Our beach (Part 3)
Hi everyone!
From Ryder Beach to Knowles Heights, our crescent of sand along Cape Cod Bay (with Cranberry Hill at its center) has a vibrant history.
In previous installments of this blog post, we chronicled the rise of a working waterfront from Colonial times to roughly 1900, and the 20th century demise of the maritime economy as roads and bridges brought tourism to our shores. In this week’s post, Cranberry Hill is born, as part of the postwar development of the Outer Cape. In next week’s final installment, we come 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.
Mid-Cape Highway, 1950s
Part 3: Development Reaches the Outer Cape (1961-1990)
Cape Cod’s population reached a high of about 36,000 people in 1860. As farmers pulled up stakes to move into the cities, numbers declined for nearly a century, not reaching the 1860 peak again until 1940. From 1940 to 1960, the population doubled, then doubled again from 1960 to 1980, finally reaching about 230,000 today.
We left off last week with the foundation of the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961. With the stroke of a pen, the Federal government ensured that the Outer Cape would be spared the intensive, suburban development that overtook much of the rest of Barnstable County.
Provincetown has always followed its own unique and interesting course, and continued to do so after World War II. The towns of Truro and Wellfleet languished a bit during this time period, protected from overdevelopment by the National Seashore and their distance from the bridges. Along Cranberry Hill’s beachfront, vestiges of the old infrastructure remained visible well into living memory. The Old Colony railroad bridge over the Pamet survived until 1968, the old fishery tower at Cold Storage Beach until at least the mid-1970s, and the Cold Storage tramway (unbelievably) until the 1990s, as the pictures below illustrate:
Old Colony Railroad Bridge, Pamet Harbor, 1968
Cold Storage tower, 1975 - baskets of mackerel and shellfish were once hauled up using this structure, where a tramway took them to the fishing weirs onshore
Cold Storage tramway, 1990s - incredible that this survived so long! Note the fabulous 80s architecture at the right of the photo
A question arose during the 1950s about how to finish off the last miles of the highway out to Provincetown. Unbelievably, the original plan was to take Route 6 along the Old Colony Railroad tracks, over the Pamet trestle bridge, behind Corn Hill beach, through Great Hollow and along Cranberry Hill’s waterfront, ultimately connecting to an esplanade along Beach Point. It would have been a lovely drive along the coast, but a disaster for our beach!
Fortunately, the decision was made to punch through the dunes further inland, once people were satisfied that winter sandstorms would not bury the road. As a result, the section of Route 6 from Castle Road to the winery turnoff lacks a country road bypass. While experienced bikers may have come to dread this stretch, shared with manic truck drivers and distracted day trippers, it was a small price to pay for Cranberry Hill’s coastal bank and pristine private beach.
With the road sorted out, residential development got underway, with numerous subdivisions recorded in North Truro starting in the 1960s. Cranberry Hill was one of them, founded in 1963 by two brothers named Earl and Lester Godwin who we assume cobbled the land together from old farmsteads. At the time, you could stand on Route 6 at the entrance to Fishermans Road and see clear to the ocean on one side and the bay on the other — a spare, elegant Hopper landscape of rolling coastal meadows in every direction. Charlie and Ellen Harrer bought the first lot and several others, including 27 Fishermans Road, where Ken and I now live. Dick and Bobbie Keating’s house on Heather Lane was one of the first to be built, joined by a few others in the 1960s and 1970s, then followed by a building boom through the 1980s around the time the HOA was started.
When the Godwin brothers snapped up the Old Colony Railroad property and rights of way along the coastal bank in 1968, they did an amazing thing for Cranberry Hill: Rather than subdividing that land into distinct beachfront lots, each with ownership out to mean low tide, they created a flag-shaped lot encompassing the entire tideland and a parking lot for the perpetual benefit of the entire community. Cranberry Hill, Inc. succeeded the Godwins as owners of this precious legacy. To this day, we are the only HOA on the Outer Cape that owns the entire length of its beachfront. (I told you the Coastal Ordinances of 1641-1647 would become important later on in this saga!)
Next week, we will wrap things up with a focus on recent history and trends, as towns on the Outer Cape struggle with the buildout of the 1960s subdivisions, a shortage of affordable housing and scant economic opportunity for year-round residents, all while balancing the need to protect the natural environment that makes our area so special.