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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 9, part 5
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2002 08:16:25 -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 IX - WELLFLEET [part 5]

Wellfleet and her neighbor town, Truro, had their great whaling days,
but the Revolutionary War dealt both towns such a blow that neither
had capital enough left to fit out anew for the business. You will not
find many reminders, therefore, of those old days as you visit
Wellfleet now.

Whaling made Elisha DOANE one of the richest men in Massachusetts, and
it did almost as much for Jesse HOLBROOK. Our old historian, with fine
Yankee reserve, describes Captain Jesse as "a strong, athletic man,
weighing 350 pounds." In one voyage he killed 52 whales. Some of them
he may have simply got aboard and sat on till they suffocated; but
like Ichabod PADDOCK, Captain Jesse was so skillful with the iron that
he hired out as a professor of practical whaling, in the employ of a
London firm. He taught twelve years.

If you fancy reading what their survivors thought of these old
whalemen, you should turn off the highway at Commercial Street for
Chequesset Neck, where you will find the oldest "Judgment Lot" in town.

In the surrounding woods, too, there are several small old cemeteries,
some of them "pox acres." These were where the Old Colony buried its
victims of the dread smallpox - far from the settlement - and where
Cape folks continued to bring the bodies of such unfortunates until
late in the Nineteenth Century.

Hidden away in many wooded parts of Cape Cod, the "pox acres" are
avoided to this day by many an old-timer who remembers what they were
for. I have succeeded in getting them to tell me where the lots are
located, but not in getting them to go with me. "I know there ain't
been no burying there for forty year," one of these old men explained
to me, "but I jest don't never go there anyway. It's a notion I have."
And if you care to read of the ravages of the pox in centuries past,
you will understand why the Cape still has "a notion."

The road to Bound Brook Island, which is an island only by virtue of
an uncertain little creek, leads off the highway to the left, in North
Wellfleet. My five-foot map of the Cape, dated 1858, shows at least
two dozen houses on Bound Brook Island, and a school as well. Today
there are not more than half a dozen in the section proper.

When Cape Cod families moved, they went into the business
wholeheartedly, whenever possible taking the house along as the
principal item of their luggage. And sometimes they took along church,
schoolhouse and all. That was done usually for an economic reason, or
because the village streets were being washed away from under their
feet. But the practice of moving houses carries down to this day; only
recently the CLIFFORD house, an ancient landmark on the highlands
between Chathamport and West Chatham, was rolled up the South Shore
across four towns to a spot in Englewood, West Yarmouth. Dozens of
others have had similar travels.

If you have not yet found Sam Bellamy's pot of gold, your last chance
at it comes on Gull Pond Road, marked at the right, where, failing in
gold, I can at least show you a great green-rimmed cauldron of silver
with a sheen beyond the powers of all the smiths of India. Ben EATON's
place, the last house at Gull Pond, is the spot where "two red-coated
strangers" tethered their horses one night long ago and held a chart
up to the moonlight while a scared little girl held her breath and
peered at them over a window-ledge. They dug a hole here, but whether
they had any more luck than you might have, nobody in Wellfleet knows.
The tale has come down through generations of folks at Gull Pond,
which was something closer to a wilderness then, and curiously the
story seems to have escaped the embroidery that hangs in festoons over
most of these local traditions. It never reveals whether the strangers
really found and took away the gold.

The wreck of the ship "Franklin" is several times mentioned by
Thoreau, who saw Cape Cod wreckers along the beach, working on the
remains of her cargo. In his book he also makes a note of many fruit
trees which had been washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and
labeled. When Thoreau arrived on the scene, they were already growing
in a Cape Codder's garden. They had been consigned originally to a
"Mr. Bell," who was "importing the nucleus of a nursery to be
established near Boston."

At Gull Pond, next to Ben EATON's house, lives Walter P. ROWELL, in
whose orchard stand four sturdy apple trees. Their fruit is different
from the Cape apples - something like a Baldwin, but livelier,
snappier, juicier. And that, the neighborhood agrees, is because they
are "Franklin apples" - from saplings that were tossed up by the sea,
out of the wreck in 1848.

Across the pond, the outlines are visible of the house where Thoreau
spent the night with his "Wellfleet Oysterman," the old patriarch who
kept dolorously insisting that he was "a poor, good-for-nothing
crittur, as Isaiah says," but who, when bedtime came, took a great
pride in exhibiting his legs. "We had never had the good fortune to
see an old man's legs before," writes Thoreau, ever the inquiring
scientist, "and we were surprised to find them fair and plump as an
infant's."

On the highway, near the Truro line, there is a gasoline station. On
the roadside opposite was buried Delilah ROACH, the "last Indian in
Wellfleet."

[End of WELLFLEET; TRURO's next]

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







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