminated in the establishment of
the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961.
140
Katharine Crosby, Blue-Water Men and Other Cape Codders (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1946).
James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 2003), 97.
142
Ibid., 98.
143
Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 213.
141
100
As for the Cape’s celebrated old salt, postcards that depicted him were in use as
late as 1958, but they were only poor reproductions of ones made a half-century before.
New postcards of the Cape’s fishermen reflected a modern, industrial Technicolor world
of machines and multi-ethnic workers. A book published right before the war illustrated
the impressive diversity of New England’s fishing industry:
[T]he rank and file of the fishing industry are now mostly foreign born;
Portuguese and Greeks in Rhode Island; Portuguese on Cape Cod; Portuguese,
Italians, and Swedes in Gloucester and New Bedford; Nova Scotians,
Newfoundlanders, Italians, Portuguese, Swedes, Icelanders, and Irish in
Boston…. The Yankee is little in evidence around the Boston Fish Pier, unless he
is there as a dealer. In this sense the once typical New England industry now has
very little of New England personnel about it.144
The one exception, the author pointed out, was Maine, the last place where “native-born
fishermen” still followed their ancestors to sea.145
The turn north
During the nineteenth century few immigrants had come to Maine, except to a
small number of manufacturing towns such as Biddeford, Saco, and Lewistown. The
immigrants were also from Canada, and already shared regional ties with at least some
members of the border state.146 Little industrial growth and poor soil kept Maine
impoverished, especially after the fishing industry consolidated to Massachusetts by the
turn of the century. Today, the state still has the greatest percentage of people living
below the poverty line.147 Poverty keeps people working long after most Americans have
144
Edward A. Ackerman, New England’s Fishing Industry (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press,
1941), 291.
145
Ibid., 289.
146
George H. Lewis, “Shell Games in Vacationland: Homarus americanus and the State of Maine,” in
Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan, UT.: Utah State
University Press, 1997), 250.
147
Ibid., 253.
101
retired – at least those wealthy enough to take vacations. As coastal tourism began in
Maine at the beginning of the twentieth century, visitors saw the Maine locals as they saw
the native Cape Codders or Nantucketers: not as poor, but as “hardy, noble, simple, rustic
characters.”148
During the Great Depression, images of such self-reliant people became
increasingly popular, just as the lifestyle became increasingly unlikely for most
Americans. This type of person, eking out a living from the land or sea, became a
symbol of the strength of the region and, argues historian Joseph Conforti, “suggested
that the region might endure the depression without political and social upheaval.”149
Many people moved to northern New England in the 1930s to escape the effects of the
Great Depression. But these individuals were not just unemployed factory workers.
They included doctors, farmers, writers, and artists such as Norman Rockwell and
Maxfield Parrish. Writer E. B. White moved to the Maine coast in 1938, settling just
west of Bar Harbor in North Brooklin.150
As Nantucket had done in the nineteenth century, Maine promoted tourism as a
solution to its economic woes, officially adopting its slogan “Maine: Vacationland” in the
1930s.151 The plan worked. In 1938 Kenneth Roberts’s Trending into Maine, a glowing
tour of the state’s past and present, complained that southern Maine resembled
Massachusetts, with its “billboards, overnight camps, hot dog stands and fried clam
emporia.” Yet the author was not railing against tourists, but rather leading them farther
148
Ibid., 260.
Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the
Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 288.
150
Ibid., 289.
151
Ibid., 266.
149
102
up the coast, arguing that “you’re not really in Maine … until you’ve crossed the
Kennebec.”152
One of these authentic Maine places was Monhegan Island. As early as 1916,
Sargent’s Handbook of New England promoted the island as “inhabited for more than
two centuries by a hardy race of fisherfolk of primitive customs.”153 Such early notoriety
was largely due to the island’s popularity among artists since the nineteenth century,
whose ranks eventually included Edward Willis Redfield, Robert Henri, and perhaps
most famously, Rockwell Kent. His 1907 oil painting Toilers of the Sea showed the
rugged independent fishermen of Monhegan carving a living from the harsh coastal
landscape of barren rock and frigid water.154
Another artist attracted to the region was N. C. Wyeth, who settled in Port Clyde
Maine (just inshore of Monhegan) in the 1920s and illustrated Trending into Maine in
1938.155 In the chapter “The Gentle Art of Lobstering,” Roberts doesn’t hide the
modernity of the coastal lobstermen, as they leave the harbor in the early mornings with a
“put-put-put” of their motorboats to check their traps.156 Yet Wyeth’s illustrations of the
fishermen are distinctly timeless. Two images show men in their dories. A third shows a
close-up of a young man at the helm of a larger craft, likely a motorboat due to its size,
but he grasps a traditional ship’s wheel that connects to the steering gear with rope. In
only one of Wyeth’s book illustrations does he show an automobile, but it so far in the
152
Kenneth Roberts, Trending into Maine (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown and Co., 1938), 340.
Porter E. Sargent, A Handbook of New England (Boston, MA.: Porter E. Sargent, 1916), 769.
154
Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William
H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 151.
155
Ibid., 151.
156
Kenneth Roberts, Trending into Maine (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown and Co., 1938), 227.
153
103
distance as to blend in with the landscape.157 More than the text, Wyeth’s illustrations
portray Maine as a timeless reminder of old New England inhabited by strong Yankee
men and women. And in Trending into Maine and elsewhere, Wyeth’s artwork helped
spread this image of Maine nationwide, as artists have done since Winslow Homer a half
century before.
The 1930s also saw the region claim the term “Yankee” as its own. In 1935 one
of the refugees from southern New England named Robb Sagendorph founded Yankee
magazine at his home in Dublin, New Hampshire. Originally a Granite State magazine,
the astute former businessman and now publisher soon broadened the focus to include all
of New England, but concentrated on Vermont and Maine as the heart of
“Yankeedom.”158 The representative Yankee of the magazine was always portrayed as
an old man from either of these two states.159 In conjunction with state and local tourism
efforts, the magazine promoted northern New England as old New England, and opened
up advertising offices by the late 1930s in Boston, Chicago, New York, and Maine.160
The magazine featured stories, articles, town histories, and poetry that emphasized the
region’s simplicity, traditions, and self-reliance. Poet Robert Frost was among the
Yankee contributors, as well as an ideal representation of the magazine’s namesake.
Other sources helped popularize the north as the refuge of the Yankee and old
New England. In 1933 A. Hyatt Verrill published Romantic and Historic Maine, whose
end pages provide a map of the Maine coast, and indicate immediately where tourists
157
Images from Roberts, 228-229 (The Lobsterman), 280-281 (A Young Maine Fisherman), 348-349 (The
Doryman), 360-361 (The Aroostock Potato Harvest).
158
Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the
Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 291, 305.
159
Ibid., 293.
160
Ibid., 304-305.
104
could find the state’s “romantic past.”161 Edwin Valentine Mitchell followed in 1939
with Maine Summer, and again featured a map of the Maine coast on the end pages.
However this time the coast south of Portland is omitted, where Roberts had complained
of its non-Maine atmosphere the previous year. Mitchell’s chapter titles, despite the
inclusive book title, are almost entirely coastal, including “The Mast Country,”
“Islandmania,” “Seacoast Inns and Taverns,” “A Kettle of Fish,” and “The
Shipbuilders.”162 The first and last chapters in this list reveal Maine as the last place in
the 1930s where one could witness the construction of large wooden ships, and see an
aging fleet of schooners as they hauled lumber and granite to southern New England.
In 1946 author Robert P. Tristam Coffin, whose surname is rooted in Nantucket
genealogy but was himself born on a Maine island, focused entirely on the seashore with
Yankee Coast. The title advertised the region as the last place where coastal Yankees
dominated. And in Maine, the coastal Yankee, the old salt, was a lobsterman. In
particular he was the author’s brother, Frank. In a unique Maine adaptation of the old salt
encounter, Frank rowed his brother and a friend four miles down the coast one night to
harvest lobsters by starlight. After an eight-hour shift at the Bath Iron Works, “[t]his,”
the author concluded, “was his way of resting.”163 After collecting a number of lobsters,
Frank built a fire on the beach to cook them, and then sat down to smoke his pipe.164
Though no sea stories accompanied the crackling fire, Coffin proudly reassured his
161
A. Hyatt Verrill, Romantic and Historic Maine (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1933), vii.
Edwin Valentine Mitchell, Maine Summer (New York, N.Y.: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1939), 9.
163
Robert P. Tristam Coffin, Yankee Coast (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1947), 17.
164
Ibid., 19.
162
105
readers that Frank was “one of the last survivors of the old race of oral story-men of
Maine, and the best of the survivors, I believe.”165
While Frank may have lacked the antiquity of some old salts (the author was fiftyfour years old in 1946 and Frank was likely of similar age) such men did populate the
coast, with surprising skill and vigor despite their years. “It is good to see my
octogenarian friends coming home with their white hair against the evergreen,” Coffin
observed later in the book. “They stand up slim and straight in their dories, backingwater with their slim oars. You would swear they were twenty.”166 Coffin’s observation
carried with it no amazement or surprise at either the men’s vitality or still being hard at
work despite their advanced age. Old men on the water were presumably a common
sight. Yet he ignored, or at least didn’t say, that the men were likely poor, and had no
other means of subsistence should they stop working. Instead, their identification as
Maine lobstermen is sufficient to explain their exemplary work ethic. For unlike the old
salts pictured in southern New England postcards of decades earlier, the real old salts of
Maine are not posing idly in a rocking chair or studio, or found retired in a home awaiting
the knock of a tourist. Maine old salts are always found with the tools of their trade, if
not on the water, then right beside it, and soon to be.
The editors of Look magazine helped disseminate this image to a national
audience the following year, when they published Look at America: New England, their
latest in a series of regional guides of the U.S. The book is divided into regions, with
each having an introduction followed by a black and white photographic tour. In the
book’s opening, it introduces New England with twelve full-color photographs of the
165
166
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 123.
106
region’s icons, divided among the five states (Rhode Island is oddly omitted).
Connecticut gets the colonial house and apple trees; Vermont, the farm and winter skiers;
New Hampshire, the back road and the covered bridge; Massachusetts, the white New
England church and a modern fishing fleet; Maine, lastly, gets two classic and historic
icons of the old New England coast: a lighthouse and an old salt.
Seated outside his fishing shack with the sea just visible in the distance, the Maine
lobsterman paints an orange buoy with a stick, eschewing something as extravagant as a
paint brush. He wears denim overalls, worn brown shoes, and a yellow raincoat. Around
him, over fifty buoys hang from the sides of the shack and an adjacent fence, belying any
presumptions the viewer might have about the vigor of a balding old man with white hair
and a bushy mustache. But tourists and attentive armchair lovers of the Maine coast by
now knew better than to question the stamina of any old Yankee, and especially an old
salt.167
Fifty pages later, Look at America presents a photographic essay of Gloucester.
While it does feature an historic house (though a granite breakwater in the foreground
obscures the lower half) and a quiet picturesque harbor, Gloucester is foremost a modern
fishing port. Its fleet of diesel-powered otter trawlers lines an industrial waterfront of
warehouses. Its seamen are mostly young and predominantly Portuguese and Italian.
The iconic white church in the city is Portuguese, not Anglo-colonial. Looking
elsewhere in the book, even such former redoubts of old New England as Cape Cod and
Nantucket have lost much of their quaint, rural character that first attracted vacationers.
Development has either restored the dilapidated buildings or torn them down to build
167
Look, Look at America: New England (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947), 33 (Maine
lobsterman).
107
rental cottages or second homes.168 There are hardly any pictures that do not have
tourists in them.
Maine is different. It still retains its quaint coastal decay of rotting boats and
weathered fishing shacks. It still retains an active fleet of schooners (though most now
operating as ‘dude cruisers’ for tourists). It still has a fishing industry composed of
independent and usually old Yankee men working the water just offshore. It still has old
‘colonial’ houses not yet restored as trophy homes or museums. It still has builders of
wooden boats working with hand tools. And it still has vistas without a single tourist. At
least in 1947 Maine reflects a landscape still quaint, traditional, and unspoiled. In short,
it is the last refuge of old New England in the twentieth century, and the home of the old
salt.
Future books and postcards would only reinforce what many tourists and
transplants had come to believe in the 1930s, and what became obvious to most
Americans after World War II: that northern New England best embodied the beliefs,
practices, and the physical appearance of the region’s past. And along the Maine coast,
that Yankee past was best visible in the character of an old lobsterman, or what tourists
now called an old salt. A 1950s postcard represents the final stage in the old salt’s over
fifty-year journey through coastal New England culture. Entitled “The Old Salt Along
the New England Coast,” it remains curiously non-specific. Yet tourists familiar with the
region would recognize the location from just the image. An old man with gray hair,
beard, and a mustache sits on a wooden crate at the edge of a wharf. He wears his
trademark yellow foul weather hat and jacket, the ends of the sleeves bleached from years
168
Ibid., for images of Gloucester see pages 86-97; for Nantucket and Cape Cod loss of quaintness see
photographs between pages 108-141.
108
of salt-water spray. His khaki pants are tucked into brown boots. He holds a yellow
buoy and his feet rest on a collection of cork floats and lines. An empty lobster trap is to
his right, and empty crates to his left. Off in the distance is a low, granite-lined shore
nearly void of vegetation. To tourists, the scene could only be Maine. A half-century of
literature and art had taught Americans that Maine was the exclusive source of Homarus
americanus, and the lobsterman who pursued him. Now, as the postcard made clear, the
only old salts to be found along the New England coast are the old lobstermen of Maine.
Whether Maine was really the last place to find an old salt did not matter, only that
people perceived it as true. And Maine is still where tourists seek the old salt today.
Conclusion
The image of the old salt has experienced a significant transformation in the past
century and a half. In the early and mid nineteenth century he was only a curiosity to the
few tourists who strayed beyond the large seaside hotels. Thoreau, as with so many of
his observations, was ahead of his time in seeing value in the character and tales of an old
man, in a region people had not yet begun to visit. However, during the colonial revival
era surrounding America’s centennial and continuing into the twentieth century, coastal
people were widely seen as those of purest English, Pilgrim, Puritan, or Anglo-Saxon
stock. Americans contrasted these noble living ancestors with the thousands of new
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who were reshaping American society as
the region rapidly industrialized and urbanized.
As unique residents of the coast, fishermen, sailors, whalemen, and others who
made their living on the water best represented the region, and, with the factor of age, its
109
history and racial heritage. Grouped under the label of old salts, they became living links
to the past, and essential props for the growing tourist industry struggling to overcome
the economic stagnation plaguing most coastal towns. Yet it was that lack of economic
growth that kept so many old buildings, vessels, and people seemingly frozen in time. A
new generation of historically conscious tourists delighted in the now quaint landscape,
as an antidote to their modern societal ills.
Entering the twentieth century, the new medium of postcards commercialized and
standardized the image of the old salt, turning a formerly non-descript old man into a
coastal icon and popular souvenir. The transformation occurred just as an increasing
number of visitors arrived on the coast in their automobiles. Familiar with old salt stories
and what old salts supposedly looked like, most people quickly found the popular image
to be a myth. The reality of young, mostly immigrant men dominating the coastal
fisheries disappointed most and outraged a few. Some protested by retreating into an
idealized past or lashing out at the present. Anti-immigrant legislation calmed old-stock
Americans who feared immigrants would eventually supplant them, and led to their
broader acceptance of immigrants along the seacoast. However, old-stock Americans
would not recognize recent immigrants or their descendants as old salts.
Enough people, though, still found some old salts along the coast to perpetuate the
image in southern New England travel narratives (usually Cape Cod) through the 1940s.
But it was in the decade of the 1930s that the image of the old salt had shifted northward,
mirroring the relocation of the larger mythic old New England of which he was a part.
The southern New England coast by the 1940s was turning into the congested, urbanized,
and multi-ethnic environment that vacationers had originally seen places such as Cape
110
Cod as the antithesis of. Now Americans looked northward to Maine and Vermont as the
best representation of an older New England, and an older America. It was a place where
independent Yankees made a living from nature and their own ingenuity. Where small
towns and their inherent values and traditions still existed. Where postcard views of
bucolic and historic landscapes awaited travelers who journeyed beyond the southern
parts of Maine that looked so much like everywhere else. And to tourists reaching the
Maine coast, that was where they would find the redoubt of the coastal Yankee, the one
they had read about in books, seen in advertisements, and in movies. The old salt was
there, they were sure of it. They had a postcard as proof.
For these tourists, during the first three decades of the twentieth century the entire
New England coast had crystallized in their minds into a de facto historical attraction.
But despite the best efforts of promoters – or perhaps as a result of the best efforts of
promoters – some left disappointed at not finding the perfectly pickled port of their
colonial-revival infused dreams. Some locals debated how far to go to accommodate
them. In the summer of 1930, maritime historian Carl Cutler in Mystic, Connecticut,
fumed to his friend Albert Reese in New York about the publisher of his upcoming
history of the American clipper ship wanting a photograph of the author to help promote
the book. Reese wrote back that he should comply, and present himself as an old salt.
“Publicity – my dear Watson – PUBLICITY. You might be taken clothed in oilskins –
your rugged features topped by a souwester. Or, seated on a rock on the broad acres of
your Connecticut estate, flanked by wife and bairns, looking out over the choppy sound at
a sail boat scudding before the breeze in the distance. Publicity being the word, sir.”169
169
Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Albert Reese of Scardale, N.Y., dated July 18, 1930. Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
111
While Cutler turned down his friend’s half-serious advice, he still wondered how
to best connect the American people with their real maritime history – beyond the
stereotype of the old salt. But taking cues from the popularity of old mariners, it should
be tangible, a direct connection to the region’s Anglo-Saxon founders, and still tap the
popular perceptions of maritime New England that brought carloads of tourists to coastal
towns from Connecticut to Maine. The solution that his Marine Historical Association
settled on during the following decade didn’t involve old salts at all, but the place where
they had grown up. To visitor complaints that the coastline of southern New England had
lost its sense of history after decades of industrialization and immigration, the MHA
would counter by building the perfect nineteenth-century seaport.
112
CHAPTER 2
Mystic Seaport: Reconstructing a Maritime Past to Safeguard the Present
Introduction
On November 8, 1941, the bascule bridge at the mouth of the Mystic River
temporarily stopped traffic along Route 1 as it rose to accommodate a unique vessel.
Those in their cars and pedestrians along the shore watched as a Coast Guard tug slowly
pushed the large three-masted ship through the narrow passage and then upriver towards
its new home. Mostly empty, the century-old whaleship Charles W. Morgan rode high in
the water, showing the peeling paint and patches in its hull from years of neglect and
damage from a severe hurricane in 1938. The Morgan had barely survived its previous
role as a museum ship in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, but now had a second chance
under the ownership of the Marine Historical Association of Mystic, Connecticut.
Acquiring an old sailing vessel was a major goal of the decade-old association.
While museum ships before and since have sat anachronistically at a pier alongside more
modern craft and buildings, the MHA envisioned the Morgan as a crucial waterfront
exhibit in a soon-to-be-reconstructed small New England seaport – the type that would
have launched such a vessel and supplied it with the necessary gear and men for
successful global commerce. Re-created historic villages were already popular methods
among American and European preservationists for saving old buildings and trying to
recapture a past ambiance. But no one in America or Europe had tried to fully replicate a
113
maritime setting, locating collections in and along the waters that had spawned this
culture.170
And this was not to be a re-creation merely to entertain sea-minded antiquarians
or tourists lured from the nearby highway. The founders of the Marine Historical
Association saw their mission as no less than reestablishing America’s dominance in
maritime trade and saving the character of the American citizen from its position of
gradual decay since the mid-nineteenth century. The seaport, then, would be far from a
static display of nineteenth-century structures honoring maritime industry. From its
conception in the 1930s to completion in the early 1950s, the seaport became a
participant in the cultural and ideological conflicts occurring in America during World
War II and the subsequent Cold War. Over the next decade this reconstructed waterfront
village served as the cultural hearth around which the young museum promoted itself,
eventually becoming one of the largest and most influential maritime museums in the
nation.
170
Under the guidance of antiquarian-architect George Francis Dow, the city of Salem, Massachusetts,
built a replica of its original settlement in the seaside Forest River Park in 1930 as part of its tercentenary
celebrations. But aside from a replica of the Arbella – the flagship of the fleet which arrived to establish
the Massachusetts Bay Colony – tied up alongshore, some fish flakes and a small salt works, there were
apparently no other connections to its maritime location. Today, Pioneer Village bills itself as the
country’s oldest living history museum. The Arbella eventually decayed and the city demolished it,
according to Note 33 of Francis J. Bremer, “Remembering--and Forgetting--John Winthrop and the Puritan
Founders,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 6 (2004): 38-69. See also City of Salem, “Salem Pioneer
Village 1630,” http://www.pioneervillagesalem.com (accessed January 7, 2013); Salem, Mass., Board of
Park Commissioners, A Reference guide to Salem, 1630, Forest River Park, Salem, Massachusetts (Rev.
ed., 1935. Salem, MA.: Board of Park Commissioners & Portland, ME.: Southworth-Anthoensen Press,
1935); George Francis Dow, “The Colonial Village Built at Salem, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1930,”
Old-Time New England 22, no. 1 (July, 1931): 3-14; Salem Preservation Inc., “2005 Marks a Time to
Commemorate 375th Anniversary of ARBELLA fleet’s Arrival to Salem in 1630,” The Salem
Preservationist 3, no. 1 (May, 2005): 1-2; http://www.salempreservation.org/newsletter/v0301.pdf
(accessed January 8, 2013). Erpi Classroom Films made an educational film about the village in 1940 that
includes brief clips of reenactors catching fish and mending a net, though it’s unclear whether these
activities were done just for the film or were frequently demonstrated to visitors: Early Settlers of New
England (Salem 1626-1629) (Erpi Classroom Films Inc., 1940), 10 min., 12 sec.; 35mm; from Internet
Archive, “Early Settlers of New England (Salem 1626-1629) - Encyclopaedia Britannica Films,” AVI
http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=EarlySet1940&newflash=1, (accessed January 7, 2013).
114
While scholars for decades have used museum collections to write American
history, fewer have studied the museums themselves and their role in shaping public
memory. The majority of books on American museums are by and for a popular
audience, with smaller categories comprising institutional histories that often do not put a
museum’s development in historical context, or scholarly evaluations of current museum
practices in regard to gender, race, and ethnicity. Some excellent exceptions includes
James Lindgren’s works on the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities
and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Stephanie Yuhl’s
account of the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings in Charleston, and Michael
Kammen and Charles Hosmer’s landmark works on American memory and historic
preservation, respectively.171
Aside from a few paragraphs in Kammen and Hosmer, the development of
American maritime museums in the twentieth century has largely escaped scrutiny by
historians, despite their status as increasingly popular attractions for coastal tourists who
171
For examples of popular and institutional histories, see Shelburne Museum, American Dreams,
American Visions: The Collections of Shelburne Museum (Shelburne, VT.: Shelburne Museum, 2003);
James S. Wamsley, American Ingenuity: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (New York, N.Y.: H.
N. Abrams, 1985); Kent McCallum, Old Sturbridge Village (New York, N.Y.: Harry Abrams, 1996);
Edward Knowlton and Mary F. Greaney, The Wells Family: Founders of the American Optical Company
and Old Sturbridge Village (Southbridge, MA.: R.D. Wells, 1979); Jean Kerr and Spencer Smith, Mystic
Seafood: Great Recipes, History, and Seafaring Lore from Mystic Seaport (Guilford, CT.: ThreeForks,
2007); for museum studies literature see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old
Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997);
Kenneth L. Ames, Barbara Franco, and L. Thomas Frye, eds., Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive
History Exhibits (Walnut Creek, CA.: AltaMira Press, 1997); Moira McLoughlin, Museums and the
Representation of Native Canadians: Negotiating the Borders of Culture (New York, N.Y.: Garland Pub.,
1999); Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance (Lanham, MD.:
Scarecrow Press, 2007); for books that put American museums within the larger story of American public
history see Catherine M. Lewis, The Changing Face of Public History: The Chicago Historical Society and
the Transformation of an American Museum (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005);
Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago
Press, 1998); Steven D. Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick, Legacies: Collecting America's History at the
Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); and Patricia West, Domesticating
History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1999).
115
encounter history there that they likely never learned previously in school. Mystic
Seaport, as an example, opened as a public museum in 1934 and received 184 summer
visitors that year; by 1954 it welcomed over 100,000 annually in addition to an array of
publications both scholarly and general that reached thousands more. While such
numbers pale in comparison to an iconic outdoor museum such as Colonial
Williamsburg, which received over 300,000 by the mid-fifties, few regional museums
could rely on such wealthy backers as the Rockefeller family. A casual sampling of New
England tourist literature from the 1940s onward puts Mystic Seaport out front as both
the most photogenic maritime museum and the largest. James Lindgren has written about
the nearby New Bedford Whaling Museum and its idealization of Anglo masculinity in
its first forty years, but this is just the beginning (hopefully) of scholarship on maritime
museums as sites of both historical entertainment and contested heritage. This chapter is
a small step in that direction.172
1929: the state of maritime preservation and the beginning of the MHA
When three men gathered to found the Marine Historical Association in 1929,
there were few places dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the history of maritime
America. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., exhibited a National
Watercraft Collection, started around 1884 and consisting mostly of ship models, in a
172
Mystic Seaport visitor statistics from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A
Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 3, 11; Colonial Williamsburg visitor
statistics from Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American
Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 551. James M. Lindgren, “‘Let Us Idealize Old Types
of Manhood’: The New Bedford Whaling Museum, 1903-1941,” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 2
(June, 1999): 163-206. See also Phyllis Leffler, “Peopling the Portholes: National Identity and Maritime
Museums in the U.S. and U.K.,” The Public Historian 26, no. 4 (Autumn, 2004): 23-48; and a look at the
nineteenth-century origins of the Peabody Essex Museum in James M. Lindgren, “‘That Every Mariner
May Possess the History of the World’: A Cabinet for the East Indian Marine Society of Salem,” The New
England Quarterly 68, no. 2 (June, 1995): 179-205.
116
story of the “progress of civilization.”173 In Annapolis, Maryland, visitors to Maury Hall
at the United State Naval Academy could inspect a hodgepodge of naval artwork, relics,
models, and ordnance.174 The plans and ship models comprising the bulk of the Hart
Nautical Collection at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, existed largely for the use of its
engineering students. Only three museums in the entire country were specifically
devoted to maritime history, and all in Massachusetts: the Peabody Museum in Salem,
the Boston Marine Museum inside the Old State House, and the New Bedford Whaling
Museum. In addition to these, historical societies existed in some coastal communities
such as Gloucester, but as with the maritime museums, all of these collections were
local.175 None collected large watercraft, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum went
so far as to build a half-scale model of a whaleship in 1916 in its new museum building
so that future visitors could get a feel for how such a vessel once worked.176
The final whaling voyage from New England ended in 1927, but there were
plenty of other opportunities to see commercial sailing vessels in the 1920s and ‘30s –
mostly in the form of fishing and cargo schooners. But increasingly the owners of
working vessels preferred steam propulsion or the internal combustion engine for
advantages in speed, and, increasingly, reliability and affordability. Owners of smaller
173
Carl W. Mitman, ed. & comp., Catalogue of the Watercraft Collection in the United States National
Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), 1; Howard I. Chapelle, The National
Watercraft Collection (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), 3.
174
United States Naval Academy Museum, “History,” http://www.usna.edu/Museum/history.htm (accessed
January 7, 2013).
175
As Carl Cutler, one of the three founders, later explained in a November, 1948, article for Connecticut
Industry, “At that time, aside from a ‘watercraft collection’ in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and
the naval collection at Annapolis, there were only four marine museums in America – The Peabody
Museum at Salem, the Boston Marine Museum, and the museums at New Bedford and Nantucket. All of
these were local in character, and two of them were devoted to whaling and nothing else.” Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Cutler was partially
incorrect in his recollection. The Nantucket Whaling Museum of the Nantucket Historical Association
opened to the public in July 1930.
176
Jonathan Olly, “Lagoda: A Legacy in Wood, Iron, and Sail,” Nautical Research Journal 49, no. 3 (Fall,
2004): 144-153.
117
sailing craft might cut down the masts and install an engine, but those with larger vessels
sailed them until they could no longer produce a profit and then scrapped or abandoned
them. As the number of sails in various American harbors gradually diminished, a
nostalgic minority of individuals attempted to preserve some noteworthy examples. But
aside from the U.S. Navy’s restoration of the USS Constitution beginning in 1927177,
there was only one private preservation success in the 1920s: the whaleship Charles W.
Morgan.178
Launched in 1841 from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the wooden-hulled ship
Charles W. Morgan enjoyed a profitable and unusually long life for a whaleship: over
$1,400,000 of whale oil and baleen harvested during thirty-seven voyages over eighty
years. Even before her last voyage ended in 1921 she had a brief film career, appearing
in Miss Petticoats (1916), Down to the Sea in Ships (1922) and Java Head (1923) before
once again being laid up at a wharf in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. At this time Dartmouthbased artist Harry Neyland began a campaign to save what was now the last American
square-rigged whaleship. By 1924 he had acquired twenty-seven of the thirty-two shares
in the vessel, giving him majority ownership, and convinced millionaire Edward
Howland Robinson Green to permanently house the vessel as an outdoor exhibit on his
waterfront estate of Round Hill in South Dartmouth, a few miles south of New Bedford.
177
The USS Constitution went through two periods of restoration in the early twentieth century: 1906 to
1907 and 1927 to 1931. See, for example, Thomas Charles Gillmer, Old Ironsides: The Rise, Fall, and
Resurrection of the USS Constitution (Camden, ME.: International Marine Publishing Co., 1993).
178
While another ship preservation attempt started in the 1920s, it did not succeed until the 1950s. In 1926
sports promoter James Coffroth purchased the 1863 iron-hulled ship Star of India for donation to the San
Diego Zoological Society as a museum ship, but it would be thirty years before the ship was restored. See
“Old Ship Soon to be Anchored Off San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1926; “Famous Craft
Marine Museum at San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1927; Peter Stanford, The Ships that Brought
Us So Far (Washington, D.C.: National Maritime Historical Society, 1971) 20-21, 31; and Trudie Casper,
ed., “Jerry MacMullen: An Uncommon Man. Part II,” Journal of San Diego History 28, no. 1 (Winter
1982), http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/82winter/uncommon.htm (accessed November 28, 2012).
118
Green was the grandson of Edward Mott Robinson, the Morgan’s second owner, and
likely joined the cause out of a strong sense of filiopiety.179
Neyland created the non-profit group Whaling Enshrined, Inc. for the purpose of
preserving the vessel, and its incorporation certificate laid out an ambitious mission:
To enshrine and preserve the whaleship, Charles W. Morgan, and other relics of
the whaling industry; to create and foster an interest in the history of whaling and
the trades which are subsidiary thereto; to promote historical research; to collect
documents and relics and to provide for their proper custody; to acquire and
preserve other vessels of historical interest; to take and hold historic sites and to
care for them; and generally to discover, procure and preserve whatever may
relate to general history and antiquity.180
Though a whaling museum already existed in New Bedford, Neyland and his group saw
the Morgan as a unique and evocative set piece for telling the history of whaling, and an
outdoor burden that no historical society would accept. Whaling Enshrined focused on
the first two clauses of its mission. Green had the Morgan towed to his estate on May 7,
1925, where workmen moved it into a cofferdam which they then filled with sand up to
the ship’s waterline. The vessel no longer floated, but the sand berth protected it from
storms and rot. Alongside the vessel Green recreated a whaling wharf, complete with
large water-filled casks lying on their sides in tight rows and covered in wet seaweed.
The exhibit mimicked what a wharf in New Bedford looked like when a whaler returned
from a voyage. Workers would unload a ship and arrange the casks of whale oil in rows
on the wharf, covering them with seaweed to prevent the barrels from drying out in the
sun and leaking while the oil awaited processing in a refinery. Nearby, Green added a
179
Morgan biography from John F. Leavitt, The Charles W. Morgan (Mystic, CT.: The Marine Historical
Association, Inc., 1973), 3, 77-81. Edward Mott Robinson was the ship’s principal owner from 1849 to
1859 (p.81).
180
Whaling Enshrined’s certificate of incorporation from Series A: Administrative Records, 1925-1947.
Mss 45, Kendall Institute, New Bedford Whaling Museum.
119
nineteenth-century shipsmith shop from New Bedford that he purchased that same year –
the start of a replica seaport street that never materialized.181
Nonetheless, the site quickly became a major tourist attraction in the region, no
doubt drawn by the theme-park atmosphere of Green’s estate, complete with private radio
station, airport, poolhouse, beach, eighteenth-century windmill, and a blimp hanger in
addition to the ship.182 Attendance logs record that over one million visitors climbed
aboard the Morgan in the first five years. “All kinds of people crowd the whaler’s
decks,” reported the New York Times five months after the Morgan arrived. “Farmers,
tourists, summer visitors from every part of the United States, New Bedford people,
Italian and Portuguese laborers from the cotton mills … fishermen, lobstermen, writers,
sailors, mechanics and men of affairs; and all with their families, so that the vessel is
overrun with children of every size and shade.” Free admission aided in the vessel’s
popularity, as did the genial retired whaling captain named George Fred Tilton whom
Green hired to interpret the Morgan for visitors.183
To operate, Whaling Enshrined had a limited membership of thirty-three who paid
regular dues. But the main source of income came from frequent $5,000 checks which
Green wrote to the organization to cover supplies and salaries of the dozen men who
staffed and repaired the Morgan. Having a single major revenue stream would later
prove to be the organization’s undoing as Green died in 1936 and left no funds in his will
181
“It had been planned to build a museum, boat shop, sail loft, counting rooms, ship chandlery, oil
refinery, and candle works.” George Fred Tilton, ‘Cap’n George Fred’ Himself (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928), 291.
182
For details of the elaborate structures at Round Hill, see Barbara Fortin Bedell, Colonel Edward
Howland Robinson Green and the World He Created at Round Hill (South Dartmouth, MA.: Applewood
Books, 2003).
183
Tilton eventually wrote his autobiography, which Neyland illustrated. See ‘Cap’n George Fred’
Himself (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1928).
120
for the vessel’s continued operation. But at least in 1929, the ship at Round Hill
represented a preservation success story.184
Despite the thousands who visited Round Hill or watched historical films starring
old sailing ships, it was a much smaller minority who moved from passive historical
recreation to actively seeking to preserve the past in some way, such as Green and
Neyland with the Morgan. In nearby Mystic, such rare sentiment led three men to found
the Marine Historical Association. Incorporated on Christmas Day, 1929, by Edward
Eugene Bradley, Charles Kirtland Stillman, and Carl Custer Cutler, the society was
rooted in their maritime ancestry and first-hand experience at sea.
The eldest of the three founders, Edward Bradley was born in 1857 in the western
Massachusetts town of Russell, but raised in Stonington, Connecticut. Like most of the
region’s smaller coastal communities, Stonington’s days as a shipbuilding center and port
of departure for global voyages were largely past, but a seventeen-year-old Bradley
managed to find a local captain in the summer of 1875 who agreed to hire him as a
seaman for a voyage from New York to Shanghai aboard the clipper ship Mary
Whitridge. Bradley worked as a sailor for two years in the Pacific before returning to
Stonington in 1877, where he soon married, and eventually worked his way up through
the ranks of the Atwood Machine Company to become its vice president and general
manager. Along with his decades-long focus to improve his company’s manufacture of
184
Morgan arrival date and attendance figures from Series C, Attendance Records, vol. 1 & 2, Mss 45,
Kendall Institute, New Bedford Whaling Museum. Neyland acquisition information from “A Shrine For
The Last Whaling Ship,” New York Times, March 22, 1925, 91. Tilton and visitor descriptions from “Last
Old Whaler’s Realism Upsets Romantic Visitors,” New York Times, October 4, 1925, X16. Green’s $5000
checks from Series A: Administrative Records, 1925-1947 of Mss 45. Shipsmith shop information from
William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.:
Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 118, 121. According to Bedell, the membership of Whaling Enshrined,
Inc. was limited to thirty-three people who owned 32 shares in the Morgan. Barbara Fortin Bedell, Colonel
Edward Howland Robinson Green and the World He Created at Round Hill (South Dartmouth, MA.:
Applewood Books, 2003), 67.
121
silk-weaving machinery, he was an active community member and generous local
benefactor – with an interest in preserving the age of sail he experienced as a youth.185
Dr. Charles Stillman never went to sea but was the scion of one of Mystic’s
shipbuilding families. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1879, he went first to a
Pennsylvania military academy before undergraduate study at Brown University and
finally medical school at Columbia, where he graduated with an M.D. in 1907. For the
next four years he jointly maintained a practice in New York City and worked as a
researcher at Bellevue Hospital in the Pathology Department. The combined workload
was apparently too much for Stillman, and in 1911 he took a leave of absence from both
to recuperate at his family’s home in Mystic. When his health recovered, Stillman
decided to remain in Mystic, where he started a small practice in the large house he
shared with his mother, Harriet Edith Greenman Stillman.
A short distance from the house was a low marshy area along the Mystic River
named Shipyard Point. In the nineteenth century it had been the site of a shipyard
belonging to his grandfather Clark Greenman and his brothers George and Thomas. At
some point Stillman acquired the land purely for its sentimental value, though it would
later become the site of the organization he would help found. The doctor enjoyed his
Mystic life as a fisherman, yachtsman, amateur artist, and part-time doctor. It was a
routine that, with the exception of an appointment as a medical officer in charge of a base
185
Bradley biography condensed from Marion Dickerman, The Three Founders: Dr. Charles Kirtland
Stillman, Carl C. Cutler, Edward Eugene Bradley (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965), 3442.
122
hospital in Georgia during World War I, continued unchanged until he met Carl Cutler in
1928.186
Like Stillman, Carl Cutler was not born or raised in Connecticut, but he could still
proudly trace his lineage to New England’s founding. As he recalled in his unpublished
autobiography written in the third person for the MHA in 1950, as a boy “he found he
was descended from one John Cutler, who settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, about
1637, and that his paternal grandmother was Ruth Thomas, whose father was a
shipbuilder of Quincy and had helped build the ‘Constitution.’ Her home was near that of
the Adams family.”187 Born in 1878 in Kingston, Michigan, Cutler moved at the age of
six with his family to Tiverton, Rhode Island, where his father had accepted a position as
a Baptist minister. The location likely suited the sea-leaning family. The Reverend
Gilbert Cutler had begun a stint as a mariner at the age of fifteen, visiting ports in
England, South America, and the West Indies including one voyage on a whaler. After
eight years at sea he came ashore and became a Baptist minister, a job that also kept him
on the move. Gilbert’s brother, Captain Roswell Cutler, had also gone to sea at fifteen
for what became a forty-five year career under sail.
In the late nineteenth century the maritime industries that had first built New
England still permeated the communities lining Buzzards Bay. Writing decades later,
Cutler waxed about exploring with his cousins the local boat shop and the derelict
whaleships laid up along New Bedford’s waterfront – his favorite place in the region.
186
Stillman biography condensed from Marion Dickerman, The Three Founders: Dr. Charles Kirtland
Stillman, Carl C. Cutler, Edward Eugene Bradley (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965) 9-14.
187
Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume One,” 23. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. In a letter Cutler wrote to Alexander Wood of Winnetka,
Illinois, dated February 15, 1963, he further stated that “My own line goes back to 1637 when John Cutler
settled in Hingham and 1620 when John Alden and Pricilla Mullen arrived in Plymouth…” Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
123
Equally entertaining were the adventure stories told not only by his father but the old
retired mariners whom Cutler met about town or at his father’s parsonage. Upon
graduating from high school Cutler worried about his health and decided to copy Richard
Henry Dana Jr. (author of the celebrated Two Years Before the Mast (1840)) and go to
sea before continuing his education. With his father along to provide advice, Cutler went
to New York and the pair decided on the bark Alice bound for New Zealand. Once at sea
Cutler found his boyhood fantasies of the sailor’s life replaced with deprivation and toil.
In New Zealand he jumped ship and started working his way home – first on the RMS
Gothic to London, and then the steamer Montcalm to New York. Having decided that he
had suffered enough, Cutler never went to sea again but gained a first-hand view of the
maritime history that would later direct his life / and a love for maritime history.188
After undergraduate study at Brown and law school at Columbia (never crossing
paths with Stillman), Cutler passed the bar in 1906 and began work as a lawyer in New
York City. But by the late 1920s he felt he was wasting his life in his chosen career path,
and decided to resign to begin writing on a topic he had spent much of the decade
researching. “He had come to the conclusion,” Cutler recounted, “that the most
interesting thing he could do, would be to write a story of American shipping. It seemed
to him that it had never been told in adequate fashion, although his imagination pictured
188
Cutler biography condensed from Marion Dickerman, The Three Founders: Dr. Charles Kirtland
Stillman, Carl C. Cutler, Edward Eugene Bradley (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965), 1822. Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume One,” 21 (father’s travels at sea), 79, 86-89, 94 (meeting
mariners and adventure stories), 96-97 (exploring New Bedford), 105 (uncle’s first voyage), 110-111
(adventure stories), 130 (copying Dana), 133-191 (Cutler’s voyages). Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G.
W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
124
it as one of the most remarkable and inspiring achievements of all time. It held
something, he thought, that should inspire and strengthen America.”189
So in the spring of 1928 Cutler left New York and joined his wife Helen Grant
Irving Cutler and their two children at her ancestral home in Mystic, Connecticut. The
colonial farm suited Cutler as an appropriately inspiring writing center. Aside from the
seaside view, Helen’s father had been a Mystic shipbuilder and Cutler found some of his
builder’s models in the barn and outbuildings. This was lucky as Cutler planned to
include within his book technical drawings of clipper ships and photographs of replica
builder’s models he made and originals that he might find. It was this search for models
that led him to Stillman, who had a collection from his shipbuilding Greenman ancestors.
The two teamed up, with Cutler agreeing to buy models he found in various cities and
towns along the eastern seaboard for both of their collections, and Cutler using them as
source material for his book. Their conversations, though, soon extended beyond
collecting and publishing. Cutler credits Stillman with proposing that they start a new
organization dedicated to maritime research – one with national influence.190
By the time G. P. Putnam’s Sons agreed in 1929 to publish Cutler’s nowcompleted manuscript on the history of the clipper ship (released in 1930 as Greyhounds
of the Seas), Cutler and Stillman had enlisted Edward Bradley in their cause, and the
Marine Historical Association had its founding members. Early next year the men began
enlisting and meeting with fellow maritime enthusiasts. From these conversations Cutler
189
Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 278. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
190
Dickerman, 18-22 and Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 278-288. Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
125
wrote the society’s Statement of Plan and Purposes, which outlined the group’s
reasoning for the creation of a new type of maritime organization.191
The nine-page document began with Cutler bemoaning the wholesale destruction
of American maritime history in the form of ship models, logbooks, and official records
burned, scrapped, abused, neglected, or sold as junk. But as Cutler and Stillman showed
in their initial model-collecting efforts, much could still be salvaged – including
photographs, implements, and other three-dimensional material. But collecting was not
enough, and here Cutler took aim at what he saw as the fault of other maritime
collections. Without naming specific organizations (though there were only a few so the
criticism was obvious), he argued that all of the maritime collections were local instead
of general, some were staid memorials while others made cursory attempts at public
education, and all were more interested in preserving the past than making that past
relevant to present and future generations. “It is one thing to have a fine collection and
exhibit it to the public in an interesting manner. It is wholly another to make that
collection the nucleus of a vital, growing force which shall be the rallying point of an
organization capable of playing a worthy part in a living America with a future to face.”
The MHA would fill this void.192
Building a general collection and focusing on maritime education were not ends
in themselves. Cutler and his conscripts saw their ultimate goal as once again redirecting
American culture seaward. And it had slipped far: “Old ideals, lost three-quarters of a
century, must be revived; ancient knowledge recovered…. Above all, the youth of
191
Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 290, 292-296. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G.
W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine
Historical Association is located in box 1, folder 4 of ibid.
192
Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 4.
Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
126
America must be imbued with the spirit of the seas and all for which it stands.… More
than an institute; more than a museum; more than an historical organization; more than a
perpetual memorial – although combining the essentials of all – we may look forward to
playing some small part, ultimately, in the re-creation of a powerful maritime
civilization.”193
At the end of World War I the United States had indeed largely withdrawn from
the world stage. But to Cutler the damage was not years but decades old. In the
conclusion of Greyhounds he pronounced this maritime civilization moribund by 1860, as
America turned inward and fought itself.194 The answer, for at least the men and women
reading the Statement of Plan and Purposes, was the sea. “The sea is a perpetual
frontier,” Cutler began, outlining America’s salvation in the twentieth century. “From it
have sprung and will always spring those higher qualities invaluable to national wellbeing, such as courage, sacrifice, the pioneering spirit of adventure, co-operation, loyalty,
high aspiration and true religion. To bring these factors of soul back, in however small
degree, into the national consciousness cannot fail to be a patriotic service.” With the
western frontier closed, the ocean remained the final and the original place to foster the
best qualities of American citizens. And to bring these back into popular use, the MHA
would lead by example.195
193
Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 4.
Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
194
“America, which had been sea-minded for two centuries, was nautically decadent in 1855. By 1860 the
process could go little farther. There was an utter lack of anything resembling public interest in matters
pertaining to shipbuilding or in the exploits of the ships themselves.” Carl C. Cutler, Greyhounds of the
Seas: The Story of the American Clipper Ship (1930; reprint, Annapolis, MD.: Naval Institute Press, 1984),
370.
195
Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 4.
Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Closing of
the frontier discussed in Department of the Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census:
1890, Part I, Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892), xlviii; Frederick Jackson
127
How the association would start this revival was, somewhat ironically, with the
construction of a traditional museum building with storage, exhibition, and meeting
spaces. In the future Cutler suggested that the association might add a center for training
boys for careers in the merchant marine and navy, but a museum was likely the easier
first objective. Where to situate this building and any future developments was the final
focus of the Statement. While members were free to argue otherwise, MHA’s officers
preferred a rural location generally and Mystic specifically. Aside from the higher cost
of urban real estate, institutions based in cities could supposedly only depend on support
for projects relevant to that community. Rural locations were “neutral ground,” offered
room for growth, and a smaller constituency who could be more amenable to a new social
and economic opportunity in town. Historian Michael Kammen has also identified an
increased preference at this time for local historical commemorations as opposed to
participating in national historical events. As the founders all lived in or near Mystic, this
same sentiment of “proud provincialism” made it likely that they would stay for more
than just economic and political reasons.196
Geographically and historically, Mystic was located on the region’s main
highway of Route 1 halfway between the large cities of New York and Boston, and
halfway between Bath, Maine, and Baltimore, Maryland – the zone for much of Cutler’s
recent research and collecting. As a small village settled in 1654 in what became the
town of Stonington, it had a centuries-long history of shipbuilding and seafaring but also
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in American Historical Association, The
Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Chicago: American Historical Association, 1894):
119-227; or see the first chapter of Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New
York, N.Y.: H. Holt and Co., 1920).
196
“By the end of the twenties proud provincialism seemed to generate greater esprit than leaving one’s
community to celebrate some national anniversary at a distant location. Local commemorations thrived for
a decade.” Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American
Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 494.
128
an indistinctiveness that made it representative of the small New England seaports that
had fostered the ideals which the MHA so badly wanted to resurrect. Whatever the
ideological arguments, though, the likely deciding factor for where to base the MHA was
that Stillman had offered his family’s former shipyard site to the association should they
choose to locate there. To a nascent organization with no funds, a free waterfront
location anywhere would be hard to turn down. And so in 1930 the group agreed to stay
where their roots already ran deep.197
Nowhere in the Statement of Plan and Purposes did Cutler describe plans for
the reconstructed village/seaport for which the MHA would later become famous. If
Cutler’s recollections are to be believed – and no other evidence exists to corroborate or
refute his claims – then the idea was there but just never made it into print. “He
visualized, in addition, the re-establishment of an oldtime seaport, life size and complete
in all its essentials,” wrote Cutler in 1950, describing Stillman’s vision at the time of the
MHA’s founding. “He was a gifted amateur artist and made pencil sketches, showing old
buildings, shops and lofts and ancient ships, ranged the waterfront. They were singularly
attractive. There was something to grip the interest and stimulate the imagination of
everyone – merchant, shipbuilder, mariner, fisherman, naval architect, model builder,
collector, yachtsman, and even the antiquarian. / It was new and different. Nothing like it
had ever been attempted. Properly carried out, it might even ground a new type of
research – more convincing and inspiring. Even Ed – obsessed through he was by
197
For plans for eventual building and sail training and Mystic as best location see Carl C. Cutler,
Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 6-9. Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. For Mystic history see
Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical
Association, 1945).
129
practical considerations – acknowledged its appeal. Looking back, it seems to account, in
a measure, for the rather remarkable success of the venture.”198
Ignoring for the moment Cutler’s sense of who comprised the MHA’s target
audience – a narrow group of professionals rather than the general public – his writings
need to be seen in the context of 1950. Then, the reconstruction was several years along
and it would make sense to argue for the expensive project’s completion by tying it to the
intentions of the founders. As Bradley and Stillman had both died in 1938, the seaport
would be largely the result of Cutler’s vision, both in construction and documentation.199
The earliest reference in Mystic Seaport’s archives to an historical reconstruction
is in 1938, with a report Cutler submitted to the MHA’s president outlining their progress
since 1929 and recommendations for future growth. Charles Stillman had died that
March, leaving the MHA without a managing director. Recently back from Texas where
he had spent a number of years managing an oil investment, Cutler agreed to take his
place. That September saw the death of the association’s first president (from 1930 to
1934), Edward Bradley, leaving Cutler as the sole founder to carry on their vision.200
198
Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 291-292. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W.
Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
199
Mystic Seaport has little of Bradley and Stillman’s professional correspondence in its archives. Charles
Stillman’s papers are in two main collections: Coll. 324 and VFM 661, Manuscripts Collection, G. W.
Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. There is no collection of Bradley’s papers pertaining to
his association with the MHA, though it does have letters and a journal from his time as a sailor, and a
certificate from his career as an industrialist.
200
Carl C. Cutler, “Report, The Marine Historical Association, Inc., December 1929 – July 1938, With
Recommendations Made and Submitted to Clifford D. Mallory, President, By Carl C. Cutler, Acting
Managing Director, The Third Day of August, 1938” in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual
Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 9. Excerpt of letter from Cutler to Fred P. Burden of Vancouver, B.C.,
dated Jan. 26, 1942: “As a consequence of his withdrawal [Mr. Higgins, a lawyer and oil developer], I am
home from Texas early in 1938 and took charge of the Marine Museum work which I had started back in
1929, with two other associates. During my years in Texas, the Museum was managed by Doctor Stillman,
one of the principal original founders and as he died in March, 1938, it was left to me to carry on the
work.” Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
130
Though with only eighty-eight members in 1938, the association had developed
considerably in the nine years under Stillman’s direction. At the group’s inception its
members imagined a purpose-built structure on Shipyard Point for their exhibition,
storage, library, and office needs. Member Clifford D. Mallory (later the MHA’s third
president) suggested that it resemble an old stone warehouse with a dock “that might
have the atmosphere of a whaling dock.”201 But as the nation’s economy worsened into
what became the Great Depression, the association became more practical. Likely to
protect their investment and provide more room for growth, in 1931 Mary Stillman
Harkness, Stillman’s cousin and spouse of millionaire philanthropist Edward Harkness,
purchased for $30,000 a defunct woolen mill for the association located next to Shipyard
Point. Presented by Stillman to the MHA on April 4 on behalf of Harkness (who, along
with Stillman, was a director on the association’s board), the former Mystic
Manufacturing Company site comprised several wooden and brick buildings on one and a
half acres along the Mystic River. The complex dated to 1849 when the Greenman
brothers decided to expand into textile manufacturing on a lot adjacent to their
shipyard.202
Aside from two garages and an office building to be kept temporarily, all other
wooden buildings were quickly demolished within the year due to their decay, leaving
behind four brick buildings. One of these – a one-story former machine shop built
201
Letter to Cutler from Clifford D. Mallory, dated Sept. 17, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G.
W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
202
Description of Harkness gift from Marine Historical Association, “The Gift of Mrs. Mary Stillman
Harkness to The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,” Bulletin No. 5 – April 15th, 1931. Mystic Seaport
Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 2. History of the Mystic Manufacturing
Company from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum
(Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 44-50. Membership count from Mystic Seaport Museum,
Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum,
1980), 3.
131
around 1889 – the MHA renovated over the summer into its temporary headquarters and
first exhibition space. Opened in time for the second annual meeting that September, it
displayed a collection of artifacts mostly loaned from the members’ own collections. The
association invited the public to view the exhibits beginning in the summer of 1934.
Over the next six years the MHA increased its collecting and public access, and
continued to rehabilitate the final three buildings as fast as members’ funds, labor, and
donated materials allowed. A second exhibition building opened in 1935, and a third in
1938.203
As Cutler typed up the progress of his association in the summer of 1938,
tabulating its members (88), land (1.5 acres), museum buildings (4), collection (1001
objects), library (1511 two-dimensional items), and publications (12 pamphlets), he
described the next five goals. The first would be to remodel the last and largest of the
former mill buildings at a cost of over $25,000. Next was moving the library and
artifacts from the smaller buildings into it. Third was “Equipping and fitting out small
buildings as old time shipyard shops, lofts, etc., including coopering and carving shops,
blacksmith, treenail and blockmaking shops, sail and mould lofts, saw-pits and spar yard.
Eventually a complete shipyard of early type will be reproduced, fully equipped, so that
the visitor will be able to appreciate to some degree the factors involved in producing
wooden ships.” Though this is the earliest known reference to the re-creation – and it is
purely a shipyard instead of a village – the brevity and specificity of the description
203
Demolition plan from Marine Historical Association, “The Gift of Mrs. Mary Stillman Harkness to The
Marine Historical Association, Inc.,” Bulletin No. 5 – April 15th, 1931. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives,
Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 2. Machine shop renovation details from William N. Peterson
and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum,
1985), 50; for opening dates of the new exhibit buildings and related photos see Mystic Seaport Museum,
Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum,
1980), 3-5.
132
implies that it was already known to its audience. It is unclear whether Cutler meant for
these shops to go into the vacated brick buildings or new ones to be built on Shipyard
Point, but likely the latter, as was apparently Charles Stillman’s intention. The fourth
goal was to find and preserve an old square-rigged ship and possibly other craft, while the
fifth was to increase and broaden the collecting of historical records for the library.204
Buoying Cutler’s ambition was an offer which Harriet Stillman made to the MHA
that spring of her property on Greemanville Avenue, her son Charles’s adjacent Shipyard
Point (seven and a half acres in all), and their shared maritime collections, all of which
had passed to her upon his premature death. Despite Cutler’s prediction that Shipyard
Point would be available for immediate use, such was not the case. Stillman chose to
retain the property, in its undeveloped state, until her death – which would not occur until
1949 at the age of ninety four. Her intransigence likely frustrated the other MHA
directors (Stillman was one of fifteen directors on the board), who now had to carry out
their vision on the edge of its future home. In the meantime they would focus on other
goals. They continued to gather tools and equipment with which to stock the planned
shipyard – including material salvaged from the Benjamin F. Packard, one of the last
remaining American-built wooden square-rigged ships, before it was sunk in Long Island
Sound in May of 1938, too decayed for commerce or preservation. Mary Stillman
Harkness again came to the rescue of the MHA in 1940 with a gift to remodel the last,
and with three floors, the largest, of the former mill buildings, in memory of her cousin.
204
Carl C. Cutler, “Report, The Marine Historical Association, Inc., December 1929 – July 1938, With
Recommendations Made and Submitted to Clifford D. Mallory, President, By Carl C. Cutler, Acting
Managing Director, The Third Day of August, 1938”, pp. 2-5 (statistics), 6-7 (goals) in Mystic Seaport
Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 9.
133
And the directors searched for a ship to add to the proposed shipyard, eventually
choosing the whaleship Charles W. Morgan in 1941.205
The importance of ancestry
All of these efforts – ship preservation, building refurbishment, and the
association’s own inception and expansion, succeeded through its leaders’ skillful appeal
to ancestry. The United States’s centennial celebrations in 1876 had helped spark a
growing historical awareness among its citizens. As post-Civil War America witnessed
unprecedented social and technological change, the past for many people became a
refuge, a place of inspiration, and common ground. Such historical encounters could be
through oral or written history, art, food, song, literature, performance, artifacts, buildings
or places. In the following decades such reverence broadened from honoring the national
founding fathers to one’s own ancestors. In Mystic Chords of Memory, historian Michael
Kammen describes how the practice of ancestor worship took hold in America in the
1880s. One of the earliest efforts dates to 1824 with the establishment of Pilgrim Hall in
Plymouth, Massachusetts, by descendants of the famous settlers to hold a collection of
205
Harriet Stillman’s proposed gift is first mentioned in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of a
Special Meeting of Directors of The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,” Bulletin No. 18 – May 12, 1938.
Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 9. The meeting took place
on April 30, 1938. The complete details of the gift are in a letter from Harriet G. Stillman to Clifford D.
Mallory, dated August 1, 1938, in box 2, folder 14 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White
Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Harriet Stillman’s status as a board member and Cutler’s
expectations that due to Stillman’s gift Shipyard Point “is now available for instant use, when needed,” are
on pages 3 and 4 of Carl C. Cutler, “Report, The Marine Historical Association, Inc., December 1929 –
July 1938, With Recommendations Made and Submitted to Clifford D. Mallory, President, By Carl C.
Cutler, Acting Managing Director, The Third Day of August, 1938”, Mystic Seaport Museum Archives,
Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 9. Salvage of the Packard is described in Marine Historical
Association, “Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc., July 8, 1939,” Bulletin No. 21 –
July 15, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 10.
Harkness’s gift to rehabilitate the brick building detailed in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the
[11th] Annual Meeting of Marine Historical Association, Inc., July 27, 1940,” Bulletin No. 22 – September
1, 1940. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 11.
134
relics. (The hall, as a mausoleum, was the type of institution the MHA dreaded
becoming.) But by the late nineteenth century, the practice extended to honoring lineages
of no particular importance.
Filiopiety took many forms depending on one’s income and social opportunity.
Wealthy Americans, such as those in the Piscataqua region of New Hampshire and
Maine, restored or remodeled their ancestral colonial homes. Regardless of whether one
had a family estate, national organizations such as the Sons of the American Revolution
(1889) and Daughters of the American Revolution (1890) attracted genealogicallyminded Americans who wanted to highlight their lineage to further their social standing
or to increase their sense of self. Those without such deep roots in America, such as
recent immigrants, or denied official recognition and membership on account of racism,
such as happened to African Americans, often joined or created organizations with lessrestrictive criteria.206
Contiguous with the growth of national ancestry organizations were community
based historical societies interested in preserving the artifacts and structures of their
forebears. The historic preservation movement had started in the mid-nineteenth century
with the preservation of Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters in Newburgh by
the State of New York in 1850, his Mount Vernon estate in Alexandria, Virginia, by the
private Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association in 1859, and the Old South Meetinghouse in
Boston in 1876 by a group of concerned citizens that marked the first successful
preservation effort in the face of development. In the coming decades the movement
206
Richard M. Candee, “The New Colonials: Restoration and Remodeling of Old Buildings Along the
Piscataqua,” in “A Noble and Dignified Stream”: The Piscataqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 18601930, eds. Sarah L. Giffen and Kevin D. Murphy (York, ME.: Old York Historical Society, 1992), 35-78
(especially 35-48). Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in
American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 215-223.
135
spread nationwide with local, state, and regional organizations selectively preserving
pieces of the built environment outside of any museum to meet their current needs.207
The MHA had two major influences: those doing ancestry-based preservation and
those creating museum villages. Of the former, three organizations deserve special
mention as examples of ancestral-fueled preservation efforts preceding the MHA, and for
the attention paid to them by historians. One of the earliest state-wide efforts, the
Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (1889) was able to promote its
version of history through preserving structures, building monuments, and holding
pilgrimages. Before Colonial Williamsburg or the National Park Service, the APVA was
already working to define the character of its home state. It serves as a pioneering
example of a group that worked to define American cultural identity, and which
individuals in other states emulated with their own preservation organizations. In
contrast to later preservation standards, APVA preservationists, to quote historian James
Lindgren, “did not consider the artistry, landscape, or craftsmanship of an antiquity to
hold much import. They instead valued these antiquities as symbols of venerated
ancestors, time-honored customs, and the cultural environment of early Virginia.”
Basically the APVA was about using relics to inspire the present with the wisdom of their
forebears, and more caught up in exercising a form of civil worship than accurately
preserving the past – what Lindgren calls a “Gospel of Preservation.” Their campaign
involved courting old Virginia families, preserving sites of the “good” past and hoping
207
For the campaign to save the Old South Meetinghouse, see Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful
Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998) , 94-109. For Hasbrouck House see Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: A History of
the Preservation Movement in the United States Before Williamsburg (New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1965), 35-37. For Mount Vernon see ibid., 41-62.
136
that social malcontents would show respect for this golden past, and spreading Virginia’s
historical supremacy nationwide.208
Farther north and two decades later, Bostonian William Sumner Appleton formed
the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in 1910 out of a desire to
save the region’s colonial-era homes and artifacts. Collaborating with like-minded
architects and preservationists such as Joseph Chandler, Norman Isham, and George
Dow, he shaped an idealized view of early New England through select preservation and
sharp “restoration” of two dozen properties in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut
and New Hampshire in the organization’s first two decades.209
Lindgren shows that SPNEA’s preservation work was not a retreat into the past,
but an intervention in the present meant to check what its proponents perceived as the
eroding of Anglo-Saxon cultural power in the face of immigration and urbanization. Old
buildings were good for tourism, served commercial purposes, and helped anchor
neighborhood identity. While this kind of progressivism was not wholly democratic –
anyone could join but only a few controlled SPNEA’s mission – it contained the similar
elements of corporate structure, scientific methods, professionalism, and involved the
same class of participants as other progressive causes. In reality, while SPNEA became
preservation’s first corporation and a model to groups such as the National Park Service,
Colonial Williamsburg, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it created a
homogenized Yankee ancestor that excluded the diversity within New England’s early
population such as Native and African Americans, and all women. We are left with
208
James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism
(Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 7.
209
For a list of properties see James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation,
Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 185-186.
137
SPNEA’s legacy of what it felt was important to save, and ambiguity over what is the
actual past versus the restored past. As a result, much has been lost that could have
presented a more accurate picture of New England’s early built heritage.
In a similar warning of the politics of preservation on a community level,
historian Stephanie Yuhl has studied how elite white residents of Charleston, South
Carolina, during the interwar years formed an organization to advocate for the
preservation of the city’s antebellum mansions. The Society for the Preservation of Old
Dwellings’s (later the Preservation Society) lobbying resulted in the city creating the
nation’s first planning and zoning ordinance in 1931. The ordinance created a Board of
Architectural Review and a historic district in the oldest quarter of the city – where most
of Charleston’s elite lived – protecting it from any future development. Yuhl points out
that the work of preservationists displaced African American residents through
gentrification, and resulted in erasing what had once been racially integrated streets and
neighborhoods. These decisions have permanently shaped the understanding of place
and race in Charleston for tourists and many of its residents.210
Such were some of the historical lessons available to Cutler, Stillman, and
Bradley at the time they founded the Marine Historical Association, though it’s unknown
how much they followed regional or national preservation efforts. At least two of the
three men, though, used ancestry as a tool in their public lives either before or outside the
MHA. In a brief three-sentence bio written by Stillman for his Brown University
yearbook in 1900, he stated his date and place of birth, names and hometowns of his
parents, and ended with “Ancestors were of Puritan and Seventh Day Baptist stock, the
210
Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
138
majority of them Rhode Islanders from Westerly, Newport, Tiverton and Portsmouth.”
Clearly Stillman was proud of his deep local roots, which were particularly potent in this
smallest of states. Cutler also used ancestry as a touchstone, as he explained to his
publisher that being from “an old New England sea-faring family” was his greatest
impetus for writing Greyhounds of the Seas, and he sometimes asked business colleagues
about their origins if one matched a surname that he came across in his research. In the
case of his query to Ednah Crosby Farrier, publicity manager of the publisher of Cutler’s
book, he was incorrect, but she knew enough of her family’s nineteenth-century
genealogy to correct him. Such an exchange suggests that asking about one’s ancestry
was not unusual, even among purely business contacts, in the early twentieth century/was
among the public details of one’s life in the early twentieth century.211
While such correspondence may have simply contributed towards a good working
relationship, the MHA placed a deeper meaning on one’s roots by initially using it as a
litmus test for membership. At the first meeting in January 1930 of prospective
members, Cutler recalled in his memoirs the names of the dozen or so men and women
who had agreed to join and observed that “All were descendants of early shipping
families, with strong traditional interests in maritime concerns. The country had
211
Charles Kirtland Stillman, “Papers, April 14, 1904 – May 2, 1938,” VFM 661, Manuscripts Collection,
G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Cutler mentions ancestry as main reason for
writing his book in a letter from Cutler to Ednah Crosby Farrier (publicity manager at G. P. Putnam’s
Sons), dated July 10, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport
Museum, Inc. For an example of Cutler using ancestry in business see letter from Cutler to Ednah Crosby
Farrier, dated Oct. 21, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport
Museum, Inc. His letter ends with: “You mention coming from seafaring stock. I wonder if young John
Farrier, born in Providence about 1801, who, in 1815, shipped on the schooner Betsey of Stonington, bound
for the West Indies, was a connection? John was reported at that time to be 14 years old, 4 feet 10 inches
high and light complected. One of his ship mates was William Williams, who was, I think the grandfather
of William Williams, collector of the port of New York a few years ago.” Farrier responded the next day
that she “feel[s] that the probabilities are that it is not a member of our family since my father’s father came
direct from Scotland subsequent to 1801.”
139
thousands more, with similar traditions and interests, constituting a great reservoir of
potential support.” A year later in “A Private Communication from the Membership
Committee to the Members of The Marine Historical Association,” the committee,
comprised of Cutler, Stillman, and Bradley, called for expanding membership,
particularly in cities from Boston to Baltimore. In the “Qualifications for Membership”
section it curtly stated that the “essential personal traits and characteristics of proposed
new members will be obvious to all our present membership, without further discussion.”
But the founders went on to suggest patriotism and immediate sympathy for the MHA’s
mission as qualifiers, while “those with a background of sea tradition or interest in
marine affairs should be given special consideration.” The rolls were also restricted to
adult American citizens, though foreigners could become “Corresponding members.”
After nine years of cautious growth, Cutler proudly tallied eighty-eight mostly
East-Coast members in a 1938 report to the MHA, and concluded that “Those who have
become members, therefore, are almost without exception, persons with a maritime
ancestry whose interest and sympathies are natural and require no stimulation or
corrective influence.” Presumably such correction would involve someone of Anglomaritime ancestry explaining to the uninformed why this founding generation mattered –
which would be the function of the MHA with its publications and exhibits.212
Whether out of a sense that it finally had a solid core of wealthy members of
Anglo-maritime origin, or that it ran out of such people and needed to look beyond
ancestry to fulfill its goals, the MHA decided in 1940 to broaden its membership rolls.
212
Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 296. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. “A Private Communication from the Membership Committee
to the Members of The Marine Historical Association,” January 17, 1931, in Mystic Seaport Museum
Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 2.
140
At the eleventh annual meeting in July of 1940 President Clifford Mallory called for a
“great expansion in membership” and stressed that the only requirement was to be
“genuinely interested in preserving and making vital the memory of what our seafaring
ancestors accomplished and the high standards by which they lived. It is only recently
that world events have demonstrated with compelling force the part their qualities and
principles played in developing and sustaining a fine, beneficent civilization, and the
urgent need for a renewed appreciation of the things for which they stood is becoming
daily more obvious.” The new war in Europe and the likelihood of American
intervention now seems to have placed one’s ancestry second to one’s chosen nationality
as an American in Mallory’s eyes. His inclusive language invited in anyone interested in
American maritime history, though the “our” qualifier marks a continuing preference for
a certain slice of that history – which would be demonstrated in the preservation
campaign for the Charles W. Morgan two years later.
Such an invitation was not new. Preservationists in New England had been using
historic structures as tools for instilling immigrants with “American” values and
reverence for early Anglo Americans for several decades, such as the Paul Revere
Memorial Association’s restoration of the famous patriot’s seventeenth-century house as
a museum in the immigrant neighborhood of Boston’s North End in 1907, and Caroline
Emmerton’s establishment of a settlement house in the restored seventeenth-century
Turner-Ingersoll Mansion (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables) in Salem,
MA, in 1910. Both examples were about restoring buildings as anchors of AngloAmerican culture in neighborhoods now dominated by those recently arrived from other
141
countries, and then using such sites to teach the newcomers about early American history
and provide them with role models for values that were supposedly foreign to them.213
Cutler and the other MHA members likely believed that their Yankee ancestry
contributed to, if it was not directly responsible for, their success.214 In the late
nineteenth though early twentieth centuries, such thinking permeated American upperclass white society. Michael Kammen argues that ancestor worship became less intense
by the 1920s from its peak at the turn of the century, “yet it clearly remained a social
force that motivated high-minded people to participate on diverse commemorative
occasions. As with the growing appeal of local observances, however, acts of historic
preservation or tradition-oriented piety increasingly occurred on account of a personal
sense of devotion to forebears.” As maritime preservation has always lagged behind
213
Mallory quoted in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Marine
Historical Association, Inc. / July 27, 1940,” Bulletin No. 22 – September 1, 1940. Mystic Seaport Museum
Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 11. For Paul Revere House restoration see Michael
Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore,
MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 216-218. For House of the Seven Gables as a settlement
house see William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” in
Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 89-90 and The House of the Seven Gables, “The Settlement:
Caroline Emmerton,” http://www.7gables.org/settlement_camp.shtml (accessed January 7, 2013). For
additional examples of the ties between preservation and immigrants, see James M. Lindgren, Preserving
Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.:
Oxford University Press, 1995) and William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of
Immigrants,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton,
1985), 341-361. Despite the popular belief among established Americans that immigrants needed historical
tutoring, newcomers and their families were active participants in the Colonial Revival. For example,
historian Briann Greenfield has explored the important role of Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth
century American antique market. See Chapter 2: “The Jewish Dealer: Antiques, Acculturation, and
Aesthetics” in Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New
England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009).
214
Maybe they were right. A recent scientific study has shown that thinking about one’s ancestors
improved subsequent performance on intelligence tests. Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic, and
Silke Weisweiler, “The Ancestor Effect: Thinking about Our Genetic Origin Enhances Intellectual
Performance,” European Journal of Social Psychology 41, no. 1 (February, 2011): 11-16.
142
land-based efforts, the MHA would continue to use ancestry as a preservation tool long
after organizations such as SPNEA had become increasingly professional.215
The MHA had acquired its first vessel in 1931 as a gift from Charles Stillman.
Named the Annie, it was a single-masted racing craft called a sandbagger, built in 1880
and used by a wealthy Mystic owner on Long Island Sound in summer, and the waters off
Georgia and Florida in winter. Initially it may appear to be an odd acquisition, as
yachting was not a part of Cutler or Bradley’s backgrounds or Cutler’s scholarship. But
it speaks to the organization’s attitudes towards ancestry and its membership base. In a
history of Mystic written in 1945 by Cutler, he looked back on the Annie as the “ultimate
development” of vessels of this design (as recreational vessels were often based on the
designs of local working watercraft), but that “The type vanished, partly at least, because
it demanded an inexhaustible supply of the ablest and most active young sailor men.
Unfortunately, in the last half of the 19th century, our ships were manned largely by the
sweepings of Europe and the Yankee sailor was fast becoming tradition.” So the
mastless hull that greeted visitors outside the MHA’s museum beginning in 1931
represented the height of local design, but that the sport of racing them died for lack of
seaworthy local men. The sailboat had become a memorial for a supposedly vanishing
race of Yankee sailors.216
Such a public demonstration of filiopiety (and veiled racism) by the MHA needs
to be seem in conjunction with a practical need for money. It made good business sense
215
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture
(New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 220-221 (belief in biological superiority), 494-495 (ancestor
worship as a powerful force).
216
Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical
Association, 1945), 162-163. Maynard Bray, Mystic Seaport Museum Watercraft (Mystic, CT.: Mystic
Seaport Museum, 1979), 48-49.
143
for the MHA to court select wealthy Americans interested in maritime history by offering
them both an exclusive organization to join and a chance to publicly demonstrate their
ancestral pride. In 1939 Cutler predicted in his report at the annual meeting that the
eventual “development of shipyard shops will call for services of old shipwrights and
descendants of shipbuilders.” The former category makes sense due to the decades-old
knowledge an experienced shipwright could contribute to a historical re-creation of his
work space, but the call for help from the kin of old-time shipbuilders (who presumably
had no such skills to offer) must have been an appeal for money.217
This business aspect of filiopiety appeared in the MHA’s first year in a letter
Cutler wrote to a colleague in Maine. Then, the MHA had just under forty members, but
“some of our members are related to some of the wealthiest men in the world – a fact
which of course is of significance as bearing on the possibility of the Association
engaging in useful work on a large scale in the future. For example, near relatives of two
of the wealthiest families in America built ships in Mystic for nearly a hundred years.”
But wealthy members, or wealthy potential members, did not automatically mean easy
money for the organization. Later that year Cutler wrote to a collector in Massachusetts
and complained that these supporters “regard me with the same amused tolerance they
accord to Fido, and write a check to some old furniture faker for $10,000.00 for a rickety
old chest which has perhaps fifty mates in different parts of the country, and pass up
217
Marine Historical Association, “Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / July 8,
1939,” Bulletin No. 21 – July 15, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (19301950), folder 10.
144
models which are unique.” But gradually Cutler and his associates became proficient
fundraisers.218
Using ancestral ties to court rich potential members continued through the
organization’s first two decades, visible in the land, buildings, and money given by
wealthy families such as the Harknesses, Stillmans, and Mallorys. The association
reciprocated by publicizing such acts of generosity along with physical accommodations
on the MHA’s grounds such as docking facilities for visiting yachtsmen, commemorative
plaques and memorial buildings, a larger dock built in 1948 with funds provided by the
Cruising Club of America (and which received the prestige of appearing as the cover
photo on the first issue of the MHA’s new publication, the Log of Mystic Seaport in
1948), and the New York Yacht Club relocating their 1844 clubhouse to the museum
grounds in 1949 to guarantee its preservation (and yachting as a part of MHA
storytelling).219
The MHA’s filiopiety extended to contemporary sympathy with its members’
ancestral homeland in the British Isles. By the annual meeting in the summer of 1941,
Clifford Mallory had died and been replaced by his brother Philip as MHA president,
while far out in the Atlantic Allied convoys battled with German submarines. As
President Roosevelt readied the country for war, so, too, did the museum. On display
that day was the newest exhibit: the jolly boat from a British steamer torpedoed in the
Atlantic the previous August, and in which two men had survived a seventy-day, 3000218
Carl C. Cutler letter to Charles R. Patterson of Cape Cottage, Maine, dated Oct. 3, 1930 and Carl C.
Cutler letter to Ray Baker Taft of Hingham, MA, dated Nov. 21, 1930, both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts
Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
219
For story of dock and cover photo, see The Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 1 (October 1948); for
acquisition of the New York Yacht Club’s Station 10, see William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope,
Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 95-99;
actually a long-term loan to the MHA, the NYYC moved its clubhouse from Mystic to Newport, Rhode
Island, in 1999.
145
mile voyage. Members of the Mallory family had been vacationing in Nassau that winter
when the boat was auctioned off to benefit its survivors and war relief charities. Clifford
Mallory unsuccessfully bid on the boat to exhibit it in Mystic, but his death the following
April convinced the winning bidder to loan it to the museum anyway. The jolly boat of
the Anglo-Saxon was meant to provide a vivid and contemporary example of heroism,
sacrifice, and determination – five men had died aboard it during the ordeal – and show
solidarity with the British people.
Indoor exhibits such as the jolly boat, and the planned replica shipyard might
appear to be disparate examples of maritime collecting, but managing director Carl Cutler
saw the museum and the historical reconstructions as mutually supportive. The library
and exhibits were places of research and broad storytelling, while the re-creation offered
context for the disparate objects on display in the museum buildings, or in Cutler’s
words: “significant, purposeful unity to a mass of material which would otherwise
present to the casual visitor a merely picturesque spectacle, or a bewildering
accumulation of relics, depending upon his mental background. Together, they make
plain an effective, inspiring lesson in patriotism, courage and high achievement.”220
Spoken in the summer of 1939, such lessons now had heightened importance as first the
United Kingdom and then the United States became embroiled in the new world war.221
On the cusp of America entering the war, the association accomplished its singlegreatest example of preservation in the Charles W. Morgan. Publicly, the MHA did not
220
Carl C. Cutler, “Report of Managing Director” in Marine Historical Association, “Annual Meeting of
the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / July 8, 1939,” Bulletin No. 21 – July 15, 1939. Mystic Seaport
Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 10.
221
Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association,
Inc. / June 28, 1941,” Bulletin No. 23 – July 22, 1941. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting,
box 1 (1930-1950), folder 12. Role of Mallory family in acquiring the jolly boat from J. Revell Carr, All
Brave Sailors: the Sinking of the Anglo-Saxon, August 21, 1940 (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster,
2004), 229-234, 257.
146
consider acquiring the whaleship until sometime in early summer of 1941, when
members of Whaling Enshrined decided they couldn’t save the ship. For years the MHA
had watched the vessel decay and public support for it wane. A letter from Cutler to
Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall in 1939 failed to produce any state support,
and Cutler had to publicly deny that the MHA had plans for the vessel after one of its
members inquired in New Bedford about buying it. But privately, the MHA’s president
acknowledged that they were the only museum that could take in such an exhibit, though
Mallory hoped the National Park Service or the citizens of New Bedford would rally at
the last minute and keep him from having to ask his members for the expected $3040,000 needed to preserve it. They didn’t. Instead Whaling Enshrined voted in July of
1941 to give the Morgan to the MHA. So the MHA officers started soliciting offers to
remove the ship to Mystic, and by September accepted a bid and started constructing a
sand berth on their waterfront.222
With the deal approved, at least Cutler was enthusiastic. Remarking to lithograph
collector Harry Peters in New York that she was “the last real American ship” aside from
the USS Constitution, Cutler looked forward to the hundreds of thousands of visitors that
had once climbed over the Morgan in South Dartmouth to now follow her to Mystic.
Such an audience would bolster his and the association’s efforts to create a sense of unity
222
Saltonstall letter mentioned in letter from William H. Tripp to Carl C. Cutler, dated Feb. 21, 1939.
Cutler’s public denial of the MHA wishing to acquire the Morgan is in an undated newspaper clipping from
the New Bedford Mercury included with a letter to Cutler dated July 15, 1939. Both in Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Mystic as the Morgan’s
last best hope and estimate of her removal and restoration cost in letter from Clifford Mallory to Reginald
W. Bird of Boston, MA, dated Aug. 9, 1940 in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White
Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Whaling Enshrined’s offer and the MHA’s consideration in Marine
Historical Association, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / June
28, 1941,” Bulletin No. 23 – July 22, 1941. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1
(1930-1950), folder 12. The MHA’s acceptance mentioned in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harry T. Peters
of New York, N.Y., dated Sept. 7, 1941 in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library,
Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
147
and pride around their forefathers’ records of accomplishments. And to a former oil
business partner in Portland he confided that “We took the job only after the best blood of
Massachusetts had struggled with the problem for three years, and fallen down on it.”
All ancestral preservation efforts, even with the “best blood,” still required deep pockets.
And the MHA’s were now deeper and broader.223
Once the Morgan was safely docked in Mystic only weeks before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, the MHA put out a four-page publication to explain their
acquisition to the public. Entitled Why the “Morgan” came to Mystic, it evoked the
power of ancestry-based preservation and sought to dispel notions that the MHA poached
New Bedford’s history. While the whaling city’s residents were sadly no longer able to
care for the vessel, the Morgan’s preservation in Mystic still represented a triumph of the
two group’s shared “New England Character,” which, according to the unknown author
of the report (likely Cutler), represented the “vigorous root of Americanism.” Following
this train of logic, as American character was supposedly based in New England, and
New Englanders had as a people come of age at sea, then the source of American strength
lay in the crucible of that maritime history. Such an unprecedented preservation effort
showed that the initiative of early New England seamen to overcome hardship and
bravery had not been wholly lost in the subsequent years. And that success, the MHA
reasoned, was due to them preserving maritime history and relics. It was a self-fulfilling
ancestral prophesy. Mystic’s steadily mounting successes embodied “the maritime
tradition which gave birth to the hardihood, endurance and self-reliant common sense so
223
Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harry T. Peters of New York, N.Y., dated Sept. 7, 1941; and letter from
Carl. C. Cutler to John C. Higgins of Portland, OR., dated Sept. 19, 1941, both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts
Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
148
strongly identified with New England character.” It was a pact. People preserved their
history and in turn that history gave them “magnificent character.”224
Mystic’s new museum was itself a perfect complement to the Morgan, being “the
one available spot in all New England completely suited to the re-creation of the
conditions and atmosphere surrounding ships and ship-building during the great days of
sail.” Though this site was currently only a collection of renovated former mill buildings
and a swampy peninsula, the fact it had once been a vital place of maritime business was
apparently what mattered. As with the imagined power of (proper) ancestry, the latent
energy was in one’s mind. From the bare ground that once launched famous sailing
vessels the MHA envisioned an “early shipyard and attendant shops, lofts, spar-yard,
tools and equipment” that would be coastal New England’s answer to Virginia’s
Williamsburg. Until then, people were invited to peruse their “romantic exhibits” which
included the Morgan, Annie, a forty-two foot boat restored to look like a now-vanished
type of fishing vessel, the English jolly boat, and the museum’s smaller artifacts and
publications. Using the word “romantic” shows the association using sentimental
language to appeal to members of the public beyond their earlier and narrower group of
224
As historian John Seelye explores in Memory’s Nation, history-centric New Englanders in the early
twentieth century dwelt on their supposedly lauditory, centuries-old character and their ancestors’
accomplishments because it was what they had left as the region declined industrially and commercially,
relegated to the margins of modern America. Seelye pronounced the living force of old New England that
had elevated Plymouth Rock to a political and moral icon of national importance dead by the
Massachusetts Tercentenary in 1930. The New England of today exists largely as an outdoor museum of
its once central role in American society. While the South did rise again after the Civil War, New England
has never regained the political and economic influence it once enjoyed in the early nineteenth century.
See especially chapter 25 of John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
149
maritime professionals and enthusiasts. And now that work required the help of everyone
who felt “the surge of seafaring ancestry within his veins.” 225
Through luck, another membership drive, and much donated labor and materials,
the MHA was able to maintain the Morgan through the lean years of World War II; it
remains to this day the only surviving American wooden merchant ship of the early
nineteenth century. But calling on only a narrow section of the American population –
those descended from early New Englanders – for support was untenable for the
museum’s postwar goals, particularly the re-creation of a shipyard. As the MHA had
already compared its plans to Colonial Williamsburg, its members were clearly aware of
other historic reconstructions around the country. While it’s unknown which ones the
Marine Museum at Mystic corresponded with aside from Colonial Williamsburg, they’re
worth exploring as both potential inspiration and how Mystic fits into this sentiment of
historic outdoor re-creation in America in the 1940s and ‘50s.226
Influences / Inspirations
The story of Williamsburg’s transformation from historical footnote to popular
living museum began with the Reverend Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, rector of the town’s
Bruton Parish Church and a department chair at the College of William and Mary.
Historian Charles Hosmer credits him as the first American preservationist to propose
saving an entire community instead of select historic buildings or sites within it. In a
225
Marine Historical Association, Why the “Morgan” came to Mystic (Mystic, CT.: Marine Museum of the
Marine Historical Association, [c.1942])
226
Mallory called for another extensive membership drive at the 1942 annual meeting. Cutler complained
to friends in letters in 1942 and 1943 that with the occasional help of schoolboys and sea scouts, he was
largely responsible for keeping the vessel maintained. See letter from Carl C. Cutler to Lt. H. Oliver Hill in
Petersfield, England, dated Aug. 16, 1942, and letter from Carl C. Cutler to Albert Reese of Newburgh,
N.Y., dated Sept. 12, 1943, both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic
Seaport Museum, Inc.
150
vision that preceded Charleston’s creation of the nation’s first historic district, Goodwin
believed that the importance of Williamsburg rested in its historic cohesiveness. He saw
his adopted home as the birthplace of American liberty (one of many places along the
East Coast claiming this title), a sacred font of American character that could not be
contained in any single structure. And by the 1920s this “spirit of the past” at
Williamsburg was under assault from the forces of modernity – particularly the
automobile and its related infrastructure and businesses. In a note of irony Goodwin
sought to reconcile this clash by appealing to two of the nation’s richest industrialists for
help.227
His blunt and unintentionally public efforts from 1924 to 1926 to convince Henry
Ford to buy and restore the town failed. More reserved and private courting on
Goodwin’s part eventually earned the full backing of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in late 1927
to restore the town to its eighteenth-century appearance. Rockefeller went public with his
vision (and his status as the project’s sole bankroller) in 1928, and over the following
decades an unprecedented army of historians, architects, urban planners, archaeologists,
builders, and art and antiques experts worked to preserve, selectively demolish, and
rebuild Williamsburg’s historic center.228
Some members of the community balked at the flow of money and experts from
the North, but entering the Depression many found this investment to be a unique stroke
of luck. By 1931, 321 modern buildings had been demolished and thirty-four buildings
227
For Goodwin as first major preservationist, and his beliefs in what Williamsburg represented, see
Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949
(Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:11-12. For Goodwin and Rockefeller seeing
CW as a shrine, see Anders Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg: The Restoration of Virginia’s
Eighteenth-Century Capital (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 10-12.
228
Goodwin courting Ford recounted in Hosmer, 12-15; Greenspan, 8-9; and Kammen, 359-361. Goodwin
gaining Rockefeller’s support recounted in Kammen, 360-362; Hosmer, 12-33.
151
had been restored, at a cost of $7 million – with the two latter tallies slowly increasing
along with new reconstructions. By 1934 the group had reconstructed the Capitol and
Governor’s Palace from archaeological and historical evidence, restored the Wren
Building on the adjacent campus of William and Mary, and visually brought the town’s
main street back to an eighteenth century appearance in time for President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s attendance that October for its dedication. Tourist numbers surged in
the coming years, from over 30,000 in 1934 to over 200,000 in 1941 – encouragement,
no doubt, to later builders of outdoor museums.229
What became the living museum of Colonial Williamsburg (CW) proved to be the
single most important preservation project in twentieth century America. First, it was an
incubator for the fields of architectural reconstruction and restoration, historical
archaeology, museum management, decorative arts, landscape and interior design, and
historical tourism and historical interpretation. Second, it was a model for imitation or
improvement/set the standard for authenticity. All subsequent outdoor and historic house
museums either copied/built on Williamsburg’s practices or benefited from the enlarged
field of preservation-related scholarship and businesses that grew up in its wake.230
No other group or wealthy individual chose to replicate Rockefeller’s outsized
plan on another American community. Instead, the preferred method for preserving a
group of buildings remained the museum village, an idea that was already a half-century
old when the Marine Historical Association planned their re-creation. The world’s first
229
For restoration as a benefit to Williamsburg, see Greenspan, 32-34. For progress of construction by 1931
see Hosmer, 44. For Roosevelt’s presence at dedication and visitor numbers see Kammen, 362-363 and
367.
230
For prompting new areas of scholarship see Hosmer, 30; for discontent over the “invasion” of Northern
money and expertise see Hosmer, 32; for tension between focusing on restoration and public education, see
Hosmer, 38-48 and 56-64. For CW as most influential preservation project see Michael Kammen, Mystic
Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1991), 554-555.
152
open-air museum started on the grounds of King Oscar II’s summer residence of Bygdø
outside Oslo (then Kristiania) in 1881. The collection of eventually five buildings (of
eight planned) was meant to show the king’s interest in the Norwegian people, as the
Swedish-born king ruled over both countries at the time. The site opened to visitors the
following year.
One of these early visitors was Artur Hazelius, who since the 1870s had collected
artifacts from Sweden’s vanishing pre-industrial farming culture. He opened his first
museum, the Nordiska Museet, in Stolkholm in 1873. Inspired by what he saw in
Norway, he decided to expand beyond exhibiting artifacts in period rooms. In 1888 he
secured land on the island of Djurgården in Stolkholm and opened the outdoor museum
of Skansen three years later with the first of eventually 150 relocated historic structures
and a corps of costumed interpreters. Skansen’s rapid expansion and popularity
influenced the creation of other open-air museums in Scandinavia, such as the Norsk
Folkemuseum in 1894, and eventually ones in continental Europe and America. Uniting
them all were shared goals of patriotism and concern for capturing what their founders
saw as disappearing ways of life.231
231
Oscar II’s museum from Norsk Folkemuseum, “Oscar II’s Collection,”
http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/en/Exhibits/The-Open-Air-Museum/Oscar-IIs-Collection/ (accessed
January 7, 2013); and Sten Rentzhog, Open Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea
(Kristianstad, Sweden: Jamtli Förlag and Carlsson Bokförlag, 2007), 48-51. For history of the Skansen see
Skansen, “The Creation of Skansen,” http://www.skansen.se/en/artikel/creation-skansen (accessed January
7, 2013); and Sten Rentzhog, Open Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea
(Kristianstad, Sweden: Jamtli Förlag and Carlsson Bokförlag, 2007), 4-32. The Norsk Folkemuseum and
Skansen vie for which had the first open air museum. While Oscar II’s collection preceded Skansen,
Rentzhog argues that the latter was more influential, as aside from local renown, the king’s collection was
“astonishingly unknown in Sweden” and the incomplete project was moribund after 1890 until being
incorporated into the collection of the Norsk Folkemuseum years later (p. 51). Oscar II’s collection
became part of the Norsk Folkemuseum in 1907 according to Norsk Folkemuseum, “Oscar II’s Collection,”
http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/en/Exhibits/The-Open-Air-Museum/Oscar-IIs-Collection/ (accessed
January 7, 2013).
153
Henry Ford was the first person to replicate the Skansen model in the United
States, though it’s unknown how much he knew of the European museums. In 1919 he
had decided to restore his boyhood home in Dearborn, Michigan, and the search for
correct period furnishings sparked a broader desire to collect Americana of all kinds. In
the midst of the colonial revival he quickly became the pre-eminent collector of his
nation’s material past. Ford’s scorn for book-based historical instruction is well known,
and as an alternative he believed in learning about history through artifacts from those
eras. Expanding from collecting small artifacts to industrial machinery and eventually
entire buildings allowed him to preserve and exhibit a fuller picture of his idealized past.
By 1924 his zeal for historic architecture had resulted in him buying and restoring
his childhood home and schoolhouse in Dearborn, an 1836 tavern outside Detroit that he
had visited as a youth, and the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, made famous by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Wayside Inn proved to be a test bed for his brand of
immersive history as he purchased over 2,500 acres surrounding the inn to preserve its
rural character and as space for a proposed village reconstruction. He even paid the state
of Massachusetts to relocate the adjacent and now automobile-traveled highway. But the
distance between Massachusetts and Michigan prevented Ford from closely managing his
historical and commercial enterprises, so the village idea shifted in 1926 to Dearborn.232
As had Artur Hazelius, Ford envisioned a museum with an adjacent village of
relocated structures. But unlike Hazelius, Ford wanted to showcase industrial history.
For him, American history was a story of progress through invention, and this idea
232
Ford collecting Americana and pre-Greenfield Village restoration projects from Michael Kammen,
Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1991), 353-354. See also Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and
Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929-1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford
Museum Press, 1979), 3-4, 8, 15-19.
154
stitched together the myriad buildings soon to be moved to a field next to the Ford
Engineering Laboratory. Ford appointed a draftsman named Edward Cutler (no relation
to Carl) as architect of the project, and Cutler drew up plans modeled after a New
England village with a central green, church, town hall, and surrounding businesses.
Unlike the fastidious and professional reconstruction work at Colonial Williamsburg,
Ford distrusted specialists and preferred to rely on his own sense of historical accuracy
and workers from his factories and dealerships to carry out his plans. Having a budget as
unlimited as Rockefeller’s, Ford searched for appropriate pieces for his inspirational
collection, particularly buildings from New England, Michigan, and those associated with
industrious men such as Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Orville and Wilbur Wright,
Harvey Firestone, and Ford himself. Though taking divergent approaches to historic
preservation, Rockefeller and Ford traded ideas and visited each other’s historical
projects.233
Edison had the greatest physical presence at the museum. His laboratory from
Fort Myers, Florida, was the first building re-erected in the village, and Edison attended
its dedication in September, 1928, along with the cornerstone ceremony later that day for
the museum itself, named for the octogenarian inventor and modeled on Philadelphia’s
Independence Hall and several other historic buildings. The following October Edison
returned to dedicate the Edison Institute and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his
invention of the incandescent light bulb – re-enacted in the village inside a replica of
Edison’s research laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey. Ford had rebuilt the
233
Village development from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to
the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:80-83, 86; Ford
and Rockefeller relationship detailed in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation
of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 356-358.
155
industrial research complex – the world’s first – on the village grounds using the original
foundation stones, topsoil, and also added a surviving boarding house that had once
served its workers in New Jersey. Visitors, which included President Herbert Hoover,
toured the two-dozen buildings erected so far in the village. The entire complex opened
to the general public on June 30, 1933, and as with Skansen and Colonial Williamsburg,
quickly became a hugely popular tourist attraction. Named after his wife Clara’s
hometown, Greenfield Village was largely complete with over eighty relocated historic
buildings by the time Ford suffered a stroke in 1945.234
The legacy of Greenfield Village is several-fold. First, it demonstrated the
viability of the museum village in America as an historical attraction and furthered the
argument that historic buildings – especially groups of historic buildings – had public
educational value. Starting in September, 1929, Ford turned the village into an outdoor
classroom by offering lessons to select local students in the various historic buildings.
By 1937 the program expanded to a full kindergarten through college curriculum. A
person could literally receive all their formal education within Ford’s museum. Next,
Greenfield Village combined education with commerce, as it had staff in the various
shops demonstrating their craft and producing goods for sale – a practice also begun at
Colonial Williamsburg at this time. However, CW went further and also licensed outside
companies to make reproductions. Lastly, Henry Ford’s nation-wide acquisition of
buildings raised the awareness among citizens of the historic structures within their
communities. Some, such as Sandown, New Hampshire, immediately raised funds to
234
For Edison and dedication details see Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and
Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929-1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford
Museum Press, 1979), 22-23, 30-37, 48, 53; Greenfield Village as largely complete see Michael Kammen,
Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1991), 355.
156
restore their meetinghouse upon Ford’s offer to buy it; while town officials in Lincoln,
Illinois, unsuccessfully fought to block Ford’s removal of his recently-purchased former
courthouse in which Abraham Lincoln had once worked. Eventually the preservation
movement by the 1960s would side with Rockefeller’s approach of preserving historic
buildings in situ – though open-air museums would continue to multiply in number and
scope for several more decades.235
Preservationists around the country and particularly in southern New England
were quick to follow on the examples of Ford and Rockefeller. As it would be
cumbersome to catalog every outdoor museum that developed between
Williamsburg/Greenfield Village and Mystic Seaport, I will focus on the three largest and
most well known in the neighboring states of New York and Massachusetts as potential
food for thought for Mystic Seaport’s builders.236
In Cooperstown, New York, summer resident Stephen C. Clark wished to
preserve the ambiance of the quiet community while at the same time help it become
something other than just a resort town for wealthy families such as his. Clark’s solution
was historical tourism. In 1938 he appealed to the New York State Historical
235
Education opportunities at the Edison Institute and Greenfield Village described in Geoffrey C. Upward,
A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 19291979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford Museum Press, 1979), 97-101; Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation
Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University
Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:56-57 (CW selling consumer goods), 1:87-89 (communities resisting Ford’s
collecting of their buildings). As recently as 2000 the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., has
continued to add historic buildings to its collection.
236
I am not including among this group Storrowton Village, a collection of nine buildings moved to a recreated New England village between 1927 to 1931 on the grounds of the Eastern States Exposition in
West Springfield, Massachusetts; their purpose was to exhibit antiques and crafts that are for sale – not to
authentically re-create the past. See Eastern States Exposition, “History of Storrowton Village,”
http://www.thebige.com/sv/history/history.asp (accessed January 7, 2013); and Nicholas Zook, Museum
Village U.S.A. (Barre, MA.: Barre Publishers, 1971), 47. Nor am I including Pioneer Village in Salem,
Massachusetts, as all of its buildings are reproductions. See the first footnote of this chapter. In 1954 the
New York Times published an article on the re-created and original villages in New England. See Mitchell
Goodman, “The Yankees Re-Create Their Past: Museum Villages Offer a Glimpse of Life In The Old
Days,” New York Times, June 13, 1954, XX21.
157
Association to relocate its headquarters to the town where he was already preparing to
open the National Baseball Hall of Fame the following year. Negotiations between
Clark, one of the heads of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and the association
resulted in a promise of a new headquarters for the latter and encouragement for the
former to start collecting agricultural and domestic implements from around the county.
Clark’s collecting zeal and the association’s already large holdings led the former to turn
his unproductive dairy farm into a farmers’ museum with a small village of local
buildings to showcase the collection. In 1944 workmen began reassembling the first
building, an 1819 stone general store, on the site of the combined Farmers’ Museum and
Village Crossroads. After acquiring a schoolhouse in 1945, museum staff began touring
rural and outdoor museums in Pennsylvania (Mercer Museum, Landis Valley Museum),
Virginia (Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg), and Massachusetts (Old Sturbridge
Village) over the next three years to make sure their developments followed the same
high professional standards as other institutions which they admired. By the end of the
1950s the Farmers’ Museum had a complete village of over a dozen structures built in
and around Ostego County in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.237
When a staff member from the Farmers’ Museum visited Old Sturbridge Village
in 1946, she found it superior to Williamsburg for depicting the lives of common people
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The village was the dream of Albert
Wells, one of three brothers who owned the American Optical Company in Southbridge,
Massachusetts. As had Ford and many other Americans, Wells became enamored with
237
Development of the Farmers’ Museum from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From
Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981),
1:97-109; and Farmers’ Museum, “Historic Structures,”
http://www.farmersmuseum.org/farmers/collections/historic_structures (accessed January 7, 2013).
158
collecting antiques in the 1920s. And as had Clark, Albert Wells decided to house his
ever-growing collection in period buildings. But it was Albert’s son who suggested in
1936 that instead of a collection of old buildings stuffed with antiques they create a “live
village” of the early nineteenth century complete with water-powered shops. J. Cheney
Wells joined his brother Albert on the project, and the pair purchased a former farm along
the Quinebaug River in adjacent Sturbridge. After contacting Colonial Williamsburg for
advice, they initially hired the Boston firm of Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn to plan the
proposed village. Due to the firm’s expensive services and outsized vision, the Wells
brothers switched to another Colonial Williamsburg expert, landscape architect Arthur
Shurcliff.238
Inspiration came from other sources as well. In 1938 J. Cheney went to
Stockholm for a business trip and toured Skansen, taking photographs to share with his
family. In 1940 the Wells family sent their curator and superintendent of construction to
Greenfield Village to gather ideas. The two men reported back that the trip taught them
“what not to do,” and Albert concurred from his own earlier observations that it was “a
cold, dreary, flat place.” Despite his displeasure at the ambiance of Greenfield Village,
Albert, as had Ford, added historic and new structures with a greater emphasis on their
ultimate purpose as exhibition and craft-demonstration spaces than as examples of
painstaking architectural authenticity. The point wasn’t a Williamsburg-quality
architectural reproduction of a typical New England village, but a place where rural New
England arts and industries could be taught to a new generation. Albert hoped that the
238
OSV as better than CW from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to
the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:107. For
Wells’s early collecting through the planning of the village see David M. Simmons, The Wells Family and
the Early Years of Old Sturbridge Village (Sturbridge, MA.: Old Sturbridge Village, 2000), 18-32; and
Hosmer, 1:109-112.
159
production and sale of crafts could make the project self-sustaining – a dream of many
museum village founders that never came to pass. His declaration in 1941 that visitors
“will appreciate how the early New Englander’s ingenuity and thrift and self-reliance
paved the way for some of man’s greatest material achievements,” echoed the MHA’s
hope that their museum would pass on an appreciation for the accomplishments of the
region’s founders. Incorporated back in 1938 as Quinabaug Village Corporation, the
renamed Old Sturbridge Village opened to the general public in June, 1946, with eighteen
original or reconstructed buildings, four of which were working craft shops. Within three
years attendance reached almost 40,000, showing both the benefit of the museum’s
proximity to major highways and public appetite for historical immersion in the postwar
era.239
A final Massachusetts example lay to the west, in Deerfield. In a similar though
smaller version of what took place in Williamsburg a decade before, headmaster Frank
Boyden of the town’s namesake Deerfield Academy had, by the 1940s, worked for
several decades to preserve the town’s old houses and ambiance. For Boyden it was
partly out of a desire to create a private boarding school for elite Yankees, and limit the
presence and influence of recent European immigrants in the town. Boyden’s appeals in
the 1920s to William Sumner Appleton of the Society for the Preservation of New
England Antiquities got him advice about forming a preservation organization, but no
financial help. Both men dreaded new immigrants owning or occupying historic
239
Skansen and Greenfield Village observations from David M. Simmons, The Wells Family and the Early
Years of Old Sturbridge Village (Sturbridge, MA.: Old Sturbridge Village, 2000), 27-28. Rest is from
Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949
(Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:113-118. Wells’s quotation is from page 22 of
a pamphlet he wrote in preparation for a visit by the Walpole Society in 1941. Pamphlet is listed as Albert
B. Wells, Old Quinabaug Village (1941) in Hosmer’s endnotes.
160
properties, and worked to acquire buildings for their respective organizations as funds
allowed. Salvation finally came from the parents of one of Boyden’s students, Helen and
Henry Flynt. As had Rockefeller while strolling around Williamsburg, the New Yorkbased couple were impressed with Deerfield’s antiquated charm, and sympathetic to calls
for preserving its Yankee character.240
Deerfield already had a deep historical consciousness. It was the site of one of the
first preservation attempts in America when citizens tried in 1847 to save a house that
had witnessed a 1704 raid by Frenchmen and Native Americans. With its hatchedscarred front door, the house had long been a popular tourist attraction. While the effort
failed and the house was demolished the following year, it sparked other preservation and
commemoration activities, most notably the establishment of the Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association in 1870. The association acquired a building in 1880 and
eventually installed what is arguably the first display of period rooms in an American
museum. Other heritage activities included Deerfield citizens participating in a crafts
revival from the 1880s to 1920s and using local antiques for inspiration, and wealthy
residents restoring old houses.241
No doubt familiar with the town’s historical attractions by the time of their son’s
graduation in 1940, Helen and Henry soon bought their first Deerfield property in 1942
and then began a project to buy and restore additional eighteenth and nineteenth-century
structures along the town’s main street. At first their efforts were to benefit the
240
Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst,
MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 142-143.
241
Deerfield’s preservation history and initial involvement of the Flynts from Briann G. Greenfield, Out of
the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of
Massachusetts, 2009), 132-145. For examples of Appleton’s distrust of immigrants, see James Michael
Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory
(New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 87-89 (the Norton house), 82-83 (the Boardman house).
161
academy’s building and landscaping needs, but soon the couple began buying houses to
create their own string of historic house museums. Following the process at
Williamsburg, they solicited advice from national experts on how to restore and furnish
their growing collection. By 1949, when the New York Times trumpeted “Massachusetts
Town Now Another Williamsburg,” the academy and the Flynts each owned a dozen
houses, with the latter also owning a store and the village’s 1884 inn. The following year
the Times noted that six of the properties were open for tours by their owners – a number
that would eventually double. In less than a decade the Flynts’ Heritage Foundation
(later Historic Deerfield) had become the public face of the community.242
While the Flynts’ actions could be seen as continuing a tradition of preserving the
town’s eighteenth and nineteenth century past, historian Briann Greenfield argues that the
couple “undermined traditional patterns of valuing family stories and local heirlooms
with a new emphasis on using Deerfield to define national values.” Both on the scale of
their restoration work and relying on national experts, the Flynts introduced Deerfield to
a national audience. Henry also vocally defined their work as a demonstration of
American patriotism; in doing so, he brought their adopted community into the current
ideological war with the Soviet Union. Henry Flynt argued that his “stark village” had
once been nearly destroyed by its enemies, and in its survival, growth, and now graceful
old age it represented American tenacity and cultural refinement. These ancestors had
not shirked in the face of a threat, a theme he set down in a book that he co-wrote with
photographer Samuel Chamberlain in 1952 called Frontier of Freedom: The Soul and
242
Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst,
MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 142-148. Sanka Knox, “Restoring Deerfield: Massachusetts
Town Now Another Williamsburg,” New York Times, September 25, 1949, XX20; Cynthia Kellogg, “An
Old New England Town Restored,” New York Times, September 24, 1950, X16.
162
Substance of an American Village. As Greenfield outlines, the Heritage Foundation was
but one of many cultural organization both public and private using American history as a
bulwark against communism. Mystic Seaport would, too, see itself as a player in the
ideological debates of the Cold War, as it also irrevocably changed the character of its
host community.243
By 1949 the aforementioned five outdoor museums were in full operation, with
three more in the planning stages: the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, Plimoth Plantation
in Massachusetts, and the Marine Historical Association’s seaport.244 While the MHA
copied the ground-up village approach of Ford, Clark, and Wells, they otherwise
preferred Colonial Williamsburg as a role model. Henry Ford, for instance, sought to
illustrate a story of progress – including himself and people he admired as exemplars of
that progress – in Greenfield Village, whereas the MHA was retrenching into what they
imagined as a golden age of maritime history from which important lessons and behavior
needed to be resurrected. Supporters of Colonial Williamsburg also felt this way about
the town’s eighteenth century history.
Of all the contemporary outdoor museums in America in the 1940s, only Colonial
Williamsburg has a documented influence on the MHA. As early as 1946 the MHA
retained a public relations firm that contacted CW to learn of some of their restoration
pitfalls.245 In December 1949 MHA Assistant Curator B. MacDonald Steers wrote to
CW board member Vernon Geddy, complementing their “ability to inspire others with
243
Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst,
MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 133 (quotation), 149-150.
244
Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 19261949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:129.
245
Raymond T. Rich to Kenneth Chorley, November 6, 1946, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and
1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia.
163
the spiritual significance of re-creations,” and asked for copies of any public remarks on
the subject.246 Continuing CW’s practice of being a clearinghouse for preservation
advice, Geddy responded with copies of speeches that he and CW’s president, Kenneth
Chorley, had delivered previously in Charleston and Newport.247 After receiving and
reading the speeches, a delighted Steers wrote back a week later to thank the men and
invited them to Mystic to speak about CW’s restoration “for the inspirational value it
would have to our townspeople and members in the similar job we are attempting
here.”248 Historian Michael Kammen describes Chorley as an evangelist for preservation,
and the specific texts which Steers received were versions of his stump speech that
emphasized authenticity and the economic benefits surrounding such preservation
projects. Whether Chorley or Geddy ever spoke in Mystic is not documented in the
records of either institution. But it’s clear that Steers hoped that the MHA, as it began to
construct a version of Mystic within its grounds, would have as smooth a working
relationship with its host community as Colonial Williamsburg did.249
Building the Seaport
As the directors of the Marine Historical Association gathered for their annual
meeting in July, 1945, they could take pride in their spiritual contributions to the war
effort. As Philip Mallory had stated at their annual meeting three years prior, the
246
MacDonald Steers to Vernon M. Geddy, November 26, 1949, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and
1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia.
247
Vernon M. Geddy to MacDonald Steers, December 27, 1949, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and
1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia.
248
MacDonald Steers to Vernon M. Geddy, January 6, 1950, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and
1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia.
249
For Chorley as preservation evangelist and his speeches, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of
Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991),
369-370, 554.
164
“fighting qualities” which American servicemen had demonstrated in a succession of
Pacific battles, “were bred into the American bone” by famous maritime ancestors such
as John Paul Jones, Oliver Hazard Perry, Stephen Decatur, and David Farragut. But apart
from blood, success also depended on servicemen learning about the demands of the sea,
and the tradition of American maritime leadership and perseverance, naval and
mercantile. “The preservation of this great maritime tradition – the transmission intact of
its inspiring, revitalizing message, happens to be the function and chief purpose of this
Association” he stated that year to museum members, emphasizing the MHA’s longstanding objectives for the new war.250
Carl Cutler agreed. In writing that November to a woman preparing a radio
broadcast on a U. S. Army observation post being built on Shipyard Point – through a
quirk of riverine geography the MHA now found itself hosting a military installation – he
stressed that they were different than most museums. They sought to bypass the rare,
beautiful, and valuable for “the crude, homely, everyday things, which would enable us
to reproduce a picture of the actual conditions under which American seamen once lived
and which they had to meet and overcome in order to accomplish their remarkable
achievements.” If statistics are any indication, their message found a receptive audience.
From 1942 to 1944, twenty percent of the visitors to the museum were servicemen and
women, with the majority coming from an officers’ training school in New London,
Connecticut, at their instructors’ strong recommendation.251 For the MHA the clearest
250
Mallory quoted in “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of Members of the Marine Historical Association,
Held at the Museum on Saturday, June 27th, 1942, at 2:30 o’clock in the Afternoon (W.S.T.),” pp. 3-4 in
Box 6, folder 4 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum,
Inc.
251
Military attendance figures from the “President’s Statement” within Marine Historical Association,
“Fourteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal
165
way to reproduce this picture was with a reconstruction – following the trend of other
museums in the region.
Now with the war nearly won the MHA didn’t see itself as needing to change its
message. In a speech that reads as if written for him by the MHA, Governor Raymond
Baldwin of Connecticut addressed the association’s members at the 1945 meeting in
Mystic and deftly summed up the museum’s beliefs and mission: that maritime ancestors
set the standard for self-reliance, courage, and individual liberty; that their successes built
the foundation for America’s subsequent rise to a world power; learning of this maritime
history can help perpetuate America’s maritime supremacy in the postwar era and check
the growing preference for security over self reliance and freedom in American society.
And in order to best convey the spirit of past maritime Americans to present-day ones,
Baldwin pointed to Greenfield Village and Williamsburg. A re-creation at Mystic would,
he and his audience believed, succeed in passing on ancestral values through an
immersive experience. That a guest politician could so closely mirror the language of his
host audience speaks to the ties between American politics and history museums at the
end of World War II, and the widespread faith in outdoor museums as reservoirs of
American character. Such ties would grow stronger as the nation entered the Cold War,
and cause the MHA to alter its development plans.252
Members of the MHA had ruminated for years over what the reconstruction
would include and resemble. The earliest known image of what it would look like is in
Year Ending June 30th, 1943,” Bulletin No. 27 – July 15th, 1943. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual
Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 14: “Annual Meeting, 1943”.
252
Baldwin’s speech from Marine Historical Association, “Sixteenth Annual Report of The Marine
Historical Association, Inc. Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1945,” Bulletin No.
32 – August 15, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16:
“Annual Meeting, 1945”.
166
an advertisement from late 1941, just after the MHA acquired the Morgan. Captioned
“Buildings of the Marine Historical Association, Mystic, Conn., 1939,” the idealized
aerial illustration looks to the west, showing a complex of connected brick museum
buildings to the right with Shipyard Point to the left. On the point’s south side two
wooden boats on marine railways are under construction, with a collection of small sheds
and shops on either side. Anchoring the tip of the point is a ship’s mast doubling as a
flagpole, while three tents, another shed, and a tied-up ship and schooner line the
peninsula’s north side. With the exception of the tents, which are likely the summer
quarters for the planned youth sail training program, the scene resembles the working
shipyard that had occupied the site decades before, with small buildings erected as
needed and without attention to aesthetics.253
Dating to 1939 or before, the illustration of the finished museum was already
outdated by the time Reynolds Printing made the larger advertisement in which it was a
part. In July, 1941, architect Francis (Frank) Rogers had written to Philip Mallory about
the layout of buildings on the peninsula. A member since 1931, a trustee since 1939, and
Mallory’s cousin, the twenty-nine year old Francis was also the son and employee of
famous architect James Gamble Rogers – the favorite architect of Edward and Mary
Harkness. For at least the past two years Francis had worked as an architect for the
museum. In his letter Rogers agreed with Mallory that the re-creation on Shipyard Point
should have as its center a compact street, both to create “atmosphere” and limit the
distance visitors would have to walk.254 Though not accurate to what had once been
253
Advertisement reproduced in Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A
Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 9.
254
Letter from Francis D. Rogers to Philip R. Mallory, dated July 29, 1941. Mystic Seaport Museum
Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.
167
there, a row of close-together buildings along a small waterfront street would help to
screen out the modern activity surrounding it. Thereafter, MHA’s directors referred to
the re-creation most often as the “waterfront street” or “seaport street,” with “Seaport
Street” becoming the dominant name for the project in MHA publications after 1946.
In January, 1945, this new version appeared in the president’s bi-annual report to
members. After summarizing the museum’s progress over the past six months and
appealing for additional support, the report ends with a watercolor illustration by Francis
Rogers of the proposed seaport street on Shipyard Point. In the right side of the image
the Morgan is docked at her wharf that runs perpendicular to a new seawall with a threemasted schooner tied up alongside. A wide cobblestone street runs parallel with the
seawall and contains six buildings between one and three stories in height. At the bottom
left, a small perpendicular side street contains a single building with a sharply-pitched
roof and a wide porch – likely a store or tavern. Arranged in a backwards capital “L”, the
seven buildings either abut one another or stand no more than a few feet apart. In their
design and proximity to the waterfront, all the buildings are either industrial or
commercial spaces. With no modern wires, vehicles or motorized boats in the picture, the
scene is broadly nineteenth century. The directors had agreed the previous year to keep
most of the museum architecture between roughly 1820 and 1860. Carl Cutler included
Rogers’s MHA tenure from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A
Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 35. For Rogers working as an
architect for the museum since at least 1939 see letter from Carl C. Cutler to Clifford D. Mallory, dated
Aug. 10, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological
Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. For James Gamble Rogers as the Harknesses’ favorite
architect, and his son taking over the firm after his death, see Aaron Betsky, James Gamble Rogers and the
Architecture of Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1994), 4 [favorite], 258nn114&1 [son takes
over].
168
the watercolor as one of three images in his history of Mystic, Connecticut, which the
MHA published that December.255
The following June, Philip Mallory sent a letter to the directors about plans for the
annual meeting and included a photocopy of a recently completed painting by Lars
Thorsen depicting the museum’s future growth. In the foreground three new connected
brick museum buildings run along Greenmanville Avenue, while in the background
Thorsen copied Rogers’s seaport street layout but added a single building behind the row,
suggesting the start of a backstreet. Described as containing only a street with “old local
Maritime industries” the reconstruction was not a traditional museum village. With no
modern objects in view, the complete scene resembles a small college next to a tiny
seaport. At the July meeting Mallory referred to the painting as showing “the over-all
plan that will probably be closely followed,” and announced that it was already on view
to the general public in the Stillman Building. That the MHA’s grounds resembled a
school was an apt metaphor for their mission. In his June letter Mallory had pledged to
the directors that the MHA would “be a powerful influence in molding the thoughts of
youths of the Eastern Seaboard, as well as adults…. Basically each visitor should
become a better and more intelligent American.” The museum would act as a finishing
school for American citizenship.
255
Marine Historical Association, “President’s Half-Yearly Report of The Marine Historical Association,
Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,” Bulletin No. 29 – January 20, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual
Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual Meeting, 1945”. Architecture fixed as early to mid-19th
century mentioned in letter from Margaret Mallory to her uncle Philip Mallory, dated June 9, 1944. Coll.
100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Carl C. Cutler,
Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1945),
178. The 1860 end date corresponds to when Cutler felt American culture turned away from the sea. See
Carl C. Cutler, Greyhounds of the Seas: The Story of the American Clipper Ship (1930; reprint, Annapolis,
MD.: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 370.
169
A third and final painting arrived that year courtesy of Philip Mallory’s nephew,
Clifford Mallory Jr. Based on Rogers’s watercolor and painted by Howard French, it
showed an eye-level view of the street and six buildings across from the Morgan’s wharf.
By including a horse, wagon, and people in period clothing, French presented a
prosperous and industrious version of the past that visitors would soon be able to enter.
All three images the MHA reproduced in various publications through the 1940s until
photographs of the actual project could take their place.256
The first of the buildings had reached the museum in 1944. That year the MHA
finally had all the material to outfit a shipsmith shop, rigging loft, cooper’s shop, sail loft,
spar yard, and a merchant’s counting house. Writing to a colleague at the American
Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, that February, Cutler explained that
“We expect to set up all this material in reproductions of old-time buildings in full
working order, to show the tools and equipment under the conditions of actual use – the
whole group of buildings to constitute an old-time seaport street fronting on the water
near our museum.” Here Cutler makes a private concession that the re-creation did not
need to have actual historic buildings as long as they appeared old.257
256
Letter from Philip R. Mallory to the directors of the Marine Historical Association, dated June 17, 1946.
Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Mallory’s
quote from the 1946 annual meeting is from a typed copy of the minutes of the meeting in “Minutes of the
17th Annual Meeting of the Members of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., July 13, 1946” in folder 5
of Box 6 within Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum,
Inc. Howard French’s painting is reproduced on the backside of the title page of Marine Historical
Association, “Seventeenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,
For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1946.” Bulletin No. 34 – August 31, 1946. Mystic Seaport Museum
Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946”. This painting
represented the public face of the re-creation as late as 1949. See the illustration in Carl C. Cutler, “A
Memorable Port of Call For All,” The Ensign 37, no. 6 (June-July 1949): 8-11.
257
For list of historic buildings and confidence in replica buildings see letter from Carl C. Cutler to Clifford
K. Shipton of the American Antiquarian Society, dated Feb. 3, 1944. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G.
W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc..
170
As it turned out the street would have both. By the end of the year the MHA had
acquired two historic buildings. The first was the James D. Driggs shipsmith shop which
Edward H. R. Green had relocated to his estate from New Bedford in 1925. Sitting idle
at Round Hill along with the Morgan following his death, the MHA purchased the fiftynine year old shop and its contents in 1944 from Whaling Enshrined for $50. The sixtysix year old Cutler, Steers, and two other men took the building apart and loaded the
pieces onto trucks along with some twenty tons of tools and equipment included in the
sale. The men even dug up and removed the dirt floor of the shop, though it’s unknown
whether Green had done the same during the first move. Either way, Cutler and his
companions saw the soil beneath their feet as integral to the historic atmosphere they
wished to re-create – copying Henry Ford when he salvaged the remains of Edison’s
laboratory. Staff reassembled the shop along the northern edge of the museum grounds
until Shipyard Point was ready for development.258
The second building was a small derelict stone bank from 1833 in the village of
Old Mystic, just up the river from the museum. Cora Mallory Munson, the sister of
Philip Mallory, purchased what the MHA thought was the second oldest bank building in
the state, and gave it to the museum along with funds to restore it as a merchant’s
counting house. But the building would remain in Old Mystic for four more years while
258
For purchase and removal of the shipsmith shop see Marine Historical Association, “President’s HalfYearly Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,” Bulletin No. 29 – January
20, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual
Meeting, 1945”; letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harry B. Cutler of City Island, N.Y., dated June 25, 1944.
Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.; William N.
Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport
Museum, 1985), 119, 121; and two letters from Carl C. Cutler to John M. Bullard of Whaling Enshrined,
dated Jan. 14, 1944 and June 15, 1944 in Series A: Administrative Records, 1925-1947. Mss 45, Kendall
Institute, New Bedford Whaling Museum.
171
the MHA dealt with the sensitive issue of how to coax Shipyard Point from Harriet
Stillman.259
In the meantime, they scrambled for how to pay for the project. In the fall of
1945 they unsuccessfully tried to court the Electric Boat Company of Groton,
Connecticut, to donate a building, or, in the best scenario, pay for the entire seaport street
as a memorial for their contributions to the war effort – at an estimated cost of $117,600.
The MHA’s correspondence doesn’t say why the Electric Boat Company declined to
make a large gift, but the MHA not yet possessing the land for which they solicited
buildings and money could not have helped their case. They had better luck the
following winter when Cutler wrote a five-page letter to Harriet Stillman, pleading that
the museum’s health and future depended on using Shipyard Point now. Aside from
building the seaport street the MHA needed to build a shed from which they could make
major repairs to the Morgan. Cutler succeeded, and the MHA sent out a press release in
March, 1947, announcing Stillman’s gift and a donation of $55,000 from Frederick and
Margaret Brewster of New Haven, Connecticut, to start on the seaport street. An
industrialist and the son of a Standard Oil Company executive, Frederick enjoyed fishing
and yachting and was proud of his Mayflower ancestry. Two anonymous gifts from the
couple in the next two years went towards the seaport street, construction of a museum
store, Morgan repairs, and part of a yacht dock. When Mallory anonymously thanked the
couple at the annual meeting with “to the vision of these descendents of our earliest
259
For acquisition of the bank, see Marine Historical Association, “Fifteenth Annual Report of The Marine
Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1944,” Bulletin No.
28 – July 15, 1944. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 15:
“Annual Meeting, 1944”; and William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic
Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 87-90.
172
pioneers we are deeply in debt,” it demonstrated that the MHA’s language and practice of
filiopiety still resonated with the public.260
With seed money and ownership of Shipyard Point, the museum’s development
accelerated. At the 1947 annual meeting they accepted a gift of a ship from the U.S.
Congress. Built in Copenhagen in 1882 as a sail training vessel for the Danish merchant
marine, the Joseph Conrad (ex-Georg Stage) later served as a private yacht and finally as
a training vessel for American merchant seamen. Declared government surplus after the
war, it would now serve as a dockside sail training vessel for American youth. Reflecting
the growing prominence of the museum, admirals William Halsey and Telfair Knight
attended, along with now Senator Raymond Baldwin. After repairs to the Morgan and
Conrad, work began on the preparing the ground for the street. By the following summer
workmen had added and graded several feet of fill on the north side of Shipyard Point,
built a stone bulkhead running along the waterside of the future street, started erecting a
large shed as a workshop and storage space for spars and small watercraft, completed
260
Estimate for seaport construction in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Nov. 28, 1945.
Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder
“Seaport Street 1949”. For pitch to Electric Boat for funding a memorial, see E. A. Olds Jr. to O. Pomeroy
Robinson of the Electric Boat Company, dated Dec. 17, 1945 in Box 6 (undated material) of Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. The rest of the Electric
Boat-related correspondence and document, dating between October and December of 1945, are divided
between these two locations. Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harriet G. Stillman, dated Dec. 5, 1946;
Stillman’s agreement to deed land mentioned in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Francis Rogers of New York
City, dated Dec. 17, 1946. Both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic
Seaport Museum, Inc. Typed draft of untitled press release dated March 3, 1947. Mystic Seaport Museum
Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.
Brewster’s biographical details from “F. F. Brewster, 86, a Financier, Dead,” New York Times, Sept. 17,
1958, 32. The Brewster’s second gift announced on page 11 of Marine Historical Association, “Nineteenth
Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ended
June 30, 1948,” Bulletin No. 39 – Sept. 6, 1948. Brewster’s third gift in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip
R. Mallory, dated May 4, 1949. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research,
Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.
173
construction of the Seaport Store, and dredged the cove between the point and the
northern part of the grounds, where a new dock greeted visiting yachtsmen.261
It is around this time that the Cutler’s correspondence reflects a growing number
of voices in the seaport reconstruction, as other people working for the museum sought to
identify their projects with it. At the end of the war Mary Harkness had given her
grandparents’ house along Greenmanville Avenue to the museum. Two years later the
chair of a museum committee restoring the Thomas Greenman House wrote to the
directors that they planned to restore it to circa 1842 so as to “dovetail into the planned
Museum picture of an early maritime village” – though the house was several hundred
feet from the proposed street and on the other side of the museum’s driveway. Restoring
a house with only the finest of antiques also went against the rough and masculine
atmosphere of “crude…everyday things” Cutler sought to display on the waterfront. In
calling the seaport street a village – a word Cutler and Mallory never used – some
museum members clearly had a different concept of what would be built on Shipyard
Point. At this same time, Cutler deflected the idea of relocating a large church to the
point. Ostensibly because there was firmer ground elsewhere on the campus, this would
also have upset the otherwise commercial and industrial re-creation which Cutler and
Mallory had repeatedly described.262
261
Marine Historical Association, “Eighteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,
Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1947,” Bulletin No. 37 – Sept. 1, 1947. Mystic
Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.”
Summary of building progress from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A
Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 10.
262
Eunice Gates Woods [chair of the Greenman House Committee] to the Directors of the Marine
Historical Association, undated, but found in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1
(1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.” Cutler deflecting plans to move church from “Draft of
letter to Mr. Mallory in 1947” in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic
Seaport Museum, Inc.
174
Another claim on the seaport’s identity came in 1948. In time for the annual
meeting Cutler had stakes put in the ground to mark the future locations of the bank,
shipsmith shop, sail and rigging loft, and a tavern. Two photographs taken for the report
show the bare Shipyard Point in one and the interior of the museum’s new Old Seaport
Store in the other. Converted from a nineteenth century house that Harkness had given to
the museum years before, the store was coincidentally situated at the start of the recently
graded seaport street. Perhaps eager to state that the MHA had finally built something on
the street, some staff echoed the caption of this photo in describing the store as “the first
building on the seaport street.”
That the museum promoted its gift shop as the first building in a re-created
nineteenth century waterfront meant to instill reverence for maritime ancestors shows a
potentially troublesome blending of the museum’s mission with its search for revenue.
Its location made it for visitors a frequent entry and exit point for experiencing the past.
It was an old building. Its name suggested it could be the original seaport store. The
publicity photo of the store’s interior shows three boys looking at a rack of postcards at
the end of a long wooden counter sparsely stocked with items that include lamps, clocks,
ships in bottles, and prints. Managing Director Thomas Stevens proudly pointed out that
the counter was the one from the original Greenman shipyard store – further blurring the
line between history and commerce. In looking at the picture it is hard to tell whether
some items, such as a wooden chair in the corner, are antiques, reproductions, or for sale
at all. Perhaps this is intentional; to make you feel like you’re in an old country store and
can surprisingly buy stuff. But the building’s purpose was to use history to sell goods –
175
to make consumption a natural part of the immersive historical experience. It was not to
teach history, but sell it.263
This commercialization of the museum’s purpose likely bothered Cutler, who had
already warned Mallory that “we should avoid any tendency to a large and pretentious
development, for … it would be inconsonant with the spirit and false to the environment
of the small, early seaport we wish to portray.”264 But that year Cutler apparently either
gave in to the seaport becoming more than just a small industrial/commercial street, or
accepted the broader cultural appeal of a museum village (albeit a maritime museum
village). In a letter to Mallory he mentioned the expanded plans for the waterfront
development to include a “church, school, toyshop, etc.,” but that these wouldn’t fit
logically with industrial buildings on the waterfront so they should go on a new
backstreet. Cutler would never use the world “village,” but that’s what the project would
become.265
Whatever the final reconstruction would look like, the idea that Cutler nurtured
through the 1930s and ‘40s now enveloped the entire project. In 1948 the MHA changed
the name of its museum from the generic “marine museum” to Mystic Seaport, arguing
that they had outgrown the former term. The first issue of the museum’s new
publication, The Log of Mystic Seaport, described the museum’s growth as a resurrection:
“It is unthinkable that the old port of Mystic should not rise again, that click of adze …
263
For staff describing the store as the beginning of the seaport street see a typed page from “Mr. Steven’s
talk” in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 19: “Annual
Meeting, 1948”; and Stevens again on page 24 of Marine Historical Association, “Nineteenth Annual
Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30,
1948,” Bulletin No. 39 – Sept. 6, 1948. The caption for the photograph of the Seaport Store’s interior was
likely written by Herb Corey, photographer and publicity manager for the museum.
264
Carl C. Cutler, “Draft of letter to Mr. Mallory in 1947.” Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
265
Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Sept. 25, 1948. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W.
Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
176
should not again resound up and down the valley…. That is a time and a feeling that no
mere museum could recreate.” The site now encompassed seventeen acres, over a dozen
mostly historic buildings, two large ships, and exhibits crammed with thousands of
artifacts. Visitors could arrive by land or sea. The seaport re-creation had been the
catalyst for the name change, as it had brought the museum, and its educational mission,
outdoors. Artur Hazelius’s Skansen was now more than fifty years old, but the MHA had
brought the open-air museum into the water.266
Many of the details behind the acquisition of the historic buildings at Mystic
Seaport are not in Cutler’s correspondence or the institutional archives. This suggests
that many of Cutler’s papers have not survived, that some acquisitions happened more
through oral communication than written, that the MHA curator did not take part in
acquiring every building, or some combination thereof. A 1951 letter from Mallory to
Cutler names four other directors working with these two men to decide how the
buildings should be arranged – and presumably such group debates also decided what
structures the museum would acquire. The re-creation was no longer Cutler’s dream
alone. Depending on the size and condition of a structure, and Mystic Seaport’s funds, it
could be several years between acquisition, restoration, and public exhibition. Between
1944 and 1954, the museum moved ten of its eventually fourteen principal historic
seaport buildings to its grounds – seven of these between 1948 and 1951. In addition, the
museum either built from scratch or recycled at least eight more buildings to fill in the
gaps of the village between 1948 and 1956.267
266
“Notes On a Name,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 1 (October 1948): 2.
Letter from Philip R. Mallory to Carl C. Cutler, dated Feb. 8, 1951. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives,
Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.
267
177
To try and picture what the village looked like at any one time is difficult, as the
museum staff sometimes moved the replica and recycled structures according to what
stories they wished to tell and where. But a rough chronology for the core village
buildings with their community of origin and year of arrival at Mystic is as follows: the
shipsmith shop (New Bedford, MA, 1944), bank (Old Mystic, CT, 1948), schoolhouse
(Griswold, CT, 1949), chapel (Groton, CT, 1949), ropewalk (Plymouth, MA, 1950),
Buckingham House (Old Saybrook, CT, 1951), sail loft (Mystic, CT, 1951) and Burrows
House268 (Mystic, CT, 1953). Newly-built structures to fill in what they couldn’t locate
include an apothecary shop (1952), wood-workers’ shop (1952), and a tavern (1956).
A visitor’s map at the time of the MHA’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1954
provides an overview of the essentially complete nineteenth-century village (with the
exception of the tavern). To walk down the cobblestone waterfront street (itself
completed in 1949), you would pass, from left to right (with age of building in
parentheses), the bank (1833), apothecary shop, Burrows House (c. 1812), Colegrove
Memorial (wood-workers’ shop), painting shop (a white shed not on the map but visible
in photographs), another shed displaying a hand-pulled nineteenth-century fire engine,
the shipsmith shop (1885), and finally end in front of the sail loft (c. 1832), ropewalk
(1824), spar shed, and a replica lobster shack. Behind the waterfront street ran the aptlynamed village street containing, from left to right, the Buckingham House (c. 1695/1768),
chapel (1889), schoolhouse (c. 1768), and a general store made from a recycled
nineteenth century building.
268
Mystic Seaport referred to this house at the time of its acquisition as the Edwards House, but as a result
of subsequent architectural research now calls it the Burrows House.
178
In uncomfortable proximity to this re-creation, behind both streets was Mystic
Seaport’s large parking lot for several hundred cars. It was a harsh concession to the
founders’ original hopes of creating a believable nineteenth-century seaport atmosphere
on Shipyard Point. A screen of trees attempted to separate village visitors from the
twentieth-century automobiles, but it would not be until the opening of a larger
replacement parking lot outside Mystic Seaport’s grounds in 1959 that allowed the old
one to become a village green. The example suggests that for the increasingly businessoriented museum, accommodating ever-increasingly numbers of visitors took precedent
over a colonial-revival era idea of walking into an authentic past.269
To tell the stories surrounding every building in the seaport village would be
tedious and unnecessary – and much of that work is already done.270 Instead, I will focus
on two: the ropewalk and the chapel. The former represents the original story of
industrial maritime history which Cutler and Stillman first wanted to tell with a replica
shipyard. During the Cold War it also stood for the American tradition of fair labor and
free-market capitalism. The chapel represents the domestic turn of the seaport, reflecting
269
Map is found within MacDonald Steers, comp., An Exhibit Guide (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical
Association, 1954). Age of historic buildings from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic
Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985). New parking lot
mentioned in Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey
(Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 21. Screen of trees – actually described as “a natural
planting” but I’m making a guess – from “On the Grounds,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 5, no. 2 (Spring
1953): 8. MacDonald Steers mentions the problem as “Mrs. Munson has been vehement in her objection to
the sight of anything so modern as an automobile seen anywhere near the cobblestone street section. A tall
lilac hedge to hide the cars from the old-time section would meet her objectives.” Letter from MacDonald
Steers to Francis D. Rogers, dated January 2, 1951. . Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties
– Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.
270
Peterson and Coope provide histories of twenty-one historic buildings at Mystic Seaport, but devote
little attention to the museum’s acquisition, restoration, and placement of them on the campus. The small
and anonymous but still historic sheds and barns converted to display buildings are not included, nor are
any of the reconstructions. Curiously, there is also no map of the museum showing the locations of
buildings. William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum
(Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985). To fill in the gaps I have consulted issues of The Log of
Mystic Seaport and Marine Historical Association - Publicity Department, Ships Buildings and Wharves at
Mystic Seaport: A Compendium of Facts (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965). G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
179
the increased presence of religion in the MHA’s language and activities as another tenet
of American cultural superiority during the Cold War. It is by chance that the chapel
arrived first, but as the ropewalk represents the original vision, I will begin there.
When MacDonald Steers boasted in the April, 1951, Log of Mystic Seaport, that
“Mystic Seaport is the conglomerate of all the long-forgotten ports of New England. It
must be their desired haven, for one by one they find rest for their old bones at Mystic,”
the Log’s editor was describing the recent gift to the museum of the nineteenth-century
schooner Australia.271 But his claim was equally valid for their collection of historic
buildings. Nearing completion that spring was the village’s largest building, a ropewalk.
A long, narrow building used to make rope from hemp, and, after 1860, manila fibers, the
ropewalk was an essential part of a large maritime community. Mystic once had three in
the nineteenth century. Due to the manufacturing technique, the building’s length
determined the length of rope that could be made within. For instance, a 1000-foot
ropewalk could make about a 600 foot rope. Fires and industrial consolidation later
reduced the number of ropewalks, while technological innovations in the twentieth
century made them obsolete. By mid-century, aside from one at the Charlestown Navy
Yard in Boston, the last ropewalk in America belonged to the Plymouth Cordage
Company in Massachusetts.272
For years the MHA had pleaded with the PCC to consider donating it to the
museum. Finally in June, 1950, they received an urgent call from Plymouth offering the
271
“Our Cover,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 3, no. 2 (April 1951): 1.
Ropewalk description, function, and Mystic examples from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope,
Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 75-79.
Plymouth ropewalk as the next-to-last one in the nation in letter from Carl C. Cutler to W. P. Smith of
Seattle, WA., dated Dec. 11, 1950. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic
Seaport Museum, Inc. I am making an educated guess that Cutler is referring to the ropewalk in Boston as
the last one, as I know of no other.
272
180
structure in advance of its planned demolition for new construction.273 The MHA
scrambled to raise money, and also how to preserve a wooden building that was longer
than the village in which they hoped to place it. Since its construction in 1824, the
building had tripled in width to three walks or rope-making bays, and now stretched for
1,050 feet. Balancing the needs of authenticity with their site limitations, Mystic Seaport
choose to dismantle the building and erect only one bay at a quarter of its original length.
Beginning in October, workmen disassembled the building while Mystic
businesses volunteered their labor and trucks to eventually haul 190 tons of material back
to the museum. There, Cutler supervised the building’s slow reconstruction until its
completion the following summer. Inside, two men with fifty and seventy years of
experience apiece working for Plymouth Cordage set up the machinery in a space that
existed in no other museum. Money to fund the project came from the company and
three descendants of Henry Bradley Plant, a Connecticut-born developer and railroad
baron in Florida.274
The building’s dedication in memory of Henry Plant on August 3, 1951, revealed
that it represented more than a technological display of an extinct trade. Plymouth
Cordage Company President Ellis W. Brewster addressed the crowd at the annual
meeting that day, and presented the industry and the building as case studies in American
patriotism, character, and entrepreneurship. The fifty-nine year old was head of the
largest maker of cordage in the world, and as his surname and place of work suggested, a
273
Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-First Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1950,”
Bulletin No. 43 – October 1950, p. 22.
274
Ropewalk removal, reconstruction and funding details from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope,
Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 78-79. For
elderly PCC workers setting up equipment, see “More of the Past,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 3, no. 1 (Jan.
1951): 3.
181
direct descendant of Mayflower passenger and Pilgrim religious leader William Brewster.
Exhibiting both modern business success and a deep heritage rooted in faith, he embodied
two of the most important values in Cold War America. Life magazine profiled him in a
1948 article on Pilgrim descendants.275 He credited Boston ropemakers as those who had
first taunted the British soldiers who later fired into the crowd at what became known as
the Boston Massacre. He then quoted a Longfellow poem about the trade, elevating the
status of the lowly ropemakers.
But it was the PCC’s founder, Bourne Spooner, who deserved special
commendation. Born in Plymouth, Spooner returned from ropemaking in New Orleans
to start a cordage company in his hometown in 1824, believing that free men, Brewster
explained, produced a better product than those who were enslaved. Quality ropemaking
was a demonstration of the superior achievement of free people. The reference to
antebellum slavery in the American South likely evoked for his audience comparisons to
modern Soviet workers in the USSR.
Brewster ended his remarks with his company’s rock-solid history of profitability,
respect for the past, and fairness to workers and customers alike. The whole exercise was
free publicity for the company – a chance to demonstrate their patriotism in helping to
preserve history (albeit their history) and show that the American system of free
enterprise was, in the long run, dependable and beneficial to all. Strictly as an example
of preservation, though, in removing the building and reducing its size the ropewalk
would not have met the rigorous standards of Colonial Williamsburg. And despite
Cutler’s belief that it would become one of the seaport’s “greatest attractions,” as a static
display it could not spark the same sort of empathy with American craftsmen as, say, the
275
“Life Visits the Mayflower Descendants,” Life 25, no. 22 (November 29, 1948): 130.
182
functional shipsmith shop. But though an imperfect restoration, the museum now had
one of the rarest of American industrial buildings, and an inspirational story to promote
in the history of the PCC and its founder. Neither the museum nor Brewster knew that
the same system of capitalism they celebrated would result in a competitor destroying the
PCC through a hostile takeover in the 1960s. But the name of the Plymouth Cordage
Company as an exemplary American business would live on at Mystic Seaport.276
While the MHA couldn’t hope to make their ropewalk productive again, the same
was not true for the museum’s Fishtown Chapel. Built in 1889 in a rural part of Groton,
Connecticut, called Fishtown, just outside the village of West Mystic, it served as a nondenominational place of worship and education for local residents until the mid 1920s.
Thereafter, it sat abandoned until the Williams family of Cleveland, Ohio, gave it to the
museum and paid for its removal and restoration at Mystic Seaport in the summer of
1949. The family’s connections to the museum are unknown, but it’s likely they had
members who currently or once lived in the area, or had ties with museum staff. Set up
on the village street next to the red schoolhouse, the chapel represented the latest
expression of the MHA’s new focus on religion.277
The museum’s first public ties to religion likely began with Reverend George L.
Farnham, pastor of Mystic’s Congregational church. A Navy veteran of World War I
276
Brewster’s remarks from Marine Historical Association, Annual Meeting, August 3, 1951 (Mystic, CT.:
Marine Historical Association, n.d.), 2-5. This is an eight-page booklet possibly printed as a souvenir by
the MHA for those who had attended the meeting. There is no bulletin number or date of publication.
Cutler’s claim of ropewalk as a top attraction in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Augustus P. Loring, Jr.,
president of the Peabody Museum, dated April 9, 1951. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. End of the Plymouth Cordage Company from Elizabeth M.
Fowler, “Personal Finance: Stockholders Should Seek Advice When Considering a Tender Offer, New York
Times, June 10, 1968, 69; and “Ellis. W. Brewster, a Descendent of the Pilgrim Spiritual Leader,” New
York Times, March 19, 1978, 38.
277
The chapel’s history and donor information from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic
Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 122-125.
183
who became an ordained minister in 1924, he volunteered for duty in World War II as a
chaplain for the United States Maritime Service. It was during this appointment that the
New London Evening Day noted that he would speak at the MHA’s 1943 annual meeting
“on the growth and significance of the museum.” By 1946 he was back at his church and
also formally serving as Association Chaplain at annual meetings, which he opened with
an invocation, acknowledging those who had died in the previous year and sometimes
offering a poem, such as Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” Together with his religious and
maritime affiliations, Farnham’s election that fall as a representative of the Connecticut
General Assembly likely made him a particularly useful public figure for the MHA.278
The following year other MHA staff began referencing God in their speeches. At
the 1947 annual meeting Philip Mallory was fearful that American individualism would
be crushed under the growing powers of “stateism,” taking with it everything their
ancestors had worked and died for. At least for the museum, the solution was to recall
and follow American mariners’ self reliance and “belief in the dignity of the human soul,
and of respect for the Almighty.” These traits “developed tolerance and understanding at
home and abroad” – a point likely not lost on Mallory’s audience as the Federal
Government became increasingly vigilant that year in rooting out suspected Communists
278
Farnham biography from “Congregational Church Accepts Resignation of Rev. George L. Farnham,”
New London Evening Day, Aug. 2, 1950, 7. 1943 speech at Mystic from “Marine Historians to Elect,” New
London Evening Day, June 23, 1943, 2. First mention of Farnham as the MHA’s chaplain in Marine
Historical Association, “Seventeenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association Inc., Mystic,
Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1946.” Bulletin No. 34 – August 31, 1946. Mystic
Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946”.
Poem mentioned in typescript copy “Agenda / General Meeting of the Membership @ 2:00p.m., July 28,
1950,” Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 21: “Annual
Meeting, 1950.”
184
in American society. It was his hope that visitors would find the museum an inspirational
place. “We deal in spiritual values!” he concluded.279
Even Cutler made a rare nod to religion. Writing in the museum’s publication in
1950, he repeated the harsh conditions upon which their ancestors had wrung success.
But now it was that despite these hardships “they did not neglect the things of the spirit,
which the founders of your Association wished to stress above all else.” After two
decades of writing about the museum’s purpose, objectives, and challenges, Cutler
perhaps now saw linking the popularity of religion in twentieth-century America with
ancestral achievement as a new way to try and interest people in their history. As
representative of people who had risen to the challenge, in the summer of 1950 Mystic
Seaport dedicated a bronze plaque on a boulder at the head of the seaport street. It
thanked the Brewsters for their support in establishing the seaport and proved that, to
quote the inscription, “a people inspired under God with a sturdy sense of individual
worth and personal responsibility may work out their destiny unaided and unafraid.”
With the postwar era offering a host of new fears to the American people, Mystic Seaport
offered a solution in studying the inspiring and spiritual ancestors of their collective
American past.280
Emphasizing spirituality at the museum first took permanent form with the
chapel’s arrival. Despite being of a more recent architectural style than they would have
liked, its local origin and small size still made it a good fit for the village. Though the
279
Marine Historical Association, “Eighteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,
Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1947,” Bulletin No. 37 – Sept. 1, 1947. Mystic
Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.”
280
Carl C. Cutler, “The Future of Mystic Seaport,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 3 (July 1950): 3.
Photo of bronze plaque with hand-written caption “Brewster Plaque – Head of Seaport Street, July, 1950”
from Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder
“Seaport Street 1949”.
185
building had scarcely been altered in its three decades of use, Francis Rogers added a
steeple to the chapel during its restoration. Some other rural chapels in the area had
them, but this one never did. The MHA’s directors likely believed in the white church
steeple as an icon of every New England community, and so the seaport village would
have one too.281 Rogers’s drawing of the completed chapel became the cover of the
January, 1950, Log of Mystic Seaport. Under a blanket of snow the chapel sits along a
lane at the edge of a field. Smoke rises from the chimneys of two houses in the
background. In the foreground a man admires a graveyard beside the building, while to
the right a couple approaches the chapel along a fence. Within, the Log predicted the
space would serve the spiritual needs of youth groups that visited the museum, such as
Girl and Boy Scouts, as well as christenings and weddings.282
At the 1950 annual meeting hundreds of MHA members gathered for the
dedication of the schoolhouse, the chapel, the bank (now remade as a merchant’s
counting house), the 1899 ferry Brinckerhoff as a floating exhibit, and, incongruously
placed between the spar shed and ropewalk, a captured WWII Japanese manned suicidetorpedo called a Kaiten. The grouping represents the multiple facets of American culture
to which the museum was trying to appeal, including nostalgic history, faith, business,
and nationalism. And by now Mystic Seaport had learned how to skillfully manage its
publicity for this audience. A memo from Managing Director Charles A. Brooks to Herb
Corey, the publicity manager and museum photographer, notes that invitations for the
meeting went to “the Associated Press, International News Service, United Press, New
281
At this moment, the MHA’s leaders allowed political and religious sentiment to trump their previous
emphasis on authenticity, though it wasn’t permanent. Seaport staff removed the steeple in 1977. William
N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic
Seaport Museum, 1985), 125
282
“Our Cover,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 1 (January 1950): 1.
186
York Times, New York Herald Tribune, The New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford
papers, and locals papers: Bulletin, Day, Sun, Journal, New London Life, and Providence
and Boston papers. The museum will provide them with lunch and darkroom facilities if
needed.” At the chapel’s ten-minute dedication service, Reverend Farnham joined
Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal and Jewish religious leaders from houses of worship in
New London and Mystic to perform the service, leading a call to worship, an invocation,
scripture reading, hymn, prayer, and finally a benediction.283
The chapel was now officially open as the spiritual center of the seaport, with
vespers held every Sunday during the summer by a rotating list of religious leaders from
seven denominations within Judaism and Christianity, in addition to the weddings,
christenings, and other services for visitors and staff alike. It was the only historic village
building that the public could use in the way that it was originally intended. They were
not observers watching a demonstration or listening to a guide, but allowed to practice
their faith in this historic museum space – demonstrating that religion was a particularly
intimate way to experience the past. Though a novel museum experience in New
England, Mystic, whether intentionally or not, was copying the idea of regular nondenominational services which Henry Ford had instituted in his village’s chapel
beginning in 1930. But Mystic’s unique twist to the project came in 1955, when, in an
apparent attempt to make the village appear as old as possible – and again placing
atmosphere above historical accuracy – it added both the fence and graveyard from
283
Charles A. Brooks memo to Herb Corey, dated July 15, 1950. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives,
Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 21: “Annual Meeting, 1950.” Dedication ceremonies covered
in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-First Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1950,”
Bulletin No. 43 – October 1950.
187
Rogers’s 1950 illustration, procuring headstones from the First Baptist Church in North
Stonington.284
The past is present: the ambiguous imagery and language of the MHA and
appropriating Mystic’s identity
Simulating an old burial ground wouldn’t have fooled anyone familiar with
Mystic Seaport’s growth over the past decade. But the MHA moving local historic
buildings and materials to Mystic Seaport was part of a long-standing practice of
appropriating the identity of its host community through language, imagery, and the built
environment.
The process started in 1942 with the MHA’s new letterhead. Through 1941 it was
a plain piece of paper with the association’s name in a gothic font and the names of MHA
officers below. But likely in recognition of the museum’s substantial recent physical
growth, they hired artist James McBey to sketch the waterfront. The Scottish-born
McBey was a friend of MHA director Harold H. Kynett, and had sketched throughout
Europe, North Africa, and Palestine before the WWI veteran immigrated to America,
married, and became a citizen in 1942. Then living in Manhattan, McBey visited the
museum in late 1941. He created a profile ink drawing of the MHA’s grounds as viewed
from the north. The brick museum mill buildings are at left with a square-rigged ship at
284
Four-page program handed out at the chapel’s dedication: “Dedication Service, Fishtown Chapel,
Mystic Seaport, July 28, 1950,” in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950),
folder 21: “Annual Meeting, 1950.” Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and
Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929-1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford
Museum Press, 1979), 100. Headstones and fence additions mentioned in Marine Historical Association,
“Twenty-Sixth Annual Report for the Year Ending December 31, 1955,” Bulletin No. 48, p. 24. The
cemetery and the steeple were both removed in the 1970s – apparently dismissed as 1950s sentimentality.
See William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.:
Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 125; and the spiral-bound report “History of the Buildings at the Mystic
Seaport Museum, David G. Brierley, 1979” at the G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum,
Inc.
188
center (the Morgan), followed by a schooner and smaller watercraft. On Shipyard Point
are some low buildings next to a hull under construction.285
While the letterhead itself was labeled “Marine Museum of the Marine Historical
Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,” the image itself was more ambiguous.
Beginning with this drawing in 1942, the MHA advertised Mystic’s past and future
simultaneously. Ignoring McBey’s signature and date, the scene resembled either the
Greenman mill and shipyard complex in the nineteenth century, or the faithful recreation
of it in the twentieth – just the sort of time travel the MHA hoped to recreate for each
visitor. The MHA also used the image on the cover of its Log of Mystic Seaport and
several annual reports in the late 1940s, including the 1947 report that paired McBey’s
drawing with a photo taken at the Conrad’s acceptance ceremony. Perhaps the
connection between these two is that the association is on its way to making the dream a
reality. Mystic Seaport would use this letterhead unchanged until 1954, when it replaced
the text with “Mystic Seaport, a 19th century coastal village recreated by Marine
Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut.” The name change signals the
completion of the village, and the image above as what the visitor could now expect to
find there.286
285
“James McBey, 75, Painter, Etcher,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1959, 43. Friendship with Kynett from
Martin Hardie and Charles Carter, The Etchings & Dry-Points of James McBey (San Francisco, CA.: Alan
Wofsy Fine Arts, 1997), xxvi. For examples of letterhead, see Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W.
Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
286
McBey’s imaged appeared in the 1947 and 1948 annual reports. Marine Historical Association,
“Eighteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal
Year Ending June 30, 1947,” Bulletin No. 37 – Sept. 1, 1947. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual
Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.” Marine Historical Association,
“Nineteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal
Year Ended June 30, 1948,” Bulletin No. 39 – Sept. 6, 1948. For example of 1954 revised letterhead see
letter from Edouard Stackpole to Carl C. Cutler, dated Dec. 20, 1954. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G.
W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
189
A second work of McBey’s appears in annual reports from the mid-1940s, and
also as the cover illustration for a history of Mystic, Connecticut, that Cutler wrote and
the association published in 1945. Signed and dated October 31, 1942, McBey’s etching
is from the undeveloped Shipyard Point, looking north to the Morgan on the horizon and
the museum’s buildings to the right. With the building-less Shipyard Point and clearlydefined whaleship, it lacks the timelessness of McBey’s first image. But used on the
cover of a history of Mystic, it posits the MHA grounds as representing the village’s past
in the present. Nowhere else in Mystic could one find a ship of the type that once called
Mystic home.
Curiously, despite hardly mentioning the museum in his text, all three images in
Cutler’s Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (1945) depict the museum.
Aside from McBey’s cover etching and an aforementioned watercolor by Rogers of the
imagined seaport street, there is a photograph of three vessels on the MHA’s waterfront.
The caption reads “The Old Ships Come Home – A Section of the Old Port of Mystic.
Pinky Regina M., Charles W. Morgan and the Pilotboat Frances. V-J Day, 1945.” The
Old Port of Mystic was a name the association briefly used to describe its proposed
replica village in several publications in the 1940s. As the village of Old Mystic lay just
two miles north of the museum at the head of the Mystic River, the similar names must
have confused many non-local visitors. The name choice textually relocates the oldest
part of Mystic from its location at the head of the river downstream to this former
industrial site.287
287
Second McBey image reproduced in the 1944 and 1945 annual reports. Marine Historical Association,
“Fifteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal
Year Ending June 30th, 1944,” Bulletin No. 28 – July 15, 1944. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual
Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 15: “Annual Meeting, 1944”. Marine Historical Association,
190
Further muddling the distinction of where to find the historic heart of Mystic was
Mystic Seaport’s outfitting of its grounds with salvaged Mystic-area buildings and
material. Aside from four historic buildings from West Mystic, Mystic and Old Mystic –
the sail loft, Burrows House, Baptist Church, and the bank – and attempts to acquire other
local buildings, Cutler proposed in a January 1949 letter to Mallory that they remove the
granite curbing in front of the Thomas Greenman house along Greenmanville Avenue to
use in the seaport street. Cutler had already asked the Stonington Highway Department
for permission. The granite curbing outside the Greenman House is still there, so
apparently the town either refused his offer or the MHA found a larger supply elsewhere.
A contractor had already located a cache of cobblestones near Westerly, Rhode Island,
for Cutler that month. By midsummer, 1500 feet of paving stones removed from a
sidewalk along the main street of Deep River, Connecticut, would lead from the
cobblestone street to the Stillman Building. The museum would also accept gifts of
additional salvaged stone in the coming years from properties in New London and New
York City. To have visitors walk over worn stones on the seaport street was apparently
as important to the MHA directors for creating a believable past as actual nineteenthcentury buildings.288
“Sixteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc. Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal
Year Ending June 30th, 1945,” Bulletin No. 32 – August 15, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives,
Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual Meeting, 1945”. Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story
of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1945), cover, 175 (Rogers’s
watercolor of the seaport), 178 (photo of three ships). “Old Port of Mystic” used in Cutler’s 1945 history,
the caption for Howard French’s painting reproduced on the backside of the title page of Marine Historical
Association, “Seventeenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,
For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1946.” Bulletin No. 34 – August 31, 1946. Mystic Seaport Museum
Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946”; and in Hamilton
Cochran, “The Old Ships Come Home,” Saturday Evening Post 221, no. 15 (October 9, 1948): 31.
288
For two examples of Cutler pursuing other Mystic buildings see two letters from Carl C. Cutler to Philip
R. Mallory, dated Dec. 13, 1948 and Jan. 12, 1949, regarding Clara Wilcox’s barn on Water Street, and
letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Jan. 5, 1949, regarding Mrs. Fish’s barn. All three
letters in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
191
As years of planning the village led to actual construction work on Shipyard
Point, the language with which the MHA described its plans and work is also ambiguous.
The MHA and the press most often used the verbs “reproduce,” “reconstruct,” and “recreate” (and their variants) to describe the village’s conception and construction. But
both in internal correspondence and in several publications, writers also refer to the
village as a restoration. The most notable example is in a Saturday Evening Post article
from 1948. Though Cutler dismissed the profile of Mystic Seaport as “too Hollywood,”
other directors found the unprecedented national publicity flattering, and reprinted copies
of the article in booklets to send to all members. A popular magazine writer might be
excused for not distinguishing between a restoration and a reconstruction, but even Cutler
was not immune to this error. In a 1949 article he wrote for the magazine The Ensign, he
used the term exclusively in describing the village. Given the museum’s attention to
having the seaport street look as real as possible, one cannot fault a reporter for the
Chicago Daily Tribune for assuming that “generations of seamen have invoked divine
guidance and protection for their perilous journeys from within its walls” when
describing the formerly land-locked but maritime-sounding Fishtown Chapel.289
Removing curbing from Greenmanville Avenue in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated
Jan. 15, 1949 in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological
Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. Cobbles near Westerly in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip
R. Mallory, dated Jan. 12, 1949 in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic
Seaport Museum, Inc. Paving from Deep River, CT. cited in “of ships and shoes and sealing wax…,” The
Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 10; and “A ‘New’ Old Building,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 6,
no. 3 (Summer 1954): 4. For New London stone see Mystic Seaport press release dated Feb. 6 [1950] in
Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder
“Seaport Street 1949”. For stone from New York City see The Log of Mystic Seaport 5, no. 4 (Fall 1953):
18.
289
Hamilton Cochran, “The Old Ships Come Home,” Saturday Evening Post 221, no. 15 (October 9,
1948): 31. “Too Hollywood” from letter from Carl C. Cutler to Joanna Colcord of Searsport, ME., dated
Oct. 13, 1949. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum,
Inc. Saturday Evening Post article reprinted by MHA and sent to members mentioned in The Log of Mystic
Seaport 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 9. Carl C. Cutler, “A Memorable Port of Call for All,” The Ensign 37, no. 6
192
Mystic Seaport’s expansion was not always to the liking of its host community.
A letter from Cutler to Mallory in 1950 provides a rare glimpse of this interaction in
saying that “Robinson [a MHA member] is voicing a criticism which is growing – that is,
that local people have no part in planning and do not know what is being done until it is
an accomplished fact. … We either have to brush it off … or we have to get more of the
local group in on the planning, or, at least establish a closer liaison.” How the men chose
to resolve the situation is not recorded in Mystic Seaport’s archives, but Cutler referenced
the criticism in an article in the July Log of Mystic Seaport. Entitled “The Future of
Mystic Seaport,” Cutler began by speaking of “divergent views” “coming to light”
regarding the Seaport’s development and that such numerous “suggestions, advice and
criticisms” “frequently vary 180 degrees”. He saw such input as healthy, and that the
museum welcomed all comments and criticism. He regretted that the directors had been
unable to answer and meet every suggestion, partly due to their limited time, staff, and
resources.
Ignoring the apparent lack of local participation in the museum’s growth, he
divided the criticism between those who wanted a typical indoor museum where the
finest objects of the past were preserved and exhibited, and the mix of indoor and
outdoor, crude and refined objects – which Cutler argued presented a more accurate
portrait of the past and which was the course the museum would follow. However, he
ended his essay with an appeal for further comments, visits, and volunteers. As the Log
was mailed only to museum members, it’s likely that this message did little to assuage the
concerns of non-member Mystic residents who wanted a voice in what was becoming an
(June-July 1949): 8-11. Lawrence McCracken, “Seafaring Era Lives Again in Boat Museum,” Chicago
Daily Tribune, May 27, 1951, H5.
193
increasingly popular regional tourist attraction. But the town and the association were
already permanently intertwined as both looked towards celebrating their anniversaries in
1954.290
It appears to be only a coincidence that Cutler, Stillman, and Bradley incorporated
the Marine Historical Association on the 275th anniversary of Mystic’s founding. But
their joint anniversary celebrations twenty-five years later represent an intertwined
historical commemoration as the museum worked with the Mystic Tercentenary
Committee to honor the host community and the most popular attraction within it. On
July 11 several hundred worshippers gathered at Mystic Seaport for an outdoor service
that at least to the Log marked the official start of Mystic’s tercentenary celebrations.
Mystic Seaport played a role in seven of the eighteen events celebrating Mystic’s 300th
anniversary between July 10 and 21, 1954. Events at or ending at Mystic Seaport
included the dedication service on July 11, a variety show on July 12, a concert of 300
years of American music called “Voices of Freedom” on July 13, a sailing race and a
performance by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra on July 15, and finally on
July 17 a historical parade that started in West Mystic and ended at the museum, and
evening fireworks. Some 40,000 spectators watched thirteen bands, over a hundred
horses, oxen, and ponies, an M-47 tank, thirty-one historical floats displaying everything
from a Puritan schoolhouse to a model aircraft carrier, re-enactors, veterans groups,
290
Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Jan. 5, 1950. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Carl C. Cutler, “The Future of Mystic Seaport,” The Log of
Mystic Seaport 2, no. 3 (July 1950): 2-3.
194
active military, policemen, firemen, and members of fraternal, civic, religious, and youth
groups all parade past.291
To the thousands of visitors who wandered into Mystic Seaport during the twelveday celebration, the private museum offered them a space where they could interact with
the most celebrated relics of that community. Though founded decades before the MHA
in 1895, the Stonington Historical Society lacked the MHA’s resources and drive, instead
focusing its efforts on its namesake borough over the outlying villages which included
Mystic. Mystic Seaport, then, had become Mystic’s de-facto historical society. And the
small village found itself, reimagined on the museum’s grounds and in their publications,
as the best representation of a historic New England seaport. While the shipbuilding
industry had once made Mystic famous a century before, the tourism industry now
defined it in the present.292
Mystic Seaport becomes a business / Carl quits
As Seaport staff collaborated with other town residents on the anniversary events,
one name was notably missing from the newspaper articles and photos: Carl Cutler. He
had quit at the end of 1952, capping years of steadily-building frustration as he watched
his museum become, in his eyes, a business. Cutler had first tried to resign back in 1945.
He was exhausted and depressed after seven years of running the museum – the first four
as the only full-time staff member – and felt that he couldn’t do everything required
291
Mystic Seaport listed the events on the back cover of the Summer 1954 Log of Mystic Seaport. Full list
of parade participants from “30-Float Revue to Tell 300-Year Mystic Story in July 17 Parade,” New
London Evening Day, July 6, 1954, 3. Size of audience from “Estimate 40,000 Watch Hour-Long Parade
of Mystic History Climaxing Celebration of Its Tercentenary,” New London Evening Day, July 19, 1954,
11. For details of “Voices of Freedom” concert see “American Music to be Theme for Tuesday Musical,”
New London Evening Day, July 12, 1950, 11.
292
Taliaferro Boatwright, “History of the Stonington Historical Society,”
http://www.stoningtonhistory.org/about1.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
195
there. It needed “new blood.” Partly through Mallory agreeing to hire a second assistant
for him, Cutler agreed to stay, and steered the museum’s postwar planning for the seaport
re-creation. As fundraising efforts, gate revenue, and the museum’s mission all expanded
in the postwar years, the MHA hired more staff. In 1949 there were nine, in 1950,
seventeen, and in 1951, twenty-seven full-time and fourteen part-time staff. One of the
architects of this growth was Charles A. Brooks, whom Mallory had hired in 1948 as a
part-time staff member to run the new museum store. In 1949 Brooks became the
managing director of the museum – a position Cutler had held from 1938 to 1947.293
The additional voices involved in operating the museum, together with its rapid
growth and rising expenses worried Cutler. At the 1951 annual meeting he tried to halt
further expansion of the re-created seaport. “If we complicate their [the members’
ancestors] working-day picture by the introduction of irrelevant features, however
pleasing or diverting, our visitor may be more effectively entertained, but his impressions
will be vague and confused and less likely to be permanent.” Cutler was responding to
suggestions for another street of old buildings that he felt had only a remote connection to
shipbuilding at best. But Cutler may have already suspected that his goal of passing
along the inspiring qualities of his ancestors to present-day Americans was now a distant
second for the other directors to making Mystic Seaport an ever-more popular tourist
attraction. In a letter written to his brother that December, Cutler confided that “In a
293
First attempt to resign from two letters from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated May 8 & 27,
1945. Directors agreeing to give Cutler another assistant in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles R.
Patterson, dated July 17, 1945. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic
Seaport Museum, Inc. Increases in museum staff from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First
Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 10-11. For details of
Brooks’s arrival, see letter from Carl C. Cutler to Alan Villiers, dated March 18, 1953. Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
196
word, the thing [Mystic Seaport] has been turned into a cold-blooded business concern,”
and he would resign.294
Between December and the following April, when he finally submitted his
resignation to Mallory, Cutler stewed and vented his frustrations to family, friends, and
sympathetic colleagues. He stated that he had quit his career as a lawyer decades ago out
of a “desire to do something of permanent value.” He saw the business world he left
behind as “making a nation of spineless workers” while their ancestors had been
independent, hard working, and self-respectful citizens. In starting the Marine Historical
Association, Cutler and his two associates sought to draw attention to what they saw as
these rapidly disappearing “standards and principles of our ancestors.” The solution was
to build an environment that showed how America’s seafaring ancestors once lived, and
to have an organization run it that embodied those admirable ancestral qualities: group
consensus, equal work, respect for the individual, and personal sacrifice to benefit the
whole. They practiced what they preached, and it worked.295
But this ethos would eventually collide with the capitalistic spirit that dominated
postwar American society. To be fair, wealthy capitalist members were responsible for
the museum’s growth since the beginning, and now in the postwar era it was almost
natural that it would spread from members to the entrepreneurial history they celebrated,
and finally to the operation of the association itself. Supposedly this last step began when
Philip Mallory took over the presidency upon his brother Clifford’s death in 1941. The
294
Carl C. Cutler, “Report of the Secretary-Curator,” in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-Second
Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1951 and the First New Year (Calendar) Fiscal Year,
July 1st to December 31st, 1951.” Bulletin No. 44 – April 1952. Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles
Cutler, dated Dec. 22, 1951. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport
Museum, Inc.
295
Summary and quotations from two letters: letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles Cutler, dated Dec. 22,
1951, and letter from Carl C. Cutler to Arthur R. Wendell, dated March 22, 1952. Coll. 100, Manuscripts
Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
197
millionaire industrialist – at the time he was president of the P. R. Mallory & Co.
electronics firm which he had founded in 1916 – apparently went along with the other
directors until the museum’s growing size led him by the end of the 1940s to treat it as
another corporation with himself at the head, and his fellow directors in a descending
hierarchy.296
Applying his business model to the association, Mallory supposedly hired Brooks
as a business manager in 1949 with a salary that was a fifth of the museum’s income at
the time, and almost three times that of any other employee. Brooks supposedly
promised huge profits through a larger seaport store – “Coney Island stuff” to Cutler –
that would pay his salary; but when this failed, he fired staff to even the balance. Now,
despite years of hard work and low pay to make a museum enormously popular, the
MHA’s creed for Cutler, once true – and written by him back in 1929 and repeated every
year since in speeches, letters, and publications – was now a lie. “Now… the
organization is no different from any soul-less business corporation,” he concluded to his
former secretary in February of 1952.297
On April 22, 1952 Cutler wrote to Mallory that he would resign when it was
convenient to the other directors. The past few months of correspondence had allowed
him to focus his thoughts, and his appeals to Mallory during that time to keep Mystic
Seaport small and focused had failed. He feared that visitors would see it as a poor
imitation of typical museum villages such as Old Sturbridge Village. Cutler repeated his
once-private belief that the museum had become a business in violation of the spirit and
296
Mallory’s biographical details from “Philip Mallory, Industrialist, 90, Dies,” New York Times, Nov. 17,
1975, 34.
297
Summary and quotations from three letters: letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles Cutler, dated Dec. 22,
1951, and letters from Carl C. Cutler to Frances Mott, dated Feb. 22, 1952 and Labor Day, 1952. Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
198
intentions of its founders. The MHA was meant to embody and promote their ancestors’
belief in personal dignity and individual responsibility. They were supposed to be
“working side by side on a plane of equal, mutual respect, without reference to wealth,
position or grade of service. It was not a business corporation, and was never intended to
be. On the contrary it was started solely because of the conviction that the world needed
something besides business – something that placed a higher value on sacrifice and
devoted cooperation, than on material gains.” In a letter to the MHA executive
committee later that year when he agreed to serve as curator emeritus, Cutler understood
that the MHA leadership had made these decisions out of a sincere desire for efficiency.
But their ancestors would not have tolerated such efficiency, he argued, and this
preoccupation with material prosperity was destroying the association’s soul.298
In repeating his grievances against the MHA, Cutler comes across as idealistic at
best and naïve at worse. Most organizations in American society did not operation on
equality but hierarchy, whether a family, school, church, or corporation. His anticapitalistic beliefs must have seemed especially foreign – some Americans at the time
would have called them socialistic – and hypocritical when his own museum was
promoting American capitalism and benefitting from it through corporate and federal
donations of money, labor, or materials. The Marine Historical Association would not
have been able to accomplish its goals were it not for the gift of a former textile mill by
Mary Harkness, the U. S. Coast Guard helping to extract and then tow the Charles W.
298
Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated April 22, 1952. Reference to Old Sturbridge
Village in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Feb. 21, 1952. Cutler’s papers contain
three typed drafts of “To the Members of the Executive Committee of the Marine Historical Association,
Inc.” in the undated material in Box 7, folder 9 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White
Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. I have quoted from the shortest version.
199
Morgan from Dartmouth to Mystic, or Congress donating the Joseph Conrad as a
training vessel, to give but three examples.
In a way, Cutler’s frustrations at the commercial turn of Mystic Seaport mirror the
professionalization of various fields since the nineteenth century that pushed out
amateurs. Women’s groups had led some of the earliest preservation efforts in the nation,
such as the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and the Association for the Preservation of
Virginia Antiquities. But by the early twentieth century, as historian James Lindgren and
others have argued, such groups or the women within them were replaced by men who
advocated research and scientific restoration over sentiment, and the guidance of trained
experts.299
To put another of Cutler’s grievances in context, leading maritime museums such
as Mystic could not be just about entertainment, as the public was largely unable to gain a
maritime history education through formal schooling. Due to changes in the relationship
between museums and universities in American society over the past half century, this
was not a problem faced by land-based history, art, or science museums. Historian
Steven Conn has traced how in the late-nineteenth century, museums were leaders in the
production of knowledge. Museums pursued original research, and made their work
available to the public through exhibits and publications. Only by the mid 1920s, Conn
argues, do universities and colleges surpass museums as knowledge producers, and
299
James Michael Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia
Traditionalism (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1993). James Michael Lindgren,
Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York,
N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995). Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of
America’s House Museums (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). Professionalization
of the field of archaeology pushed out amateurs in the mid twentieth century. David La Vere, Looting Spiro
Mounds: An American King Tut's Tomb (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), and Donald
W. Linebaugh, The Man Who Found Thoreau: Roland W. Robbins and the Rise of Historical Archaeology
in America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005).
200
attract the specialist/student visitor into the classroom. In this process, “by the
1920s…an object-based epistemology had largely disappeared from the mainstream of
American intellectual life.” Now, museums “no longer fulfill the role of knowledge
production that their founders anticipated.” Since the early twentieth century they have
focused on entertaining and educating the general public, and especially school groups in
knowledge that was not new and sometimes rather outdated.
For the vast majority of museums, Conn’s analysis is correct. Cutler, Stillman,
and Bradley in 1929 adopted the traditional expectation that their new association and its
future museum would publish new works of maritime history. But maritime history
scholarship did not followed other fields of history into academia, and it remains largely
in the hands of amateurs and maritime museums. So by the 1950s Mystic Seaport and its
sister maritime museums had for decades shouldered the burden (or challenge) of trying
to communicate a history that its audience would likely not have first learned in school –
no matter how highly educated.300
In the MHA’s early years Cutler had served as curator, publicist, secretary,
managing director, librarian, ship rigger, preservationist, groundskeeper, and a host of
other jobs that by the 1950s were now the responsibility of staff with specialized training.
How much the museum needed to mirror a business to remain viable is open to debate,
but in order to communicate its mission to a national audience it needed multiple sources
of revenue, trained staff, and museum grounds and exhibits that continuously offered
something new. The museum’s growing bureaucracy allowed it to skillfully use the
media to promote its belief that the lessons of early American maritime history were vital
300
Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 17-19.
201
to contemporary American society. And unlike in 1929, the museum now had to
compete with a new array of entertainment that, on the surface, could be much more
compelling. Aiming for a large general audience that was sometimes only stopping off
on their way to vacations elsewhere, Mystic Seaport couldn’t only be educational or
spiritual. It also had to be entertaining. Places such as Walt Disney’s soon-to-beconstructed Disneyland only had to focus on fun. The businessman had toured Mystic
Seaport in November of 1949, presumably as inspiration as he designed his future theme
park.301
The MHA trying to balance scholarship and entertainment is reflected in
Edouard Stackpole taking over as curator from Cutler in January of 1953. Combining the
MHA’s respect for ancestry with its modern business focus, The Log of Mystic Seaport
spoke of Stackpole’s great grandfather and grandfather who had served aboard
whaleships, while he had led the Nantucket Historical Society, served as editor of
Nantucket’s Inquirer & Mirror newspaper, and written several works of historical fiction
along with an upcoming history of New England whaling. Stackpole’s maritime ancestry
likely helped him in the application process, and the directors would have appreciated his
ability to write for popular and academic audiences.302
Cutler also hoped to still reach a broad audience with his scholarship. After
quitting the museum, the seventy-five year old built a log cabin as a writing studio in the
woods near his West Mystic home. There, he began a history of American packet ships.
It would be a follow-up to his successful but now out of print Greyhounds of the Seas
(1930). But when it came time to find a publisher for the manuscript, Cutler found a very
301
302
Walt Disney’s visit mentioned in The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 1 (January 1950): 13.
The Log of Mystic Seaport 5, no. 1 (Winter 1953): 3-5.
202
different business climate. An apologetic letter from Vice President Robert Farlow at W.
W. Norton and Company in July, 1959, explained that the dozen years since the two had
spoke of publishing such a work “now have brought about changes in the reading public.
Books about the sea unless they are about horrendous adventures or else fiction with a
sea background seem not to capture a wide enough audience these days.” Cutler
eventually found a safe harbor with the specialty Naval Institute Press. It published
Queens of the Western Oceans: the Story of America's Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines
in 1961. But it would be for other writers to adapt New England’s maritime past for
popular consumption – and none would be more prolific or successful than a
Massachusetts teacher named Edward Rowe Snow.303
Conclusion
Between 1929 and its silver anniversary in 1954, the Marine Historical
Association grew from three men with a desire to preserve America’s maritime past to an
organization with 4,255 members and a large, dynamic museum with thirty-six staff and
over a hundred thousand annual visitors. There were only three maritime museums in the
U.S. in 1929, and none collected large artifacts nor on a national scale. But family stories
and first-hand sea experience imported in Carl Cutler, Charles Stillman, and Edward
Bradley a love for maritime history and desire to preserve artifacts that illustrated it. As
the person at the heart of this story, Carl Cutler had an aim deeper than saving objects and
telling stories. He believed that the physical environment in which his and others’
ancestors had grown up with in New England was the crucible that created characteristics
303
Letter from Robert E. Farlow to Carl C. Cutler, dated July 10, 1959. For details of Cutler’s cabin see
letters in folders 14, 19, and 20 in Box 4 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library,
Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
203
of self reliance, courage, and ingenuity that earned them successful careers and capital
that fueled the subsequent industrial growth of America from sea to sea.304
But shortly before the Civil War, the United States had turned from a maritime
nation to one focused on land-based progress and expansion. Despite these
achievements, Cutler and his converts believed that the sea, as a place that could never be
settled or tamed, represented a permanent frontier which promised, through studying the
people who had come of age upon it, to rejuvenate a largely spineless, dependent, and
listless citizenry. In the belief that learning about and imitating ancestors was the key to
success (or survival) in modern society, the MHA was part of a trend of filiopiety
common in historical and genealogical organizations in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. And it was the tool with which the MHA selected its early, mostly
wealthy members, acquired land and buildings for a museum, and raised funds for the
preservation of the whaleship Charles W. Morgan. But though a skillful appeal to
filiopiety was largely responsible for the MHA’s successes in its first fifteen years, such
an approach was inherently exclusionary to the majority of Americans without Yankee
ancestors.
While the Marine Historical Association welcomed everyone by World War II, it
remained fixated on promoting the values it ascribed to early coastal New Englanders –
who represented, in their thinking, the root of American values. The MHA took a twofold approach. First, they would practice what they preached and try to operate the
organization according to the principles of their ancestors. Second, they would re-create
their humble nineteenth-century working environment to, as Cutler later explained, “hit
304
Statistics for 1954 from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A
Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 11.
204
our visitor like a blow between the eyes. It should make him go away saying: ‘My God!
What a people!’”305
The idea of an open-air museum of historic buildings where people could connect
with the past was already a half-century old in Scandinavia when the MHA began
planning their reconstruction in the 1930s. The Skansen model first took root in the U. S.
in the 1920s with Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, but the MHA preferred the ambiance
of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colonial Williamsburg as a role model. Beginning in 1941
the MHA pledged that its reproduction would do for coastal New England what Colonial
Williamsburg had done for tidewater Virginia. While the MHA was only one of a halfdozen museum village or village restoration projects around the country by the 1940s,
their claim to uniqueness lay in its maritime character and the inherent values therein. It
didn’t matter that other sites also regarded themselves as the crucible of American
character.
The original concept for the MHA’s village was not a village at all but a
waterfront street containing all the shops one might expect to find in a small New
England port. Preserved historic ships would be moored nearby, with possibly an
adjacent working shipyard like the one that had existed on the site in the nineteenth
century. As Cutler and other museum staff began moving small industrial and
commercial buildings from southern New England to the museum grounds beginning in
1944, the character of the project changed in two ways.
The first was a blending of the museum’s mission with its search for revenue
through the opening of a faux “old seaport store” at the head of the seaport street.
305
Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Feb. 21, 1952. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection,
G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
205
Described by some staff as the first building in the historic re-creation, it resembled a
nineteenth century general store where visitors could buy a mixture of modern and
traditional gifts. The building’s location made it a frequent entry and exit point for
visitors experiencing the past, and made consumption a natural part of the immersive
historical experience. The second change was the seaport reconstruction taking on the
buildings found in a typical village re-creation, including a house, chapel, and school.
Whether the turn towards domesticity was due to outward public pressure from donors
and members, an internal decision by the MHA’s leaders, or some combination, is
unknown. But the project was no longer only the purview of Cutler.
It’s likely that Mystic Seaport’s directors – the MHA had renamed the whole
museum complex after the reconstruction in 1948 – accepted the broader cultural appeal
of a traditional museum village, albeit a maritime one. The replica seaport’s structures
divided between commercial/industrial and the non-working world of home, church, and
school. The United States entered into a cold war with the Soviet Union as the MHA
built the village between 1948 and 1954, and the assemblage demonstrated American
cultural superiority. Industrial buildings such as the ropewalk stood for America’s
centuries-old tradition of fair labor and free-market capitalism, while domestic structures
such as the chapel emphasized America’s deep-rooted faith in God that contributed to
success in all facets of life. The chapel also gave visitors a chance to join this silent
debate with the USSR. By participating in services, weddings, or other events at the nondenominational chapel they could demonstrate that the values of their collective
American ancestors still thrived. The whole re-creation made the museum a showcase of
the durability of American capitalism, faith, and education, and served as a collective
206
balm to a host of fears in modern American society. Whatever these were, the solution
lay in studying the inspiring and always faithful ancestors of their collective past.
America had met worse challenges throughout its history, and always won.
The seaport reconstruction obviously overlooked darker aspects of maritime New
England. Away from the much-celebrated glories of American capitalism there were
labor disputes, corporations that cared little for the welfare of the individual worker, and
industrial consolidation and decline – which particularly hurt small communities such as
Mystic. The museum itself sat on a site of commercial failure, as the Greenman brothers
could not compete in the post-Civil War era with larger shipyards with better access to
cheaper materials and labor. Their shipyard was a casualty of the free market that the
museum now trumpeted.306
In its appearance the seaport presented a freshly-painted small community without
class structure, ethnic or racial diversity, or the unsavory side of maritime life that
included brothels, jails, and rooming houses. In a living version of this vision, the MHA
commissioned an “indoctrination film” to show to visitors. Cutler wrote the outline in
1951 of the film that would soon be named Origins of Freedom: The Story of Mystic
Seaport, but it was his successor who wrote the script and steered it to completion for
presentation to visitors beginning in the spring of 1955. In addition to the expected tour
of the museum’s indoor and outdoor offerings, the film crew and their actors recreated a
mid-nineteenth century fitting out and unloading of the Morgan, with segments of the
1922 film Down to the Sea in Ships illustrating the story of a whale hunt in between the
pre and post-voyage dockside footage. In both the decades-old movie and filming around
306
The Greenman shipyard launched its last vessel in 1878. William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope,
Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985) 13, 16.
207
the seaport street and Morgan’s wharf, the actors present a whitewashed version of
history stripped down to its favored Anglo-American roots.307
This is a past that rings hollow to anyone who has read Moby-Dick, but as an
organization with a political and cultural agenda, the MHA felt the need to build its own
idealized view of the past. In doing so it borrowed freely from its host community of
Mystic. Since 1929 it had promoted Mystic as representative of the small New England
seaports that had fostered the ideals the MHA so badly wanted to resurrect. Mystic
Seaport subsequently took in local historic buildings and artifacts, while its publications
sometimes blurred the distinction between old and new, present and the past. The result
was to present Mystic Seaport as the place where Mystic’s past – and therefore New
England’s maritime past – survived in the present.
Mystic Seaport’s expansion was not without criticism by the local community,
who felt they were not getting a say in the museum that had appropriated their identity.
But the simultaneous anniversary celebrations of the village and the museum in 1954
showed that they were firmly bonded, and the latter gave the former a level of historical
exposure and preservation it would not have otherwise enjoyed. Within the museum’s
grounds, though, the commercialism that had begun encroaching into its operations in the
late 1940s soon led to the resignation of the Seaport’s first, and perhaps most idealistic
member, Carl Cutler.
For him the museum’s development into a (non-profit) corporation was an
abandonment of his original intent of a small group working together for little material
307
Carl C. Cutler, “Report of the Secretary-Curator,” in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-Second
Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1951 and the First New Year (Calendar) Fiscal Year,
July 1st to December 31st, 1951.” Bulletin No. 44 – April 1952, p. 10. Origins of Freedom: The Story of
Mystic Seaport, written by Edouard Stackpole (DVD; Mystic, CT.: De Frenes Co., 1955).
208
gain in the pursuit of common historical goals. Though the museum was a huge success
in its large attendance, influence on the practice of maritime public history, and spreading
awareness of New England’s maritime past to a national audience, for its only surviving
founder it had traded its soul for commercial success. Cutler’s grievances and eventual
exit mirror the professionalization of many fields during the twentieth century, as
professionally-trained experts pushed out self-taught amateurs with their often unique
practices and sense of duty. In a note of irony, the changing climate in the public
presentation of history that so frustrated Carl Cutler would be the key to the success of
another historian, Edward Rowe Snow.
209
CHAPTER 3
Edward Rowe Snow and the Distilling of Coastal Identity; or, Selling Sea Tales by
the Seashore
Introduction
One night in June, 1952, a man worked alone digging on the rocky shore of Isle
Haute off the coast of Advocate, Nova Scotia. The previous day he had hired a fishing
boat to take him to the small, cliff-ringed island some thirteen miles out in the Bay of
Fundy. Fearing potentially bad weather, he had left his wife and daughter ashore in the
care of a local family. That night he boarded with the four residents who maintained the
island’s lighthouse, and traded stories with the keeper and his family about the history
and lore of the place. For anyone familiar with Edward Rowe Snow, the purpose of his
visit was no mystery. He was in pursuit of buried treasure.
Five years prior Snow had purchased a reputed treasure map, and eventually
identified it as made by the eighteenth-century English pirate Edward Low of the island
on which he was now digging. Earlier that day he had toured the island with his hosts,
taking photographs and sweeping a borrowed metal detector over the section of shore
which Low had marked as “The Place.” Snow was not the first to search for treasure on
Isle Haute. Several decades earlier a man had reportedly found $20,000 in gold and
jewels at the spot where Snow now found himself digging by the light of a kerosene
lantern. After the fourth hole had produced yet more bits of worthless, rusted iron, the
keeper and his son had left Snow to finish the day’s digging on his own. Twenty minutes
210
later, Snow’s pick unearthed first ribs and then a human skull that rolled across his feet.
Losing his nerve, Snow scrambled out of the hole, grabbed the lantern and headed back
to the lighthouse for the night. The next morning the party returned to the unexpected
grave, where Snow uncovered eight coins near the right hand of the skeleton. Snow had
found his treasure.
Perhaps more valuable than the coins was the story itself. When Snow returned to
the mainland, the news of his discovery attracted the attention of government officials
who temporarily confiscated the treasure for Snow’s lack of an export license for gold.
The story appeared in newspapers in Nova Scotia and Snow’s home state of
Massachusetts, and Life magazine brought the story to a wider audience the following
month with the article “Red-Taped Gold.” Appearing on July 21, 1952, the three-page
article shows Snow combining historical research with the popular romance surrounding
pirates and treasure. One of the accompanying photographs, taken by Snow on the
island, shows a partially unearthed skeletal hand next to a small box containing coins and
some vertebrae he had already collected. Others taken by a Life photojournalist show
Snow back at his Marshfield, Massachusetts home, surrounded by authentic pirate
memorabilia including chests, coins, weapons, and human remains.
Life’s portrait reveals a successful writer, collector, and treasure hunter who had
admittedly “earned more writing about pirates than by digging for their treasure.” The
article prompted “no less than 1,370 letter, telegrams, telephone calls, and personal
visits” over the next year, when Snow included a full account of the experience in a
chapter of his latest book, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold. His New York
211
publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, would release at least seven printings of the
popular book over the next thirteen years.308
By the 1950s Edward Rowe Snow was more than a lucky treasure hunter and
successful writer. In a career that spanned fifty years until his death in 1982, Snow
gained renown as a teacher, author, columnist, radio and television personality, lecturer,
tour guide, photographer, historian, folklorist, and preservationist. During this time,
Snow educated millions of people about the history and lore of the Atlantic coast. While
his stories could range around the globe, from Labrador to Madagascar to China, the
heart of his maritime world was New England. His interest began with his New England
seafaring ancestry and an intense curiosity about the stories within the people and
environment surrounding his Winthrop home on the edge of Boston Harbor.
Key to Snow's success was learning what fascinated the public. Or, to put it
another way, learning what history was commercially viable enough to tell. His interests
centered on topics with mass appeal: pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and
ghosts. In this way Snow shaped and was shaped by the public's understanding of New
England maritime history and lore. Snow always emphasized that what he told was, to his
knowledge, true, and he spent countless hours conducting archival research and
interviews. At the same time he applied his skills as a master storyteller to make that
history best come alive. But this entertaining history also had a serious end, as Snow
worked for decades to help preserve the islands of Boston Harbor for public use. Edward
Rowe Snow’s New England was vivid, tangible, and worth saving.
308
“Red-Taped Gold,” Life, July 21, 1952, 37-38, 40. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and
Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1953), 107-122. Betty MacDonald, “Coins Found
By Treasure Seeker,” Amherst Daily News, June 28, 1952, 1. “Snow Finds Gold Spanish Doubloons in
Pirate’s Cache,” Boston Globe, June 30, 1952, 1.
212
In the wake of Snow’s death, scholars have largely overlooked his career and
body of work. Almost no scholarship exists on him aside from a bibliographic checklist
published in 2007, a regional television newsmagazine story that first aired in 1996, and a
multi-part documentary that first aired on the public-access television station in his
hometown in 1989. But significant primary sources on Snow remain, including his
personal papers at Boston University, and maritime artifacts and photographic negatives
at the Peabody Essex Museum. Most of this material is not cataloged, and awaits the
perusal of researchers. While Snow’s main book publishers are no longer in business,
dedicated fans such as maritime historian James D’Entremont (who also directed and
produced the Snow documentary) have brought new editions of seven of his books into
print since 2002. Along with these efforts to keep Snow’s memory alive, this chapter
serves as a small step toward recognizing Edward Rowe Snow’s importance in helping to
create coastal New England’s sense of place.309
Early biography and influences
309
James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist
(Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007). “Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV,
February 2, 1996. Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, prod. Jeremy D’Entremont (WCAT/Coastlore
Productions, 1988-1990 & 1995; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). Snow donated the first batch
of his papers to his alma mater in 1969; his widow, Anna-Myrle Snow, donated a second batch to BU in
1992. Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University, Boston, MA.
Anna-Myrle Snow donated a collection of photographic negatives taken by her late husband to the PEM in
Salem, MA, on August 31, 1987 (accession number 24461). Snow’s daughter and son in law, Dorothy and
Leonard Bicknell, donated a collection of maritime artifacts to the PEM on November 15, 1991 (accession
number of 25,816). These details are from correspondence with the PEM’s Assistant Registrar for the
Permanent Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Carrie Van Horn, “FW: Edward Rowe
Snow collection,” e-mail message to Jonathan Olly, March 2, 2011. Updated and edited by Jeremy
D’Entremont, Snow’s reissued books are Lighthouses of New England (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth
Editions, 2002); A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); The
Islands of Boston Harbor (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); Pirates and Buccaneers of the
Atlantic Coast (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2004); Storms and Shipwrecks of New England
(Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2005); Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast
(Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2006); and Women of the Sea (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth
Editions, 2008).
213
In the early twentieth century, as many Americans celebrated their ancestry
through various commemorative activities and preservation of family heirlooms and
stories, one such family was the Snows of Winthrop, Massachusetts. Born on August 22,
1902, Edward Rowe Snow was the third of four sons of Alice Rowe Snow and Edward
Sumpter Snow. Both parents were from Rockland, Maine, where the third cousins had
married in 1889 before immediately moving to Winthrop. Here, Alice ran the household
while her husband was the head of Snow & Co., a Boston produce and fruit importer.
Along with the eventual four children, Alice’s widowed mother, Caroline Alden Keating
Rowe, shared their house at 59 Cottage Avenue.
Snow’s New England roots began with the arrival of Stephen Hopkins, his wife,
and their four children aboard the Mayflower in what would become the settlement of
Plymouth in 1620. Hopkins wasn’t a member of the religious sect, but he had joined the
venture for the opportunity to own land. According to at least one researcher, he was the
same Stephen Hopkins who in 1609 was aboard a ship headed to Jamestown, Virginia,
when it wrecked in Bermuda. Hopkins made it to Jamestown later that year before
eventually retuning to England. Aboard the Mayflower anchored off Cape Cod in 1620
he was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, and played a prominent role in
subsequent negotiations with the Wampanoags.
Nicholas Snow brought Edward’s surname to America in 1623 when the ship
Anne arrived at Plymouth; he eventually married Hopkins’s daughter Constance. A later
ancestor, William Nickerson, arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1637 and moved to
Cape Cod three years later. For several decades the Pilgrim elders fought him in court
over the legality of a 1656 land purchase Nickerson made in what is now the town of
214
Chatham with a Nauset sachem named Mattaquason. In writing his 1946 book A Pilgrim
Returns to Cape Cod following a seven-week hike there, Snow expressed delight in
having discovered in court records that Nickerson also had helped a pirate escape from
the nearby island of Nantucket in 1684. He further imagined that his ancestor may have
buried treasure from this exchange on some Cape beach.310
Another ancestor of the Snow family came from Ireland. On July 28, 1741, the
Irish immigrant ship Grand Design wrecked on the coast of Mount Desert Island in
Maine. Most of the two hundred passengers died from drowning, sickness, or starvation
before Native Americans brought word of the disaster to the distant English settlement of
Saint George’s (now Warren), Maine. One of the survivors was the now-widowed
Isabella Asbell Galloway. In 1950 Snow tracked down the gravestone of Isabella and the
Warren man whom she married after the rescue, Archibald Gamble. He also located the
keel of the Grand Design in the mud of Ship Harbor with the help of an elderly mariner
who had spotted it seventy years before.311
From these early New England pioneers Edward Rowe Snow claimed to have
descended from four generations of sea captains on both sides of his family, with the
exception of his businessman father.312 While this captaincy lineage may be a bit
exaggerated, Snow’s family was extensively involved in New England shipbuilding and
310
“Couple Mark Golden Wedding,” Boston Globe, September 9, 1939, B14. Third cousin detail from
Frank P. Sibley, “Winthrop Woman’s Adventures as a Girl on Robinson Crusoe’s Island,” Boston Globe,
October 23, 1932, B5. Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee
Publishing Company, 1946), 17, 353-355; Dolores Bird Carpenter, ed., Early Encounters – Native
Americans and Europeans in New England: From the Papers of W. Sears Nickerson (East Lansing, MI.:
Michigan State University Press, 1994), 203-204. Hopkins biography summarized from Caleb Johnson,
Here Shall I Die Ashore; Stephen Hopkins: Bermuda Castaway, Jamestown Survivor, and Mayflower
Pilgrim (Bloomington, IN.: Xlibris Corporation, 2007).
311
Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1950), 161-164.
312
Snow wrote a four-page autobiography that appeared in: Harvard College Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth
Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957), [unknown page
number].
215
maritime trade for generations. Of this large family, it was Snow’s maternal
grandparents and mother who had the most influence on his career.
Snow’s childhood offers ample anecdotes for his later maritime interests, most of
which he shared with the public in a half-century of speaking and writing. In 1972 he
recalled that:
My interest in gold, sunken treasure, and pirates began in a strange way when I
was four years of age. My older brother Nicholas, then twelve, was showing a
group of his chums Grandfather’s collection of foreign curios. All of the boys
gathered in our parlor. They were looking high on the wall where hung a pirate’s
poison dagger. Grandfather Joshua Rowe had captured the dagger after killing
the pirate who had held it in a personal duel fought between them, now more than
a century ago. At the time of the encounter Grandfather was one of the crew
aboard the wrecked clipper ship Crystal Palace, which was ashore in the island of
Mindanao, near Zamboanga.313
Snow continued that Nicholas took down the sword and chased the other boys around the
room. When their mother Alice intervened and tried to take the sword away, she
received a small cut on her hand. In a bit of theatrics she exclaimed that the poison in the
dagger would kill her; but this didn’t happen and the next day she warned the boys “in
such a dramatic manner and with such vivid imagery” to never again touch the relic.314
This fight with a Filipino pirate was only one of many adventures in the life of
Snow’s grandfather, Joshua Nickerson Rowe. Born in 1837, Rowe grew up in Rockland,
Maine, and first went to sea at the age of twelve. It was on this first voyage that his
vessel, the fishing schooner Checker, sank, marooning Rowe temporarily on Amherst
Island in the Magdalen group in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was one of several
313
Edward Rowe Snow, Ghosts, Gales and Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972),
223.
314
Ibid. The story also appears in Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast
(Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944). A photo of Snow and his mother holding the “poison
dagger” is on page 72. On page 7 Snow dedicates this volume “In memory of my grandfather Captain
Joshua Nickerson Rowe who fought pirates while on the clipper ship Crystal Palace.”
216
shipwrecks he would endure during his forty-nine year career. As both his parents had
just died – his mother in Rockland and his father out west as a forty-niner – Rowe
returned to sea; by the age of twenty he was second mate aboard the merchant ship
Crystal Palace when he helped repel Filipino pirates while the ship was ashore for
emergency repairs near Zamboanga in 1858.
After surviving this voyage on the Crystal Palace, Rowe became captain of
several smaller sailing vessels, served as a navigator about the USS St. Louis during the
Civil War, and returned home to marry Caroline Alden Keating. Their daughter Alice
was born in 1868. As was common practice with ship captains, Rowe took his family to
sea with him on many voyages, and Alice spent twelve of her first nineteen years
traveling to the Caribbean, Europe, and South America. While Alice and Caroline came
ashore for good in 1887, Joshua continued sailing, making it home only once more during
the next nine years. His life ended unexpectedly, when, as captain of a steamer on the
Yukon River transporting passengers and supplies during the Klondike Gold Rush, he
caught pneumonia and died shortly thereafter in a Skagway, Alaska, hospital on October
18, 1898.315
Rowe was only the latest member of Snow’s family to have died while out west.
In 1855 Snow’s forty-eight year-old great-grandfather Captain Richard Keating died in
Calcutta, India, while in command of the ship Kate Sweetland, likely as the result of an
illness. A decade later Snow’s great-aunt Eliza Smart Snow drowned at the age of
315
Biography of Joshua Rowe Snow compiled from Alice Rowe Snow, More Stories from the Log of a Sea
Captain’s Daughter (Winthrop, MA.: Alice Rowe Snow, 1949). Rowe being shipwrecked while aboard
the Checker from Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd,
Mead and Company, 1950), 78. Joshua N. Rowe married Caroline A. Keating on February 5, 1865, and
was acting master of the USS St. Louis according to Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and
South Thomaston, Maine, from their First Exploration, A.D. 1605; with Family Genealogies (Hallowell,
ME.: Masters, Smith & Co., 1865), 2:384.
217
twenty-eight when the steamer Brother Jonathan, which had left San Francisco on July
28, 1865 for Port Ludlow in the Washington Territory, sank after hitting an uncharted
ledge near Crescent City, CA, during a gale while making for that safe harbor. As Snow
recalled almost a century later, “‘Oh, yes, that was your great-aunt Eliza who was lost at
sea on the Brother Jonathan.’ How often I had heard that remark in my boyhood days
when, on visits to Rockland, Maine, I glanced through the cabinet pictures which once
were so much a part of the old-fashioned parlors of the Maine sea captains.” Whether in
photographs or the family’s fortunate collection of diaries, letters, charts, and curios,
stories of the Snow family were in constant circulation.316
It wasn’t all tragedy. The earliest stories that Snow could recall were told to him
at the age of five by his mother, Alice, about the four and a half years she spent at sea
with her parents aboard the bark Russell from 1883 to 1887 as it sailed from Liverpool,
England, south around Cape Horn, up the South American coast to Lima, Peru, and back
again. Alice had kept a logbook of her voyage, dutifully noting each day’s events and
making occasional drawings. Of all the stories about gales, ice, leaks, sickness, unusual
cargoes, a stowaway, and marine animals, the trips delivering supplies to and from the
island of Juan Fernández captivated young Snow.317 Situated some 400 miles off the
Chilean coast, Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned here in 1704 and lived as
316
Richard Keating’s death mentioned in photograph opposite title page of Alice Rowe Snow, More Stories
from the Log of a Sea Captain’s Daughter (Winthrop, MA.: Alice Rowe Snow, 1949) and confirmed in
Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, from their First Exploration,
A.D. 1605; with Family Genealogies (Hallowell, ME.: Masters, Smith & Co., 1865), 2:289,
http://books.google.com/books?id=bOtLfyIZBL4C&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 7,
2013). The Kate Sweetland was built in Thomaston, Maine, in 1852 (p. 105). Death of Eliza Snow from
Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1952),
164.
317
The island at the time was known as Isla Más a Tierra, one of three islands in the Juan Fernández
archipelago. But as it is the largest, it has popularly assumed the name of the group. In 1966 the Chilean
government renamed it Robinson Crusoe Island.
218
a castaway for four and a half years until his rescue by a passing English ship. The event
is believed to have inspired Daniel Defoe to write the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe based
on Selkirk’s life.
Alice loved Defoe’s story, and brought her copy of the novel ashore to rub the
island’s “romantic dirt” over it. Her subsequent explorations of the island with her
family included the cave where Selkirk (Alice preferred to say Crusoe) once lived (and
where a German man named Meyers was now living at the time of her visit) and a
mountaintop lookout where British naval officers in 1868 had erected a tablet to Selkirk’s
fifty-one month stay. There, Joshua recited the William Cowper poem Alexander
Selkirk’s Soliloquy to the delight of everyone present. Snow would later credit Alice’s
journal for inspiring him to write his first publication in 1935: the forty-five page Castle
Island: Its 300 Years of History and Romance. A view of the past as romantic now
spanned three generations.318
Inspiration also came from other family members and trickled in through his
surroundings. At the age of five Snow’s older brother Winthrop brought him to the
nearby Governor’s Island to explore the ruined Fort Winthrop. As Snow remembered
more than seventy years later, “I still recall the dark chambers, the dripping stalactites,
the dank, dungeon-like smell, and the pitch-black inner room with its hidden entrance….
[I]t left me with a feeling of awe and almost pleasant dread. It was really a boy’s dream
come true.” By the age of seven, Grandmother Rowe was taking Snow on regular visits
318
Alice Rowe Snow, Log of a Sea Captain’s Daughter with Adventures on Robinson Crusoe’s Island
(Boston, MA.: Meador Publishing Company, 1944). Snow dedicates his first publication to his mother:
“To my mother Alice Rowe Snow whose diary of her visit to Robinson Crusoe’s Island inspired the
preparation of this book.” Edward Rowe Snow, Castle Island: Its 300 Years of History and Romance
(Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 2. Frank P. Sibley, “Winthrop Woman’s Adventures as a Girl on
Robinson Crusoe’s Island,” Boston Globe, October 23, 1932, B5.
219
to “important historical sites” that included cemeteries and buildings such as the Old
State House, where they read through “great masses of reference works and scrapbooks.”
He also began to attended historical commemorations, such as memorial services in the
summer of 1912 preceding the cutting down of Winthrop’s centuries-old Gibbons Elm,
from which Snow secured a small souvenir. Inspiration also came from unexpected
places. During visits to his aunt Annabel Snow’s home in Rockland, Snow recalled the
stories told by her handyman, Charlie Smith. As a former whaleman he “had made many
voyages before his shipwreck on the sea of intemperance. He would talk to us children
by the hour about his adventures. He interested me in whaling at an early age, and I
would often visit the library to take out volumes on whalers and their experiences.”319
At thirteen Snow bought his first of many canoes, and began exploring the
harbor’s several dozen islands. Eventually he visited all of them. “With each island
conquest,” recalled Snow decades later, “I was anxious to learn what I could about the
tunnels, graveyards, shipwrecks, and dilapidated buildings I found. I soon discovered,
however, that there was not a single modern book or pamphlet that contained the answers
to my questions. I would journey up to the Boston Public Library, where the late Pierce
Buckley would help me as much as he could, and by the fall of 1917 I had amassed a
319
Fort Winthrop visit from Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New
York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 177. Caroline Rowe anecdotes from Edward Rowe Snow,
Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 215217 and Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New
York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 210. Memorial service for the Gibbons Elm were held on
June 22, 1912 according to Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land
and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 77. Charlie Smith quote from Edward Rowe
Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 101.
220
considerable amount of information concerning the harbor.” Snow’s career as a historian
and storyteller, then, started as a quest to answer questions about his environment.320
Snow didn’t experience drama just through books and other people’s stories. He
saw death at an early age. While walking along the Winthrop shore with a friend in April
of 1917, the fourteen-year old Snow came upon bodies washing ashore. The week
before, a group of thirteen boys from Lynn had taken a motorboat out on a joyride and
disappeared later that night. Snow himself almost drowned the following year when he
fell through the ice on January 2, 1918, while walking to various islands near Winthrop.
Neither experience deterred him from the water (he continued walking on the ice until
1946), and may have fueled his interests in shipwrecks and lifesaving. He was already an
excellent swimmer and a bit of a daredevil, diving off piers and under schooners, and
experimenting with breathing underwater using a rubber hose and five-gallon cans.321
His adventurous spirit and wanderlust, like many of his ancestors before him, took
him to sea. In the most detailed description of this period in his life, Snow only recalled
later that “between 1919 and 1928 I journeyed all over the world, serving in various
capacities on sailing vessels and oil tankers, and going ashore whenever the urge
presented itself.” This period ashore included working as an extra in three films in
Hollywood and as a lifeguard at four swimming pools along the Pacific Coast. 1928
320
Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1958), 235. Also recounted in Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal
Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 112.
321
Boating accident from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England
Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1943), 259. Snow falling through ice from Edward
Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1958), 234-246 and told again in Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities
(New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 111-121. Snow as early diver from Edward Rowe
Snow, Ghosts, Gales and Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972), 224 and “Winthrop
By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont
(1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008).
221
found Snow working as a lifeguard in Helena, Montana, where he attended Intermountain
Union College on a scholarship, and met his future wife, Anna-Myrle Haegg. The
following year he was back in Massachusetts to attend Harvard University. By taking
summer classes he managed to graduate early, in 1932, writing a thesis on the history of
the Boston harbor islands under the guidance of professor and historian Samuel Eliot
Morison.322
Fifteen years older than Snow, Morison was in many ways his opposite. Born
into one of Boston’s upper-class Yankee families known as the Boston Brahmins,
Morison attended private preparatory schools in Boston, New Hampshire, and Paris
before earning his PhD at Harvard in 1912. With the exception of a few short teaching
appointments at other universities and service during World War II, he would continue to
teach history at his alma mater until retiring in 1955. During a writing career that
stretched from the 1910s through the 1970s and included more than fifty books and 150
articles, Morison became one of the preeminent historians in America, winning the
Pulitzer Prize twice, the Bancroft Prize for American history, and the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, awarded by President Johnson in 1964. At various times he also served as
editor for The New England Quarterly, the region’s leading academic journal, and The
American Neptune, the leading academic journal of American maritime history which he
co-founded in 1941.
While Snow was also a prolific writer, he preferred short, distinct stories of
sometimes unverified veracity over Morison’s biographies and sweeping histories of
322
See Snow’s four-page autobiography that appeared in: Harvard College Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth
Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957), [unknown page
number]. Snow’s lifeguarding from Edward Rowe Snow, Astounding Tales of the Sea (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965), 197.
222
people, events, and groups. While both men wrote for a popular audience, Morison also
wrote textbooks and institutional histories, including the landmark History of United
States Naval Operations in World War II, that he joined the Navy in 1942 to document
first-hand and then published in fifteen volumes from 1947 to 1962. As this example
demonstrates, along with earlier and later biographies of Christopher Columbus and
Samuel de Champlain, Morison believed in writing about topics from the point of view of
having traveled to and through those spaces – usually by sailing. Snow shared this value
in first-hand experience, and may have been encouraged to write that way by his mentor.
But aside from that, the two men pursued different facets of the maritime past. As their
careers paralleled each others for four decades, the master storyteller and the professional
historian likely remained aware of each other’s pursuits.323
After graduation in 1932 Snow drove back to Helena to marry Anna-Myrle, and
the couple then returned east for his first teaching job in Athol, Massachusetts. The next
year he was thrilled to move back to the coast to a teaching position at his old high school
in Winthrop. For the next thirteen years Snow taught history, math, and English, coached
track and football, and started a history club that included field trips around Boston.
Snow was a popular teacher, and the stories he had accumulated since he was a teenager
came through no matter what topic he was ostensibly teaching. As former history class
student John Domenico recalled in an interview decades later:
He could tell stories to illustrate his points at the drop of a hat. And as treats he
would tell us stories about the islands, and that’s I think where he excelled and
that’s where he captured all of us and just kept us enthralled for as long as that
323
Alden Whitman, “Adm. Morrison, 88, Historian, is Dead,” New York Times, May 16, 1976, 1. Navy
Department Library, Navy History & Heritage Command, “Biographies in Naval History,”
http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/morison_s.htm (accessed January 7, 2013); Navy Department Library,
Navy History & Heritage Command, “A Bibliography of Writings by Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot
Morison,” http://www.history.navy.mil/library/guides/morison_bib.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
223
class period ended. And if we could get through the history work early enough in
the class we were sure to get some of these stories – the ghosts, the mystery
people, the happenings on the islands that he just brought alive. There was
something about him, the way he told us – he would frequently darken the room
to make certain that the effects were there. And to see this hulk of a man emote
before the class, I tell you he just left us with a lot of great memories.
Edward Rowe Snow’s time at Winthrop High School gave him experience perfecting
stories in front of an audience, whether in a classroom or on tours with them throughout
greater Boston.324
But Snow didn’t limit himself to only working with students.325 The 1930s was a
productive time for Snow, as he began all of the activities that would come to define his
public life. By 1934 he was participating in historical commemorations and leading
harbor tours and giving lectures to a diverse array of groups, from historical and fraternal
organizations to veterans and women’s clubs, as well as the general public. To give an
incomplete sample: he led anniversary celebrations of harbor lighthouses and keepers, the
75th anniversary of the creation of the famous Civil War song “John Brown’s Body” at
Fort Warren, the 250th anniversary of supposedly America’s first rebellion in Boston’s
Fort Hill Square, the 140th anniversary of the USS Constitution evading the British
blockade, sponsored a memorial for a photographer friend killed in a plane crash, and
presided over annual memorial services for families of victims of the sinking of the
steamer Portland during a gale in 1898.
324
“Winthrop By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy
D’Entremont (1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). For details of the history club see
“Edward Rowe Snow Remembered,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced by Jeremy
D’Entremont (1995; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008).
325
A student of Snow’s named Louis Cataldo would later, along with colleague Dorothy Worrell, found in
1949 the non-profit historical organization Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., to record Cape Codders’ stories of local
history and folklore. These tapes were later archived in the library of Cape Cod Community College.
Richard Connolly, “Old Jail Fire Scorches Deputy’s Dream; Restoration Aid Asked,” Boston Globe, July
25, 1973, A58. Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., http://www.talesofcapecod.org (accessed January 7, 2013).
224
Additionally, in 1935 Snow chaired a memorial committee that erected a plaque
at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, honoring Confederates imprisoned there during the
Civil War. Former Confederate and Union soldiers, veterans groups, and government
representatives were among the crowd that gathered on George’s Island for the ceremony
on June 9, at which Snow spoke about the significance of the commemoration and read a
letter from President Roosevelt commending the event as a demonstration of the nation’s
united spirit. By the following year Snow had joined other prominent historians in
publicly opposing plans for the destruction of Governor’s Island to enlarge Boston’s
airport.326
A relief program during the Great Depression unexpectedly gave a boost to
Snow’s career when the Adult Education Project of the Works Progress Administration
sponsored four talks by Snow on radio WCOP in February of 1937. Broadcasting from
the studio in the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, Snow delivered the four, fifteen minute
talks on Boston’s wharves and docks, storms and shipwrecks, legends of Boston, and
New England’s lighthouses and their keepers. The WPA additional sponsored an
evening lecture later that July in a downtown municipal building, where Snow told stories
about the city’s Long Wharf.327
326
“Brave Seas to Unveil Tablet,” Boston Globe, December 3, 1934, 1. “Graves Light’s 30th Birthday
Observed,” Boston Globe, September 2, 1935, 14. “Graves Light Anniversary Presentation,” Boston
Globe, September 2, 1935, 14. “Group Marks Anniversary of Fall of Minots Light,” Boston Globe, April
19, 1936, A30. “Commemorative Exercises for Song ‘John Brown’s Body’,” Boston Globe, May 24, 1936,
A19. “Tablet Dedicated at Fort Hill Square on 250th Anniversary of America’s First Rebellion,” Boston
Globe, April 30, 1939, C7. “Mark Anniversary with Air Tour,” Boston Globe, October 18, 1937, 3.
“Photographers Plan Ramsdell Memorial,” Boston Globe, September 16, 1936, 6. “SS Portland Disaster
Roll Enlarged By Tales at Rites 40 Years After,” Boston Globe, November 27, 1938, B9. “Plaque at Fort
Warren to Honor Confederacy,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1935, 9. “Women’s Relief Corps Pays Honor to
Confederate Trio,” Boston Globe, June 10, 1935, 2. “Historians Oppose Taking of Governors Island for
Airport, Boston Globe, July 23, 1936, 5. “Fight to Save Governor’s Island Fortifications,” Boston Globe,
September 5, 1936, 13.
327
List of four scripts in James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A
Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 25. For time of broadcast see
225
By the time he appeared on radio, Snow was already an author. As early as 1934
his personal stationary describes himself as a “lecturer and writer on the islands of Boston
Harbor,” and 1935 saw the publication of his first two works. The first was the
aforementioned booklet on Castle Island, while the second was an expansion of his 1932
Harvard thesis. At 367 pages, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and
Romance, 1626-1935 was the largest publication on the harbor islands (and remains so)
and the result of two decades of research. Previously only a few articles and booklets had
provided a brief survey of the terrain on which Snow now built his career.328
On the inside of the covers Snow included a map of the islands of Boston Harbor
marked with yacht clubs, forts, lighthouses, reefs, and brief details about the various
places. Drawn by engineers Whitman & Howard, it was based on Snow’s own aerial and
island surveys and U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Chart 246. Included in the empty
spaces of the map are whimsical drawings by Edith Stevens of fish, a whale, and sea
serpents. The combination of accuracy and entertainment signaled that the stories within
the book were written the same way, and the places accessible to boat owners.
This first book also contained all of the main subjects that Snow would focus on
in his subsequent writings and lectures: pirates (more than fifteen buried on Bird Island
and Nix’s Mate), treasure (from the wreck of the French Magnifique found by a keeper
“Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February 15, 1937, 15. “Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February
16, 1937, 19. “Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February 22, 1937, 17. “Radio Broadcasts,” Boston
Globe, February 23, 1937, 15. “Speaker to Recall Days of Old on Long Wharf,” Boston Globe, July 20,
1937, 22.
328
Letter from Snow to John Hay Library, August 15, 1934, in Folder 12, Box 2 of “Selected
Correspondence, 1913-1993, ‘Seven’ to ‘Zeitlin,’ Hay Manuscripts, Ms. 94.8, Brown University Library.
For Boston Harbor islands publications see for example, A Descriptive and Historical Sketch of Boston
Harbor and Surroundings: Giving All the Islands, Ledges, Shoals, Buoys, Channels, and Towns from
Nahant to Minot's with Their Location and History (Boston, MA.: W.M. Tenney and Co., 1885); William
Otis Crosby, Geology of the Outer Islands of Boston Harbor (Salem, MA.: Salem Press, 1888). Patrick J.
Connelly, comp., Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1932, “Green Isles of Romance,” (Dorchester, MA.:
Chapple Publishing Company, 1932).
226
on Lovell’s Island in 1920), ghosts (at Fort Warren), lighthouses (Boston Light, Graves
Light, Deer Island Light, Minot’s Light, Long Island Light, and range lights on Lovell’s
Island and Spectacle Island) and shipwrecks (from the Magnifique in 1782 to the City of
Montgomery in 1935). Snow never defines the “romance” of his title, but in his calling
Lovell’s Island “the Island of Romance” due to its compact, sixty-two acres containing
“two lighthouses, Lover’s Rock, the treasure, and the pirate’s skeleton, and last but not
least, the mysterious underground passageway which shoots off under the Harbor” shows
that the recipe includes mystery, legend, geography, and things for visitors to explore. In
a nod of recognition to Snow’s hard work, his former teacher Samuel Eliot Morison
wrote a favorable review of the book in the December 1936 issue of The New England
Quarterly.329
Perhaps deciding that his abilities as an historian were lacking compared to
contemporaries such as Morison, Snow subsequently entered Boston University and
completed a master’s degree in history in 1939, writing a thesis on the history of
Winthrop. Having thanked Dr. Robert Earle Moody in his 1935 book for introducing him
to several of Boston’s archives, Snow likely attended Boston University at least in part
due to this friendship. Only a year older than Snow, Moody was a new professor at the
school, specializing in colonial American history. For the next several decades Snow
would frequently thank Moody in his books’ acknowledgements for editorial help and
329
Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover,
MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 228 (Magnifique treasure found), 231 (City of Montgomery; Lovell’s Island
quote), 325 (pirates buried on Bird Island and Nix’s Mate). Samuel Eliot Morison, review of The Islands of
Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 by Edward Rowe Snow, The New England
Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Dec., 1936): 744.
227
guidance – particularly “the importance of accuracy and truth.” Snow had found his
mentor.330
Snow cared deeply about the people in his stories, who often lived on the
geographic and societal margins. First visiting as a youth the people who worked on the
offshore islands, Snow returned as an adult to commemorate their service (and of the
lighthouses where they worked) and lead educational tours. In December, 1938, he
became a substitute “flying Santa Claus” in dropping Christmas care packages of food,
candy, cigarettes, reading material, and toys to the keepers and their families stationed at
each of New England’s offshore lighthouses, in addition to Coast Guard stations and
lightships. Pilot William H. Wincapaw and his son William, Jr. had started the practice
in 1929 as gratitude for their dedication to maintaining the navigation aids in often
isolated and harsh environments. The junior Wincapaw was a student of Snow’s at
Winthop High School, and after introducing his teacher to his father, Snow began
assisting the pair in 1936 on their Christmas deliveries. Over the next decade, when one
or both of the Wincapaws was away on business, Snow would assume the role of Flying
Santa, and take it over completely following the elder Wincapaw’s death in 1946.
Edward Rowe Snow would continue the practice, with volunteer pilots and family and
friends assisting, until a stroke in 1981 forced him to retire.331
330
“I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Robert Earle Moody of Boston University who willingly gave his
time and knowledge in introducing me to several of Greater Boston’s archives.” Edward Rowe Snow, The
Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935),
7. “Robert E. Moody, 82, BU Historian; Worked on Saltonstall Papers,” Boston Globe, April 6, 1983, 1.
“Accuracy and truth” quote from the dedication page of Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact:
New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), v. “To Dr.
Robert E. Moody who, more than a quarter of a century ago, taught me the importance of accuracy and
truth.”
331
“Flying Santa to be Edward Snow,” Boston Globe, December 23, 1938, 15. “Odd Items From
Everywhere,” Boston Globe, December 17, 1940, 24. “Lighthouse Men to Be Visited by Santa Today,”
Boston Globe, December 22, 1940, A15. “Santa Plane Drops Presents at Lighthouses,” Boston Globe,
228
Perhaps it was Snow’s interest in photography and experience in airplanes that led
him to enlist in the Army Air Corps in 1942. Commissioned as a first lieutenant, Snow
went to Miami, Florida, for training before finally leaving from New York in November,
1942, for England aboard the steamship Coamo. Sailing without a military escort, Snow
recalled standing on the deck of his transport with other soldiers watching an unknown
vessel setting off distress rockets into the night as it likely sank. The Coamo arrived
safely in Liverpool, but immediately after departing it was torpedoed by the German
submarine U-604 on December 2, sinking with the loss of everyone aboard. Assigned to
the Eighth Air Force while in England, Snow managed to find time for historical
research. In London he browsed library catalogs for unusual stories (finding one about a
“stone-throwing devil” in a seventeenth-century New Hampshire town), visited “the
ancient Pirates’ Stairs” which Captain Kidd had descended on the walk to his execution
in 1701, and “attempted to find definite evidence that there had been a great treasure
aboard the former Dutch vessel [the De Braak] when she foundered [off Lewes,
Delaware] in 1798.” On a visit to the fishing port of Grimsby while temporarily stationed
at a nearby airbase, he visited several places displaying relics from the nineteenth-century
English whaleship Diana.332
December 23, 1940, 1. Brian Tague, “The History and Origins of the Flying Santa, 1929-2010,”
http://www.flyingsanta.com/HistoryOrigins.html (accessed January 7, 2013).
332
“Santa Goes to War,” Boston Globe, August 5, 1942, 15. The Coamo sailing unescorted mentioned in
Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1977), 179. Watching distress rockets from Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New
England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 201. Coamo sunk by
U-604 from Guðmundur Helgason, “Coamo,” http://uboat.net/allies/merchants/ships/2486.html (accessed
January 7, 2013). New Hampshire story from Edward Rowe Snow, Legends of the New England Coast
(New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 42. “Pirates’ Stairs” from Edward Rowe Snow, “I’m
Not Afraid of Capt. Kidd!” Yankee, February 1966, 44. Dutch treasure vessel from Edward Rowe Snow,
Strange Tales from Nova Scotia to Cape Hatteras (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1949),
267. Diana relics from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1958), 170.
229
That winter Snow was transferred to the Twelfth Bomber Command to do photo
reconnaissance and sent to North Africa following the Allied invasion in November,
1942. Snow rarely spoke publicly of how he became wounded in the spring of 1943 from
shrapnel, but as his daughter Dorothy described in a television appearance in 1995 that, “I
remember him saying that there were like nine people when he went to sleep and when he
woke up he was in the hospital, and everyone else was killed. And he had trouble with
his hearing after that. In fact he had to learn how to walk without a limp….” Evacuated
to the Seventh General Hospital in Oran, Algeria, an immobile Snow made the best of his
recovery – by telling stories. When a Spanish nurse told him that she had ancestors
aboard a Spanish ship that never returned to port in 1813, an excited Snow explained to
her “in doubtful French” that it was likely the Spanish ship Sagunto that had wrecked on
Smuttynose Island off the coast of New Hampshire in January of 1813. Snow also
entertained his fellow patients, who would walk over to his cot and ask him to tell stories.
“We passed many a lonely night in this fashion,” recalled Snow a few years later.333
Edward Rowe Snow’s injuries permanently removed him from combat. The
British hospital ship Amarapoora brought him and other wounded servicemen to Bristol,
England, later that spring. There, Snow was sent for long-term recovery to Frenchay
Hospital on the outskirts of the city, which had recently been turned over to the
Americans for use as a military hospital. Once well enough to walk, Snow resumed his
333
Photo reconnaissance detail from “Massachusetts: Yo-ho-ho and a Radar Set,” Time, October 15, 1945.
Reassignment to Twelfth Bomber Command from Edward Rowe Snow, Legends of the New England Coast
(New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 42. Injury details from “Edward Rowe Snow
Remembered,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced by Jeremy D’Entremont (1995; DVD,
Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). Two versions of Spanish nurse anecdote from Edward Rowe Snow,
Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 38 and
Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943), 201. Snow telling stories to other patients from Edward Rowe Snow,
Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948),
122.
230
historical sightseeing. In Bristol he visited the birthplace of Samuel Plimsoll, the
politician and social reformer who had advocated for lines on the side of a ship’s hull to
indicate when it was fully loaded. He also befriended a drugstore owner who
subsequently drove him around the area and helped him seek out unusual sea stories.
They kept in touch for decades. Snow even apparently made it to a bookshop in
Aberdeen, Scotland, before being sent back to the United States. He would draw on the
experiences and the stories he had collected during his deployment for the rest of his
career.334
In a surprising show of productivity, Snow returned to Winthrop, resumed
teaching (Anna-Myrle had been teaching his classes in his place), and managed to write
his second book, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast, in
time for publication that December. Since 1940 Snow had managed to write at least one
short publication a year, and now he took to writing full-length books in earnest. 1944
saw the publication of Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast and The Romance of
Boston Bay, with Famous Lighthouses of New England following in 1945, and A Pilgrim
Returns to Cape Cod (based on a seven-week hike Snow had taken there that spring) in
1946.
Snow also returned to radio. From April to September of 1945 Snow read his
fifteen-minute “New England Sea Tales” that broadcasted over WCOP on Wednesday
evenings. In October, 1945, Snow switched to WNAC with a half-hour Sunday radio
334
Hospital ship detail from Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston,
MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 250. Frenchay and friendship from Edward Rowe Snow,
Astounding Tales of the Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965), 34. James C. Briggs,
The History of Frenchay Hospital (Bristol, England: Monica Britton Hall of Medical History in association
with the Postgraduate Medical Centre, Frenchay Hospital, 1994). Plimsoll visit from Edward Rowe Snow,
Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 65. Aberdeen
visit from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1958), 38.
231
program called “Six Bells,” sponsored by the Boston-based dairy company H.P. Hood
and Sons. Broadcasting from radio stations in every New England state except Vermont,
the radio schedule section of the Boston Globe described it as a “new adventure series
from historic places.” The format, at least initially, involved Snow telling historical
stories from the actual places where they had occurred, such as the dungeon of Fort
Independence on Boston’s Castle Island (“Castle Island Duel”), the Captain Thomas
Paine House in Jamestown, Rhode Island (“Captain Kidd”); the steeple of Boston’s Old
North Church (“Paul Revere’s Ride”), the bow of the USS Constitution in Charlestown,
Massachusetts (“Figurehead of Old Ironsides”); the Wiley House in Crawford Notch,
New Hampshire (“New Hampshire Avalanche”); and the John Adams House in Quincy,
Massachusetts (“John Adams”). Balancing his teaching with his writing soon proved
unfeasible for Snow, and he resigned from Winthrop High School in May of 1946 to
write for print and radio and lecture full-time.335
When Snow wrote an autobiographical sketch in 1957 for a publication for his
twenty-fifth reunion at Harvard, he outlined his extensive local media presence: in
addition to his yearly books he was a veteran broadcaster with his “Five Bells” program
airing twice a week from Brockton, Massachusetts, radio station WBET; his “New
England Sea Lore” program had previously broadcasted from radio WRKD out of
335
Anna-Myrle substituting for Edward from “Winthrop By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England,
directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont (1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008).
For a Hood advertisement of Snow’s radio program see “Hood’s Milk,” Boston Globe, October 23, 1945, 9.
Boston Globe quote from “Air Attractions,” Boston Globe, October 14, 1945, D48. Note: the names of
stories in quotation marks are from a list of scripts found in Snow’s personal papers archived at Boston
University. They are not necessarily the titles that appeared on the radio page of various New England
newspapers. For instance, the broadcast for March 17, 1946 is listed in the Boston Globe as SIX BELLS:
“War with France,” narration by Edward Rowe Snow, from John Adams House in Quincy, WNAC, 3.”
“Air Attractions,” Boston Globe, March 17, 1946, C8. Some of the listings, though, for want of space, left
out the titles of Snow’s talks and/or his broadcast locations. For list of scripts, see the Edward Rowe Snow
Collection, Box 18 (of 1992 Addendum – box 58 overall), Folder “WEEI.” Howard Gottlieb Research
Center, Boston University. According to records at Winthrop High School, Snow started teaching on
September 1, 1933 and resigned before the end of the school year on May 2, 1946.
232
Rockland, Maine; and his “Six Bells” radio program had for a decade been carried by
twenty-seven stations throughout New England over the Yankee Network. Further, he
was then writing for three newspapers: a twice-weekly “True Tales of the Past” column
for the Brockton Enterprise (operating in the same building as WBET), the column “New
England Lore of Sea and Shore” in the Rockland, Maine, Courier Gazette, and a column
in the Quincy Patriot Ledger that he would continue under various nautical titles until
suffering a stroke in 1981.
Snow wasn’t necessarily tripling his workload in writing books, newspaper
columns, and radio stories. He might expand a column into a future book chapter, or edit
down a chapter in an out-of-print book for a column or broadcast. For instance, Snow’s
Brockton Enterprise column for March 31, 1956: “True Tales of the Past: All about
Whaling,” came directly from an anecdote in his A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod of a
decade earlier. In balancing his work in print, radio, and in person, Snow was a master at
getting the most from his writing.336
Predecessor / contemporaries
Snow was not the region’s only famous chronicler of New England, past or
present. In collecting and telling New England stories, Snow was continuing the legacy
of author Samuel Adams Drake from a half-century before. Born in Boston on December
20, 1833, Drake was one of six children of Louisa Maria and Samuel Gardner Drake.
(The family proudly traced its lineage to an English ancestor who had settled in New
336
Snow’s four-page autobiography appeared in: Harvard College Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth Anniversary
Report (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957), [unknown page number]. Edward
Rowe Snow, “True Tales of the Past: All about Whaling,” Brockton Enterprise, May 31, 1956. Edward
Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 101.
233
Hampshire around 1640.337) The elder Drake had opened the first antiquarian bookstore
in the United States in Boston in 1830. While he pursued a career as a bookseller, editor,
publisher, and historian specializing in early American and Native American histories,
his son Samuel Adams, like Edward Snow’s great-grandfather, went to California during
the Gold Rush.
In 1858 the now twenty-three year-old Drake moved to the Kansas Territory,
where he worked as a correspondent and editor at three newspapers. It was here that he
wrote his first publication in 1860, a pamphlet for future western travelers called Hints
for Emigrants to Pike’s Peak. When the Civil War broke out he joined the militia of the
new State of Kansas in 1861, and eventually rose to the rank of colonel of the 17th Kansas
volunteers. Upon returning to Boston in 1871 he began his final career as a writer of
history and historical fiction. From 1873 until 1904 (the year before his death) Drake
wrote at least thirty publications, ranging from small pamphlets on the states of Georgia
and Florida to massive 400+ page books on New England history and lore.
Unlike his father (who had died in 1875), Drake wrote for young readers as well
as adults. The New York publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons sold his American regional
histories as “books for the young,” while his Around the Hub: A Boy’s Book about
Boston (1881) tried to more specifically interest boys in the early history of the city.
Drake even tried historical fiction with Captain Nelson: A Romance of Colonial Days
(1879), starting its titular hero in seventeenth-century Boston. For reasons of both
337
Samuel Gardner Drake, Genealogical and Biographical Account of the Family of Drake in America
(Boston, MA.: Printed at the private press of George Coolidge for Samuel Adams Drake, 1845), 27.
234
ancestry and profession, Drake was deeply interested in communicating the importance
of the past to present audiences.338
For Edward Rowe Snow, Drake mattered most for his scholarship on New
England lore and the seacoast, particularly the books Nooks and Corners of the New
England Coast (1875), and A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1883;
revised edition 1901). Snow referenced Drake throughout his career, such as researching
and retelling many of the stories in New England Legends, including “The Spanish
Galleon,” a story about a ship’s stolen cargo in eighteenth-century New London, and
“The Spanish Wreck” about the wreck of the Sagunto on Smuttynose Island in 1813.
Both men, in turn, were referencing earlier writings, such as those by Puritan minister
Cotton Mather or the nineteenth-century poet Celia Thaxter. Snow also copied at least
one of Drake’s illustrations. Snow’s story on a duel at Boston’s Castle Island in the
summer of 1817 from Secrets of the North Atlantic Island (1950) includes a hand-drawn
version of the engraving that accompanied Drake’s story “The Duel on the Common”
from New England Legends (1883). Snow even carried a copy of the hefty Nooks and
Corners in his knapsack during his 1946 hike on Cape Cod. Though the two authors’
338
Biographies of Samuel Adams Drake and his father are compiled from Samuel Adams Drake, Catalogue
of the Private Library of Samuel Gardner Drake, A.M. (Boston, MA.: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1876); Charles
Henry Pope, “Deaths,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register 60 (July 1906): 324; “Drake,
Samuel Adams,” in Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the United States, ed. John Howard Brown, 2
(Boston, MA.: James H. Lamb Company, 1900), 512-513; “Drake, Samuel Gardner,” in Appleton’s
Cyclopaedia of American Biography, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, 2 (New York, N.Y.: D.
Appleton and Company, 1888), 225-226. “Col. Samuel A. Drake Dead,” Boston Globe, December 5, 1905,
7. For Charles Scribner’s Sons selling Drake’s regional histories to youths, see the advertisements in the
back pages of Samuel Adams Drake, The Making of New England, 1580-1643 (New York, N.Y.: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1886).
235
lives overlapped by only three years, Snow found a literary mentor in the works of
Samuel Adams Drake.339
Writing several decades later, Snow was hardly alone in his craft. In Drake’s
wake, professionals and amateurs continued to seek out and publish the region’s stories,
from college professor Horace Beck’s The Folklore of Maine (1957) to plant foreman
Lewis Taft’s Profile of Old New England: Yankee Legends, Tales and Folklore (1965) –
the latter issued by Snow’s eventual publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company. But as
someone also making a living as a popular storyteller outside of academia, Snow’s
closest contemporary in New England was Alton Hall Blackington.340
Born on November 25, 1893 in Rockland, Maine (where Snow often visited
family), Blackington served during the First World War as an official photographer in the
United States Navy, stationed in the First Naval District that covered New England.
Thereafter he worked for a decade as a staff photographer for the Boston Herald. He
traveled throughout the region with a camera and notebook, documenting events and
339
For examples of Snow quoting and citing Drake, see Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast
(New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 218, 219, 221, 222; and Fantastic Folklore and Fact:
New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 39, 43, 113,
114, 117. For other mentions see Snow’s Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast
(1943), Romance of Boston Bay (1944), Famous Lighthouses of New England (1945), and A Pilgrim
Returns to Cape Cod (1946). Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in
Poetry and Prose (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown, and Company, 1901), 352 (“The Spanish Wreck”), 431
(“The Spanish Galleon”). Snow’s versions appear in Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures
Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 212 (“Connecticut’s
Spanish Galleon”); and Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England
Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1943), 199-201 (“Isles of Shoals”). Snow’s copy of
Drake’s drawing is in Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd,
Mead and Company, 1950), 60. For the original see Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England
Legends and Folk Lore in Poetry and Prose (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown, and Company, 1901), 70. For
Snow carrying Drake’s book on Cape Cod see Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod
(Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 66.
340
Details of Beck and Taft are from the author blurbs on the back cover of the dust jacket for Horace
Beck, The Folklore of Maine (Philadelphia, PA.: Lippincott, 1957), and the inside back flap of the dust
jacket of Lewis Taft, Profile of Old New England: Yankee Legends, Tales and Folklore (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Co., 1965). Beck taught American literature at Middlebury College in Middlebury,
Vermont, while Taft was a foreman in the Bulova Watch Company plant in Providence, Rhode Island.
236
“interesting people, from old ladies who lived in haunted houses with forty cats to
President Calvin Coolidge.” Like Snow, he “poked through country cemeteries and
visited local libraries and historical societies” to gather material, as he recalled decades
later. By 1927 Blackington started using this material to deliver illustrated lectures to
groups around New England, with his most frequent topic being “The Romance of News
Gathering.”341
That same year he also began a regular feature in the Boston Globe of
photographs with captions spotlighting New England people and events, from a
champion twelve-year-old skeet shooter to folks harvesting crabs on Cape Cod. In 1933
he published his first article in the Globe on archaeologists excavating a Native American
shell midden, and would continue to write topical articles for the paper for the next
twelve years in addition to ones for popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest. His
interest in unusual stories and popularity as a speaker led to his first radio program on
station WNAC from 1933 to 1934, a four-month bi-weekly series of “Yankee Yarns” in
1937 on Boston’s WNAC and Providence’s WEAN, and finally a weekly version of his
“Yankee Yarns” delivered in his “Down East nasal twang” on Boston’s WBZ station
from 1942 through 1951.342
341
“A Blackington, ‘Yankee Yarns’ Author, at 69,” Boston Globe, April 25, 1963, 42. The earliest notice
for a lecture that I can find is “Harvard Club Hears Photographer,” Boston Globe, February 17, 1927, 17.
Quotations from Alton H. Blackington, Yankee Yarns (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954),
ix.
342
“A Simple and Beautiful Garden on the Ropes Estate in Salem,” Boston Globe, June 5, 1927, 1. Alton
Hall Blackington, “Archaeologists on Cape Cod,” Boston Globe, August 20, 1933, B12. Writing for
Reader’s Digest noted in the author’s biography on the back cover of Alton Hall Blackington, Yankee
Yarns (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954). “Down East nasal twang” from Ted Ashby,
“Blackie,” Boston Globe, January 30, 1953, 13. On page x of Blackington’s first book in 1954 he says that
“Yankee Yarns was broadcast practically every week over WBZ, Boston, and the New England stations of
NBC” though I can only find his radio show listed in broadcast schedules through 1951. Perhaps he’s also
adding his television version of Yankee Yarns that aired in 1953.
237
After his radio career ended, Blackington made several appearances on television
(including the Boston Globe sponsoring his Yankee Yarns for the small screen) while
collecting his stories into two popular books: Yankee Yarns (1954) and More Yankee
Yarns (1956). The book jacket for Yankee Yarns shows how Blackington and his
publishing company sold the Yankee author and the region’s colorful past. On the front
cover are illustrations of a ship, a man swinging an ax, a partial head-shot of a man
resembling Lincoln wearing a top-hat, and a colonial woman with bound hands being
lead to the gallows for her hanging. The collection promises lively and likely sensational
stories of the type that frustrated Carl Cutler’s attempts to publish his maritime history
scholarship to the general public.
Between the covers, Blackington’s eighteen tales sweep through all six New
England states and beyond, incorporating “humor, tragedy, mystery, superstition, and
violence.” Rural elderly Vermonters forced into hibernation, a giant molasses tank
collapse in Boston’s North End, a Cape Cod gold mine hoax, runaway locomotives, and
the steamer Portland’s sinking were some of the mostly inland and a few saltwater tales.
As with Snow, Blackington’s research and personal recollections often become part of
the story. On the back cover Blackington poses in a three-piece suit at his WBZ
microphone with script in hand, while the biography below briefly mentions his Maine
roots and Massachusetts residence, career as a writer, photographer, and lecturer in New
England, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., and passion for
“chasing fire engines, gardening and fresh water fishing.” Whether Blackington, Snow,
238
Beck, or Taft, each man’s identity as a New Englander was prominently noted on the
book jackets, which sanctioned them as authentic conveyors of their region’s stories.343
Snow and Blackington both published with Dodd, Mead and Company, and an
advertisement for Snow’s Amazing Sea Stories Never Told Before takes up the back flap
of Yankee Yarns’s jacket. But the addition likely didn’t bother Blackington; the men
complemented each other. They were friends, lectured over the same region at the same
time, thanked each other in their books’ acknowledgments or introductions, and
sometimes told versions of the same stories – though Blackington stayed mostly on land
and Snow seaward. When Blackington died on April 24, 1963, his friend continued as a
public storyteller for almost another twenty years.344
While Snow had many contemporaries telling stories about New England, he was,
at least following Blackington’s death, arguably the region’s most prominent storyteller
in terms of length of career, quantity of writings, focus on the maritime past, and
historical legacy on the minds and landscape of New England – both in preservation
advocacy and how peopled perceived hundreds of spaces around New England. In this
way, Snow’s career also invites comparison to his contemporary in Nova Scotia,
folklorist Helen Creighton.
Historian Ian McKay has written about Creighton as a part of his work focusing
on how the tourism industry and cultural producers refashioned the identity of rural Nova
343
Advertisement is “New England’s ‘Best Yarns’ by Alton Blackington,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1953,
11. Quotations from back cover and blurb on inside front cover of book jacket of Alton Hall Blackington,
Yankee Yarns (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954).
344
For Snow thanking Blackington see Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (1948) and
Great Gales and Dire Disasters (1952). The decapitation of the Andrew Jackson figurehead of the USS
Constitution in 1834 is a story both men told. Hear Blackington’s March 11, 1951 broadcast at “The Old
Time Radio Flyer 36 ‘Yankee Yarns,’” http://www.squidoo.com/freeoldtimeradioyankeeyarns (accessed
August 1, 2011). Snow told the story in his “Six Bells” radio show on February 24, 1946 according to the
advertisement “hear the HOOD SHOW,” Boston Globe, February 24, 1946, D29.
239
Scotia during the twentieth century. In The Quest of the Folk, he profiles Creighton’s
career from the 1920s through the 1970s as she participated in a process by which “as
tourism, folklore, and handicrafts all developed in the twentieth century, the people of the
fishing villages came to be seen as bearers of Nova Scotia’s cultural essence…. They
came to be represented as stout-hearted, resourceful fisherfolk who led a ‘simple life’ by
the sea, untroubled by urban stresses, nourished by the natural beauty all around them.”
Born in the coastal town of Dartmouth next to the provincial capital of Halifax, on
September 5, 1899, Creighton started out as a local journalist and soon became intrigued
with the stories and songs recalled by people in the rural hinterlands surrounding her
home. In 1929 she visited a small fishing community on Devil’s Island at the entrance to
Halifax’s harbor and found what she described as her “gold mine” in the songs and lore
that its small population possessed. This and subsequent collecting resulted in her first
book in 1932, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia.345
Creighton’s work joined at least six books on Atlantic Canada folklore written
between 1928 and 1935. In both the United States and Canada at this time, middle-class
collectors such as Creighton believed that they were saving a dying art, and their
collecting focused on the oral traditions of rural people of Anglo descent. This “Folk”
was not a self-defined group, but rather a category created by outsiders who believed they
were a rural, apolitical, and self-sufficient people passively conveying traditional songs,
tales, and beliefs without modifying them. McKay traces this fantasy held by urban,
modern, and middle and upper class people back to elite Europeans’ fascination with the
“primitive folk” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the tales collected by
345
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova
Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 4 (definition of Folk), 7 (“gold mine”).
240
Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Perceived as enduring and antimodern, rural working people
became a source of comfort for those stressed by the rapidly changing societies on both
sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inland, this quaint, rural
person was commonly a farmer, artisan, or shopkeeper, while along the coast this folk
character could also be an old fisherman or sailor.346
The American folklore revival in the 1930s spurred Creighton’s career as a
folklorist. After being invited to New York in 1936 to share her folksongs, she received
further exposure at home when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation agreed to do
twenty broadcasts on the folksongs of Nova Scotia in 1938 and 1939 based on her field
work. During World War II she took advantage of the desire by cultural and
governmental organizations for closer cultural ties between the two nations, first with the
Rockefeller Foundation awarding her a fellowship to attend the Institute of Folklore at
the University of Indiana in the summer of 1942, then the loan of recording equipment
from the Library of Congress as she collected for their Archive of American Folk Song,
and finally four Rockefeller grants from 1942 to 1946 that funded her field work. In
1947 she joined the staff of the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa as a museum
adviser, and now had a steady funding source. From this prominent post over the next
two decades Creighton became a nationally-respected folklorist in the 1950s and ‘60s as
she published six books (including a bestseller on ghost stories), made guest appearances
on television, and her work appeared in films, records, a folk opera, and a ballet.347
346
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova
Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 8-12 (history of fascination with Folk), 21
(definition of ‘Folk’), 22 (collectors), 26 (where the Folk lived), 44 (six books), 102 (dying art).
347
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova
Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 75-86.
241
Throughout Creighton’s career she and other folklorists practiced what McKay
calls “cultural selection”: deciding what aspects of the imagined Folk culture were worth
documenting. As Snow told stories of New England’s maritime past based on his own
interests, Creighton explicitly collected folklore of the Maritimes, and especially songs
that excluded class and gender inequality, sexuality, or participation in modern urban
society, industry, and capitalism. It was a living past that supposedly needed to be
sheltered from corrupting modern influences, whether technology or popular music. The
result was a selective version of the culture of the Maritimes that romanticized what were
the very hard lives of working-class modern Canadians from diverse backgrounds
battling economic exploitation, poverty, dangerous working conditions, and often social
or geographical marginalization.348
It’s unknown whether Creighton ever met or corresponded with Snow, though
their interests in Atlantic maritime lore overlapped for several decades. Both reached
audiences through articles, books, lectures, radio, and television. They sometimes sought
stories from the same places, such as the ghosts and legends on Sable Island. Creighton
wrote about the island off the coast of Nova Scotia for a 1931 article, while Snow
actually visited it in 1947 and included his investigation as a chapter of his 1948
Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast. As the shared interest in writing
about ghost stories shows, they both had a romantic view of the past – and both saw the
commercial value in the material they found. As Creighton recorded and disseminated
her own version of Nova Scotia’s rural working class, Snow employed his own historical
348
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova
Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 100-118.
242
shorthand in writing about what principally interested him: pirates, treasure, lighthouses,
shipwrecks, and ghosts.349
Learning what sells
Edward Rowe Snow’s 1946 A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod was his last book
published by the Yankee Publishing Company of Boston. While it would continue to
publish smaller pamphlets of his through 1949, Snow switched to the New York-based
Dodd, Mead and Company for his next book in 1948: Mysteries and Adventures along
the Atlantic Coast. The change between publishers affected how Snow wrote, his books’
numerical and geographical distribution, the type of audience they reached, and how
these readers subsequently understood the New England maritime past.350
With the exception of Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast, all of Snow’s
titles for Yankee Publishing contained New England place names, and even Pirates
dedicated almost half of its content to those from New England. The Yankee books
stretched from 319 to 457 pages, contained a bibliography of published and unpublished
sources, and had at least two-dozen pages of illustrations – a mixture of old photographs
and prints (the latter being copyright free), contemporary photographs taken by Snow or
of him as he participates in various stories, and folded maps with the same historical
whimsy as appeared in his first book. The result was beautiful but expensive hardcovers
costing from $3.75 to $4 in the 1940s, or $40 to $49 in 2010 dollars.
349
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova
Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 60 (Creighton seeing history as romantic),
59 (commercial potential), 75 (commercial potential). Helen Creighton, “Sable Island,” Maclean’s
(December 15, 1931), 14-??.
350
As Snow’s works are the only publications that Yankee appears to have published, it’s possible that he
may have self-published them – though in these books the Yankee Publishing Company is listed as having
an office at 72 Broad Street in Boston. There is apparently no connection between the Yankee Publishing
Company of Boston and Yankee Publishing of Dublin, New Hampshire, which publishes Yankee magazine.
243
The switch to Dodd, Mead and Company standardized, shortened, and shrank
subsequent books to make them more accessible to a wider audience. Started in 1839 by
former minister Moses Woodruff Dodd to publish religious texts, his successors at the
New York firm by the 1860s changed it to a more general publisher – particularly of
popular fiction and juvenile literature. The company eventually published books for
American and British authors such as H.G. Wells, George Barr McCutcheon, Joseph
Conrad, and Agatha Christie; published the New International Encyclopedia for several
decades before selling it to Funk and Wagnalls; and published for poets such as Paul
Laurence Dunbar and Robert Service, in addition to a raft of less-famous mystery and
detective writers.
When Snow signed up with Dodd, Mead and Company in 1948 he bolstered their
non-fiction roster that included works on biography, history, nature, travel, yachting, and
the sea. Snow was perhaps the publisher’s most prolific non-fiction writer, with thirtyfour books from 1948 through 1981. But he was easily bested by his fiction counterparts,
whether Agatha Christie’s over seventy books or Frederick Faust’s nearly 200 works of
medical drama, western, adventure, ghosts, and mysteries published by Dodd, Mead, and
Company under various pseudonyms. Snow benefited from his publisher’s
internationally-known name and advertising power, and it was this exposure and
subsequent commercial success that likely led to the English publisher Alvin Redman
reprinting fourteen of Snow’s books in London between 1957 and 1966, and a French
press publishing an edition of Snow’s 1963 Unsolved Mysteries of Sea and Shore in Paris
244
the following year. Through a large New York-based publisher, Snow brought his
version of maritime New England to a global audience.351
Snow’s books for his new publisher were physically smaller, averaging 276
pages, with sixteen pages of illustrations, no bibliography or footnotes, and the
percentage of titles evoking New England shrank to 26% (9 of 34 full-length books) in
favor of general but dramatic maritime titles such as True Tales of Buried Treasure
(1951), Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (1958), The Fury of the Sea (1964), and
Tales of Terror and Tragedy (1979). However, the majority of stories within these
covers remained tied in some way to New England, whether as the home port of an illfated ship, the site of ghost-haunted towns, or as the place from which the New
Englander Snow set out for his next adventure elsewhere along the Atlantic coast.
Making his titles no longer regionally specific allowed Snow to include dramatic stories
with no New England connection (guaranteeing his pen would never run dry), and also
presumably make his books more marketable nationwide. The unintentional result made
the general maritime past a New England maritime past to Snow’s readers. And by
removing his list of printed sources (though he would continue to thank in his
introduction the places where he did research), these readers could not easily check
Snow’s scholarship, and needed to take him at his word.
Dodd, Mead and Company did not initially lower the cover price of Snow’s
books, but postwar inflation made them more affordable. The $4 for his Great Storms in
1943 was equal to $49.87 in 2010 dollars, while $4 in 1950 for his Secrets of the North
351
History of Dodd, Mead and Company from Gregory Ames, “Dodd, Mead and Company,” in Dictionary
of Literary Biography, Volume 49: American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638-1899, ed. Peter
Dzwonkoski, 1 (Detroit, MI.: Gale Research Co., 1986), 126-130. Foreign editions of Snow’s books listed
in James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist
(Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 19.
245
Atlantic Islands was equal to $35.82 today. For 1951 through 1954 the publisher lowered
the cost of Snow’s books to $3 (about $24 today), which made them affordable to a larger
audience. If the number of editions which these books went though is any indication
(sales figures for either of Snow’s publishers do not survive), they did attract more
buyers. Perhaps because of this success, the publisher raised the price in 1955 back to $4
($32.20 in 2010 dollars). It remained there through 1964, when once again steadily rising
inflation made his The Fury of the Sea drop to the equivalent of $27.81. Even at this
price they continued to sell well, with Women of the Sea landing in the top five of the
non-fiction bestseller list of Boston-area bookshops in early 1963 along with Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and Samuel Eliot
Morison’s memoir One Boy’s Boston.352
While Snow put together his books based on popular themes, he always made
sure that the history therein was visible, evocative, and often tangible. The practice dated
to his childhood interests in family relics and stories and explorations of Boston Harbor.
Starting with his first publication on Castle Island in 1935 and in every one thereafter, he
tried to illustrate as many stories as possible with prints and photographs. When dramatic
storms or shipwrecks occurred along the New England coast, Snow was often there
interviewing people and documenting the scene. In Great Gales and Dire Disasters
(1952) he wrote about the scallop dragger Cape Ann, wrecked on Cape Cod’s Nauset
Beach on March 6, 1948, and ended the story with “To introduce a personal touch,
352
“Best Sellers,” Boston Globe, February 17, 1963, 63. The list credits the Old Corner Book Store,
Gilchrist’s, Lauriat’s, Bay Colony Bookshop, and the Jordan Marsh Company. As several of these
companies had stores outside of Boston, I’m not sure if these books were popular sellers in the city of
Boston, Metro Boston, or the region. The prices of Snow’s books are from book reviews or advertisements
in the Boston Globe. I calculated the modern equivalents of these prices using S. Morgan Friedman, “The
Inflation Calculator,” http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ (accessed January 7, 2013).
246
shortly after the cargo had been unloaded Mrs. Snow and I went aboard and obtained
several of the scallops from the remains of the great cargo…. We were able to obtain
some thrilling pictures of the wreck as the waves swept in and out around it.” This is an
important detail, as it shows Snow as a form of salvager or beachcomber.
Local people have always salvaged usable items from shipwrecks – though for
Snow their value wasn’t in the machinery, cargo, or equipment, but the event itself.
Photographing it, filming it, maybe gathering a souvenir or two, and then writing and
speaking about it was how he profited from wrecks. He certainly didn’t wish for
disasters, but they were part of coastal life. With a radio show and several newspaper
columns he covered them as a journalist. These were important local stories, and he
emphasized the heroism of Coast Guardsmen and others who helped save lives. Locals
have always told and retold stories of wrecks. But as navigation aids and ship designs
improved, the rate of shipwrecks declined and their novelty made them more noteworthy
and valuable to a writer and lecturer – particularly if the incident was well documented
and included danger and drama. And Snow wasn’t the only curious witness. After the
cargo, machinery, and equipment were salvaged from the Cape Ann, tens of thousands of
people visited the wreck for a few months before it broke up. Many in this audience
would likely also be interested in Snow’s future retelling of the incident.353
Snow also sought what remained of his older stories in the present landscape.
Aside from the obvious historic forts and lighthouses, Snow also directed the reader to
sites such as that of the Blue Anchor Tavern on Washington Street where Captain Kidd
once visited (and where the Boston Globe building now stood); a former tunnel in the
353
Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1952), 131.
247
basement of 453 Commercial Street in Boston once used by pirates for smuggling; the
grave of pirate John Lambert in Boston’s King’s Chapel Burying Ground; a house in
Wellfleet where Henry David Thoreau stayed in 1849; Dungeon Rock in Lynn, where a
man spent over a decade digging for treasure; the Ocean Born Mary house in Henniker,
New Hampshire, where once had lived a woman named by a pirate; engraved rocks in the
Dogtown section of Gloucester that marked where a man was killed while fighting a bull;
the grave in Nantucket’s Newtown Burial Ground containing a man’s preserved heart
(and whose belated grave marker Snow helped dedicate); and the burned hulk of WWI
submarine chaser S-241 in the mud of the South River near the Marshfield house where
Snow and his wife had moved in 1950.354
Snow also directed readers to relics of the past no longer in situ. A bell formerly
used at Castle Island was, according to Snow’s research, originally from a Scandinavian
ship that Spanish pirates captured in the seventeenth century, who in turn were captured
by English authorities, one of whom later donated the bell to Boston. Twentieth-century
visitors could now see it on a window sill at the Old State House in Boston. A
photograph of Snow examining the bell with a member of the Bostonian Society (that
now owned it) helpfully showed its shape, size, and inscription. Surviving souvenirs
354
For Capt. Kidd see Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.:
Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 235. For pirate tunnel see Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of
Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 42-45. For Lambert grave see Edward
Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company,
1944), 53. For house Thoreau stayed in see Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston,
MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 123-126. For Dungeon Rock see Edward Rowe Snow,
Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 20-30.
For the Ocean Born Mary house see Edward Rowe Snow, Legends of the New England Coast (New York,
N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 64-68. Fog Dogtown see Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures,
Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 240-249. For the
preserved heart see Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York,
N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 128. For the S-241 see Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore
and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 226233.
248
from the Boston Tea Party included a vial of tea at the Old State House and one of the tea
chests at the Royall House in Medford. For the majority of people who had never seen or
held pirate treasure, Snow loaned a silver coin to the Marine Museum at the Old State
House from a cache he discovered on a Chatham beach in 1945, and instructed the
curator to let any visitor hold it upon their request.
But the majority of artifacts existed outside of museums, in private hands. Snow
collected hundreds of such items from individuals and by digging and diving in the
coastal environment himself. To give but one example, at an auction barn in Marshfield
in 1951 Snow found a sea chest with a painting of the ship Molo on the inside of the lid –
a discovery that gave Snow a new story to investigate and the opening scene for a chapter
in his True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953). The chest was one of many artifacts
that Snow collected and exhibited at his talks and used in book illustrations, along with
weapons, treasure chests, coins, photographs, handcuffs, relics, and human bones. Snow
believed that to see and if possible touch pieces of the past made it come alive.355
As Snow’s own extensive collecting demonstrates, the past was also for sale.
Beginning in 1940 with The Story of Minot’s Light, Snow published limited editions of
his books with slivers of wood attached to the inside cover and endpapers – usually from
famous shipwrecks. Snow likely persuaded his mother to do likewise with limited
editions of her two books, which included pressed ferns and whalebone that she had
collected during the childhood voyages with her parents. Snow also included silver coins
355
For Castle Island bell see Edward Rowe Snow, Castle Island: Its 300 Years of History and Romance
(Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 6 and photograph between pages 30 and 31. Tea Party souvenirs
from Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company,
1944), 49. For silver coin on loan to Old State House see Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried
Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), viii. Molo sea chest from Edward Rowe
Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1953), 204.
249
from his 1945 discovery in two small printings of True Tales of Buried Treasure (1951),
ferns from his mother and wood chips from the schooner Alice S. Wentworth in Women of
the Sea (1962), and a small packet of tea from the Boston Tea Party in a special
Bicentennial edition of Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (1974) along with chips
of wood from the British frigate Somerset and Minot’s Ledge Light.356
The fragments added few, if any, new details to the stories in the books, but as
scholars Rachel Maines and James Glynn have written, these items are valuable for their
status as numinous objects. They are important not “for any visible aesthetic qualities,
but for their association, real or imagined, with some person, place, or event endowed
with special sociocultural magic.” They serve as tangible focal points for expressing
emotions about past people, events, and places both real and imagined.
Snow and his readers were hardly alone in loving relics. Back in 1930, as Mystic
Seaport-founder Carl Cutler readied his manuscript on a history of American clipper
ships for publication with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the firm asked if he could secure wood
from the remains of a clipper to include in a special edition of the forthcoming
Greyhounds of the Seas. They had done a similar treatment with explorer Richard Byrd’s
autobiography Skyward: including in the front cover a piece of cloth from the wing of the
aircraft which he had flown to the North Pole. Cutler agreed, and managed to convince
officials in Melbourne, Australia, to mail him a six-foot-long timber from the remains of
the clipper Lightning, which had sat in the harbor mud since catching fire there in 1869.
That Cutler was able to enlist the help of individuals in another country in valuing a piece
of wood from an old hulk points to the universal appeal of objects with numen. And in a
356
For which publications contain ferns, wood chips, or other relics, see James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe
Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son,
2007), 7-13, 27.
250
half-century of collecting, writing, and lecturing, Edward Rowe Snow saw relics as an
essential part of conveying the past, and selling his version of maritime New England.357
The popularity of pirates
In Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (1958) Snow summarized how he
made a book:
Incredible, miraculous escapes on the high seas from death by drowning and other
violent causes, in the face of overwhelming odds, always intrigue those whom the
ocean attracts. / Beginning in 1935, when my first book was published, I have
received hundreds of letters from readers who have given hints of almost
unbelievable adventures on sea and shore. It has taken many years to check these
stories, and it was often a hard task to become reasonably certain of the accuracy
of what I have been told. From the many score of tales which particularly
appealed to me, I chose the ones included in these nineteen chapters. Now I have
completed the last fragment of research and rescued the last map and picture from
the cellar or attic where they were secreted, and these stories of great sea rescues
and survival on the deep are ready to be presented in this volume. Each of these
accounts has been checked to make sure that it is not now in print in the same
form elsewhere, and they appear here in chronological order.358
Innate interest and reader demand guided Snow’s literary output. This formula of
compiling individual tales sharing a common topic – instead of constructing a history of
that broader topic, such as the evolving technology and practices of survival and rescue at
sea – allowed Snow to quickly write a book a year for his publisher. Surveying the titles
of the thirty-four full-length books which Snow published with Dodd, Mead and
Company annually from 1948 through 1981 show that he grouped his stories around five
357
Rachel P. Maines and James J. Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (Winter
1993): 10. Letter from Carl Cutler to Sherman R. Peabody, the American Trade Commissioner in
Melbourne, dated February 6, 1930. Letter from G. P. Putnam’s Sons to Carl Cutler, dated March 3, 1930.
And letter from Carl Cutler to Mr. MacGillivray at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, dated Oct. 19, 1930. Coll. 100,
Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.
358
Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1958), vii.
251
main topics: pirates, treasure, shipwrecks, lighthouses, and ghosts. Snow also listed his
expertise in these five topics in advertisements for his lectures.359
Of these topics, pirates and their treasure are at the top. These are two of the
largest research files in Snow’s personal papers that he and his family later donated to
Boston University.360 They appear in nearly every Snow book no matter the title. And
the two titles that remained in print the longest during his lifetime were his 1951 True
Tales of Buried Treasure (sixteenth printing by 1967) and his 1953 True Tales of Pirates
and Their Gold (seventh printing by 1966). A typical Snow book stayed in print for only
a year or two.361
Readers also directly corresponded with Snow. From the beginning of his career
as a popular writer, Snow invites the public to share information with him. The end of
his introduction in True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold was typical: “To each of my
readers I wish the best of luck. Feel free to write me at any time, for I am always
interested.” And they did. In 1946 Snow noted in A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod that
since 1935 he had received “approximately 26,000 letters” from readers. Often the
information or stories they shared appeared in future book chapters, and he often credited
them by name. In 1951 Snow was more specific in saying that in the past eleven years he
had received “43,000 letters and communications about hidden gold and silver” alone.
Snow’s publishing success and receiving at least ten fan letters a day about pirates and
359
Snow reproduced the biographical sketch from these advertisements in Edward Rowe Snow, BiCentennial Boston and New England (Marshfield, MA.: E. R. Snow, [c.1976]), 62.
360
Snow gave the first batch of his papers to Boston University in 1969, and his family donated a second
set in 1994.
361
Dodd, Mead and Company printed editions of Snow’s Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic
Coast (1948) in 1955 and 1961, though it’s unclear if the book was continuously in printed from 1948
through 1961. This information from James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer:
A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 8-10 and various
booksellers’ web sites.
252
treasure points to the strong resonance that these subjects had in American society during
the 1950s and ‘60s.362
In writing about pirates, Snow was tapping a centuries-old fascination shared
among people on both sides of the Atlantic (at least those who have never been victims of
them). What historians have called a golden age of piracy lasted from about 1650 to
1730, and breaks down into three generations of pirates. The first lasted until 1680 and
involved Protestant Europeans such as Henry Morgan taking to sea and raiding the ships
and settlements of Catholic Spain – often those in the Caribbean. But it is the second
generation of pirates of the 1690s such as William Kidd and John Avery, and the third
generation from 1716 to 1726 that included Edward Teach or Blackbeard, Mary Read,
Anne Bonny, Samuel Bellamy, and Edward Low that have most captured the popular
imagination with their exploits – and whose ranks include many who once haunted the
New England coast.
Historian Markus Rediker has succinctly written that pirates became such popular
and enduring figures because they were rebels:
They challenged, in one way or another, the conventions of class, race, gender,
and nation. They were poor and in low circumstances, but they expressed high
ideals. Exploited and often abused by merchant captains, they abolished the
wage, established a different discipline, practiced their own kind of democracy
and equality, and provided an alternative model for running the deep-sea ship.
Shadowed by the grim reaper, they stole his symbolism and laughed in his face.
Pirates opposed the high and mighty of their day and by their actions became the
villains of all nations.
As men and women who flouted societal rules and cultural expectations, they
simultaneously garnered praise and condemnation depending upon one’s viewpoint.363
362
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1953), x. Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee
Publishing Company, 1946), 7. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), ix.
253
More precisely, as scholar Hans Turley has written, they became what in popular
culture today are called antiheroes – people who both thrilled and repelled the public.
Turley traces the merger of history and fiction surrounding pirates that turned them into
these romanticized antiheroes to Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the
Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. First published in London in
1724 (with a second volume in 1728), it arrived when the last of the most famous pirates
were being captured or killed, and writers seized upon the sensational reports of violence
and daring coming from news-bearing ships and less-frequent trials in courtrooms. Since
then it has become (at least to Turley) the most influential book on pirates ever written.
As pirates left behind few, if any records (and actively cultivated their own legends and
personality while alive), contemporary writers such as Johnson assembled their
biographies in a way that made the legend and reality impossible to untangle. The result
was sensationalized and demonized figures which subsequent generations of writers have
molded into various romanticized forms according to contemporary needs.364
In Johnson’s wake hundreds of histories, poems, plays, novels, and films for
adults and children alike continued to revise the pirate’s romanticized depiction, from
Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair (1814) to Walter Scott’s novel The Pirate (1832), B.
Barker’s novel Blackbeard; or, the Pirate of the Roanoke (1847), W. S. Gilbert and
Arthur Sullivan’s opera The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island (serialized, 1881-1882; novel, 1883), Captain Hook’s character in J. M.
Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) to the silent film The
363
Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, MA.: Beacon
Press, 2004), 8, 176 (quotation).
364
Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, N.Y.:
New York University Press, 1999), 2-7, 32, and especially 62-72 (“Captain Avery and the Making of an
Antihero”).
254
Black Pirate (1926) which starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and brought the swashbuckling
pirate into movie theaters as a popular character. Errol Flynn’s pirate captain in The Sea
Hawk (1940) joined Burt Lancaster’s acrobatic version in The Crimson Pirate (1952) to
become the most famous pirate films of their respective decades.365
In the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s when first Yankee and then Dodd published Snow’s
books on pirates and their treasure, they were no less a staple of American popular
culture – and reflected the technological advances and societal conditions of the time.
Snow demonstrated the abilities of early metal detecting equipment with a discovery of
pirate treasure on a Cape Cod beach in 1945, and by the 1950s was using scuba gear to
search underwater. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a boom in the popularity of diving.
Diving clubs formed to train and equip would-be recreational scuba divers, and a national
certification organization starting in 1959 to codify that training. Popular films and
television programs such as Sea Hunt (1958-1961) and The Undersea World of Jacques
Cousteau (1966-1976) stoked the public’s fascination for what lay beneath the surface of
the ocean.366
For a subset that included Snow, that fascination included lost treasure. Snow’s
publications were joined by a flood of similar books such as his friend Robert Nesmith’s
Dig for Pirate Treasure (1958), Jane and Barney Crile’s Treasure Diving Holidays
(1954), F. L. Coffman’s 1001 Lost, Buried or Sunken Treasures: Facts for Treasure
Hunters (1957), John Potter Jr.’s The Treasure Diver’s Guide (1960), and Dave Horner’s
365
David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates (New
York, N.Y.: Random House, 1995), 171-176.
366
Home movie footage from the 1950s shows Edward Rowe Snow and Anna-Myrle Snow scuba diving in
Maine, though Snow had been experimenting with breathing underwater since childhood. See “Edward
Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996. National Association of Underwater Instructors,
“NAUI History,” http://www.naui.org/history.aspx (accessed January 7, 2013). NAUI held its first
instructor certification course in 1960. See Sale Perry and Albert Tillman, Scuba America (Olga, WA.:
Whalestooth Publishing, 2001), 85.
255
Shipwrecks, Skin Divers, and Sunken Gold (1965). Much to the dismay of
archaeologists, recreational scuba divers joined traditional hard-hat divers in destroying
shallow-water shipwrecks in the pursuit of anything valuable.
Since 1935 Snow had written about lost treasure and chronicled efforts –
including his own – to find some of it. In the introduction to his 1944 Pirates and
Buccaneers, he estimated that there was $35 million (excluding the contents of the fabled
“Money Pit” on Oak Island off Nova Scotia) buried along the Atlantic coast with “at least
four locations in Massachusetts alone where the prospects of finding coins are good.” In
a 1955 newspaper column he reprinted this excerpt but raised the total to $38.5 million
and described the four locations as “where substantial pirate treasure awaits the lucky
finder.” In both versions he cautioned that “if five percent of this is recovered within the
next century … it will be a miracle.” Still, Snow did not lose faith in the seashore’s
hidden bounty. In 1951 he similarly forewarned his readers that only one out of a
thousand treasure seekers would ever find something. But, Snow demonstrated through
his stories that while treasure was rare, people have found fortunes through hard work
and sometimes just luck.
To underscore both of these points, Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure is
bookended by Snow’s failures but eventual success. In the third chapter “The Pirate Ship
Whidah’s Baffling Hoard,” Snow recounts the wreck of the ship in 1717 off Cape Cod
before confessing that “Personally, I have spent the equivalent of a small treasure hoard
at the scene of the pirate ship’s wreck. There I erected a fifteen-foot diving platform as
near as possible to that part of the Whidah which was said to contain the cannon [spotted
by a local some years earlier]. The weeks went by and the expenses mounted. Diver Jack
256
Poole tried his best to salvage a substantial amount of gold and silver from the wreck, but
a handful of pieces of eight worth at most one-fortieth of the cost of the operation was all
he ever brought to the surface.” A storm later destroyed the platform and Snow gave
up.367
The last chapter, “The King of Calf Island,” is devoted to Snow’s 1945 find on a
Cape Cod beach of a small chest containing 316 coins worth almost $1800. As with his
later discovery on Isle Haute, more valuable than the treasure was the story. In an earlier
visit to the island of Middle Brewster in Boston Harbor, Snow had found a tattered
seventeenth-century Italian book in the basement of an abandoned house. The book had
been stashed there decades before by a former pirate turned lighthouse keeper. A friend
of Snow’s at the Boston Public Library revealed to him pinpricks above certain letters
that suggested a code. After some guesswork Snow realized that it directed him to gold
buried on a beach in the Cape Cod town of Chatham. In an amazing stroke of luck, Snow
found the treasure in less than a week of searching with a metal detector. He
subsequently delighted in recounting the story in newspaper articles, lectures, and his
book. Unlike Drake, Blackington, or other chroniclers of New England tales, Snow was
not just the storyteller. In prowling the coastal environment and picking up a shovel he
made himself part of the narrative.368
367
Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing
Company, 1944), 15. Edward Rowe Snow, “True Tales of the Past: I’m Interested in Pirates!” Brockton
Enterprise, ?, ?, 1955. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1951), vii, 59.
368
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1951), 242-272 (“The King of Calf Island”). While Snow states in this chapter that he spent weeks
searching the sand for the treasure, but a Boston Globe article from September 19, 1945, states that the code
was cracked the night before, while an article from September 28, 1945, announced Snow’s discovery of
the treasure. See “Clew Found to Island Treasure,” Boston Globe, September 19, 1945, 1; and Herbert
Richardson, “Snow Proclaims Finding $2000 in Old Coins Buried at Chatham,” Boston Globe, September
28, 1945, 16.
257
In admitting his failures, Snow sympathized with his readers’ desire for treasure
and usually fruitless efforts to find it. But in his eventual triumph, he lent credence to the
validity of the other stories he carefully selected and expressed his desire that others
would also meet with success. There was also real treasure to inspect at his lectures and
on loan at the museum in the Old State House. And in writing about buried treasure and
pirates in what were apparently his most popular books, Snow again reaffirmed that
exciting maritime history was predominantly New England-based (the majority of
chapters being set in New England), and that his favorite coast was stocked with gold,
both physically and literarily.
While the allure of treasure and pirates clearly stretched across centuries and
cultures, the popularity of Snow’s books on these topics is revealing about the social
conditions of the time during which Snow wrote. Rediker and Turley have written that
key to the public’s attraction to pirates are their rebel/antihero personas. American
society in the 1950s and early 1960s was a time of conformity, of maintaining social
order and putting faith in capitalism, government, family, and God. At this same time,
rebels thrived in popular culture. Actors such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and
musicians such as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash adopted personas that fulfilled a fantasy
of risk, adventure, or danger that most Americans in their button-down lives did not
experience. And as characters blending fiction and history, the pirates of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries similarly enlivened literature, film, and television.
Snow understood his own fascination with pirates as coming from several
sources. He opened his True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953) with an anecdote
about Robert Louis Stevenson visiting the childhood home of Philip Gosse in England
258
and telling adventures tales to Gosse and the other children. Gosse (1879-1959) grew up
to become a naturalist, physician, and, in Snow’s words, “an outstanding writer of true
pirate stories” with his The Pirates’ Who’s Who (1924) and The History of Piracy (1932).
Snow wrote to Gosse and received permission to use this story and several others. “Just
as Stevenson influenced Philip Gosse,” wrote Snow, “so Gosse and his writings have in
turn made me a student of the intriguing subject of piracy.” This story and the personal
connection tied Snow’s works to some of the most famous literature on pirates, and
perhaps made him stand out in the crowded field of pirate and treasure books.369
As the Gosse example and Snow’s own childhood story of the poison dagger that
his grandfather had taken from a pirate demonstrated, children had an early attraction to
pirates that was likely due to the decades-old influence of pirate stories written for them,
such as those by Stevenson and Barrie and contemporary examples such as Earl Schenck
Miers’s Pirate Chase (1965). Published by Colonial Williamsburg, it shows that even a
professional museum wasn’t above pointing out its hometown connection to Blackbeard
in an attempt to interest children in American history. But as Snow cautioned in 1953,
Of course, this feeling of adventure which everyone has experienced at one time
or another does not mean we accept piracy as right and proper. It is really
because the picturesque stories stimulate our imagination that we enjoy reading
about these infamous careers. Whatever we think about their cruelty and
wickedness, we must admit they were matched by their bravery and fortitude.370
Safely in the distant past, Snow’s pirate stories provided modern readers with vivid
performances of often horrible people who still possessed some redeeming qualities such
as bravery.
369
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1953), vii-viii. “Dr. Philip Gosse, 80, Expert on Pirates,” New York Times, October 6, 1959, 39.
370
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1953), ix.
259
But pirate stories themselves had another redeeming quality. As nearly all of
these pirates came to early and violent deaths, there was a strong moral lesson embedded
in these tales. For instance, in Pirates and Buccaneers Snow opened the chapter on
Edward Low with the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth presiding over Low’s marriage to
Eliza Marble on August 12, 1714 in a Boston church. Snow next said that Wadsworth
went on to become the president of Harvard College, while Low a year later became a
pirate who eventually became so depraved that his crew set him adrift in an open boat to
die at sea. The author clearly showed the intersection between the paths of virtue and
vice, and the consequences of each choice.371
Snow devoted ample space to the trials and executions of many pirates – partially
because court records and newspapers articles are two of the largest primary sources
about them. He frequently mentioned priests and ministers visiting pirates during their
imprisonment and trials, and administering to them shortly before their executions. None
of these men counseling the sinners was more famous than the Reverend Cotton Mather.
Pastor of the Second Church in Boston from 1685 to 1728, Mather was one of America’s
most influential religious leaders, writing hundreds of books and pamphlets and
participating in the major events around Boston, whether encouraging inoculation during
a smallpox outbreak, advising his fellow ministers running the Salem Witch Trials, or his
more common duties of preaching against sin and counseling accused criminals. The
goal was to get the pirates to repent their sins.
While many of the condemned did feel remorse, and gave speeches on the
gallows warning others to not follow in their paths, unrepentant pirates such as William
371
Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing
Company, 1944), 183.
260
Fly in 1726 instead called for fair treatment of sailors as a way to prevent piracy. For
those who were convicted and hanged, their bodies were sometimes gibbeted on Bird
Island or the island of Nix’s Mate in Boston Harbor as a warning against piracy. The
untimely deaths of most pirates either in battle or through trial and execution a century or
two earlier made them salacious but ultimately safe stories. And to pursue their treasure,
whether as a reader of Snow’s books or an active hunter in his footsteps, carried with it
no risk of moral corruption.372
Snow’s public reception
Aside from Edward Rowe Snow being able to make a living writing about
maritime topics with wide appeal, his books going through multiple printings, and
receiving a stack of fan mail each day, it’s worthwhile to gauge his public reception
through the reviews that accompanied the publication of each book. For here was the
chance for a public critique of his work, to judge it against not only previous books but
those of his contemporaries.
Snow’s books were most often reviewed in the Boston Globe, with an occasional
supplemental review in another paper or journal. The newspaper reviews are usually
between October and January, which suggests that the publisher released them late in the
year in time for Christmas. And several reviewers duly recommend the books as holiday
gifts. Dorothy Wayman, in reviewing A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod in 1946, like most
later reviewers found Snow informative and entertaining – “maritime plum duff” for the
372
Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing
Company, 1944), 38, 40-42, 52, 66-67, 137. Snow repeats Fly’s story in Edward Rowe Snow, Piracy,
Mutiny and Murder (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1959), 23-34. See also Marcus Rediker,
Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 2004), 1-5,
261
book’s “solid facts … so deliciously sprinkled throughout with ‘plums’ in the way of
anecdote.” Henry C. Kittredge writing in The New England Quarterly was less
enthusiastic about the book, and devoted half the review detailing the factual errors in the
text and accompanying map. However, this was a characteristically sharp review by the
teacher, writer, and Cape Cod native who took his historical accuracy seriously – and
perhaps particularly so for non-locals chronicling his region.373
With few exceptions, the reviews through the 1940s and ‘50s are positive, at
times glowing, such as Whit Sawyer’s claim that parts of Secrets of the North Atlantic
Islands (1950) “will hold you in a spell.” Samuel Eliot Morison gave his second and
apparently last Snow review in New England Quarterly, applauding his former student’s
goal to separate fact from fiction in Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast
(1948), creating “a fine companion for a winter fireside.” J. Malcolm Barter reviewed
True Tales of Buried Treasure (1953) alongside George Woodbury’s The Great Days of
Piracy in the West Indies. Barter found that the history and the compiled tales
complemented each other, as Woodbury was the “down-to-earth writer” and Snow the
“historical romanticist” for his (not-unfounded) belief in buried treasure. Writing for the
William and Mary Quarterly, Martha’s Vineyard newspaper editor Henry Beetle Hough,
however, was frustrated at Snow’s tales being “set down … without any attempt at order
or organization” but concluded that those in Great Gales and Dire Disasters (1952) were
373
Dorothy G. Wayman, “Maritime Plum Duff,” Boston Globe, October 31, 1946, 15. Henry C. Kittredge,
review of A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod by Edward Rowe Snow, The New England Quarterly 20, no. 1
(March, 1947): 130-131. For a compilation of other reviews see David Kew, “book reviews by Henry C.
Kittredge,” http://capecodhistory.us/20th/Kittredge-reviews.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
262
still “told in an informal style appropriate to Mr. Snow’s purpose” – which presumably
was to entertain and inform a general/middlebrow audience with sea stories.374
The only Snow book to receive a review in the New York Times, Edward B.
Garside had nothing but praise in January of 1959 for Great Sea Rescues and its author.
In proclaiming “For my money he is just about the best chronicler of the days of sail
alive,” he gave Snow a valuable quote that he used thereafter in promoting his lectures.
He further described him as the quintessential salty New Englander:
Mr. Snow is one of those rare writing people who is perfectly in tune with his
chosen subject. He even looks the part, a big, strikingly handsome man, with a
mane of graying hair, rosy complexion and bright blue eyes. No trouble at all to
imagine him striding the poopdeck, like any number of his ancestors…
In Garside’s estimation, Snow was a modern old salt, a Yankee who had chosen to
remain ashore and chronicle his world for the entertainment and education of the general
public. His writing style was “fresh and simple,” and “spiced with just enough quaintly
old-fashioned allusion to insure the evocation of the past.” As “quaint” was a term used
by writers for decades to describe New England’s old coastal towns and their people, to
apply it to Snow’s writings further fixed him as representative of his home
environment.375
Snow’s most frequent reviewer in the 1950s and ‘60s was Earl Banner, a Boston
Globe reporter who specialized in covering the city’s fishing industry. Banner started
reporting in 1935, the same year Snow began publishing, and was also a graduate of
374
Whit Sawyer, “Islands and Mystery,” Boston Globe, November 19, 1950, A19. Samuel Eliot Morison,
review of Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast by Edward Rowe Snow, The New England
Quarterly 23, no. 2 (June, 1950): 282. J. Malcolm Barter, “Pirates and Buried Treasure,” Boston Globe,
December 2, 1951, A29. Henry Beetle Hough, review of Great Gales and Dire Disasters by Edward Rowe
Snow, The William and Mary Quarterly 10, no. 2 (April, 1953): 322-323.
375
Edward B. Garside, “Salty Yarns of Survival,” New York Times, January 25, 1959, BR16. For the New
England coast as quaint see chapter 10 of John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University
Press, 1994), 295-333; and chapter 4 of Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the
Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 105-134.
263
Boston University and lived in Marshfield. Banner was frank in his reviews. He found
the first part of the bestselling True Tales of Pirates and their Gold (1953) “rather heavy
going” due to the writing style and the subject matter “heavily padded out with
inconsequential detail.” But the book was redeemed by one Hollywood-worthy story of a
local female pirate. Of Snow’s Famous New England Lighthouses (1955) he found it
satisfying for the “legions of Snow fans who literally eat up his hair-raising tales of
derring-do and adventure on the high seas” as well as “a good buy” “for the fellow who
reacts even faintly to the spell of the oceans.” And The Vengeful Sea (1956) was
“Snow’s best.” He credited Snow with solving the mystery of the sinking of the steamer
Portland in 1898, and even attempted to bring in new readers with “If you were ‘allergic’
to Mr. Snow’s style and choice of subjects before now, try this one on for size. Few who
do will regret it.”376
But three years later Snow went too far. Banner found Piracy, Mutiny and
Murder (1959) “by far the bloodiest, most grisly, and least salty of anything he has
done.” While Banner apparently enjoyed pirate tales and their corresponding violence,
he loathed these “case histories of some of the most brutal and senseless murders in the
history of New England.” Apparently speaking for his audience, Banner concluded that
“we wish Edward Rowe Snow would pick up that oar and head shoreward again.” In
twenty-five years of writing, Snow sometimes included landlocked stories, and disasters
376
“Earl D. Banner, 80 Globe Reporter for 40 years,” Boston Globe, November 1, 1991, 77. Earl Banner,
“Many a Pirate Came from Boston,” Boston Globe, November 1, 1953, A29. Earl Banner, “Any
Lighthouses Left?” Boston Globe, December 4, 1955, 38C. Earl Banner, “Here’s Snow’s Best,” Boston
Globe, October 7, 1956, B18.
264
or violence were part of every book. But Banner enjoyed Snow as a maritime writer, and
reproached him when he strayed too far from the waterfront.377
Despite Snow’s subsequent return to maritime topics, Banner found new points of
criticism in Snow’s almost automated schedule of publishing and recycling of stories.
For Women of the Sea he warned that “Snow is beginning to revive stories that he has
related before now,” while his harshest criticism came out for True Tales of Terrible
Shipwrecks (1963). The author was an “outwardly well-adjusted Yankee yarn spinner
[who] was probably driven to turn out yet one more Snow job by the perfectly normal
and healthy desire to make an honest buck.” He specifically called out Snow for his
repeated retelling of two stories, with “large chunks of this current retelling … were lifted
verbatim from Snow’s 1956 offering, ‘The Vengeful Sea’ (and he apologized then for
retelling a story that had been part of his 1943 ‘Storms and Shipwrecks’).” Labeling the
book “yet one more Snow job” turned Snow’s admirable productivity into a fraudulent
attempt to repackage and resell old stories to devoted fans.
At least for some reviewers such as Banner and “P.H.” – who found the writing in
Astounding Tales of the Sea (1966) “old-fashioned and slow-paced” with “Profuse
quotes,” that “while lending to authenticity, slow down the narratives” – Snow was
retreading his past successes to an unreceptive modern audience. While reviewers such
as Robert Soares’s proclamation for Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities
(1979) that Snow was “especially worthy of the term master story teller in his vivid
reconstructions of events at sea,” he either didn’t know or didn’t care to admit that at
least three of the chapters were taken from earlier Snow books that were now out of print.
While back in 1948 a reviewer found Snow’s work to be fresh and “more absorbingly
377
Earl Banner, “Ed Snow Goes Ashore,” Boston Globe, December 20, 1959, A25.
265
different than any sea tales told for landlubbers,” by retelling the same stories Snow was
shortchanging his loyal readers as well as refusing to change the maritime portrait of New
England that he had carefully crafted from the 1930s through the 1950s. The result was
that Snow’s work became outdated just like the era of sail he loved to chronicle.378
Regardless of the opinion of one review of a single Snow book, what mattered
more to him were the opinions of the people who inhabited his maritime world. And to
them, over decades of visits, interviews, letters and phone calls, he became someone who
not only sought interesting maritime stories, but as someone whom this audience
sometimes sought as a sort of maritime confessional. They had followed his stories on
radio, in the newspaper, and through copies of his books that he often gave during visits
or dropped in Flying Santa care packages, and decided that he was fair and
knowledgeable enough to be entrusted with the airing of their coastal secrets.
Three examples from Snow’s five favorite topics provide a sense of his position.
When a man named James Staples was about to undergo a serious operation at Boston
Hospital he called Snow to correct details about a shipwreck. Snow recorded their
interview on August 20, 1950. Back in February of 1907 Staples was a quartermaster
aboard the steamer Larchmont when it collided with the schooner Harry Knowlton off
Block Island. Staples was one of only nineteen survivors. As the passenger list went
down with the Larchmont the official death toll was estimated at 131. But Staples
confessed to Snow that having counted the passengers as they boarded in New York at
the start of the voyage, he believed that at least 332 people had died when the ship sank.
This detail elevated the 1907 collision to the worst maritime disaster in New England
378
Earl Banner, “Two Great Unknowns,” Boston Globe, November 11, 1962, A80. Earl Banner, “More
Sea Disasters,” Boston Globe, November 24, 1963, A57. P.H., “Sea Sagas,” Boston Globe, February 20,
1966, A36. Robert Soares, “Of mystery and adventure,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1979, C11.
266
history. Snow didn’t say whether Staples survived the surgery, but he published
Staples’s new figure in Great Gales and Dire Disasters (1952).379
On a more personal scale, when Snow was autographing books in a Boston
department store in December 1954, a man named Augustus Reekast tapped him on the
arm. Snow had previously interviewed him about a murder on Middle Brewster Island in
1923. A boy had been shot by a concealed rifle when he tried to enter the house of the
island’s caretaker. Brought to the nearby Boston Light, he died of his wounds in the
keeper’s kitchen. Now that the shooter in the story had died, Reekast wanted to give the
full details. They met later that evening and Reekast told Snow that the man named
Hjalmar Roos had intended to kill him after he accused Roos of theft. But Roos had
rigged a gun that accidentally shot the boy when he attempted to enter the house instead
of Reekast.380
Lastly, on November 15, 1970 the remains of a large sea creature over thirty feet
long washed ashore at Mann Hill Beach in Scituate. When rumors spread that it was a
sea serpent thousands flocked to the beach, including Snow. Though scientists quickly
determined that it was the decomposing carcass of a basking shark, Snow remained
skeptical that it was not a sea serpent, and duly included the story and photographs of the
carcass in Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (1974). The public stance attracted
the attention of Cameron Dewar, who had worked for Boston newspapers for several
decades. Dewar revealed to Snow that he had been born near Loch Ness in Scotland, and
379
Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1952), 126-127. Edwin J. Park, “Horror is Described,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1907, 1.
380
Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1977), 54-58. Edward Rowe Snow, Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1974), 134-138. Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales
(New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 235-236.
267
at the age of five or six witnessed the famous monster crossing a field and a road before
entering the loch. Perhaps wanting to protect Dewar’s reputation, Snow waited until after
his death in 1973 before printing his testimony in Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales
(1977).381
As the Dewar and other examples show, Snow had a deep sympathy for his
subjects and would wait years and sometimes decades for permission to tell a story.382
His open-mindedness about the possibility of ghosts and sea serpents did not enhance his
reputation with academics, but it did help make him a popular public figure, whether as a
source of historical entertainment or a sympathetic listener. As Snow advertised through
his books, articles, lectures, and tours his interest in stories centered around shipwrecks,
pirates, lighthouses, treasure, and the supernatural, this picture of the maritime past, and
of the New England maritime past in particular, was reflected back to him by the fans
who shared these interests. Critics rightly pointed out the shortcuts Snow took – either at
the suggestion of his publisher or his own initiative – in recycling older stories for current
readers. But Snow had a hard time letting go of a good story, and his continued presence
on the bookshelf and in regional newspapers from the 1930s until his death fifty years
later suggests that his audience didn’t mind. As Snow made a living from interesting
stories, people who talked to Snow about an alluring anecdote were well aware of the
possibility that they might subsequently play a small role in his coastal productions.
381
David Taylor, “Thousands View Huge Carcass,” Boston Globe, November 16, 1970, 1. Snow is
mentioned in this article: “According to Edward Rowe Snow, a chronicler of New England maritime
history, such creatures were spotted during the 1700s in Gloucester and Plymouth, and the carcass of a
similar creature washed ashore some time around 1850.” Diane White, “500 view burial of ‘sea serpent’ on
Scituate beach,” Boston Globe, November 17, 1970, 3. “Cameron Dewar, newsman in Boston for 30
years,” Boston Globe, January 16, 1973, 32.
382
For other examples of Snow waiting decades before telling a story, see Edward Rowe Snow, The Fury
of the Seas (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964), 176, and Edward Rowe Snow, Boston
Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 222.
268
Artful history
Key to this successful production was the ways in which Snow artfully presented
history in his books and lectures by using a combination of rigorous research and tonguein-cheek, dramatic performance. In his books for Yankee Publishing he carefully listed
his sources in endnotes or a bibliography. He dropped these for Dodd, Mead and
Company, but continued to thank an average of forty-five people by name for their
assistance in helping to prepare each book, and the research help of an average of thirteen
organizations per book that most often included the American Antiquarian Society in
Worcester, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library, Bostonian
Society, Boston Athenaeum, National Archives (presumably the local branch in
Waltham), Harvard College Library, and the Peabody Museum and Essex Institute of
Salem, Massachusetts.
This documented truthfulness seems to be how Snow sought to distinguish
himself among the many New England storytellers. He included the word in four book
titles as well as the name of his column in the Brockton Enterprise.383 Since The Islands
of Boston Harbor in 1935, Snow repeatedly emphasized that what he was telling was, to
his knowledge, true. In his early books, when he couldn’t verify the truth himself, he
tried to get the reader as close as possible – whether as an explanation for an explosion in
1901 that came from a contact “with a reputation for truthfulness” or in accounting for a
tunnel built by a pirate under the Boston waterfront with “While we cannot vouch for the
story about him that has come down through the years to the present generation, we
383
True Tales of Buried Treasure (1951); True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953); True Tales of
Terrible Shipwrecks (1963); True Tales and Curious Legends: Dramatic Stories from the Yankee Past
(1969); Snow’s column written for the Brockton Enterprise was “True Tales of the Past”.
269
believe what follows is essentially correct.”384
Even for this interest in pirates, who
were a blend of fact and fiction (a condition that often appealed to writers and readers
alike), he attempted to strain out the latter. The preface of Pirates and Buccaneers
(1944) opens with Snow arguing for historical accuracy:
This is no collection of Old Wives’ Tales, half-myth, half-truth, handed down
from year to year with the story more distorted with each telling, not is it a work
of fiction. This book is an accurate account of the most outstanding pirates who
ever visited the shores of the Atlantic Coast. / These are stories of stark realism.
None of the artificial school of sheltered existence is included. Except for the
extreme profanity, blasphemy, and obscenity in which most pirates were adept,
everything has been included which is essential for the reader to get a true and fair
picture of the life of a sea-rover.385
And echoed again in the introductions to many of his books, of which these three span
three decades of his writing career:
384

Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast (1948): “A further reason for
this book was my desire to correct many erroneous accounts of adventure and
drama along the Atlantic Coast. From time immemorial, it seems, there have
been writers who believed it their special privilege to color and exaggerate the
truth and thereby mislead the reading public. Their errors have often become
accepted as facts, and, frequently, it is too late to set the record straight. But I
have tried here to correct many falsehoods and mistakes, and I have found in
nearly every case that the truth, although more difficult to discover, has proved
more interesting than the ‘colorful’ distortion.”386

True Tales of Buried Treasure (1951): “Although in this volume you will read of
millions of dollars recovered from land and sea, every one of them believed to be
true stories, it is naturally impossible for all those who seek it to find buried
treasure.” “I have chosen over fifty true stories from almost 600 which I
investigated, true stories about the finding of buried treasure.”387
Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover,
MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 195 (1901 explosion at Fort Winthrop). Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of
Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 42 (pirate tunnel).
385
Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing
Company, 1944), 9.
386
Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1948), viii.
387
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1951), vii-viii.
270

Fantastic Folklore and Fact (1968): “New England is one of the richest regions in
the world in folklore and legend, as well as in bizarre but true tales. I have
attempted to choose from hundreds of examples some that have interested me the
most, and trust you enjoy my selection.”388
In taking the position of discriminating truth-teller, Snow attempted to bond with his
readers over his promise to not mislead them, as so many writers in the past had done. In
the chapters of these and other books Snow stressed his focus on the truth, and took on
past and current writers – sometimes by name – who had, to him, preferred “‘colorful’
distortion” over accurate storytelling. Perhaps the best example is how he addressed the
story of the Mary Celeste, a brigantine that was found drifting in the mid-Atlantic with no
one aboard on December 4, 1872.
In investigating what Snow called “one of the world’s greatest mystery vessels”
and “the great mystery of the Atlantic,” he flew to Nova Scotia, where the vessel was
launched and spent its early years, in order to reconstruct its history from the beginning.
“I wished to be certain of every fact long before I was ready to report it,” stressed
Snow.389 After spending five and a half pages telling what he felt was the correct version
of the ship’s discovery, he devoted the remaining fourteen pages of the chapter to
covering what other writers have said about the Mary Celeste and his own view of what
likely happened instead. Only four of some eighty-seven accounts of the mystery that
Snow had reviewed “made any pretense of acquainting themselves with the facts,” while
the remainder was either “careless compilers of facts or outright falsifiers of the truth.”
He particularly directed blame at writers Arthur Conan Doyle and P. T. McGrath, and the
otherwise commendable naval historian John R. Spears for their erroneous magazine
388
Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York,
N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), viii.
389
Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1948), 311, 331.
271
articles; publicity-hungry seamen who claimed to have been part of the crew; and
Laurence Keating’s 1929 book The Great Mary Celeste Hoax, which claimed to solve the
mystery but was itself a hoax. Snow ended his chapter with his belief that the only
plausible explanation was that the crew feared the Celeste’s cargo of alcohol was in
imminent danger of exploding and hastily abandoned the ship.390
In choosing a popular story with New England connections (e.g. in 1872 the Mary
Celeste’s captain was from Massachusetts and the mate from Maine), detailing his own
research of the story, dissecting the poor scholarship of others, telling what he believed
was the true version, and naming other respectable sources for further information
(though long out of print) encapsulates Snow’s approach to writing about the past. And
the example shows that Snow didn’t blindly accept and pass along a story as he first
encountered it – even if that version had more alluring details. Years later in the
dedication of his 1968 book, Snow credited his method to friend and mentor Dr. Robert
Earl Moody “who, more than a quarter of a century ago, taught me the importance of
accuracy and truth.”391
But on this base of facts Snow added salt in the form of dialogue, qualifiers, and
superlatives. Most commonly, Snow used dialogue in many – but not all – of his stories,
whether set in the seventeenth century or the present. The purpose of the dialogue was to
pump up the drama at key points, such as between the captain and second mate of the Dei
Gratia when they first discovered the drifting Mary Celeste:
Let us go back to the year 1872 and join the crew of a British brigantine, the Dei
Gratia, almost three weeks out from New York. It is December 4. The position
390
Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1948), 311-325.
391
Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York,
N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), v.
272
of the vessel is about halfway between the Azores and Portugal, and the course is
southeast a half east. The seas are running high, but not dangerously so. The
wind is steady from the northeast as Captain David R. Morehouse, master of the
brigantine, speaks to Second Mate John Wright.
“Mr. Wright, what are we logging?”
“Still two knots, sir,” comes the answer. “The wind is falling off.”
“Mr. Wright, look there, off the port bow. Is that a sail?”
“Yes, sir. In fact, I was about to tell you, sir,” replies Wright.
“Why, that’s strange,” continues Captain Morehouse, “for there doesn’t seem to
be more than one sail set on her forward stick. But she’s hull down yet, and it’s
hard to tell. Here, let me put the glass on her.” A moment passes, and then
Captain Morehouse gives a shout!
“I can make her out now. […] Why, I can’t see a soul on deck at all!”
Half an hour later the Dei Gratia has come up on the strange, crewless
brigantine. […] Captain Morehouse is able to reader he name. He spells it out,
“M-A-R-Y, Mary, C-E-L-E-S-T-E, Celeste. Why, that’s Captain Briggs’ vessel!
We had dinner together in New York the night before he sailed. What can have
happened to him?”392
In order to tell the story in the most evocative light, he guides the reader into the past, sets
the place and conditions (based upon actual weather reports and logbook data), and
employs nautical terminology that is both pedestrian and believable. Representative of
the dialogue that Snow used in stories spanning four centuries, he does not say whether
Morehouse and Wright actually exchanged these words. There are three possible
explanations. The dialogue is either invented by Snow to give the story more drama,
quoted by Snow from another source that invented it, or quoted from the original speaker
or speakers. As Snow stopped including endnotes and bibliographies when he started
publishing with Dodd, Mead and Company, it’s impossible to fact-check his stories
unless one is already familiar with the primary sources for a given tale. For the vast
majority of Snow’s readers, they just had to guess.
392
Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1948), 311-312.
273
Other forms of salt included Snow’s frequent use of superlatives and qualifiers. In
an interview for a 1996 television documentary on Edward Rowe Snow, the editor of
Yankee magazine, Judson Hale, recalled Snow’s approach to telling about the past:
He was kind of New England’s P. T. Barnum. And I don’t mean that in any
critical sense. But he was able to promote his stories in a kind of flamboyant way.
It didn’t mean they weren’t true – they were – but, you know, some of his favorite
words were “unbelievable,” “astounding,” “the most incredible rescue feat in the
history of New England.” And he would cover himself. He would say
“reportedly,” or, “it is said,” you know. He was quite a guy.393
Hale joined the magazine in 1958 and was long familiar with Snow, who had written
twenty-one articles for Yankee between 1957 and 1967. Yankee had started publishing in
1935, the same year Snow released his first book, and over the coming decades both
helped to shape the public’s understanding of the region, locally and nationally.394
Whether “the greatest mass execution,” “the greatest cutthroat,” “the greatest lifesaver,”
or “the greatest disaster,” it’s easy to find superlatives in Snow’s articles and books. And
throughout his writings Snow indeed covered himself with qualifiers such as "it is said,”
“legend has it,” and “was reputed to be.” Often these appear in stories about the
supernatural, or ones set several centuries ago when records of the event are scarce and
the facts mix with legends.395
393
“Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996.
Yankee Publishing Inc., “Yankee History: A Brief History of Yankee Magazine,”
http://www.yankeemagazine.com/about/yankeehistory.php (accessed January 7, 2013). Historian Joseph
Conforti has written about how Yankee magazine helped to shape the regional identity of New England.
See Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to
the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 287-309.
395
“[T]he greatest mass execution in New England history” was the hanging of 26 pirates in Newport on
July 19, 1723. Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1950), 257. Blackbeard as “the greatest cutthroat of them all” is from ibid., 2. Edward
Rowe Snow, “World’s Greatest Lifesaver,” Yankee, August 1964, 54. This is likely Joshua James of Hull,
Massachusetts. “[T]he greatest sea disaster ever to occur on the mainland of the North American
continent” was the sinking of the steamer Atlantic in 1873 with the loss of 481 lives. Edward Rowe Snow,
Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1952), 13. Great Gales is
an excellent example of Snow’s love of superlatives. For an example of a supernatural qualifier: “Every
section of Massachusetts has its legend or ghost, and Cape Cod is no exception to the rule.” “Many in
394
274
One story above all best represents Snow’s transformation from a cautious
historian to a colorful storyteller: the Lady in Black. Snow’s most popular ghost story
was about a female Southerner supposedly hanged as a spy at Fort Warren on George’s
Island in Boston Harbor during the Civil War. His first version appeared in The Islands
of Boston Harbor (1935) and begins with:
Every island has its legends, but perhaps the most famous of them all concerns the
Lady in Black at Fort Warren. The legend of this famous Lady in Black has been
whispered at Fort Warren for many, many years, until now there are quite a few
who believe in the existence of this lady of the black robes. I hereby offer the
reader the legend without the slightest guarantee that any part of it is true.
Snow then relates in a two-page story how during the Civil War one of the Confederate
prisoners at the fort was a “young lieutenant who had been married only a few weeks
before.” The man managed to send a message to his wife, who journeyed from the South
to Hull, Massachusetts, a peninsula and town a mile from the island. A Southern
sympathizer gave her men’s clothing and a pistol, and one “dark, rainy night” she rowed
to the island, snuck into the fort, and found her captured husband.
Emboldened by her actions, the prisoners decided to dig an escape tunnel. Alert
guards, however, quickly detected the diggers. When Colonel Dimick (the fort’s
commanding officer) and soldiers confronted the prisoners, the woman attempted to
shoot the colonel. But, the old pistol exploded, killing her husband instead. Dimick
ordered the woman hanged as a spy, and as a last request she asked to wear women’s
clothing. “After a search of the fort, some robes were found which had been worn by one
of the soldiers during an entertainment, and the plucky girl went to her death wearing
Osterville are said to have heard the screech” of the ghost of a girl named Hannah the Screacher, who was
killed by pirates and buried along with their treasure to keep the secret two centuries ago on Oyster Island.
Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946),
326.
275
these robes.” Snow ended by chronicling, again without names or dates, “the various
times through the years [that] the ghost of the Lady in Black has returned to haunt the
men quartered at the fort.”396
This initial version is the shortest and the least specific – no dates, dialogue, or
names of the Confederate woman and her husband. Snow included the story, unchanged,
in The Romance of Boston Bay (1944). But by 1950 his approach had changed. He
included the story as a part of the “Islands of Boston Bay” chapter in Secrets of the North
Atlantic Islands. It now spanned seven and a half pages. Gone is Snow’s disclaimer that
the story had no basis in fact. And Snow is remarkably specific. The woman arrived in
Massachusetts aboard a blockade runner two and a half months after receiving word from
her imprisoned husband. She made her way from Cape Cod to Hull and studied the fort
through a telescope “for a few days” before a Southern sympathizer rowed her to
George’s Island. Snow then describes her evasion of two sentries on patrol in the rain
before reaching the fort’s walls and climbing inside. She brought a pick with her in
addition to her pistol, which the prisoners would now use to dig a tunnel out of their
dungeon, capture the Union soldiers, and turn the fort’s guns on the city of Boston.
After the men spent weeks digging and disposing of the dirt, sentries eventually
detected the tunnel and commanding officer Colonel Justin E. Dimick confronted the
prisoners ten minutes after the discovery of the escape attempt. Snow adds dialogue
when Dimick confronts the prisoners, when the woman threatens to shoot Dimick (who
raised his hands in mock surrender but then swatted away the gun), and when she
requested to wear a dress for her execution. Snow also details and expands the number of
396
Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover,
MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 72-73.
276
Lady in Black encounters, the last of which dated to 1947 and was related to him by the
man who experienced it, “Captain Charles I. Norris of Towson, Maryland.” In naming
his contact and including his hometown and even the dialogue spoken during the
incident, Snow connects the story to the present day and provides a verifiable source that
lends credence to the entire story.397
Snow also provides photographic proof for the first time. One of the book’s
eighteen illustrations is a cropped old photograph showing eight uniformed men and one
woman gathered around a large cannon. The woman wears a dark full-length dress and
hat. The caption is unambiguous: “The famous Lady in Black whose ghost still haunts
Fort Warren. This picture was taken just before she was hanged as a spy.” By 1950,
Snow had matured as a writer, adapting earlier stories with dialogue and details that
could not possibly all exist in the written records he pursued at local libraries, museums,
and archives. The cautious historian whose early books included notes and
bibliographies was now a seasoned storyteller whom readers just had to believe, or not.398
The story continued to grow. For the 1964 Yankee article “Boston’s Lady in
Black,” Snow identified the Confederate soldier as Andrew Lanier from Crawfordville,
Georgia, and included not only his wedding date to the still anonymous Mrs. Lanier (June
28, 1861), but the night she arrived on Georges Island (January 15, 1862), and the day of
her execution (February 2, 1862). Snow also includes the full version of the photograph
397
Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944),
200-202. Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1950), 70-77.
398
The photograph is between pages 84 and 85 of Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic
Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950). Snow spells Dimick’s name as “Dimmick”
in 1935 and 1944 versions, and as “Dimmock” in the 1950 version, but as his gravestone in the Proprietors
Burying Ground in Portsmouth, N.H. says “Justin Dimick,” this is the version I’m using. Russ Dodge,
“Justin Dimick,” http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=19852 (accessed January 7,
2013).
277
he had cropped in his 1950 book, which depicted “Part of the garrison at Ft. Warren in
1862. The author feels that the woman in the upper right is very possibly the ‘Lady in
Black,’ herself!” Despite Snow’s precise details, writer Jay Schmidt in a 2003 book on
Fort Warren could not find any evidence that a woman was executed at the fort. Nor
does a 1955 PhD dissertation on prison conditions at Fort Warren mention the execution
of a female spy. While most of the fort’s official records were destroyed after it was
decommissioned in 1946, the lack of any mention in the local newspapers of what would
have been a sensational story led Schmidt to conclude that it was merely a popular
legend, embellished by generations of soldiers, and blamed for unexplained events.399
Regardless of the veracity of the original tale, in both the 1950 and 1964 versions
Snow concluded with describing how the legend became part of a performance. In
preparation for an officers’ party at some unknown date, one of the fort’s commanders
had a wooden box built into the dirt floor in the “Corridor of Dungeons,” where the
Confederate soldiers had once been imprisoned. Then,
Whenever newcomers enter the Corridor of Dungeons, the ritual first performed
at the officers’ dance is repeated. A small soldier, or perhaps a girl, is dressed in
black and taken up to the casemate ahead of the others. The “Lady” of the
particularly occasion is placed in the coffin and the lid is closed over her. The
unsuspecting guests enter the casemate and gather around the story-teller, who,
with proper embellishment, tells the tragic history of the Lady in Black. At the
end of the story, and usually with a flourish, the narrator swings open wide the
cover of the casket, whereupon, with a blood-curdling scream, the Lady in Black
leaps to her feet. Visitors who have been fortunate enough to see this
performance are never likely to forget it.400
Snow was not describing a bygone practice. In the years following World War II
thousands of visitors began arriving at the now deactivated and mostly abandoned fort
399
Edward Rowe Snow, “Boston’s Lady in Black,” Yankee, July 1964, 68. Jay Schmidt, Fort Warren:
New England’s Most Historic Civil War Site (Amherst, N.H.: UBT Press, 2003), 4-5. Minor H. McLain,
“Prison Conditions in Fort Warren, Boston, During the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1955).
400
Edward Rowe Snow, “Boston’s Lady in Black,” Yankee, July 1964, 133.
278
even before it officially opened to the general public in 1961. Snow attempted to drum
up interest in visiting even before this date, as evidenced in the full-page article he wrote
about the fort for the Quincy Patriot Ledger on April 7, 1960 that included a large map
with the caption “Tour of Fort Warren Is Mapped for Adventurous Readers.” While
Snow secured permission for the groups he brought to the government-owned island,
many others clandestinely explored it on their own.
By the 1960s Snow was leading regular tours of Fort Warren and its Corridor of
Dungeons, where he would tap someone – in one case his daughter Dorothy – to play the
Lady. The example is significant because Snow was largely responsible for
disseminating the ghost story to the general public through decades of writing and
speaking about it. It had long been part of military culture as Fort Warren soldiers likely
invented it after the Civil War and gradually added detail and new sightings, culminating
in a tour of the now historic space and an unexpected meeting with the Lady. In Snow
continuing the tradition he went from a passive chronicler of coastal lore to a participant
in it. But this was only the latest example of Snow as a showman in presenting his own
version of coastal New England’s history.401
Snow the showman
401
For thousands of visitors arriving since 1946, see Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic
Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 77. Edward Rowe Snow, “Harbor Fort Bears
Marks of Many Eras,” Patriot Ledger, April 7, 1960, 14. Snow’s daughter, Dorothy Snow, described
playing the Lady in Black during a tour that her father led for her sixth grade class around 1962 in “Edward
Rowe Snow Remembered,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced by Jeremy D’Entremont (1995;
DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). A photograph of Snow with actress Jessie Gill playing the
Lady in Black on the day Fort Warren officially opened to the public is in Edward Rowe Snow, “Fort
Warren,” Patriot Ledger, September 20, 1961. An example of Snow leading Georges Island tours before
1961 is his approved request to the MDC to bring approximately a hundred people to the island on August
21, 1960. Metropolitan District Commission, Minutes, Card Index, 1893-1972, DCR Archives, Boston,
MA.
279
In the fall of 1945 Snow dug up actual treasure hidden by a former pirate on a
beach in Chatham, Massachusetts. But he subsequently revised the story when he
recounted it six years later in True Tales of Buried Treasure. In the chapter “The King of
Calf Island,” Snow began by telling how in 1934 he first heard of something valuable
buried on one of the Brewster Islands in Boston Harbor. In 1940 another source told him
of an old book that contained a message and was supposedly hidden in the foundation of
a fisherman’s house on one of those islands. Snow guessed it might be Middle Brewster.
Five years later he finally tested this theory, and was surprised to find a seventeenthcentury Italian book bound in skin in the cellar of an abandoned house on Middle
Brewster. Upon showing it to a librarian at the Boston Public Library, she pointed out a
coded message on one of the pages which Snow quickly unscrambled to read “GOLD IS
DUE EAST TREES STRONG ISLAND CHATHAM OUTER BAR.”
The following week Snow went to Chatham with a metal detector and began
searching for the treasure. He returned to the beach “day after day, week-end after weekend,” but only found worthless bits of buried scrap metal. Finally “October came,” when
on “a Friday afternoon … the metal detector paid for its cost.” He had already dug six
worthless holes that morning when a promising “hit” on the metal detector caused him to
return to the boat for a spade. After digging down to a depth past his waist he paused to
rest and then continued, eventually hitting rotten wood and then the solid form of what
turned out to be a small chest eight inches by six inches square. Prying it open with the
spade he found “a collection of silver and gold coins, covered with rust, sand, and ancient
280
bits of newspaper. I sank exhausted against the side of the pit. I had reached my
objective! I had found treasure!”402
The exciting account shows Snow making good on years of following tips and
hunches, and then weeks of wandering the beach and digging hole after hole. But it’s not
the entire true tale. Snow’s find of the ancient Italian book in the basement of the ruined
house made the front page of the Boston Globe on September 19, 1945, and revealed that
the book’s secret code had been deciphered the previous night. Snow announced that he
would start hunting for the treasure within two weeks. On September 28, 1945, the
Boston Globe ran the headline “Snow Proclaims Finding $2000 in Old Coins Buried at
Chatham.” Filed the previous day by United Press reporter Herbert Richardson, he
detailed how earlier that day he had accompanied Snow, his brother Donald, and a
Chatham fisherman named “Good Walter” Eldridge in a dory to the beach identified in
the decoded message. After the brothers had spent six hours searching and dug four
treasure-less holes, they tried again and found the chest at the bottom of a nine-foot-deep
hole.403
Assuming that the two newspaper articles are accurate, Snow actually found his
treasure in a mere eight days. Snow had deciphered the code on Tuesday, September 18,
and found the treasure the following Thursday on what Richardson suggests, by not
mentioning any previous digging and only that Snow had already “charted the area where
he thought the chest was buried on Nauset Beach,” was Snow’s first day of digging in the
company of a newswire reporter, a local friend (who had supplied Snow with many
402
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1951), 242-271.
403
“Clew Found to Island Treasure,” Boston Globe, September 19, 1945, 1. Herbert Richardson, “Snow
Proclaims Finding $2000 in Old Coins Buried at Chatham,” Boston Globe, September 28, 1945, 16.
281
stories over the years), and his brother. It’s an amazing display of luck. In reconciling
the article with the book chapter it appears that Snow omitted the help of his brother in
searching and digging for the treasure, as well as the other two witnesses. And he
lengthened the time spent searching by at least another eight days – October 5th being the
first Friday in that month and thus the earliest possible discovery date according to the
book version. Eldridge does appear in the chapter, as a friend who “from time to time”
rowed over from his nearby home to visit Snow and provide encouragement. Snow was
either mistakenly exaggerating when he sat down to draft his own account, or he was
intentionally making the discovery sound more solitary and difficult. He likely did this to
appease the many frustrated treasure hunters who had sent him “43,000 letters and
communications about hidden gold and silver” over the past eleven years.404
That the book jacket for True Tales of Buried Treasure features a snapshot of a
beaming Snow at the bottom of a pit with the opened chest in front of him and coins in
each hand strongly suggests that he was not alone at the time of discovery, or that he later
restaged the photograph. Given his three companions on that day, the former is most
likely, though Snow did re-enact moments for the benefit of the camera. In this book one
of the photographs is of Snow kneeling at the edge of a hatch in a wooden floor. He’s
wearing trousers and a crisply ironed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.
Though the caption reads “The author about to descend into cellar of ruined house at
Middle Brewster,” this is from a later visit to the place where he had found the Italian
book, as Snow said in that chapter that he was wearing only swimming trunks and
404
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1951), 268. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1951), ix.
282
sneakers when he first entered the house alone, pried open the cellar hatch, and found the
text after a half-hour of searching in the darkness.405
The image recalls an event back in July of 1937, when Snow rescued a boy
trapped on the side of a hundred-foot cliff in his hometown of Winthrop. A group of
boys had climbed the cliff, but one nine-year-old “found himself unable to either go up or
down” once he reached a gully forty feet up. His cries for help alerted another boy who
crossed the street and notified Snow. With another man and a group of boys holding a
rope, Snow lowered himself down the cliff face, grabbed the boy, and brought him up.
The story appeared in several papers including the Boston Post and Boston Globe. The
photograph accompanying the latter article shows a courageous Snow on the slope of the
cliff, his right hand wrapped around the end of the rope while his left arm holds the boy.
Fifty years later Snow’s wife, Anna-Myrle, revealed in an interview that “We have
pictures of him as he reenacted the scene. The poor boy was scared to death and he did
reenact it for the people to take pictures of it, believe it or not.” The picture takers were
most likely newspaper photographers, as each article includes a different image. For his
heroism Snow received a citation from the Humane Society of Massachusetts, and area
newspapers got a positive story with dramatic photographs. The lesson that dramatic
stories sell better with dramatic pictures was evidently not lost on Snow.406
In 1952 Snow again discovered pirate treasure, this time on the island of Isle
Haute off Nova Scotia. A treasure map once belonging to eighteenth-century English
pirate Edward Low had led him to a spot on the island’s shore where he unearthed eight
405
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1951), 258.
406
“Man Rescues Boy Trapped On Great Head at Winthrop,” Boston Globe, July 22, 1937, 28. “Winthrop
By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont
(1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008).
283
coins and a human skeleton. When Snow tried to leave Canada with his booty, customs
officials temporarily confiscated the coins for Snow’s lack of an export license. The
sensational international story attracted the attention of Life magazine, and Snow worked
with German-born photojournalist Eric Schaal on an article. Comprising three pages and
nine photographs, “Red-Taped Gold” profiles the successful writer and treasure hunter.
Schaal traveled to Canada to photograph the lighthouse keeper and his wife who had
hosted Snow, and also to Marshfield, Massachusetts, where he photographed the treasure
map Snow had used, the letter from a Canadian customs officer explaining that they were
temporarily holding his eight pieces of “Pirate’s Gold” until he applied for an export
license, and Snow himself.
One image of Schaal’s shows Snow in front of his garage displaying his large
collection of replica pirate flags and real treasure chests, pistols, swords, and other
memorabilia. His two-year-old daughter stands next to him, tugging on a large whale
vertebra. The other photograph is of Snow at a typewriter in his study, pointing to the
Low treasure map on a side table that also includes a human skull, vertebrae, and large
pile of coins. Behind him are the pirate flags, an articulated skeleton sitting on a stack of
chests, a ship model, and another human skull. Stoking the viewer’s appetite for more
mystery, the final photograph in the article is of another map showing an island with
buried treasure that Snow had yet to identify.
For reasons known only to the two men, Snow supplied the remaining three
photographs. The first is of him walking along a rocky shore near his home while trying
out a metal detector. The second is a profile photo he took of Isle Haute during either his
boat trip to or from the island. The third photograph shows Snow’s growing flair for
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drama. It’s a close shot of a skeletal hand protruding from a gravely beach next to a
cardboard box containing the coins and several human vertebrae which Snow had already
collected. The caption reads only “Treasure trove was found amid skeletal bones. Snow
took bones into U. S. after certifying that they were not carriers of hoof and mouth
disease.” Assuming the skeleton and coins both date to Low’s burial of loot in the same
spot, it’s surprising that the bones of the hand remain articulated after two centuries
underground. And the hand’s bleached white color is a sharp contrast to both the
surrounding gravel and the darker vertebrae in the box. It’s unknown how Snow set up
the shot, but in exposing the fingers and placing the box only a few inches away, the hand
appears to be reaching out of the ground towards the collected loot.407
Snow continued to employ this romantic presentation of history the following
year with photographs he included in his True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953).
The first of the nineteen photographs in the book set the tone for how the reader should
view the remaining images and presumably the text. The photo shows an excavated
section of beach in which Snow has laid down a skeleton that he owned, wrapped fabric
around the upper torso, put an open iron chest in front with two human skulls inside, and
scattered around four pistols, two swords, and what appears to be a spade. In the
skeleton’s right hand is a stack of coins. The caption identifies the scene as “Pirate
tragedy of centuries ago revealed by shifting sands.” Snow is clearly having fun with his
subject. As with him posing at the settings for some of his stories, he is enjoying the
romance instead of purely reciting the facts.
But the scene is not wholly fictitious. While the “tragedy” and arrangement are
from his imagination, many of the items are recognizable as authentic pirate artifacts – or
407
“Red-Taped Gold,” Life, July 21, 1952, 13 (list of photo credits), 37-38, 40.
285
what Snow believed were authentic pirate artifacts when he bought or discovered them.
For instance, the articulated skeleton is likely that of pirate William Holmes, executed in
Boston in 1820 and whose body was used for medical research before Snow acquired the
bones in the twentieth century. One of the other skulls was that of the pirate Blackbeard,
which Snow purchased in 1949 in Virginia. And the stack of coins was likely from the
hundreds that he discovered in 1945 in Chatham. Having the skeleton’s right hand
holding coins was likely a nod to his 1952 discovery on Isle Haute – which Snow
recounted in chapter eight and wondered whether the person had “fled from the other
pirates with a fistful of gold and silver.” Readers familiar with Snow’s approach to
storytelling would likely recognize such images as a romantic ideal that even Snow
himself wasn’t lucky enough to uncover – though as the Life article demonstrated, he
came closer than most. Snow shared his readers’ frustrations in relating his own failed
and costly treasure hunts, but his less frequent and highly publicized discoveries
continued to stoke his readers’ imaginations.408
Four additional photos show Snow interacting with the past. The one captioned
“A typical pirate treasure hunt” shows Snow in a suit standing around a shallow hole with
ten others. In the hole stands a boy examining something in his hands, while a man with
a metal detector stands at the side, listening. Another shows Snow, in shirt and tie in
“Captain Gruchy’s pirate tunnel at Boston.” Cobwebs cover his sleeve and back as he
408
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company,
1953), 122. The photographs are between pages 34 and 35. Snow described the provenance of his skeleton
in one of the exhibit placards that accompanied his “traveling museum” of artifacts at various lectures. See
the placard text for nine artifacts on three typed pages in the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37,
Folder 16. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Snow’s purchase of Blackbeard’s skull
described in Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1951), 121. “The coins were found near the skeleton and it is believed that at the time of death,
the man (or woman) must have been holding the coins in his hand.” Betty MacDonald, “Coins Found By
Treasure Seeker,” Amherst Daily News, June 28, 1952, 1.
286
sits at the truncated end of a brick-lined tunnel built in the 1740s to supposedly smuggle
goods from the waterfront to Thomas Gruchy’s mansion. A photograph similar to the
one by Eric Schaal has Snow posing in front of his garage in Marshfield with a stack of
chests and weapons. Wearing a white dress shirt, Snow grips a pistol in one hand while
the other holds open a treasure chest showing the elaborate locking mechanism. A replica
pirate flag pinned to the garage wall forms a backdrop. The caption identifies the
weapons as having once belonged to pirates Lolonois, Ann Bonney, Madame Ching, and
Ben Avery. The last photo of Snow in the book has him in a white shirt and tie, and
smiling as he holds a silver-painted human skull, identified in the caption as that of
Blackbeard.409
Of all Snow’s artifacts, perhaps none was more sensational than the skull which
he believed was that of “the greatest cutthroat of them all”: Edward Teach, or
Blackbeard. As Snow related many times over the years, Teach was an English-born
pirate who operated in the Caribbean and eastern coast of the American colonies in the
1710s until he was killed during a bloody battle with two Royal Navy vessels off
Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, in November of 1718. One of the sailors cut off
Blackbeard’s head, and it was brought back to Bathtown, North Carolina, as proof of the
British victory. According to Snow, one of the leaders of the town acquired the skull,
had it lined with silver, and then turned it into a macabre drinking vessel. The skull then
continued in this capacity as part of a college fraternity’s initiation ritual. After the
409
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company,
1953), 122. The photographs are between pages 34 and 35. Snow at various times listed the pirate as
“Thomas Grouchy” and “Thomas Gruchy.” See the tunnel story in Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of
Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 42-45.
287
fraternity disbanded “about the time of the American Revolution,” it passed into the
hands of a tavern owner, and then down through generations of his family.
While Snow was conducting an interview with a ninety-one year-old local
historian in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1949, “a chance remark involving Blackbeard led to
my later discovery of the infamous pirate’s venerable skull in a nearby section of
Virginia, still with its silver coasting. After considerable discussion, examination, and
appraisal, the skull became my property.” Snow included a photograph of his new relic
in Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (1950), but waited until the following year before
explaining how he had acquired it. But the most sensational aspect of the story of
Blackbeard’s skull happened outside the pages of Snow’s books. If one is to believe his
friend Robert Nesmith, Snow eventually knew that his purchase was authentic because on
one dark and stormy night the skull talked to him.410
Nine years older than Snow, Robert I. Nesmith was a commercial photographer,
numismatist, and authority on treasure hunting. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1891,
he worked first as a salesman for Eastman Kodak in Rochester from 1912 to 1919 and
then for various photographic services companies in New York City until 1930, when he
started his own photography firm, R. I. Nesmith & Associates. Back in 1922 Nesmith
first began reading about pirates and their treasure, and like Snow, it became a consuming
hobby that expanded from collecting literature, maps, and documents to authentic relics
and coins. By the 1950s he had established the Foul Anchor Archives in Rye, New York,
that he regarded as “one of the best libraries on the subject of piracy, buccaneering, and
treasure hunting.” By then he was a friend of Snow’s, and he recalled how back in 1945
410
Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1951),
104 (“greatest cutthroat”)-117, 120-121.
288
they had “spent an exciting evening” sorting through the 316 coins from the chest which
Snow had discovered in Chatham. Grateful for their friendship, Snow dedicated his True
Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953) to Nesmith, “who has a sincere interest in things
piratical.”
Having authored a paper on a sixteenth-century mint in Mexico City for the
American Numismatic Society in 1955, Nesmith wrote a full-size book in 1958 on his
favorite subject. Dig for Pirate Treasure surveyed tales “about the pirates and the
Spanish galleons and their treasures, how they were lost or hidden and of the modern
searches to recover them.” Like Snow, he asked his readers to send in additional stories
about their own treasure finds. And given that Snow was one of the few people to have
twice discovered actual buried pirate treasure, Nesmith chose to write a chapter on his
famous friend, but not covering a tale that Snow had written about.411
As Nesmith recounted in “The Pirate’s Skull,” Snow sent a telegram one morning
to his New York office asking him to immediately take a train to Boston and stay the
night. Assuming his friend had important news, Nesmith did, and dined with Edward and
Anna-Myrle at their Marshfield home before the men retired upstairs to Snow’s study.
Ever aware of setting the proper mood for a story, Snow made sure he had driftwood
burning in the fireplace and his friend a drink in hand before confessing, in a room
already filled with pirate relics, that he had found the skull of Blackbeard. He produced a
small iron-banded wooden box and opened it to reveal an engraved silver plate fastened
411
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), viii-ix
(Nesmith’s early interest in pirates and what this book is about), 13 (Snow’s 1945 discovery), 275 (Foul
Anchor Archives quote). Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead & Company, 1953), v (Nesmith dedication). “Robert I. Nesmith.” Contemporary Authors
Online. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 July 2011.
http://go.galegroup.com.revproxy.brown.edu/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1000072517&v=2.1&u=prov98893
&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w (accessed July 10, 2011).
289
to the underside of the lid listing the name of the pirate, the officer who had slain him,
and his date of death. Snow then lifted out an object covered in tissue paper, which he
unwrapped to reveal a silver-coated human skull.412
Snow went over Blackbeard’s brief biography and then the skull’s strange
centuries-long afterlife that culminated with his purchase of it in Virginia. When
Nesmith questioned the skull’s authenticity, Snow offered a new kind of evidence that he
had never shared with his readers:
“I know it is the skull of Blackbeard,” said Snow positively. “I’ll tell you what
finally proved it to me. I have not told this to anyone; in fact, I don’t dare to.
You know that I am a sensible, sober man [Snow was a teetotaler]. You know
that I would not try to fool you. I know that this is Blackbeard’s skull because he
talked to me. Right here. Last night. Right where I am sitting now.” And while
the rain beat on the windows and the firelight flickered, Ed talked on as I stared at
the skull and it stared back at me.413
Snow related how the previous night he had been trying to finish a chapter in his next
book, while outside a storm brought wind that “was howling around the chimney and the
eaves. A shutter was loose and banging.” He thought of the lighthouse keepers and
fishermen at work in this weather, and famous shipwrecks that had happened under
similar conditions. Now “torrents of rain beat against the dormer windows. The wind
rose almost to screams.” It was then that Snow heard a low voice giving nautical
commands. But he was alone. He first dismissed it as some sort of practical joke or a
nightmare brought on by overwork. But then he heard the voice again, and Snow, having
eliminated what rational explanations he could think of, looked at the silver skull sitting
on his windowsill and asked if it had spoken to him. It answered yes, and identified itself
412
413
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 105-106.
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 108.
290
as having formerly been Captain Teach. Only minutes before Snow had been writing
about Teach for his chapter. He threw a sheet of paper over the handwritten paragraph.414
Snow paused his story and told Nesmith “I have never been a believer in spirit
manifestations, perhaps because I was never fortunate enough to witness any. But here
was a mystery that demanded consideration – something that could not be explained
away on the theory that my senses had deceived me.” So he then recounted his
conversation with the skull, the full dialogue of which Nesmith provided in his chapter.
After talking about the pirate’s death and rumors about his many wives, Snow asked
Blackbeard for a clue to the location of some of his buried treasure, promising “I can
make you more famous in my next book with a lead to work on, and I will not belittle
your genius, I can assure you.” But just as the skull was giving him directions to a stash
near the town of Nahant just north of Boston, a simultaneous flash of lightning and
thunderclap lit up the room, the skull toppled to the floor, and the power went out. Snow
turned on a flashlight and found that the skull had lost two teeth in the fall, and
apparently its desire to speak. Nesmith concluded the chapter by saying that he agreed
with Snow that the skull was Blackbeard’s, “Because nobody else but Blackbeard and the
Devil knows where his treasures are buried and I am very sure that Ed was not chatting
with the Devil on that stormy night on Cape Cod.”415
It’s hard to know what to make of Nesmith’s account of what Snow supposedly
told him. Nesmith includes most of the dialogue between himself and Snow as they sat
by the fire, which includes the complete conversation between Snow and the skull from
the night before. Nesmith apparently didn’t have a photographic memory to retain such
414
415
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 107-111.
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 111-115.
291
detail. When Nesmith quotes Snow describing Blackbeard’s death and his skull’s
subsequent use, these three paragraphs have only a few words changed from the same
story told on page 120 of Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure. Either Snow told his
story to Nesmith aloud exactly how he had previously written it, and Nesmith exactly
remembered and reproduced it, or Nesmith had Snow’s 1951 book open to this page
when he was reconstructing the conversation.416
Additionally, when Snow said that he had just been writing about Blackbeard
when the skull started speaking to him, Nesmith reproduces the paragraph that Snow was
working on at that moment. These lines first appeared in print on pages eight and nine of
Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands, and, given Snow’s fondness for not wasting
something that was well written, on page 111 of True Tales of Buried Treasure. He was
therefore working on one of these two books on the night of his supernatural
conversation. As Snow wrote the introduction for the former book on August 7, 1950,
and the latter on June 7, 1951, this encounter with Blackbeard’s ghost and subsequent
conversation with Nesmith occurred some time in 1950 or 1951.417
Nesmith adds one last wrinkle to the story. In the chapter-by-chapter
bibliography at the back of Dig for Pirate Treasure, Nesmith describes his sources for
this chapter as: “The facts on Snow’s discovery of Blackbeard’s skull, as he told them to
my friend Captain Jafar Clarke, together with the historical events in Blackbeard’s life,
are based on history.” Jafar Clarke was a pseudonym which Nesmith apparently used
when writing about lost treasure for popular magazines. While “The Pirate’s Skull”
chapter is written in the first person, Nesmith’s name does not appear in the quoted
416
417
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 107-108.
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 111.
292
dialogue. But at one point when Snow is talking to the skull he mentions his friend Jafar
Clarke, who believed that Blackbeard never buried any of his treasure. Snow wouldn’t
likely have referred to his friend by his pen name when talking to any person or a ghost
for that matter, so the substitution was likely Nesmith’s choice. Why Nesmith chose to
pretend that his pseudonym was a mutual friend who had spoken to Snow is unclear –
especially since this twist is only revealed to those readers who flip to the bibliography.
As Nesmith is the book’s author, it’s logical to assume that when a chapter uses the first
person, that individual is Robert Nesmith. Perhaps in using Jafar Clarke, Nesmith was
just having fun in pretending that his fans did not know his pen name. Or, more likely it
was a sign to careful readers that this chapter was a fantastic departure from the more
serious and journalistic accounts of treasure hunting in the rest of the book.418
What parts of the chapter were “based on history” were likely the details of
Blackbeard’s life, the skull’s provenance, and that two pirate-obsessed friends met for a
conversation during which Snow showed off his latest purchase. The rest was likely a
collaborative literary performance, as Nesmith likely wouldn’t write a tale about Snow’s
newfound belief in ghosts without his permission. The titular buried treasure in this case,
then, was a colorful but fictitious story tucked in between real ones.
Whether or not Snow spoke to a pirate’s ghost one dark and stormy night, his
public opinion of the supernatural did change over time. In Strange Tales from Nova
Scotia to Cape Hatteras, Snow stated in 1949 that “I, for one, do not believe in ghosts,
but the story which will be revealed in this chapter is perhaps the most outstanding
418
Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 113, 283.
For examples of Nesmith writing under his pseudonym, see Capt. Jafar Clarke, “Treasure of the ‘Thetis’,”
Treasure Adventure, Spring 1961. Capt. Jafar Clarke, “Galleon Gold: Who Gets To Keep The Goodies,”
True Treasure, October 1966, 18; and Capt. Jafar Clarke, “Confederate Gold in North Carolina,” True
Treasure, April 1969, 23.
293
example of unexplained ghost-like happenings ever recorded.” But in Ghosts, Gales and
Gold (1972), he opens a chapter with “A resident of Winthrop, Massachusetts, who was
born in Wales, one day took me aside to ask if I believed in the existence of ghosts. I told
him I was openminded about ghosts in general, and admitted I believed many ghost
stories were founded in fact, but in other cases I was sure that the tales were not
supernatural in origin.” The following year, “During the lecture on things supernatural
which I gave at the University of New Hampshire … I emphasized my firm conviction
that we should accept the possibility that matters which we cannot explain or comprehend
may be actualities.” This opinion aligns with a statement from Anna-Myrle in a 1996
documentary that regarding her husband’s view of the past “The possibility was as
important to Edward as the fact that it maybe might have been.” By the 1970s, Snow’s
historical openmindedness included cryptozoology (by 1944), alternative versions of
New England’s early exploration and settlement (by 1950), and the supernatural (after
1949). Perhaps taking a cue from P. T. Barnum that controversy attracted an audience,
Snow embraced legendary artifacts and colorful stories as vivid, if unorthodox, ways to
educate the public about his favorite corners of maritime history.419
419
Edward Rowe Snow, Strange Tales from Nova Scotia to Cape Hatteras (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1949), 61. Edward Rowe Snow, Ghosts, Gales and Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1972), 52. Edward Rowe Snow, Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.:
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1974), vii. “Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996.
For Snow’s belief in cryptozoology: “Boston Bay, according to the records and statements of landsmen and
sailors of the last three centuries, has from time to time been visited by that never caught but often sighted
denizen of the deep, the sea serpent. There are those who claim with haughty disdain that they know that
there is not such thing as this mysterious creature of the ocean. I cannot agree. I believe that we should all
look at the possibility with open minds, not necessarily deciding that there must be sea serpents, but
perhaps saying, ‘Why not?’” Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee
Publishing Company, 1944), 19. For Snow’s belief in alternate histories: “After a careful study of all the
facts, I believe that the Newport Tower [an old stone tower in Newport, R.I.] was built in 1121 by one of
the early Norse explorers, Eric Gnuppson, who copied it after a round church of the Holy Sepulchre which
he had seen in the Holy Land several years before. But there is no authentic proof of this. The tower
remains the island’s secret. Some day we may discover who built it, when it was constructed and why –
294
For the Edward Rowe Snow fans who were intrigued by the artifacts in his books,
they could see them in person at his lectures and other public appearances. Surviving
lecture flyers show how he promoted himself. They always included a publicity photo of
Snow, the theme (which often coincided with his latest book topic), and usually some of
the stories that he would cover. In some cases these are multiple pages, include a lengthy
biography and bibliography, and offer more than one lecture – which suggests that they
were sent to the operators of potential venues around New England, including schools,
libraries, clubs, churches, and lodges. As with his other writings, the flyers continue his
preference for superlatives such as “SEA WONDER TALES NEVER BEFORE
REVEALED,” “YOUR ENTERTAINMENT THRILL OF THE 1955 SEASON,”
“NOTHING LIKE IT EVER BEFORE,” and “AN INSPIRED CHALLENGE TO
TELEVISION.” When E. B. Garside wrote a glowing review in the New York Times of
Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (1958) and pronounced its author “For my
money he is just about the best chronicler of the days of sail alive today,” Snow
judiciously shortened this in subsequent flyers to “called by the New York Times ‘the
best chronicler of the days of sail alive today.’”420
By the late 1930s Snow was illustrating his talks with slides and movies, and by
the early 1950s had added a traveling museum of relics. In claiming that he could rival
television, a circa 1952 flyer explained that the audience could see, hear, and touch what
they encountered:
but I doubt it.” Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead
and Company, 1950), 264.
420
For examples of Snow’s flyers see the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 9 (of 1992 Addendum –
Box 49 overall), Folders “Lectures” and “Lecture Circulars”; Box 10, Folder 7; and Box 27, Folders 23 and
24. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Edward B. Garside, “Salty Yarns of Survival,”
New York Times, January 25, 1959, BR16.
295
For after his stories and moving pictures have ended, the audience is invited to
come forward and examine selected articles which Mr. Snow has placed on the
stage, such as pirate treasure chests, gold and silver from uncovered treasures,
shipwreck material, pirate daggers, pistols, handcuffs, and scores of other
interesting relics of bygone days. You will have the chance to run your hands
through genuine pirate treasure!421
Connecting people with the sites and artifacts of history was Snow’s approach to
storytelling since his days as a teacher in Winthrop. The cost of these items was part of
the allure, as sometimes the flyers would include the insurance value of his “traveling
museum.” Around 1952 it was worth $14,000 or the equivalent of $113, 705 in 2010,
and by 1954 it had increased to $17,000 or $136,841 today. Included in Snow’s
surviving personal papers is the text for placards that accompanied one version of the
traveling museum. They are brief, unambiguous, and sensational:
421

“THIS TRAVELING MUSEUM OF EDWARD ROWE SNOW PATRIOT LEDGER
COLUMNIST IS DRAWN FROM ALL POINTS OF THE WORLD CONTAINING
AUTHENTIC, DOCUMENTED ARTICLES PERTAINING TO THE SEA AND THE MEN
WHO SAILED IT.”

“FRAGMENT OF PLANE BROUGHT UP FROM OFF JEWEL ISLAND IN CASCO BAY
WHERE FAMED FRENCH ACES ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE CRASHED ON MAY 9, 1927,
THE DAY AFTER THEY TOOK OFF IN THEIR AIRCRAFT ‘WHITE BIRD.’”

“MODEL OF OLD MINOT’S LIGHT WHICH CRASHED INTO SEA DURING STORM OF
SAME NAME, APRIL 17, 1851, WITH THE LOSS OF THE TWO KEEPERS, JOSEPH
ANTOINE AND JOSEPH WILSON.”

“SKELETON OF SO-CALLED THIRD CLIFF PIRATE, WILLIAM HOLMES, WHO WAS
HANGED IN BOSTON ON JUNE 15, 1820 AFTER BURYING TREASURE AT THIRD
CLIFF, SCITUATE. THE BODY OF HOLMES WAS LATER USED FOR DISSECTION BY
DR. J. W. WEBSTER, WHO WAS LATER HANGED HIMSELF FOR THE MURDER OF DR.
PARKMAN.”

“TRIPLE WRIST DAGGER, SAID TO BE MOST DIABOLICAL WEAPON EVER
INVENTED BY THE DISORDERED BRAIN OF MAN. IT WAS USED BY THE MAN
BUCCANEER LOLONAIS DURING HIS PANAMA RAVAGES.”
“AN INSPIRED CHALLENGE TO TELEVISION,” [flyer], Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 9 (of
1992 Addendum – Box 49 overall), Folder “Lecture Circulars.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston
University. For notices of Snow giving illustrated lectures in the 1930s see “Among the Churches,” Boston
Globe, November 23, 1935, 9; and “Port of Boston,” Boston Globe, November 3, 1938, 15.
296

“THE SKULL OF BLACKBEARD THE PIRATE, WHICH WAS SILVERED AND USED AS A
DRINKING MUG BETWEEN 1723 AND 1794, AFTER WHICH IT BECAME AN
INITIATION IMPLEMENT DURING UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA RITES.”

“TREASURE COINS FROM THIRTEEN DIFFERENT TREASURE HOARDS, ALL
LOCATED IN NEW ENGLAND. THE SILVER COINS ARE MOSTLY PIECES OF EIGHT,
THE GOLD COINS DUBLOONS.”

“THE THREE DAGGERS ARE ALL CONCERNED WITH PIRACY. THE TWISTED BLADE
IS THE CREESE OF MADAME CHING, THE WORLD’S GREATEST PIRATE, THE
STRAIGHT BLADE WAS CAPTURED BY CAPT. JOSHUA ROWE IN BATTLE ON
MINDANAO WITH PIRATES, AND THE CURVED BLADE IS A DAMASCUS SWORD
WHICH ACTUALLY CUT THE HEAD OF BLACKBEARD AFTER HIS BEING KILLED IN
BATTLE BY CAPT. MAYNARD.”

“THE FIRST NOTCHED GUN IN HISTORY, WHICH WAS OWNED BY NEWPORT’S
PIRATE TOM TEW, WHO KILLED THIRTY-TWO PERSONS WITH IT BETWEEN 1694
AND 1710.”

“GIANT TREASURE CHEST OWNED AT ONE TIME BY PIRATE FRANCIS SPRIGGS.
THE CHEST HAS A SECRET LOCK IN THE TOP OF THE LID AND WOULD COST $6500
TO DUPLICATE TODAY.”
His specificity and near absence of qualifiers lend authority to the lurid anecdotes, while
sparing Snow from having to repeatedly identify each artifact for each viewer. And the
placards serve as a starting point for Snow telling further details of these stories that he
knew by heart, and likely had told during the lecture that these appeared in.422
Snow’s daughter Dorothy in an interview for a 1990 documentary provided a
sense of how the public responded to a Snow lecture:
I have wonderful memories of lectures. … They’d leave way early, and usually
get there before the people even thought about expecting him. So some janitor
would let him in and he’d start setting things up and people would wander in and
go “What are those?” And he’d start talking. And then by the time the lecture
started he had this enormous crowd of people asking about things. And
afterwards there would often be a question and answer period. And it often would
have to be stopped because it would be so late. He never would run out of
questions. It was always that the hall had to close, or something had to happen.
But they just loved the curios. They are so interesting and so unique that they told
a story all by themselves sometimes.
422
For circa 1952 valuation of traveling museum see “The LONGMEADOW MEN’S CLUB,” [flyer],
Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 27, Folder 24. For 1954 valuation see “YOUR ENTERTAINMENT
THRILL OF THE 1955 SEASON,” [flyer], Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 10, Folder 7. Howard
Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. For placard text see the three typed pages in Edward Rowe
Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 16. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University.
297
Snow knew that unusual items attracted an audience, and so he also sometimes brought
artifacts to book signings and on his harbor tours.423
After Anna-Myrle and Edward moved to Marshfield in 1950 he agreed to take
over a loose-knit touring group that visited sites of interest around Boston. In existence
since 1928, members of the Harbor Ramblers paid a yearly subscription to receive
frequent notices of tours that Snow now scheduled year-round, usually on weekends. In
1962 Snow estimated the group’s membership between 350 and 900 people. Most tours
began at Boston’s Long Wharf, and could be a walking trip to Snow’s favorite historic
sites around the city, or by boat to the islands and lighthouses in Boston Harbor, or
farther a field via boat or plane to Nantucket, Casco Bay in Maine, the Isles of Shoals off
New Hampshire, New York City, or points in between. Writing to a public relations
official of a local hospital who had enquired about his trips for their staff, Snow
cautioned that “For any one who has not gone on any trips before, it may be more or less
of a shock, because we have adventures and not strictly trips. Every one is welcome,
however, providing they realize that we do not ‘cater to tourists’ as the expression may
be, but we really are a group of people who wish to do something different on week
ends.” In a form letter to all Ramblers he advised everyone to wear old clothes, dress for
the weather, and bring a lunch if they chose. Snow’s version of local history was
tangible, gritty, and strenuous.424
423
“True Tales of Pirates and Treasure,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by
Jeremy D’Entremont (1990; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). This part also includes AnnaMyrle describing Snow bringing a treasure chest to a Jordan Marsh book signing and Snow friend Joe Kolb
recalling “Periodically he’d bring various artifacts out with him, on these harbor island tours. It might be
Blackbeard’s skull, it might be a pistol carried by John Paul Jones. It could be just about anything.”
424
Snow taking over the Harbor Ramblers recalled by Anna-Myrle in “The Romance of Boston Bay,”
Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD,
Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). Snow’s form letter explaining the Rambler’s origins and operations is
298
Through the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, members climbed lighthouses, scrambled over
islands, shared steamed clams, explored coastal fortifications and caves, and
commemorated local anniversaries such as the loss of the steamer Portland in 1898 and
the Boston Tea Party in 1773. For the 199th anniversary of the latter, Snow somehow
acquired some of the original tea – which he brewed and served to members at the spot.
Snow also led tours for specific companies; youth, women’s, and veterans’ groups;
schools, colleges, churches, political and historical organizations, and patriotic societies.
Additionally he sometimes worked for tour companies, narrating lectures aboard harbor
ferries. For those who had not had the opportunity to follow Snow personally, he gave a
virtual tour of Boston’s “ghost spots” for television viewers on Halloween night in 1970.
Having been a guest on various television programs since the 1950s, “the white-haired
storyteller used his most sepulchral tones in an attempt to create an eerie atmosphere,”
noted one viewer, as he recounted – with accompanying ghostly music – tales of death
and heroism and subsequent spectral events – including, of course, his favorite Lady in
Black.
Overall, when it came to the public presentation of maritime history in New
England, Edward Rowe Snow was the region’s most prominent and active storyteller
from the 1930s through the 1970s. But Snow’s enthusiasm into his seventies for
personally leading people on adventures into the past was not wholly about making a
living. Yes, he created a marketable version of maritime New England. But he cared
in Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 8 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 48 overall), Folder “Harbor
Ramblers”. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Estimated size of Harbor Ramblers from
letter from Edward Rowe Snow to Frank Donohue, March 8, 1962. Edward Rowe Snow to Nancy
McCauliff of the Public Relations Division of Beth Israel Hospital, dated October 28, 1962. Both letters
from Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 18 (“Trips”). Howard Gottlieb Research Center,
Boston University.
299
deeply about the places he introduced thousands of people to, and no more so than the
islands of Boston Harbor. And of all these islands, it was Georges Island, with its
historic Fort Warren, that Snow was determined to preserve.425
Snow as preservationist
Edward Rowe Snow’s interest in the fortifications in Boston Harbor dated back to
his explorations of the islands as a child, and then his formal study of their history for his
Harvard thesis and subsequent first book. One of these was Governor’s Island, a short
paddle from his Winthrop home. First owned by Snow’s ancestor Roger Conant in the
1620s, the colony later acquired and leased it to then Governor John Winthrop in 1632,
whose heirs later purchased it. Around 1744 the colony built the first fortifications on the
island, followed by the United States government establishing a fort in 1808 named for
patriot Dr. Joseph Warren, who was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The government
continued to expand Fort Warren into the 1870s, though it changed the name to Fort
Winthrop with the establishment of Fort Warren on Georges Island in 1833.
No longer a modern defensive position, the island in the twentieth century became
a popular recreation site for Bostonians, some of whom built summer cottages. But in the
early 1930s government officials began exploring the idea of expanding the city’s airport
in East Boston out into the harbor to Governor’s Island. In response, a group of
historians formed the Society for the Preservation of Governor’s Island in 1936. Among
425
For the places that Edward Rowe Snow conducted tours and for whom in the 1960s and ‘70s, see
correspondence and postcards in Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 18 (“Trips”); and Box 8
(of 1992 Addendum – Box 48 overall), Folder “Harbor Ramblers.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center,
Boston University. An example of Snow working for a private tour company is his agreement to do a tenday block of harbor tours in 1966 for the Boston Harbor Tours company aboard the M/V Provincetown.
See the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 3 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 43 overall), Folder “Boston
Harbor Tours.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Percy Shain, “Viewers given tour of
Boston’s ‘ghost spots,’” Boston Globe, November 2, 1970, 38.
300
the members were Snow, his future mentor Robert E. Moody, and long-time preservation
activist William Sumner Appleton, who had started the Society for the Preservation of
New England Antiquities back in 1910. With Snow serving as secretary, the group
stressed that they were not against “the rightful development of any of Boston’s future
activities,” but felt expanding the airport did not have to mean leveling the fort. After
rallying the support of area historical and social organizations (which included Snow
leading tours of the island and fort), the society convinced the Boston Park Department in
1938 to turn over control of the island to them. The group envisioned repairing the fort
and installing a resident caretaker to discourage vandals.426
It was a short-lived victory. With the start of World War II the need for a modern
airport with longer runways became essential. The state acquired title to Governor’s
Island and nearby Apple Island in 1941, and the following year construction crews built a
dike between the airport and Governor’s Island. Four dredges worked year round to
expand the old 325-acre airport into a new 2000-acre one that swallowed Governor’s and
nearby Apple and Bird islands. In the fall of 1946 Fort Winthrop itself was dynamited to
construct a new runway. Snow was surprisingly accepting about the loss of the popular
recreation and historic site, observing that “The leveling of historic Governor’s Island
should be gladly accepted by all Bostonians if it brings a great American plane base here
as a result. Then Boston again would be the port of a century ago, exchanging her white
426
For more on William Sumner Appleton, see James Michael Lindgren, Preserving Historic New
England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University
Press, 1995). History of Governor’s Island from Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor,
1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 124-140. “Historians Oppose Taking of
Governors Island for Airport,” Boston Globe, July 23, 1936, 5. “Fight to Save Governor’s Island
Fortifications,” Boston Globe, September 5, 1936, 13. “Antiquities Society is Host to League,” Boston
Globe, January 17, 1937, B14. “Pleas to Save Governors Island Win Favor of Crowd There, 270-5,”
Boston Globe, June 13, 1937, A1. “Governors Island Given Over To Society For Preservation,” Boston
Globe, August 7, 1938, B2. “When Boston Dreamed of Vineyards: John Winthrop and Governors Island
Were to Supply Old Town With Its Wine,” Boston Globe, September 2, 1945, C5.
301
wings of the clippers for the silver wings of the air.” His comment showed his
understanding that Boston needed modern infrastructure to thrive, and as a historian he
knew that the expansion of Logan Airport by filling in part of Boston Harbor was how
the peninsular city had expanded since the seventeenth century. But Snow would not be
so accepting about the fate of Georges Island.427
Located at the entrance to Boston Harbor, Georges Island saw intermittent
military use during the eighteenth century. But in 1834 the federal government began
constructing a massive pentagonal granite fort that encompassed much of the island.
During the Civil War, Fort Warren achieved fame as the birthplace of the song “John
Brown’s Body,” and where thousands of Confederate prisoners were incarcerated. In the
following decades the U.S. Army continually modernized the fort, and it remained in
service through World War II.
Snow had first visited Georges Island in 1926 with his brother, and in the 1930s
led a memorial committee that dedicated a plaque to the fort’s three prominent prisoners,
and conducted a commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Union song. In
at least the latter case and likely in both, he also led participants on a tour of Fort Warren.
Following the destruction of Governor’s Island, Fort Warren became his favorite place in
the harbor. When the U.S. Army decided after the war that the fort was no longer
necessary, Snow participated in the closing ceremony on July 30, 1950. After giving a
history of the fort to the assembled crowd, he temporarily accepted custody of the fort’s
427
William Clark, “Harbor Gives Up 2000-Acre Airport,” Boston Globe, July 15, 1945, B1. Donald
Willard, “How Giant Boston Airport Is Being Built From Mud,” Boston Globe, January 20, 1946, D1.
Arthur Riley, “From an East Boston Cinder Patch to a Leading World Airport,” Boston Globe, September
28, 1947, A23. “Two Mighty Dynamite Blasts Fail to Destroy Historic Fort Winthrop,” Boston Globe,
October 27, 1946, C9. The source of Snow’s quotation is unknown, though it appears in “The Romance of
Boston Bay,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989;
DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). For more on landmaking see Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining
Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Boston, MA.: MIT Press, 2003).
302
flag and delivered it to the State House for preservation. What would become of the fort
itself was less clear.428
With only a single caretaker to guard the island, salvagers and vandals began
surreptitiously stripping anything of value from Fort Warren and causing widespread
damage to what remained. The General Services Administration eventually decided to
put federally-owned Georges Island, Peddocks Island (the site of Fort Andrews), Lovells
Island (the site of Fort Standish) a portion of Spectacle Island (the site of a garbage
dump), and a parcel in East Boston up for auction on November 22, 1957. The
announcement grabbed the attention of area residents, businesses, and social and
historical organizations, who eyed the properties as either unique real estate investments
or important pieces of the past that should be kept for public use. Among these,
Congressman Richard B. Wigglesworth representing the Massachusetts Thirteenth
District hoped the auction could be delayed until a responsible group could be found to
take over Georges Island, while Edward Rowe Snow announced the creation of a Society
428
Early history of Fort Warren from the first chapter of Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston
Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 1-38; Frank Barnes says that
construction of the fort began in the spring of 1834. Frank Barnes, Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston
Harbor, Massachusetts, GSA Control No. D-Mass-456; Report on Application by Metropolitan District
Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for Transfer of Surplus Federal Properties for a Historical
Monument (N.p.: National Park Service, April 1958), 16. Metropolitan District Commission, Report
Library, Georges Island, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Snow’s early experience with Fort Warren from his
confidential report submitted to MDC Commissioner Robert F. Murphy on May 22, 1961. See Edward
Rowe Snow, “Report on Fort Warren,” Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject
Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. “Plaque at Fort Warren to Honor
Confederacy,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1935, 9. “Women’s Relief Corps Pays Honor to Confederate Trio,
Boston Globe, June 10, 1935, 2. “Commemorative Exercises for Song ‘John Brown’s Body,’” Boston
Globe, May 24, 1936, A19. Anna-Myrle stated in an interview that “When Governor’s Island was taken
away, Fort Warren became his most enjoyable place.” See “The Romance of Boston Bay,” Edward Rowe
Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT,
Inc., 2008). “100th Anniversary of Fort Warren Observed Today,” Boston Globe, July 30, 1950, C3.
“Famed Ft. Warren Closed by Army as Surplus Item,” Boston Globe, July 31, 1950, 17. There is a
photograph of Snow accepting the folded American flag in an undated (but either July 31 or August 1,
1950) newspaper clipping along with an undated column of his entitled “Fort Warren’s Flag Lowered in
1946” in his personal papers at Boston University. See the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 7 (of 1992
Addendum – box 47 overall), Folder “Fort Warren.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University.
303
for the Preservation of Fort Warren to oppose the auction. As the fortifications on
Peddocks and Lovells both dated to the twentieth century, Georges Island, with its
massive fort and famous Civil War history, was the iconic property among the list of
parcels.429
Despite some local opposition, the auction took place as planned in a Boston
courtroom crowded with more than 300 people. The New England Tank Company of
Cambridge bought Lovells Island for $28,000, while a group comprising car-rental
executive Richard S. Robie, banker Alan Sturgis, and shipbuilder Isadore Bromfield
bought the rest. Snow attended the auction and put in a bid of around $10,000 for
Georges Island before the Robie group eventually won it for $28,000, along with
Peddocks for $35,000, and Spectacle for $4,500. Though Snow later claimed in 1971
that Georges Island “was sold to a group interested in using the deep dungeons and
passages for the storage of contaminated atomic material,” the Boston Globe reported the
following day that Robie had pledged that the islands would become “the outstanding
yachting center of the East Coast, and the finest Summer recreational area on the
Atlantic.” But whatever plans the businessmen had for the islands were immediately
halted when the Metropolitan District Commission submitted an application to the GSA
on the day of the auction, to acquire Georges Island as a “national shrine” and Lovells
429
For vandalism see Joe Harrington, “Vandals do More Damage Than the Red Coats,” Boston Globe,
October 4, 1959, A67. For caretaker and Snow starting SPFW see Fred Brady, “Auctioning of Fort Warren
Stirs Ghosts of Lady in Black, Civil War,” Boston Herald, November 3, 1957, A3. For the GSA auction
see the classified ad “At Public Auction,” Boston Globe, November 3, 1957, A46 and New York Times,
November 3, 1957, 338. For Wigglesworth’s efforts see James J. Collins, “Along the South Shore,” Boston
Globe, November 3, 1957, 30. For history of Peddocks and Lovells see Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands
of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 167, 179. For list of
thirteen organizations interested in saving Fort Warren see page 10 of the Metropolitan District
Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public
Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan
District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR
Archives, Boston, MA.
304
Island for “a yachting and recreational center.” As a state agency, the MDC had first call
on the properties – should the GSA approve their development plans and suitability as a
recipient.430
Established in 1893 as the Metropolitan Parks Commission, the MDC since 1920
was responsible for water, sewer, and park operations in Boston and thirty-seven
surrounding communities. Among its 1,700 personnel were engineers, maintenance
workers, and police officers to manage the almost 13,000 acres of beaches, parks, and
parkways under their control. With the power to acquire additional open space for public
recreation on behalf of the state, the MDC already had several historic properties under
its care. In its application to the federal government for Georges Island it described three.
In 1904 it purchased a seventeenth-century mansion known as the Quincy Homestead in
Quincy and collaborated with the Massachusetts chapter of the National Society of The
Colonial Dames of America to operate it as a museum. In 1919 the MDC accepted title
to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, from the association which had gradually
built the granite obelisk from 1827 to 1843. And in 1931 the MDC purchased an
undeveloped coastal parcel of land in Quincy known as Moswetuset Hummuck – “an
area of Indian occupation supposed to have played a significant part in the derivation of
the name of our state.” Though unstated, adding an island with a famous Civil War fort
would bring the history that the MDC could interpret into the modern era.431
430
“3 Harbor Islands Sold but MDC May Get Two of Them,” Boston Globe, November 23, 1957, 1.
Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1971), 33-34.
431
For MDC history and stewardship of historic sites see pages 6 and 7 of the Metropolitan District
Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public
Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957; and Frank Barnes,
Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, GSA Control No. D-Mass-456; Report on
Application by Metropolitan District Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for Transfer of
305
Since at least the beginning of 1956, the MDC was interested in acquiring the
federally-owned islands of Georges, Peddocks, and Lovells in Boston Harbor. But for
reasons that are unclear in the surviving correspondence between the General Services
Administration and the MDC, although the GSA offered as early as November of 1956 to
not put the properties up for public auction pending receiving their applications for the
islands – and waited for them until May 6, 1957 before proceeding with auction plans –
the MDC delayed until auction day to submit the one for Georges, with an application for
Lovells submitted a week later. The Commission decided against acquiring Peddocks.432
The Georges Island application shows Edward Rowe Snow playing a prominent
role in the process. In the document’s eighteen pages of text the MDC describes its
organization, finances, experience operating parks, and plans for restoration and
development of the fort as a historical monument. But it turned to Snow to explain Fort
Warren’s historical significance – crediting him by name as “the eminent historian,
author and lecturer of Boston Harbor and the New England Coast.” In his three-page
report written on November 6, 1957, Snow summarized the island’s important names and
dates, concluding with what he felt were the “five important events which have occurred
at the fort.” Aside from the expected “John Brown’s Body” song written in 1861,
Confederate diplomats Mason and Slidell imprisoned in 1861, Confederate vice president
Surplus Federal Properties for a Historical Monument (N.p.: National Park Service, April 1958), 11, 14.
Metropolitan District Commission, Report Library, Georges Island, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.
432
“Neglected Islands in Boston Harbor Surveyed as Recreational Centers,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1956,
B59. Earliest surviving correspondence showing MDC interest in acquiring islands is letter from Donald L.
Kline of the Edwards, Kelcey and Beck consulting agency to Commissioner Charles W. Greenough of the
MDC, dated February 1, 1956. See also letter from Regional Director C. H. Cool of the GSA to Charles
W. Greenough of the MDC, dated April 29, 1957. For MDC deciding against Peddocks, see “Extract from
Records of Meeting, November 7, 1957” on page 9 of the Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort
Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area
and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission,
Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.
306
Alexander Stephens in 1865, and what Snow described as “The last handshake between a
Union veteran and a Southern veteran” taking place in 1935 during a bronze plaque
dedication (which Snow arranged), was #4: “The Southern spy, Mrs. Andrew Lanier, was
hanged here. Her ghost is said to haunt the island.” After two decades of writing,
lecturing and leading tours, legends were essential to Snow’s manner of describing the
past, whether to families on a harbor tour or civil servants reading another government
agency’s official application.433
The National Park Service was actually responsible for reviewing the MDC’s
application and submitting a report to the GSA. It found the agency to be relatively
inexperienced in managing historic properties but still an acceptable custodian, and
dispatched NPS regional historian Frank Barnes to make a site visit to help determine
Fort Warren’s historical importance, condition, and feasibility of the MDC’s
development plans. As the acknowledged expert on the history of Boston Harbor and
particularly Fort Warren, Edward Rowe Snow joined Barnes on January 20, 1958 along
with MDC officials to inspect the island. Having explained the historical significance in
the MDC’s application, Snow now had the opportunity to illustrate his case in person.
And having spent two decades leading thousands of people – in 1961 Snow estimated
25,000 – around the fort, Snow knew how to make an audience appreciate it. In Barnes’s
NPS report submitted three months later, he omitted any mention of ghosts in describing
the fort’s significance, but included Snow’s 1941 Historic Fort Warren among his
433
See pages 10 and 16-18 of Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston
Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the
GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files,
1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.
307
sources, and concluded that Fort Warren more than met the criteria for historical
significance.434
With the GSA approving of MDC plans for both Georges and Lovells, the MDC
took title to both islands on July 14, 1958, and paid the federal government $4,860.06 and
$18,485.06 respectively. Only two days later the Boston landscape architectural firm
Shurcliff & Merrill wrote to the head of the MDC asking to be consultants for the
forthcoming engineering work on the islands. In making their case, company head
Sidney Shurcliff pointed out his experience from 1928 through 1940 in the restoration of
what became Colonial Williamsburg, and site development for Old Sturbridge Village
and the MDC’s own Quincy Homestead property. Shurcliff had worked in Williamsburg
under his father, Arthur A. Shurcliff, who had been the head landscape architect in what
became the most important example of historic preservation in the United States. Having
died the previous year, his son Sidney now led the firm. No doubt in part due to their
reputation in the field, the MDC hired Shurcliff & Merrill to draft the History and Master
Plan for Georges Island, which they completed in May, 1960. For the forty-page
historical research portion, the firm hired Minor H. McLain, who had just completed his
PhD dissertation in 1955 at Boston University on the Civil War prison conditions at Fort
Warren.435
434
Frank Barnes, Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, GSA Control No. D-Mass456; Report on Application by Metropolitan District Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for
Transfer of Surplus Federal Properties for a Historical Monument (N.p.: National Park Service, April
1958), 3, 9. Metropolitan District Commission, Report Library, Georges Island, DCR Archives, Boston,
MA. Snow’s tour estimate from page 8 of his confidential report submitted to MDC Commissioner Robert
F. Murphy on May 22, 1961. See Edward Rowe Snow, “Report on Fort Warren,” Metropolitan District
Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives,
Boston, MA.
435
“$400,000 Recreation Plan For Two Boston Islands,” Boston Globe, September 29, 1959, 1. Cost for
each island from minutes of MDC meetings on May 1, 1958 and June 5, 1958. Metropolitan District
Commission, Minutes, Card Index, 1893-1972, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Sidney N. Shurcliff to
308
Snow’s Lady in Black did not receive mention in McLain’s account of the fort’s
history, but Snow was no less involved in the project. He continued to participate in
memorial activities and tours on the island – including one for MDC officials on May 16,
1961 during which they discussed the possibility of opening the fort early. Though the
MDC had hoped to open at least part of Georges by the spring of 1959, demolition of
most of the derelict modern buildings, repairs to the island’s water supply, and the
renovation of docking facilities pushed the final opening to the summer of 1961. In the
interim, local newspapers chronicled the physical progress and increasing amounts of
capital pledged to the project.
As the opening date approached, Snow submitted a short report to MDC resident
engineer Christopher Joyce with his top five concerns: vandalism, the need for a
functioning water supply, public toilets, extra guards, and fencing off dangerous areas.
He expanded on these in a confidential twelve-page report submitted to MDC
Commissioner Robert F. Murphy on May 22 at his request, and also promised to draft an
hour-by-hour program for the expected July 4 opening. In the report, after giving a brief
history of the fort and his experience with it, he went over the three main problems: how
to regulate the docks and beach areas, how to handle the flow of visitors on the island,
and setting general rules for behavior – including Snow’s preference for only guided
tours within the fort for the safety of visitors.436
Commissioner Charles W. Greenough of the MDC, dated July 16, 1958. Metropolitan District
Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives,
Boston, MA. Shurcliff and Merrill, History and Master Plan, Georges Island and Fort Warren, Boston
Harbor (Boston, MA.: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Metropolitan District Commission, Parks
Division, 1960).
436
Edward G. McGrath, “N.E. War Dead Saluted In Every City and Town,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1958,
1. Snow’s tour with MDC officials agreed to in MDC minutes of May 11, 1961 meeting. Metropolitan
District Commission, Minutes, Card Index, 1893-1972, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Hope of MDC to
open Georges Island in spring of 1959 in letter from Commissioner Charles W. Greenough to Sidney
309
But as hard as the civil servants, contractors, and Snow worked to get the island
ready by Independence Day, the formal opening did not occur until August 6, 1961.
Beginning that afternoon of speeches to formally dedicate the island as an historical
recreation site, Commissioner Murphy in his opening remarks credited the MDC taking
custody of the island due to “concerted public demand …. not to allow George’s Island
and Fort Warren to fall into the hands of private interests, intent upon
commercialization.” He welcomed the public’s feedback and constructive criticism, but
ended on a word of caution:
But if the succeeding weeks and months indicate a sparse turnout of visitors and
an apathetic attitude toward what the Commonwealth is attempting to accomplish
on the public’s behalf, the long-term future of George’s Island and Fort Warren as
a historical site – as we want it to become known – accessible to all, may well be
in jeopardy.
Included among the subsequent speakers was Edward Rowe Snow, who did his usual part
in telling the history of the island and fort to the crowd of two hundred. After all the
dignitaries had spoken Snow led tours of the fort, and included, as he did during the
ceremony, the Lady in Black. The activism of Snow and other concerned citizens and
civic organizations had pushed the MDC to expand its public stewardship to include the
Shurcliff, dated October 20, 1958. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject
Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. “$400,000 Recreation Plan For Two
Boston Islands,” Boston Globe, September 29, 1959, 1. Barry Cadigan, “Georges Island Project Nearing
Completion,” Boston Globe, May 1, 1960, 93. Edward Quarrington, “Island Fort at Boston to Become
Picnic Site,” New York Times, August 14, 1960, X23. “Historic Ft. Warren in Boston Harbor being readied
as tourist attraction and recreation area,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, November 13, 1960, 16 (Parade
Section). “Historic Georges Island Opens July 4 as Tourist Attaction,” Boston Globe, May 17, 1961, 18.
James Hammond, “Georges Island Will Be Family Recreation Spot,” Boston Globe, May 21, 1961, 72.
John H. Fenton, “New Career Develops For Old Boston Fort,” New York Times, July 2, 1961, XX3. For
both versions of Edward Rowe Snow’s 1961 “Report on Fort Warren” and accompanying letters from
Snow to Joyce (dated May 18, 1961) and Murphy (dated May 18 and May 22) see Metropolitan District
Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives,
Boston, MA.
310
islands in Boston Harbor as recreation sites. But in taking on a project that had already
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the MDC wanted continued public support.437
And they did come. By late September an estimated 21,400 people had stepped
ashore from a variety of personal watercraft and ferries. As for Snow, he was committed
to the fort as a public park, and remained a persistent advocate through the 1960s and
‘70s – even if it made him a gadfly to the Commission. Three events illustrate his typical
activism. In July 1967 Snow reprinted in his Patriot Ledger column a letter from the
president of the Massachusetts Marine Historical League charging that “in general the
entire island seems to have slipped into a passive defeated attitude, with certain areas
approaching slum-like squalor” due to discarded trash. Snow endorsed his friend’s letter
based on his own observations, though the MDC denied the charges. Two years later
Snow wrote to then-Commissioner Howard Whitmore Jr. to express “certain fears
regarding the future of Fort Warren” that included a suggested but yet-to-be-dug artesian
well among the “so many other items that I have heard about that I am very discouraged.
Why is that people cannot get together and plan a sensible result for this delightful fort?”
Snow frustrated concluded.
His advocacy eventually got him designated by subsequent MDC Commissioner
John Sears as a “Selectman” of Fort Warren, named after the New England town official
who helped manage public affairs. While the two men met and discussed the island’s
problems, Snow also tried to rally public support. In his June 7, 1972 “Mystery and
Adventure” column in the Boston Herald-Traveler under the title “Fort Warren Needs
437
“Fort Warren Opens As Recreation Area,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1961, 12. For typed copies of the
program for the dedication of Fort Warren and the text of Commissioner Robert F. Murphy’s opening
remarks see Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges
Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.
311
Help,” Snow bypassed his usual historical anecdotes for advocacy in explaining the
history behind the island’s perennial lack of fresh water, the possibility of using a
desalinization system, and a steadily-growing breach in the island’s seawall that was
becoming increasingly costly to fix.438
Snow was hardly alone in his criticism. James Crowley’s July 28, 1974 Boston
Globe article “The Boston Harbor Forts are Crumbling” echoed Snow’s concerns as it
profiled fort curator and laborer Gerald Butler who “clearly cannot keep ahead of the
vandals who wreck his handiwork as fast as he accomplishes it, thanks largely to the
inadequate MDC police force of just three men who cannot be expected to cope with the
boatloads of thousands of school children and adults who are dumped on the island daily
during the summer…. Sightseers and the ravages of time have converted the old fort into
an almost total ruin.” Crowley also revealed that the ambitious restoration outlined in the
1960 master plan was impossible due to the MDC’s budget needing to go toward
maintaining “250 miles of parkways, 12,000 acres of urban parks, the banks of the
Charles, Mystic and Neponset rivers, 26 hockey rinks, 19 pools, 47 playgrounds and 30
miles of ocean beach.” As the now largely uninhabited and abandoned harbor islands did
not fall under the constituency of any state legislator, it was difficult for activists to
convince the government to spend money on them. Easily accessible urban recreational
spots such as a hockey rink won votes for local politicians instead.439
438
September visitor estimate from Edward Rowe Snow, “Fort Warren,” Patriot Ledger, September 20,
1961. “MDC Officer Challenges Charge of ‘Near Squalor’ at Ft. Warren,” Patriot Ledger, July 21, 1967,
9. Letter from Edward Rowe Snow to Commissioner Howard Whitmore Jr., dated May 5, 1969.
Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File,
DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Edward Rowe Snow, “Fort Warren Needs Help,” Boston Herald-Traveler,
June 7, 1971, B21.
439
James Crowley, “The Boston Harbor Forts are Crumbling,” Boston Globe, July 28, 1974, A6.
312
Perhaps what spurred Snow’s activism, aside from his desire that the public
deserved access to an island with an important chapter of history to tell, was a clause in
the federal application process for surplus property that the MDC had agreed to back in
1957. For twenty years the receiving agency or organization needed to use the property
in the manner they had promised; if they violated these terms and conditions the federal
government reserved the right to reclaim the property. However, after twenty years there
was no restriction on what the receiver could do with their property, so the MDC could, if
necessary, close the island to the public, or put it up for sale or lease any time after 1978.
Fortunately this closure never happened, and Snow continued to lead tours of the
fort into the 1980s -- though the MDC’s “era of mismanagement” continued. On May
16, 1981 an accidental fire destroyed the chapel inside Fort Warren. It was a space where
Snow had for decades spoken with visitors. Back in the 1930s Works Progress
Administration artists had painted the walls with murals depicting the fort’s Civil War
history, and Snow later brought back some of the original artists to do restoration work.
Only two months after the fire, Snow suffered a stroke on July 24, 1981, and remained
hospitalized until passing away on April 10, 1982 at the age of seventy nine.440
Although Fort Warren never received the care Snow felt it deserved within his
lifetime, he could still see his advocacy for the islands of Boston Harbor as a success.
440
See pages 3 and 4 of Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor,
Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA,
dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 19302003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. For murals painted by WPA artists see Joe
Harrington, “Vandals do More Damage Than the Red Coats,” Boston Globe, October 4, 1959, A67. “Fire
Destroys Island Chapel,” Boston Globe, May 18, 1981, 1. For more on what one MDC ranger described as
the “era of mismanagement,” the chapel, and the chapel fire see “The Romance of Boston Bay,” Edward
Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD, Winthrop, MA.:
WCAT, Inc., 2008). For an example of Snow relating “history diced with imagination” in the chapel, see
Dave Arnold, “Step Back in Time at Georges Island,” Boston Globe, August 10, 1980, 1. For Snow’s
stroke and death, see John William Riley, “Edward Rowe Snow, 79, Lecturer, Sea Author, Flying Santa
Claus,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1982, A1.
313
The early groundswell of support that had spurred the Metropolitan District Commission
to acquire and open two of the islands in the 1950s subsequently expanded to include all
of them. When Snow completed The Islands of Boston Harbor in 1935, the harbor was
largely a place for defense, navigation, and commerce. From the half-dozen fortified
islands to Little Brewster Island’s lighthouse, Deer Island’s prison, Thompson Island’s
trade school for boys, Moon Island’s sewage pumping station, Gallops Island’s
quarantine station, Long Island’s hospital and almshouse, and Spectacle Island’s garbage
dump, the islands were often used for activities at the margins of society. The loss of two
large islands, Governor’s and Apple, to construct Boston’s modern airport was part of the
commercial sentiment towards the harbor that trumped recreation.441
But in the late 1950s this feeling was changing – as evidenced by both the MDC’s
plans for recreation centers on the islands and businessman Richard Robie’s similar
intentions for a yachting center. In 1967 the Metropolitan Area Planning Council
(MAPC) – created by the state legislature in 1963 to provide coordinated regional
planning for eighty-three communities in eastern Massachusetts – proposed a $45 million
plan to acquire and develop thirty-one islands in Boston Harbor as recreation sites over
the next decade. The report noted that despite the harbor’s “decay and deterioration”
(which included its famously polluted waters) it was still “the most spacious recreational
area closest to the most densely populated areas of metropolitan Boston.” Towns ringing
Boston Harbor largely objected to MAPC’s proposal, for reasons of lost tax revenue, the
state taking over town property, and the decades-old sewage problem as what should be
441
Histories of various islands from Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New
York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971); and Eric Jay Dolin, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty,
Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor – A Unique
Environmental Success Story (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 54.
314
addressed first. For reasons of opposition and expected cost, the state did not enact the
plan.442
Since the nineteenth century Boston and surrounding towns had disposed of
sewage by dumping it directly into the harbor, intending it to be carried out to sea on the
outgoing tide. But growing urban populations and industries into the twentieth century
created more waste than the tides could naturally disperse. The results were frequent
closings of shellfish beds and public beaches, foul odors, debris-filled waters, and a
public that largely turned away from much of the harbor as a place for recreation. Sadly,
the problem persisted until the end of the twentieth century.
The MDC was in charge of sewer systems for greater Boston, but eventually
learned, as Eric Dolin chronicled in Political Waters, his history of the harbor, that there
was no political incentive to maintain the system. To do so would have required an
expanded budget from the state legislature, which would have required raising the
sewage rates for residents in the system. As raising taxes was unpopular among voters
who were not clamoring to have the harbor cleaned up, the situation for most of the
twentieth century was cheap rates and a historic but polluted coastal environment. The
MDC built sewage treatment plants on Nut Island in 1952 and Deer Island in 1968, but
the system was still inadequate and poorly maintained for lack of funds and public
interest. Only in the 1980s would public pressure in the form of lawsuits result in the
legislature creating a new authority to take over the MDC’s water and sewage systems,
and the subsequent launch of the massive Boston Harbor Project to build a new treatment
442
Richard McLaughlin, “Marina, Second to None, Planned for Peddocks Island,” Boston Globe,
December 1, 1957, 50. Peter F. Hines, “What People Talk About; A Pat on Back for Speaker Thompson,”
Boston Globe, October 3, 1963, 26. James Ayres, “31 Islands to Play On,” Boston Globe, March 31, 1967,
1. Ken Botwright, “Shore Towns Cool to Harbor-Islands Plan,” Boston Globe, April 1, 1967, 5.
315
plant on Deer Island and related modern infrastructure. Fully operational in 2001, it
resulted in Boston having one of the cleanest harbors in the nation.443
The roots of this eventual success date to the late 1960s, when a growing
environmental awareness was causing Americans to reappraise the condition of the
places where they lived. In February 1969 two members of the Squantum Women’s Club
(of Quincy, Massachusetts) launched Save Our Shores (SOS), a campaign to preserve and
improve the Boston Harbor islands.444 Within a year they had amassed 250,000
supporters nationwide, from governors to sportsmen. Also in 1970 the State Federation
of Women’s Clubs backed House Bill 900, which provided “for an accelerated program
of land acquisition to create the Boston Harbor … program as a national recreation area
and an historic site.” Following the rising popularity of environmental issues among their
constituents, and in the wake of the first Earth Day on April 22, the Massachusetts
legislature debated a bill that would have the state take control of the harbor islands for
conservation and recreation.
Signed into law by Governor Sargent on August 22, 1970, it authorized the
Department of Natural Resources to take the harbor islands by eminent domain, purchase,
or gift, and gave the department authority over both public and private land use along the
shore of Boston Harbor. Over the next three years the state acquired thirteen islands. In
1971 it hired MAPC to prepare a recreation and conservation-oriented master plan for the
443
History of the sewage problem from Eric Jay Dolin, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious,
Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor – A Unique Environmental
Success Story (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 1-2, 54-55, 97, and 143-194 (the
Boston Harbor Project). Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), “The Boston Harbor Project
Timeline: 1986-2001,” http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/harbor/html/soh_bhp.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
444
In Snow’s 1971 update to The Islands of Boston Harbor, he praised their work on Lovells Island,
commenting “The S.O.S. or Save Our Shores group has carried out many projects here and on other islands
in an effort to beautify Boston Bay.” Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New
York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 170.
316
islands. Completed the following year, the plan called for spending $27 million over the
next eighteen years including on additional acquisitions, developing infrastructure,
conservation, and regular ferry service between the islands and the mainland. But the
plan repeatedly failed to secure state funding.445
In a Boston Globe article in the summer of 1976, journalist Michael Kenney
assessed the state of the six-year-old Harbor Islands Park. The preservation of thirty-one
islands was a major victory for conservationists and recreationists. But park access
remained limited and expensive for those who did not own a boat, and development
being the joint responsibility of the Department of Environmental Management and the
MDC had resulted in inter-governmental rivalry over management and funds. Still,
150,000 people had used the park the previous summer, with Georges Island serving as
the gateway for most of those visitors. With its large docking facilities built by the MDC
between 1959 and 1961, it was also the only island with direct ferry access from the
mainland, and served as a hub for a free water taxi to take visitors to neighboring Lovells,
Gallops, Bumpkin, and Grape islands.446
Decades earlier, Edward Rowe Snow had first brought public attention to the
fortifications in Boston Harbor through his books, radio broadcasts, lectures, and personal
tours. First he focused on Governor’s Island, which due to its proximity to the mainland
made it a hugely popular recreation site. The island’s prominent Fort Winthrop gave
445
Mary Sarah King, “Bid to save Boston Harbor wins wide support,” Boston Globe, March 1, 1970, A12.
“Hope for the harbor,” Boston Globe, April 26, 1970, A26. David Nyhan, “Sargent OKs taking of islands
in harbor,” Boston Globe, August 23, 1970, 22. M. R. Montgomery, “Chalk one up for politicians: Hub’s
harbor islands saved,” Boston Globe, August 30, 1970, 91. James Ayres, “Boston Harbor: After five years
of controversy, another master plan is being made,” Boston Globe, February 28, 1971, 4A. Deckle
McLean, “The Boston Harbor Islands: Plans, Problems and Pleasures,” Boston Globe, March 18, 1973,
C12. Anson Smith, “Boston Harbor islands park still a dream,” Boston Globe, February 2, 1975, 2.
446
Michael Kenney, “Harbor park takes shape, but getting there isn’t easy,” Boston Globe, July 18, 1976,
45.
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those visitors a tangible gateway to two centuries of local and national history. After the
state government nonetheless put economic development ahead of historic preservation,
Snow turned his attention to the distant island guarding the entrance to Boston Harbor.
On Georges Island, he recognized that its important history and massive fort made it the
historical and physical centerpiece of the storied Boston Harbor islands. While he
campaigned for the preservation of Fort Warren from the 1950s until his stroke in 1981,
other individuals and organizations built on this early success to advocate for making the
entire harbor a park.
While Edward Rowe Snow was not directly responsible for preserving the other
thirty-odd islands in Boston Harbor, he did labor for a half-century to interest residents
and visitors in journeying out into the often-polluted harbor and learning about its history.
He realized that people do not value what they do not understand. To know the history of
a place increased the possibility that it wouldn’t be ignored, vandalized, or demolished.
And this was especially true for the islands without iconic buildings, where Snow had to
unearth their history in area archives, from local residents, and clues in the landscape.
For this half-century of research and public education, Edward Rowe Snow emerges as
the foremost preservationist of Boston Harbor.
Conclusion
From the 1930s until his death in 1982, Edward Rowe Snow created a
commercially successful and lasting image of New England’s maritime past. The roots
of his interests lay in his family history and curiosity about the landscape and people
surrounding his home in Winthrop, one of the towns ringing Boston Harbor. As he
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revealed to readers of his books over decades, Snow proudly traced his ancestry to the
Mayflower and was fond of saying that generations of men on both sides of his family
had been sea captains. Of these, his grandfather’s experiences as a sailor and captain
(including his fights with pirates) made a strong impression on Snow, who had learned
them from his mother. Keepers of family lore, Alice Rowe Snow and other relatives
recounted stories that told the entire course of American maritime history through a
succession of Snow ancestors. Snow credited his mother’s storytelling for inspiring him
to begin writing publications in 1935, and he also continued her preference for a romantic
version of the past.
Additional inspiration came through the coastal landscape and local people. By
the age of seven his grandmother was taking him to historic sites and archives, his brother
was taking him to nearby islands strewn with the debris of three centuries of use, while
other family and friends shared their experiences of living at sea and along the coast. At
thirteen Snow began exploring the harbor on his own by canoe, with successive trips to
the Boston Public Library to answer the questions he encountered in the landscape. His
ancestry-fueled wanderlust took him briefly to sea, the West Coast, and then Montana
before finally landing at Harvard, where he wrote his senior thesis on a history of the
harbor islands. Snow turned it into his first book, and revealed his preference for small,
colorful stories of sometimes questionable veracity over broad histories of people, events,
or groups. While he later earned a masters degree in history that sharpened his research
and writing skills and imparted a determination to be accurate and truthful, Snow would
become a popular historical storyteller instead of an academic historian.
319
Upon beginning what would be thirteen years of teaching high school math,
history, and English, Snow found ways to include his storytelling in his classes. By then,
Snow was organizing and participating in historical commemorations, leading historical
tours, and delivering lectures to groups throughout New England about the region’s
maritime history and lore. He had perfected his art of storytelling through addressing his
students, servicemen and civilians in North Africa and Britain during his wartime service
and convalescence, and through speaking with those who had lived along the coast for
decades. In 1946 he quit teaching to write and lecture full time. A decade later, at the
height of his public exposure, he had a radio show broadcasting throughout New
England, wrote columns for three newspapers in Massachusetts and Maine, lectured in
every New England state, and had over two dozen publications to his name. He would
continue to write a book a year until 1981.
Edward Rowe Snow was not the only famous storyteller in the region, past or
present. Samuel Adams Drake wrote popular history and historical fiction centered on
New England for a quarter century. Snow referred to Drake throughout his career,
researching and retelling many of the legends and folklore he had collected decades
before. In the mid twentieth century, Snow shared the airwaves, lecture circuit,
bookshelves and sometimes even the same stories as his friend Alton Hall Blackington.
However, the latter’s brand of storytelling was mostly landlocked, while Snow favored
the sea. At least after Blackington’s death, Snow was the region’s most prominent
storyteller, and no one else chronicled the seacoast so thoroughly and for so long.
In changing how the public perceived the past along the New England coast,
Snow’s career draws parallels with Helen Creighton, his contemporary in Nova Scotia.
320
Through six decades of writing and collecting folklore, she helped to refashion the
popular perception of Nova Scotia’s coastal people as rustic, rural Anglo folk with lives
rooted in tradition and free of modern societal ills. While Snow did not similarly help to
create an imagined folk culture in New England, he nonetheless shared Creighton’s
romantic view of the past and its commercial value. And he still practiced cultural
selection in collecting and sharing stories about pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks,
and ghosts.
After the success of his first book, Snow published his next five through a small
Boston-based company before switching in 1948 to the New York-based Dodd, Mead
and Company. The change altered his coastal product for a wider audience. The books
were now smaller, shorter in length, had fewer pictures, no endnotes or bibliography, and
the number of titles referencing New England dropped to a minority – even as the
majority of the stories remained connected to the region. Making his titles generally
maritime instead of regionally specific made them more marketable to a national
audience. The result of this transformation, however, made the general maritime past a
New England maritime past to Snow’s readers, who also could now not easily check his
scholarship and had to take his sometimes incredible stories at his word.
Thanks in part to lower prices and better marketing, Snow’s books sold well
through the 1950s and ‘60s. Within them, Snow always sought to make the history
visible, evocative, and often tangible. He participated in many of the stories, either as a
witness or a later researcher hunting for pieces of the story in local libraries, archives,
museums, and the landscape. He would point out the locations of his stories, relics from
them in local museums and homes, and sometimes include fragments of wood, tea,
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plants, or even silver coins in limited editions of books. It was all a part of Snow’s belief
that artifacts and place were essential to his brand of maritime New England.
More than any other subjects in his imagined coastal realm, pirates and their
treasure accounted for Snow’s most popular books, much of his fan mail, and his most
dramatic personal adventures. Snow became one of the few people to find buried pirate
treasure, though he made more money writing about it. For centuries before Snow,
writers had fed the public’s appetite for stories of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century
pirates who provoked terror and fascination on both sides of the Atlantic. Contemporary
historians have since credited this popular fascination for pirates to their status as rebels.
At the time of Snow’s writing in the 1940s through 1960s, pirates enjoyed wide
resonance in popular culture alongside people such as actors and musicians who also
adopted rebel or antihero personas. This was at a time when American society focused
on conformity and faith in capitalism, family, government, and God. But unlike Johnny
Cash or Elvis, pirates were safely in the distant past, and their early and often violent
deaths in battle or governmental executions brought a strong moral lesson to Snow’s
salacious tales.
Book reviews published in the Boston Globe give a sense of how the public
received his work. Through the 1940s and ‘50s they’re largely positive, as critics
approved of his superlative-laced dramatic sea stories and Yankee identity that
sanctioned him as an authentic chronicler of his region’s history and lore. But when
Snow drifted too far inland with his stories, at least one reviewer spoke for the multitude
in wishing he would head seaward again. Despite this return to maritime topics, entering
the 1960s Snow’s books met increased criticism in their almost automated appearance
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each holiday season, in his increasing habit of recycling stories from out of print books,
and a writing style that some found outdated. Whether this behavior was due to the
suggestions of Dodd, Mead and Company or his own initiative is unknown. But by the
end of his literary career Snow was largely retelling a portrait of maritime New England
that he had carefully painted from the 1930s through the ‘50s.
Irrespective of how Snow’s books were judged by critics, he cared more about the
thoughts of the people who inhabited his maritime world. Through his work as a Flying
Santa, and his decades of visits, interviews, letters and phone calls, he became someone
that coastal New Englanders trusted to fairly tell their stories, hold their secrets for as
long as they asked, be open-minded about their beliefs in ghosts and sea monsters, and in
general be the voice for people living at the margins of society.
In order to remain a trusted source for disseminating coastal history and lore,
Snow always listed where he did archival research and thanked the dozens of people by
name that helped with each book. It was this emphasis on accuracy that appears to be
how Snow distinguished himself from his many yarn-spinning contemporaries. While it
wasn’t often possible for readers to verify that Snow’s version of an event or historical
figure was correct, in detailing his exhaustive research, his debunking of details that,
while alluring, just weren’t true, and his presence in many of the chapters as either
witness or careful investigator, marked him as a trustworthy historical guide.
But onto this base of facts Snow added salt: in the form of dialogue, superlatives,
and qualifiers. Whether describing contemporary or centuries-old events, Snow added
dialogue at key points to increase the drama. And by focusing on stories that were
“unbelievable,” “astounding,” or “the greatest” gave him a means to compete for the
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public’s attention in an increasingly crowded literary market. Qualifiers such as “it is
said” or “allegedly” allowed Snow to preserve his claim of truth telling while at the same
time not have to exclude a great story just because he couldn’t verify it.
The Lady in Black is the best example of Snow’s salt-infused historical
storytelling, and illustrates his transformation from a cautious historian in 1935 to a
seasoned storyteller by 1950. Snow dropped his original disclaimer that the story had no
basis in fact as he recounts precise details, dialogue, and even photographic evidence that
she existed. In Snow blending the history of Fort Warren with a ghost story passed
through generations of soldiers, he created a plausible tale that couldn’t be unraveled into
fact and pure fiction. It was also one that people could take part in. Snow was largely
responsible for setting down and spreading the story of Mrs. Lanier to the public through
more than forty-five years of writing and lecturing. Once the fort became a state park, he
continued to keep the story alive as a public performance by having a volunteer hide in a
“coffin” in the fort’s former dungeon and surprise unsuspecting tour groups.
This was only the most famous example of Snow as a showman. When Snow
discovered actual pirate treasure on Cape Cod he improved the story for his latest book
by making his hunt seem longer and more solitary – likely to appease frustrated treasureseeking fans. Snow also re-enacted events for the benefit of the camera, and took his
own photographs of treasure finds that could test the bounds of plausibility. The story of
Blackbeard’s skull talking to Snow on a dark and stormy night continued his playing with
the boundaries of fact and fiction, this time in collaboration with a fellow writer.
But while Edward Rowe Snow made a living from creating and selling an
abridged version of coastal New England, he genuinely cared for the places where such
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history had taken place – and no more so than the Boston Harbor islands. When
government officials considered destroying Governor’s Island in the 1930s, Snow joined
other historians in starting a preservation society and convinced the city to turn the island
over to them. While this victory lasted less than a decade before the island was absorbed
into the airport, Snow had better success with Georges Island.
Once again he joined others in calling for the fort to be preserved, and put
together a preservation society that opposed the government auction. Behind the scenes
he worked with the MDC to put together a convincing application, and then found
himself accompanying the NPS historian in touring the island to determine the viability
of the MDC’s proposal and the fort’s historical significance. Once the federal
government gave the island to Massachusetts, Snow remained involved, pressing for it to
be opened to the public as soon as possible, and submitting reports to the MDC on how to
manage it. Through the 1960s and ‘70s he remained a critic of the commission’s lack of
policing and maintenance – likely out of fears that, if ignored, the fort would decay to the
point where it would cease to be a public park.
While Snow fought for the future of Georges Island, others picked up the message
he had been championing since the 1930s: the islands of Boston Harbor were valuable for
their history and as recreation sites for millions of people living in the region. He began
leading tours of the islands and harbor when it was largely a place of industry. Now
decades later, a rising environmental awareness throughout American society caused
people to see the harbor as a heavily abused environment that deserved protection. By
the 1970s this had become a reality as the state passed legislation to begin taking each
harbor island through eminent domain to form a novel kind of state park.
325
The legacy of Edward Rowe Snow exists in monuments and public parkland,
literature, and public memory. Reaching an audience of millions through decades of
writing, radio and television broadcasts, lectures, and tours, he provided the public with
an easily consumable portrait of the New England coast. It was once the haunt of pirates,
contained millions of dollars of lost treasure, historic and romantic lighthouses, tragic
shipwrecks that should not be forgotten, and supernatural stories to be debated. Points of
entry for Edward Rowe Snow’s New England were bookshops, auditoriums, boat decks,
and city streets. Each place visited in text or in person was a compilation of colorful
anecdotes that were easy to digest and share – which accounts for the continuing
popularity of even centuries-old stories that Snow revived and polished for new
generations. His stories live on decades after his death. Without the resources of a large
museum or government agency, Snow devoted his life to educating the public about the
history and lore of the New England coast. But while Snow could only re-create the past
through his storytelling, the federal government would attempt to create a historical
preserve in the modern landscape of Cape Cod.
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CHAPTER 4
Toward a More Natural History: Cape Cod National Seashore, 1955-1989
Introduction
At noon on August 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy sat at his desk in the Oval
Office, surrounded by supporters of Senate bill S. 857. Using twenty-two pens (to later
distribute as souvenirs) he signed the act authorizing the establishment of Cape Cod
National Seashore. Afterward he remarked that “This act makes it possible for the people
of the United States through their Government to acquire and preserve the natural and
historic values of a portion of Cape Cod for the inspiration and enjoyment of people all
over the United States.” The creation of Public Law 87-126 capped six years of debate in
state and national legislatures, media, and public meetings since the National Park
Service published a report on the nation’s vanishing public coastal lands in 1955. It
detailed the urgent need to create national seashore parks, with Cape Cod high on the
list.447
Having co-sponsored park legislation himself two years prior with fellow
Massachusetts senator Leverett Saltonstall, and having a family vacation home on Cape
Cod, Kennedy was long familiar with the rapid postwar development on the peninsula
and the widespread belief that “old Cape Cod” was rapidly disappearing.448 In creating a
447
Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978),
54. “President Uses 22 Pens to Sign Cape Park Law,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1961, 1.
448
See for example, Frank Falacci, “Builders Carve Up Cape While Park Bill Droops,” Boston Globe,
August 29, 1960, 1; and Earl Banner’s six-part “Preserving Our Beaches” series in the Boston Globe from
327
national park spanning six coastal towns, the federal government was assuming a large
role in the preservation and interpretation of New England’s maritime past. But it needed
to do so in a living landscape containing some of the nation’s oldest communities and an
ever-growing number of visitors. And Kennedy pairing the need to protect natural and
historic values for the public good echoed the mission of the National Park Service since
its founding in 1916.449
But beyond providing an interpretation of northern coastal history and nature to a
mass audience (though this was important in contributing to the Cape’s nationwide
recognition), the Cape Cod National Seashore is worth studying as the capstone of a
regional image. Beginning with planning documents and extending through three
decades of preservation and interpretation, the Cape Cod National Seashore has come to
include all the components of the modern portrait of coastal New England. It includes
old salts and other individuals leading traditional lifeways, Mystic Seaport’s emphasis on
preserving noteworthy historic structures, and the dramatic coastal history and lore
beloved by Edward Rowe Snow. Into this mix the Park Service added the final element:
the preservation and interpretation of (coastal) nature that has always surrounded these
cultural stories. Until the NPS efforts on Cape Cod, non-profit organizations interested in
July 22, 1959 to July 27, 1959. Not everyone mourned the loss of “old Cape Cod.” Resort operator and
Cape resident Mari Kenrick wrote a letter to the editor of the Cape Cod Standard-Times, which the New
York Times reprinted as “In Defense of Modernity,” New York Times, October 23, 1960, X31. Kennedy
himself said in 1959 that “If a park of this nature is not established on Cape Cod, there is every danger that
much of the Cape will become a mere extension of the suburban civilization which typifies so many of our
lives. If we act sensibly now, while the opportunity remains, we shall have preserved for America and for
our people a priceless heritage to be enjoyed many times over, not only by this generation but by those
which follow.” Quoted in Gloria Negri, “…JFK Walked Its Beaches, Sailed Its Waters,” Boston Globe,
May 31, 1966, 1.
449
The National Park Service Act charged the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the
natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such
manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Quoted
in National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 21.
328
preserving parts of the New England coast largely focused on either history or nature.
The NPS combined them.450
The Park Service, however, does not operate in a vacuum. From its creation in
1961 through 1989, Cape Cod National Seashore reflects changing attitudes towards
nature and history within the Park Service as it influenced and was influenced by the
American public. As the National Park Service built the park, their portrait of the past –
of what should be preserved and interpreted for the public – would not go unchallenged.
Historiography
The extensive scholarship on North American parklands has largely addressed the
iconic western ones, leaving the coast understudied.451 An important Canadian
450
Leading historical organizations such as Mystic Seaport (est. 1929) and the Society for the Preservation
of New England (est. 1910; later renamed Historic New England) are typical of those focused on
preserving and interpreting cultural history. The Massachusetts Audubon Society (est. 1896) and the Cape
Cod Museum of Natural History (est. 1954) are representative of organizations focused on environmental
education and conserving the natural world. The Massachusetts Audubon Society is the largest
conservation organization in New England, and has established ninety wildlife sanctuaries in Massachusetts
encompassing 34,000 acres. In 1958 it purchased what has became the 1100-acre Wellfleet Bay Wildlife
Sanctuary on the Bay side of Cape Cod with funds provided in part by the Avalon and Old Dominion
philanthropic foundations of siblings Ailsa Mellon-Bruce and Paul Mellon. See Mass Audubon, “About
Mass Audubon,” http://www.massaudubon.org/about/index.php (accessed January 7, 2013); and Priscilla
H. Bailey, “The 50th Project: The Austin Years,”
http://www.massaudubon.org/blogs/wellfleetbaynaturalhistory/the-50th-project-the-austin-years/ (accessed
January 7, 2013). A rare exception to this history/nature division in preservation is The Trustees of
Reservations, a non-profit organization that since 1891 has sought to “preserve, for public use and
enjoyment, properties of exceptional scenic, historic, and ecological value in Massachusetts.” The Trustees
of Reservations, “Our Mission,” http://www.thetrustees.org/about-us/our-mission/ (accessed January 7,
2013). TTOR currently manages more than one hundred Reservations in the state encompassing almost
25,000 acres.
451
For an overview of books on the National Park Service, the park system, and individual parks see
Horace M. Albright and Marian Albright Schenck, Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years
(Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Horace M. Albright and Robert Cahn, The Birth of
the National Park Service: The Founding Years, 1913-1933 (Salt Lake City, UT.: Howe Brothers, 1985);
Thomas R. Cox, The Park Builders: A History of State Parks in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, WA.:
University of Washington Press, 1988); Lary M. Dilsaver, ed., America’s National Park System: The
Critical Documents (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994); William C. Everhart, The
National Park Service (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1983); John Ise, Our National Park Policy: A
Critical History (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961); Polly W. Kaufman, National Parks and the
Woman’s Voice: A History (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); David Louter,
329
exception, Alan MacEachern’s National Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada,
1935-1970 looks at the history of the first four national parks in Atlantic Canada (Cape
Breton Highlands (est. 1936), Prince Edward Island (est. 1937), Fundy (est. 1948), and
Terra Nova (est. 1957)) through their selection, expropriation, development, and
management. Unlike in the frontier of western Canada, the eastern part presented a
special challenge to the Canadian National Parks Branch in that the geography was
smaller and flatter, without the glaciers, large waterfalls, and mountains of famous parks
such as Banff and Jasper. The land had been home to Anglo and French settlers for over
two centuries – and Native Americans for centuries before that. Additionally, the
wildlife was smaller and less abundant than out west. MacEachern aims in part to restore
the human history of these areas, and show that the national parks are a blend of nature
and culture – echoing historian William Cronon’s argument that wilderness is a cultural
construct.452
According to MacEachern, because Parks officials saw these as imperfect sites for
a park (settled, little big game, no Western-type dramatic vistas), they allowed tourist
Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks (Seattle: Washington
University Press, 2006); National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington,
D.C.: National Park Service, 2005); Hal K. Rothman, America’s National Monuments: The Politics of
Preservation (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Hal K. Rothman, The New Urban Park:
Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of
Kansas, 2004); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln, NE.: University of
Nebraska Press, 1987); Richard West Sellers, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian
Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul
Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement
(Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2002); Harlan D. Unrau and George Frank Williss,
Administrative History: Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s (Denver, CO.: Denver Service
Center of the National Park Service, 1983); Conrad L. Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman,
OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); and two works that study the park movement and conservation
in Canada: Janet Foster, Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1978); Tina Merrill Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in
the Twentieth Century (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).
452
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90.
330
development on a scale that was not acceptable out west. Eastern parks, then, became
destinations for mass tourism, while the western parks retained a more elite status, and
audience. Within these four parks, attitudes surrounding their conception were solidified
in how each park was developed. They therefore exist as snapshots of Parks Canada’s
view toward what blend of culture and nature was appropriate. It developed Cape Breton
and PEI as resorts for the masses; Fundy in New Brunswick was designed with less
infrastructure for more passive recreation, while Terra Nova on the eastern coast of
Newfoundland remained the most “wild,” with a focus on the intellectual appreciation of
nature over cultural amusement.453
The National Park Service no doubt followed Parks Canada’s developments along
the Atlantic Coast and inland during these decades. Created in 1911 as the world’s first
national park management organization, Parks Canada’s existence (then called the
Dominion Parks Branch within the Department of the Interior) was used by American
park advocates in their successful push for legislation establishing the National Park
Service five years later. Parks Canada counts its coastal properties as national parks or
national park reserves, while the National Park Service in the 1930s created a separate
designation of national seashore, owing to a greater range of activities allowed in the
latter, such as recreational and commercial fishing, and later, hunting. Since 1937
Congress has designated ten national seashores and four national lakeshores, creating
new preservation and conservation challenges for the National Park Service in regard to
public access, wildlife management, and erosion control.454
453
Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal, QC.:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001).
454
For Parks Canada used in Congressional argument to establish the NPS, see William C. Everhart, The
National Park Service (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1983), 164. For origins of the national seashore
331
No scholar has followed MacEachern’s lead and written about national seashores
in relation to one another. Administrative histories exist for Assateague, Padre Island,
Point Reyes, and Cape Hatteras national seashores, along with an array of other NPSproduced histories and reports covering parks’ founding legislation, vegetation, geology,
and cultural resources. The most useful model for talking about Cape Cod National
Seashore is Lary Dilsaver’s history of the conflicts surrounding conservation on
Cumberland Island National Seashore since its authorization in 1972.455
Eighteen miles long and anchoring Georgia’s southern coastal boundary,
Cumberland Island’s human history started 13,000 years ago as first Native Americans
and then Europeans beginning in the sixteenth century altered the island and harvested its
resources to suit their needs. Spanish missions yielded to English forts and later English
and then American plantations through the Civil War. From the 1880s through the 1960s
the Carnegie and Candler families owned most of the island, erecting large mansions as
vacation retreats. The 1950s and ‘60s were marked by negotiations between island
owners, the National Park Service, environmental groups, and state and local officials
who all recognized the public value of a largely undeveloped stretch of coastal land. The
Park Service originally planned for extensive recreational development on the island to
accommodate some 10,000 visitors per day, but pressure from environmental groups
idea see Douglas W. Doe, “The New Deal Origins of the Cape Cod National Seashore,” The Historical
Journal of Massachusetts 26 (Summer 1997): 139-156. For hunting and fishing see Cameron Binkley, The
Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: The Great Depression through Mission
66 (Atlanta, GA.: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 2007),
31, 38-39, 185-190, 216 (Sections 3 and 4 of the 1937 legislation establishing CHNS), 217 (1940
amendment to 1937 legislation allowing hunting). Online version at
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/caha/caha_ah.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013).
455
Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict
(Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004). For a partial list of histories and other reports on
properties within the National Park system, see National Park Service, “Park Histories,”
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/park_histories/ (accessed January 3, 2013).
332
eventually led to an act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard
Nixon in 1972 that the island would be preserved, as stated in the enacting legislation, “in
its primitive state.”456
Through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, Dilsaver explores the related issues of how to
preserve the island’s cultural resources in regard to cost, historical worth, and in balance
with preserving natural resources; and then the same concern with the cost and extent of
ecological restoration, and conflict with historic resources. This dual preservation goal
also accompanied a Park Service mandate to encourage public use of these resources.
Whether in debating how much money to spend on deteriorating buildings, whether to
remove non-native species such as the popular but destructive feral horses, and
negotiating with inholders, Dilsaver shows that the aims of conservationists,
preservationists, and recreationists have created conflicts with no easy solution. And he
anchors his study within the National Park Service’s administrative history and the
federal government’s evolving environmental policy. The debates that surrounded the
use and management of Cumberland Island are also reflected, with regional variations, at
other national seashores being established in the second half of the twentieth century.
The story of Cape Cod’s national seashore offers an important comparison to this
portrait. Cumberland Island tells a Southern coastal history of Native Americans,
European powers battling for control of the coast, plantations using enslaved labor, and
the post Civil War development of the seacoast as a vacation spot for wealthy families.
Cape Cod follows a northern development pattern (similar to that of Atlantic Canada) of
Native Americans and early European explorers, small towns, the rise and fall of
456
Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict
(Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 99 (10,000 visitors per day), 109 (“primitive
state”).
333
subsistence agriculture, and a twentieth-century growth in the coast as an increasingly
democratic tourist destination. The Park Service envisioned and built Cape Cod National
Seashore to accommodate large numbers of tourists who could drive directly into the
seashore from surrounding metropolitan areas. It designed Cumberland Island, too, for
large-scale recreation, but public opposition coming at the height of the American
environmental movement both pushed the Park Service to have the northern half of the
island designated as wilderness, and allow only 300 visitors per day on 16,000 acres of
island parkland. In the contest between nature, history, and recreation on Cumberland,
Dilsaver concludes that after thirty-two years nature is faring best.457
Even at more than twice the size of Cumberland with 44,600 acres, the millions of
visitors to CCNS each year have resulted in a significant impact on the seashore’s natural
and cultural resources.458 This is through greater physical use and extensive Park Service
infrastructure to accommodate them: roads, hiking and biking trails, visitor centers,
restrooms, parking lots, and interpretive exhibits at significant natural and historic sites
around the park. On Park Service maps these and natural and cultural sites are all clearly
457
For CCNS as site for mass tourism: “If the Great Beach area had the status of a major public seashore, it
would unquestionably attract increasingly large numbers of people from the country at large and from
Canada, besides those who would come from New England and metropolitan New York.” National Park
Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 34. And “Now it is
within a day’s travel of nearly one-third of our Nation’s population – less than 300 highway miles from all
six New England capitals and New York City.” National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A
Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1959), 2. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island
National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press,
2004), 5 (300 visitors), 260 (nature faring best).
458
In only its second summer of operation in 1963 and with limited infrastructure, CCNS already had more
than 700,000 visitors. Frank Falacci, “Even Critics Now Admit: National Seashore Cape’s Biggest Asset,”
Boston Globe, May 31, 1964, 42A. Almost five million visited the Seashore in 1972 according to Charles
H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of
New England, 1985), 40. CCNS’s acreage from Conrad Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman,
OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 199. The NPS’s current park pamphlet for CCNS also repeats
the 44,600-acre figure. Of this total area, about 27,700 acres are land while the remaining 17,000 acres are
marsh and water. James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 2003), 116.
334
marked within a solid green block of public land running from Chatham in the south to
Provincetown in the north. But once on the ground, one finds that the seashore’s
boundaries are largely invisible and contain numerous inholdings. This hybrid cultural
and natural history preservation contributes to the whole outer Cape being perceived as
one massive and immersive preserve. As the Cape Cod National Seashore quickly
became one of the region’s leading tourist attractions, its operation was contested by local
individuals and communities who sought to maintain their traditions. This clash would
become most prominent in the 1980s involving a collection of shacks built on the dunes
outside Provincetown, and it indicated a shift in the eight-decade relationship between the
public and the Park Service in New England.
The National Park Service and its arrival alongshore
The entry of the federal government into managing part of coastal New England
came just weeks before the establishment of the National Park Service itself on August
25, 1916. On July 8, President Woodrow Wilson designated Sieur de Monts National
Monument on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Congress later expanded and renamed it
first Lafayette (1919) and then Acadia National Park (1929). Back in 1872 with the
Yellowstone region of the Montana and Wyoming territories, Congress had first begun
creating federally-managed parks from federally-owned land of impressive scenic value
in sparsely-populated regions of the country – usually in the West. In 1906 Congress
authorized the president (as part of the landmark Antiquities Act) to establish national
monuments for their scientific, scenic, or historical value. Now four decades later
fourteen national parks, twenty-one national monuments, and the Hot Springs
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Reservation all under the oversight of the Department of the Interior became the
responsibility of its newly-minted National Park Service.459
More coastal units soon followed Acadia: in Hawaii (Hawaii National Park,
1916), Alaska (Katmai (1918) and Glacier Bay (1925) National Monuments), Michigan
(Isle Royale National Park, 1931), and Florida (Everglades National Park, 1931). If the
land within a park’s authorized boundaries was not already federally owned, it could take
years or even decades for private groups and the states or territories to acquire sufficient
land for the park to be formally established. The standard federal legislation authorizing
each new national park did not include funds for land acquisition. While these coastal
parks represented important conservation victories, they were located far from populated
areas and intended as places of inspiration and education, not active recreation. As
Dilsaver writes, the Park Service administration believed that state parks were better
suited for recreation, and in the 1920s it began coordinating with state governments on
park planning and staff training – becoming by default the national leader on public
recreation.
Entering the 1930s, both the Roosevelt administration and Congress pushed the
Park Service to carry out studies identifying sites specifically for their recreational value.
As part of this larger initiative to increase the number of public recreational areas, the
Service launched a series of nationwide coastal surveys in 1934. Though the surveys
recommended twelve areas along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts that met their criteria for
459
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 12-21. This is the updated and expanded third edition originally written by Barry
Mackintosh and first published in 1985.
336
national importance, only Cape Hatteras secured Congressional authorization to become
the first national seashore on August 17, 1937.460
Seven months after Congress authorized Hatteras, the National Park Service made
its second investment in New England. Taking advantage of new powers granted to the
Secretary of the Interior by the Historic Sites Act of 1935, the National Park Service
chose to establish the first national historic site in Salem, Massachusetts, on March 17,
1938. Located in the heart of what once was one of America’s main ports in the early
nineteenth century, the site centered on eighteenth-century Derby Wharf and an adjacent
custom house in which Nathaniel Hawthorne had once worked. Apart from the powerful
cultural aura that New England held in 1930s America at the end of the Colonial Revival
era, the decision was likely also practical. The Treasury Department transferred its
ownership of the custom house to the Park Service, while the city and state governments
arranged to purchase the adjoining wharf. But Cape Hatteras was not so fortunate. With
much more expensive and extensive land acquisition requirements before it could be
established, the development of it, and the national seashore model it pioneered, would
have to wait.461
460
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 19, 26-27. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of
Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 77-79. National Park
Service Director Conrad Wirth recalled that the 1930s coastal studies “resulted in the selection of about
fifteen areas for possible inclusion in the national park system…,” while Our Vanishing Seashore cites
twelve, as does Dilsaver. Conrad Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman, OK.: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1980), 192-193. National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.:
National Parks Service, 1955), 9. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of
Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 79.
461
“Nation Will Save Its Historic Sites,” New York Times, August 11, 1935, N4. “Customhouse Made
Hawthorne Shrine,” Boston Globe, June 7, 1936, A16. “Plan Salem Restoration,” New York Times, August
2, 1937, 6. “Great National Park Project at Salem Centers Around Derby Wharf, Boston Globe, August 8,
1937, A8. “Historic Sites of Salem to be Saved,” Aiken Standard and Review, September 29, 1937, 7.
337
Impetus to create the CCNS, and the place of history and nature in that argument
The prosperity of the postwar era brought renewed attention to America’s
coastlines in the 1950s, as commercial and residential development steadily encroached
into formerly remote areas. Continuing a long history of private interests molding the
shape of the park system (the Rockefeller family, for instance, had donated most of what
became Acadia National Park), the Mellon family came to the aid of both the nascent
Cape Hatteras National Seashore and the seashore model. Siblings Ailsa Mellon-Bruce
and Paul Mellon were millionaire philanthropists and heirs of industrialist Andrew W.
Mellon. Ailsa and Paul each headed their own philanthropic foundations, the Avalon and
Old Dominion, respectively. In 1952 the siblings agreed to split with the state of North
Carolina the amount needed by the federal government to buy the necessary land on Cape
Hatteras. The funds allowed the Park Service to quickly buy a majority of the land, and it
formally established the seashore on January 12, 1953. As the Service continued with
remaining land purchases and infrastructure development, the Mellons agreed in 1954 to
fund new studies of the coast along the Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific, and Great Lakes.462
The results in the 1955 National Park Service report were obvious in its title: Our
Vanishing Shoreline. The thirty-six page booklet chronicled a “seashore fever” as
developers, residents, businesses, and tourists flocked to the nation’s coastline in everygrowing numbers. Photographs of endless lines of shoreside cottages, hotels, tourist
attractions, and overcrowded beaches, along with industrial and military sites on the
coast, contrasted with a smaller number of photos of undeveloped coastline with its
462
Cameron Binkley, The Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: The Great
Depression through Mission 66 (Atlanta, GA.: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast Regional Office,
National Park Service, 2007), 97-102, 197-198 (coastal surveys). Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island
National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press,
2004), 79-80.
338
unique vegetation, wildlife, and quaint scenes – some of these within parks, but most not.
A large uncaptioned photo of an old salt talking to an attentive boy as they sat on a
driftwood stump on an otherwise deserted beach conveyed the peacefulness, generational
bonding, and human presence rooted in the landscape that required protection. Wearing
rubber boots and rolled up sleeves exposing muscular forearms, the man appears to be
taking a break from some maritime occupation to share a story. Arguing that “a people’s
heritage is threatened” through unchecked development, the Service outlined a three
point need for conservation, wildlife preservation, and recreation. The few remaining
undisturbed “natural” areas should be preserved as reminders of the balance that existed
before Europeans arrived, and for their future study by scientists.
Seeking to bring millions more Americans to the coast would seem to run counter
to calls for conservation, but the Park Service saw a balance of recreation areas and
restricted conservation lands within a national seashore as the best way to get public
support. The reasoning also followed the prevailing view of conservation as an efficient
use of natural resources. Should the Service do nothing, much of the land would quickly
be lost to private development, and the resulting beachfront erosion and dune migration
would harm everyone.
Of the twelve areas recommended in the Service’s 1935 report on the Gulf and
Atlantic coasts, only Cape Hatteras became a national seashore. Of the remaining eleven
possibilities only one was now left: Cape Cod’s Great Beach. Needing to start over, Our
Vanishing Seashore detailed a new air, land, and water-based survey covering 3,700
miles of Atlantic and Gulf coast in eighteen states from Maine to Texas. Of this entire
stretch only 240 miles (six and a half percent) were in federal or state ownership as sites
339
for public recreation – and more than half of this was in Cape Hatteras National Seashore
and Acadia and Everglades national parks, though the latter two had little beach area for
recreation. Weighing factors such as accessibility, insect problems, biological, historical,
and archaeological values, fishing, beach conditions, and difficulty of acquisition, it
detailed the opportunities in each state.
Of sixteen prime areas, Our Vanishing Shoreline spotlighted three: Cumberland
Island, Georgia; Fire Island on the south shore of Long Island, New York; and the Great
Beach of Cape Cod. With almost as much text as the other two combined and described
last, Cape Cod was the clear main candidate for leading the postwar growth of the
national seashore program. The Great Beach was less than 300 miles from six state
capitals and metropolitan New York but still maintained along its thirty-odd miles a
“priceless feeling of remoteness.” Its history was iconic, and its landscape contained
“spectacular” dunes and rich plant and animal biodiversity. The seashore survey party
concluded,
There is no longer any comparable area in the New England region that exhibits
all the outstanding values desirable and suitable for extensive seashore recreation.
For these reasons alone, the Great Beach area of Cape Cod merits preservation as
a major public seashore of the North Atlantic coast.463
The Cape’s desirability was shared by more than just the report’s authors. Between 1949
and 1959 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts built the limited-access Mid-Cape
Highway between the Sagamore Bridge and Orleans, opening the interior of the
463
National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 9
(old salt), 27 (statistics), 33. “Seashore Fever” and “A People’s Heritage Is Threatened,” are titles of two
of the five sections of the report. Looking at the photo credits at the end of the report, the old salt photo
was taken by Florida State Park Service photographer William Z. Harmon. But as the NPS didn’t caption
the photo, it became a scene that could, at least for the moment, be found anywhere in the “vanishing
seashore.” As evidence of the photo’s adaptability, correspondent Earl Banner (Edward Rowe Snow’s
most frequent book reviewer) included the old salt photo as evidence of the unspoiled beaches threatened
by development. Earl Banner, “Too Many Beach Cottage Colonies Are Turning Into Seaside Slums,”
Boston Globe, July 22, 1956, A2.
340
peninsula to extensive commercial and residential development; within this same decade
the Cape’s population increased by fifty percent, from 46,805 to 70,286. “Extensive
seashore recreation” would happen on the Cape regardless of NPS involvement, but
without federal intervention it would be more commercial and more exclusive.464
Beyond the Great Beach’s recreational assets of size, accessibility, proximity to
metropolitan areas, and the growing development pressure due to this proximity, it is
worth examining the place of nature and history within the National Park Service’s
argument for national importance. A Park Service report on the Great Beach followed
Our Vanishing Shoreline later that year, but it carried out a new and larger study from
May 1957 through September 1958 that incidentally coincided with the arrival of
Mayflower II in Provincetown Harbor as the replica Pilgrim ship retraced the original
1620 journey from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts.465 Experts both within and
outside the Park Service in biology, geology, history, and archaeology each provided
reports. As these comprised forty-five, thirteen, four, and three pages of text,
respectively, even before evaluating the content the emphasis on the nature of the outer
Cape is clear. The emphasis was echoed in an accompanying map of land use within the
proposed seashore that marked eleven “areas of biological interest,” four “areas of
geological interest,” and only three “areas of historical interest.” Of these three, one is
464
James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 2003), 97-98. Charles H. W. Foster also concluded, commenting on the results of an
economic evaluation of the CCNS’s impact, that by the late 1960s “Although much of the profitable
business increase would probably have occurred without establishment of the Seashore, the land value, the
motel and restaurant business, and the permanent population increases were definitely the results of the
Seashore.” Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1985), 37.
465
The Mayflower II was built as a commemoration of the wartime unity between the U.S. and Great
Britain. It departed from Brixham, England, on April 20, 1957, and took a longer and more southerly route
to Massachusetts due to the need to avoid ice. Plimoth Plantation, “The Journey of the Mayflower II,”
http://www.plimoth.org/media/mayflower-2/index.html (accessed January 7, 2013).
341
the 1620 landing site of the Pilgrims, and the second is a spring where they first gathered
fresh water. The third is unidentified, but it is where Deacon John Doane and his family
resettled after leaving Plymouth with six other Pilgrim families in 1644. A stone
monument to Doane placed by a descendant in 1869 marked the homestead site at the
time of the NPS survey.466
The Cape’s geology had long attracted amateur and professional geologists, and
its layers of glacial deposits and subsequent modification by water and air created “some
of the most spectacular dunes along the Atlantic coast” as well as eroding beachside cliffs
up to 175 feet in height that provide “awesome and impressive” views. “This
combination of a thick deposit of easily eroded rocks and the violent action of the sea
gives the area its character and makes its geology of national significance,” concluded
Park Service naturalist Bennett Gale. The Cape also formed a natural compliment to the
geological story told at Acadia National Park. As the latter dramatically illustrates glacial
erosion, Cape Cod is the result of glacial deposits.467
For the biological argument, the Cape was important “for its number of distinctly
different plant and animal associations, and for its controlling effect upon these
associations by environmental factors.” As glaciers receded at the end the last ice age,
plant and animal species typical of a northern climate established themselves. But
subsequent warming of the climate led southern species to migrate northward, making the
466
National Park Service, The Cape Cod Study Group, A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed
National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958). Map follows page 19 of the main
report. Though the Doane site is not identified on the map, subsequent NPS publications, and present
signage at the location, name it. No other historic sites are nearby. For an article discussing John Doane
and his home site that includes text of the monument, see Earl Banner, “Eastham is Gateway to Cape Cod
Park,” Boston Globe, August 11, 1961, 7.
467
National Park Service, The Cape Cod Study Group, A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed
National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 5 (“awesome and impressive”).
Bennett T. Gale, “Geological Report on a Portion of Cape Cod,” 12 (“national significance”), 13 (glacial
deposits) as an appendix of ibid.
342
Cape a biological mixing zone. This geologically and biologically rich area contained six
plant communities (beach grass and beach pea dunes, fresh water marsh, salt marsh, pitch
pine woods, bearberry heath, and saline meadow) and served as a major wintering ground
for waterfowl.468
For his report, Park Service historian Frank Barnes immediately presented “the
basic ‘national historical significance’ of the Great Beach area” as the Pilgrims making
their first landfall in North America at Cape Cod in 1620. A full-page map tracks their
“three expeditions” on and along the Cape during four weeks in November and
December of that year. He identified where they found a cache of Native American corn
(Corn Hill, Truro), where they first found freshwater (Pilgrim Spring, Truro), and where
they first met Native Americans (First Encounter Beach, Eastham).
“Almost equally important,” according to Barnes, was that Cape Cod served as a
landmark in the Age of Discovery. He identifies Bartholomew Gosnold as first naming
Cape Cod, Samuel de Champlain making landfalls in 1605 and 1606, then Henry Hudson
and John Smith. Barnes also postulated that earlier explorers Verrazano and John Cabot
also sighted the Cape, as well as generations of anonymous Northern European fishermen
and even Vikings. It’s unstated, but the high cliffs at what is now the town of Truro were
most likely the first sight of land for these explorers as they entered the region.
The report is frustratingly non-chronological as Barnes then moves from
discussing the Cape as likely starting America’s whaling era in the seventeenth century
and continuing to participate into the twentieth century; the nineteenth-century rise of the
Cape’s fishing and oyster industries and attendant salt works, lighthouses, and
468
National Park Service, The Cape Cod Study Group, A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed
National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 7.
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shipwrecks that rivaled Cape Hatteras for the title “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”469 He
then comes ashore to chart the first permanent Pilgrim settlement in 1637, the gradual
establishment of towns, the 1752 Atwood House in Chatham as the best surviving
prototype of the “Cape Cod cottage” so common in twentieth-century American suburbs,
and the local events of the Revolutionary War. Anecdotes of the first and second world
wars get a sentence each, as does “Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless station in the
United States (1903), remains of which are still visible today on the beach at South
Wellfleet.”
For Barnes, the European explorer and Pilgrim-landing history were of national
significance, and the rest mostly of regional or local importance. He oddly ignored the
nineteenth-century visits of Henry David Thoreau, who is cited in the summary of these
individual reports as naming the Great Beach, and a quotation of his graces the main
report’s frontispiece: “A place where a man can stand and put all America behind him.”
But even Barnes’s narrow noteworthy history would not be easy to communicate to
future park visitors, as none of these sites except Pilgrim Spring were within the proposed
seashore boundaries.470
The archaeological report found much the same problem. Park Service
archaeologist John Cotter identified the first Native Americans as arriving on the Cape
around six to seven thousand years ago, briefly described their subsistence activities, and
then moved into the contact period with Europeans. The only sites he describes in detail
are the landing sites of Champlain in Chatham and the Pilgrims in Provincetown, Corn
469
In writing about shipwrecks, Barnes consulted Edward Rowe Snow’s Famous Lighthouses of New
England (1945). As Barnes wrote his report in 1958, he had met Snow in January of that year during a
Park Service investigation of Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.
470
Frank Barnes, “Cape Cod in History,” in A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed National Seashore,
National Park Service, Cape Cod Study Group (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 1-5.
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Hill, the First Encounter Site, and Pilgrim Spring. Of these, archaeological evidence
existed only at Corn Hill and the spring, with the latter “much disturbed by amateur
diggers.” His summary is discouraging for the Cape’s archaeological prospects and
national merit:
In summary, the traces of prehistoric man on Cape Cod are present but limited.
Human occupation waxed and waned until the advent of the white man. By the
time modern ethnographers were studying the surviving Indian life of New
England in the early 20th century and late 19th, there were no more Indians on
Cape Cod.471
Perhaps especially damaging in hindsight was Cotter’s erasure of any contemporary
Native Americans on the Cape. Barnes likewise makes no mention of Native Americans
aside from their brief encounter with the Pilgrims in 1620. While a vibrant Wampanoag
community lived in Mashpee some thirty miles from the proposed seashore, it would be a
struggle for them into the twenty-first century to get the full scope of their experience –
prehistoric, historic, and contemporary – on Cape Cod acknowledged within the park’s
boundaries.
The Park Service distilled all of this evidence the following year into the richlyillustrated seventeen-page Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal. As with the
seashore itself, it interwove the natural and historic elements that were worthy of
preservation. It included quotes from not only Thoreau but Henry Beston, whose account
of living in a shack on the Great Beach for a year was published in 1928 as The
Outermost House, a modern landmark of American nature writing. Eleven of the
seventeen photographs were either of purely natural settings or contained at most a few
visitors or distant buildings that appear insignificant in the dramatic and biologically rich
471
John Cotter, “Archeological Evidence at Cape Cod,” in A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed
National Seashore, National Park Service, Cape Cod Study Group (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 1958), 3.
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landscape. To summarize the Park Service’s argument, the “old” Cape was vanishing as
a tide of development was replacing “the natural open spaces long cherished as an
American birthright.” It acknowledged the local preservation efforts by individuals,
towns, and the state but felt that only national protection could meet the conservation
goals of the Cape’s advocates against encroaching coastal development. In a likely
attempt to appease local residents fearing eviction to create a wilderness, the park’s
boundaries would exclude the residential and commercial parts of the six outer Cape
towns.472
Thoreau’s Great Beach was the most prominent part of the seashore, but the
inland landscapes with their diverse plants and animals were also basic parts of the
Cape’s charm and distinctive character. The Park Service defined national significance
as “scenic, scientific, or historic stature so great, so precious as to make its preservation
the concern of all Americans.” That Cape Cod had drawn artists, writers, scholars, and
nature lovers for more than a century attested to its public appeal. The report repeated
the earlier report’s significant story of glaciation and erosion, the mix of plant and animal
species from the north and south, and the valuable role of the Cape as a bird nesting
ground and migration stop. The animals living offshore were equally rich in diversity
and number.473
472
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 1959), 2-3. A Globe letter to the editor by Catherine Murphy of Truro read in part: “First, I protest
the avowed purpose of destroying more than 300 years of hard-won settlement … and of returning most of
it … to a state of wilderness.” “Cape Park Plan Outrageous,” Boston Globe, April 29, 1959, 16. Other town
residents said that Truro “may have to go out of business.” Grace Des Champs, “Truro’s 250th Birthday
May Be Last,” Boston Globe, August 9, 1959, A32. For more on the local opposition to a national
seashore, see Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden
Press, 1978).
473
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 1959), 3-6.
346
“Significant history” was again defined as the Pilgrims first making landfall there,
and in Cape Cod later hosting “many of New England’s famed fishing and whaling fleets.
Courage sailed those fleets; faith awaited their return. The men and women Cape Cod
reared have bequeathed to America a proud, intrepid heritage.” Here the historical
argument is sharpened to Cape Cod as the place of Pilgrim beginnings, and this bravery
and faith perpetuated by generations of mariners and their families. This view of
maritime New England synched perfectly with the mission of Mystic Seaport since 1929
to restore American character by educating people about their proud Yankee roots.
Either the National Park Service independently shared the belief of Mystic Seaport
founder Carl Cutler that the best of American character came from its maritime culture,
or the museum’s decades of national evangelism was bearing fruit.474
To convey the outer Cape’s history and charm the report included four
photographs by famed photographer, writer, and artist Samuel Chamberlain, who had
also photographed Mystic Seaport that year for his book Mystic Seaport: A Camera
Impression.475 The doorway of an old Cape Cod house, a meeting house, a windmill, and
a close-up of a fishing vessel’s nets with Provincetown in the background neatly matched
the themes of home, faith, and industry at the heart of both Mystic Seaport’s
interpretation of the past and important symbols in America during the Cold War.
Continuing the theme of industry, and again aiming to secure the backing of local
business-minded Cape Codders, the report was careful to point out that businesses
474
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 1959), 6-7.
475
With over thirty publications written and illustrated by Chamberlain (usually with his photographs) on
historic sites and areas within New England (including Old Sturbridge Village and Historic Deerfield)
between 1936 and 1972, his obituary years later reflected that “travelers throughout New England could not
enter an antique store, drugstore, bookshop, or art gallery without coming across some of Mr.
Chamberlain’s works.” “Samuel Chamberlain, artist in many fields,” Boston Globe, January 11, 1975, 25.
347
outside of the park would benefit from large numbers of visitors wanting food, lodging,
and goods and services. As the original economic base of the Cape had shifted from
fishing and agriculture to tourism, to preserve the Cape’s natural features would
guarantee the perpetuation of the qualities upon which this recreational economy
depended.476
The pitch within Cape Cod: A Proposal is visually beautiful and simultaneously
urgent and inspiring in tone, but it was hardly new information. Area residents and
visitors had been debating the merits of a national seashore on Cape Cod since local
weekly newspaper The Cape Codder published the first rough details of a park
development plan back in 1956. The subsequent contentious five years of meetings,
proposed legislation, studies, debates, and hearing between federal, state, and local
officials, private organizations, and citizens that culminated in John F. Kennedy signing
S. 857 into Public Law 87-126 on August 7, 1961 is outside the scope of this chapter and
is the subject of a separate book.477
Aside from authorizing America’s second national seashore, the bill created a
number of new precedents. The park’s boundaries were detailed in the law. Congress for
the first time appropriated money for purchasing and improving parkland.478 Hunting,
476
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 1959), 10 (fishing nets), 11 (doorway), 12 (meeting house), 13 (windmill), 14, 16.
477
A chronology of CCNS history is available in Appendix A of Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod
National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 87.
Foster’s book is a history of the first twenty years of the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory
Commission, on which he served as the first chairman. For the legislative history of CCNS written by the
former managing editor of The Cape Codder, see Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National
Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978). Burling also covers local park proponents and opponents.
478
Part of Congress’s newfound willingness to fund NPS projects was that it had already approved more
than a billion dollars for a ten-year restoration program that NPS director Conrad Wirth had named
“Mission 66” in preparation for modernizing NPS staff, management, and infrastructure in time for its
fiftieth anniversary in 1966. William C. Everhart, The National Park Service (Boulder, CO.: Westview
Press, 1983), 25-27; and National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington,
348
fishing, and shellfishing within the park would still be allowed. An advisory commission
composed of representatives appointed by the federal government, Commonwealth,
county, and six towns would guide the NPS’s development and management of the park.
And the law guaranteed that individuals who owned “improved property” (defined as “a
detached one-family dwelling”) within the park’s boundaries as of September 1, 1959
could keep their property in perpetuity. Those properties developed afterward, as various
versions of seashore legislation were making their way through Congress, were still
subject to eventual condemnation and purchase by the National Park Service. These
compromises did not satisfy all park opponents, but what those who had endorsed479 and
protested480 the seashore could likely agree on was that Cape Cod was a place of special
significance that should be preserved for future generations; it should not be allowed to
become just like anywhere. As the National Park Service now had a mandate and funds
to begin building the park, how to actually preserve and interpret the seashore’s nature
and history would be the next challenge.481
D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 64. Ethan Carr, Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park
Dilemma (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
479
Renowned architect and Harvard architecture professor Serge Chermayeff, wrote an editorial in the
Globe supporting the park, despite having a home and studio within its proposed boundaries. “His Studio
and Cottage Involved, Yet Favors National Park on Cape,” Boston Globe, April 19, 1959, A2.
480
Renowned historian and Harvard history professor Samuel Eliot Morison wrote an editorial against the
proposed CCNS, based on his observations living adjacent to Acadia National Park. “Four Reasons Why
Historian Morison Opposes National Park on Cape Cod,” Boston Globe, March 29, 1959, A2. See also
editorial by Annie Murphy refuting SEM’s reasons. “Unless Professor Has Alternate Plan,” Boston Globe,
April 6, 1959, 12.
481
Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978),
20-21 (significance of CCNS legislation), 56-65 (text of law). The text of Public Law 87-126 is also
printed in Appendix G of Foster, 102-111. In 1964 correspondent Frank Falacci concluded “The great
furor over establishment of the Federal seashore has died its death and today several of its staunchest foes
are ready to admit the Seashore is rapidly becoming one of Cape Cod and New England’s best assets.”
Frank Falacci, “Even Critics Now Admit: National Seashore Cape’s Biggest Asset,” Boston Globe, May
31, 1964, 42A.
349
Planning the park: placing the human past in a natural history
Echoing the Park Service’s mission of conservation and recreation, Law 87-126
required “that the seashore shall be permanently preserved in its present state” and
developed in a way that protected the flora, fauna, “physiographic conditions,” and
historic sites and structures. The Park Service would establish trails, observation points,
exhibits, and other necessary infrastructure to accommodate the public’s appreciation of
these cultural and natural resources, as well as allow camping, swimming, boating,
sailing, hunting, fishing, and other recreational activities where appropriate. While the
Park Service would duly pursue conservation and preservation as specified in the CCNS
legislation, from the onset the emphasis was on nature. Cape Cod National Seashore was
created not to protect history but to save undeveloped coastal land – land which had
important stories to share about the natural and human world. This land would be used
by millions of people each year, but only as visitors.482
Studying a copy of the 1963 Master Plan for Preservation and Use, shows how
the Park Service sought to balance the interpretation of nature and history. The
seashore’s master plan was the result of research dating back to the first coastal surveys,
and planning by experts in various sciences, history, architecture, engineering, and
management. It required the input and approval of the director of the Park Service, and
482
Quotation of Law 87-126 from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark
Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 110. For emphasis on nature, the 1963
brochure for CCNS stated that “Natural features are Cape Cod’s most important asset. Preservation of
these features is the chief aim of the National Park Service.” National Park Service, Cape Cod National
Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963). In the 1955 report Our Vanishing
Seashore it stated that the seashore “is entitled to better treatment as a part of the natural heritage of the
Nation,” with this “better treatment” focusing on conservation, wildlife preservation, and recreation.
National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 15-21.
See also Earl Banner, “Cape’s National Seashore Masterpiece of Nature,” Boston Globe, August 10, 1961,
17.
350
the staff and heads of the Northeast Regional Office in Philadelphia, the Eastern Office of
Design and Construction in Washington, D.C., and the seashore’s superintendent, staff,
and Advisory Commission on the Cape. At each stop various specialists contributed to
the maps, narrative, and drawings. Even after Director Conrad Wirth’s final approval on
April 17, 1963 the document continued to evolve for several more years according to
changes in need, budget, and evolving ideas within the NPS outside of this single,
comparatively small park. In May the Boston Globe publicized the master plan with a
large map detailing the seven swimming beaches, nineteen natural areas, fifteen historic
sites, visitor centers, and various trails.483
The plan drew upon the earlier geological, biological, and historical arguments to
present the park’s interpretive theme as “the natural history of Cape Cod” with four sub
themes: “1. Glacial - The origin of the landscape. 2. Postglacial - Continuing change in
the landscape. 3. Biological - Environments created by glacial and ocean influences.”
And “4. Historical - Man on Cape Cod – interaction of man and nature.” In telling the
history of Cape Cod beginning with glacial formation, human inhabitation became a
small fraction of this story. And the human history the park would tell would be
inseparable from its environment.484
This hierarchy was also reflected in the park’s staffing. With divisions of the
Superintendent’s Office, Administration, Protection, Maintenance and Operations, Plans
and Programs, and Interpretation, this latter group would “provide interpretive and
information services for Seashore visitors. Basic functions include research, guided tours,
483
“Final Plan for the Cape Cod National Seashore,” Boston Globe, May 26, 1963, 60.
National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-2 in Cape Cod National
Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure
CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”
484
351
audiovisual programs and orientation.” A chief naturalist would head the department,
with a naturalist and historian serving under them. Beginning with only a permanent
staff of three year-round employees, the master plan envisioned adding by 1967 a fulltime clerk-stenographer, three more naturalists, two more historians, four park guides, a
museum curator, and a biologist. Seasonal staff of three more clerks, ten rangernaturalists and ten ranger-historians would complete the roster.485
The slightly greater emphasis on nature-focused staff speaks to the Park Service’s
dominant focus on nature more generally but is also understandable given the greater
number of floral and faunal resources to monitor and potentially interpret for the public.
As Frank Barnes’s survey of the seashore’s history in 1958 concluded, much of it was not
rooted in the landscape – or at least it was not easily visible. But archaeological and
historical base maps detailed well over a hundred sites for possible investigation and
future interpretation within the seashore, from pre-historic Native American shell heaps
to sites of seventeenth through twentieth-century Euro-American buildings both intact
and long-vanished. In this way, an ancient shell heap at Pilgrim Heights and Henry
Beston’s Outermost House (1927) were duly logged alongside sites of now-vanished huts
built by the Massachusetts Humane Society for shipwrecked sailors (c.1800) and the
elegant house built for a whaling captain (1868). And in a selection that would surely
please Edward Rowe Snow as well as other lovers of New England lore, the Park Service
identified Hog Island as a “possible site of Captain Kidd Pirate Treasure.” Choosing sites
485
National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-16, G-17 in Cape Cod
National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration,
structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”
352
that were buried, fully intact, anonymous, famous, and even apocryphal shows the Park
Service’s open-mindedness as to what stories it could eventually tell.486
While the master plan included the findings of a Historic American Building
Survey conducted between 1959 and 1962 that identified eighty-six historic structures
within the seashore, the Park Service controlled only eleven of these by 1965 and planned
for seven to be exhibits. As the above maps showed, this was only scratching the surface.
The plan emphasized that further “history, archaeology, and natural history research will
be initiated to determine those areas of the seashore where protection, preservation and
interpretation will be the prime objectives.” That many sites flagged in various maps of
the master plan for their historic, archaeological, and natural history importance
overlapped pointed to a necessary double or even triple focus when Park Service
personnel or interpretive exhibits guided visitors through these areas.487
Interpretation within the seashore required extensive infrastructure. Four visitor
or interpretive centers would anchor each corner of the park and serve a specific purpose.
The Nauset Visitor Center would be at the main entrance to the seashore in Eastham,
while the Ocean View Visitor Center would be at the northern end of the Cape in the
isolated dunes outside Provincetown. Both would orient visitors and cover historic and
natural history themes. The Nauset Maritime Museum would be housed in a former
486
National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-20, G-23, G-24 in Cape Cod
National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration,
structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”
487
National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-2, G-33 (natural history
map), G-35 (natural history map), Developed Area Narrative 1 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives,
Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook
for Supt?).” For HABS survey see Frank Falacci, “Land Acquisition to Cost U.S. Over $16 Million,”
Boston Globe, September 30, 1962, A7 and an article by CCNS historian William Burke in the seashore’s
official newspaper: William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod
National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 10.
353
Coast Guard Station on Nauset Beach and “be devoted to the colorful history of Cape
Cod’s relation to shipping” – a euphemistic way of saying the museum would focus on
shipwrecks and lifesaving. Lastly, the Griffin Island Interpretive Center on the park’s
narrow Cape Cod Bay side “would be devoted to natural history interpretation. It would
also be the Park research center as well as having subsidiary historical and archaeological
importance.” Scattered throughout the park would be interpretive shelters housing
exhibits on one or more themes, “exhibits-in-place (historic houses),” interpretive trails
“dealing with specific ecological niches of the Seashore,” and markers describing specific
events or phenomena. Tours both conducted and self-guided would cover history, natural
history, and archaeology. Bicycle trails also would be built. U.S. Route 6 would
function as the central artery of the seashore as it ran parallel to much of its length, with
secondary roads branching off into the park for each interpretive area, vista, beach, or
center. Most of these secondary roads already existed, as they led to residences,
businesses, and beaches now a part of the park. This infrastructure neatly balanced
history and nature for public enjoyment – each received their own center, with the two
visitor centers both covering nature and history themes.488
What architectural style all of these new structures would assume – in a landscape
prized for both its nature and history – was the subject of some debate. Josiah Childs was
the only architect of the ten-member Advisory Commission, and in order to bolster
support for the contemporary architecture-style envisioned by the Park Service’s design
office in January, 1963, he wrote to twelve of the leading architects in America for help
488
National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-14 in Cape Cod National
Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure
CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”
354
on selling modern to traditional Cape Cod. The response from Walter Gropius, dean of
the Harvard Graduate School of Design, emphasized the project’s cultural importance
and that there was no room for historical sentimentality:
The looks of these installations and buildings will give evidence of the cultural
status of the American people in the twentieth century. Only a fresh and
imaginative contemporary design approach can result in a worthy solution of this
challenging task…
The Cape Cod shore is not a museum; it lives, it grows, it changes. It would be
against its inherent tradition if we should try to preserve an external ‘cosmetic’
uniformity. A creative attitude only, not an imitative one, will keep this unique
region of New England alive. New buildings in this area, therefore, must be
invented, not copied. They must be blended into the existing scenery of
landscape and buildings with tact, and understanding for its peculiar scale and its
characteristic materials, but using the design language of today.
We cannot go on indefinitely reviving revivals. Architecture must move on, or
die. Its new life comes from the tremendous changes in the social and technical
fields during the last generations. Colonialism cannot express the life of the
twentieth-century man.…489
At times quoting from his own Scope of Total Architecture (1955), Gropius understood
the attention that the Cape Cod National Seashore would receive from visitors nationally
and abroad in the coming years. And though his declaration that the region was not a
museum might rankle those who had sought to preserve and promote “old New England,”
it was hard to ignore the modern development that was reshaping the region. At least
within the national seashore, this architectural theme was a modern-style hexagonal
structure clad with wood shingles on its roof and siding. The design originated with
Donald Benson, Chief of Architectural Design at the National Park Service’s Eastern
Office of Design and Construction in Washington, D.C. But his design aesthetics came
from a larger movement predating Childs’s query.490
489
Walter Gropius, “On the Desirable Character of Design for the Cape Cod National Seashore,” Record
Group 79, Box 2, National Archives, Waltham, MA.
490
Gropius’s non-Cape comments beginning with “We cannot go on indefinitely…” are from Walter
Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1955), 75. Maureen K. Phillips,
355
In sharp contrast to the earlier rustic architecture that defined national park
buildings in the early twentieth century, postwar Park Service architects practiced a
modern style that typified the era and offered the benefits of being cheaper and faster to
build and easier to maintain. Back in 1956 Park Service Director Conrad Wirth had
secured the endorsement of President Eisenhower and more than a billion dollars in
funding from Congress for a ten-year program to modernize National Park Service
staffing, management, and infrastructure in time for its fiftieth anniversary in 1966.
Years of lean funding for the Park Service through the Depression, World War II, and the
Korean War had collided with massive postwar interest in recreation among the
American public. The needs of the latter quickly outstripped the capacities of the former.
Named “Mission 66,” the program reshaped the Park Service visually and structurally –
most noticeably to the public in the facilities built in current and new parks during this
ten-year Golden Age of Park Service expansion.491
The Mission 66 style, in representing a modern and capable Park Service, would
define Cape Cod National Seashore’s buildings. Benson’s design entered the seashore’s
landscape in the form of two interpretive shelters built in 1963 at Pilgrim Heights and
Marconi Station with hipped hexagonal roofs covered in wood shingles and supported on
wooden posts set in a hexagonal concrete platform. They set the architectural motif for
the seashore as bathhouses, another interpretive shelter, and two visitor centers all copied
the hexagonal shape and materials, with the latter also including bricks and large plate
glass windows. The master plan defended the choice as a blend of old and new as
Historic Structure Report: Salt Pond Visitor Center, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts
(Lowell, MA.: NPS Northeast Cultural Resources Center, August 1999), 4.
491
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 64. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 183-187, 202.
356
shingles were a traditional building material “that blend in color and texture with the sand
and bespeak the climactic needs of a northeastern shore building.” Also, the plan’s
writers felt that to use indigenous Cape Cod architecture for the shape would have been
incompatible with the modern function of these new types of twentieth-century
structures.492
Not everyone was convinced. In corresponding with one renowned architect in
January of 1963 Childs had complained bitterly that some of his colleagues on the
Commission were barely aware of the twentieth century, and saw the Cape’s eighteenth
century architecture as the only answer to any building need. As the design for the park’s
signature visitor center in Eastham (designed by Benjamin Biderman, Benson’s colleague
at the EODC) came before the Advisory Commission the following year, Foster recalled
that “more than a few acid comments were made about ‘that beehive thing’ destined to
command the horizon overlooking scenic Salt Pond. Why not a nice, simple, Cape Cod
cottage, Chatham’s McNeece asked?” Similar sentiment surrounded construction of the
second visitor center for the Province Lands a few years later.493
As the traditional Cape Cod style house had become a common design in many
twentieth-century American suburbs, McNeece was not alone in being frustrated that the
region’s signature building type was not being reflected in the region’s new and heavily
visited park. But as the first national seashore created in more than twenty years – and in
492
National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), Developed Area Narrative 9 in
Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder
“Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”
493
Josiah H. Childs to Pietro Belluschi, January 14, 1963, Record Group 79, Box 2, National Archives,
Waltham, MA. The Eastham visitor center designed by Benjamin Biderman from Maureen K. Phillips,
Historic Structure Report: Salt Pond Visitor Center, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts
(Lowell, MA.: NPS Northeast Cultural Resources Center, August 1999), 4. Charles H. W. Foster, The
Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,
1985), 28.
357
President Kennedy’s home state – there was a lot of public attention on the park and its
buildings. The National Park Service had decided that the best way to promote the park,
and thereby its own work, was by not pickling the architecture. The only old looking
buildings that visitors would encounter within the park’s boundaries would be historic,
and clearly labeled as such. But in deferring to the traditional use of unpainted wood
shingles on the park’s signature buildings, it was, ignoring the hexagonal shape, another
example of interpreting Cape Cod’s inseparable natural and human histories.
Generations of builders in the wake of the Pilgrims had harvested the region’s cedar trees
for rot-resistant building material (as a later handout for one of the park’s nature trails
made clear). And as the buildings weathered in the salt air in the coming years they
would also come to match the color palate of the surrounding landscape.494
Building the park: how the Park Service actually interpreted nature and history
The National Park Service acquired its first piece of the future national seashore
even before passage of its enabling legislation. On July 5, 1961, George and Katherine
Higgins donated their colonial Atwood-Higgins House and forty-three acres of land on
Bound Brook Island in Wellfleet to the Department of the Interior, with the stipulation of
retaining lifetime residency. Starting in 1919 upon inheriting the estate, Higgins had
spent four decades restoring the property in memory of his ancestors. In addition to the
circa 1730 Cape Cod-style house he added a garage (1923), barn (1924), guest house
494
For public attention see Maureen K. Phillips, Historic Structure Report: Salt Pond Visitor Center, Cape
Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: NPS Northeast Cultural Resources Center,
August 1999), 3. The later handout, distributed from the visitor center in 1968, was the four-page “Atlantic
White Cedar Swamp Trail,” which states in part, “The white-cedar is valued as a lumber tree. The wood is
lightweight, moderately soft and easy to work. The heartwood ranks as one of the most durable woods. It
can be used for siding, poles, small boats and pails.” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc
Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.8 Visitor Center Handout 1968.”
358
(1929), summer house (1936), and country store (1947) among lesser structures –
creating a whimsical farmstead that echoed larger village museums in the region such as
Old Sturbridge Village and Mystic Seaport. While George died in 1962, Katherine
would continue to live on the property until 1975, and the house would not open to the
public for tours until 1976.495
While an impressive gift and display of faith in the mission of the Park Service,
there were some 3,000 properties within the boundaries of the seashore that it would seek
to survey, appraise, and purchase from owners. Hundreds of pre-1959 houses would,
however, stay in private ownership. It was the most complicated property acquisition in
the Park Service’s history. As it needed to acquire a significant amount of land before it
could start building infrastructure and accommodating eager Cape visitors (locals already
enjoyed access to their town’s beaches), the Park Service started with properties already
government-owned. Land acquisition officer George Thompson arrived on the Cape in
October of 1961 and organized a small staff at the seashore’s temporary headquarters in a
U.S. Coast Guard Station at Nauset Beach in Eastham, which the Guard had
decommissioned in 1958. Just a few miles north along the Great Beach was the 1,800acre Camp Wellfleet, an Army training site from World War II which the Park Service
had moved to acquire soon after passage of the seashore bill. By the end of the following
August the Army had completed decontamination of the site, removing live ammunition
that littered the area. The first park visitors were allowed to wander around the property
495
Marsha L. Fader, Historic Structure Report: The Atwood-Higgins House, Cape Cod National Seashore,
South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1980), 2. Larry Lowenthal, Historic
Assessment: Atwood-Higgins Property (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 1996), 1. William
Burke, “Landscape of Memory or Historical Folly? The Debate over George Higgins’ Whimsical
Farmstead on Bound Brook Island, Wellfleet,” Seashore News, July and August 2009, 9. Emily
Donaldson, Lauren H. Laham, and Margie Coffin Brown, Atwood-Higgins Historic District Cultural
Landscape Report and Outbuildings Historic Structures Report, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston,
MA.: National Park Service, 2010), x-xi.
359
beginning in October after they had checked in with an on-site caretaker. The access
roads around the camp’s perimeter had already been closed to vehicles to allow
vegetation to begin reclaiming the scarred landscape.496
But the major public lands on the outer Cape lay to the north, in Truro and outside
Provincetown. There, some 6,100 acres comprised the Province Lands State Reservation
and the Pilgrim Spring State Park.497 The former was one of the oldest public lands in the
country, having been purchased and set aside by the Plymouth Colony around 1650 as a
fishing base, and subsequently inherited by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and finally the
Commonwealth. With about a thousand acres, the smaller state park dated only to 1956,
when Truro residents successfully petition the state to acquire a property that a developer
was having graded and marked for house lots. While the site contained “unspoiled dunes,
marsh, and Atlantic beach,” it was of unique importance because it was reputed to
496
CCNS as “the most complicated land purchase ever contemplated by the Department of the Interior”
according to Lewis A. Carter, “Help: Needed to Check Erosion and Ruin,” Boston Globe, February 22,
1957, 83. See also Frank Falacci, “Cape Park Skipper Has Big Task Ahead,” Boston Globe, March 11,
1962, E10. For Thompson setting up shop at USCG station see Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod
National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 17;
and decommissioned in 1958 from Lance Kasparian, U.S. Coast Guard Nauset Station, Dwelling and
Boathouse, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore (Philadelphia, PA.: Northeast Regional
Office, National Park Service, 2008), 50. For Camp Wellfleet acquisition, cleanup, and open to public see
Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England, 1985), 15-16; and “Cape Seashore: 100 Appraisals in the Works on Properties,”
Boston Globe, October 14, 1962, 15.
497
Sources disagree on the acreage of these properties. National Park Service maps of Cape Cod National
Seashore from 1963-1967 list the former Province Lands State Reservation at 4,400 acres, and the former
Pilgrim Spring State Park at 1,700 acres. However, according to a newspaper article on the seashore’s
dedication in 1966, “At the ceremony, Gov. Volpe will present deeds to the Federal government for the
Province Lands area in Provincetown and the former Pilgrim Springs State Park in Truro, comprising 5402
acres of parkland.” James B. Ayres, “JFK Cape Project Real – On His Birthday,” Boston Globe, May 29,
1966, 1. State senator Edward Stone, who introduced the 1956 bill to take the land around Pilgrim Spring
for a state park said in a letter to the editor that the acreage was “nearly 1000 acres,” and that the state was
trying to purchase an adjacent parcel of land the following year. Edward Stone, “Says Pilgrim Spring
Within State Tract,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1957, 18. Similarly, Francis Burling said that in December
1957 state Commissioner of Natural Resources Francis Sargent met with NPS officials and “said that the
State was in the process of purchasing the land between the Pilgrim Spring and the Province Lands (1,000
acres). He promised to work towards the transfer of these lands by the State to the Federal Government for
the National Seashore.” Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.:
Leyden Press, 1978), 11. However, CCNS maps from 1963 through 1968 show significant private land
still separating these two former state properties.
360
contain the spring where the Pilgrims had first found fresh water after making landfall on
the Cape in 1620. With a possible national seashore coming to the outer Cape, the state
had done no more than put up a sign by the developer’s dirt road leading into the park as
officials had promised to turn the land over to the Park Service. As the bureaucracies of
the state and federal governments slowly moved to transfer the lands, they finally became
part of the national seashore in 1963 – though Massachusetts would not formally hand
over the deeds until the park’s dedication three years later.498
For the seashore’s first full year in 1963, the Park Service issued a large
pamphlet with a stylized lighthouse on the cover with its lower half as a Pilgrim hat.
Inside it described with a map and extensive text the four areas open to the public, and
more generally the history and natural features of the park. At the conclusion of the latter
the Park Service stated frankly that “Natural features are Cape Cod’s most important
asset. Preservation of these features is the chief aim of the National Park Service.”
While the seashore’s enabling legislation charged it to practice conservation, recreation,
498
History of Province Lands from “Legislative Research Council Report on Legal Background of the
‘Province Lands’ at Provincetown, Massachusetts” (Boston, MA.: State House, Legislative Research
Bureau, January 4, 1961), 1 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, folder
“Province Lands History 16.9.6” and Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore
(Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 3. “Unspoiled dunes” from Senator Edward Stone editorial “Says
Pilgrim Spring Within State Tract,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1957, 18. For brief history of Pilgrim Spring
State Park see Earl Banner, “Preserving Our Beaches III: Builders Nosed Out By State At Cape,” Boston
Globe, July 24, 1956, 17. Earl Banner, “Preserving Our Beaches IV: Millions for Highways, Little for
Recreation,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1956, 19. Earl Banner, “Preserving Our Beaches VI: Egbert Hans’
Report And What Came of It,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1956, 11; and Earl Banner, “Cape Park or Not –
View From Highland Light Hard to Beat,” Boston Globe, August 13, 1961, 11. For debate over whether
the site includes the actual Pilgrim Spring see Earl Banner, “Cape Shrines in Doubt: Where Did Pilgrim
Land?” Boston Globe, May 12, 1957, A6; Earl Banner, “Where Did Pilgrims Land? III: Historian Places
Water Site Mile From Present Tablet,” Boston Globe, May 14, 1957, 22; Edward Stone, “Says Pilgrim
Spring Within State Tract,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1957, 18; and Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape
Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 5-6, 11. For state finally handing over title
at 1966 dedication see James B. Ayres, “JFK Cape Project Real – On His Birthday,” Boston Globe, May
29, 1966, 1.
361
and preservation, the Park Service historically was about protecting large natural areas
for public enjoyment.499
As for the seashore’s four public areas, the Province Lands contained a lookout
tower and two beaches. Coast Guard Beach contained the park headquarters/visitor
center, a swimming beach (the town of Eastham had voted to turn its Atlantic beaches
over to the seashore earlier that year), and a temporary amphitheater for illustrated
evening history and nature-themed talks such as “Preservation of Salt Marshes,” “Strange
Creatures of the Sea,” “Revival of Cape Cod Drift Whaling,” “Cape Cod Architecture,”
“Origin of Cape Cod,” “Ranger Activities at Cape Cod National Seashore,” and
“National Parks – Nature’s Last Frontier.” Often supplemented by guest speakers from
surrounding communities, seashore staff gave lectures on not only the seashore’s main
themes, but also on the operation of the Park Service itself. They were, after all,
promoting a federal organization that did not have a strong presence in New England, and
that beginning in the late 1950s and through the 1960s had at times a contentious
relationship with the six towns of the outer Cape as the Park Service moved to acquire
private and town land for the seashore and enact regulations.500
But the park’s interpretive future in 1963 was best on view at Pilgrim Heights (an
area within the former Pilgrim Spring State Park) and the Marconi Station site within the
former Camp Wellfleet. At both sites, modern hexagonal interpretive shelters contained
exhibit panels that told of each spot’s interwoven nature and history, while nearby were
499
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1963). This and other brochures are in the Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File,
Folder “CCNS – Programs/Brochures 3.4.27B.”
500
Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1985), 24 (Eastham turning over beaches), 32-33 (contentious
relationship).
362
newly-created self-guided nature trails. At Pilgrim Heights, three panels discussed the
glacial kettle pond around which Native Americans once lived, the wanderings of the
Pilgrims in 1620 as they made key “discoveries,” and then the early Native AmericanPilgrim relationship. One loop trail took visitors by the spring “believed to have been
used by the Pilgrims” – and identified with a stone and bronze marker placed there in
1926 – while another loop trail took visitors through what the Park Service soon called
Small’s Swamp.501
Similarly, within the boundary of the former Camp Wellfleet was the site where
radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi had chosen to built the first wireless station in the
United States in 1901-02. Operational in 1903, it transmitted messages until wartime
security concerns shut it down in 1917; it was dismantled in 1920. Forty-three years
later, visitors encountered a hexagonal shelter containing a scale model of the station in a
large glass case, and exhibit panels detailing Marconi’s invention, the history of the
station, its visible ruins, and finally an explanation of coastal erosion. The bluff that once
contained Marconi’s station was steadily crumbling into the ocean – and taking the last
remnants of the station with it. It was a dramatic story of both human ingenuity and
nature’s destructive power. Leading away from the cliff edge, a nature trail guided
visitors through White Cedar Swamp. Eventually, improved markers would provide
greater detail of the human use and nature at both these sites. Park rangers led daily
walks here as well as into Nauset Marsh adjacent to the visitor center, Pilgrim Heights,
and among the Province Lands’ ponds and beech forest.502
501
Quotation from 1963 park brochure.
Marconi Station history from the interpretive markers at the site. See also the 1963 brochure: National
Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963);
National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1963” in Cape Cod
502
363
At the end of the summer the Boston Globe assessed the seashore’s
accomplishments. It now controlled 9,265 acres. An estimated 3,336 people visited
daily in July and August. There were now nineteen uniformed personnel (14 of whom
were seasonal). Fifteen lifeguards supervised the park’s three beaches. Both the guided
walks and evening programs were hugely popular, with a single nature walk attracting
300 participants, while one evening program drew an audience of 700. More than
700,000 people visited from across the United States and abroad. By any estimation the
seashore was a success.
What the Globe did not mention was that in June the Park Service had purchased
the former house and barn of whaling captain Edward Penniman in the Fort Hill area of
Eastham. The previous year it had acquired one of the Hill’s two large former farms, and
in 1964 it would acquire the second. With the entire hill (actually two hills – Skiff Hill
and Fort Hill) under its ownership, the woods and fields would soon host more
interpretive options for the public. But as Fort Hill was the first part of the seashore that
visitors encountered as they arrived from the west along U.S. Route 6, the photogenic and
elegant Penniman House would become one of the seashore’s most prominent historic
sites, and a main story within its historical interpretation.503
In subsequent years the Park Service expanded on the framework of its first full
season. Some 750 dignitaries, guests, and visitors met at the seashore’s headquarters in
National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center
Handout 1966.” David A. Kimball and Vernon G. Gilbert, “Interpretive Prospectuses for Cape Cod
National Seashore, Ocean View, Pilgrim Springs, Marconi Site, Camp Wellfleet Overlook [1963]” in Cape
Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Admin Files,” Folder “D18 – Interpretive Prospectus.” “1963
Accomplishments, Division of Interpretation,” Record Group 79, Box 19, National Archives, Waltham,
MA.
503
Frank Falacci, “Park’s 1st Season Reported Good One,” Boston Globe, September 1, 1963, 9. Frank
Falacci, “Even Critics Now Admit: National Seashore Cape’s Biggest Asset,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1964,
42A. Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort
Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 47.
364
Eastham on October 11, 1964 for a ceremony to honor Henry Beston as the Department
of the Interior declared his Outermost House a national literary landmark. The
designation was part of a larger Park Service effort to identify and officially recognize
both natural areas and historic properties that were nationally important; as most of these
(including the Outermost House) were outside federal control and would never join the
national park system, the Park Service hoped to encourage the public to recognize their
value and continue to preserve them. For his part, the seventy-six year-old Beston
praised the federal government for forever protecting his beloved Great Beach, and,
quoting from his The Outermost House, advised the crowd to “Touch the earth, love the
earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills and her seas.” Beston had donated
the house and surrounding 60 acres of dunes to the Massachusetts Audubon Society back
in 1960, and as it remained private property the Park Service did not include the house on
seashore maps that staff handed out daily at the visitor center. But Beston’s message of
honoring the earth would gain greater weight within the park by the end of the decade.504
Far from the solitude-providing dunes described in Beston’s book, a new policy
from the Park Service’s administration threatened to alter how Superintendent Gibbs and
his staff managed the growing park. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in July 1964
had signed a memorandum recognizing that the parks which Congress had created in the
preceding decades belonged to one of three types of areas – natural, historical, or
recreational – and should be managed as such. Natural areas would be managed to
restore and maintain their natural environment, though significant historic features would
continue to be maintained. Preservation of the built environment would dominate in
504
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 64. Herbert A. Kenny, “Now A National Monument: Outermost House Feted,” Boston
Globe, October 12, 1964, 8.
365
historical areas, while outdoor leisure activities would take precedence over conservation
and preservation in recreational areas.
Udall’s memorandum, prepared by Park Service Director Hartzog and his staff,
coincided with criteria set by the Recreation Advisory Council. The six-member
Cabinet-level council had the previous year proposed the construction of recreational
areas within 250 miles of major urban centers for large-scale public use. The recentlyopened Cape Cod National Seashore largely fell into this category by default, as
according to the Park Service’s own history of the system’s evolution, many of the
national seashores and lakeshores being created at this time would have been categorized
as natural areas were it not for their allowance of hunting.505
Superintendent Gibbs and his staff having to put the outdoor recreational needs of
the public ahead of preservation and conservation on Cape Cod was against both the
spirit and the language of the law that President Kennedy had signed in 1961. Under the
chairmanship of Charles H. W. Foster, the Advisory Commission protested the new
categorization through much of 1965. After significant correspondence and meetings
with Park Service officials, the Commission won a rare and unusual exemption. As
Foster recalled in his history of the Commission’s first twenty years,
Although the formal designation was never changed, the Advisory Commission
won agreement in principle from Director Hartzog that the legislative language
would prevail. The agreement was fortified by special language in the fiscal year
505
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 66, 72-73, 75. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History
(New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 244-246. The Recreational Advisory Council’s
recommendations were released as “Federal Executive Branch Policy Governing the Selection
Establishment, and Administration of National Recreation Areas, Policy Circular No. 1, March 26, 1963.”
For complete text see the section “Policy on the Establishment and Administration of Recreation Areas” in
Chapter 5 “Questions of Resource Management: 1957 – 1963” in America’s National Park System: The
Critical Documents, ed. Lary M. Dilsaver (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994),
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_5g.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
366
1966 appropriations act inserted by Senator Leverett Saltonstall expressing the
underlying conservation philosophy of the Seashore.506
Had the Advisory Commission not fought the recreational area designation, the
preservation and interpretation of both historic and natural features would have had
secondary importance to accommodating the recreational needs of visitors. As Udall’s
memorandum was released after the seashore’s master plan was approved, it’s uncertain
exactly how a recreation focus would have altered the seashore’s development – likely
more roads, parking areas, beaches with bathing facilities, hiking and biking trails, and
even sites for camping, concessions, and athletic fields. Outside of Cape Cod National
Seashore, these three categories would persist in the park system until the Service enacted
a new management policy in 1975 that recognized that each park should be managed
according to its individual historic and natural assets and recreational potential. It would
officially abolish the categories two years later.507
While still getting to pursue its original legislative management direction, 1965
still brought dramatic changes in the operation of the seashore. The previous fall, work
had started on renovating former barracks and other buildings at Camp Wellfleet into
classroom, administration, and living space for up to one hundred underprivileged young
men participating in the new federal Job Corps program that emphasized classroom
education and gaining practical job skills. A program of President Johnson’s War on
Poverty, it chose Cape Cod to host one of the first four Job Corps centers in the nation.
The pairing of training center and seashore echoed the Civilian Conservation Corps
506
Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1985), 29.
507
Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.:
University Press of New England, 1985), 29, 90. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the
System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 88.
367
camps that had created significant and lasting improvements in state and federal parks
during the Great Depression. By June eighty-one enrollees resided at the Wellfleet
Conservation Center, and over the next five years hundreds of youth between the ages of
sixteen and twenty-one worked alongside park rangers as they practiced tasks such as
construction, landscaping, vehicle repair, fire and insect control, building nature trails,
dune stabilization, and reforestation.508
Partially with the help of this extra labor, the seashore saw major projects finished
by year’s end. Nauset Light Beach opened. Restoration work began on the Penniman
House. Seashore headquarters relocated to purpose-built administration buildings near
Marconi Station. The park’s largest glacial erratic called Enos Rock (or Doane Rock)
was now accessible via a new trail off the main road between the Nauset Coast Guard
station and the seashore’s new Salt Pond Visitor Center which opened that July. For at
least the past two years the park’s interpretive staff had collected artifacts and
information for the center’s exhibits, which the Park Service’s Eastern Museum
Laboratory in Washington D.C. actually fabricated and installed in the visitor center’s
museum wing in September (the other wing being an auditorium). The lab was also in
charge of the park’s outdoor exhibits, with presumably the seashore staff providing
images and information as well as feedback.509
508
For Job Corps as CCC successor see Jean Dietz, “How Cape Job Corps Will War on Poverty,” Boston
Globe, December 18, 1964, 18. For progress of Job Corps camp see Jean Dietz, “A Chance to Grow… Job
Corps Is Launched,” Boston Globe, June 20, 1965, A7. Jean Dietz, “Wellfleet Job Corps Center,” Boston
Globe, June 27, 1965, A44.
509
Opening of new attractions from National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965); National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, 1965,
Cape Cod National Seashore,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp
Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” For collecting see “Minutes of Cape Cod
National Seashore Staff Meeting,” July 1, 1964, page 3, Record Group 79, Box 3, National Archives,
Waltham, MA. Penniman House restoration first mentioned in “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore
Staff Meeting,” June 2, 1965, page 4. Salt Pond Visitor Center opening mentioned in untitled minutes of
368
Lastly, workmen in December completed the third and final interpretive shelter in
the seashore at Skiff Hill, part of the recently-acquired Fort Hill area. Its exhibit panels
detailed the plant and animal life within Nauset Bay that the shelter looked out on, as
well as the story of significant Native American inhabitation along the shores of the bay.
To present dramatic and hands-on evidence of this lengthy tenure, the Park Service had
located a twenty-ton rock in the marsh below the hill which they dragged up and placed
in front of the shelter. Deep grooves and flat areas on the boulder’s surface showed
where Native Americans for years had used it to grind their stone tools. And as with
Pilgrim Heights and Marconi Station, visitors could head from the shelter down a new
self-guided nature trail – this one through a swamp noted for its red maple trees. As park
attendance reached 2.3 million visitors by the end of 1965, the Park Service was gaining
an ever greater audience to communicate its version of coastal New England.510
With 13,000 acres in federal control in 1966, the Park Service formally
established Cape Cod National Seashore in a ceremony held on Memorial Day. Some
3,000 people crowded the lawn of the new Salt Pond Visitor Center built on a bluff
beside U.S. Route 6, and overlooking the eponymous Salt Pond. Senator Ted Kennedy of
Massachusetts read from Thoreau’s Cape Cod to convey how his late older brother had
January 5, 1966 staff meeting, page 1. Museum Lab mentioned in “Minutes of Cape Cod National
Seashore Staff Meeting,” April 7, 1965, page 2; untitled national seashore staff meeting minutes of August
4, 1965, page 3; “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” September 1, 1965, page 1; and
“Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” November 29, 1966, page 2. All from Record
Group 79, Box 3, National Archives, Waltham, MA.
510
Weight of rock from current exhibit signage at Skiff Hill Interpretive Shelter. For details on move of
“Indian Rock” and construction of the shelter see “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,”
September 1, 1965, page 2; “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” October 6, 1965,
page 3; “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” November 3, 1965, page 2; untitled
minutes of national seashore staff meeting, December 1, 1965, page 3. Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine
Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore
(Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 51-53. Attendance figure from untitled minutes of national
seashore staff meeting, January 5, 1966, page 2. Record Group 79, Box 3, National Archives, Waltham,
MA.
369
valued the region and sought to protect it. Among those attending were a delegation from
the Federation of Eastern Indians, whom a photographer for the Associated Press
photographed in their full regalia walking with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.
The Native Americans were a visual reminder that the Native history of the region did
not stop with the prehistoric and colonial-era stories told within the seashore’s exhibits.511
As visitors toured the park in record numbers – the visitor center’s museum room
at times was crammed with as many as 200 people in a space designed for thirty-five –
infrastructure improvements continued, as well as the attention of the Intrepretive
Division to balancing its nature and history themes. While the Penniman House would
remain closed to the public even after its exterior restoration, it finally received outdoor
signage in 1966. Seashore historian Edison Lohr continued to gather artifacts for the
eventual lifesaving museum in the Nauset Coast Guard Station, and by the following year
he reported that everything was on hand. However, as the Park Service’s budget had
shrank in the wake of Mission 66’s completion, and the Park Service was using the Coast
Guard Station on a year by year permit basis from the Coast Guard, both a lack of money
and outright ownership stalled the museum for the foreseeable future. The seashore’s
Griffin Island Interpretive Center was likewise yet to be built.512
In 1967 the number of guided walks led by park rangers either daily or every few
days had increased to ten: Pilgrim Springs History, Great Island, Tidal Marsh, Nauset
Marsh, Seashore, Skiff Hill, Pilgrim Lake Dunes, Hatches Harbor, Fort Hill History, and
511
13,000 acres from James B. Ayres, “JFK Cape Project Real – On His Birthday,” Boston Globe, May 29,
1966, 1. Gloria Negri, “…JFK Walked Its Beaches, Sailed Its Waters,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1966, 1.
Associated Press photo in author’s collection, found on eBay.
512
Crammed museum room from untitled national seashore staff meeting minutes for September 7, 1966,
page 2. Lohr acquires everything for maritime museum but stymied from “Minutes of Cape Cod National
Seashore Staff Meeting,” November 1, 1967, page 6. Charles Foster said that the first significant budget
cuts for the park came in 1968. Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark
Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 34.
370
Atlantic White Cedar Swamp. The walks’ names and descriptions in the interpretive
program handout divide into either history or nature, with only Hatches Harbor and
Seashore walks described as combining the two. However, as the types of flora present,
such as non-native apple trees, grape vines, and roses all now growing wild, and the
cultural names of ostensibly “natural” areas implied, human history was present even on
a nature walk and vice versa. Not ignoring other methods of exploring the park, up in the
Province Lands the Park Service opened the first of three bicycle trails in the seashore
that September. The ribbon of asphalt running through a beech forest and dunes was the
first ever bicycle trail built by the Park Service, and attested to a federal emphasis on
encouraging physical fitness that had started with the Kennedy administration. Booklets
available to riders duly chronicled the natural and human history visible along the
paths.513
The National Park Service’s careful integration of history, archaeology, and
nature in its exhibits, talks, walks, and trails represented a sharp contrast to the way
maritime public history had traditionally been practiced in New England – best
represented through Mystic Seaport. The region’s most popular maritime museum had
brought the open-air museum model into the water with its construction in the 1940s and
‘50s of a typical nineteenth-century New England seaport village. Museum visitors could
inspect historic vessels docked at wharves adjacent to a model community that had
513
National Park Service, “Revised Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1967,” in
Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.7 Visitor
Center Handout 1967.” National Park Service, Bicycle Trail Guide: Province Lands, Pilgrim Heights &
Nauset Areas, Cape Cod National Seashore (Harpers Ferry, W.V.: Harpers Ferry Job Corps Civilian
Conservation Center, National Park Service, [c. 1969]); and National Park Service, Bicycle Trail Guide:
Province Lands & Nauset Areas, Cape Cod National Seashore (Hyannis, MA.: U-Pedal-It Inc., [c. 1969]),
both in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder
“3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.” William Burke, “Wild Ride: The Curious History of the Province
Lands Bike Trail,” Seashore News, July and August 2010, 10.
371
equipped such vessels for global trade and fishing. Nature existed in the materials used
to construct buildings and vessels, and the marine animals and derivative products
harvested from the sea, but Mystic Seaport otherwise excluded the role that the maritime
environment played in a coastal village. Representative of this approach was the
museum’s attitude toward the salt marshes on its property. At Mystic’s annual meeting
in 1946 the board of dir ectors thanked E. A. Olds Jr. “for the conveyance to the
association of the five acres of salt marsh formerly owned by him in Greenmanville
avenue. It was felt that this land, while useless now, may be of considerable importance
in the future development of the museum’s holdings.”514
As the Marine Historical Association would soon fill in the marsh along Shipyard
Point to create level high ground for the village, wharves, and adjacent deep water to
dock its vessels, it practiced a traditional attitude of subduing nature for the sake of
progress. Nature, even in the minds of early twentieth century American
conservationists, existed to be used efficiently for human benefit. Shipyard Point for the
Association was a tabula rasa for carrying out their museum vision, and not a valuable
ecosystem to be preserved in its own right. The “useless” salt marsh donated by Olds to
the Association was likely filled in for a parking lot. While conservation organizations
elsewhere in the region such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society valued and protected
coastal lands such as salt marshes, they were dedicated to conservation and not promoting
history. However, at Cape Cod National Seashore the National Park Service married the
two approaches in interpreting maritime history as intertwined with its environment. At
Pilgrim Heights for instance, in order for visitors to see the famous spring they had to
514
Quote from newspaper clipping from the New London, Connecticut, Evening Day, July 15, 1946, in
Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, Box 1, 1930-1950, Folder 17: “Annual Meeting,
1946.”
372
leave their cars behind and walk down a winding trail through woods that while
ecologically different than what the Pilgrims saw (interpretive markers identified plants
and features), still provided a sense of their frantic search for fresh water that distant
November. History at the national seashore was environmental and immersive.
By the late 1960s the Cape Cod National Seashore was more than simply showing
that natural and human history were inseparable. As the visual imagery of the seashore’s
literature demonstrates, the image of the national seashore was becoming more
environmental than cultural. The national seashore’s branding had begun with the first
full brochures handed out in 1963, as a stylized lighthouse/Pilgrim hat graced the cover.
In 1965 a stylized tern was added above the lighthouse and remained there until a 1969
redesign created a condensed, pocket-size brochure without any illustrations besides a
map and small photos of marsh grass and the Nauset Coast Guard Station.
But the trend continued in the summer interpretive programs handed out at the
visitor center. The cover of the first program in 1963 featured a drawing of the
seashore’s Cape Cod Light atop the high cliffs in Truro. The next year it was a
watercolor of a marsh that mimicked the photo used on the later map. For 1965 through
1967 a pen drawing of a tern hovered above a dune dotted with beach grass.515 For 1968
the image became a simple line drawing within a circle of a tern flying above a dune
topped with beach grass and “Cape Cod National Seashore” printed on the dune face.
This has been the emblem of the national seashore ever since, appearing on clothing,
signage, and promotional literature. This visual transformation would also be evident in
515
Naturalist David Spang recalls in a newsletter of the Friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore that the
design was created by Patsy Gilbert, wife of Chief Naturalist Vernon C. “Tom” Gilbert. David Spang,
“Memories of the Seashore’s Early Days,” The Shore, Spring/Summer 2011, 6. Friends of the Cape Cod
National Seashore, http://www.fccns.org/newsletters/TheShoreSpringSummer2011.pdf (accessed January
7, 2013).
373
the publication of the new master plan already being prepared in 1968. The original
cover of the 1963 plan had the Pilgrims’ Mayflower on its title page. Published in 1970,
the new master plan’s cover featured a single tern.516
This environmental turn was also evident at individual sites within the park, and
the National Park Service’s adoption of an environmental education program called
NEED. Visitors walking along the Fort Hill Trail in 1969 were provided with an
extensive eleven-page handout describing thirteen stations at which they were to read the
handout’s relevant paragraphs. For station #5, at an overlook of the entire hill area, the
message was frank and contemporary:
The importance of Fort Hill-Skiff Hill, for us, is that most of the mistakes later
made in our westward expansion and land use had already been made in the
Eastham section of Cape Cod. Cape settlers did not intentionally abuse the land:
it is just that Eastham is so small and fragile that 250 years of improper land use
impoverished the soil almost beyond saving.
As we continue down the path toward the marsh, we can answer some questions
and leave some for you. We shall note how the Cape was reduced from great
forests, valuable swamps, good farmland and superb shell and ocean fishing to no
forests, disappearing swamps, wind-blown farmland and poorer and poorer
fishing. These are of course not purely local problems – they are national.517
Gone is the traditional American narrative of heroic settlers who tamed the landscape and
embodied values of faith and hard work that their descendants should follow. What
replaces it is a subjective and heartbreaking story of decline and destruction of nature by
humans as they expanded westward over the next three centuries. The seashore’s history
516
The illustration of the cover of the 1963 version of the master plan mentioned in Charles H. W. Foster,
The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New
England, 1985), 17. National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan
(Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970). For CCNS maps and brochures from 1962 through 1990
see Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, Folder “CCNS – Programs/Brochures
3.4.27B” and Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folders “Handout Materials 1965,” “3.6
Visitor Center Handout 1966,” “3.7 Visitor Center Handout 1967,” “3.8 Visitor Center Handout 1968,” and
“3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.”
517
“Fort Hill Trail (Eastham),” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files
(History),” folder “3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.”
374
was no longer the “interaction of man and nature” as the 1963 master plan had stated,
balancing the two forces. Instead, man was doing significant harm to nature.
This imbalance became the new interpretive theme of the 1970 master plan: “The
story of Cape Cod is the history of natural forces and man’s effect on this landscape.”
But instead of merely illustrating environmental damage on the Cape as a cautionary tale
for the public, the National Park Service embraced activism with its adoption two years
prior of the National Environmental Educational Development program. As explained in
the master plan, an increasing number of visitors to the seashore were urban residents
with little experience in or knowledge of nature and humanity’s relationship to it. “If
such visitors are to respect the resources of the Seashore, refrain from activities which
damage those resources, and support continued preservation, they must understand the
environment and man’s dependence upon it.” With the seashore by now having
completed its infrastructure development (the Province Lands Visitor Center opened in
1969); and an extensive amount of interpretation of natural and man-made change was
available through its exhibits, programs, and trails, it was an excellent place to educate
the public. The Park Service’s answer was a residential environmental education
program where school groups were given dormitory and classroom space to study
“natural forces and the effects of man’s tinkering with them.” Hopefully the immersive
experience within a national seashore would impart a greater respect for the land, as
Mystic Seaport had hoped its Yankee museum village would do for the American
character.518
518
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.:
National Park Service, 1970), 7, 46. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A
History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 210 (NEED). Retired seashore naturalist David
375
The master plan identified the Nauset Coast Guard Station as the temporary
headquarters for the program, as it still planned to convert the station into a lifesaving
museum. But the Park Service’s reduced budget for the seashore in the wake of Mission
66’s completion, and competition for federal dollars from programs such as President
Johnson’s War on Poverty, NASA, and the escalating Vietnam War would contribute to
the Griffin Island Center never being built, and the NEED program remaining in the
Coast Guard Station into the present. A “home-made” lifesaving exhibit opened in the
garage of the Coast Guard Station in 1970 and continued to be open for limited hours
through 1978, after which it was relocated to a refurbished former lifesaving station in
the Province Lands. A living history program demonstrating a turn-of-the-century
lifesaving drill would start that same year on Coast Guard Beach, and switch to the
Province Lands beside the former station the following summer.519
But the Cape Cod National Seashore’s major period of growth was now over by
the start of the 1970s. It hoped to acquire more of the 7,519 acres of private land still
within its boundaries, but the rest of its 44,000 acres was in public ownership (state,
federal, or towns). And the master plan still outlined a strong mission of restoring and
interpreting the historic areas and buildings within the seashore; of the more than eighty
historic buildings identified in the HABS survey, only the Penniman house and barn were
Spang says that the Province Lands Visitor Center was built smaller and with only one wing due to budget
cuts, according to a 5/24/12 conversation.
519
Park Service reduced budget from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark
Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 34; and May 24, 2012 conversation
with David Spang, who began as a naturalist at CCNS in 1963 and worked for the next forty-two seasons;
he still volunteers at the seashore. “Home-made” from page 2 of “Briefing Statement: Interpretive
Operation at Cape Cod National Seashore,” November 3, 1978, Cape Cod National Archives, box “Misc
Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “The Cape Cod Interpreter.” Dates for the lifesaving exhibit are
from surveying the summer interpretive programs, 1970 through 1977, and park newspapers for 1978 and
1979. For NEED temporarily housed at Nauset CG Station and a Life Saving Museum still planned for the
space, see National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington,
D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 45 (museum), 47 (NEED).
376
interpreted as exhibits in place. Subsequent improvements in the park would come from
working with the pieces of the built environment already within its boundaries.520
The larger context of how the NPS saw history, nature, and tourism in the 1960s
and ‘70s as the environmental movement emphasized an ecological understanding of
nature
As the development of the first decade of infrastructure and interpretation within
Cape Cod National Seashore demonstrates, it was the product of a long line of laws,
regulations, and decisions originating in Washington, D.C., where the federal government
itself was subject to evolving attitudes within American society surrounding the study,
preservation, and promotion of nature, history, and recreation. Originating as an
organization largely tasked with preserving and welcoming the public to large iconic
“natural” parks in the American West, the National Park Service in the 1930s
significantly increased its presence eastward – particularly with its acquisition of historic
sites controlled by other federal agencies. Laws such as the Historic Sites Act of 1935
and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 gave the National Park Service
greater authority and responsibility to document, advocate for the preservation of, and
sometimes acquire sites of national historical significance.521
Along with this focus on history came an understanding in the 1930s to also
accommodate the recreational needs of Americans – a vision that included the nation’s
seashores and lakeshores. The long-envisioned designation and development of Cape
Cod National Seashore eventually occurred within the National Park Service’s Mission
520
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.:
National Park Service, 1970), 51 (public ownership), 54 (Penniman).
521
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 2005), 28, 51-52, 65.
377
66 drive to modernize its infrastructure, staffing, and expand the number of parks. Its
successor program, Parkscape U.S.A., sought to further grow the system in time for
Yellowstone’s centennial in 1972. During these two programs the Park Service also
expanded its law enforcement program to handle the increasing attendance and resultant
conflicts between people and nature, and people themselves. And it expanded
interpretive programs, emphasizing both environmental education and living history.522
But this growth occurred during the American environmental movement, and
revealed the Park Service leaders’ limited interest in biological science. While the Park
Service created more “natural” parks, enforced regulations protecting nature, and
emphasized environmental education, these were not rooted in an ecological
understanding of the parks. As Park Service historian Richard Sellars makes clear in his
history of the Service’s management of its natural resources, the National Park Service
throughout its history has always put scenic preservation and recreational tourism above
scientific study of the park system’s natural resources.
Since the 1930s, a rival faction within the Park Service led mainly by wildlife
biologists advocated scientific study to preserve the ecological integrity of a park and to
limit development to areas where it would cause the least harm. But especially during the
rapid expansion of Mission 66 and Parkscape U.S.A., this viewpoint found little
sympathy among the NPS leadership, particularly given Park Service Director (19511964) Conrad Wirth’s background in landscape architecture and his successor George
Hartzog’s (1964-1972) shared enthusiasm for growing the park system. Within their
tenures the system experienced its largest period of expansion yet, with ninety-eight
522
Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale
University Press, 1997), 205-210.
378
permanent additions from 1952 through 1972. Of these, twenty-eight were recreational
areas, sixty-one historical areas, and only twelve natural areas. While the Park Service
had its 1916 mandate “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the
wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same…,” Secretary Udall’s 1964
memorandum (one of an array of internal documents over the bureau’s history that
interpreted and reinterpreted this mission) tilted the balance according to each park’s
main category as history, nature, or recreation. As Mission 66 and Parkscape U.S.A.
progressed they would run up against evolving attitudes in American society towards
nature, and Congressional legislation.523
While historians have long debated the origins of the modern American
environmental movement,524 it had become part of mainstream American culture by the
end of the 1960s. In the postwar wake of large-scale American suburbanization,
infrastructure development, the widespread adoption of pesticides, and a wealthier
populace able to afford an ever-greater range of goods, a growing public concern arose
over the resulting accelerated environmental destruction, pollution, and consumption of
523
Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale
University Press, 1997), 204-210. Tally of NPS additions from National Park Service, The National Parks:
Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 67, 70, 72.
524
For the origins of conservation and the later environmental movement see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the
Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press,
1993). Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States,
1955-1985 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature:
Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA.:
University of California Press, 2001). Richard William Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The
Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Thomas P. Jundt, “The Origins of the Environmental Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2008).
Tina Merrill Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver,
B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2006). Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How American
Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (1975; Corvallis, OR.:
Oregon State University Press, 2001). Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American
Environmental Movement (New York, N.Y.: Hill & Wang, 1993). Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight
Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington
Press, 2002). Adam Ward Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of
American Environmentalism (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
379
resources. What had once been the regrettable but acceptable costs of modern society,
such as the polluted Cuyahoga River catching fire in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952, had
become by the time of another Cuyahoga fire in 1969 emblematic of what were now
environmental disasters that received nationwide publicity and significant public outrage.
At the heart of this concern for the environment was the word ecology – an understanding
that organisms had complex, interdependent relationships with their environment and
each other. Rachel Carson’s 1962 best-selling book Silent Spring brought this scientific
term into the mainstream as she dramatically demonstrated the damage that understudied
chemicals were having on not only the natural ecosystems but the humans who lived
within and depended upon them.525
The belief that man was upsetting the harmony by which the natural world
operated dated back to the nineteenth century with such proto-environmentalists as Henry
David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh. Critics of American expansion into, and the
subjugation or destruction of nature had existed since the early nineteenth century, and
citizens by the 1860s were already working to regulate pollution, manage finite natural
resources, and set aside public lands for preservation. But what had once been the radical
criticism of a small number of advocates for nature became within a century – through
advances in science, technology, public education, communications, expansion of voting
rights and political activism, and an increased pressure on the natural world by a growing
nation – a mainstream movement that sought to curb mankind’s destruction of nature, and
in doing so help protect itself.526
525
Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 239-241.
526
For Thoreau and Marsh see Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental
Movement (New York, N.Y.: Hill & Wang, 1993), 46-53. For regulating pollution see John T. Cumbler,
380
For modern environmentalists and their spiritual founders, the roots of this
destruction originated with the arrival of the first Europeans. Successive waves of
colonists and their descendants used the land without regard for how their actions upset
the natural order or ecosystem. The virgin continent was a place to be tamed and put to
productive use. But the idea of wilderness soon underwent a sea change. Historian
Roderick Nash released the book Wilderness and the American Mind in 1967 as
Americans were taking an ever-growing interest in their environment. He traced the
contemporary positive view of wilderness to the nineteenth century, as Americans began
to reimagine the wilderness as an asset over a liability. For much of the century it had
been a place to seek the sublime, and with the frontier deemed closed in the 1890s, its use
now expanded to include escaping the constraints and stresses of urban modernity and to
restore mental and spiritual health. Wilderness advocates began campaigning to protect
what few wild places America had left. At the time of Nash’s writing, wilderness was
now legally defined, governmentally designated, and heavily visited.527
As Americans’ European ancestors became the (if unintentional) villains in this
story of environmental decline, and their descendants tried to limit pollution and save
Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790-1930 (New York, N.Y.:
Oxford University Press, 2001). For managing finite natural resources see Richard William Judd, Common
Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA.:
Harvard University Press, 1997). Though communities and colonies in America have set aside common
land for public use since the seventeenth century (such as the Boston Common and Province Lands outside
Provincetown in Massachusetts), the federal government deeding the Yosemite Valley and nearby
Mariposa Grove to the state of California in 1864 for use as a public park was the first state park in the
nation, and set a precedent for the establishment of the first national park – Yellowstone – in 1872.
National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service,
2005), 12-13.
527
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York,
N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1983). Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (1967; New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1982). Nash assigned wilderness appreciation only to the urban elite.
For a rural perspective of how local people in the Adirondack Mountains interacted with the environment
and practiced a “moral ecology,” see Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves,
and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 2001).
381
what remained, there were important consequences to this version of history as it became
part of government policy as well as popular culture. The National Park Service had
adopted this narrative by 1958 in Our Vanishing Seashore, when it chronicled the coastal
plant and animal communities and concluded,
Since Europeans came on the scene, this native life has been sharply disturbed,
often destroyed, and the balance of nature upset. The few remaining examples of
natural plant-animal communities along the seacoast should be zealously
preserved and protected from further modification…. Even at this late hour we
can save some of our native seacoast life if areas can be given permanent
protection.528
Once Cape Cod National Seashore was established, the story of decline was eventually
repeated in the park’s interpretation.
Going further, the 1963 paper “Wildlife Management in the National Parks”
(popularly known as the Leopold Report) was both the first of its kind as an outside
review by five leading scientists and wildlife advocates on how the Park Service
managed wildlife, and received nationwide publicity for its criticism of present practices
and recommendations. Submitted to Secretary Udall, the committee reported that “As a
primary goal, we would recommend that the biotic associations within each park be
maintained, or when necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that
prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man. A natural park should
represent a vignette of primitive America.” As Park Service historian Sellars critiqued in
Preserving Nature in the National Parks, this language “inspired a patriotic, ethnocentric
goal – to maintain the landscape remnants of a pioneer past” that ignored how Native
Americans perceived the land and that they could ecologically impact it.529
528
National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 19.
“Goal” in A.Starker Leopold et al., “Wildlife Management in the National Parks: The Leopold Report,”
March 4, 1963. National Park Service,
529
382
Scholars have subsequently debunked the myths that Native Americans – the
outnumbered and persecuted hero of the story of American environmental decline – did
not significantly alter flora and fauna, and that true wilderness, free of human influence,
existed. But the popular stereotype of the “Ecological Indian” – that Native Americans
were proto-ecologists and aware of the systemic consequences of their actions and sought
to maintain the natural balance – has proven to be lasting in American culture, and one
which many Native Americans have embraced.530 Perhaps in recognition of the deep and
extensive footprint on the land, whether from Native or Euro-Americans, the 1964
Wilderness Act used a more practical definition in evaluating wilderness by its present
appearance of wildness and lack of development.531
Intended to protect extensive undeveloped areas of land within federal ownership,
the Wilderness Act signed by President Johnson in 1964 created a legal definition of
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/leopold/leopold4.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). For a
hard copy, see A. Starker Leopold et al., “Wildlife Management in the National Parks,” in Transactions of
the Twenty-Eighth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, ed. James B. Trerethen
(Washington, D.C.: Wildlife Management Institute, 1963), 1-43. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature
in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 214.
530
Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company,
1999), 21.
531
For wilderness as a cultural construct, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting
Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New
York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90. For Native Americans shaping their environment, and their
subsequent removal to create “wilderness” see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian
Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999); Philip
Burnham, Indian Country, God's Country: Native Americans and the National Parks (Washington, D.C.:
Island Press, 2000); Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, N.Y.: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1999); and Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis, eds., Native Americans and the
Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
Public Law 88-577 (the Wilderness Act) defines wilderness “as an area where the earth and its community
of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness
is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character
and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so
as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the
forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding
opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand
acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired
condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational,
scenic, or historical value.” “The Wilderness Act,” September 3, 1964,
http://wilderness.nps.gov/document/wildernessAct.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013).
383
wilderness and established a National Wilderness Preservation System to designate
wilderness areas within land managed by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service,
and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Believing that they were already doing a satisfactory
job in protecting natural resources, Park Service leadership resisted passage of the Act,
which required a survey of federally-owned lands, and those with at least 5,000 acres of
supposed “wilderness” were to be designated as such and kept that way in perpetuity. In
the midst of a massive building program it did not want to lose the authority to decide
where it could develop. The Park Service eventually complied in recommending areas
within its park system to be declared as wilderness, but environmental groups and
Congress frequently contested the Service’s recommendations for being too conservative
or overlooking certain areas entirely. Representative of such battles, the Park Service’s
plan for developing Cumberland Island National Seashore for large-scale recreational use
was defeated by local and national conservation advocates, who eventually succeeded in
having a significant portion of the island protected under the Wilderness Act.532
At the height of the environmental movement, and in the same year that Congress
established Cumberland Island National Seashore, the NPS issued the two-part National
Park System Plan in 1972 that divided American history (part 1) and natural history (part
2) into thematic categories and assigned its “natural” and “historical” parks to these
categories. The gaps showed where the Park Service was not adequately representing
history and nature and were targets for future expansion. But even as the NPS used
ecological and scientific characteristics in deciding where to grow the system, it was
“only grudgingly,” according to Sellars, “accepting ecological science as part of park
532
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (1967; New Haven, CT.: Yale University
Press, 1982), 221-226. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New
Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 191-194 (opposition to act), 211-212.
384
management. The Park Service may have thought of itself as being ecologically aware,
but it remained largely uninformed about its biological resources and oblivious to the
ecological consequences of park development and use.”533
Within Cape Cod National Seashore there were definitely nowhere near 5,000
acres that had escaped human development in the preceding three centuries, so the
Wilderness Act did not apply to the Cape as it did on Cumberland Island. And the 1970
master plan did echo the Park Service’s preference for scenic preservation and
accommodating tourists as it discussed the state of and recommendations for improving
recreation, an ecologically-based interpretation, public environmental education, and
resource management (erosion control, dune stabilization, insect and plant disease
control, and fire suppression), but not scientific study of the park by the Park Service
itself. While the Park Service stated in promotional literature that “natural features are
Cape Cod’s most important asset” and preserving these features was its chief aim,
recreation ruled on Cape Cod.
While the public face of the seashore by the second half of the 1960s was nature –
represented in its emblem – the promotion of recreation largely trumped ecological
concerns. Partly this was following the aforementioned sentiment of the National Park
Service leadership, and partly it was due to local factors. At the time of the seashore’s
creation significant development already existed within its boundaries, from hundreds of
homes and businesses to the Provincetown Airport in the Province Lands. To create the
park required the support of many of these inholders as well as recognition of some
traditional activities not normally allowed in national parks, such as hunting, fishing, and
533
Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale
University Press, 1997), 213, 341 note 22. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System
(Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 67.
385
the off-road “beach buggies” that roamed the dunes and headed out to favorite fishing
spots. The Massachusetts Beach Buggy Association, for example, was an early
proponent of the national seashore. In this instance the master plan did call for carefully
studying the effects of the vehicles on the dunes’ ecology – the only ecological study
mentioned in the text. But within or outside the master plan there was no discussion of
taking the seashore back to some imagined state of wilderness. The seashore’s enabling
legislation specifying that it “shall be permanently preserved in its present state” – unlike
Cumberland Island’s requirement to be preserved “in its primitive state” – was
recognition that Cape Cod was not a wilderness, nor a purely “natural” area. It was a
landscape extensively modified by first Native Americans and then European settlers and
their descendants.534
Within the seashore were areas imprinted with both natural and human stories,
though the former physically dominated the latter. The master plan classified the
seashore’s 27,700 acres of land into “general outdoor recreation” of 4,400 acres including
beaches, visitor centers, airport, the Highland and Marconi Station areas, and house-lined
roads; “natural environmental areas” encompassing 21,800 acres that were largely
undeveloped but often riddled with inholdings; “outstanding natural features” comprising
450 acres of Nauset Marsh; “primitive areas” of 770 acres within mostly Great Island;
and eighty-odd “historic and cultural sites” estimated at three acres per site for a total of
240 acres. While encompassing a vastly smaller area of the national seashore, and
534
Pat Harty, “Beach Buggy Casters Like Cape Park Plan,” Boston Globe, June 8, 1958, 56. National Park
Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park
Service, 1970), 49-50. Quotation of Law 87-126 (“present state”) from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape
Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985),
110. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict
(Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 109 (“primitive state”).
386
situated within nature, history in the park can be divided into three categories: Native
Americans, the outer Cape as a place of entrepreneurism, and a benevolent government
working hard to protect its people.535
Cape Cod’s Native history
After exploring the creation, planning, construction, and environmentalism at
Cape Cod National Seashore, it is important to now focus on the types of human stories
told within the park. Since the late-nineteenth century, tourists, consumers, and regional
boosters have prized Cape Cod as an especially historic place – with families, old
buildings, artifacts, and stories sometimes extending back to the seventeenth century.
And Cape Cod National Seashore has adopted this narrative, beginning with the region’s
Native Americans. I have grouped the dozens of stories that visitors encounter into three
main categories: Native American/Contact history, the Cape’s history of industry and
entrepreneurism, and the federal government’s history on Cape Cod.
Visitors walking through Cape Cod National Seashore by the late 1960s
experienced an ecologically-influenced interpretation of both Native American and EuroAmerican history that stood in contrast to many of New England’s historic sites and
historical attractions which overwhelmingly celebrated the region’s Anglo colonial era.
At CCNS one could find ancient shell heaps along the Small’s Swamp Trail, a boulder at
Skiff Hill once used to sharpen stone tools, evening programs such as “The Indian on
Cape Cod” and “Welcome, Englishmen,” Native-American-derived words such as Pamet
and Nauset describing the seashore’s geography, and an exhibit at the Salt Marsh Visitor
535
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.:
National Park Service, 1970), 37.
387
Center that described the lives of the Cape’s Native Americans using illustrations,
archaeological artifacts, and a diorama of Champlain visiting a Native American village
at Nauset Harbor. All of these were points of entry to a Native past on Cape Cod, but it
was a history that ended shortly after the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 – and as a result
occupied only a minor segment of the park’s historical interpretation.
While explorers and Pilgrims were the major thrust of the historical argument for
creating the seashore, a part of both the narratives of early explorers, such as Champlain,
and the Pilgrims were encounters with Cape Cod’s Native Americans. Decades of
archaeological excavations dating back to the 1940s guided this interpretation, expanding
both what anthropologists knew about how prehistoric and historical Native Americans
lived and their dates of habitation to 10,000 years before the present. Though historical
interpretation for CCNS has overwhelmingly focused on Euro Americans, it’s important
to spotlight the less prominent but still ubiquitous Native narrative, and how it contrasted
with the story of the region’s modern Native Americans. A twentieth-century visitor
within the park could easily conclude that the Cape’s Native history ended in the
seventeenth century. But it did not.536
536
“The Indian on Cape Cod” lecture from National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape
Cod National Seashore, 1966” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp
Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” “Welcome, Englishmen” lecture from
National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, June 28-Labor Day
1969” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” unlabeled
folder. Diorama mentioned in description for Station 5 of “Fort Hill Trail (Eastham),” Cape Cod National
Seashore Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.9A Visitor Center Handout
1969.” Artist and amateur archaeologist Ross Moffett wrote extensively on the Native American
archaeology of Cape Cod in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ross Moffett, “A Review of Cape Cod Archaeology,”
Massachusetts Archaeological Society Bulletin 19, no. 1 (October 1957): 1-19. National Park Service
archaeological surveys began in 1958, with the most extensive by Park Service archaeologist Francis P.
McManamon, who conducted the Cape Cod National Seashore Archaeological Survey from 1979 to 1981
and resulted in a multivolume report “Chapters in the Archeology of Cape Cod” published between 19841986 and 2011. For a full list of CCNS archaeological surveys and excavations see National Park Service,
“The Archaeology of Cape Cod,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/the-archaeology-of-outer-capecod.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
388
To the Park Service, the Nauset Indians of Cape Cod who encountered the
Pilgrims in 1620 as they explored what is now Truro and Eastham were a cultural and
political group distinct from the adjacent Wampanoags of southeastern Massachusetts,
and who collapsed in the seventeenth century under the weight of post-Contact factors
such as disease and Anglo settlement. But according to anthropologist Bert Salwen, the
modern concept of a “tribe” began to emerge only in the seventeenth century as a result
of this upheaval, and political and territorial divisions on Cape Cod at the time of contact
are extremely difficult to determine. In his estimation, the Native Americans living in
southeastern Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, can
all be organized into the Wampanoag or Pokanoket group, which inhabited southern New
England along with the Pawtucket, Massachusett, Narragansett, and Pequot-Monhegan.
And, at the time of the national seashore’s creation in the 1960s, there remained two
vibrant Wampanoag communities in what are today the towns of Mashpee on Cape Cod
and Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard.537
From the seventeenth century through the twenty-first, Wampanoags have fought
to improve their economic and political status as well as cultural prominence. This
section of the dissertation reviews the limited portrait of Native Americans at CCNS in
the twentieth century and then moves beyond it – showing how area Wampanoags have
sought to maintain their history and culture in a region popularly defined as the home of
Yankees. As no historical survey exists of the place of Native Americans within New
537
“The Nauset Indians, a branch of the Algonquian linguistic stock, inhabited all of Cape Cod except for
the extreme western end in which the Wampanoag tribe lived. They had a loose affiliation with the
Wampanoags. Those Nauset villages on the upper Cape were dominated by the Wampanoags while the
ones more distant on the lower Cape enjoyed relative independence. Six Nauset villages were located in
the proximity of what is now Cape Cod National Seashore.” Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study,
Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 14-20. Bert Salwen is quoted in
Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 7273.
389
England public history, this section offers an in-depth look at Native American cultural
and political activism in southeastern New England from the 1920s to 2011. In the latter
half of this story, Cape Cod National Seashore’s creation and rise to become the region’s
most popular tourist destination makes it an important potential site for the public to learn
about Native history, colonial and contemporary.538
*
*
*
The seventeenth century was a devastating time for the Wampanoags in what is
now southeastern New England. As English settlers expanded beyond Plymouth, the
attendant diseases, warfare, ecological and economic practices, and proselytism soon
fragmented Wampanoag culture. The area that includes the present town of Mashpee
was home to a Wampanoag community that converted to Christianity, and, with the help
of missionaries Richard Bourne and his son Shearjashub, built a meeting house in 1684
and secured title to the land in the Plymouth Court for the “Praying Indians.” For almost
the next two centuries the Mashpees endured colonial (beginning in 1746) and then stateappointed guardians that limited their ability to self-govern, missionaries who similarly
did not advocate for their best interests, the dispensation of commonly-held land and
538
For a starting point on the modern history of Native Americans in New England, see Paul Brodeur,
Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England
(Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985). Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War:
Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,
1997). Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,
1991). Thomas Dresser, The Wampanoag Tribe of Martha’s Vineyard: Colonization to Recognition
(Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2011). Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s
Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979). Shepard Krech III, ed., Passionate Hobby:
Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of
Anthropology, Brown University, 1994). Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian
Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987). Ronald Rudin, Remembering
and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey Through Public Memory (Toronto, ON.: University of
Toronto Press, 2009).
390
resources to non-Native Cape Codders in transactions both legal and not, and numerous
appeals to colonial and state officials for redress.
In 1834 the Mashpees finally succeeded in petitioning the state to remove their
white overseers and grant them a greater degree of self government with the
establishment of Mashpee as an Indian District. But the arrangement lasted less than
forty years as the Massachusetts legislature made the Mashpee (and all other Native
Americans in the Commonwealth) citizens in 1869 and then incorporated Mashpee as a
town the following year. A predominantly Wampanoag community of 227 residents on
Martha’s Vineyard was similarly incorporated as the town of Gay Head in 1870. While
the majority of the district’s residents (an 1859 state report listed 371 Mashpees and 32
non-Mashpees) voted against incorporation, Cape Cod’s legislators supported the move,
possibly as the incorporation act put the town’s remaining common land (excluding
meadow and hay land) up for public auction. Most of Cape Cod had long been
deforested for agriculture, making the Mashpee land exceedingly valuable. The result
was devastating for the Mashpees, however, who could not afford to buy most of the land
that they had communally shared for centuries. But, they would continue to control the
town’s government for almost a century.539
The Wampanoags of Gay Head and Mashpee may have lost their legal status as
Native Americans with the incorporation of their Indian Districts into towns, but they did
not abandon their Native American identity in the coming decades. They continued to
practice folk medicine, share folktales, foodways, hunt, fish, and make handicrafts and
539
History of Mashpee Wampanoags summarized from Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 76-119; and Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of
Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 34-37. Gay
Head incorporation from Thomas Dresser, The Wampanoag Tribe of Martha’s Vineyard: Colonization to
Recognition (Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2011), 105-107.
391
tools for their own use and for sale to the public. By the 1910s they were a visible part of
the Cape’s tourist economy, described in guidebooks and promoted through postcards.
One card mailed in 1916 shows a comic drawing of Cape Cod with stereotypes of both
locals and visitors. In the upper Cape, a “Mashpee Indian” wearing a single feather and
wrapped in a blanket sits beside a teepee while smoking a pipe. The card remained in use
through the 1930s, while additional ones through the 1960s continued to label Mashpee
as a distinctly Native American town through stylized Indians and teepees. This presence
on the Cape’s tourist map was evidence of the region’s Wampanoags maintaining a
cultural identity – albeit one that popular culture erroneously and incompletely
interpreted.540
In the early twentieth century, as the colonial revival movement witnessed a
renewed interest among Euro-Americans in the history, material culture, and lineages of
their ancestors, a similar cultural revival occurred in Native American communities and
was supported by whites who held a romanticized view of the “noble Indian.” Members
of some eastern Native American tribes including the Mashpee adopted dress and other
elements of western Native American tribes in a demonstration of a new pan-Indian
identity and solidarity. The pan-Indian movement also saw the establishment of
organizations to promote and preserve Native rights and culture. Southern New
540
Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991),
136-137. For examples of folklore see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian
Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 14, 24-25, 42, and 57. Postcards
are in author’s collection. For a brief description of Mashpee and its Native history, see Porter E. Sargent,
A Handbook of New England (Boston, MA.: Porter E. Sargent, 1916), 567-568. See also, Welcome to Cape
Cod; Road Map and Directory (Hyannis, MA.: Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce and Cape Cod, Martha’s
Vineyard and Nantucket Hotel Association, [c.1930]); Eleanor Early, And This is Cape Cod! (Boston, MA.:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936), 190; Chapter 4 “Mashpee, the Indians’ Town” in Katharine Crosby, BlueWater Men and Other Cape Codders (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1946), 51-58; and Federal Writers’
Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 26,
593.
392
England’s indigenous population also fought popular perceptions among the American
public and state and federal governments that they had lost their Native identity through
centuries of inter-marriage with Anglo Americans, African Americans, and Portuguese
Americans.541
The revival and celebration of local Native identity was visible through individual
and group action. Plymouth’s celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing
included Wampanoags from Mashpee as well as members of the Passamaquoddy and
Penobscot tribes in Maine. At the tail end of festivities, a large bronze sculpture of
seventeenth-century Wampanoag leader Massasoit was erected on Coles Hill in Plymouth
on September 5, 1921, overlooking Plymouth Rock. Charlotte Mitchell
(Wootonekanuske), a descendant of Massasoit, unveiled the statue but later decried the
anniversary as a “farce” for celebrating the arrival of a group that eventually caused the
death of most of the Wampanoag people. Her anger and charges of racism would be
picked up by Native Americans at Plymouth almost a half-century later.542
541
For Native American revival see Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse University Press, 1991), 130. For Native American identity and blood in Southern New England
see Ann McMullen, “‘The Heart Interest’: Native Americans at Mount Hope and The King Philip
Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard
Krech III (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), 168. Francis G.
Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979),
139-148. Ann McMullen, “Blood and Culture: Negotiating Race in Twentieth-Century Native New
England” in Confounding the Color Line: Indian-Black Relations in North America, ed. James F. Brooks
(Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 261-291.
542
Postcards of Passamaquoddy Chief William Neptune seated inside a birchbark teepee at Plymouth and
two Penobscot men paddling from Old Town, Maine to Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the Tercentenary are
in the author’s collection. The two men in the birchbark canoe are identified as Newell Tomah and Johnnie
Ranco in “Indian Braves Visit Hampton,” Hamptons Union, June 23, 1921,
http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/newspapers/hamptonunion/1921/19210623.htm (accessed January
7, 2013). Participation of Mashpee Wampanoags mentioned in Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of
Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979), 150. “Massasoit Statue Ready for
Casting,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1920, 6; “Indian Princess Unveils Bronze Statue of Massasoit,” Boston
Globe, September 6, 1921, 3; “Should Have Killed Pilgrims, Says Last of the Wampanoags,” Boston
Globe, September 18, 1921, 56.
393
At home, Mashpee Wampanoags restored and rededicated their seventeenthcentury meetinghouse in 1923 in a ceremony that included the president of Harvard
recounting the church’s history and his university’s role in helping to fund the missionary
work. In the fall of 1928 Mashpee leaders joined other local Native Americans at
Herring Pond on the outskirts of Plymouth to form the Wampanoag Nation, electing the
Reverend Leroy C. Perry as supreme sachem. Perry had already been elected in 1923 as
the leader of the Wampanoags by another pan-Indian organization, the Indian Council of
New England, which later became the National Algonquin Indian Council. Perry
assumed the Indian name of Ousa Mekin, which he translated as Yellow Feather, and
appointed the leadership of the Mashpee Wamapanoags, which included a chief,
medicine man, and secretary.543
The new “nation” also organized its first powwow in the summer of 1929 in
Mashpee which included a religious service, speeches by white and Native dignitaries,
historical commemorations, dances, a marathon, games, and a beauty contest in the threeday event. Annual powwows dated back to the early 1920s in Mashpee, and evolved
from a traditional annual homecoming that had been practiced for generations. When a
Boston Globe article the following year listed the celebrations being held in various
communities to mark the state’s tercentenary, Mashpee held an “Indian pow-wow by
descendants of native New England tribes.” It was the only event among the 103 listed
towns and cities hosted by actual Native Americans, as opposed to historical pageants in
543
Frank P. Sibley, “Mashpee’s Indians Rededicate Chapel,” Boston Globe, September 10, 1923, 4.
Development of pan-Indian organizations discussed in Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 131; Ann McMullen, “‘The Heart Interest’: Native
Americans at Mount Hope and The King Philip Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick
Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard Krech III (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of
Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), 171-173 (includes biography of Leroy Perry); and Francis G.
Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979),
150-151.
394
towns such as Natick that included European-Americans playing the parts of historical
Native Americans. But Mashpee was different. Its powwow was a demonstration of
Native American continuity in the wake of the European colonization that the other
communities so lavishly commemorated.544
Around 1930 Perry became involved in interpreting the collections of the private
King Philip Museum to the public. Owned by industrialist Rudolf Haffenreffer, the
museum collected the material culture of North American indigenous groups, and
Haffenreffer sought to involve those living in southeastern New England, whether as
individuals or pan-Indian organizations. By 1931 he had hired Perry as an educational
interpreter who lived on the museum grounds in Bristol, Rhode Island, and spoke with
visitors. The full-time appointment, though apparently ended by 1933 when Perry
became pastor of a church in Gay Head, was unique according to Smithsonian curator
Ann McMullen, who writes that large urban museums in the early twentieth century
occasionally employed Native Americans to demonstrate crafts or interpret exhibits, but
that New England museums largely did not hire Native educators as permanent staff until
the 1970s.545
Wampanoag activism and cultural celebrations continued long after the colonial
revival. In 1951 Gay Head became the last town in the state to be connected to the
electricity grid. It was the result of Wampanoag women and white neighbors getting
enough of the townspeople to pledge to pay for electricity that the local power company
544
Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991),
132. The web site of the Mashpee Wampanoags describes its 2012 annual powwow as the 91st, dating the
practice to 1921. Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/ (accessed January 7,
2013). Louis Lyons, “First Complete Guide to Tercentenary,” Boston Globe, June 1, 1930, B1.
545
Ann McMullen, “‘The Heart Interest’: Native Americans at Mount Hope and The King Philip
Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard
Krech III (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), 169, 173-174.
395
agreed to install the infrastructure a decade earlier than it had planned. Wampanoag
cultural activities also expanded that decade when Helen Attaquin (Princess Running
Water) and her family, descendants of Massasoit, began sponsoring semi-annual
powwows in Middleboro, Massachusetts, in 1954. Involving Native Americans from
tribes across the country, the events grew from perhaps fifty people taking part in the first
one in October of 1954 to more than 700 at a June, 1955, powwow.546
Whether and to what degree Wampanoags should participate in Anglo-American
commemorations was a topic of increasing debate from the 1950s onward. When the
Mayflower II, a replica of the vessel that brought the Pilgrims to America, arrived in first
Provincetown and then Plymouth in the summer of 1957, Wampanoags both participated
in the festivities and performed in contrast to them. When the Mayflower II arrived in
Provincetown Harbor on June 12, 1957, Clinton Marcellus Haynes (Chief Wild Horse)
was a popular subject for newspaper photographers as the Mashpee Wampanoag, wearing
a large feathered headdress and other regalia, shook hands with Mayflower crewmen
from a boat moored alongside during the official reception. That evening in Plymouth,
three Mashpee Wampanoags acted in the first performance of the Pilgrim pageant “A
New Tomorrow” held on the town’s waterfront, and for which Helen Attaquin served as
a consultant. The following day when the Mayflower II arrived, Wampanoag Charles D.
Harding Sr. (Chief White Feather) was a part of the official reception line of
546
Earl Banner, “Last Town in State Gets Electricity Tonight,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1951, 1. “Hark,
the Tom-Tom: Indians to Powwwow at Middleboro Next Week-End,” Boston Globe, October 10, 1954, 29.
“Indians Gather at Middleboro for Big Powwow,” Boston Globe, October 17, 1954, 44. “Indian Pow-Wow
in Middleboro Attended by 700,” Boston Globe, June 20, 1955, 16.
396
“descendants and distinguished personages” to greet the captain and crew as they came
ashore.547
While a select few Wampanoags added a dash of multiculturalism to the twelveday Mayflower celebration, some protested the lack of significant Native participation.
An “Indian Day” held on June 15 was actually a large gathering of the Improved Order of
Redmen, a national fraternal organization that appropriated Native American traditions,
regalia, and tribal structure. They had also participated in the Plymouth tercentenary, and
had contributed much of the funds for the statue of Massasoit. As “tribes” from seven
states paraded, performed a sun dance, fire dance, and presented an “authentic headdress”
to the cabin boy of the Mayflower, Wampanoag Lorenzo Jeffers (Mittark) of Gay Head
sourly commented that “There isn’t one authentic Indian in the crowd.” Jeffers would
become supreme sachem of the Wampanoag Nation in 1960 upon Leroy Perry’s death,
and become increasingly politically active. As criticism of the lack of Native American
involvement in the Mayflower celebration also surfaced in newspaper editorials, Helen
Attaquin announced that she would sponsor a two-day powwow in East Bridgewater to
present “a pageant of life of the Indians before the coming of the white man, including
dances, songs and tribal ceremonies.” Aware of the political statement of the powwow,
particularly given the “Indian” performances held in Plymouth, Attaquin invited Vice
547
For photos of Haynes shaking hands with crewmen, see Leonard Lerner, “Thousands Greet Mayflower,”
Boston Globe, June 13, 1957, 1, 17; “Mayflower II Reaches Port, But in Tow,” Washington Post, June 13,
1957, A2; and “Mayflower II Arrives,” Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 1957, 6. “Indians to Join
Plymouth Fete for Mayflower II,” Boston Globe, May 30, 1957, 12. Joseph F. Dinneen Jr., “Newest
Citizen Among Plymouth Ship Greeters,” Boston Globe, June 12, 1957, 1. White Feather’s legal name of
Charles Harding Sr. (1905-1980) is mentioned in obituary of his wife: “Eleanor Harding, 94, Was Elder of
Mashpee Tribe,” Vineyard Gazette, January 2, 2004, http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?12975
(accessed January 7, 2013).
397
President Richard Nixon – in town that Saturday to tour the Mayflower and give a speech
– though he did not attend.548
Post-Plymouth, the Wampanoags sought another venue to tell their own stories in
1958 by starting a temporary museum in Gay Head, where Attaquin would be serving as
curator by 1965. The Mashpees would open their own tribal museum in 1973. The
1960s marked a period of increased political activism among the Wampanoags as Jeffers
became supreme sachem in 1960, appeared at a State House hearing in full regalia to
argue for land for an Indian Museum in 1962, helped to found the Federated Eastern
Indian League by 1963, and hosted the first-annual American Indian Festival in 1965 in
Boston to raise money for scholarships for Native American students. 1966 brought
increased national prominence for the Wampanoags as the Department of the Interior
designated the cliffs at Gay Head a national landmark – in part due to Wampanoag
advocacy. At the dedication ceremony on July 30th where Secretary of the Interior
Stewart Udall spoke and unveiled a plaque, Brave Grand Moose549 gave an invocation in
the Wampanoag language and Jeffers led a Native American dance. Two months prior
Jeffers was part of a delegation of the Federated Eastern Indian League that met Udall
while attending the dedication of Cape Cod National Seashore.550
548
Improved Order of Red Men contributing funds for Massasoit statue see “Massasoit Statue Ready for
Casting,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1920, 6. Details of Indian Day from Robert B. Carr, “Mayflower Stays
at Pier for Close-up Viewing,” Boston Globe, June 15, 1957, 1. Lorenzo Jeffers quoted in Robert B. Carr,
Redmen Heap Honors Upon Bark’s Cabin Boy,” Boston Globe, June 16, 1957, B1. For Jeffers succeeding
Perry see Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,
1991), 142. For Perry’s obituary see “Funeral Today At Oak Bluffs Of Indian Chief,” Boston Globe, June
28, 1960, 25. Charles Ogilvie, “Still Time To Recognize Indians” [editorial], Boston Globe, June 20, 1957,
28. M. D. Kountze, “Isn’t Bay State Missing the Boat By Not Promoting Indian Folklore?” [editorial],
Boston Globe, June 25, 1957, 14. “Wampanoag Indians To Hold Powwow In East Bridgewater,” Boston
Globe, June 16, 1957, B38.
549
Though the Boston Globe article uses the name Brave Grand Moose, the name was likely Great Moose,
the Indian name of Wampanoag tribal historian Russell H. Gardener.
550
Eleanor Sayre, “Gay Head Indians Open Their Museum,” Boston Globe, August 28, 1958, 20. For
mention of Helen Attaquin as 5th grade teacher in New Bedford and curator of the Gay Head Museum, see
398
Following the visit, Wampanoag Historian Russell Gardener (Great Moose) wrote
to CCNS Superintendent Stanley Joseph to thank him for the reception and recognition
that the group received at the dedication. Gardener also apologized for the limited Native
presence at the dedication, and complemented him on the wigwam diorama in the Native
American exhibit at the Salt Pond Visitor Center. While the exhibit emphasized
archaeology and the historic and prehistoric Native past – perpetuating the problem of the
invisibility of living Native Americans on the Cape – Gardener nonetheless apparently
appreciated that Native Americans at least anchored the seashore’s history. He also
revealed to Joseph his own strong interest in archaeology, having just returned from a
week-long camping trip on the Vineyard where he “charted over 300 of an original 400
Indian wigwam sites on my ancestral family lands there, as well as extensive shell heaps
and abrading stones and a village mortar as well.” Gardener appended his letter by
saying that he would be happy to collaborate on any future projects involving Native
American history. In reply Joseph thanked Gardener and his group for attending, for his
complements on the exhibit, and for presenting a map to the Visitor Center the he felt
would “add to our knowledge of Indian activities in this area.” While Joseph didn’t
address Gardener’s offer of collaboration, the dedication and subsequent correspondence
between the two was a starting point in the public dialogue between the seashore’s staff
and local Wampanoags.551
Earl Banner, “Gay Head Road Threatens War,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1965, 1. For history of Mashpee
Wampanoag Tribal Museum see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective
on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 76-77. “Indians Beat War Drums for Equal
Rights,” Boston Globe, February 27, 1963, 5. Joseph Bradley, “First Indian Festival is Wild, Eerie,
Beautiful,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1965, 7. Edward Jenner, “Vineyard Cliffs Made U.S. Landmark,”
Boston Globe, January 2, 1966, 52. Gloria Negri, “…JFK Walked Its Beaches, Sailed Its Waters,” Boston
Globe, May 31, 1966, 1. “Udall to Speak at Gay Head Cliffs Dedication,” Boston Globe, July 30, 1966, 5.
551
Russell H. Gardener to Stanley C. Joseph, June 8, 1966; and Stanley C. Joseph to Russell H. Gardener,
June 21, 1966, Record Group 79, Box 7, National Archives, Waltham, MA.
399
By the mid-1960s the hordes of tourists flocking each year to the Cape Cod
National Seashore and the postwar building boom finally reached Mashpee. As the
Mashpees’ annual powwow welcomed 5,000 visitors in 1966, the town’s population had
increased by half between 1960 and 1970, rising from 867 to 1,288, and the decade
before that it had doubled. The 1960 census also showed a non-Native majority in the
town for the first time. The population increase and the eventual permanent loss of
political control polarized the community into Native and non-Native, each group with a
different attitude toward development and access to the town’s land, water, and natural
resources. As the Mashpee Wampanoags held a dedication ceremony in 1970 at the end
of a decade-long restoration of their seventeenth-century meetinghouse (that, in a sign of
the tribe’s increased political prominence, included Massachusetts Governor Francis
Sargent as a guest and speaker), they were headed toward greater confrontation with their
non-Native neighbors both due to internal pressures and the outside influence of the
national Native American rights movement.552
In 1970 the past complaints from Native Americans about their limited roles in
historical commemorations at Plymouth in 1921 and 1957 crystallized into an actual
protest. Taking advantage of the town’s national prominence each Thanksgiving, a group
of young Native American activists called the United Indians of New England called for
a “national day of mourning” and announced a series of demands that included returning
current and former Indian reservations in Connecticut and Massachusetts to Native
control, and the implementation of a Native American studies curriculum in all schools.
552
5,000 visitors cited in “Rights War Dance,” Boston Globe, July 11, 1966, 13. Population figures and
Native/Non-Native schism in Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse University Press, 1991), 138-139. Robert Sales, “Wampanoag Church Restoration Complete,”
Boston Globe, August 17, 1970, 3.
400
The purpose of the day of mourning was to raise awareness of modern American Indians,
show their unity, provide a forum to “speak the truth,” and to dismantle the “untrue glass
image of the Pilgrims.” More than one hundred Native Americans from across America
including Gay Head Wampanoags gathered on November 26, and protested by covering
Plymouth Rock with sand, temporarily occupying the Mayflower II, and making speeches
protesting the Vietnam War and the disease, poverty, and death suffered by Native
Americans since the arrival of the Pilgrims. The statue of Massasoit served as a rallying
point. Subsequent annual National Days of Mourning revealed a division between the
conciliatory older Wampanoag leader Lorenzo Jeffers, who sought to exercise soft power
through his participation in Pilgrim-related commemorations, and younger Native
Americans such as Wampanoag Frank James, head of the United Indians of New
England, who balked at such appeals for collaboration and friendship.553
553
List of demands and purpose of day of mourning quoted from Andrew F. Blake, “Indians plan day of
mourning at Plymouth on Thanksgiving,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1970, 4. “Robert Carr and Andrew
Blake, “Indians Take Over Mayflower II,” Boston Globe, November 27, 1970, 1. For Jeffers participating
in Pilgrim commemorations, see Paul Kneeland, “Parade marks anniversary of the Pilgrims,” Boston
Globe, September 13, 1970, 57; George M. Collins, “Dr. Graham lauds the Pilgrims,” Boston Globe,
December 21, 1970, 3; Ann-Mary Currier, “20,000 see parade in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 28,
1971, 49; and Paul J. Deveney, “Pilgrim descendants give thanks to Massasoit,” Boston Globe, November
25, 1973, 29. For examples of Native criticism of history, Anglo historical celebrations, and counter
protests see Rayleen M. Bay, “The Pilgrims and the Indians” [editorial], Boston Globe, December 31, 1970,
6; Janet Riddell, “Those non-Indian Indians,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1971, A3; Joe Pilati, “Indians,
antiwar veterans mark holiday in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 26, 1971, 18; Ann-Mary Currier,
“20,000 see parade in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 28, 1971, 49; “Indian tribes plan protests at
Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 22, 1972, 3; “50 Indians protest at Plymouth,” Boston Globe,
November 24, 1972, 11; Paul J. Deveney, “Chief says town exploits Indians,” Boston Globe, May 7, 1973,
19; Paul J. Deveney, “Let’s throw out that pumpkin pie, say Indians,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1973, 33; and
Tony Chamberlain, “Plymouth Thanksgiving plans criticized by Indian leaders,” Boston Globe, November
5, 1973, 3. For literature on the larger Native American rights movement, see for example, Vine Deloria
Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, 1969). Troy R.
Johnson, Red Power: The Native American Civil Rights Movement (New York, N.Y.: Chelsea House,
2007). Paul Chaat Smith, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New
York, N.Y.: New Press, 1996). Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of
Russell Means (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the
Fight for Red Power (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2012).
401
Both approaches achieved results, perhaps most noticeably at the living history
museum of Plimoth Plantation. Incorporated on October 2, 1947, the organization sought
“the creation, construction and maintenance of a Pilgrim Village as a memorial to the
Pilgrim Fathers” and the “historical education of the public with respect to the struggles
of the early settlers, the expansion of that settlement and the influence of the Pilgrim
Fathers throughout the world…” Plimoth’s founder and first president was Henry
Hornblower II, a Harvard-trained archeologist and anthropologist. A 1948 newspaper
article outlined the plan for constructing a Pilgrim village and an Indian village on a plot
of land near the center of town, but in the interim Hornblower oversaw construction of
the first replica seventeeth-century house on the Plymouth waterfront in 1949 to drum up
support for his full-scale plan, adding a Fort Meetinghouse in 1953 and a second house in
1955. With donations of land and funds from the Hornblower family and ancestral
organizations, in May of 1957 workmen in Pilgrim garb began laying out the permanent
Pilgrim Village on a 100-acre tract two miles south of downtown. The ambitious
construction plan called for nineteen houses, the Fort Meetinghouse, a grist mill, trading
post, and an Indian village.554
By 1960 – the second full season for the museum – five houses lined the village
street ending with the Fort Meetinghouse and all surrounded by a palisade, with a nearby
Indian campsite. By the following year archaeologist Donald Viera was working at the
campsite, demonstrating how Native Americans made stone-tipped arrows, dugout
canoes, and other examples of Native technology. Inside the Pilgrim Village and over at
554
Plimoth Plantation incorporation date, purpose, and first buildings on Plymouth waterfront from Jean
Poindexter Colby, Plimoth Plantation: Then and Now (New York, N.Y.: Hastings House, 1970), 97-98.
Hornblower’s education mentioned in Alison Arnold, “351 years later,” Boston Globe, November 12, 1972,
B29. “Plymouth Is Rebuilding Early Pilgrim Village,” Boston Globe, August 21, 1948, 11. “ColonialGarbed Artisans Start Pilgrim Village Work,” Boston Globe, May 5, 1957, C29.
402
the Mayflower II, costumed interpreters spoke with visitors about seventeenth-century
life and the tasks they performed, while mannequins provided static interpretation. The
Native American campsite consisted of a longhouse constructed of saplings and clad in
bark – a structure that in the seventeenth century would have housed several Native
American families.555
At the end of the decade as Plimoth continued to fundraise among Pilgrim
descendants to erect more houses, it always strove towards achieving greater realism,
whether in how the houses were furnished or adding live animals, farming, and food
preparation – even if the changes went against visitors’ romantic expectations of Pilgrim
or Native life. But although Plimoth had been committed to a dual portrait of
Pilgrim/Native lifeways since at least 1948, the focus through the 1960s was
overwhelmingly on America’s humble origins and not multiculturalism. Representative
of this approach, in August of 1964 the State Department sponsored an educational
exchange program that brought four Jordanian students and their teacher to Plimoth as
part of a month-long tour of the U.S. As reporter Betsy Ervin recounted in the Boston
Globe, “Their conception of America as a land of opportunity was reinforced Thursday in
a visit to the Plimoth Plantation. ‘It gave us a vivid picture of the beginnings of
American history,’ said Boullata [the Jordanian teacher]. ‘From very simple beginnings,
you built in a very short time a wonderful civilization.’” Her comments could have easily
been about the re-created seaport village at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, which also
555
Joe Harrington, “Pilgrim Village Replica, Mayflower II at Plimoth,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1960, 40
(costumed interpreters and five houses). “‘Heritage Day’ at Plimoth Plantation,” Boston Globe, November
19, 1961, 4 (Viera). Joe Harrington, “He Produces Arrowheads With Tools Indians Used,” Boston Globe,
July 9, 1962, 7. Jean Poindexter Colby, Plimoth Plantation: Then and Now (New York, N.Y.: Hastings
House, 1970), 108-109 (mannequins and costumed interpreters). Jean O’Brien Erickson, “Seeing the First
Thanksgiving,” Boston Globe, November 21, 1965, A21 (costumed interpreters). Jean O’Brien Erickson,
“The First Pilgrim Village Recreated at Plymouth,” Boston Globe, July 15, 1962, 45 (description of Indian
campsite).
403
sought to inspire the public with the humble beginnings and impressive accomplishments
of America’s hardworking Yankee forebears. Newspaper coverage of Plimoth similarly
overwhelmingly focused on the Pilgrim reenactors and their village – particularly around
Thanksgiving as the living history museum became one of the major stops for the
thousands of tourists visiting the colonial town.556
But by 1973 Plimoth Plantation had responded to the Native Americans’
Thanksgiving protests. That year it agreed to add a Native American to its board of
trustees, improved what it thereafter called the “Wampanoag Homesite,” now had five
Native Americans on its staff (including as interpreters), and had implemented a Native
American Studies program with Helen Attaquin as its director. One of Plimoth’s
directors, archaeologist and Brown University professor James Deetz, sympathized with
Native American complaints that many of the historical offerings in the town could be
offensive, and he sought greater Native involvement in not only Plimoth’s program, but
collaboration with town officials and museum directors to correct the problems.
Plimoth’s director admitted that much of their reforms were a direct result of the annual
National Day of Mourning. The injustices that alarmed Native Americans included a
wax figure of Miles Standish killing a Native American at the Plymouth National Wax
Museum, the annual (since 1921) Pilgrim Progress that featured costumed actors carrying
Bibles and muskets reenacting the Pilgrims’ walk to church for a service, and a display of
Indian bones at Pilgrim Hall, the oldest public museum in the United States and a shrine
556
Beth Stanbrough, “Plimoth corrects ‘mistakes,’” Boston Globe, August 10, 1969, A18. Paul P. Feeney,
“The Way It Really Was at Plimoth,” Boston Globe, September 14, 1969, 37. Margaret Good, “At
Plimoth” [editorial], Boston Globe, October 5, 1969, A36. Betsy Ervin, “Jordanian Students Delighted,
Admire American Civilization,” Boston Globe, August 2, 1964, 36. Bruce F. Smith, “Plymouth Expecting
15,000,” Boston Globe, November 21, 1965, 6.
404
of Pilgrim relics. As a result of petitioning by both Jeffers and James, Pilgrim Hall
turned over the remains to the Wampanoags, who reburied them in Mashpee.557
That year marked the beginning of a trend of area museums and historical
organizations voluntarily removing Native American skeletons from collections to
repatriate to local Native American tribes for reburial. Seventeen years before Congress
would pass the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990),
requiring federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funds to return all human
remains and artifacts removed from Native American graves, it was a reversal of more
than two centuries of looters, antiquarians, and then archaeologists excavating graves in
pursuit of profit, scholarship, or both, with their findings put on public display, stored,
sold, or destroyed.558 In 1932 a Harvard student named James Andrews was charged
with digging up Native Americans skeletons on a farm in Dartmouth, Massachusetts,
without a town permit. Calling himself a “martyr to anthropology,” he bemoaned that “In
the Southwest they did up Indian graves every day, but in this part of the country local
prejudice hampers our work.” Andrews pleaded no contest and was allowed to keep the
skeletons, which went to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. He resolved to secure the proper
permits before his next trip to “hunt skeletons of Indians at Mashpee and other Cape
sections.” As the Mashpee town government in 1932 was run by Native Americans, they
557
Paul J. Deveney, “Plymouth museum votes in Indian,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1973, 7. Paul J.
Deveney, “Let’s throw out that pumpkin pie, say Indians,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1973, 33 (details of
grievances). Bruce Smith, “10,000 Visitors Expected for 343d Thanksgiving in Plymouth,” Boston Globe,
November 22, 1964, 48 (description and history of Pilgrim Progress performance). For return of bones to
Wampanoags, see J. Deveney, “Plymouth museum votes in Indian,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1973, 7; and
Paul J. Deveney, “Pilgrim descendants give thanks to Massasoit,” Boston Globe, November 25, 1973, 29.
Pilmoth Plantation’s web site dates the creation of the Wampanoag Homesite to 1973, which suggests that
it was a significantly expanded version of the campsite that had been in existence by 1960. Plimoth
Plantation, “About Us,” http://www.plimoth.org/about-us (accessed January 7, 2013).
558
Edward Rowe Snow found several Native American graves on an eroding cliff face in 1941 on
Thompson’s Island, and wrote an article about the discovery and Peabody Museum archaeologist Frederick
P. Orchard’s subsequent excavation of one skeleton. Edward Rowe Snow, “Skeletons of Mysterious
Indians Discovered on Thompson’s Island,” Boston Globe, August 3, 1941, D3.
405
held legal control over who, if anyone, could excavate Native graves. But the same
cultural vigilance and legal protection would be more lax or nonexistent elsewhere, as
Mashpee and Gay Head were the only towns in the state run by Native Americans.559
Forty-one years later, anthropologist William Simmons in a rare gesture of respect
arranged to return Narragansett remains that he had excavated seven years prior from a
Jamestown, Rhode Island, burial ground at the request of the town. In storage at
Harvard’s Peabody Museum since 1965, the remains were now reinterred in a section of
the original Jamestown site after consultation with members of the local Narragansett
community. Twenty-five Narragansetts participated in the May, 1973, reburial ceremony
along with some two hundred white observers, in what the Reverend Harold Mars of the
Narragansett Indian Church in Charlestown, Rhode Island, summarized as “There have
been so many desecrations. But this is the first restoration.” It’s unclear if this was the
first such reburial of Native American remains, as the remains from Pilgrim Hall were
also reburied at this time, but it was the start of a local trend toward reburying Native
remains in consultation with the appropriate Native American tribe. In November 1974
Frank James led a march to Pilgrim Hall, where the director of the Pilgrim Society was
forced to sign a “treaty” before turning over the bones of what was apparently a sixteenyear old Wampanoag girl that had been dug up on Cape Cod in 1863 and later displayed
at the museum. James announced that she would be reburied in Barnstable.560
559
“Harvard Man Freed in Opening of Graves,” Boston Globe, June 12, 1932, A8.
Lenny Glynn, “Reburial in Rhode Island,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1973, E16. “Indian protest gets
bones back from museum,” Boston Globe, November 29, 1974, 21. The identification of the bones as
belonging to a Wampanoag girl may be incorrect, for in 1863 in the Cummaquid section of Barnstable,
farmers unearthed a skeleton that was believed to be the grave of the sachem Iyanough, who died in 1623.
The bones and grave goods were subsequently put on display at Pilgrim Hall, as described in Edward Rowe
Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 209-211. One
of Snow’s former students, Louis Cataldo, eventually founded the non-profit historical organization Tales
of Cape Cod, Inc., which owns the Iyanough gravesite. Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., “A Brief History of Tales
560
406
In a more conciliatory and significant action for area Wampanoags two years
later, a joint Wellfleet Historical Society-National Park Service-Wampanoag tribal
ceremony was held on May 30, 1976 on a site within Cape Cod National Seashore. Back
in 1953 the remains of a sixteenth-century Wampanoag woman were discovered during
the excavation for a house in Wellfleet. Since then they had been on display at the town’s
historical society. But recognizing that such an action was now culturally insensitive, the
organization joined the Park Service and members of the Mashpee Wampanoags on Great
Island as the latter performed burial rites. A granite stone marked the new grave, reading
“Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves
and their land that this great nation might be born and grow. Reinterred here May 30,
1976.”
Aside from belated recognition that Native American remains deserved the
respect afforded to those of European Americans, the ceremony was important for
showing the Wampanoags reaffirming their deep cultural claims to the landscape now
included within Cape Cod National Seashore. All in attendance recognized Wampanoag
culture as dating back some 400 years, or at least that the Mashpee Wampanoags were
the closest descendants to the woman. The trend of archaeological digs removing history
from the landscape was in this instance reversed, with modern Wampanoags being
allowed to consecrate land that had once been inhabited by their ancestors. Ten years to
the day after the seashore’s formal establishment, this small ceremony affirmed that
Native Americans were a part of the seashore’s history, part of American history, and as
the quotation stated, responsible for the success of the colonists in the New World. Some
of Cape Cod,” http://www.talesofcapecod.org/history (accessed January 7, 2013). See also the planned
reburial of a Wampanoag child’s skeleton on display at Philips Academy’s Peabody Museum: Deborah
Fitts, “350 years later, Indian child to be given a second burial,” Boston Globe, December 25, 1975, 62.
407
Native activists would charge that lives and land were not given but taken by the
newcomers, but perhaps occurring during America’s bicentennial year the stone’s
inscription sought to heal instead of divide.561
The feeling of unity between Native and European Americans existed only at the
gravesite. As part of the Native American rights movement, the 1970s witnessed a
number of lawsuits brought by Indian tribes seeking the return of tribal lands that they
argued were illegally taken from them in violation of the federal Nonintercourse Act of
1790, which stated that Native American land could not be sold without the approval of
Congress. The act applied to all Native American tribes whether or not they were
federally recognized, and while a succession of Congressionally-approved treaties had
relieved western tribes of their lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the act had
not been used in the eastern United States. For the moment the federal government was
receptive to Native land claims, and local Native Americans responded. The
Wampanoag Tribal Council of Gay Head followed the path of the Passamaquoddy and
Penobscot tribes suing for land in Maine when they announced their intention in
November, 1974, to sue in federal court for the return of 250 acres of common land from
the town. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council did the same in August of 1976,
seeking the return of 16,000 acres of land in Mashpee and adjacent Sandwich from 146
defendants.562
While the town of Gay Head held a special meeting and voted to return the 250
acres to the tribe on December 9, 1976 (the town’s selectmen were all Wampanoag), the
561
“Town gives proper burial to a 16th Century Indian,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1976, 5.
Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of
New England (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 3-5. Nick King, “Gay Head Indians to
sue for land,” Boston Globe, November 28, 1974, 53. “Indian tribe files suit to recover 16,000 acres of
land on Cape Cod,” Boston Globe, August 27, 1976, 12.
562
408
town of Mashpee and its co-defendants decided to fight the lawsuit. In a case that has
been well covered by scholars and will only be summarized here, the Mashpees needed to
prove that they were a tribe before they could proceed with their lawsuit under the
Nonintercourse Act. In the fall of 1977 the Mashpee Wampanoags’ history and culture
was debated in federal court in Boston with testimony by anthropologists, historians, and
tribal members themselves, among other witnesses. An all-white jury concluded the
following January that the Mashpees did not meet the definition of a Native American
tribe. Subsequent appeals by the Mashpees to the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme
Court were also dismissed. Individual members of the Mashpee tribe brought another
lawsuit in December of 1981, but in 1983 it was also dismissed.563
While the Wampanoags lost their attempts to recover ancestral land in Mashpee,
they focused on strengthening their cultural traditions, fighting for aboriginal shellfishing
rights, and pursuing federal recognition of their tribal status. Successes came slowly. In
1987 the Wampanoags of Gay Head received federal recognition. 1993 witnessed the
launch of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, a collaborative effort between
the Wampanoag bands of Assonet and Herring Pond and the Wampanoag tribes of
Aquinnah (the town voted to change its name in 1998) and Mashpee to resurrect their
formerly shared language. Two years later the Massachusetts Supreme Court affirmed
the Wampanoags’ aboriginal rights to hunt and fish, while in 1997 the town of Mashpee
agreed to transfer ownership of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Museum over to the
563
Samuel Allis, “Gay Head voters will decide on Indian land claim,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1976,
15. “Gay Head votes return of 250 acres to Indians,” Boston Globe, December 10, 1976, 4. Paul Brodeur,
Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England
(Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 3-65. Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on
Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 9-65, 151-158. James Clifford, “Identity in
Mashpee,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
(Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 277-346.
409
Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council. As relations between the town and Mashpees had
soured in 1976 the latter increasingly distanced themselves from the institution, and the
town found itself owning an Indian museum that it was not enthusiastic to operate. A
decade later, in 2007, the Mashpees finally received federal recognition as a tribe,
bringing to close a decades-long campaign for public recognition as not simply Native
Americans, but a tribe with a cohesive and continuous history and culture.564
A comparatively minor victory came in 2011. On May 14 two new exhibits at the
Salt Pond Visitor Center officially opened. The first was a large round map of Cape Cod
in the center of the lobby. Framed by informational panels, one focused on Native
Americans history and included a photograph of Vernon Lopez (Silent Drum), the current
chief of the Mashpee Wampanoags. In the museum wing of the Visitor Center, the
second exhibit was entitled “People of the First Light.” As the press release explained,
This new section interprets Wampanoag culture and history through artifacts;
photographs and art; a partial wetu (home); and oral histories. Cultural specialists
from the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes consulted on the project and
prepared several display items. A major theme of the exhibit is that the
Wampanoag culture continues to thrive on Cape Cod. The exhibit includes two
listening stations with eight interpretive messages by local Wampanoag
discussing cultural topics.
“This exhibit is very compelling,” said [seashore Superintendent George] Price.
“We’ve been aware that the absence of the Wampanoag story in our museum is a
564
Fight for aboriginal shellfishing rights detailed in Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the
Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University
Press, 1985), 61-62; and Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Press, 1991), 157-158; with the 1995 legal victory described in Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe,
“The Mashpee Wampanoag Timeline,” http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/timeline14.html (accessed
January 7, 2013). Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, “Project History,”
http://www.wlrp.org/History.html (accessed January 7, 2013). For seeking federal recognition, see
Clifford, 345; and Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, “The Mashpee Wampanoag Timeline,”
http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/timeline15.html (accessed January 7, 2013). For history of Mashpee
Wampanoag Tribal Museum see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective
on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 76-77; and Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe,
“Museum,” http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/museum.html (accessed January 7, 2013).
410
deficiency, and we’re happy to now be telling a more complete story of the people
on Cape Cod.”565
Forty-six years after the Visitor Center opened with exhibits on the natural and human
history of Cape Cod, the Wampanoags finally achieved recognition in the park’s
permanent interpretation566 that they exist as a modern, vibrant culture. A major
refurbishment of the Visitor Center’s museum in 1989 had not changed the depiction of
Cape Cod’s Native Americans from the past tense.567 But now, a celebration of that
culture accompanied the opening as Wampanoag dancers and singers performed, and
artists demonstrated weaving and carving.
In a nod to the bulk of the seashore’s Native history occurring before a written
record, a May 3rd press release announced that the final event in the dedication would be
a gathering of archaeologists and members of the public for “A Carns Conversation” to
565
“Cape Cod National Seashore Announces New Permanent Exhibits at Salt Pond Visitor Center,” CCNS
press release, February 23, 2011, on CCNS web site, http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/cape-codnational-seashore-announces-new-permanent-exhibits-at-salt-pond-visitor-center.htm (accessed January 7,
2013).
566
It’s unclear from the titles and descriptions (if provided) of evening programs held at the Salt Pond and
Province Lands visitor centers from 1963 onward when Native Americans on Cape Cod began to be
discussed in the present tense, though one held on August 16, 1984 in the Province Lands Visitor Center by
Daejanna Wormwood is the first to have a description referring to current Wampanoags. Called
“Eninuoug: The First People of the Narrow Land,” it was described as “Long before European colonization
of Cape Cod, Native Americans had developed a rich and diverse culture. This slide program will trace the
peopling of Cape Cod from the earliest archaeological evidences up through the current state of the
Wampanoag Federation.” National Park Service, “Evening Programs and Special Activities August 12 –
August 18, 1984, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown area,” in Cape Cod National Seashore
Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Programs 84.”
567
Articles in the Cape Cod Times beginning in December of 1987 covering plans for a new museum
within the Salt Pond Visitor Center make no mention of expanding the Native American part of the current
exhibits, nor that it would even be retained. For example, “The Cape’s natural environment – an array of
plant reproductions and stuffed animals – will be shown as the basis for stories on whaling and commercial
fishing, 19th century life, sea-rescue techniques, and the beginning of tourism and other industries.”
Excerpted from Joyce Starr, “Seashore to create Cape Cod museum,” Cape Cod Times, December 18,
1987. And a detailed 1989 article similarly describes the newly-refurbished museum only by its natural
history and Euro-American human history: “Within about 5,000 square feet of floor space are five display
platforms, each on a specific theme: natural settings, a combination of commercial fishing and whaling; a
combination of navigation, shipbuilding and agriculture (cranberry farming and sea hay harvesting);
maritime safety and sea rescue; and architecture and every-day life.” Excerpted from Joyce Starr, “Salt
Pond center ready to reopen: Cape artifacts to fill museum,” Cape Cod Times, July 3, 1989. See also “New
showcase for Cape history,” Cape Cod Times, February 12, 1989, which states that the museum “will
showcase an expanded collection of artifacts from 19th and 20th century Cape Cod.”
411
recall the sixteen months of archaeological fieldwork that resulted when winter storms in
November 1990 eroded a portion of Coast Guard Beach to reveal a site that Native
Americans used seasonally between 2,100 and 1,100 years ago. Some of the excavated
items were now on display in the new exhibit. The day was an important demonstration
of both the persistence of Wampanoags who maintained their culture over the centuries,
and in the value of that culture being reflected in the most prominent tourist attraction
and educational venue on Cape Cod. Millions of visitors would now be introduced to the
Cape’s living indigenous residents, and the seashore now counted the Wampanoags
among its collaborators.568
A place of (past) entrepreneurism
After the story of Cape Cod’s first inhabitants and subsequent explorers and
settlers, the second category of CCNS history was the outer Cape as a place of
entrepreneurism. Shore and pelagic whaling, fishing, shellfishing, cranberry cultivation,
ship and boatbuilding, salt making, commercial agriculture, communications, and
hospitality comprised many of the main local industries developed between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But due to poor soil, limited infrastructure,
industrial consolidation, and geographic isolation, Cape Cod’s economy and population
declined beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and only began to recover in the 1930s,
568
“Cape Cod National Seashore Exhibit Dedication and Celebration of Wampanoag Culture Slated for
May 14,” CCNS press release, May 3, 2011, on CCNS web site, http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/capecod-national-seashore-exhibit-dedication-and-celebration-of-wampanoag-culture-slated-for-may-14.htm
(accessed January 7, 2013). James W. Bradley, “The Carns Site,”
http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/the-carns-site.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). This web summary
of the Carns site is drawn from James W. Bradley, Archeological Investigations at the Carns Site, Coast
Guard Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: Northeast Region Archeology
Program, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, 2005),
http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/upload/FinalCarnstreportweb.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013).
412
largely as a result of the tourism industry that would after World War II become the
Cape’s main economic engine.569
However, two historic sites within the park – the remains of a former wireless
station designed by Guglielmo Marconi, and the mansion of whaling captain Edward
Penniman – allowed the National Park Service to nonetheless tell stories of successful
businesses and men that countered this larger narrative of decline. Though the seashore’s
1961 boundaries purposely excluded developed areas – which would have served as ideal
sites to interpret the region’s commercial activities such as fishing and whaling – there
are other sites of industry located within the seashore. Of these, Marconi station and
Penniman’s house are among the park’s signature historic sites due to the extent of Park
Service investment in public access and interpretation.570571 Such a focus on innovation,
industry, and internationalism reflected important values in Cold War America. And in
the half century of the seashore’s operation, these sites are major destinations for park
569
James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 2003), 8.
570
Other sites of industry within CCNS include a twenty-seven acre former commercial cranberry bog in
the Pamet Valley in Truro that includes a nineteenth-century building used as a workspace and living
quarters. The bog operated until 1961 and the Park Service purchased the property in 1963. However,
though the Park Service has stabilized the bog house, the site is sparsely visited and has minimal parking,
signage, and interpretation – making it not one of the Seashore’s signature historic sites. According to the
Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Report (1973), the proposed restoration and interpretation was on hold
due to a lack of funds. In 1978 the Park Service began offering guided walks through the abandoned bog,
and the following year the tour included a portion it was restoring. It became a self-guided nature trail in
1980, though rangers continued to offer guided walks. Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape
Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 57-58. National Park Service, Site
Plan, Pamet River, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (n.p.: National Park Service, September
1999); Leslie P. Arnberger, “Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Report (1973)”, p. 4, in Cape Cod National
Seashore Archives, Seashore Historian’s files, Folder “Atwood Higgins – general history.” “Seashore adds
new nature trail,” Summer Sandings, August 1-September 1, 1980, 2.
571
Other sites demonstrating entrepreneurism include the Highland Links Golf Course (1892), the oldest
course on Cape Cod, and Highland House (1907), a former hotel. Both are NPS-owned and located
adjacent to each other and Highland Light in North Truro. But the NPS does not interpret these sites; the
golf course is leased to the town, and the Truro Historical Society maintains a museum in Highland House.
Highland Links Golf Course, “About,” http://trurolinks.com/about/index.html (accessed January 7, 2013).
Truro Historical Society, “Highland House Museum,” http://www.trurohistorical.org/intro.html (accessed
January 7, 2013).
413
visitors, with their stories echoed in the Salt Pond Visitor Center’s museum and in public
programming.
Marconi Station
At the end of Wireless Road in South Wellfleet stands a hexagonal interpretive
shelter at the edge of a bluff, with adjacent scattered bits of debris that include bricks,
wood, concrete, and rusted chain. At the start of the twentieth century the site was the
location for a bold experiment in wireless communication. Italian inventor, electrical
engineer, and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) began experiments with
wireless communication as a child by sending Morse code between homemade
transmitters and receivers in his backyard; by 1895 he had increased the distance to a
mile, and, following a move to England where he found greater encouragement and
financial support for his work, transmitted eight miles by the spring of 1897, and
successfully sent a message twenty miles across the English Channel in 1899. As
Marconi incorporated the Marconi International Marine Communication Company in
1900, a dozen wireless stations were already operating, and innovative ship-owners were
installing his equipment.
With the goal of bridging the Atlantic with his wireless technology, Marconi
arrived on Cape Cod in 1901 and selected an eight-acre site in Wellfleet that would be the
counterpart for a station at a site called Poldhu in south Cornwall, England. But separate
gales in September and November of that year toppled the circle of twenty wooden
broadcasting masts at both Poldhu and Wellfleet, respectively. After designing new
towers for Poldhu, Marconi was able to receive a signal (the letter “S”) from the English
414
station using a kite antenna at Signal Hill outside St. John’s, Newfoundland, in December
1901. It was the first successfully received transatlantic wireless transmission. As
engineers at South Wellfleet rebuilt using a more stable design of four rectangular
wooden towers similar to those erected at Poldhu and a new station at Glace Bay, Nova
Scotia, Marconi sent the first message across the Atlantic to Poldhu from Glace Bay in
December 1902. Though the Wellfleet station missed the start of transatlantic wireless
communication, it transmitted its first messages on January 19, 1903, relaying mutual
greetings between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII. Having
inaugurating wireless communication between the United States and Great Britain, the
Wellfleet station expanded and continued operating until 1917, when the federal
government shut it down along with other commercial radio stations. Technologically
outdated even before the war, and the site’s erosion having been a concern to Marconi
engineers as early as 1906, the station was not reopened after the war and its towers and
machinery were scrapped in 1920.572
Some forty years later Marconi was not forgotten on Cape Cod. The station site
became one of the first two designated historic sites of the new Cape Cod National
Seashore – the other being Pilgrim Spring in nearby Truro. In 1963 the National Park
Service dedicated its interpretive shelter at the site of Marconi’s station. The hexagonal
roof sheltered a scale model of the station within a glass case, and interpretive panels
described the site’s history, namesake, and the dramatic erosion that was quickly sending
the station’s remnants into the ocean below. The Park Service removed a plaque that the
572
History of Marconi and his stations summarized from the 31-page booklet John V. Hinshaw, Marconi
and his South Wellfleet Wireless (Chatham, MA.: Chatham Press, Inc., 1969). Hinshaw’s booklet was
produced in cooperation with the Cape Cod National Seashore, and copies were available at the visitor
centers as well as through the publisher, as stated in the booklet’s copyright page. Today, Parks Canada
operates national historic sites at Signal Hill and Glace Bay.
415
South Wellfleet Historical Society had erected in 1950 at the junction of Route 6 and
Wireless Road commemorating Marconi, installed it beside the interpretive shelter in
1963 but had it recast the following year to correct factual errors. Seashore brochures
beginning in 1963 directed visitors to the first wireless station built in America, while
Marconi and his station became a part of the evening public programs and guided walks
offered by park staff.573
The value of Marconi’s wireless station to the Park Service was several-fold.
First, among the rural separate parcels of public land that comprised the initial national
seashore, it was pure luck to have an internationally significant historic site located on the
grounds of the former Camp Wellfleet. And, as discussed earlier in this chapter, it was a
site where the Park Service could jointly discuss natural processes and human history –
increasingly important in the coming years as the Park Service interpreted human history
within a larger story of natural history. The adjacent Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail
along with a large parking lot and restrooms also guaranteed the cliff-top site significant
foot traffic. And though a ruin, the site was not a failure. It was a place of innovation – a
demonstration of a “pioneering spirit” according to a booklet on the station’s history
published in 1969 and available at the seashore’s visitor centers. And a new station in
Chatham replaced the one at Wellfleet, pointed out a c.1977 park brochure, and was “still
the most heavily used ship-to-shore radio station on the East coast.” That the Park
Service interpreted Marconi’s station as a step along a path of progress is also evident as
573
John V. Hinshaw, Marconi and his South Wellfleet Wireless (Chatham, MA.: Chatham Press, Inc.,
1969), 30 (shelter dedication and plaque). Recast bronze plaque discussed in letter from Superintendent
Robert F. Gibbs to Regional Director, Northeast Region, March 16, 1964, and in contract signed between
the firm of Henry T. Crosby & Son and Vernon C. Gilbert Jr. of CCNS, May 18, 1964, Record Group 79,
Box 19, National Archives, Waltham, MA. Evening public programs included “Marconi and His South
Wellfleet Wireless” (1964) and “Marconi’s Thunder Factory” (1967), while in the mid and late 1970s park
rangers either offered guided walks at the Marconi site or were available there to answer visitor questions.
416
early as 1964 in the revised text which the Park Service selected for the bronze plaque at
the site. It reads:
SITE OF FIRST UNITED STATES
TRANSATLANTIC WIRELESS TELEGRAPH STATION
BUILT IN 1901-1902
MARCONI WIRELESS TELEGRAPH COMPANY OF AMERICA
PREDECESSOR OF RCA
TRANSMITTED JANUARY 19, 1903
THE FIRST U.S. TRANSATLANTIC WIRELESS TELEGRAM
ADDRESSED TO
EDWARD VII KING OF ENGLAND
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
In an attempt to curtail foreign dominance of American radio communications, the
General Electric Corporation (GE) bought a controlling interest in the Marconi Wireless
Telegraph Company of America in 1919, a subsidiary of the British-owned company that
Marconi founded in 1900. G.E. incorporated the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
later that year and put the Marconi business and assets under the new name. By the
1960s RCA had become a major American electronics company.574
The plaque’s text identifying RCA as the successor to Marconi’s company creates
for it a humble beginning, much like the nearby Plimoth Plantation exhibited the crude
living conditions of America’s pioneering English ancestors. Far from simply a coastal
ruin, the station site at South Wellfleet, then, becomes a birthplace of a major American
brand that by the 1960s spanned from music to television to computers. The plaque’s
emphasis on inaugurating wireless communication between American and British leaders
574
John V. Hinshaw, Marconi and his South Wellfleet Wireless (Chatham, MA.: Chatham Press, Inc.,
1969), 5 (“pioneering spirit”). Glen Kaye, Marconi and His South Wellfleet Wireless (Wellfleet, MA.:
National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, [1977?]). This and other brochures are in the Cape
Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, Folder “CCNS – Programs/Brochures 3.4.27B.”
Brief history of the creation of RCA from chapter 30 of Linwood S. Howeth, History of CommunicationsElectronics in the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963),
unpaginated text uploaded by Thomas H. White to his web site, “United States Early Radio History,”
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw30.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
417
in 1903 conveniently sidestepped the start of transatlantic wireless messaging the
previous month within the British Empire, and evoked the long history of cooperation
between the two countries most recently evident locally in the 1957 voyage of the
Mayflower II. Commemorating both international unity and business success were
important values in Cold War America as the U.S. participated in a technological arms
race with the Soviet Union and relied on strong diplomatic and cultural ties with its
European allies.
Penniman House
A half century before Guglielmo Marconi arrived in Cape Cod looking for a
station site, a whaling captain named Edward Penniman was launching his own
European-inspired construction project. Born in 1831 on his family’s farm in the Fort
Hill section of Eastham, Penniman first went to sea at the age of eleven as a cook aboard
a Grand Banks fishing schooner – a voyage that ended in shipwreck. At the age of
twenty-one he joined New England’s burgeoning whale fishery by signing on as a
crewman of the bark Isabella of New Bedford. Just eight years later in 1860, the newly
married Penniman became captain of the Minerva II, also of New Bedford. At the
conclusion of a second voyage commanding the Minerva II, Penniman returned to
Eastham in April 1868 with his wife, Betsey Augusta Knowles, and hired master builder
Nathaniel Nickerson to erect a house on twelve acres of that land that Edward purchased
from his father.575
575
Biography condensed from Andrea M. Gilmore, Historic Structure Report, Captain Edward Penniman
House, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Atlantic Historic
Preservation Center, National Park Service, 1985), 12-13; and Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and
418
The resulting two-story mansard-roof house reflected the financial success of the
whaling captain. Built in seven months in the Second Empire-style widely popular in
1860s and ‘70s America, it included indoor plumbing, a kerosene chandelier, fine
wallpaper and woodwork, and a cupola, from which, at least according to family lore
Edward could look out to sea. A matching barn was added to the property in 1880, by
which point a whalebone gate comprised of two upright jawbones welcomed people to
the estate. Penniman’s success in the whaling industry allowed him to retire to Eastham
in 1884 after six voyages in command of four different vessels. There, he lived as a
gentleman farmer with his family until dying in 1913 at the age of eighty two. The
property then passed to his wife, and then to their daughter Betsey Augusta Penniman,
who died in 1957. Her niece Irma Penniman Broun inherited the property, and owned it
with her husband before selling to the Park Service in 1963.576
The Fort Hill area was a last-minute addition to the boundaries of the proposed
national seashore, which by 1961 included a developer’s plans for a subdivision on the
former farm that comprised the southern portion. With the exception of two inholdings,
the Park Service acquired all of Fort Hill (geographically comprising Fort Hill to the
south and Skiff Hill to the north) by 1965. With the Penniman property containing the
hill’s only Park Service-owned historic buildings (the other two houses having been kept
by their owners), they would become a valuable part of the hill’s eventual interpretation.
Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.:
National Park Service, 1995), 33-34.
576
Andrea M. Gilmore, Historic Structure Report, Captain Edward Penniman House, Cape Cod National
Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Atlantic Historic Preservation Center, National Park
Service, 1985), 2 (property succession), 3 (plumbing), 14 (property succession), 22 (Second Empire), 25
(cupola); and Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for
Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 34 (barn and
whalebone gate). Kerosene lantern mentioned in current Fort Hill pamphlet: Glen Kaye and Mike Whatley,
Fort Hill Trail (Wellfleet, MA.: National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, n.d.).
419
Park rangers began offering guided walks around Fort Hill in 1964, which specifically
became Fort Hill History walks the following year. As the Red Maple Swamp Trail
opened at Skiff Hill in the summer of 1966, Fort Hill History walks saw their description
in park programs expand from “this area features considerable evidence of former Indian
activity” of the previous summer to now encompass “early Indian sites, historic
exploration, and settlement of the area.”577
That the Penniman House was now nearing the end of a two-year exterior
restoration that included exterior interpretive signage likely resulted in its addition to the
Fort Hill History tour. A map handed out at the visitor center beginning in 1966 shows
the Fort Hill History Walk as a loop trail connecting Penniman House, the interpretive
shelter at Skiff Hill, and a parking area/overlook atop Fort Hill itself. The extensive
eleven-page “Fort Hill Trail” handout provided to visitors in 1969 begins at Penniman
House and walks the reader back in time through three centuries of ecologically
destructive practices, Europeans explorers, Native Americans, flora both foreign and
native, and the Park Service’s plans for managing the land. (The 1970 master plan would
call for the scene to be restored to the 1850-1890 period.) The section on Penniman’s
house identifies it as “representing the great age of whaling, [and], Eastham’s best
example of 19th century Victorian architecture” with following paragraphs describing the
architecture, the newly reinstalled whalebone gateway, lore surrounding the house, and
577
For Fort Hill development plans and NPS land acquisition see Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy,
and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston,
MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 47-48. Red Maple Swamp Trail now open mentioned in Edward
Jenner, “Cape Cod National Seashore Park Expecting Record Year,” Boston Globe, May 8, 1966, 47.
National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1964”; National Park
Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, 1965, Cape Cod National Seashore”; and National Park Service,
“Summer Interpretive Program, 1966, Cape Cod National Seashore,” all in Cape Cod National Seashore
Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.”
420
the then-prohibitively expensive cost of restoring the interior to allow public access. In
1980 park rangers finally began offering tours of the house’s interior.578
With only the Penniman House’s grounds open to the public for the first fifteen
years of Fort Hill’s interpretation, it still became a major historic site for the seashore.
Visually it was the most ornate building within the park, and Fort Hill was the first part of
the national seashore that visitors encountered as they drove north up Route 6 – and the
most visited aside from the beaches. The multi-colored house became the subject of
postcards, photographs, artwork, and even juvenile literature with the publication of
Wilma Pitchford Hays’s The Ghost at Penniman House (1979). With the Skiff Hill
interpretive shelter focusing on Native American and natural history, Penniman House
provided a late nineteenth-century bookend of the decline of both the whaling industry
and subsistence farming on the Cape. All together, the Fort Hill area compactly
conveyed the Cape’s human history for visitors, from prehistoric Native Americans to the
twentieth century. And finally, the property served as a physical reference point for the
seashore’s evening programs about whales and whaling offered at the visitor centers,
such as “Old Whaling and Scrimshaw” (1964), “Thar She Blows,” (1967), “Whales and
Whaling” (1973), and “Whales” (1982). When the Park Service expanded its Salt Pond
578
Penniman House restoration first mentioned in “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff
Meeting,” June 2, 1965, page 4; and was complete with the exception of staining the roof according to
“Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” January 7, 1967, page 3, Record Group 79, Box
3, National Archives, Waltham, MA. Installation of aluminum-clad interpretive signage in 1966 from
Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill,
Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 51 (installation of aluminumclad signage), 55 (re-create landscape appearance to c. 1850-1890). See also National Park Service, Cape
Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), list
opposite page 32. Untitled map of Nauset area of CCNS found in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives,
Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” “Fort Hill Trail
(Eastham),” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder
“3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.” The first tours of the Penniman House’s interior listed in “Summer
Activities,” Summer Sandings, August 1-September 1, 1980, 3.
421
Visitor Center museum exhibits in 1989, Penniman family artifacts would be included
among those used to illustrate the local whaling industry.579
In the life of Edward Penniman, the Park Service had a Horatio Alger-type story
of an Eastham boy who rose from modest means to achieve success in the global
American whaling industry. While the text for the interpretive outdoor signage installed
in 1966 is unknown, the current one installed around 1984 briefly chronicles his whaling
career, the spouse and three children who at times accompanied him at sea, and his return
home to build “the costliest house in town, a monument to the fortune he made in whale
oil, baleen, spermaceti, and ivory. The whaling industry soon declined, however, as
petroleum replaced whale oil. Today the National Park Service is preserving the
Penniman House as one of the most outstanding sea captains’ homes on Cape Cod.”580
This last sentence illustrates the transformation of Penniman in the Park Service’s
interpretation into an old salt. In the center of the panel is a large photograph of an
elderly Penniman sitting in his elegant parlor. The captions of two smaller photographs
illustrate that “Captain Penniman enjoyed a colorful retirement here with his family. He
died in 1913 at age 82.” And, “From the cupola on the roof, Captain Penniman could
watch his family at play, while keeping one eye on the sea.” As the National Park
579
Fort Hill as most visited part of CCNS after the beaches from William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous
Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October
31, 2011, 10. Wilma Pitchford Hays, The Ghost at Penniman House (Middletown, CT.: Xerox Education
Publications, 1979). Of the evening talks listed, some were offered repeatedly over several years, while
others only ran once. See the corresponding “Summer Interpretive Programs” for talks up through 1977,
while later ones were advertised through a handout listing the week’s programs. The 1982 “Whales”
evening program (which combined natural history and whaling history) is listed in “Cape Cod National
Seashore, Weekly Programs, Salt Pond Visitor Center, Week of July 11, 1982,” in Cape Cod National
Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Evening Program Printed
Schedules – 1982 + other 1982 schedules.” For a description of the Penniman family artifacts to be
included in the expanded museum (and are still on exhibit), see Joyce Starr, “Seashore to create Cape Cod
museum,” Cape Cod Times, December 18, 1987.
580
Age of current outdoor signage at the Penniman House from Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and
Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.:
National Park Service, 1995), 51.
422
Service had included a photo of an old yet rugged man in work clothes telling a story to a
boy on a beach in its Our Vanishing Seashore report back in 1955, it was familiar with
the old salt as a coastal icon and his value in promoting the seashore to the public. And
on Cape Cod, visitors had recorded their experiences and sought new encounters with the
region’s loquacious old mariners since Henry David Thoreau lodged with “the Wellfleet
oysterman” in 1849.581
But Captain Penniman was different. Here was a version of the old salt updated
for the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s: owner of the most expensive house in
town, having made his fortune in a risk-prone industry, and enjoying a comfortable
retirement into an advanced age. An ornate sea captain’s home would have been out of
place on Mystic Seaport’s re-created rustic village street. But on Cape Cod decades later,
Penniman and his house allowed the Park Service to present for millions of visitors a
story of a successful and literal captain of industry that ran counter to the outer Cape’s
overall economic decline during this same period, and longer narrative of ecological
degradation. On Fort Hill the house and Penniman were a bright spot in what especially
during the ecologically-influenced park interpretation of the late ‘60s and ‘70s could
seem a depressing story. Though most Cape Codders at least in the first half of the
twentieth century lived in homes more modest than Penniman’s, the Park Service would
continue to focus on rare and iconic buildings as it sought to preserve and interpret
government-built structures within Cape Cod National Seashore.
581
National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 9.
For Thoreau’s encounter with the Wellfleet Oysterman, see chapter 5, “The Wellfleet Oysterman” in Henry
David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 1: 104135. See also chapter 1 of this dissertation.
423
*
*
*
An important postscript to these two stories of Cape entrepreneurism is one that
the Park Service did not extensively interpret, but is still worth mentioning for
demonstrating the NPS’s investment in historical archaeology. According to local
tradition, Wellfleet’s Great Island was once the site of a colonial trading post or tavern.
And local diggers had unearthed pipe stems, spoons, and an eighteenth-century coin on
the eastern side of the island. Subsequent NPS archaeological surveys identified the
remains of a colonial structure there, and maps in both the 1963 and 1970 CCNS master
plans mark the site as a trading post. Great Island was one of the more remote areas of
the seashore. Park rangers began offering guided walks through the Great Island Natural
Area in 1967 exploring its natural and human history, and were initially by reservation
only, strenuous, and limited to small groups. The trail would open to non-guided hikers
in 1970.582
Amid this increasing public access, the Park Service contracted archaeologists
from Plimoth Plantation to excavate the supposed tavern or trading post. Under the
leadership of Brown University anthropology professor and Plimoth Plantation assistant
director James Deetz and his graduate student Eric Ekholm (also a research associate at
Plimoth), a team excavated the site in two seasons in 1969 and 1970. They unearthed
thousands of artifacts including clay pipes, ceramics, glassware, nails, plaster, bricks,
whalebone, clam and oyster shells, and animal bones. The amount and types of pipe stem
582
Eric Ekholm and James Deetz, “Wellfleet Tavern,” Natural History 80, no. 7 (August-September 1971):
48-57. For first mention of a Great Island guided walk, see National Park Service, “Revised Summer
Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1967,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box
“Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.7 Visitor Center Handout 1967.” For first mention of
a self-guided Great Island hiking trail, see National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape
Cod National Seashore, June 20 – Labor Day 1970,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc
Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Handouts for 1970.”
424
fragments and European ceramics suggested a date range of 1690 to 1740 for what the
archaeologists concluded was a two-story, wooden tavern built to support a shorewhaling operation on the island. As local shore-whaling waned in favor of pelagic
whaling in the early eighteenth century, the tavern was abandoned.583
At the conclusion of the 1970 season Ekholm and his team backfilled the site to
preserve it. That same summer, park officials opened the island’s trail to non-guided
hikers, which included the tavern site along its route. While exhibit panels and a Great
Island Trail brochure (beginning in 1977) describing the tavern and excavation eventually
became part of the trailside interpretation, neither the dig nor the tavern were ever
mentioned in the seashore’s “Summer Interpretive Programs” or maps. It was apparently
only with the new exhibits in the Salt Pond Visitor Center in 1989 that seashore visitors
got to see artifacts from the tavern site.584
Though never becoming a popular destination due to its remoteness, lack of any
visible historic features, and the Park Service preferring to keep the island as a relatively
undisturbed natural area, the tavern excavation is still an important story for Cape Cod
National Seashore. The Park Service had included the seashore’s potential
archaeological contributions when arguing for its creation in the late 1950s and early
1960s; and the agency had pioneered the practices of historical archaeology and the
583
That the bore diameters of clay pipes changed over time was a discovery of archaeologist J. C.
Harrington. Lewis Binford subsequently converted Harrington’s data into a formula for dating pipe bores
which archaeologists still use today. George L. Miller, “J. C. Harrington, 1901-1998,” Historical
Archaeology 32, no. 4 (1998): 3.
584
A draft of the text for a Great Island brochure, copyrighted 1976, and what is presumably the first
edition of the published brochure, Glen Kaye, Great Island Trail (Wellfleet, MA.: National Park Service,
Cape Cod National Seashore, 1977), are both in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin
Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Great Island 7.51.” “Some 18th century artifacts found in an
archaeological dig at Great Island in Wellfleet also will be featured. They include 17th century brass
spoons, shards of locally crafted and English-made pottery and pipe bowls and stems.” Excerpt from Joyce
Starr, “Seashore to create Cape Cod museum,” Cape Cod Times, December 18, 1987.
425
public awareness of historical archaeology dating back to the 1930s at Jamestown,
Virginia – for which the Great Island dig benefited.
At Jamestown, the National Park Service had first collaborated with the Civilian
Conservation Corps on a series of excavations from 1934 to 1942, and then on its own
from 1954 to 1957. The arrival of University of Chicago-trained archaeologist J. C.
Harrington to Jamestown in 1936 began a new era of professionalization and public
education. Apart from improved excavation techniques and record keeping, he began
public tours to the formerly fenced-off dig site. Through his excavations in the eastern
U.S. and his scholarship in the 1950s and ‘60s he was an early advocate for the
importance of historical archaeology. Up through the early postwar era when Harrington
began publishing papers such as “Historic Site Archaeology in the United States” (1952)
and “Archaeology as an Auxiliary Science to American History” (1955), North American
archaeologists had primarily studied Native American cultures.585
A fellow early proponent of historical archaeology was John Cotter, and his
career similarly illustrates the ties between academia and the NPS that made the subfield
an integral part of both in the 1960s and ‘70s. The same year that Cotter contributed the
to the 1958 report on the proposed CCNS, he also wrote an account of the Jamestown
Archaeological Project (1934-1957). First published by the NPS in 1958, Archaeological
Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia was an important early contribution to the field –
with a revised edition published in 1994. Cotter had worked for the NPS since 1940 and
585
Biography of J. C. Harrington compiled from Edward B. Jelks, “Jean Carl Harrington, 1901-1998,” SAA
Bulletin 16, no. 5 (November 1998), http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/SAA/publications/SAAbulletin/165/SAA17.html (accessed January 4, 2013). George L. Miller, “J. C. Harrington, 1901-1998,” Historical
Archaeology 32, no. 4 (1998): 1-7 [opening dig site to visitors, p.3]. J.C. Harrington, “Historic Site
Archaeology in the United States,” in Archaeology of Eastern United States, ed. J. B. Griffin (Chicago, IL.:
University of Chicago Press, 1952), 335-344. J. C. Harrington, “Archaeology as an Auxiliary Science to
American History,” American Anthropologist 57, no. 6 (December 1955): 1121-1130.
426
a decade later became the head archaeologist at Colonial National Historical Park (which
includes Jamestown). Earning an anthropology Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of
Pennsylvania where he had begun his doctoral studies in 1935, Cotter joined the
university’s faculty in 1960. The following year he taught the first course in historical
archaeology offered by an American university. In 1967 he was also one of the founders
of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Harrington, Cotter, and their peers led the
professionalization of historical archaeology in the 1960s and ‘70s, as it expanded into
consulting businesses, government agencies, academic departments, popular magazines,
professional societies, and, as at Cape Cod National Seashore, public history sites.586
Prior to that, academically-trained archaeologists had primarily focused on classical
(ancient Greece and Rome) and prehistoric cultures, leaving the excavation of the more
recent past to self-taught amateurs.587
During this flowering of the field in the 1960s, Dr. James Deetz emerged as one
of the most respected historical archaeologists working in America at this time.
Historical archaeology can be defined as the subfield of archaeology that studies the
surviving material culture of literate, historical-era societies. In the Americas, this period
begins with the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and Deetz broadened this
586
John Cotter biography compiled from Mark Rose, comp., “A Life Dedicated to Archaeology,”
Archaeology, February 22, 1999, http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/cotter/life.html (accessed
January 4, 2013). Susan D. Ball, review of Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia by John L.
Cotter, Historical Archaeology 32, no. 2 (1998): 111-113. Daniel G. Roberts and John L. Cotter, “A
Conversation with John L. Cotter,” Historical Archaeology 33, no. 2 (1999): 6-50 [started at UPenn in
1935, p. 11].
587
Perhaps the most famous of these amateurs working in the twentieth century was Roland W. Robbins
(1908-1987), who discovered the foundation of Thoreau’s famous one-room cabin at Walden Pond in 1945.
While the window washer, painter, and self-taught archaeologist was eventually ostracized by the
professionals of the field he loved, he nonetheless made important contributions to early historical and
industrial archaeology – including promoting archaeology to the public (through lectures, field schools with
school groups, and the public lending a hand) and consulting – and worked until around 1980. Donald W.
Linebaugh, The Man Who Found Thoreau: Roland W. Robbins and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in
America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005).
427
study to include the impact of European culture on indigenous peoples. He also strove to
make his field understandable to the general public, through not only his work for
Plimoth Plantation, but writing books that included Invitation to Archaeology (1967) and
In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (1977). As this latter
title suggests, Deetz pioneered the approach of studying small things to illuminate wider
social processes and complex histories. An English-made wine bottle excavated at Great
Island, for instance, suggests not only the drinking habits of Cape shore whalers in the
early eighteenth century, but also trade practices with the mother country.588
The Great Island dig gained wide publicity in local newspapers, magazine
articles, and in Deetz’s 1977 book. Though it never attained the level of Park Service
interpretation that Marconi’s station and Penniman’s house enjoyed, the Great Island
tavern excavation is still an important archaeological achievement. It was one of the first
American digs to accurately use British ceramic types to date the site, and overall was a
noteworthy careful and sophisticated excavation as the field of American historical
archaeology professionalized. As the tavern’s thousands of artifacts went to Plimoth
Plantation for storage and analysis, the Park Service turned its focus toward preserving
and interpreting the historic government buildings that still dotted the length of Cape Cod
National Seashore.589
588
For an overview of the field of historical archaeology, see Alan Mayne, “On the Edges of History:
Reflections on Historical Archaeology,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (February 2008): 93-118.
For James Deetz’s specific contributions, see ibid., 97, 105. For book-length histories of historical
archaeology, see Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, eds., Historical Archaeology (Malden, MA.:
Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to
Historical Archaeology (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
589
“Archeologists Dig 18th Century Wellfleet Tavern,” The Cape Codder, September 25, 1969, 16. Dawn
Anderson, “Down Under Plymouth (and Wellfleet),” Yankee, February 1971, 76. Eric Ekholm and James
Deetz, “Wellfleet Tavern,” Natural History 80, no. 7 (August-September 1971): 48-57. James Deetz,
Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, N.Y.: Published for the American Museum of Natural History by
the Natural History Press, 1967). James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early
428
The federal government’s long tradition of helping its people
The third category of CCNS history was the outer Cape as a place where the
government has long sought to help its citizens by providing navigation aides, rescuing
those in distress, and, finally, in an era when water-borne traffic is both safer and less
frequent, the government addressing a new need for public recreation by forming the
seashore itself. Interpretation for five surviving lighthouses, a single lifesaving station,
and a constant stream of annual programming brought this governmental history to life.
The federal government’s concern with maritime safety on the outer Cape dates to
the first decades of the new republic. With Boston as a major American seaport (and
location of the first lighthouse built in the colonies back in 1716), heavy sea traffic passed
by or around the sandy arm of Cape Cod as vessels headed east toward Europe or
southward along the Atlantic coast. To aid navigation, the federal government
constructed the first permanent lighthouse on Cape Cod on the highlands of Truro in
1797. Other lighthouses soon followed, with lights at Chatham (a pair in 1808), Race
Point (1816) and Long Point (1827) near Provincetown, and Nauset (three in 1838) on
the Atlantic Coast in Eastham. Erosion, decay, and improved technology prompted the
construction of newer towers at these locations in the coming decades, with the current
American Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977). The significance of the Great Island
excavation was discussed in an email with Dr. Patrick Malone, who participated in the dig. Patrick
Malone, “Re: Chapter,” e-mail message to Jonathan Olly, September 30, 2012. For the Great Island tavern
artifacts stored at Plimoth Plantation, see Alan T. Synenki and Sheila Charles, Archeological Collections
Management of the Great Island Tavern Site, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.:
Div. of Cultural Resources, North Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, 1984), 4.
429
version of Highland Light built in 1857, Chatham in 1877, Race Point in 1876, Long
Point in 1875, and Nauset receiving one of Chatham’s 1877 towers in 1923.590
But lighthouses were just navigational aides; they could not prevent maritime
disasters, nor aid those in distress. To help with individuals and ships needing rescue, the
Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts formed in 1786, and the
following year began building rescue huts along the state’s coast to shelter shipwreck
survivors. The Humane Society has erected a series of huts along the outer Cape by
1802, and began adding lifeboats to its network of Massachusetts stations in 1806.
During the nineteenth century the system expanded with aid from private donors and the
federal government, which began funding the construction and operation of volunteer-run
stations in 1848, and adding a paid full-time keeper to each station in 1854. A division of
the Treasury Department administered the loose network. By 1871 the Humane Society
owned 78 lifeboats and 92 structures including huts and boathouses along the
Massachusetts coast, all manned by volunteers during disasters. That year, advocates in
the Treasury Department successfully lobbied Congress to fund an expanded network of
stations and hire lifeboat crews to man them. The network coalesced into the United
States Life-Saving Service in 1878, an independent agency within the Treasury
Department.591
590
Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park
Service, 1979), 41-42.
591
Dennis L. Noble, “A Legacy: The United States Life-Saving Service,” 2-3. Report is available through
a link via U.S. Life-Saving Service Heritage Association, “History of the USLSS,” http://www.uslifesavingservice.org/history_of_the_uslss (accessed January 7, 2013). The Humane Society of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “History,” http://www.masslifesavingawards.com/history/ (accessed
January 7, 2013). Lance Kasparian, U.S. Coast Guard Nauset Station, Dwelling and Boathouse, Historic
Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Barnstable County, Massachusetts (Philadelphia,
PA.: National Park Service, Historic Architecture Program, Northeast Region, 2008), 18.
430
On Cape Cod, nine stations were built in 1872-1873 to replace those of the
Humane Society: Race Point and Peaked Hill Bars outside Provincetown, Highland and
Pamet River in Truro, Cahoon Hollow in Wellfleet, Nauset in Eastham, Orleans and
Chatham in their namesake towns, and Monomoy on Monomoy Island in Chatham. The
Life-Saving Service later built four more: High Head (1883) between Peaked Hill Bars
and Highlands stations, Wood End (1896) near Long Point Light, Old Harbor (1897) in
Chatham, and Monomoy Point (1902) at the southern tip of that island.592
At each station lived a keeper and crew, who patrolled the beaches day and night
looking for distressed vessels. But in the coming decades the construction of the Cape
Cod Canal in 1914, and advances in technology such as motorboats, aircraft, and
electronic communication and navigation equipment reduced the number of accidents and
the need for so many stations and surfmen. While the U. S. Coast Guard (formed in 1915
through the merger of the U. S. Life-Saving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service)
built a new station house at Race Point outside Provincetown in 1931 and a new dwelling
and boathouse at Nauset in 1936 to replace the outdated original stations, in the 1940s it
began decommissioning the rest on the outer Cape. In 1958 the Coast Guard also
decommissioned Nauset Station, leaving active stations in only the towns of Chatham
and Provincetown.593
592
Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park
Service, 1979), 44-45. Richard G. Ryder, Old Harbor Station - Cape Cod (Norwich, CT.: Ram Island
Press, 1990), 2.
593
Lance Kasparian, U.S. Coast Guard Nauset Station, Dwelling and Boathouse, Historic Structure Report,
Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Barnstable County, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: National Park
Service, Historic Architecture Program, Northeast Region, 2008), 28-29 (station closures and
consolidations), 44-47 (construction of new Nauset Station). For new Race Point Station see Maureen K.
Phillips, Race Point Coast Guard Station, Station House Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National
Seashore, Provincetown, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: National Park Service, Historic Architecture
Program, Northeast Region, July 2005), 3.
431
With the authorization of Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961, the National Park
Service was quick to acquire Nauset Station, which it used as its headquarters until 1965,
and then as the site for the Park Service’s residential National Environmental Education
Development program by 1970. Both the seashore’s 1963 and 1970 master plans had
called for a lifesaving museum at Nauset Station, and the 1965 “Interpretive Prospectus”
provides a look at what the Park Service envisioned:
It is the courage and resourcefulness of the lifesavers, shipmasters and crew
which this museum will seek to present, as it can, more effectively than could any
other interpretive media. The theme of life-saving, which we propose to develop,
would roughly cover the historic period of 1700 to the present, and would be
accomplished through exhibits and audiovisual effects portraying the work of the
Massachusetts Humane Society (roughly 1786-1871), the Lighthouse Service
(about 1790-1939), the Lifesaving Service (1871-1915), and the United States
Coast Guard (1915--). The latter organization ultimately absorbed the lifesaving,
sea-rescue functions of the older services, with the Lighthouse Service coming
under Coast Guard jurisdiction as well. The proposed museum will be unique in
that the central theme will not be minimized or made subordinate to the usual
maritime subjects so extensively and well-developed elsewhere.594
The subjects so “well-developed elsewhere” were likely the stories told by maritime
museums all along the New England Coast, from Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut,
to the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. These private non-profit
museums told stories of shipbuilding, maritime trade, and fisheries that dominated (if
they were included at all) any mention of the role of the federal government in helping to
enable these pursuits through building and maintaining navigational aides, enforcing
maritime laws, and performing sea rescues. The federal government, then, was left to tell
594
Vernon G. Gilbert and Edison P. Lohr, with assistance from Merdith B. Ingham Jr. and Marc Sagan,
“Interpretive Prospectus for Cape Cod National Seashore [May 1965],” 23, in Cape Cod National Seashore
Archives, Box “Admin Files,” Folder “D18 – Interpretive Prospectus.”
432
its own history, which within the boundaries of the Cape Cod National Seashore fell to
the National Park Service.595
To implement this plan, the main floor would be exhibition space, with the
basement as storage and the second and third floors devoted to storage, restrooms, and
possible future exhibits. The main floor would include maps situating the Nauset
Lifesaving Museum and locations for all past and present lighthouses, and the stations of
the Humane Society, Life-Saving Service, and Coast Guard. Two display cases would
contain clothing and personal effects of surfmen as well as ship and boat models. A wall
panel would illustrate the history of the Lighthouse Service. A diorama would show
surfmen performing a sea rescue. And finally, an audiovisual room would contain an
automated slide lecture narrated in part by a retired Coast Guardsman. Out in the
adjacent garage, the staff hoped to display a surf boat, a beach cart containing all of the
typical rescue apparatus, and a bell from a Coast Guard lightship that sank in a hurricane
off Martha’s Vineyard in 1944 with the loss of all hands.596
These exhibits were an amalgam of traditional and innovative museum exhibit
techniques. The use of display cases, models, and a diorama dated to the nineteenth
century, while the focus on surfmens’ material culture continued an interest in collecting
objects documenting daily life that history museums such as Mystic Seaport had
embraced by the 1930s. With the museum’s exhibits organized along a central theme of
595
For NEED temporarily housed at Nauset CG Station and a Life Saving Museum still planned for the
space, see National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington,
D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 45 (museum), 47 (NEED). The planned “Nauset Maritime Museum” is
described in National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National
Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-14 in Cape Cod
National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration,
structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”
596
Vernon G. Gilbert and Edison P. Lohr, with assistance from Merdith B. Ingham Jr. and Marc Sagan,
“Interpretive Prospectus for Cape Cod National Seashore [May 1965],” 23-25, in Cape Cod National
Seashore Archives, Box “Admin Files,” Folder “D18 – Interpretive Prospectus.”
433
Cape Cod lifesaving, they continued what at the time was the new approach of thematic
history exhibits developed by leading American history museums in the 1950s such as
the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. And like the Farmers’ Museum, the
displays were to be without romanticism (as was common in history exhibits during the
colonial revival, and Edward Rowe Snow’s storytelling), but they were still a shrine to a
special breed of men. It was not wrong for the Park Service to celebrate those who risked
their lives in what could be extremely dangerous jobs. And telling about the sailors,
surfmen, and lighthouse keepers working in the harsh Atlantic weather and water was
also part of the Park Service’s goal of situating human history within a larger natural
history of the area. But the resulting heroic portrait prevented a more critical
understanding of the history of coastal navigation and rescue. They were not simply
saints rescuing the distressed.597
The most innovative part of the whole museum was the audiovisual room.
Having a person describe their job in their own words via video or audio recordings
would become an increasingly common museum practice in the late twentieth century.
But the Nauset Lifesaving Museum unfortunately never came to fruition. As explained
earlier, budget cuts and the growing focus of the National Park Service on environmental
education and interpreting natural history through the 1960s and ‘70s kept NEED based
at Nauset Station, and relegated the museum to a “home-made” exhibit of lifesaving
597
History of history museum exhibits from Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions
from Peale to the Present,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, eds. Warren
Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3-37.
434
equipment in the station’s garage, where it remained open for limited hours from 1970
through 1978.598
With the story of lifesaving on the outer Cape denied significant exhibition space,
the National Park Service still saw the topic as important and compelling. And so did the
public. Evening programs by staff and guest speakers at CCNS on shipwrecks and
rescues began in 1963 and continued annually. Demonstrating the potential mass appeal
of these topics, an August 8, 1966 Boston Globe article covered a recent evening lecture
by brothers Howard and Bill Quinn. More than a thousand people crammed the
seashore’s temporary amphitheater built into a bluff above Coast Guard Beach to hear the
speakers, who showed slides and movies as they spoke of local shipwrecks. In 1966
Howard was a director of the Eastham Historical Society (located conveniently across the
street from the new Salt Pond Visitor Center), while Bill was a director of the Orleans
Historical Society. The latter Quinn was also a commercial photographer, and his photos
of Cape Cod scenes, such as octogenarian brothers and fishermen Ralph and Alexander
Hunter of Chatham, were among his many images of Cape Cod that went into postcards,
books, and other media. The creation of the national seashore not only brought increased
visitation to the outer Cape; the talents of the Quinns and other individuals who knew
how to craft and promote a marketable version of Cape Cod gained a large national
audience through the seashore, much as Edward Rowe Snow had accomplished through
598
Park Service reduced budget from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark
Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 34; and May 24, 2012 conversation
with David Spang, who began as a naturalist at CCNS in 1963 and worked for the next forty-two seasons;
he still volunteers at the seashore. “Home-made” from page 2 of “Briefing Statement: Interpretive
Operation at Cape Cod National Seashore,” November 3, 1978, Cape Cod National Archives, box “Misc
Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “The Cape Cod Interpreter.” Dates for the lifesaving exhibit are
from surveying the summer interpretive programs, 1970 through 1977, and park newspapers for 1978 and
1979.
435
his dozens of books on New England maritime lore and decades of lecturing throughout
the region.599
As the Quinns and others continued to present regular talks on shipwrecks and
lifesaving, an unexpected chance to preserve part of this history surfaced in 1973 when
the Park Service purchased nineteen acres of coastal land in Chatham. On the property
was the former Old Harbor Life-Saving Station. Built in 1897 and decommissioned in
1944, the Coast Guard had sold the building in 1946, after which it became a private
residence. It was now only one of two former life-saving stations left on Cape Cod; the
other, at Cahoon Hollow, had been heavily altered and turned into a restaurant. By 1977
rapid coastal erosion put the Old Harbor Station in imminent risk of collapse. Despite the
objections of two successive seashore superintendents who argued that the cost of
moving the station was prohibitively expensive, strong support for historic preservation
among the public, elected officials, and the Park Service’s Regional Office – particularly
in the year following the Bicentennial – resulted in Congress appropriating funds for the
relocation. A crane loaded the station onto a barge in November, 1977, and though
delays in construction of a new foundation at Race Point kept the station docked in
Provincetown through the winter, riggers finally moved Old Harbor Life-Saving Station
into place in May of 1978. After a partial restoration the station opened to visitors in
May of 1979.600
599
George McKinnon, “Crowd Hears Shipwreck Tales,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1966, 79.
Peggy A. Albee, Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Historic Structure
Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service,
Building Conservation Branch, Cultural Resources Center, North Atlantic Region, June 1988), 34 (sale of
Old Harbor), 38-39 (objections over cost of relocation and funding), 41-45 (move). For Cahoon Hollow
Station turned into a restaurant, see Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National
Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 46; and The Beachcomber, “Cahoon Hollow Life
Saving Station,” http://www.thebeachcomber.com/restaurant/cahoon-hollow-station (accessed January 7,
2013). For opening of Old Harbor Station, see “Activities,” Summer Sandings, Summer 1979, 3. Date of
600
436
That summer, the lifesaving story exhibited in the garage of Nauset Station
moved to Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, along with a new living history program. Park
rangers were on duty at the station to talk about the history of lifesaving on the Cape,
while staff dressed in replica Life-Saving Service uniforms performed a drill on the beach
with the type of lifesaving apparatus in use when the station was new. The practice had
begun the previous summer on Coast Guard Beach. It emerged from both a children’s
sea rescue program started in 1975 in which kids used their imagination and some props
to recreate a lifesaving drill on Cape Cod Beach, and the implementation around this
same time of a full Beach Apparatus Drill by staff at Cape Hatteras National Seashore
using replica equipment. The success of the re-enactment at Cape Hatteras resulted in its
adoption at other national seashores including Cape Cod. The program continues to this
day.601
The summer of 1979 also saw the start of another facet of interpreting
governmental history within Cape Cod National Seashore when park rangers began
leading regular tours inside Highland Light (also called Cape Cod Light), and giving talks
on its history. Aside from their obvious value and purpose as navigation aides, in the
centuries since construction of the first Cape lighthouse in 1797 they had also become
May 1979 as opening of Station also mentioned in “Disabled Access to be Built for Old Harbor Museum,”
Summer Sandings, Summer 1985, 2. For restoration still not complete in 1980s, see Peggy A. Albee, Old
Harbor Life-Saving Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National
Seashore, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, Building Conservation
Branch, Cultural Resources Center, North Atlantic Region, June 1988), xiii-xiv. In 2008 Old Harbor
Station was fully restored. See William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at
Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 10.
601
For first description of beach apparatus drill, see “Activities,” Summer Sandings, Summer 1979, 3. For
first listing of children’s sea rescue program, see the “Conducted Walks and Activities” in National Park
Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, July 1-Labor Day, 1975, Cape Cod National Seashore,” in Cape
Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Handout
Material and Schedules 1975.” Description of children’s sea rescue program and start of Beach Apparatus
Drill at CCNS provided by former park historian, South District interpretive supervisor, and public
information and outreach chief Mike Whatley (at CCNS 1977-2001), and shared in Bill Burke, “Re: CCNS
history question,” email message to author, September 14, 2012.
437
local landmarks and popular tourist sites. Henry David Thoreau visited Highland Light
several times in the 1840s and ‘50s, and lodging at least once with the lighthouse keeper.
Lighthouses were perhaps the seashore’s most evocative buildings. Though they
remained the property of the U. S. Coast Guard, the 1970 master plan called for
eventually acquiring and interpreting them, along with Coast Guard stations.602
The first two opportunities came in 1965, when the Park Service purchased a pair
of wooden former lighthouses. Back in 1892 the federal government had replaced the
three brick lights at Nauset with three moveable wooden towers, so the latter could be
easily moved when threatened by coastal erosion. In 1911 two of the wooden towers
were decommissioned, and sold in 1918. In 1920 the new owner moved them to a plot of
land on nearby Cable Road and converted them into a single cottage. The remaining
third wooden tower was decommissioned and sold in 1923, replaced with one of the cast
iron towers from Chatham. The new owners also turned this tower into a cottage.
Finally purchasing this last wooden tower in 1975, the Park Service reunited it with the
other two in 1983 on a cleared lot on Cable Road just west of the still-functioning Nauset
Light. With the completion of restoration, “The Three Sisters” opened to public tours in
1989. They maintain their original north-south orientation, albeit just inland from where
they once faced the Atlantic.603
602
For what is possibly the first listing of a regular Hightland Light tour, see “Activities,” Summer
Sandings, Summer 1979, 3. “The Highland Light” in Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint,
Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1896), 2: 31-67. National Park Service, Cape Cod National
Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 54.
603
A. Berle Clemensen and William W. Howell with H. Thomas McGrath and Elayne Anderson, Historic
Structure Report, Three Sisters Lighthouses, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (n.p.: National
Park Service, January 1986), 64-67. Exact dates for NPS buying the Beacon and Twins, and when the
exhibit opened to the public, is from National Park Service, “The Three Sisters Lighthouses,”
http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/the-three-sisters-lighthouses.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). That
the National Park Service did not move the lighthouses to an ocean-front lot was apparently due to cost and
Eastham property owners complaining that the towers would block their view of the ocean. Superintendent
438
By 1989 the National Park Service has reached its present state of interpreting the
history of federal government services to navigation and maritime rescue on Cape Cod.
The preservation and interpretation of lifesaving, lighthouses, and the men and women
interacting with them matured between 1963 and 1989. The Park Service would acquire,
move, and restore additional government-built structures in the coming years. And it
would continue to revise exhibits and programs about lighthouses, shipwrecks, and
lifesaving. As these stories of constructing buildings, training men, and saving lives are
mostly in the past, the creation of Cape Cod National Seashore in the late twentieth
century stands as the most recent and prominent example of the federal government
addressing the needs of people on Cape Cod. The National Park Service had worked
hard to sell the public on the idea of national seashores since the mid 1950s. And since
1963, park rangers have regularly presented evening programs on what they do (“Ranger
Activities at Cape Cod National Seashore” (1963)), the importance of their work
(“National Parks: Nature’s Last Frontier” (1963)), reminded the public that the national
parks belonged to them (“Your National Seashore” and “Your National Parks” (both
1972)), as well as celebrated significant Cape Cod National Seashore anniversaries with
special programming.604
Herbert Olsen’s suggestion of moving them to two miles north to Wellfleet was also unpopular with
Eastham residents. “He [Herbert Olsen] said that four sites in Eastham originally proposed for the
lighthouses were all rejected by owners of shore property who said the towers would obstruct the views
from their houses.” Excerpt from “Northeast Journal,” New York Times, (Late Edition, (East Coast)),
February 22, 1987, A42.
604
The National Park Service moved both Nauset Light and Highland Light back from the eroding
shoreline in 1996, and received ownership of them from the U. S. Coast Guard shortly before the
relocations, according to William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape
Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 11. But in an earlier 1998
article, Burke stated that “Ownership of both lights will pass from the U.S. Coast Guard to the National
Park Service,” so presumably it was a multi-year process. William Burke, “New Life for Old Lights:
Nauset and Highland Celebrate the Past and Look to the Future,” The Cape Cod Guide, the official
newspaper of Cape Cod National Seashore [summer?] 1998, cover. New exhibits at the Salt Pond Visitor
Center opened in 1989, and included displays on lighthouses, navigation, and lifesaving: “Within about
439
The benefit of this narrative to the Park Service is several-fold. First, private nonprofit history museums in New England focus on preserving and interpreting the
significant places, people, and things within their own community and/or region – which
is a narrative that may not prominently, adequately, or correctly address federal history or
federal sites. Next, lifesaving, lighthouses, and maritime disasters are topics popular with
the public; and, as Edward Rowe Snow learned in the 1940s when he sought to make a
living through writing and lecturing, attracting and keeping an audience comes through
learning what excites the public, and what they’ll pay for. The difference between Snow
and Cape Cod National Seashore, however, is that most visitors come (and pay) to use
the beaches; learning about history and nature are ancillary benefits. Lastly, stories of
lighthouses guiding ships to safety and uniformed government-paid and trained men
literally saving thousands of lives since the nineteenth century were excellent public
relations for the federal government. Through the 1960s and ‘70s as the American public
became increasingly dissatisfied with the actions of the federal government both at home
and abroad, they demonstrated loudly and in great numbers for reform. The National
Park Service could count itself, then and now, among the more beloved federal agencies
and a reminder of government integrity and competency. But, it did not escape public
5,000 square feet of floor space are five display platforms, each on a specific theme: natural settings, a
combination of commercial fishing and whaling; a combination of navigation, shipbuilding and agriculture
(cranberry farming and sea hay harvesting); maritime safety and sea rescue; and architecture and every-day
life.” Excerpted from Joyce Starr, “Salt Pond center ready to reopen: Cape artifacts to fill museum,” Cape
Cod Times, July 3, 1989. National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National
Seashore, 1963” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),”
Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, July 1August 31, 1972, Cape Cod National Seashore,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc
Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Schedule 1972.” For list of 20th anniversary activities, see
handout “Cape Cod National Seashore, 20th Anniversary Special Activities, Friday, August 7, 1981, Salt
Pond Visitor Center, Eastham, Massachusetts,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History
File, folder “Twentieth Anniversary.” And most recently: “Plans Unveiled for Cape Cod National
Seashore for 50th Anniversary in 2011,” CCNS press release, December 22, 2010, on CCNS web site,
http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/plans-unveiled-for-cape-cod-national-seashore-for-50th-anniversary-in2011.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
440
admonishment for its decisions within Cape Cod National Seashore or elsewhere. And in
the mid 1980s that public protest would center on the dunes outside Provincetown.
Dune shacks and the emergence of shared authority
The last story in the creation of the modern interpretation of history within Cape
Cod National Seashore concerns a cluster of nineteen shacks built in the early to mid
twentieth century among the dunes bordering the Atlantic coastline of Truro and
Provincetown. It was here beginning first in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s that
members of the public organized in opposition to the Park Service’s plan to remove nonhistoric, “unimproved” structures in an effort to return the dune landscape to a natural
setting. Their success started a new chapter in shared authority between the Park Service
and residents who lived next to and within the national seashore. The history of the dune
shacks is covered in detail in both National Park Service and private publications, and
will be summarized here.605
The present dune shacks have several precursors. When the federal government
began building a string of life-saving stations along the outer Cape’s Great Beach in
1872, it also built a series of huts midway between each station both to shelter shipwreck
survivors and serve as a meeting point for the surfmen who patrolled the beaches between
each station. These were modeled on the rescue huts first erected along the coast by the
605
Regina T. Binder, “Comprehensive Conservation Treatment & Management Plan for the Dune Shacks
of Provincetown, Massachusetts” (master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1990). Josephine C. Del Deo, The
Dune Cottages at Peaked Hill Bars: A Survey (unpublished paper, Chanel Cottage, Peaked Hill,
Provincetown, MA.: n.p., 1986). Josephine Del Deo, Compass Grass Anthology: A Collection of
Provincetown Portraits (Provincetown, MA.: Three Dunes Press, 1983). Emily Donaldson, Margie Coffin
Brown and Gretchen Hilyard, Cultural Landscape Report for Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic
District, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown and Truro, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Olmsted
Center for Landscape Preservation and National Park Service, 2011). Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the
Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.:
National Park Service, August 2005).
441
Humane Society of Massachusetts. The life-saving stations also shared the shore with
fishermen who built shacks for storing gear, and as spaces for work and recreation.
Eventually the surfmen and later Coast Guardsmen began building shacks to
accommodate visiting family, friends, and other guests to help cope with the stations’
isolation. In the early twentieth century as Provincetown increasingly began attracting
artists and other tourists, locals began renting out these shacks to visitors.606
The most famous, grandest, and one of the earliest of these adapted residences
was the original 1872 Peaked Hill Bars Life-Saving Station. Previously abandoned by
the Life-Saving Service due to severe erosion (it built a replacement nearby), playwright
Eugene O’Neill and his family used it as a summer residence from 1919 to 1924, and in
which he wrote a number of plays including “Anna Christie” (1920), winner of the
Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Erosion finally toppled the station in 1931, but by then a small
community of shack dwellers had followed in O’Neill’s wake and joined the Coast
Guardsmen in the dunes outside Provincetown. Responding to need and environmental
factors, residents moved and rebuilt their shacks over the years, often using salvaged
materials. They were usually single-story wooden structures, with at most a few rooms
and no indoor plumbing or insulation. A cook stove and basic furnishings outfitted the
rustic interior. The dunes simultaneously provided solitude to pursue one’s work, a
cheap place to live, and a nearby stimulating group of artists, writers, actors, Coast
606
Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars
Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 16-18, 21-24. The shacks were
also similar to the detached cabins that comprised tourist camps or tourist courts in which American
motorists lodged along American highways in the 1920s. See chapter 6 “Early motels: 1925-1945” in
Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, MA.:
MIT Press, 1979).
442
Guardsmen, fishermen, hunters, vacationers, and others who formed a distinct dune shack
society by the 1920s and into the coming decades.607
The formation of Pilgrim Spring State Park and then Cape Cod National Seashore
presented challenges to this bohemian community of some two-dozen shacks in Truro
and Provincetown. The state decided that some dune shack residents were squatting on
now public land and should go, but took no physical action to evict them. Charles H. W.
Foster, commissioner of the state’s Board of Natural Resources and chair of the newlyformed Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, reassured residents in
December of 1962 that the state would not order their buildings removed. The state was
content to leave this situation to the National Park Service to solve as it would take over
ownership of the Province Lands in 1963 and Pilgrim Spring State Park in 1966.608
In response to fears of eviction and demolition, several dozen shack owners
formed the Great Beach Cottage Owners Association in 1962. That they chose the word
“cottage” as opposed to “shack” indicated their argument to be considered as “improved”
properties – though each structure varied in size, construction, and amenities. The
seashore’s incorporating legislation exempted the Park Service from condemning
“improved property” built before September 1, 1959, with this term defined as “a
detached, one-family dwelling … together with so much of the land on which the
607
Jessie Martin Breese, “A Home on the Dunes,” Country Life, November 1923, 73-75. Emily Donaldson
et al., Cultural Landscape Report for Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod
National Seashore, Provincetown and Truro, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Olmsted Center for Landscape
Preservation and National Park Service, 2011), 37-38. Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional
Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service,
August 2005), 39.
608
Emily Donaldson et al., Cultural Landscape Report for Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic
District, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown and Truro, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Olmsted
Center for Landscape Preservation and National Park Service, 2011), 47. Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape
Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985),
25. “Cottages May Stay In Park Transfer,” Provincetown Advocate, December 6, 1962, 9.
443
dwelling is situated the said land being in the same ownership as the dwelling….” Like
Foster, the seashore’s first superintendent, Robert Gibbs, pledged in 1962 to work with
shack owners to find a fair solution. To bolster their public image, GBCOA members
recalled well-know artists and writers who had spent time in the dunes, such as O’Neill,
painters Jackson Pollock and Wolf Kahn, poet Harry Kemp (the “Poet of the Dunes” who
had long called for building a replica of the Mayflower, and got to take part in the
festivities dressed as a Pilgrim when the ship visited Provincetown in 1957), critic and
essayist Edmund Wilson, dance critic Edwin Denby, conductor Joseph Hawthorne,
choreographer Todd Bolender, novelists Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer, and composer
Marc Blitzstein.609
While the dune dwellers did comprise a decades-old artistic community,
Superintendent Gibbs nonetheless stated that, by law, any owner of a structure in the park
would need to show proof of ownership of the building and land in order to permanently
remain – a request that eventually only one of the shack owners, the Malicoat family,
could fully document. Such formal agreements were not how the community
traditionally operated. Though not required by the CCNS’s enabling legislation, Gibbs
secured permission from his superiors in Washington to grant leases to the shack owners
of up to twenty-five years or the owner’s lifetime. Within a decade, eventually all but
609
Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars
Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 36 (list of 40 members of GBCOA
circa 1962). Section 4d of Public Law 87-126 quoted in Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National
Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 108. Gibbs’s
pledge to find a fair solution from “Cottages Are Safe From Bulldozers,” Provincetown Advocate,
September 13, 1962, 1. “‘Poet of Dunes’ Gets Honor Spot During Reception,” Boston Globe, June 13,
1957, 14. List of famous dune dwellers from “Dune Dwellers Seek To Keep Rights To Habitations Used
By Creators,” Provincetown Advocate, April 18, 1963, 8.
444
one owner signed deals with the Park Service. With the legal status of the shacks for the
moment settled, life on the dunes largely continued as before.610
Entering the 1980s, a number of leases began to approach their termination dates,
and the deaths of two elderly shack owners – Charlie Schmid in 1982 and Leo Fleurant in
1984 – revived public concern over the Park Service’s eventual plan for the dune shacks
as their properties came under its ownership. In the previous two decades the Park
Service had demolished a few shacks, but there was hope in the community that the Park
Service would soften its stance. It did not. In the summer of 1984 the Park Service
demolished Schmid’s shack, prompting significant public outcry. Schmid had been a
beloved, eccentric resident of the dunes who bought his shack in the late 1950s and
enlarged it into a quirky three-story local landmark.611
In an effort to not lose another part of the dunes’ bohemian past, concerned
citizens formed the non-profit Peaked Hill Trust to come up with a plan to save the
610
Gibbs requiring title to building and land as required by CCNS enabling legislation from “Dune
Dwellers Write To Udall,” Provincetown Advocate, September 2, 1965, 2. Malicoat shack as only one
protected by a deed from Allison Blake, “In the dunes; windblown shacks hold mute testimony to fastdisappearing solace,” Cape Cod Times, January 26, 1986. For how shacks were transferred among owners,
see Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars
Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 41, 123-126. Gibbs getting
permission from Washington officials from “Dune Dwellers Want Guarantees,” Provincetown Advocate,
September 23, 1965. For all shack owners save one eventually settling with NPS in the first decade, see
Wolfe, 37. Grace Bessay continued her civil suit from 1967 until finally agreeing to a twenty-five year
lease in 1991. Joyce Starr, “Dune shack owner prevails,” Cape Cod Times, November 23, 1991.
611
For Leo Fleurant’s obituary, see Peter E. Howard, “He was the patriarch of the dunes,” Cape Cod Times,
April 6, 1984. For details of Schmid and destruction of his shack as catalyst for launching the dune shack
preservation movement, see Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of
the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 37-38. In the
summer of 1984 the NPS actually demolished three shacks: Schmid’s and two in Chatham. Of the latter
two, one had recently become the property of the NPS after its owner gave up his lease, while the other was
demolished after the owner, William H. Eldridge, moved the shack back from the eroding shoreline in the
winter of 1982-1983 without first securing NPS permission. The NPS judged the action in violation of the
owner’s lease and after a year-long argument with Eldridge, took ownership of the shack and demolished it
– to the anger of the owner and the town of Chatham for not first filing a notice of intent. The Chatham
story shows that there were alongshore primitive shacks/cottages/cabins elsewhere in Cape Cod National
Seashore, but the article referring to these two demolished buildings as “cabins” and “camps” linguistically
puts them in a different conversation than the more famous and contested dune shacks of Provincetown and
Truro. Robin Lord, “Battle to establish beachhead,” Cape Cod Times, June 26, 1984.
445
remaining shacks. There were more than two-dozen in the early 1960s, and now nineteen
remained, with only one of these (the Malicoat family’s shack) protected from demolition
for being on documented private land. The National Park Service allowed the Trust to
start a pilot program in the summer of 1986 managing and renting out two shacks with
time still on their leases; it also agreed to halt demolitions on the two shacks it currently
held, while it carried out a study to determine if the shacks had historic value. If the
shacks could be found eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the
Park Service would not demolish them.612
Budget cuts delayed the study but in 1987 the NPS concluded as part of a survey
of all the seashore’s historic structures that the shacks did not qualify for nomination to
the National Register of Historic Places because many were often moved and rebuilt, less
than fifty years old, and had only “ephemeral ties” to the famous individuals cited by
shack supporters. As Superintendent Olsen was quoted as asking the previous year,
“Where’s the documented evidence of who occupied these shacks?” Two years later he
repeated that “Eugene O’Neill did do some writing at the Peaked Hill (sand) bars, but that
shack’s gone. It went into the sea long ago. No writer of national note stayed there for a
significant amount of time.” His comments highlight the value that the National Park
Service placed at that time in the written record over oral histories of current and former
dune dwellers. This oral-versus-written debate also played a prominent role in the 1977
federal trial of the Mashpee Wampanoags over whether they were a Native American
612
Estimate of shacks in early 1960s from Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the
Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August
2005), 9. “Seashore to study cottages’ history,” Cape Cod Times, December 17, 1985. Operation of the
Peaked Hill Trust discussed in Allison Blake, “Non-profit group trying to save shacks,” Cape Cod Times,
April 25, 1986; and “Residents Move to Preserve Historic Shacks Among Provincetown Dunes,” New York
Times, October 19, 1986, 55. Superintendent Olsen saying shacks need to be found historically or
architecturally significant to escape demolition from Teresa M. Hanafin, “Historic Beach Shacks on Cape
Threatened,” Boston Globe, June 15, 1986, 1.
446
tribe. The written record said no, their oral testimony of their history and current
lifeways said yes; and the jury sided with the written evidence.613
But even as the Park Service certified its conclusion of the dune shacks as nonhistoric with the report, support for the Trust and the shacks steadily grew as the story
spread from local to regional papers, and the New York Times began answering public
queries over how people could stay in the shacks. And before the shacks could be torn
down, the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC) needed to rule whether it agreed
or disagreed with the NPS findings, as NHL nominations needed state approval to
proceed. In the culmination of a “flood of public interest” in the MHC’s decision, some
200 people packed the Provincetown town hall for a public hearing in August of 1988.
Clearly responding to all forty speakers being in favor of saving the shacks, the MHC
unanimously agreed in its official ruling in September that the shacks were historic and
deserved listing on the National Register. A week before the decision, U.S.
Representative Gerry Studds and Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy had added
their support to the town officials, state environmental officials, organizations and
individuals backing the listing of the shacks. One MHC commissioner emphasized the
need to save the dune shacks in light of the loss of another piece of the shore’s cultural
heritage: Henry Beston’s Outermost House, swept out to sea during a storm in 1978. In
response to the ruling, a Park Service representative said that it would rethink its position
613
Budget cuts delaying NPS study mentioned in Allison Blake, “Non-profit group trying to save shacks,”
Cape Cod Times, April 25, 1986. Brian Pfeiffer, Historic Structure Inventory, Cape Cod National
Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1987). “Ephemeral ties” quoted in Susan Diesenhouse,
“Remote Shacks on Cape Are Caught Up in Storm,” New York Times, September 18, 1988, 51. “Where’s
the documented…” from Peter E. Howard, “Group labors to save Cape’s last historic beach shacks,”
Providence Journal, August 10, 1986, A1. “Eugene O’Neill did…” from Robert Correia, “It’s a no-frills
life on the barrier; on Provincetown dunes, a struggle to preserve bohemian way of life,” Providence
Journal, August 21, 1988, A14.
447
on demolition; that winter Superintendent Olsen suggested that some use of the shacks
might be included in the seashore’s revision of its 1970 master plan.614
The debate then moved onto Washington, where the keeper of the register would
make the final decision. The Park Service relented slightly in January, 1989, agreeing
that one of the shacks was eligible for listing as the long-term residence of poet Harry
Kemp; in doing so the NPS showed how it assessed historical worth. As the MHC
argued that the shacks were historic when viewed collectively, the National Park Service
insisted that each shack be eligible on its own. Fortunately, on May 12, 1989 Keeper of
the Register Jerry Rogers agreed with the MHC that the shacks were eligible for listing as
a single historic district due to their “significant association with the historical
development of American art, literature and theater, and for their representation of a rare
and fragile property type.” Accepting the decision, the Park Service agreed to
incorporate the shacks into its long range planning of Cape Cod National Seashore.615
While the National Register decision could not protect the shacks from
destruction by nature, neglect, accidents, or an NPS use that conflicted with the desires of
shack proponents, it marked the point when public activism changed the way the Park
Service valued the structures within Cape Cod National Seashore. This was not new a
614
Stanley Carr, “Q and A,” New York Times, August 7, 1988, travel section, A4. “Flood of public
interest” from Allison Blake, “Dune shacks decision delayed,” Cape Cod Times, July 21, 1988. Details of
MHC Provincetown hearing from Kay Longcope, “State panel leans toward preserving Cape shacks,”
Boston Globe, August 27, 1988, 13. Outermost House mentioned in Allison Blake, “State historical panel
votes to save dune shacks,” Cape Cod Times, September 15, 1988. Belated political support mentioned in
“Decision due on dune cottages,” Cape Cod Times, September 14, 1988. NPS rethinking its position from
Dana Fulham, “Mass. acts to protect shacks on Cape dunes,” Boston Globe, September 15, 1988, 38.
Possible inclusion of shacks in next CCNS master plan from Allison Blake, “Dune shacks win historic
protection,” Cape Cod Times, May 13, 1989.
615
Allison Blake, “Park agrees dune shack is historic,” Cape Cod Times, January 19, 1989. NPS arguing
for each shack nominated to the Register individually while MHC backs group listing from Pamela Glass,
“Lawmakers: Dune shacks historic,” Cape Cod Times, February 4, 1989. “significant association…” from
Allison Blake, “Dune shacks win historic protection,” Cape Cod Times, May 13, 1989. CCNS including
shacks in long-range planning from Allison Blake, “Historic designation leaves dune shacks’ future still
unclear,” Cape Cod Times, May 18, 1989.
448
new phenomenon; public protests curbed the NPS’s plans for large-scale recreational
development of Cumberland Island National Seashore back in 1972, and eventually
resulted in getting a significant portion of the island designated as wilderness. And the
present national seashore system owes its origins to the Mellon family funding a series of
studies of the Atlantic, Gulf, and Great Lakes coasts in the 1950s. On Cape Cod, this
fight revealed a difference in what the Park Service and organized members of the public
felt was worth preserving. According to the latter, the standard practice of the Park
Service and other preservation-conscious organizations for most of the twentieth century
– saving the “best” buildings such as the Penniman House for their impressive
architecture or long associations with famous people or events – was inadequate.616
Representative of this low regard for the less-distinguished structures within the
park, back in 1968 the National Park Service gave a halfway house to Mystic Seaport to
add to their outdoor exhibits. Built in the 1870s on the shoreline between the Cahoon
Hollow and Pamet River Life-Saving Stations, it was the only surviving hut on the Cape.
As the remote alongshore location put the house at risk for destruction by vandals or
nature, and made it inaccessible to most visitors, the Park Service apparently decided to
relinquish instead of relocating it elsewhere in the park. And even a decade later, CCNS
superintendents saw the Old Harbor Life-Saving Station down in Chatham as not viable
to interpret in place and too expensive to relocate. It was also the last surviving unaltered
example of its kind on the Cape. It took the intervention of regional Park Service
616
Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict
(Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 5 (300 visitors per day), 109 (“primitive state”),
149-164 (debate between public and NPS over extent of development), 261-262 (summary of debate over
development). Cameron Binkley, The Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore:
The Great Depression through Mission 66 (Atlanta, GA.: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast Regional
Office, National Park Service, 2007), 197-198 (coastal surveys).
449
officials and a sympathetic Congressman to save the station. By these two examples, the
1960s represents the nadir in preservation at CCNS, with a growing assumption of
responsibility for at least the seashore’s major historic structures in the late 1970s.617
The dune shacks achieving preservation as part of a historic district in the 1980s,
however, indicates that by this decade the Park Service had come to agree with the
public’s sense that the historic value of structures was not necessarily due to individual
distinctiveness, but in the way they told a story as a group within their environment.
Though opposed on the park-level for the aforementioned reasons, the rural historic
district was a tool by which the Park Service had evaluated properties since its
publication of Cultural Landscapes: Rural Historic Districts in the National Park System
in 1984. Cultural landscapes were the rural equivalent of historic districts, which, since
becoming federally-designated with the passage of the 1966 National Historic
Preservation Act, highlighted collections of historic buildings that created an urban or
suburban area’s distinct character. The rural version was “a geographically definable
area, possessing a significant concentration, linkage, or continuity of landscape
components which are united by human use and past events or aesthetically by plan or
physical development.” History was not only evident in structures, but in how people
had modified the landscape to suit their needs. And since the early 1980s, the NPS has
617
Halfway House described in William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic
Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 109-111. See also the results of an
archaeological dig at the site of another halfway house: Edward J. Lenik, “The Truro Halfway House, Cape
Cod, Massachusetts,” Historical Archaeology, Vol. 6 (1972): 77-86. Peggy A. Albee, Old Harbor LifeSaving Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore,
South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, Building Conservation Branch,
Cultural Resources Center, North Atlantic Region, June 1988), 34 (sale of Old Harbor), 38-39 (objections
over cost of relocation and funding), 41-45 (move). Richard Ryder recalled that “Moving the station to a
spot closer to the bay side of North Beach was considered, but it was felt that the expenditure of money
could not be justified. The Park Service wanted to use the building, but it was so remote that relatively few
visitors could get to it.” Richard G. Ryder, Old Harbor Station - Cape Cod (Norwich, CT.: Ram Island
Press, 1990), 55.
450
published guidelines for evaluating and nominating cultural landscapes to the National
Register.618
In the dunes of Truro and Provincetown, the 1,500-acre Peaked Hill Bars Historic
District includes eighteen shacks (the Malicoat shack is excluded because it remains on
private property), their outbuildings, and the web of roads, paths, and other cultural
features which the community had built over more than seventy years in response to the
environment. As Jack Kerouac had stated in a letter supporting the initial GBCOA
efforts to preserve the community, “They [the shacks] are not at all ‘inharmonious with
the park landscape’ but actual museum-like adjuncts to the real meaning of the Park. The
cottages are definitely a part of the response to Place, just as you would not remove old
adobe dwellings from a park in the American Southwest.” Having stayed in a dune shack
in 1950 while working on the manuscript for what became his celebrated novel On the
Road, Kerouac understood that a place’s history was not confined to the sites preserved
and so designated by authorities. Public input mattered, and after 1989 the public
continued to advocate for the seashore’s historic assets – most recently convincing the
Park Service to document and preserve a number of Modern houses built in the 1950s,
‘60s, and ‘70s. And on March 15, 2012, after years of meetings, studies, articles, and
debates, the National Park Service finally listed the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars
618
As an example of members of the public arguing for the shacks’ value as a group: “Comments collected
by the Association [the GBCOA] from artists and writers who were former dune dwellers indicate a strong
desire to preserve the structures as an oasis of solitude and inspiration needed for creative thinking by
workers in the arts.” “Dune Dwellers Seek To Keep Rights To Habitations Used By Creators,”
Provincetown Advocate, April 18, 1963, 8. That the shack owners mobilized to create the Great Beach
Cottage Owners Association shows that they valued the community as a whole over each individual’s
shack. In the 1980s the MHC, Senators Kerry and Kennedy, and Congressman Studds also argued, based
on pressure from their constituents, that the shacks were historically important as a group. Pamela Glass,
“Lawmakers: Dune shacks historic,” Cape Cod Times, February 4, 1989. Robert Z. Melnick with Daniel
Sponn and Emma Jane Saxe, Cultural Landscapes: Rural Historic Districts in the National Park System
(Washington, D.C.: Park Historic Architecture Division, National Park Service, 1984), 8. Cari Goetcheus,
“Cultural Landscapes and the National Register,” CRM Magazine 25, no. 1 (2002),
http://crm.cr.nps.gov/archive/25-01/25-01-11.pdf (accessed January 3, 2013).
451
Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Shared authority is now the
norm at Cape Cod National Seashore, and discussions between the Park Service and the
public continue over the management, use, and interpretation of the seashore’s history
and historic places – and not least of all the dune shacks.619
Conclusion
In 1961 when President Kennedy signed Senate bill S. 857 into law, he began a
process by which the National Park Service would seek to preserve and interpret the
history of Cape Cod at a time when rapid coastal development threatened to permanently
alter its cherished sense of place. Cape Cod National Seashore represented a contrast to
the typical modes of preserving and presenting history alongshore in that the federal
government acquired more than forty miles of the New England coast and then sought to
selectively preserve and interpret the historical resources therein. And over the following
three decades, changing attitudes toward nature and history, both among the populace and
within the government, would be reflected in how the National Park Service acted on
Cape Cod.
619
For the list and links to NPS publications and documents on the dune shacks, see National Park Service,
“Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/parkmgmt/dune-shacksof-the-peaked-hill-bars-historic-district.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). Jack Kerouac quoted in “Dune
Dwellers Seek To Keep Rights To Habitations Used By Creators,” Provincetown Advocate, April 18, 1963,
8. For Modern architecture, see William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at
Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 11; William Burke, “I
Don’t Understand It, It Doesn’t Look Old to Me,” Seashore News, 2008-2009, 9. Electronic copy available
at: http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/upload/CCNS%20Modern%20Architecture.pdf (accessed
January 7, 2013). The NPS in 2006 leased one of the Modern houses it owns to the Cape Cod Modern
House Trust. It seeks to eventually restore and put to educational and cultural use all seven of the Modern
houses owned by CCNS. Cape Cod Modern House Trust, “About Us,” http://www.ccmht.org/ (accessed
January 7, 2013). “National Park Service Formally Lists the Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic
District on the National Register,” CCNS press release, March 19, 2012, on CCNS web site,
http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/national-park-service-formally-lists-the-dune-shacks-of-peaked-hillbars-historic-district-on-the-national-register.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).
452
During these first thirty years Cape Cod National Seashore has come to represent
the main parts of the New England coastal brand: people practicing traditional lifeways,
the preservation of significant historic structures, and evocative coastal history and lore.
The NPS modified this portrait further by interpreting this history and culture within a
larger narrative of environmental change – merging the usually divided approaches of
non-profit conservation organizations focusing on nature and history museums preserving
history. As was the mission of the NPS since its founding in 1916, on Cape Cod and
elsewhere it was tasked with preserving and interpreting both of these elements for the
American people while accommodating their recreational needs. This was a mandate
with at times conflicting goals.
Cape Cod National Seashore was not the first national seashore or the Park
Service’s first site in coastal New England. The NPS was involved in managing and
interpreting coastal New England since the establishment of Acadia National Park in
1919 and Salem National Historic Site in 1938. Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1931
was the first in a new type of park, emerging from a federal push to expand the number of
public recreational areas. By the 1950s the National Park Service realized it was crucial
to quickly acquire the last undeveloped areas of coastline for preservation and public use.
Cape Cod’s Great Beach (so named by Thoreau) was at the top of the list of potential
national seashores for being the last great undeveloped stretch of New England coast, its
proximity to urban areas, and accessibility. In building the argument for the Great Beach,
NPS studies focused on biology, geology, archaeology, and history. The historical
argument for its national importance centered on early explorers using the Cape as a
landmark, as the beginnings of the Pilgrim narrative in America, and their descendants
453
industriously settling it and helping to build New England’s iconic fishing and whaling
fleets. Support for the park was mixed, as residents at first feared the loss of land, homes
and businesses, and being inundated with tourists. But in what became the Cape Cod
Model, the boundaries excluded developed areas, homeowners within park boundaries
could keep their property, the public could still hunt, fish, and gather shellfish in the park,
and an advisory commission composed of members appointed by the federal and state
governments and the six towns would guide the Park Service’s development and
management of CCNS.
In planning the park, Law 87-126 authorizing Cape Cod National Seashore
echoed the Park Service’s mission to conserve history and nature for public enjoyment.
But from the beginning the emphasis was on preserving nature. The public support that
had brought CCNS to fruition centered on the loss of undeveloped coastal land – not on
the loss of the Cape’s history. This focus was reflected in the 1963 master plan, which
set Cape Cod’s natural history as its main interpretive theme, with human history only a
small fraction of this story – a hierarchy also evident in the park’s staffing as a chief
naturalist headed the interpretation division. Park infrastructure, though, was divided
evenly between history and nature, with each having their own building (a nature center
and a maritime museum, though neither were eventually built), and both visitor centers
covering natural and human history themes. The park buildings were also to be in a bold
modern style as championed by the leading contemporary architects in America, and
would present the Cape as innovative instead of quaint and pickled.
Setting up their temporary headquarters in a decommissioned former Coast Guard
station in Eastham in the fall of 1961, the Park Service immediately began acquiring land.
454
Over the next nine years it would build the seashore’s infrastructure. Among the
thousands of properties within the seashore that the Park Service slowly purchased,
Province Lands State Reservation, Pilgrim Spring State Park, and the former Camp
Wellfleet formed the core of the new park. Within these latter two areas, interpretive
shelters completed in 1963 at Pilgrim Heights and Marconi Station showcased what
became the park’s mode of outdoor interpretation. Each contained exhibit panels and
models showing the site’s interwoven history and nature, while adjacent walking trails
also interpreted the nature and history visible in the landscape. Back at the temporary
headquarters, rangers presented evening illustrated history and nature-themed lectures
and also led daily guided walks. In the next six years the Park Service added an
additional interpretive shelter at Skiff Hill, more trails and ranger-guided walks, the first
bicycle paths in a national park, bathing facilities at six Park Service-run beaches,
additional static interpretation at natural sites such as Enos Rock and historic sites such as
the Penniman House, the Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham with its small museum, and
the Province Lands Visitor Center in the dunes outside Provincetown. The National Park
Service’s careful integration of history, archaeology, flora, fauna, and geology in its
exhibits, talks, walks, and trails, were a sharp contrast to the history-in-a-bottle approach
of maritime museums such as Mystic Seaport that either ignored nature in its
interpretation or subdued it in the quest to preserve and promote Yankee history. At
CCNS, history was environmental and immersive.
By the late 1960s the image of the seashore was becoming more natural than
cultural. In 1963 its brochures first featured a stylized lighthouse/Pilgrim hat on the
cover, with a tern added above it in 1965. That same year an illustration of a tern also
455
began appearing on the interpretive programs handed out at the visitor center, and in
1968 became the modern circular logo of a tern hovering above a dune that represents
Cape Cod National Seashore to this day. The covers of the 1963 and 1970 master plans
also switched from picturing the Mayflower to a tern. This environmental turn was also
evident in the residential environmental education program NEED taking over the former
Nauset Coast Guard Station that the Park Service intended for a maritime museum, in the
park’s interpretation for Fort Hill showing the denuded landscape as evidence of the
damage humans had wrought on the fragile environment over the centuries, and in the
master plan’s new theme of a history of natural forces on Cape Cod and man’s effect on
that landscape.
Cape Cod National Seashore was a part of the Park Service’s efforts to increase
the number of parks, and modernize park infrastructure and staffing as part of its Mission
66 and Parkscape U.S.A. development programs. These successfully raised the National
Park Service’s profile, the number of visitors, and its Congressional funding. But as this
growth occurred during the American environmental movement, it also showed that NPS
leadership was more interested in scenic preservation and recreational tourism than
scientifically studying each park’s natural resources. Since the 1930s a minority within
the Park Service had advocated this latter approach so that each park’s ecological
integrity could be preserved while necessary development was limited to the lessenvironmentally-sensitive areas. But in what was the National Park system’s largest
period of expansion to date, adding ninety-eight units between 1952 and 1972, biological
science remained of limited interest to Park Service leadership, and only twelve percent
456
of these new sites were acquired as important natural areas as opposed to ones with
significant history or recreational potential.
The Park Service’s pro-growth attitude clashed with the American environmental
movement that became a part of mainstream American culture by the end of the 1960s.
Citizens were alarmed at the increasingly apparent environmental destruction, pollution,
and resource consumption that were part of postwar American suburbanization,
infrastructure development, population growth, and consumerism. Modern
environmentalists traced the root of this destructive behavior to the arrival of the first
European settlers in the seventeenth century, who, along with their descendants,
harvested natural resources and modified the land without regard for how their actions
upset the natural order, or ecosystem. As the more-enlightened Americans of the presentday were working to limit pollution and protect what remained, there were important
consequences to this narrative of decline as it became part of government policy and
American popular culture. The National Park Service used it when describing the need to
acquire the last undeveloped stretches of coastline in the 1950s, and in the interpretation
of Cape Cod National Seashore a decade later. The Leopold Report of 1963 called for
restoring wildlife to parks as they existed at the time of the arrival of white settlers – an
ethnocentric narrative that imagined a supposedly pristine natural world unimpacted by
the Native Americans who had actually lived in and modified such landscapes for
centuries.
And the environmentalists pushing for what became the 1964 Wilderness Act also
sought to preserve areas that had supposedly escaped human modification during the
course of American history. Believing that it was already doing a satisfactory job of
457
preserving wild areas, the National Park Service opposed the passage of the bill and only
reluctantly designated wilderness areas within its parklands – often as the result of
pressure from Congress and environmental advocates. But as Cape Cod had been
extensively developed since the seventeenth century, it was exempt from being defined
and protected as wilderness. And while the public face of the seashore by the latter half
of the 1960s was nature, the promotion of recreation mostly trumped ecological concerns.
Situated within nature, historical interpretation in the park fell into three
categories: Native Americans up to the point of contact with Europeans, Cape Cod as a
place of entrepreneurship, and the federal government working to protect its people.
Evidence of the Native American story on Cape Cod existed in place names, exhibits in
the visitor center, as topics of evening programs, in archaeological features visible at
interpretive shelters and along trails, and in the narratives of early explorers and the
Pilgrims as they explored the outer Cape. Decades of historical and archaeological
research by the Park Service and others informed this interpretation, and helped to
present a chronology of Native American life that dated back 10,000 years. But all of
these sites presented a story of Cape Cod’s Native Americans in the past tense. Visitors
could easily conclude from a visit to the park that Native Americans no longer lived on
Cape Cod.
But Cape Cod’s Native Americans had not vanished. Though apparently not
interpreted in the present-tense in Cape Cod National Seashore’s programs until the
1980s and in museum exhibits until 2011, it is valuable to contrast this absence with the
story of the two vibrant Wampanoag communities which existed nearby: in the town of
Mashpee on the Cape, and in the town of Gay Head (later Aquinnah), on Martha’s
458
Vineyard. Both endured oversight by colonial and then state officials, the loss of
commonly-held land and resources, and numerous petitions for redress before both were
incorporated as towns in 1870. During the early twentieth century colonial revival as
New England communities celebrated their Anglo past, Native Americans, too,
underwent a cultural revival as eastern tribes adopted dress and other elements of western
Native American cultures in a showing of pan-Indian identity. Wampanoags participated
in Anglo-American commemorative activities as early as the 1920s, a decade that also
saw the formation of Wampanoag and New England Native American political
organizations, and the start of large annual powwows in Mashpee. Wampanoags
participated individually in the festivities surrounding the arrival of the Mayflower II to
Provincetown and Plymouth in 1957. But the celebrations also provoked bitterness
among some Native Americans for their only token inclusion.
In the wake of the Mayflower II, Wampanoags on Gay Head started their own
museum while the 1960s began a period of increased political activism as Wampanoag
leaders started what was to be an annual Native American festival in Boston, organized
the Federated Eastern Indian League, attended the 1966 dedication of Cape Cod National
Seashore in full regalia as members of the League, and successfully advocated for the
cliffs of Gay Head to be declared a National Landmark by the Department of the Interior.
By 1970 the nationwide Native American rights movement had reached coastal
New England. Rising anger over Pilgrim commemorations at Plymouth resulted in the
first of what has become an annual National Day of Mourning each Thanksgiving.
Starting that year, Native Americans held protests and demanded that performances and
exhibits offensive to Native Americans be changed. More broadly, they hoped the day
459
would demonstrate Native American pride and push for greater Native American rights
and education. Responding to the protests, Plimoth Plantation in 1973 expanded its
portrayal of Native life in its living history museum, added Native Americans to its board
and staff, and started a Native American studies program.
That year also marked the start of local museums returning sets of Native
American remains to the appropriate Native American tribe for reburial – seventeen years
before NAGPRA made the practice a federal law. It was a reversal of a centuries-old
practice by which looters, antiquarians, and archaeologists dug up Native remains for
profit or science. On Cape Cod, the Wellfleet Historical Society joined the National Park
Service and Mashpee Wampanoags in 1976 to rebury a skeleton that the society had
exhibited since 1953. The reburial on Great Island within the national seashore was both
a belated recognition that Native American remains deserved the same level of respect as
those of Euro Americans, and showed Wampanoags reaffirming their deep cultural
claims to the landscape now a part of Cape Cod National Seashore.
The late 1970s brought great discord for area Wampanoags as the Mashpees lost
their lawsuit against various property owners in the town when a jury concluded that they
did not meet the legal definition of a Native American tribe. The following decades,
however, brought gradual cultural and legal improvements as Gay Head Wampanoags
received federal recognition as a Native American tribe in 1987, a project to reconstruct
the Wampanoags’ extinct spoken language began in 1993, and the Mashpee
Wampanoags finally received federal status as a tribe in 2007. A comparatively minor
victory came in 2011 when the museum at the Salt Pond Visitor Center opened a new
exhibit that finally addressed contemporary Wampanoags and was made in consultation
460
with tribal members. While the practice of shared authority between the Park Service
and its constituents began with the successful effort to save the dune shacks from
demolition in the 1980s, the inclusion of Wampanoags in creating exhibits remained
delayed – possibly due to the Mashpees’ non-recognized status until 2007.
One area of the park’s historical interpretation that did not have to wait decades to
be properly told was of the outer Cape as a place of entrepreneurship. Many types of
industries started on Cape Cod in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, from
fishing to tourism. And the two most prominent sites of industry within Cape Cod
National Seashore, in terms of the Park Service’s investment in public access and
interpretation, are the location of a former wireless station designed by Guglielmo
Marconi, and a mansion built by a successful whaling captain named Edward Penniman.
Mentioned in the historical argument for the national significance of the Great Beach
back in 1958 and fortuitously located within the former Camp Wellfleet when the
seashore first opened, Marconi’s station existed as only a ruin of scattered wood, bricks,
iron, and concrete at the edge of a cliff. But the site allowed the Park Service to jointly
talk about the start of wireless communication and the dramatic erosion constantly
reshaping the shore. And nor was it the site of failed enterprise, but a place of
innovation. It was simply replaced by advancing technology (another station nearby took
its place), and remained a monument to Anglo-American cooperation and a convenient
humble origin point for what became one of the leading American electronics firms.
These latter stories of international cooperation and technological prowess carried strong
resonance in American society during the Cold War.
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Captain Edward Penniman’s 1869 mansion was an unexpected acquisition to the
park in 1963, but similarly demonstrated American enterprise in chronicling one man’s
success in the American whaling industry. The building served as an anchor for the Park
Service’s interpretation of Fort Hill, and as a physical reference point in its programs on
whales and whaling. Though Cape Cod whaling was over by the 1960s the house was a
grand monument to the industry, and a bright spot visually and historically in Fort Hill’s
larger narrative in the 1960s and ‘70s of environmental degradation. And Penniman
himself allowed the Park Service in the 1980s to tell a Horatio-Alger story of the local
boy who eventually built the grandest house in town and retired as a wealthy old salt – a
narrative that combined one of New England’s most famous coastal icons with that
decade’s emphasis on conspicuous consumption.
The last category of history in the park was of the federal government’s long
tradition on Cape Cod of helping its people. Beginning with the first lighthouse at the
end of the eighteenth century, the federal government expanded into operating lifesaving
stations along the outer Cape in the late nineteenth century and finally, with less frequent
marine disasters by the mid-twentieth century, created the park itself to accommodate the
pressing need of Cape Codders and visitors for public recreational space. Though initial
plans for a life-saving museum at the former Nauset Coast Guard Station succumbed to
the NPS’s environmental education needs and a reduced budget, growing public support
for historic preservation in the late 1970s resulted in the relocation of the last largelyunaltered life-saving station from Chatham to Provincetown. Eventually restored, it
became the home for the lifesaving museum and the start of a living history program in
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which men in replica Life-Saving Service clothing perform a beach rescue drill.
Subsequent preservation efforts have restored or saved former and active lighthouses.
The importance of these actions to the National Park Service was threefold.
Federal history was not, the Park Service believed, told adequately by maritime museums
from Connecticut to Maine, which focused on shipbuilding, maritime trade, and fisheries
over any discussion (if at all) of the federal government’s role in enabling these pursuits
via building and maintaining navigational aides, enforcing maritime laws, and performing
sea rescues. Stories of lifesaving and shipwrecks were also perennially popular with the
public. And, such tales of guiding lights and government-trained men literally saving
thousands of lives resulted in positive public relations for the federal government at a
time of intense public frustration and protest in the 1960s and ‘70s over its policies at
home and abroad.
The National Park Service is unquestionably one of the most popular agencies in
the federal government, but its actions are not above public reproach. Throughout its
history various constituencies shaped the creation and management of the national parks.
And on Cape Cod, this practice emerged during the 1985 to 1989 public campaign to