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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 7, part 7
Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 09:01:59 -0600
References: <200112191104.fBJB48Q10270@lists2.rootsweb.com>


======================================================================
Cape Cod Pilot, by Jeremiah Diggs, American Guide Series, published by
Modern Pilgrim Press, Provincetown, MA, 1937. This was a work
underwritten by the Federal Writers Project, Works Project
Administration (WPA) for the State of Massachusetts.
======================================================================

Chapter VII - ORLEANS [part 7]

Cape Cod's main contribution to the architecture of homes is
simplicity. The principle seems to be, roughly, that the looks of a
house are not enhanced by any "gadget" or trick which does not in some
way add to its function as a shelter; and conversely, if the need for
shelter is perfectly fulfilled, and the structure best designed to
meet the elements where it stands, its looks will take care
of themselves - will be good looks. There is nothing new, of course,
about the principle; but there is plenty of evidence that it is not
always followed. The Cape Cod cottage adheres faithfully.

The type is the "story and a half," with a large chimney in the
center. This generous piece of masonry is important not only for the
draught, but as a mainstay for the entire structure. A large chimney,
a well shaped mass around it, and a few carefully placed windows, are
main requisites. The windows are small-paned, and they go up near the
eaves. Any form of dormer is incongruous. The ceilings are kept low,
and the usual design places one square room on each side of the front
door, a large kitchen across the rear, with a "buttery" at one end and
a small bedroom at the other. From the entrance hall in front, a
narrow stairway, which is sometimes called the "chicken ladder,"
goes steeply to the attic, slanting towards the front of the chimney.
Upstairs there are usually two rooms and a bath. With this design as a
base, ells can be guilt on, and were built to keep up with
the expanding family. Piazzas go poorly.

The foundation of stone, set dry, provides for plenty of ventilation.
In the fall, many old Cape Codders "banked up" for the winter filling
a trough around the base of the house with seaweed to stop the
draughts. The salt ar of the Cape will very soon bring the shingles of
a new house around to a beautiful silver gray. Inland, they turn brown
or dark gray, but here, if a house is shingled with white cedar, it
will lose its schoolgirl complexion in a couple of years and weather
to the color of its century-old companions.

A trellis or two and the conventional white picket fence, from
eighteen to twenty-four inches high, are the only bits of "running
rigging" your craft needs out of doors. Even the fences had one
function to perform, suggested by the woman who "could count the
missing pickets in her neighbor's fence quicker than she could mend
her own." The condition of the fence, on the Cape, is as important as
the state of a flight of white steps in Baltimore.

The earmarks of an old house are several., If the door to her brick
oven is wooden, she probably was built before 1800. If her window
panes are twenty-four, she is older than if they are twelve. If her
shingles are of white pine, add a century earlier than cedar. If they
are split or "rived," instead of sawn, do the same. If any of her
floorplanks are more than two feet wide, she has heard talk of the
British on our shores, and her timbers may have been to sea. If she
has a round-cellar, she deserves respect, or has succeeded to the sit
of one that did; but for such veneration, she should also have a
"summer beam" in her kitchen, she should face south, and there should
be a mark upon her floor under one of the windows, for the telling of
time on sunny days; under her attic steps there should be a cat-hole;
there should be a little grooved rain-trough on her threshold, and she
may have a millstone, perhaps, as her doorstep. She is at her best if
her fireplace in the kitchen is large enough for her mistress to walk
in and do the cooking, and for the children to sit at the ends and
look up through the chimney at the stars., The high child mortality
rate that attracts the notice of wanderers in Cape cemeteries probably
owes much to the colds caught in the fireplace.

In the village of Orleans you pass a large house that was once the old
HIGGINS Tavern, a stagecoach stop where down-Cape travelers put up for
the night with a prayer that their craft would not capsize in the deep
sand on the morrow. It is the building at the left just before
SHERMAN's garage. Here Thoreau, on his journey down-Cape, paused
feeling "very much as if we were on a sandbar in the ocean, and not
knowing whether we should see land or water when the mist cleared
away." The Tavern was built in 1829, but it was a tavern in a very
mild sense, for Orleans had gone dry three years before, and even the
use of tobacco was discouraged in concerted campaigns here.

"The cause of temperance," writes the Reverend Mr. Pratt, "is very
prosperous in the town." In 1837 a professional reformer, the Reverend
Charles S. ADAMS, came down from Boston and read an original poem
before the Temperance Society and the Anti-Tobacco Society.

"Popes, kings and legislatures all combine
By excommunication, threats and fine,
To stay its march, to break its iron rod -
It conquers still, and triumphs like a god:
This nauseous weed, despite of all their laws,
Still holds its throne between the human jaws."

It ran for twenty-four pages.

"Hysteric fits," Thoreau said, "are very common in Orleans, Eastham
and towns below, particularly on Sun day, in the times of divine
service. When one woman is affected, five or six
others generally sympathize with her; and the congregation is thrown
into the utmost confusion." His explanation for all this was the fact
that "a large portion of the population are women whose husbands are
either abroad on the sea or else drowned, and there is nobody but they
and the ministers left behind."

Two of Orleans' churches played the parts outlined by Messrs.. Pratt
and Thoreau - the Universalist, which mothered the famous Sewing
Circle, and the Methodist, and both have been dutiful in the
safekeeping of local history. In the Chapel of the Holy Spirit,
Episcopal, you will find a Fifteenth Century Della Robbia plaque, and
a bit of altar lace that dates back more than 200 years, when it was
used in a church in Southern England.


[more to come]
transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall







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