Our beach (Part 1)
Hi everyone!
From Ryder Beach to Knowles Heights, the crescent of sand along Cape Cod Bay has a vibrant history. The stretch we can see from our beach stairs, from Corn Hill to Cold Storage Beach, with Cranberry Hill dead center, is today the longest unbroken stretch of privately owned beachfront in Truro. I hope this four-part series will give you a jumping off point for further exploration!
Part 1 follows the rise of a working waterfront from Colonial times to roughly 1900. In Part 2, we chronicle the 20th century decline of the maritime economy as roads and bridges brought tourism to our shores. Part 3 takes a look at the era of development, as the last vestiges of industrial Cape Cod gave way to subdivision and home construction. Part 4 brings us full circle, to the era of conservation, as we look to preserve the fragile ecosystem that remains after four centuries of European settlement.
Cold Storage Weirs, 1908
Part 1: Colonial Times to Working Waterfront (1620-1900)
Everyone knows by now that the Pilgrims did not land at Plymouth Rock, but rather right off our beach. The interlopers marauded up and down our little coastline, hiking into Great Swamp (now in the center of the Shearwater HOA) and Corn Hill, where they found a large, mysterious iron kettle. To this day, no one knows how it got there.
After a few decades of settlement, laws were enacted by the nascent Massachusetts Bay Colony that sought to promote development along the harsh New England coastline. Under English law, the Crown owned the entire coastline from mean high tide outward. Everyone could use the wet sand tide lands for fishing and fowling, but Crown ownership ensured that the government could take a cut of the profits. But in Massachusetts, unique among the colonies, this ancient rule was modified to give private owners full possession of the tidelands out to mean low tide or 100 rods from mean high tide, whichever was less. The Colonial Ordinances of 1641-1647, still in effect today, allowed private owners to exclude others from their property except for “fishing and fowling”, and to take a cut of the proceeds from even those activities. (This concept will become important later in our story.)
Towns developed on the Outer Cape in the 18th century. The Town of Truro, founded in 1709, comprised several distinct villages - South Truro, near Ryder Beach; Truro center, clustered around the Pamet River and its natural harbor; North Truro, typically referred to as Pond Village until the 20th century; and East Harbor, now known as Pilgrim Lake, and open to the Bay until the railroad closed it off in the 1870s. Bitter weather and ship-eating sandbars along the ocean or “back side” of the Outer Cape forced settlement and commerce over to the relative calm of the bay. The pre-Colonial forest was stripped for shipbuilding, home construction, fuel and agriculture, with farms taking over the Truro highlands.
If you stood at the top of our beach stairs at the end of the Civil War, you would hardly recognize the place. Across the bay, you would see a teeming harbor that stretched al the way from Long Point to Beach Point, abuzz with packet ships ferrying the daily catch from Provincetown to Boston. To the south, Pamet Harbor in Truro, similarly thick with masts, long before the days when it shoaled up with agricultural runoff. Directly to the north, a bustling fishing weir at Cold Storage Beach, with a tramway bringing baskets of mackerel and shellfish in from the bay. Facing inland, with your back to the water, rolling farmland in all directions, dotted with church steeples.
North Truro (or “Moorlands”) Station, 1917
The maritime economy of the Outer Cape reached fever pitch with the expansion of the Old Colony Railroad from Wellfleet to Provincetown in 1873. Carried by a trestle bridge over Pamet Harbor, the OCRR’s tracks ran behind Corn Hill Beach, through Great Hollow and then up along the coastal bank, following the path of Fisherman’s Road Extension and hugging the bay all the way to Provincetown. While the railroad effectively killed off the packet shipping trade, it kept saloons and restaurants from Boston to New York well stocked with cod, haddock, striped bass and Wellfleet oysters.
For those of us who have lived through winter storms in Cranberry Hill, it is difficult to imagine a working railroad right along the beach. And as you will see from the photo below, taken just north of Cranberry Hill, it was not always an easy ride!
Snowbound train, Great Swamp, North Truro, 1910
The image below shows Cold Storage beach from the back side in 1910, at its commercial pinnacle, with the fishing weir and railroad station clearly visible. What happened next? The horse-drawn carriages waiting to collect their charges will give you a clue. For the railroad brought passengers as well as commerce. In Part 2, we will look at how this trickle of curious day trippers turned into a flood, aided by a brand new highway.
North Truro Station and Cold Storage, 1910