Our beach (Part 2)
Hi everyone!
From Ryder Beach to Knowles Heights, the crescent of sand along Cape Cod Bay, with Cranberry Hill at its center, has a vibrant history.
In last week’s installment of this four-part blog post, we chronicled the rise of a working waterfront from Colonial times to roughly 1900. This week, we witness the 20th century decline of the maritime economy as roads and bridges brought tourism to our shores. Next week, we bid farewell to the last vestiges of industrial Cape Cod, supplanted by subdivision and home construction. Finally, part 4 will bring us full circle, to the era of conservation, as we look to preserve the fragile ecosystem that remains after four centuries of exploration, exploitation and development.
Derailment at Great Swamp, 1914
Part 2: Highways and Maritime Decline (1900-1961)
From 1873 onward, the Old Colony Railroad (later absorbed by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad) became a vibrant commercial link between the Outer Cape’s farms and fishing ports and the cities of the Northeast. Seafood and produce from the wharves of Provincetown, the weirs of Cold Storage Beach in North Truro, and the oyster flats of Wellfleet traveled daily on busy tracks along the crest of our coastal bank. Although the photo above is an unhappy scene for any engineer, it does give you a sense of what our beach would have looked like during the heyday of the OCRR. The picture looks to me to be right at Great Swamp, on what is now the back deck of a home in the Shearwater HOA.
As early as the date of this photograph, major changes in Cape Cod’s infrastructure were underway that would reshape the Outer Cape over the next century. The construction of the Cape Cod Canal (1909-1914) reoriented shipping lanes, allowing ships to bypass the dangerous shoals of the Outer Cape entirely. With Truro’s harbor silting in, and Provincetown’s East Harbor cut off from the bay by the OCRR tracks, maritime activity in our corner of the world began to decline.
But nothing had as much of an impact as the construction of the Canal bridges at Bourne and Sagamore in the early 1930s, and the Mid-Cape Highway (Route 6 and associated roadways) soon after.
Mid-Cape Highway, 1930s
After World War II, the Cape attracted a steady stream of tourists, as real estate developers began to gobble up land abandoned by struggling farmers and summer cottage colonies sprang up along our shores. The highway began its march from the bridges to Provincetown during this time period, reaching Hyannis in 1950, Dennis in 1952 and the Orleans rotary in 1959. The stretch to Hyannis was widened to four lanes in 1954, and the four-lane format reached Dennis by 1971. While the Wellfleet and Truro bypasses were in place by the late 1950s, the path of the highway to the end of the line remained unclear for some time, leaving the outermost reaches something of a backwater.
During this time period, the Old Colony joined America’s other railways in a steep and fatal decline. Passenger service past North Eastham was ended in 1938, and the remaining stations, including those on Depot Road in Truro and at Pond Village in North Truro, were decommissioned. Freight service continued along the OCRR tracks to Provincetown (and past the fishing weirs at Cold Storage Beach) until the railroad’s demise, in 1959. In 1960, all of the trackage was dismantled, leaving only the old trestle bridge across Pamet Harbor.
Aerial view of the Pamet, showing the OCRR bridge, 1950s
As intensive development, even suburbanization, overtook the Inner Cape out to the Orleans rotary, a growing movement sought to preserve the Outer Cape’s unspoiled coastline, still in the same state as Henry David Thoreau would have experienced it, on his famous walk from Chatham to Provincetown.
On August 7, 1961, President Kennedy signed into law the Cape Cod National Seashore Act, preserving forever Thoreau’s ocean beach, along with large swaths of Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown. (I have always been proud that Truro is the only town where the National Seashore runs from “coast to coast.”)
All of the ingredients of our modern Outer Cape were now in place: the vanishing maritime/agrarian economy, the advance of the highway, the advent of tourism and summer “washashores” - but on the other hand, a newfound emphasis on conservation, spurred by the National Seashore.
Next week, residential development finally reaches the Outer Cape during the 1960s, as two brothers named Earl and Lester Godwin file subdivision paperwork for Cranberry Hill!