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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 8, part 1
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 12:22:52 -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 VIII - EASTHAM [part 1]

Provincetown for beauty,
Wellfleet for pride,
If it wasn't for milk cans
Eastham 'd a' died.

The poetry, anonymous and of aesthetic interest only to the Cape Cod
schoolboy of another generation, had a point nevertheless. In the days
when salt hay contented the cows and the customers were not too picky,
every up-Cape train took on a cargo of milk from the Nauset dairy herds.

The youth of neighborhoods where local rivalry exists usually has its
jingles, and the nameless young bards of Cape Cod have left several to
posterity. To the milk can quatrain the Eastham lads might fling back:

The Cape Cod girls thay have no combs,
They comb their hair with codfish bones;
The Cape Cod boys thay have no sleds,
They slide downhill on codfish heads.

"Cape Cod," in the sense used here, referred to Provincetown, and up
only as far as High Head, North Truro. There were other gems in the
repertory, referring to Wellfleet residents as "Bible-faces," and to
the good people of Harwich as "Hairleggers."

Even with her milk cans, Eastham was only a shadow of her former self,
for in Old Colony times she had embraced Wellfleet as the North
Parish and Orleans as the South. When she lost Orleans, in 1797, she
was sheared of her most populous section, and it happened at a time
when she was having thin years of her own, with an eroding soil
and depleted forests. But the parting from Orleans was a parting for
good; only the other day I ran across a newspaper story:

Orleans, Feb. 5 - A fight to the finish with Eastham over ancient
legislation governing control of the shell fishery was promised at
the Orleans town meeting yesterday ... The assembly cheered when
Moderator John KENRICK donated his $25 moderator's fee as the nucleus
of a "fighting fund" to repel Eastham attacks on the Orleans town charter.

Yet Eastham makes many demands upon your attention. She is small, but
her fourth dimension - time - stretches back to embrace teeming tracts
on the unseen maps of history.

If I were judge of a beauty contest and the fifteen towns of Cape Cod
were marched before my eyes, I think I should give the prize to
Eastham. Her hard old features are not regular; her complexion is
lumped and full of scars from her everlasting duel with the sea, and
there is no "pose" in her smile, which comes grim and sparing through
the wrinkles of centuries. But you will not have to look long to find
"character" in this old townface, and like our Cape Cod landlady of
another chapter, I would point out that there is nothing in the world
like the bareness of her "back side."

Beyond admitting that I am in love with her, I shall not try to list
the colors of her dunes or




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








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