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Archiver > MABARNST > 2002-04 > 1019535036


From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 16, part 2
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 23:12:02 -0500
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 XVI - HYANNIS & SOUTH SHORE TOWNS [part 2]

As soon as the rising young mariner of Barnstable got his captain's
berth, he began saving for a home; when the home was built, he sat
down and pondered what type of weathervane was to go on the barn; and
then, with that problem out of the way, married and had children.

The South Shore people, especially, were aware of the importance of a
weathervane, and the summer residents have kept the old feeling alive.
You will see vanes of many kinds on your tour of the Cape - the
full-rigged ship, the whale, the codfish, crow, swordfish, windmill,
dart and "Sailor Jack." One of the finest is an old cast-iron racing
sulky-horse, vehicle, driver and all - riding the Barnstable winds
atop a barn on Mill Way. Captain Thomas HINCKLEY owned the house and
barn in the eighties, and the little sulky was there then, but who
first set it up nobody knows. It follows a Currier and Ives design -
very jaunty, the horse having all four feet in the air - and the
present owner of the barn, Miss Ruth SNOW, clerk of Superior Court in
Barnstable, has had many an offer for it.

But the South Shore folks who keep up with the Joneses must now
install indoor weathervanes, the latest stage in the evolution of the
ancient golden rooster. A Boston newspaper made the faux pas in 1936
of referring to a "unique device" in a Dedham gymnasium, calling it
"the only indoor weather-vane in the United States." Immediately there
were outraged calls from Cape Cod. The new Coast Guard stations are
all equipped with them, but more decorative ones are now in many Cape
homes. The first to protest the Boston story was a resident of
Colonial Acres, in West Yarmouth, who had just installed a handsome
ship's compass, set in the ceiling of his home, with an arrow to show
the wind's direction. The arrow was on a vertical shaft which went up
through the roof, to a schooner that swung as an outdoor vane. Then
other Cape homeowners began telling about their indoor vanes. One, in
South Yarmouth, even had an elaborate electric arrangement, which
flashed little ruby-glass lamps on the compass to show which way the
wind blew!

In the library - the little gray-shingled house on Main Street - there
are exhibits worth seeing if only to remind you that Hyannis was once
a seafaring town, as unpretentious as any other on the Cape, and able
to produce its deep-sea sailors. There was young Rodney BAXTER, who
rushed a cargo of corn and flour to the Irish in the famine Of 1847.
He drove his fore-and-aft schooner to Sligo in twenty-two days and
came back in seventeen, beating Captain Allen CROWELL, another Hyannis
man, in the schooner "Cabot."

The shops are farther along Main Street, and there are two departures
from the highway to be given a note here - one to the southward, on
Sea Street through the summer estates of Hyannisport, and the other
northward to Shoot-flying Hill. For the latter, turn off Main Street
on the Barnstable Road, and at the rotary traffic circle take Route
132 for about three miles, turning off left on a dirt road.

On the hill there is a fire tower, open to visitors. From the crow's
nest the Cape and its waters are spread out for you like a vast map
which sometimes blurs in a blue haze, sometimes stands out sharp and
clear, but in either case is worth climbing to look at. If it is
clear, you can see Provincetown to the northeast, Martha's Vineyard to
the southwest, and the Canal up-Cape in Bourne; and in the foreground
is Lake Wequaquet, like a nine-mile mirror for a vain and fickle sky.

Centerville is Cape Cod in its best go-ashore shirt. Osterville,
Wianno and Oyster Harbors are the off-Cape world in a boiled shirt.
Here the everyday tourist runs into closed gateways, and the landscape
runs into money - mostly off-Cape money. There are a few houses with
pasts of their own, however. One is the large SAFFORD home on Long
Beach, Centerville.

Although the architecture of this house is Cape Cod throughout, it
was, strangely enough, built in Nottingham, N. H., more than two
centuries ago. Cape Cod would not come to this cottage, so Mrs. John
H. SAFFORD, who inherited it, decided to bring the cottage to Cape
Cod. Over the 140 miles from Nottingham to Centerville, the house
moved in sections. There were nine truckloads of it. Even the flatrock
doorsteps were fetched along. The original chimney bricks were taken
down and reset, with the three fireplaces in their former relation to
the great flue. Sometimes I wonder what this old "Cape Cod" cottage,
this exile of two centuries, must think about - now that it has come
to the Cape at last, only to find itself a stranger still, an alien
amid the off-Cape mansions of the summer folk!

In Osterville the CROSBY boatyard carries on a century-old business,
building "Crosby cats." And at Oyster Harbors, where Goodman HATCH and
his many children pickled oysters for a living in 1660, before they
decided the broad acres of Falmouth were a more respectable place to
live, the Oyster Harbors Club now shelters one of the most exclusive
colonies on the Cape. It is, in fact, more exclusive and considerably
more provincial than Falmouth Heights - that part of the neighboring
town's millionaire settlement where Goodman HATCH betook himself.

The golf course at Oyster Harbors, one of nearly a score of fine
courses on the Cape, was still a sandy wilderness in the early 1920's,
until experts were hired to see what could be done here about greens
and fairways. Money was no consideration. The course was cleared and
sodded, and grass was made to grow which all but curled its
flourishing blades into dollar signs. With the grasses came Felix du
PONT. Oyster Harbors was "made."

Throughout these South Sea villages, wealth seeks the waterfront. In
Cotuit, for example, the "highground" and Cotuitport, south of the
village, are considerably more dressed up in large estates, yacht
club, golf course and other summer rig, than Cotuit Village. But
Marston's Mills, to the north of the highway out of Centerville, is
almost recognizable as Cape Cod, though little is left of this
hamlet's ancient landmarks. One of these was the grist mill that gave
the town its name and stood here 200 years.

Benjamin MARSTON came from Salem, built the mill on the stream and
prospered. He sent his boy Nymphas to Yale. Nymphas became a judge,
but when the trouble broke out with the mother country, he scandalized
his Tory neighbors by his revolutionary leanings. He even put up the
boys who were on their way to the defense of Falmouth, and when one of
them, carried away by patriotic feeling or something, fired off a
salute inside Nymphas's house and brought down the dining room
plaster, the judge assured the crowd it was all right, "if they would
carry out their zeal in shattering the ranks of the enemy." The old
mill came down in a gale in 1930. A. P. GARDNER, a New York artist who
had seen and loved it, made a painting of it, which was presented to
the village library.

Marston's Mills lost another relic in 1937 when its century-old
blacksmith shop was taken down, and an even finer one in the same year
when the two Misses BAXTER sold their ancient cottage on Osterville
Road to a millionaire executive in the aluminum industry. This house,
- originally one room, had been moved at some time in the dim past
from East Sandwich, and it is one of the reasons I have hesitated to
call the HOXIE House in Sandwich "the oldest house on the Cape;" for
nobody knows how old the house that came to Marston's Mills was.
Captain Sidney BAXTER, a coasting skipper, bought it in 1856 and added
some rooms. The latest transfer removes it from its Osterville Road
site, and - as far as the public is concerned - from Cape Cod.


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













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