Imagining the Old Coast

Home , Boston King, By the Seashore, Camp Wellfleet, Captain Crapo, Edward Rowe Snow, Fort Winthrop

IMAGINING THE OLD COAST:

HISTORY, HERITAGE, AND TOURISM IN NEW ENGLAND,

1865-2012

JONATHAN MORIN OLLY

B.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST, 2002

A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2008

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2013

This dissertation by Jonathan Morin Olly is accepted in its present form

by the Department of American Studies as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date: ______Steven D. Lubar, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date: ______Patrick M. Malone, Reader

Date: ______Elliott J. Gorn, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date: ______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Jonathan Morin Olly was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on April 17, 1980.

He received his B.A. in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002, and

his A.M. in Public Humanities at Brown University in 2008. He has interned for the

National Museum of American History, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the

Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and the Penobscot Marine Museum. He has also worked in the curatorial departments of the Norman Rockwell Museum and the National

Heritage Museum. While at Brown he served as a student curator at the Haffenreffer

Museum of Anthropology, and taught a course in the Department of American Studies on the history, culture, and environmental impact of catching and eating seafood in New

England. Olly has additionally worked on public history projects in New York,

Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While writing is a solitary activity, this dissertation would not exist without the support of mentors, colleagues, friends, and family over the years.

To my committee of Steven Lubar, Patrick Malone, and Elliott Gorn, I feel

privileged to have worked for each of them as a teaching assistant, taken their courses,

and had innumerable conversations in offices, hallways, on sidewalks, and through email.

They have generously given their time, read though voluminous chapters, tolerated my

ever-shifting deadlines, and made timely suggestions and edits that make this document

accurate, readable, and in dialogue with the relevant scholarship. It was with Steve that I

narrowed my focus on coastal New England to these case studies, and it was his careful

editing, public history experience, and questions that brought me back from many

tangents to think about the significance of the stories I was chronicling. From Pat I

benefited from his more than four decades of studying the American built environment,

and museum and archaeological work. His often personal knowledge of the places and

people I wrote about bolstered what I learned in my own research and site visits, and he

could always be counted upon to suggest a useful book. Elliott (now in Chicago at

Loyola University) provided encouragement and advice on the craft of writing history,

from how to pare down mountains of archival material to identifying the themes within

my chapters and their relevance to the larger story. I could not have asked for a better

trio of mentors.

In the Department of American Studies I have also benefited from two fellowship

years that allowed me to begin digging through archives and writing the first rough

chapters, and from the encouragement and support of Ralph Rodriguez, Bob Lee, and

Susan Smulyan. Ralph and Susan’s periodic check-ins, knowledge, and sympathetic ears

helped to keep me on track, and it was a final paper for Bob Lee’s class in the fall of

2006 that became the core of the first chapter of this dissertation. Working for Susan as a research assistant this past semester proved informative, unexpectedly entertaining, and a

welcome, temporary distraction from dissertation editing. My thanks also to department

manager Jeff Cabral for his administrative assistance, and making the department an ideal

location to write much of this dissertation. From Karl Jacoby in the History Department

(and now at Columbia University), I received an important grounding in environmental

history that especially informed my writing on Cape Cod National Seashore.

My research on New England maritime public history brought me in contact with

individuals, businesses, libraries, museums, archives, and universities in New York,

Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Among these, I

would like to express particular gratitude to James Lindgren at SUNY Plattsburgh; Ben

Fuller at the Penobscot Marine Museum; Sarah Dunlap at the Gloucester City Archives;

Fred and Stephanie Buck at the Cape Ann Museum; Joanne Riley at UMass Boston; the

staff of the National Archives at Boston; Debbie Despres at Yankee Publishing; James

Claflin of Kenrick A. Claflin & Son; Dan Finamore and Carrie Van Horn at the Peabody

Essex Museum; Kurt Erickson at WCAT; Art Donahue at Chronicle; Jeremy

D’Entremont; Dolly Snow Bicknell; Jennifer Pino at Boston University’s Howard

Gottlieb Archival Research Center; Sean Fisher at the DCR Archives; Kevin Smith of the

Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology; D. K. Abbass of the Rhode Island Marine

Archaeology Project; and Paul O’Pecko, Kelly Drake, and Maribeth Bielinski at Mystic

Seaport’s Collections Research Center.

Out on Cape Cod, Robin Smith-Johnson at the Cape Cod Times first helped me

navigate the paper’s extensive library in 2006 while researching whale strandings, and again in December 2011 and January 2012 for national seashore research. The National

Park Service personnel at Cape Cod National Seashore were exceedingly generous during

my research trips there in 2011 and 2012, including two extended stays at Benz House

overlooking Nauset Marsh in Eastham. I could not have asked for a more beautiful and

productive place from which to research and write. For welcoming my project, providing

access to the seashore’s archives, free use of the copier, and answers to my many

questions drawn from their extensive knowledge of the seashore’s nature, history, and

infrastructure, I warmly thank Marcel Mousseau, Richard Ryder, David Spang, Hope

Morrill, and especially Bill Burke.

Dissertation research once again brought me to the New Bedford Whaling

Museum, a place I’ve admired since a year-long internship there in 2002-2003. I’ve

continued to rely on the knowledgeable and kind staff, most notably Laura Pereira,

Michael Lapides, Michael Dyer, and Stuart Frank. Many of my first significant lessons in exhibitions, collections management, and archival research began with them. Stuart

Frank and Mary Malloy have over the past decade been important mentors, and were the first to nudge me toward graduate school and Brown in particular – where they both earned PhDs in the American Studies Department. I thank you for your encouragement all these years.

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At Brown University, the staffs at the Rockefeller and Hay libraries have accommodated my innumerable inter-library loan requests, database questions, and visits to the Hay’s reading room during every year of my graduate study. I am thankful for their reservoir of knowledge about American history and culture, special collections, and seemingly superhuman ability to provide any publication I have ever needed. As the

headquarters of the Public Humanities program, the John Nicholas Brown Center has

served as a second home for much of my time in Providence. Ron Potvin, Jenna Legault, and her predecessor, Chelsea Shriver, have shared their knowledge of museum exhibitions, programs, and the inner-workings of the center. That the JNBC smoothly functions as a classroom, meeting, office, and exhibition space is testament to their hard

work, long hours, and expertise.

Starting at Brown in the fall of 2006, I’ve been fortunate to have a supportive

community of colleagues and friends not only in this department and school, but in the

surrounding city, state, and region. With you I’ve shared classes, deadlines, TA

assignments, exams, workshops, coffee, brunch, lunch, dinner, drinks, walks, hikes,

parties, karaoke, camping, beach trips, barbeques, and yoga. I’ve benefited from your

feedback, encouragement, inspiration, enthusiasm, distractions, curiosity, and humor in

person and over email and phone. To try and list everyone who contributed to my

personal and intellectual growth would take the length of these acknowledgments, but I

would like to thank especially Michelle Carriger, Erin Curtis, Laura D’Amato, Sean

Dinces, Tony Evans, Tasha Ferraro, Sara Fingal, Alissa Haddaji, Ryan Hartigan, Anna

Hartley, Kathryn Higgins, Logan Johnsen, Amy Johnson, Jessica Johnson, Andrew

Losowsky, Lyra Monteiro, Sarah Moran, Cat Munroe, Stephanie Robb, Gosia Rymsza-

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Pawlowska, Hayato Sakurai, Robyn Schroeder, Sarah Seidman, Kara Vautour, Aleysia

Whitmore, Nora Wilcox, and Miel Wilson. Many of you have since left the area, but all of you have helped make Providence, in ways small and large, feel like a home.

My longest and most dedicated supporters in this endeavor, and all that have come before, are my family. To my father Allan Olly and mother Elaine Morin-Olly, that

I have made it this far is entirely the result of your love, guidance, and encouragement for what is decidedly not a career path to fame or fortune. From my father’s knowledge of history and my mother’s passion for collecting came my early interest in material culture and awareness of the past in daily life. Both have worked extremely hard to equip their three children for success. I admire my siblings Allison and Tristan for their hard work and willingness to take risks in each of their pursuits, and I am grateful for your love and interest. I have additionally benefited from the support of cousins, aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, and grandparents. You have all influenced my life and inspired me. I stand on your shoulders.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………iii

Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………………iv

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………...v

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter 1 Salting the Coast: Creating a Coastal Icon in New England…………………………….44

Chapter 2 Mystic Seaport: Reconstructing a Maritime Past to Safeguard the Present…………….112

Chapter 3 Edward Rowe Snow and the Distilling of Coastal Identity; or, Selling Sea Tales by the Seashore……………………………………………………………….…..209

Chapter 4 Toward a More Natural History: Cape Cod National Seashore, 1955-1989…………...326

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...464

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....515

INTRODUCTION

There is nothing special about the New England coast. This is hyperbole, but wave-swept granite rocks, traditional sailing vessels anchored in quaint harbors, seafood shacks, museums celebrating the colonial era – nearly all of the individual things that visitors and locals can photograph, buy, visit, or otherwise consume can each be found elsewhere. Film and television crews know this as they add shots of famous skylines or insert local props, accents, and building forms to movies and programs filmed largely on studio lots or in more production-friendly cities and towns. Identity is malleable. What we think of as typically New England is a compendium of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures built from personal experience and sifted from popular culture. Knowledge of the latter influences the former and vice versa.

What visitors and locals experience today is an intensely remembered coastal landscape. Consider these four stories of the New England coast:

 In 1916 writer Hildegarde Hawthorne (granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne)

toured New England’s historic seaports with a particular interest in old mariners,

whom she imagined possessed romantic stories and Anglo-Saxon heritage.

 In 1941 a tugboat towed the rotting whaleship Charles W. Morgan into Mystic,

Connecticut, as the main exhibit of what would become the country’s leading

maritime museum.

 In 1959 Edward Rowe Snow published perhaps his twelfth book on coastal lore,

combining his historian’s skill for rigorous archival research with the public’s

appetite for stories about pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and ghosts.

 In 1961 President John F. Kennedy signed legislation creating a national seashore

on Cape Cod, a property that the National Park Service would have to preserve

and interpret for the public.

These vignettes illustrate ways in which groups have participated in constructing a sense of history along the New England coast. Its 6,130 miles of tidal shoreline stitch together hundreds of towns and cities in five states and preclude, at least as of 2012, any single top-down branding effort. But over the course of the twentieth century, individuals, companies, museums, and governmental agencies have together created a composite portrait of place that I call the “Old Coast.” I use this term as shorthand for the portrait of the region’s past that individuals and groups contributed to during the first six decades of the twentieth century: coastal people performing traditional occupations, groups and individuals preserving historic artifacts, the collecting and sharing of coastal lore, and preserving cultural and natural resources in situ. These cultural producers were using the past to meet their needs, whether commerce, patriotism, education, entertainment, or a combination of these.1

The “Old Coast” is not an actual brand, as no business, governmental agency, or organization anywhere in New England has publicly used the phrase to promote the

coast. New England boosters, however, have launched branding campaigns on city and

1 Length of New England coastline from this pamphlet: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, The Coastline of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), http://shoreline.noaa.gov/_pdf/Coastline_of_the_US_1975.pdf (accessed November 11, 2012).

3 state levels for over a century, such as those of Salem, Massachusetts, (the “Witch City”) and Maine (“Vacationland”). And outside New England, other states have coined terms to describe parts of their coastlines, such as Florida’s “First Coast,” created by advertisers in 1983 and which communities in northeastern Florida subsequently adopted. This dissertation also does not engage the literature surrounding branding and advertising, but rather that of public history and tourism studies for my exploration of how people construct a sense of place. Lastly, in describing coastal New England’s vernacular identity as the “Old Coast” I intend it to serve as a counterpart to historians Ian McKay and Robin Bates’s characterization of Nova Scotia as the “Province of History” for the way that cultural producers there crafted its public past during the twentieth century.2

Why write about the New England coast?

The New England seacoast is an ideal place to understand the relationship

between history, heritage, and tourism in creating a sense of place. Tourists have visited

New England for its natural and cultural attractions since the eighteenth century. And

since the late-nineteenth century these cultural attractions have increasingly focused on

the region’s historical features. In the twentieth century history became the dominant

theme of the tourism industry in alongshore New England. In focusing mostly on the

2 Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth and Memory (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 2004). The editors have also set up a companion web site, http://www.witchcity.org (accessed November 21, 2012). The State of Maine began using the slogan “Vacationland” on its license plates in 1936. The slogan was originally the creation of publicists for the Maine Central Railroad Company in the late 1890s according to George H. Lewis, “The Maine That Never Was: The Construction of Popular Myth in Regional Culture,” Journal of American Culture 16, no. 2 (June 1993): 91-100. For more on the branding of Maine, see George H. Lewis, “Shell Games in Vacationland: Homarus americanus and the State of Maine,” in Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan, UT.: Utah State University Press, 1997), 249-273. Christopher Calnan, “The Birth of the ‘First Coast,’ Florida Times-Union, November 6, 2002, http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/110602/bus_10891102.shtml (accessed December 20, 2012). Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

4 twentieth-century coast, I argue in this dissertation that people, businesses, museums, and government agencies collectively built this “Old Coast” vernacular identity – with important consequences for visitors, residents, and the coastal environment. There are many stories of the New England coast that I could have chosen. The windjammer fleet of Maine, for instance (the largest fleet of traditional sailing vessels in North America), are coastal icons offering an immersive experience in a Yankee past for tourists. And

Strawbery Banke, a living history museum created as a result of urban renewal in

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a place to explore the issues affecting a coastal community from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. But I have chosen these four examples because of their prior lack of attention by scholars, geographical coverage, and strength of primary sources available in popular culture and archives.

The case studies in this dissertation have also each made a significant mark on

American culture as being distinctly New England. Old salts are a coastal icon with the longest and most numerous presence in New England. Like Edward Rowe Snow they straddle the individual and business categories of “Old Coast” contributors, as actual people and their stories became adapted for quick, for-profit consumption. Edward Rowe

Snow is unparalleled as a coastal chronicler in terms of the number of publications and his six decades of writing and giving lectures and tours. Mystic Seaport is one of

America’s oldest maritime museums, and during the twentieth century became its leading one. And Cape Cod National Seashore within in its first decade of operation became the single largest tourist attraction along the New England coast in both acreage and visitors.3

3 Maine Windjammer Association, “Frequently Asked Questions About Windjamming,” http://www.sailmainecoast.com/cruise_planner/faqs.htm (accessed November 11, 2012). For tourists in Newport as early as the 1720s, see Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 40-42. For CCNS

The “Old Coast” is not a natural identity

But New England was not destined to become the “Old Coast.” As historians

such as Eric Purchase and Dona Brown have demonstrated in their works on regional

tourism, tourist sites are constructed, not natural.4 New England is one of America’s

oldest European-settled regions, and was a leader in certain chapters of American history

such as fishing, maritime commerce, and wooden shipbuilding. However, this economic

and historical importance, and the infrastructure of the coastal industries, did not

automatically lend themselves to becoming popular tourist sites (as the coal mining

industry of Appalachia has not). As Brown argues, tourism in New England during the

nineteenth century first became a business (infrastructure, guidebooks), then the

commodification of the tourist experience (how to best adapt what was there for

maximum “value”), and finally a mythical Old New England that selected parts of this

history and related sites and objects, and masked the rest. During the nineteenth century

tourism became commercialized, and the experiences that awaited tourists gradually

became transformed into commodities. New England was one of many American

regions romanticized and marketed – basically invented – for internal and outside

consumption. The landscape that today’s visitors and locals experience, whether miles of

empty beaches or carefully restored historic sites, is an intensely managed and often

contested space. The increasing number of these recreational sites makes New England

annual visitor statistics, 1964 through 2011, see National Park Service, “Cape Cod NS,” https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park Specific Reports/Annual Park Visitation (All Years)?Park=CACO (accessed November 10, 2012). 4 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

6 representative of a global trend in which fishing-related industries withdraw from small and remote coastal communities and consolidate into a few large ports, leaving tourism as the most, and often the only, economically important industry in this space – with important repercussions for the coast’s natural and human environments.

My focus

In four chapters I trace how a sense of history has been constructed along the

coast between the end of the Civil War and the 1980s through overlapping waves of

mythmaking, filiopiety, and preservation.5 Old salts emerged in the early twentieth century as a popular coastal icon celebrating Anglo-Saxon heritage, but one that also served to hide the increasingly diverse ethnic composition of the region’s fishermen.

Mystic Seaport developed during the nationalism and Cold War anxiety of the 1940s and

1950s into America’s premier maritime museum. Its founders needed to balance

presenting useful history while capturing people’s popular (and sometimes inaccurate)

fascination with the sea. Edward Rowe Snow relied more heavily on heritage (a blend of

fact and fiction rooted in personal or familial connections) than did Mystic as he combed

the region’s coastal lore for tales that would allow him to continue making a living as a

popular writer and storyteller for six decades. The National Park Service, meanwhile,

had political responsibilities to provide public access to the new national seashore created

5 I use the term “filiopiety” to mean a specifically American type of ancestor worship. Borrowing from the work of anthropologists, Michael Kammen differentiates American ancestor worship from the forms practiced in cultures in Asia, Melanesia, and Africa: “Americans used ‘ancestor worship’ primarily to enhance the prestige of the living more than to honor the dead, and they pursued aspects of ancestor worship in order to marginalize or exclude less ‘desirable’ inhabitants. In places like Japan and Melanesia, especially Papua New Guinea, ancestors really are revered and become sources of inspiration for the most significant works of art produced by the society.” Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991), 222.

7 on Cape Cod in the 1960s while protecting the history and nature there that millions of tourists would inevitably alter.

Taken together, these narratives allow for a regional exploration of the ideas about history, heritage, and tourism discussed in the writings of Lowenthal, Kammen,

Brown, and other scholars. Four case studies move alongshore geographically and chronologically, showing how larger historical processes link the New England coast and separate it from those that extend south into New York and north into the Canadian

Maritimes. I also show how each of these case studies either faced competition or met with local resistance. Businessmen wishing to market the image of actual old salts first needed to secure their cooperation. Mystic Seaport’s efforts to grow an audience in its first twenty-five years needed to do so in competition with a growing number of other nearby cultural attractions. Similarly, Edward Rowe Snow was not the region’s only famous storyteller, whether in print, in person, or on radio and television. And the

National Park Service needed to negotiation the purchase of properties in order to build the seashore, and then eventually accept public input on how these natural and cultural resources should be preserved and interpreted.6

Versions of these case studies, whether the creation of a coastal icon or deciding

what history gets preserved, can be found throughout the United States and the world.

Other places such as the Spanish Southwest, Florida, and Virginia can claim longer

European settlement, and structures that are just as old, or older. And every state has

6 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1985). David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 1996). Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991). David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblatt, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1998).

Native American history that is older still. Several scholars have explored how New

England’s history became America’s preferred historical narrative. Among these, historian Joseph Conforti argues that credit for New England’s dominance of the colonial revival movement is due to the region’s early historical consciousness, a high literacy rate, and, partly due to that literacy, New England’s emergence as a leader in publishing.

Historian John Seeyle, meanwhile, through his study on the rise and fall of Plymouth

Rock as a national political icon, shows how commemorations of the Rock from the

Revolutionary War through the Plymouth Tercentenary were part of New Englanders’ attempts to maintain the region’s hegemony as it steadily lost political and economic influence during the nineteenth century. In part due to this manufactured national historical importance, the New England coast provides an excellent geographically and culturally compact region in which to study overlapping twentieth-century waves of mythmaking, filiopiety, and preservation. I hope that exploring these narratives will allow readers to draw comparisons to the transformations which have shaped, or are shaping, other popular tourism regions around which they live.7

One of these twentieth-century waves is particularly affected by the region’s

economy and geography, as the coast is an especially harsh environment for the preservation of historic structures. The linear arrangement of these facilities along the coast makes for a narrow cultural region that’s vulnerable to development and natural threats. Before the era of interstate highways and air travel, American ports were the nation’s most dynamic and diverse places – resulting in land reclamation projects and the

7 Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6. John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

9 frequent demolition of older structures for larger, more efficient ones. Waves of immigrants altered and expanded the coast’s businesses and housing stock. Nature also taxes the coastal built environment with salt air, wind, erosion, and storms. Such forces, though, can actually work in favor of creating a sense of alongshore antiquity in New

England. Harsh weather quickly ages the appearance of structures, and the concentration of commerce in large ports throughout the region since the late-nineteenth century has sent many small coastal communities into quiet economic decline. Despite its devastating effects on people’s lives, poverty is an excellent preserver of historic buildings.8

In focusing on issues of ethnicity, gender, heritage, and nature in a twentieth century coastal region, my dissertation contributes to scholarship in public history and

tourism studies. Despite its status as one of America’s first tourist destinations, the

majority of scholarship on tourism has ignored the seacoast. And despite water being a

major theme of American history, maritime subjects are curiously bypassed by most

academics. Historians’ attention to the seacoast has for the most part been on single

communities, instead of more regional approaches.9 While these studies show how race,

8 Kingston William Heath, The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (Knoxville, TN.: University of Tennessee Press, 2001). Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003). John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994). 9 For works on single communities, see Connie Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2008); Karen Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005); Martha Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993); Carol McKibben, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915-99 (Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). For regional works see Chris Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994); Joshua Smith, Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida,

10 gender, class, and nature interact in these centers, it’s less clear how well these communities represent the larger regions to which they are a part. Also, the vast majority of coastal scholarship addresses the colonial period through the nineteenth century, particularly for New England, making studies of the twentieth century long overdue. Into this gap, much of the works on the seacoast are the product of journalists and amateur historians. While informative and entertaining, these rarely engage larger issues of gender, power, and race that anchor American studies scholarship.10

While investigating how people have constructed a sense of history at a place is not a novel idea, in writing this dissertation I lastly hope to direct more attention to the

seacoast as a distinct cultural and environmental area worthy of study. Though built

largely within the past century, the sites and artifacts created for celebrating and profiting

from the region’s coastal history deserve recognition because they are also a part of that

history. They represent the latest chapter in which places become self-consciously

historic. More importantly, such sites have changed how people move through that

space.

Historiography

2006); Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England Women & the Whalefishery, 1720-1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Wayne O’Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830-1890 (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1996). 10 See Mark Kurlansky, The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town (New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 2008). Kim Bartlett, The Finest Kind: The Fishermen of Gloucester (New York, N.Y.: Avon, 1977). Raymond McFarland, The Masts of Gloucester: Recollections of a Fisherman (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1937). Joseph Garland, Eastern Point: A Nautical, Rustical, and More or Less Sociable Chronicle of Gloucester's Outer Shield and Inner Sanctum, 1606-1990 (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 1999). For a popular synthesis of many academic works, see Colin Woodard, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2004).

My project lies at the intersection of tourism studies and public history scholarship. In New England, scholars have addressed coastal tourism as part of larger regional studies or single-community case studies. I bring the seacoast to the forefront and use four case studies that are indicative of processes shaping or affecting the entire

New England coast. Deindustrialization outside of major cities beginning in the nineteenth century and ever-improving roads and automobiles in the twentieth century contributed to locals finding more ways to commercialize their history and culture in the new tourist economy. Professional writers and artists were in the vanguard of an increasing number of visitors to coastal communities large and small. Their words and images helped popularize not only individual places, such as Monhegan, but a more general coastal realm containing sandy beaches hiding pirate treasure, weathered mansions containing memory-laden Yankees, and rocky shores with crashing waves that marked the edge of civilization. No coastal community has been spared from the resulting gentrification. In an essay in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory,

Bruce Robertson discusses how painters and photographers have helped shape the national image of New England’s coastal landscape and its people as rugged and heroic.

Robertson’s essay explores the important role in which artists and their works have helped shape ideas about race along the coast, which I expand into other media and their influence on coastal visitors.

Donna M. Cassidy has built on Robertson’s earlier biography of Marsden Hartley to focus on the period of his career when he returned to his native state in 1937, fashioning himself as the “painter from Maine.” It was an approach that followed other modernists who in the 1930s embraced certain regions for their rural folkways and ties to

12 a preferred American past, but was also one that took advantage of the nationwide commercial appeal of art referencing New England’s history and landscape. Hartley depicted the rural folk (especially fishermen) of Maine and Nova Scotia as “simple, earthy, and authentic” – a view of folk culture embraced in the 1930s and ‘40s by nationalists in the United States, Canada, and Europe. While Hartley subscribed to a racial hierarchy that put Anglo-Saxons at the top, he altered this popular conception of the region’s residents with a focus in his art on sexuality (in the form of the working-class male body) out of place in the reserved historical New England landscape. Both scholars influence my understanding of how artists contributed to the construction of the old salt as a coastal icon of the region, and to understanding their work in the context of movements in art, consumer culture, and public memory.11

Moving south along the coast, Dona Brown’s Inventing New England: Regional

Tourism in the Nineteenth Century includes three chapters on the nineteenth-century

resort communities in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and southern Maine to illustrate the

commodification of the experiences of nostalgia, shared domesticity, and class and race.

Her epilogue uses Cape Cod as representative of the twentieth-century auto-based tourist

experience, and is an important start to addressing how the increasing numbers of coastal

tourists both alter and view the landscape differently than their nineteenth-century

predecessors. Karen Krahulik’s Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort

provides an important case study with which to compare against other coastal

11 Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William Truettner and Roger Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 143-170. Bruce Robertson, Marsden Hartley (New York, N.Y.: Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995). Donna M. Cassidy, “‘On the Subject of Nativeness’: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 227-245. Donna M. Cassidy, Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire, 2005), 12 [quote].

13 communities as she looks at the class, race, and sexuality-based tensions in the city of

Provincetown as it moved in the twentieth century from a fishing economy to one centered on tourism. Her research is particularly complemented, among other works, by

Howard M. Solomon’s essay published that same year on the city of Portland, Maine’s gay and lesbian culture in the twentieth century, and the History Project’s exhibition and subsequent book on the lesbian and gay history of Boston. Lastly, James O’Connell’s

Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort chronicles the transformation of the

Cape from a poor backwater to a massive destination for vacationers. As a popular history, he only skirts the deeper divisions between working-class locals and wealthier visitors, such as those explored in Krahulik’s study of Provincetown. But he puts the actions of old salts and their promoters, Edward Rowe Snow’s visits and stories about

Cape Cod, and the work of the National Park Service as it builds a national seashore, into context.12

New England invites comparison with its geographical neighbor, Nova Scotia.

Since European settlement the economies and cultures of the two predominantly

maritime areas have been intertwined, with a steady exchange (legal and illegal) of

people, goods, and ideas across the border. More than any other scholar, historian Ian

McKay has explored the shaping of public history in twentieth-century Nova Scotia. In

The Quest of the Folk, McKay looked at the false but popular perception of the province

12 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). Karen Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005). Howard M. Solomon, “Creating a ‘Gay Mecca’: Lesbians and Gay Men in Late-Twentieth-Century Portland,” in Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England, ed. Joseph Conforti (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), 295-316. History Project, comp., Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 1998). James O'Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003). An earlier version of Brown’s chapter 6 is in Sarah Giffen and Kevin Murphy, eds., “A Noble and Dignified Stream”: The Piscataqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 1860-1930 (York, ME.: Old York Historical Society, 1992).

14 as the home of rustic, rural people of northern European descent keeping alive a folk culture that represents the heart of authentic Nova Scotia. Cultural producers in the first half of the twentieth century crafted this view to celebrate, instead of scorn, this supposed primitivism, isolation, and distance from modernity. The consequences of this view for

Nova Scotia were to overlook the region’s urban history, capitalist society, and residents’ differences and conflicts surrounding class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. As a vehicle for his exploration of the creation of Nova Scotia’s version of “the Folk,” McKay uses the careers of folklorist Helen Creighton and handicrafts revivalist Mary Black to represent two contrasting strategies – collecting (folklore) and teaching (handicrafts) – by which this international concept became localized.

In the follow-up In the Province of History, McKay and co-author Robin Bates use historian David Lowenthal’s exploration of the rise of “heritage” in the late twentieth century to introduce a Nova Scotian precursor which they call “tourism/history.” By the

1920s tourism/history had replaced a kind of history favoring liberty and progress. In its place, McKay and Bates trace the rise of tourism/history, a blend of fact and fantasy that packaged Nova Scotia as a consumable “Province of History.” As the authors argue,

Innocence applied to history – in the form we call tourism/history – precluded any sense of movement over time. History became more and more backward looking. It was a question of saving remnants from a process of decay, of forestalling entropy by isolating and preserving objects. Even as it became increasingly objectified in this way, history also became more abstract, especially suited to the commemoration of decontextualized moments and experiences. This process of abstraction made history more amenable to consumerism, easy to access quickly, momentarily enjoy, and then discard. Tourism/history did not really concern itself with speaking to a community or honouring the dead, but with generating profits.

Of its most persistent promoters, Bates and McKay focus on writers Will R. Bird and

Thomas H. Raddall, and Nova Scotian Premier Angus L. Macdonald as intellectuals

15 furthering the vision of Nova Scotia as innocent of the problems of twentieth-century modernity. It was a myth attractive to business and government for its promise of profits, revenues, and, hopefully, the prosperity of participating communities. It was a narrative that served first for visitors from New England and then later for those coming from central Canada as a “therapeutic outpost – simultaneously integrated into and distanced from the cultural requirements of people undergoing accelerated capitalist development.”

The consequence of tourism/history, aside from turning the past into an assemblage of decontextualized and easily consumable things, was to redefine the portrait of Nova

Scotia’s people. Building the Province of History was about building whiteness – glorifying those of northern-European descent and ignoring recent immigrants and communities of color facing poverty, segregation, and, for the Mi’kmaq, the loss of ancestral lands. McKay and Bates are careful to point out that tourism/history’s promoters were not intentionally plotting to subvert a critical look at Nova Scotia’s past, but they were still influenced by the antimodernism of the early twentieth century and practicing cultural selection as they strove to make provincial history marketable.

McKay and Bates’s scholarship provides an excellent model of how cultural elites can repackage a region’s past to suit their own needs, and the consequences of such a branding. Individuals such as Creighton, Bird, and Raddall draw comparisons with

Edward Rowe Snow, while the tourism industries of both Nova Scotia and New England embraced old salts, though for different reasons. While outside the focus of this dissertation, further scholarship is needed on the interconnections between the practice of public history in Nova Scotia and New England in the first half of the twentieth century, as both embraced separate but interlinked mythic pasts (one a historical playground, the

16 other a national cultural hearth), and people moved back and forth between the two for labor and leisure.13

Moving beyond the seacoast, my project engages the larger literature on tourism, preservation, and memory in New England. Eric Purchase’s Out of Nowhere:

Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains, in its exploration of how a landslide

disaster in 1826 helped galvanize tourism, is an important model for how all tourist sites

are cultural constructions. Similarly, Joseph Conforti’s Imagining New England:

Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century shows that while historically and geographically grounded, regions and regional identities are culturally constructed. Ancestors and places are exchanged or reinterpreted according to whether they can meet present cultural and political needs – a concept I apply to the seacoast. This mythic New England cannot be dismissed, as it is based in fact (but popularly promoted as the whole truth), and continues to impact the region’s culture, such as the stereotypes of New England fishermen that they and their families partially accept and partially reject. Both James Lindgren’s history of SPNEA, and Thomas

Denenberg’s biography of Wallace Nutting’s nostalgia business are models for how non-

13 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994). Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 17 (“Innocence applied to history…”), 374 (“therapeutic outpost…”). For a sampling of borderlands scholarship, see Mary Elizabeth Beattie, Obligation and Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870-1930 (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000). Alan A. Brookes, “Family, Youth, and Leaving Home in Late Nineteenth Rural Nova Scotia: Canning and the Exodus, 1868-1893,” in Childhood and the Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto, ON.: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 93-108. Gerald Ferguson, ed., Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia (Halifax, N.S.: Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, 1987). Stephen J. Hornsby and John G. Reid, eds., New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). James H. Morrison, “American Tourism in Nova Scotia, 1871- 1940,” Nova Scotia Historical Review, 2 (1982): 40-51. Joshua M. Smith, Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820 (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida, 2006). Michael Wayne Santos, Caught in Irons: North Atlantic Fishermen in the Last Days of Sail (Selinsgrove, PA.: Susquehanna University Press, 2002).

17 profit and for-profit institutions and individuals both shape the public’s understanding of history and are influenced by it – which informs my chapters on Mystic Seaport’s construction of a coastal village and Edward Rowe Snow’s chronicling of coastal lore.14

Outside New England and Nova Scotia, Stephanie Yuhl, Connie Chiang, and Hal

Rothman have created some of the regional tourism scholarship most relevant to my project. Yuhl’s work shows the consequences of preservation efforts in permanently shaping the understanding of place and race in Charleston for tourists and many of its residents. While segregation was never practiced in New England, there’s still a shared legacy of lower class whites, women, African Americans and other groups being largely excluded from the history-making process. Connie Chiang is well aware of the silences

(to borrow a concept from Michel-Rolph Trouillot) in Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast, as she is the first historian to integrate cultural and environmental coastal history in a study of the competing tourism and fishing industries in Monterey from the 1870s to 1970s. As someone also addressing the human and natural environments of the seacoast, I explore the tensions between the burgeoning tourism industry and declining farming and fishing industries and the effects on both the natural resources and the human communities. Lastly, in Hal Rothman’s Devil’s

Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West his argument that modern corporate tourism in the American West is a story of colonialism invites comparison to tourism in New England, as local culture is undermined and hijacked by what Rothman

14 Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), James Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Joseph Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity From the Pilgrims to the Mid- Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2003).

18 labels an extractive industry. It’s an open question as to how many tourists a region can accommodate before their presence destroys what cultural and natural attributes made them attractive in the first place, and how this decay has already manifested itself in the most heavily visited parts of the coast.15

The scholarship on North American parklands has largely addressed the iconic western ones, leaving the coast understudied.16 Within the past half-century Congress has designated ten national seashores, in the process creating new preservation and conservation challenges for the National Park Service. Aside from Connie Chiang’s

Shaping the Shoreline, the works of two historians are particularly informative for my chapter on the creation of Cape Cod National Seashore and subsequent interpretation of its nature and history. Lary Dilsaver’s Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict, provides a model for how to study the conflicts between advocates of coastal recreation, preservation, and conservation, as well as situating a park’s establishment within the history of U.S. environmental policy. There are also important parallels between the seashores, as Cape Cod served as a proving ground for ideas enacted on Cumberland Island, established a decade later. Alan MacEachern’s

15 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA.: 1995). Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Connie Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2008). Hal Rothman, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Martha Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993) also addressed public history in Monterey, but she reaches the same conclusions as Yuhl, in that the present tourist landscape favors a white past over a more democratic presentation of history and ethnicity. 16 See for example Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999); David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks (Seattle, WA.: Washington University Press, 2006); Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2002); Janet Foster, Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada (Toronto, ON.: University of Toronto Press, 1978); and Tina Merrill Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2006).

Natural Selections looks at the creation of the first four parks in Atlantic Canada and provides a transnational perspective on the conflicts between coastal nature and culture in the creation of those parks.17

Apart from the national parks, my project is more generally in dialogue with

coastal environmental history scholarship. These works address how industries have

used rivers and larger bodies of water for commerce, power, resource extraction, and as

pollution sinks – with the resulting decline in the health and numbers of aquatic plants and animals. Instead of a focus on the ecological effects of such human behavior, I look at the cultural responses to the decline of the historic New England fishing industry.

However, this scholarship still provides an important background for understanding the length and breadth of the fierce competition among various interests for the coast’s natural resources, such as between fishermen and dam owners, Native American subsistence fishermen and cannery owners, and the tourism and fishing industries.18

The final part of this historiography concerns works addressing the more theoretical parts of my dissertation as it looks at memory, heritage, and the nature of the tourist experience. As tourists explore the landscape, they consume and construct historical narratives. As David Lowenthal and Michael Kammen have argued, these narratives are not strictly a broad recounting of what happened in the past, but are that

17 Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004). Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001). 18 Margaret Beattie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933 (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000); John Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790-1930 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001); Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Joseph Taylor, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 1999); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2007); and Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1995).

20 past trimmed, amended, and resold as nostalgia, heritage, or tradition to suit current needs. There is no authentic past to which we can return, but this does not stop the creators and users of history from continually resifting and reinterpreting (and ignoring) various pieces of it. And history alone cannot provide the sense of connection people need or want with the past, which Lowenthal explores broadly in Possessed by the Past, and which promoters of the past such as maritime museums quickly discover as they work to remain in business.19

Kammen’s extensive exploration of the role of tradition in American culture in

Mystic Chords of Memory offers a framework for situating my case studies within their

historical trends. Mystic Seaport, for example, began in an era marked by the creation of

large private historical collections and subsequent museums (especially village museums)

that sought to educate the public by surrounding them with the artifacts and atmosphere

(in the case of village museums and period rooms) of the nation’s inspiring, and at times

sheltering, past. During World War II the museum’s staff increasingly began speaking of

a “sea-faring heritage,” and both Kammen and Lowenthal have traced the growing

frequency with which the word “heritage” is used in American culture from the mid

twentieth century onward. Both view it as a sugar-coated alternative to history devoid of

problems and creating an oversimplified account of the past that does disservice to those

included and excluded from it.20

19 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 1996); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991). 20 “Our Museum should become a mecca for visitors from all parts of the country who treasure our seafaring heritage and all that it stands for in our national life.” Unidentified writer in Marine Historical Association, “To Members of The Marine Historical Association, Inc. Mystic, Connecticut.” Bulletin No. 24 – April 15, 1942. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 13.

According to Lowenthal in Possessed By the Past, heritage blends fact and fiction to create a useful, deeply personal past. It shares traits with religion as it subscribes to a mythic past that glosses over the complexity of history. There is nothing new to learn, no troubling and complicated historical legacies to confront. Even exposing the myths upon which heritage is built does not destroy them because they fulfill a present cultural need.

With increasing frequency in the late twentieth century, individuals and groups preferred heritage over other methods of recalling the past (history, tradition, memory, myth, and memoir). It is a significant positive and negative force, Lowenthal concludes, as it

“offers a rationale for self-respecting stewardship of all we hold dear; on the other, it signals an eclipse of reason and a regression to embattled tribalism.” Writing from a global perspective, Lowenthal fears that while heritage helps us to value tangible and intangible parts of our past, heritage’s inherently exclusive nature will only foster conflict between groups whether local, national, or international as they try to claim parts of the past as solely their own. Kammen takes a more positive view in that while heritage “can lead, and has led, to commercialization, vulgarization, oversimplification, and tendentiously capricious memories,” it also popularizes and democratizes history; and through this initial capture of interest, heritage may lead people to study history and thereby discover a more complex and accurate past.21

This dissertation does not address heritage in the global extent of Lowenthal’s

study, but speaking from a New England perspective I would say that his greatest fears

will not come to pass. New England’s political and cultural elites have buried or

21 David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 1996), 3 (quote). Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1991), 621-626 (definition of heritage), 628 (quote).

22 rewritten unwanted parts of the region’s past for centuries before the rise of what we now call heritage. It is just the latest item in our collective historical toolbox. As nostalgia, for instance, dominated Americans’ view of the past in the early twentieth century, heritage will likely give way to another method of recalling former times in the next few decades. And even within our present “heritage crusade,” public invocations of heritage are less a metaphor of warring armies destroying one another than sports teams with rapidly shifting membership and names playing one another. The ways that places contribute to and are shaped by larger social, economic, political, and technological forces affect not only the balance of power within communities, but also the composition and variety of groups themselves. Seemingly fixed categories of identity such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender do change across time and culture. A label such as

“Yankee” can have drastically different meaning over several generations, or cease to be a relevant label altogether.

In my New England case studies covering most of the twentieth century, groups and individuals invoking heritage at first are exclusionary, but eventually their tribalism either undermines their success or they embrace a broader brand of heritage. Old salts in the early twentieth century existed as examples of nostalgia instead of heritage, as producers and consumers used them to evoke an earlier time – specifically one defined by

Anglo immigrants and heroic outdoor labor. They could, however, be included in

McKay and Bates’s “tourism/history” – their Nova Scotian precursor to heritage – but still largely fade from American popular culture before the boom in the heritage industry.

Edward Rowe Snow rarely, if ever, described his collecting and disseminating of coastal stories as heritage. But, his often Yankee focus (including his own frequent appearances

23 in them) in easily digestible tales detached from a larger understanding of how the maritime past worked, would place them in Kammen and Lowenthal’s definitions of heritage production. After his heyday in the 1950s and early ‘60s, Snow did not broaden or deepen his storytelling and suffered the consequences of a narrowly-defined heritage in a broadening literature market and increasingly diverse American populace.

When Senator John Kennedy introduced the first Senate bill in 1959 to create a national seashore on Cape Cod, he described it in terms of preserving a “priceless heritage” for the country and its people. It was about opening up Cape Cod’s landscape to all Americans – a process to be replicated along stretches of seashore nationwide in the coming decades. It was an attempt to bring often isolated and economically depressed areas into the larger portrait of America’s geography, culture, and economy. And it largely worked. By the half-century mark, CCNS could rightly claim that its interpretation was reflecting its diverse national audience across class and race. And this narrative will likely deepen in the future as additional groups press to be included in what through Park Service promotion becomes the official collective portrait of coastal heritage.

By comparison, Mystic Seaport’s earliest invocations of heritage were at a time when Yankees were the intended audience. After World War II when the museum sought to rapidly grow its membership beyond this Yankee base, the heritage on view for visitors, however, remained white and of New England. But in taking a long view of

Mystic Seaport past its first twenty-five years, the future of heritage brightens. In the late

1980s and ‘90s as it embraced racial and ethnic diversity and a new national focus,

Mystic Seaport’s subsequent uses of the word heritage lost the implicit Yankee prefix.

While the collections, exhibitions, and programs will need to eventually reflect the rhetoric of an inclusive national maritime past, this commitment to present accurate and challenging history seems to check the concerns of Kammen and Lowenthal of heritage being used to whitewash and simplify.22

Moving from language to geography, coastlines themselves present unique

challenges to the producers and consumers of history. Much of the region’s history took

place on the water, with the coast providing a complementary role with its wharves,

housing, warehouses, forts, canneries, shipyards, and other supporting industries and institutions. Sites of memory for battles, fishing grounds, accidents and adventures on the high seas, while these can be visited for those with the desire (and time and money) to board a boat, there is nothing to see on the water that marks that history. The ocean appears timeless. These stories have to be told remotely, ashore, which contributes to a sense of distance between most members of the public and maritime history.

Into this breach is a greater chance for silences in the historical record, as most of us can point to ancestors who worked on farms and in factories but who cannot provide us with a diverse array of insights on the maritime world. Michel-Rolph Trouillot cautions us in Silencing the Past that silences enter history at four points: when facts are created (e.g. newspaper article, family photo), assembled (put into a library or archive), retrieved (archival research), and finally disseminated to a broad audience through a product (e.g. museum exhibit) As more than half of the American population now lives

22 Sen. John F. Kennedy (MA), introducing a bill to establish Cape Cod National Seashore Park, S. 2636, on Sept. 3, 1959, 86th Congress, 1st session, Congressional Record 105, pt. 14: 17888. The bill itself also echoes the Cape landscape being for the entire nation, opening with “Whereas the coastal and shoreline area on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, possesses unique cultural, scenic, historic, scientific, and recreational values; and whereas these values are an important and irreplaceable part of the heritage of the United States….”

25 within fifty miles of the coast, there is an ever-growing market for these products alongshore, whether consumed at home or during leisure travel.23

With tourism’s rapid growth in the twentieth century raising important questions

about how it operates and its impact on people and places, sociologists Dean MacCannell

and John Urry have produced some of the most important works theorizing tourism.24

MacCannell argues in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class that tourists are

seeking authenticity (the typical, the exact, the actual, the real, the original), which is a modern quest for seeking what is sacred.25 The expansion of modern society is tied to modern mass leisure, particularly international tourism and sightseeing. At the center of such activities is a search for authenticity, which “moderns” believe is found in the past, in other cultures, and in simpler or purer lifestyles. Authentic attractions gain their value by the amount of people that journey far distances to see them. Seeing work is a

particular attraction for the worker on vacation, and guided tours of institutions are

appealing as they allow access to areas normally off limits to outsiders. However, the

guided tour is an example of staged authenticity or staged intimacy – you’re not really

given a behind-the-scenes tour nor are you really understanding what it’s like to work

there. What you’re getting is the appearance of openness or honesty.

23 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 1995). National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “ Over half of the American population lives within 50 miles of the coast,” http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html (accessed December 16, 2012). In 2001 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 53% of the U.S. population lived in coastal counties in 2003. Kristen M. Crossett, Thomas J. Culliton, Peter C. Wiley, and Timothy R. Goodspeed, Population Trends Along the Coastal United States: 1980-2008, Coastal Trends Report Series (Washington, D.C.: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, September 2004), http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/programs/mb/pdfs/coastal_pop_trends_complete.pdf (accessed December 16, 2012). 24 For an excellent overview of the literature theorizing tourism, see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, 2nd ed. (1990; London, U.K.: Sage Publications, 2002), 7-15. 25 For the rise of tourists seeking the “sacred” in America, see John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1989).

By contrast, John Urry in The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary

Societies looks at how a “tourist gaze” is central to tourism, and how the gaze has developed and changed over time in different societies and within social groups due to cultural difference. Basically, Urry contends that instead of authenticity, at the heart of being a tourist is a search for difference, whether real or perceived, compared to his or her everyday life. What tourists consider different or out of the ordinary helps to reveal normal, overlooked practices in their home culture. This difference comes through seeing unique objects, typical cultural places, discovering unfamiliar aspects of familiar things, people doing the ordinary in unusual contexts, and seeing signs which point out the extraordinary about something that appears ordinary. Urry also discusses the “post tourist” who takes delight in the artificiality of tourist destinations and clichés – travelers who believe there is no authentic experience to seek.26

Both authors inform my understanding of visitor behavior. But of their two

approaches, MacCannell’s authenticity is the stronger thread running through these four

case studies. Though this dissertation focuses on cultural producers instead of consumers

(most of whom are Urry and MacCannell’s tourists), it illustrates a preoccupation among each of these producers with presenting a portrait of coastal New England’s past that was

“true,” “actual,” “real,” “original,” or otherwise “authentic.” For old salts, the minority of postcard images in which the photographer and subject are known feature actual old fishermen instead of simply an actor wearing a costume. As the images were only labeled and sold with “old salt” or “old fisherman” and any number of interchangeable locations, this data suggests a preoccupation with accuracy separate from the purely

26 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1976); and John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, 2nd ed. (1990; London, U.K.: Sage Publications, 2002).

27 economic demands of the tourism industry and perhaps instead fulfills an expectation among consumers for authenticity.

The tourist narratives that I have studied in chapter one, from Thoreau in the

1840s to automobile tourists in the 1940s, show an obsession with hearing directly from coastal New Englanders about their lives. And not just any coastal resident (which would support Urry’s claim of tourists primarily seeking those who lived and worked differently than they did at home) but those who were Anglo-American and old – who had grown up along and offshore, as their families had done for generations, and thus were as much a part of defining the coast’s sense of place as the geography. Thoreau listening to an elderly oysterman on Cape Cod tell stories about his life, and later writing down much of his words, began a practice by coastal tourists to either capture the visage (in the form of sketches or photographs) or the salty language of old mariners. When these images were mechanically reproduced such as on postcards, MacCannell identifies this as one of the stages in which a sight, in this case an old salt, becomes sacralized – and the stage which compels tourists to seek the real thing. The title of tourist Clara Walker Whiteside’s 1926 book Touring New England: On the Trail of the Yankee, reads as an example of this secular pilgrimage, with its destination being elderly loquacious Yankees.

Established three years after Whiteside’s book, the Marine Historical Association from its incorporation concerned itself with amassing “real” and “original” artifacts, and by the 1940s actively worked to display these in a re-created seaport to convey the

“actual conditions” under which their ancestors had lived and worked. They were creating a tourist attraction from empty, marshy land. With rare exception the seaport’s signature buildings were all historic structures with even the cobblestones, curbing, and

28 sidewalks salvaged from other coastal communities. As with the real old salts, these details were not necessarily known to visitors, but the MHA perhaps felt that a great- enough concentration of historic artifacts would re-create a convincingly “real” nineteenth-century atmosphere – and for some it did.27 Co-founder Carl Cutler even

expected the MHA to operate by the principles that they associated with their ancestors,

such as bravery, self-sacrifice for the common good, and self-reliance. As the destination

for what MacCannell describes as tourists’ search for the sacred, Mystic Seaport by the

1950s contained an actual chapel offering regular religious services as well as thousands of “maritime relics,” while references to religion are peppered throughout the speeches and correspondence of the MHA as it emphasized themes of faith, family, and industry during the height of the Cold War.

As a writer for a national audience, Edward Rowe Snow was not directly guiding tourists on a search for the sacred. But, he stressed in each of his books his rigorous archival research, quoted from primary sources to add authenticity to his stories, physically explored the places described in his stories, and regular referenced his own seafaring Yankee ancestry that together qualified him as an authority on coastal New

England – as an authentic New England writer. That old salts, Mystic Seaport, and Snow were dependent upon the public buying their coastal portraits through purchasing postcards, admission tickets, and books, and all three succeeded for decades (old salts,

27 In the letters section of the Log of Mystic Seaport, visitor Elsa Pantzer enthusiastically wrote to Mildred Mallory, wife of MHA president Philip Mallory, that the “priceless Seaport Street seems so real and living that I felt the inhabitants were merely out for lunch and would return momentarily. At the Little Red Schoolhouse I found myself turning to the door again and again in expectation of returning children. Likewise at the Church. It’s an amazing thing to have achieved, for then one learns more thru the mere feel of things than one could thru reading a thousand books.” “Letters,” The Log of Mystic Seaport, vol. 4, no. 3 (Summer 1952): 17.

Mystic Seaport, and a number of Snow’s books remain popular), is evidence for them meeting the public’s standard for authenticity.

As a non-local organization setting up operations on Cape Cod in the early 1960s, the National Park Service had a different set of standards to meet. The interpretation within Cape Cod National Seashore was based not on ancestry or convincing re- creations, but the application of the latest scientific and historical research to the natural and cultural resources already existing within the park’s boundaries. As the federal government set national guidelines for historic preservation and management of natural resources, it held a level of authority in 1960s American society that most citizens accepted. Within the delineated and now “national” seashore, the Park Service went about what MacCannell calls “sight sacralization” as it codified the names of places and things (such as a historic house or glacial erratic), set them apart as worth seeing through interpretive trails and exhibit panels, and mechanically reproduced (e.g. model lighthouses, toy lobsters) the choice icons for public consumption. In this way the federal government brought nature into the modern tourism experience as a place for recreation – creating bonds between people that a “man versus nature” approach once accomplished.28

Chapter outlines

This dissertation consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion.

Arranged chronologically, the chapters trace the interaction between history, heritage,

and tourism along the New England coast from the late-nineteenth century through the

1980s. Together they illustrate how locals, visitors, institutions, companies, and

28 For a definition of “sight sacralization,” and the tourism experience within nature, see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1976), 43-45 (sacralization), 80-81 (nature).

30 government agencies conceived of and helped craft the culturally distinct portrait of historic coastal New England. The conclusion addresses four current public history projects that update the subjects of the four chapters and the continuance of the “Old

Coast” as a useful identity for its residents and visitors.

Chapter one focuses on the creation of an icon found in America only in New

England: the old salt. Generally depicted as a bearded old fisherman, I argue that his appearance and persistence in popular culture provides insights into the changes that have affected the region since the mid-nineteenth century. Around the turn of the century, writers, artists, photographers, and tourists increasingly described old salts as embodying a lifestyle and heritage that elsewhere was being rapidly transformed through industrialization and immigration. Some old fishermen took advantage of their increasing marketability and posed for photographs or told stories. I look at guidebooks, regional histories, travel narratives, artwork, articles, postcards, and even a gravestone as sources for tracing the depiction of the old salt from the colonial revival to the late twentieth century. Postcards in particular standardized and commercialized the image for mass consumption, creating a coastal icon. The result was a caricature which tourists rarely, if ever, found. Such media also shaped how tourists understood place. They often saw quaintness in economic stagnation, and hard-working Yankees instead of old men too poor to ever retire. More importantly, this chapter shows that the myopic focus in words and pictures on “old time” people also allowed consumers to deny the racial and ethnic diversity that have always been part of the coast. While by the 1930s this diversity was finally acknowledged and beginning to be celebrated, the popular perception of old

New England had already shifted north, taking the old salt with it.29 In our popular

imagination, Vermont and Maine best embody the beliefs, practices, and physical

appearance of the region’s – and America’s – past.30 The Maine coast remains the last

redoubt of the coastal Yankee, the old salt, in the form of the lobsterman.

The second chapter examines Mystic Seaport’s creation from the 1930s to the

1950s of an idealized nineteenth-century coastal village. New England’s industrial

heritage has been ignored for much of the twentieth century in favor of an agricultural

and pre-industrial past. While many scholars have used the maritime records and artifacts which the museum has collected, few have studied the museum itself – the process of how it has collected and presented that history.31 Founded in 1929 by an

industrialist, a lawyer, and a doctor, the Marine Historical Association became a physical

museum in 1931 with the purchase in Mystic, Connecticut, of a waterfront property

containing a defunct textile mill. The decaying mill was demolished with the exception

of its smaller brick portions, and the now mostly cleared site became a canvas for

preserving and presenting the maritime history its founders and curators deemed worthy.

The museum followed the practice of other contemporary ancestry-based

organizations as it courted wealthy Yankees with maritime roots for their membership

29 An example of the improving attitudes towards recent immigrants can be found in a description of Gloucester, Massachusetts: “The Anglo-Saxon population that dominated the city for more than two hundred and fifty years has recently been given vitality and color by large immigrant groups of Portuguese and Italians and a sprinkling of Scandinavians.” Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 236 30 As discussed in chapter 6 of Joseph Conforti’s Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity From the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 31 See John David Smith, “Exploring Amistad at Mystic Seaport.” The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (Sept., 2001): 749-750; Phyllis Leffler, “Peopling the Portholes: National Identity and Maritime Museums in the U.S. and U.K.” The Public Historian 26, no. 4 (Autumn, 2004): 23-48; Peter Neill, ed., Maritime America: Art and Artifacts from America’s Great Nautical Collections (New York, N.Y.: Harry N. Abrams, 1988); and James Lindgren is currently working on three books about American maritime museums.

32 base and studied other museum villages, especially Colonial Williamsburg, on how to re- create a convincing historic landscape. Focusing on the early nineteenth century, the

MHA sought to depict the comparatively small and crude environment from which

Yankees successfully built and launched ships and men for global commerce. The point of the re-creation was not historical entertainment, but to address a sincere belief among the MHA’s founders that the collective character of Americans had degraded to a dangerous degree since the Civil War, when the United States turned from being a maritime nation to one focused on inland development. To be immersed among the actual artifacts and structures of their collective Yankee ancestors, would, the MHA’s founders hoped, inspire visitors to once again be bold, self-reliant individuals. Largely erected between 1948 and 1952 using eighteenth and nineteenth-century buildings and artifacts (and a few modern examples as in-fill), the seaport became a cultural hearth around which the museum promoted itself and emphasized themes of domesticity, industry, and religion that carried significant ideological weight in Cold War America.

Beyond the goal of simply writing a history of a large museum, Mystic Seaport is worth studying because as it brought the museum village model onto the water, it shaped the public perception of New England’s coastal past and the nation’s cultural origins.

Through its collections, exhibits, programs, and scholarship it has not only influenced museum practice at other institutions, but met the challenge of conveying maritime history – in a blend of education, entertainment, and commerce – to an audience that largely did not learn about it in school. As with the rise of the old salt as a coastal icon, the seaport village was a sanitized portrait of a Yankee past: without class, race, or ethnic difference, free of labor conflicts, sex, violence, or industrial consolidation and decline.

My third chapter switches from institutional to individual cultural production. In

1959 E. B. Garside gave a glowing review in the New York Times to Edward Rowe

Snow’s “tenth or twelfth book on the sea,” Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival, praising his “fresh and simple style, spiced with just enough quaintly old-fashioned allusion to ensure the evocation of the past.”32 The Massachusetts-based Snow had begun writing books in 1935, and gradually gained a reputation as an author, historian, folklorist, preservationist, and lecturer. On his death the Boston Globe called him

“something of a self-made legend in his own time.”33 This chapter examines how Snow,

in a career spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s, nurtured his own personal legend and constructed a commercially successful image of New England’s past based on popular

notions of the New England coast. Snow made himself an organic part of the culture he

chronicled, and the truthfulness of both had to be taken on his word. He traced his roots

to three Mayflower passengers, claimed that most of his male ancestors were sea

captains, twice discovered buried pirate treasure, acted as a Santa Claus each Christmas

for New England lighthouse keepers and their families, and collected and shared tales

with an eye more to their value as entertaining stories than rigorous scholarship.

Snow was a public historian in the broadest sense, and carried on the practice of

earlier chroniclers of New England legends and history such as author Samuel Adams

Drake (1833-1905). He wrote newspaper columns, gave lectures, taught high school

history classes, appeared on radio and television, led historical organizations, participated

in memorial and preservation activities, and mined folklore and history for topics with

mass commercial appeal: pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and the supernatural.

32 Edward B. Garside, “Salty Yarns of Survival,” New York Times, January 25, 1959, BR16. 33 John William Riley, “Edward Rowe Snow, 79, Lecturer, Sea Author, Flying Santa Claus,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1982, A1.

Apart from being the subject of a bibliographic checklist, an episode of a regional television newsmagazine, and a documentary that aired on the public access TV station in his hometown, no one has studied Snow and his influence on the popular perceptions of the past along the New England coast or how he produced his material – which are both goals of this chapter. And his contributions were not just in historical entertainment. He helped draw public attention to the historic yet neglected islands of Boston Harbor, and campaigned for their eventual preservation and rehabilitation as public parkland. For his influence in shaping the public perception of a region, Snow invites comparison to folklorist Helen Creighton, who helped define the twentieth century popular “Folk” image of coastal Nova Scotia.34

One of the largest acts of preservation in New England is the subject of my fourth

chapter. In 1959 Massachusetts senator John Kennedy helped introduce a bill in the U.S.

Senate to establish a national park on Cape Cod, arguing that such a move “was the most effective means of maintaining the historic way of life and scenic integrity on the

Cape.”35 The peninsula was then part of a nationwide postwar building boom as

governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals scrambled for the last parcels of undeveloped coastal land. In arguing for a national park on Cape Cod, the National Park

Service cited its proximity to urban areas, compelling nature and geology, and iconic history surrounding the Pilgrims and early settlement. This was a vision of regional history that synched with the portrait of coastal New England then on view at Mystic

34 In Ian McKay’s The Quest of the Folk, he explores how Creighton (among others), contributed towards the concept of “Folk” and how various individuals and the provincial government manipulated it for tourist purposes. This resulted in a mythic image of coastal Nova Scotia’s people as rural, idyllic, and rustic -- denying the working-class realities which coastal Nova Scotians faced such as class, labor, gender, and ethnic conflicts. Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth- Century Nova Scotia (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994). 35 Sen. John F. Kennedy (MA), introducing a bill to establish Cape Cod National Seashore Park, S. 2636, on Sept. 3, 1959, 86th Congress, 1st session, Congressional Record 105, pt. 14: 17887.

Seaport. In exploring the planning, construction, and interpretation of the park from the

1950s through the 1980s, I trace how the National Park Service attempted to carry out its mandate of balancing preservation, conservation, and recreation.

The balance was always in the direction of nature. Creating the park was about saving land, not history. In planning the park the NPS placed the human past within a larger natural history. The park’s Modern architecture rejected the quaint Cape Cod style as the agency was in the midst of an effort to grow and modernize the park system. And with the rise of the American environmental movement, the once worshipped Euro-

American ancestors received criticism for beginning a national story of environmental decline. As the Park Service interpreted the outer Cape’s prehistoric and Contact periods, its subsequent industries, and the federal government as a benevolent influence, it overlooked Native history past the Contact era. This contrasted the efforts of local

Wampanoags who at this time sought greater public recognition of their status as cohesive tribes with continuous histories and cultures through judicial and political action, and participation in popular historical commemorations. Only in the twenty-first century did they finally receive recognition in CCNS exhibits as a living culture.

Cape Cod National Seashore is important for launching a new model of creating and managing parks, its massive role in shaping how the public perceives New England’s coastal history and nature, and eventually the public’s contestation of that interpretation in the successful campaign in the 1980s to save a cluster of beach shacks from demolition. This action began the present era of shared authority between the Park

Service and the public in the preservation and interpretation of history. CCNS completes the “Old Coast” by not only interpreting people practicing traditional coastal livelihoods,

36 preserving significant historic structures, and evocative maritime stories, but by keeping this history and culture within the environment that shaped them – a practice that combines those of historical and conservation organizations.

After these four case studies coalesced into the “Old Coast” in the late-1960s, it has remained intact but in a modified form. My conclusion looks at four projects begun in the 1990s and early 2000s that demonstrate the continued viability of the “Old Coast” as a lens for viewing coastal New England, and also how the portrait has aged. The first project concerns the image of the region’s famous fishermen. As popular culture in the early twentieth century turned to northern New England as the last haven for hardworking old Yankees, fishermen remained vital to the economies and self-image of some southern New England ports. Two famous bronze sculptures, dedicated in New

Bedford in 1913 and Gloucester in 1925, memorialized young heroic men in classic poses from the age of sail that were now becoming increasingly anachronistic as the fishing industries modernized (or in the case of Yankee whaling, ended). Both of these projects are examples of top-down public history, as each community’s elites chose how to remember their maritime past.

Gloucester’s statue has since become a popular tourist attraction and an important site of memory for the city’s fishermen – complemented in 2001 by an adjacent cenotaph listing all known fishermen who died at sea, and a nearby statue honoring fishermen’s families. While New Bedford’s statue was an epitaph for a dying industry, it did not resonate for the city’s other fisheries that succeeded whaling in the twentieth century.

Efforts in the twentieth century to create a monument to New Bedford fishermen were unsuccessful, but the sinking of a fishing vessel in late 2003 prompted the latest attempt.

Formed in 2004, the Fishermen’s Tribute Fund raised money among the fishing community and its supporters for several years before launching a design competition and eventually choosing a winner. When the project collapsed over disagreements between the group and the artist over design and cost, the FTF made its own design, and worked with a local sculptor to create the model. The result is a surprisingly humble and intimate statue of a fisherman, his wife, and two children.

While the FTF continues to fundraise, the design shows fishermen and the broader fishing community playing a significant role in their public image making. The monument rejects the heroic lone man battling nature for a focus on family. So while

New England fishermen continue to be celebrated in popular culture for their bravery, skill, and centuries-old seafaring heritage, the old salt is not an icon embraced by the fishermen themselves. That community today is the ethnic and diverse portrait of New

England fishing that the old salt was once meant to whitewash. With the end of the colonial revival movement and a subsequent cultural focus on youth and ethnic and racial diversity, the old salt survives today in popular culture as a photogenic grandfatherly figure divorced from his racially-charged roots. He’ll greet you from restaurant signs, key chains, and within Hollywood films, but you won’t find him down on the docks.36

Another shift in coastal New England’s public history away from a narrow

Yankee past is the story of the construction of a replica of the schooner Amistad at Mystic

36 The character of Quentin in The Perfect Storm (2000) is a classic old salt and demonstrates the continuance of the “Old Timer” character providing warning, comfort, or knowledge/historical perspective. With his full gray beard and mustache, and clad in a black wool fisherman’s cap and worn blue denim work coat, he sits at Gloucester’s Crow’s Nest bar and comments to the other patrons in a low voice, “They’re out on the Flemish Cap. Heard it straight from Big Bob Brown. Yeah, the Flemish Cap. Went there, ‘62. Lots of fish… And lots of weather… Hurricanes, squalls, huge seas-”. The bartender cuts him off with “You’re full of shit, Quentin.” Recognizing that he’s worrying everyone, he replies “That’s right. I am,” and takes a sip from his whiskey. The Perfect Storm, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2000).

Seaport. Since a group of enslaved Africans in 1839 seized the schooner transporting them to sugar plantations, were eventually detained by an American warship, and finally freed by American courts and returned to Africa, the story has remained in American public memory. For some African Americans in the 1960s and ‘70s the story was a focal point for discussing civil rights, public education, and religion. During its sesquicentennial in the 1980s and ‘90s, the story gained greater prominence through a number of fiction and non-fiction books, a monument in New Haven (site of the initial trial and where the Africans were held), a Hollywood film, and, most dramatically of all, the state of Connecticut and businesses funding a joint project by four historical organizations to build a replica of the coastal schooner at Mystic Seaport.

The project fit with the museum’s efforts beginning in the 1950s to have a working shipyard and teach traditional wooden shipbuilding skills, and its commitment since the late 1980s to expand its focus on race and ethnicity as well as national maritime history. Built between 1998 and 2000 in the museum’s shipyard, the schooner offered a public setting to discuss a more inclusive maritime history. After its launching, the non- profit Amistad America has sailed the vessel locally and abroad to teach about the history and legacy of the slave trade, and challenges of racism and intolerance in host communities.

The staff, volunteers, and supporting organizations commemorating the Amistad story through building a replica at Mystic Seaport were part of a broader historical reckoning about racial diversity in New England and its participation in American slavery. While the Amistad story was not directly about American slavery (which still existed in Connecticut at the time), it joined exhibits, documentaries, books, monuments,

39 and public commemorations since the 1990s that have created a dialogue for discussing the region’s racially diverse but also conflicted past. The Amistad also demonstrated that large public history projects were now collaborative (and increasingly expensive). Gone is Mystic’s original goal of self sufficiency. In the wake of the replica, Mystic Seaport remains committed to telling a diverse national maritime history, and is now preparing its signature whaleship to also head to sea. Whereas its seaport village was about gathering and preserving Yankee artifacts to tell one version of nineteenth-century New England,

Mystic Seaport is now breaking the bubble around the museum in planning to use its collections in the outside world. In the replica Amistad and the historic Charles W.

Morgan, the stories and material culture of the nineteenth century remain vibrant along the twenty-first century coast.

Another major proponent of New England’s coastal stories for much of the twentieth century was Edward Rowe Snow. But in the wake of Snow’s death in 1982 no individual has replaced him as the voice and face of New England’s coastal lore. In

2004, staff at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s Department of Archives and

Special Collections launched a project that I posit as the successor to Snow’s efforts to document and share local stories. The Mass. Memories Road Show (MMRS) is a public history project that visits a Massachusetts community – at the invitation of local sponsoring organizations – for a one-day event where citizens each bring in several photographs and corresponding memories that they would like to share with the public.

Staff at the event digitally scan the photographs and often film contributors telling why these images are meaningful to them. These images and stories are shared with everyone

40 at the road show, and later are uploaded by UMass Boston staff at the Joseph P. Healey

Library onto the MMRS’s online digital archives.

This example of twenty-first century digital public history is one of many community and state-based online digital history projects nationwide. The MMRS addresses a concern of local historical societies of the lack of twentieth-century material in their collections, fosters community building as organizations work together to bring the road show to them, and finally makes this material available for free on the Internet.

As of 2012 the MMRS has visited twenty towns and cities, collecting over 4,000 photos and stories. While it will take decades at its current rate of funding to visit all 351 towns and cities in the state, the result is a composite self-portrait of Massachusetts told by thousands of its citizens.

In contrast to Snow, who decided what stories fit his brand of marketable maritime history to share through lectures, walks, books, articles, radio, and television, everyone can contribute images and their stories at a road show – with the single caveat that they relate to the community in which the event is held, or a thematic road show such as World War II or the Boston Harbor Islands. The result is not one singular narrative but thousands of moments (each tagged with contributor, location, date, subject, and other related information), from which people can assemble their own larger stories. The popularity of the digitizing events reinforces the conclusions of Snow and other scholars that the past is most meaningful when people have a personal connection to it. And the stories that the MMRS has collected have already surpassed Snow’s lifetime output. This collection of local lore offers more inclusive portraits of the state, as well as legitimizing the value of personal history through public archiving.

The final story updating the “Old Coast” takes place within Cape Cod National

Seashore. In the 1960s it provided the final piece of the composite portrait by preserving and promoting New England coastal history within its environment. But in the Park

Service managing cultural and natural resources, the distinction is not always clear; humans have been extensively modifying the Cape’s landscape for centuries. During the seashore’s first three decades the Park Service allowed much of the undeveloped land in their care to revert to mature forest. In denuded areas such as the former site of Camp

Wellfleet, they planted beach grass or other plants to aid this natural process.

But by the 1980s, scientific advances in the wake of the American environmental movement and extensive study of CCNS’s own flora, fauna, and environmental processes led scientists to conclude that though saved from future development, significant areas of the national seashore contained degraded ecosystems. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several local and state construction projects had diked and drained salt marshes to accommodate transportation and development needs, and in the hopes of reducing populations of biting insects. Now decades later, the Park Service wished to restore the health of the salt marshes while at the same time preserving the cultural resources the dikes were built to protect. Scientists now understood that healthy wetlands and marshes were actually vital to local human communities through filtering pollution and absorbing floodwaters, and by providing habitat for aquatic animals such as fish and shellfish.

In a now-standard process of shared authority with regard to managing the resources within CCNS, Cape residents, property owners, scientists, and federal, state, and local officials gradually worked out a plan, raised money, and began the first tidal

42 restoration effort in 1999. At Hatches Harbor outside Provincetown workmen installed large culverts in a dike to allow greater salt water flow between the natural and tide- restricted portions of the marsh. In the adjacent town of Truro eventual governmental, scientific, and public consensus resulted in the opening of a culvert connecting Cape Cod

Bay with the formerly tidal East Harbor (but now landlocked and renamed Pilgrim Lake).

And since 2005 CCNS has been working with the town of Wellfleet and the state on a complex plan to restore the Herring River estuary, diked almost a century prior.

These projects are part of a nationwide effort among governmental and environmental groups to restore the health of aquatic ecosystems. Preserving the history and nature on Cape Cod is not simply about saving blocks of natural areas from development and preserving the historic sites therein. Rather, as our understanding of ecosystems improves, so does the need to manage ostensibly wild areas in a way that balances the needs of humans and nature. Pushing this management plan is the National

Park Service’s founding mandate to preserve historic and natural resources while accommodating public use. Restoring the outer Cape’s tidal lands updates the “Old

Coast” by historicizing nature itself. To mitigate the ecological damage from century-old dikes restores a resemblance of the environment that Cape Codders had lived in for centuries prior. And restored habitat will similarly help revive the Cape’s historic fishing and shellfishing industries.

* * *

In the following four chapters and conclusion I offer my conception of how coastal New England’s sense of place has – for readers, residents, and visitors – centered on its history. These four stories capture the trends that have reshaped the coast’s people

43 nature, geography, and material culture in the wake of the Civil War. What and who we gather around us, the stories we tell, and how we physically modify where we live shapes the lives of those around us and those who follow, as we trod the worn ground of our predecessors. For every individual described in these chapters, there are many more who also deserve credit for influencing the ways we see, think, and act alongshore. But those

I do address provide a sense of the coast’s array of cultural contributors – and areas for further scholarship.

CHAPTER 1

Salting the Coast: Creating a Coastal Icon in New England

Introduction

In the summer of 1915, Hildegarde Hawthorne and a companion arrived in

Provincetown, Massachusetts, during their tour of the region’s historic seaports. They were only the latest visitors to an increasingly popular destination. Eight years prior,

25,000 people had joined President Theodore Roosevelt in Provincetown as he presided over the cornerstone-laying ceremony for a monument that would honor the Pilgrims on the site of their first landfall in 1620. His successor, William Howard Taft, presided over the dedication of the 253-foot granite Pilgrim Monument three years later.37 After admiring the tower, Hildegarde and her friend set about seeing the rest of the town, with a particular image of it already in mind:

“You are prepared to meet bearded captains with the roll of blue water in their gait…. You expect slim maids with a Quaker demureness, and patient old women who have looked in vain for the return of their man from his calling. But you are not prepared to catch, at some lilac shrouded corner, the low laughter and soft tongue of the Cape Verde or Azores Islands, to see the silhouette of a keen dark face, the glint of blue-black hair under a brilliant shawl, and a round soft brown throat decorated with coral beads. Yet here they are!”38

37 James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 81. 38 Hildegarde Hawthorne, Old Seaport Towns of New England (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1917), 228.

Hawthorne’s expectations and her actual experience in Provincetown were not unique among coastal visitors of the time. And her description captures the myth and reality that many tourists found along the seacoast.

An explanation for this false impression lies in the proliferation of an increasingly common coastal image: the old salt. By the twentieth century, depictions of the New

England coast often focused on an aged man somehow connected with the sea. The image of the old salt emerged as the perfect distillation of the coast: ancient, masculine, and racially pure. His visage also allowed producers and consumers of the image to obscure many of the region’s realities: the ethnic and racial diversity, and the poverty faced by those living in geographical and economic hinterlands. The appearance and persistence of the old salt in coastal imagery in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries parallels changes in New Englanders’ leisure, work, and identity, and the shift in the coast’s dominant industries from fishing to tourism. A caricature of the former became a potent brand for the latter.

In the scholarship on New England and the colonial revival, there is a small but important group of works by historians who have focused less on old buildings and artifacts and more on the people who inhabited such landscapes. Just as old furniture left attics to become valuable antiques by the early twentieth century, a similar process transformed formerly non-descript citizens into living images of the New England past.

Inland, Thomas Andrew Denenberg has written about how Massachusetts-born

Congregational minister Wallace Nutting became a successful author, photographer, and businessman by creating and marketing his personalized version of the colonial revival which he called “Old America.” In a fifth of his carefully composed photographs set in a

46 colonial past, Nutting employed young women in period costumes. Enlivening parlors, kitchens, and doorways, the women demonstrate traditional female behavior as they cook, weave, write, clean, and socialize. While this was the conservative Nutting’s rebuke of the public, vocal, and independent New Woman of the twentieth century, he also likely recognized that beautiful young women helped sell his products. But more than young women lived in the old towns that attracted Nutting and other history-centric visitors.39

Elizabeth Otterson Wiley writes in her 2005 dissertation that visitors to Maine in

the first half of the twentieth century came to seek the character of the Yankee, arguing

that this fixed type was attractive to men and women whose own sense of self was in

flux. In turn, locals adopted the characteristics to promote their communities – generally

as simple, primitive, and yet dignified people living according to ancient rhythms in a

modern world. The Yankee represented something missing in visitors’ lives – and

characteristics that they could appropriate. Wiley focuses on hunters and fishermen in

the inland woods, photographers documenting Franco-American families in the St. John

Valley on the Canadian border, and early modern painters along the coast.

In this latter set of encounters, painters Rockwell Kent and George Bellows in the

1900s and 1910s sought to insert themselves into coastal communities – to temporarily

become Yankees – and test themselves against the harsh landscape. Both men put

themselves at the center of their work. Kent sought to live as a coastal Yankee year-

39 Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2003), 55-77. Nutting was one of many photographers selling nostalgia at this time. See also the work of Emma Lewis Coleman. Though not included in Denenberg’s book, Nutting did photograph a fisherman in Gloucester, Massachusetts: Wallace Nutting, Massachusetts Beautiful (Framingham, MA.: Old America, 1923), 99, 124. For details on these two photographs, see Rudy Parent, Wallace Nutting Library, “A Gloucester Peter - Studio # 467/Old Salt - Studio # 467,” http://www.wallacenuttinglibrary.com/wnp00467.htm and “Putting In Anchor Rope - Studio # 464,” http://www.wallacenuttinglibrary.com/wnp00464.htm (both accessed January 7, 2013).

47 round on the island of Monhegan, and thereby see the environment as they did. He didn’t paint portraits, nor represent individual islanders. Instead, they were small and indistinct figures in scenes that more often reflected events in his life than his neighbors’. Bellows painted Maine as a foil to New York. Mainers were clean and dignified in their labor – and Bellows sometimes painted himself as that Maine Yankee. Later, Maine-born

Marsden Hartley particularly upon his return to Maine in the 1930s, complicated the myth by sexualizing it, highlighting Maine’s young, ethnic people, and the state as a place of industry, not idyll. Maine, by this point, had become a brand, which he coopted by injecting its place names into his titles. Hartley largely ignored older folk in his paintings, and old fishermen and laborers appear in the margins of Bellows’s work but are never the subject. Kent’s indistinct characters are by contrast ageless, but through their livelihood alone he still identified them as anachronisms in a modern world.40

In a chapter of his unconventional coastal history Alongshore, historian John

Stilgoe documents a cast of characters whom tourists beginning around 1880 sought

along the entire eastern seaboard – but especially in New England – for supposedly being

the purest descendants of the earliest English colonists. The local folk were supported in

their new status as living antiques by the decayed coastal environment of crumbling

wharves and salt-bleached houses in which they lived. Stilgoe is correct in identifying

tourist interest in local characters as surviving to this day, but includes the old salt as

40 Elizabeth Otterson Wiley, “Playing the Yankee: Visitors, Natives and the State of Maine in the First Half of the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2005). See especially chapters two and four. For more on Marsden Hartley, see Donna M. Cassidy, Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire, 2005). A notable exception of Hartley focusing on young people is his posthumous oil portrait in 1938 of fellow painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), whom Hartley admired and described his eyebrows, according to the painting’s current exhibit label at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as “lichens overhanging rocks of granite.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” http://metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/210006224 (accessed November 28, 2012).

48 merely one in a series of characters both young and old whom coastal writers

(particularly Joseph Lincoln) and visitors combined with the decay, quietude, and small scale of the built environment to dub the entire coastal realm “quaint.”41

Karen Krahulik’s study of twentieth-century Provincetown complicates the

picture of quaintness that tourists expected to find. As elsewhere, Yankees founded

groups such as the all-women Research Club and the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial

Association to plant an Anglo past in the landscape at a time when immigrants and their

families were quickly outnumbering them. As white residents and tourists were forced to

navigate the Portuguese-owned businesses in order to do anything in Provincetown, they

refashioned the town’s non-white, Catholic residents as living, unintentional exhibits of

exotic and harmless local color years before whites in other coastal towns did so only

after the federal government’s passage of anti-immigrant legislation. Provincetown’s

isolation at the tip of Cape Cod may have eased fears among some whites of immigrants’

encroachment elsewhere along the supposed Yankee coast.42

Historian Dona Brown has explored the relationship between class and race in

two places along the New England coast in the milieu of the colonial revival. Beginning

in the 1870s Nantucket reimagined itself as a preindustrial island of rustic, sometimes

eccentric people clinging to old patterns of speech, dress, and behavior. To consumers

and promoters of this nostalgic tourism, it was a living offshore museum of Anglo-Saxon

continuity and quaintness. But by the 1890s Brown documents that this identity of

quaintness shifted from the island’s people to the island’s architecture, as buildings were

easier items to be “manufactured for the trade” than locals’ heritage and character.

41 John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 296-333. 42 Karen Christel Krahulik, Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2005).

Farther north at this time, in the Piscataqua region of New Hampshire and southern

Maine, wealthy vacationers embraced the region’s old houses as a way to link themselves materially if not genealogically with the Piscataqua’s earliest Anglo residents. The association was a way to distance themselves from the immigrants flooding into cities to the south and pursue a fantasy of class reconciliation by bonding with local Yankees of lesser means over their shared heritage.43

What Brown does not cover, as it is outside the focus of her study of nineteenth

century regional tourism, is that interest in quaint people did not fade along the New

England coast. In the twentieth century the focus on local characters – almost

exclusively old seafarers – only became more popular in the tourist industry at the same

time as (and, I argue, because of) unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in New

England. John Stilgoe thoroughly covers the rise of quaintness, but his lack of any

secondary sources and advocacy for social Darwinism (praising the resourceful and

healthy local folk over the overweight and ignorant summer visitors) invites a reappraisal

of the original literature and modern scholarship surrounding how coastal people shaped,

and were shaped by, the tourism industry during the colonial revival. During this time

the entire seacoast became a de facto historic attraction. The artwork of Wiley’s early

modern painters in Maine did not explicitly brand the coast as historic or Anglo Saxon,

but their focus on it as a place of tradition, of continuity, of difference to the heavily

populated places elsewhere in America, was a sentiment shared by hundreds of other

painters and thousands of visitors.

43 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 105-134, 169-199.

Even as Rockwell Kent painted a seemingly timeless environment and way of life on Monhegan in the first decade of the twentieth century, he did so only by facing away from the increasing throng of tourists and the infrastructure to accommodate them. Most tourists lacked the ability to take long periods to study a place and craft their own interpretation of it, as did Kent and his peers. While only some could purchase an oil painting or take large-format photographs, even fewer could buy and restore an old house. But every tourist or resident could materially share in the tradition-wrapped myth of what the seacoast meant to them through consuming (and sometimes producing) popular culture. And for many people, the fantasy of the “Old Coast” was best represented in the image of an old salt.

In this dissertation chapter I argue that the image of the old salt served as a unique vessel for an array of fantasies held by history-conscious producers and consumers of material culture along the seacoast. That people create and used fake pasts is not a new revelation. But what the production and consumption of that creation tells us about the coastal realm in the twentieth century is worth exploring. In the above texts the old salt is an ancillary figure if present at all. Focusing on him exclusively allows me to trace the process by which people became commoditized artifacts, and the consequences of this rewriting of history.44

Early tourism and the economic and social conditions that set the state for the old salt to become an icon

44 For examples of groups reimagining their pasts see David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: the Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Allison C. Marsh, “The Ultimate Vacation: Watching Other People Work, A History of Factory Tours in America, 1880-1950” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008).

New England tourism started well over a century before Rockwell Kent’s visit to

Monhegan Island, with Newport, Rhode Island, already a popular resort destination before the American Revolution. In the early nineteenth century, wealthy citizens toured regions of the country such as the northeast, eager to see all that made an area different from their own. Early guidebooks and travel narratives described communities in terms of population, infrastructure, natural features, and brief historical sketches. No single interest dominated.45 Inspired by Romantic landscape painters such as Thomas Cole

starting in the 1830s, visitors increasingly focused on the beauty of the natural world, and sought sublime views from mountaintop inns or seaside hotels.

Increasingly, though, tourists came to these places to escape the summertime heat and congestion of growing American cities and towns. The image of New England before the Civil War was one of progress and prosperity as small towns peaked in population in the 1830s, and industrial cities began to grow. Tourists took advantage of the improved infrastructure, riding steamboats and trains to a growing number of resorts along the New England coastline. The growing industrial economy was also slowly creating a middle class, who after the Civil War would increasingly join the wealthy in coastal areas.46

45 See for example John W. Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections: containing a general collection of interesting facts, traditions, biographical sketches, anecdotes, &c., relating to the history and antiquities of every town in Connecticut, with geographical descriptions (Hartford, CT.: Durrie & Peck and J. W. Barber, 1836); Timothy Dwight, Travels in New-England and New-York, 4 Vols. (New Haven, CT.: T. Dwight and S. Converse, 1821-1822); Theodore Dwight, The Northern Traveller: Containing the Routes to Niagara, Quebec, and the Springs, with the Tour of New England, and the Route to the Coal Mines of Pennsylvania (New York, N.Y.: G. C. Carvill, 1828). 46 Early sketch of New England tourism largely from Chapters 1 and 2 of Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). The tourism industry began in the region as early as the 1720s in Newport, Rhode Island, according to Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001), 40-42.

Along the coast, progress sometimes interfered with tourism. J. C. Myers, in his

Sketches on a Tour Through the Northern and Eastern States (1849), observed that while

Gloucester thrived as a fishing port, he found few attractions, the whole town “being rendered filthy and disgusting by the immense numbers of its fish.” At the southern end of New England on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, the town of Edgartown also lacked places of interest to Myers, “unless you would call fish and oysters, together with scores of dirty, greasy and filthy looking fishermen, objects of attraction,” he wrote.47 At least

for Myers, a thriving and odiferous fishery had no particular allure.

Before the Civil War, coastal areas far from cities and rail lines, such as Cape

Cod, attracted few visitors. Those who did visit the region found it backward and

unattractive, with the possible exception of its old men. In 1853 traveler Nathaniel

Parker Willis called Cape Cod “the earth’s most unattractive region,” yet “I never saw so

many handsome old men in any country in the world,” he observed.48 Henry David

Thoreau, visiting in 1849, also found the region unsuitable for vacationers of the time – though he personally enjoyed the desolation and solitude.49 As the region lacked any

tourist hotels, he and a friend boarded one night in a farmhouse in Wellfleet. Thoreau

detailed the experience in the chapter “The Wellfleet Oysterman” in his travel narrative

Cape Cod.

47 J. C. Myers, Sketches On A Tour Through The Northern and Eastern States, The Canadas & Nova Scotia (Harrisburg, PA.: J. H. Wartmann and Brothers, 1849), 306 (Gloucester), 399 (Martha’s Vineyard). 48 Quoted in John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 309. 49 “The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of, - if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport, - I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now.” Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 2: 203-204.

Seeking lodgings for the night, Thoreau and a companion were taken in by “a grizzly-looking man” whom the visitors presumed was in his sixties, but actually turned out to be eighty-eight years old.50 He was, as Thoreau recalled, “a strange mingling of

past and present….” The “old oysterman” had grown up during the Revolutionary War

and witnessed events that Thoreau had only read about in history books. With the

visitors seated around the fireplace, the man told stories of George Washington, the

Revolutionary War, shipwrecks, and his life as a fisherman. He was also a direct link to

the region’s Puritan heritage, as his great-grandfather had emigrated from England.51

Thoreau’s encounter marks the beginning of the old salt’s association with coastal New

England tourism. Though, as with many of Thoreau’s writings, he was ahead of his time.

It would be several decades before significant social and economic changes gave the old salt widespread cultural resonance. The experience would be one that future travelers in the twentieth century would try to match.

Thoreau in 1849 had met what most people would eventually call an “old salt.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines him as “an experienced sailor, esp. one who is prone to talk loquaciously about the seafaring life.” It dates the word’s appearance in print to a scathing 1828 review by a U.S. Navy sailor of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels

50 Historian Edward Rowe Snow identifies Thoreau’s companion as William DeCosta, and the oysterman as Uncle Jack Newcomb. Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1943), 271; and A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 123-126. Jack Newcomb and his wife Thankful both died in 1856. Their house still stands, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Pages from Thoreau’s manuscript detailing his discussion with Newcomb are at the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum. 51 Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 1: 106-108, 121. This two-volume edition includes illustrations by Amelia M. Watson based on sketches she made in the margins of her own edition “as she read the successive chapters amid the scenes characterized by Thoreau. Thus she saw the sand, the lighthouse, the ocean, the sails, the fishermen, the weather-beaten houses…” (v). At the end of chapter 5 (p.135) she includes an illustration of the Wellfleet Oysterman, and though Thoreau never describes what the old man looks like other than being “grizzly- looking,” Watson has given him a long full white beard along with a vest, hat, and trousers. Holding a coil of rope in his right hand, he sits in a chair in an open doorway.

The Pilot and The Red Rover in The Ariel, a gazette published in Philadelphia. The anonymous reviewer singled out a character in The Pilot, Tom Coffin, as “a caricature, and not a very good one of an ‘old salt,’ but terribly strained and stiff.” In Cooper’s first sea novel, published in 1823, “Long” Tom Coffin was a nearly six-foot-tall coxswain (the person in charge of a ship’s boat and crew) aboard an American ship operating off the coast of England during the Revolutionary War. The veteran black-haired sailor was a scion of two of Nantucket’s leading families, the Joys and Coffins, though he had been born just offshore. Until his dramatic drowning near the end of the story, the former whaleman carried a harpoon in his huge hands as his preferred weapon.

As the novel’s reviewer included no definition of an old salt, the term was obviously in common use in conversation by the early nineteenth century. The review also shows the disconnect already existing by the 1820s between how mariners spoke and acted, and how the public imagined them. While Cooper had been a U.S. Navy sailor in his youth, he was now writing for a general audience who enjoyed fanciful accounts of maritime heroism. “Old salt” in American popular culture eventually came to include any older man with some connection to the sea, whether as a deep-water captain or a coastal fisherman.52

By the time Thoreau’s Cape Cod was finally published in 1865, three years after

his death, New England was in the midst of rapid and profound change. At the end of the

Civil War, New England had emerged as the most urbanized region in the country, with

52 "old, salt", OED Online, (Oxford University Press, November 2010), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130955?rskey=P6W5e6&result=1 (accessed January 16, 2011). James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (New York, N.Y.: Charles Wiley, 1823). “Cooper’s Novels. From a Marine’s Sketch published in the Providence Journal,” The Ariel: A Literary and Critical Gazette 2, no. 9 (August 23, 1828): 72. By the mid twentieth century, the term had become part of American popular culture, defined in Webster’s dictionary as “A sailor of long experience; - a landlubber’s phrase.” Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA.: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1947), 1696.

Rhode Island and Massachusetts as the first and second most densely populated states.53

An increasing number of middle and working class urbanites enjoyed coastal vacations lasting from an afternoon to weeks, depending on one’s budget. Railroads, steamers, and trolleys brought vacationers to places such as Nantasket Beach in Hull, Oak Bluffs on

Martha’s Vineyard, and even Gloucester, Massachusetts. On Cape Cod, the Old Colony

Railroad reached Hyannis in 1854, Falmouth in 1872, and Provincetown in 1873, opening up the Cape to resort development. On average the Cape is ten degrees cooler that Boston in summer, and lacking the latter’s pollution and congestion made the Cape – and other areas along the coast – a welcome if temporary respite from urban life. The era of the grand hotels served by steamer and rail lines would last into the 1920s.54

But industrial progress came at a price. Since the 1830s large factories had

steadily attracted people from the countryside to settle in urban areas and work as wage

laborers. In the process, factories depleted surrounding rural communities of their vitality, both in siphoning off the young labor force and flooding the market with mass- produced goods that increasingly put smaller manufacturers and artisans out of business.

Similar changes took place along the coast. Post-Civil War imports of cheap

Western beef, competition from other fish-catching regions, the elimination of government subsidies for salted cod, and the growing popularity of fresh fish consolidated the New England fishing industry into a few large ports.55 By 1880 New

53 Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum, “Changing New England: 1865-1945” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 2. 54 James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 13, 27, 80. 55 Benjamin Labaree et al., America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1998), 393-395. The increased competition to get fish catches to market first to ‘set the price’ resulted in larger, faster vessels that unfortunately were also less seaworthy. The poorly designed craft caused great losses of life between the 1860s and 1880s when better designs emerged. See also Joseph

Englanders landed the majority of their fish in Gloucester and Boston.56 Elsewhere along

the coast, New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket before the Civil War as the capital of

the whaling industry, owing to its deep harbor and access to railroad lines and cheap

labor. Nantucket’s last whaleship left in 1869.57 But even in a modern industrial city, the

whaling industry declined after the Civil War, as textile mills offered New Bedford

merchants greater margins of profit and an ever-expanding market.

In the factories of New Bedford, Fall River, Lowell, and elsewhere, Yankees

found themselves working alongside growing numbers of immigrants. Starting in the late

1840s, immigrants from Ireland began arriving in New England in the largest wave of

immigration since the initial Great Migration of 1620 to 1640. And the numbers were

only increasing. In the 1870s and ‘80s French Canadians arrived, followed a decade later

by immigrants from southern and eastern European countries including Italy, Portugal,

Poland, and Russia.58 The immigrants fled famine, poverty, war, and religious and social persecution in Europe, attracted to New England’s booming industrial economy.

Thousands of new workers crammed into older city neighborhoods from Portland to Fall

River, Boston to Hartford. Dense clusters of new multi-family houses called three-

William Collins, “Evolution of the American Fishing Schooner,” (1898), reprinted in Frank Oppel, comp., Tales of the New England Coast (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1984), 127. 56 Andrew W. German, Down on T Wharf: The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of Henry D. Fisher (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982), 4; Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum, “Changing New England: 1865-1945” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 3. 57 Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery (1876; reprint, Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1989), 633. 58 Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 209.

57 deckers replaced older, single-family houses from past centuries, and fields that formerly bordered the expanding cities became new neighborhoods.59

The drastic changes remaking the physical and cultural landscape worried

Yankees, who saw their heritage and political power threatened. As America approached

its centennial in 1876, an increasing number of people turned to the past as a way to

confront the chaotic present, a movement eventually known as the colonial revival. As

older buildings, people, and their associated artifacts and traditions disappeared in the swiftly modernizing present, historically-minded residents sought to save cherished bits of the past. Genealogical societies reconstructed and celebrated lineages to colonial times; historical societies formed to preserve the artifacts of their ancestors, including

documents, paintings, textiles, and tools. Preservation societies formed to save and

restore old – now “historic” – buildings as museums of the colonial past. Other ways of celebrating and preserving history included anniversaries, reenactments, pageants, and historical tourism. Things once discarded when broken or obsolete, such as a spinning wheel, gradually became historic and valuable to an increasing number of Americans.

The colonial revival would last into the 1930s, but certain sentiments of it survive today in the popularity of antiques and colonial-style architecture.60

59 Distribution of three-deckers in New England from Kingston William Heath, Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (Knoxville, TN.: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 127. 60 Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009); Alan Axelrod, ed., The Colonial Revival in America (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1985); William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, eds., Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999); James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995); Sarah L. Giffen and Kevin D. Murphy, eds., “A Noble and Dignified Stream”: The Piscataqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 1860-1930 (York, ME.: Old York Historical Society, 1992); Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: the Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century

Though a national movement, New England came to dominate the colonial revival. New Englanders wrote most of the nation’s history books from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Historian Joseph Conforti argues that credit for this dominance is due to the region’s early historical consciousness, a high literacy rate, and, partly due to that literacy, New England’s emergence as a leader in publishing.61 Long before the colonial revival awakened a broader historical consciousness, groups in

Massachusetts had already founded the nation’s first historical society in 1791 and erected monuments commemorating Revolutionary War battles and the Pilgrims.62 New

England’s preeminence in historical commemoration made its founding story – of

Pilgrims and patriots – America’s founding story as well. As antiquarian Samuel Adams

Drake stated in 1875 in Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, “Plymouth is the

American Mecca.”63 The vast majority of Americans agreed.

The old salt embodies the colonial revival movement alongshore, and becomes a symbol of Anglo heritage and endurance

As the oldest settled part of New England, the coast for colonial-revival era

tourists was one of the best places to get a deep sense of history. Apart from designated historic sites of buildings maintained by proud descendants and historical associations, there were other cues in the environment that combined to make the area appear not only time-worn, but perhaps best characterized as the “Old Coast” of America. First, New

(Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2003). 61 Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6. 62 Lexington, MA, erected the nation’s first war monument on the town’s green in 1799. The Pilgrim Society erected Pilgrim Hall in 1824 as a museum to display relics of their Pilgrim ancestors. 63 Samuel Adams Drake, Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1875), 261.

England had a natural advantage. Unlike most of coastal America save for parts of the

West Coast and Great Lakes, most of the New England shoreline is rocky instead of sandy or marshy. Particularly north of Boston, large boulders or entire granite shorelines mark the passage of time in their worn and craggy surfaces. Tourists watching waves slam against the rocks, particularly during storms, witnessed a dramatic display of the sea’s power and danger to centuries of water-borne travelers and coastal residents – a display that artists have long depicted.

The connection between this ancient geological history and a beginning chapter of our colonial history was made early on with the propagation of the myth beginning in the late eighteenth century that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Two centuries later nearly every American has a mental image of colonists stepping onto a rocky shore that is almost unique in tying geology with American history. The example plants Anglo history on the bedrock of America. On a less well-known level, other New England boulders with historical connections or marks of a human past have attracted the curious since the seventeenth century, such as the petroglyphs on Dighton Rock in the Taunton

River in Berkeley, Massachusetts.64

Decay represents another identifier of the “Old Coast.” Ruins have long been a

part of aesthetic appreciation in Western art and literature, marking the passage of time

and lessons in morality and mortality. While Europeans could draw on the crumbling

remains of ancient civilizations, coastal Americans applied this sentiment to buildings no

older than the seventeenth century and derelict or wrecked sailing vessels. Nature taxes

64 John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). See also the “Westford Knight” carvings in Westford, MA. David Goudsward, The Westford Knight and Henry Sinclair: Evidence of a 14th Century Scottish Voyage to North America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2010).

60 the coastal built environment with salt air, wind, erosion, and storms. Such forces have worked in favor of creating a sense of alongshore antiquity in New England. Harsh weather quickly ages the appearance of structures, while the concentration of commerce in large ports throughout the region since the late nineteenth century has sent many small coastal communities into quiet economic decline. Poverty is an excellent preserver of historic buildings, along with the patterns of living that surrounds them.65

A worn landscape of old sailing ships and buildings with historical associations

did not wholly capture the essence of old New England, for these things could be found

elsewhere in America. But there is a final element of the coastal colonial revival

movement which makes the New England coast distinct: the old salt. As historian Dona

Brown argues in Inventing New England, old New England had multiple meanings to nostalgic visitors:

Travelers who felt stifled in their parlors and libraries might hope to experience some of the dangers and difficulties once faced by hardy pioneers. Those who were uncomfortable with the industrial order’s mechanization and regimentation were drawn to places where independent farmers and artisans performed traditional tasks with simplicity and dignity. Those beset by alien faces and languages in their home cities might search for a place where “Anglo-Saxon” purity still prevailed.66

65 See especially Priscilla Paton, Abandoned New England: Landscape in the Works of Homer, Frost, Hopper, Wyeth, and Bishop (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003); and David C. Miller, “The Iconology of Wrecked or Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century American Culture,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1993), 186-208. For more general scholarship on ruins see Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay; Ruins: Relic, Symbol, Ornament (Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968). Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Michel Makarius, Ruins (Paris, FR.: Éditions Flammarion/Rizzoli International Publications, 2004). Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (New York, N.Y.: Rodopi, 2004). 66 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 107.

As a character indigenous to the coast, an old salt could meet all three of these expectations of old New England. And no other region would so thoroughly pickle and market its elderly residents.

With the Western frontier declared closed at the end of the nineteenth century, the

Atlantic Ocean represented another frontier – the original frontier – a place where man fought the elements to make a living in an environment that could never be tamed, never settled, and never closed. Fishermen were these aquatic pioneers, and should they fail in one fishery or area, there were always more resources to harvest from the apparently inexhaustible oceans. As local fishing and whaling grounds did play out, fishermen and whalemen subjected themselves to greater hardship farther out to sea, making their jobs among the most dangerous occupations in the world.67

As a schooner or ship embarked from a New England port on another voyage, the

coastal visitor could see in that vessel of wood, iron, and sail a traditional occupation that

appeared unchanged for centuries. Through the first half of the twentieth century,

tourists could observe the construction of wooden-hulled vessels in New England

shipyards, where men still worked with basic materials and hand tools.68 The fishermen

and sailors who eventually operated these vessels also made a living with their hands,

rowing dories, baiting hooks, hoisting sails. To an urban visitor who toiled in a factory

67 Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, CT.: 2003), 83-84; Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 144. 68 The town of Essex, Massachusetts, launched its last wooden boat in 1949 until Harold Burnham restarted building traditional boats in 1997. Other shipyards, chiefly in Maine, have continued to build wooden boats to the present. Dana Story, Frame Up! A Story of Essex, Its Shipyards, and Its People (Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2004), 21. See also Nancy Beal, “Wooden Boatbuilding in Beals: An Island Tradition Fading Fast,” Fishermen’s Voice 10, no. 3 (March, 2005), http://www.fishermensvoice.com/archives/woodenboatbldg.html (accessed January 28, 2011). Julio Chuy, “Isabella Takes Bow at Rare Schooner Launching in Essex,” Greensburg Daily News, August 8, 2006, http://greensburgdailynews.com/archive/x518732638 (accessed January 28, 2011).

62 doing some repetitive task, the fishermen’s way of life must have stood in sharp contrast to their own.

Heritage was the third meaning of old New England embodied in the old salt.

Since at least the 1840s, texts describing the New England coast pointed out the region’s inhabitants as living descendants of the Founding Fathers. Now, in an era of massive immigration, the coast took on special value as a place where Yankee stock still prevailed. Thoreau stated in Cape Cod, “They are said to be more purely the descendants of the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the State.”69 The anonymous

writer of an article for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1878 repeated and

emphasized Thoreau’s hearsay as fact. In “Along the South Shore,” he said of Plymouth,

“The people are mostly descendants of the early settlers, and are therefore more

homogeneous, more of the old English stock, than almost any other community in the

United States.”70 Travel writer Moses F. Sweetser in his New England: A Handbook for

Travellers (1883), referred more generally to people in the “remote districts of New

England” who still spoke “The English of Elizabeth.” In his section on Cape Cod, he quoted Thoreau’s Pilgrim attribution, but swapped “Pilgrim” for “Puritan,” perhaps as an error, or for the latter group’s greater presence in the genealogies of some of the historically-conscious tourists reading his guide.71

Charles F. Swift’s 1897 history of Cape Cod was even more specific,

commenting, “Nearly 90 per cent of the population are of native birth, and are of purer

69 Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 2: 182. 70 S. G. W. Benjamin, “Along the South Shore,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 57, no. 337 (June 1878): 2. 71 Moses F. Sweetser, New England: A Handbook for Travellers (Boston, MA.: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1883), xvii, 57.

63 descent from the first English settlers than in any other portion of the state.”72 The

placing of this fact in the first chapter of his book, “Topography and Natural Features,”

underscored the ancestral and natural connection of Cape Codders to the land; indeed, by

describing them in the same chapter as the chickadee and the cod they gain the same

permanence in the land that writers of today use when describing Native Americans.

Two years later, Karl Baedeker’s popular guidebook The United States with an

Excursion into Mexico (1899), embraced all Cape Codders as “genuine descendants of

the Pilgrims, [who] are still very quaint and primitive in many of their ways. They form

excellent seamen.”73 His observation brings full-circle a link Thoreau observed fifty years before in the old Wellfleet oysterman whose ancestor came from England. No history text or guidebook explicitly promoted the old salt as the best embodiment of

English ancestry. Yet as farmers typified the Anglo-Saxon heritage of rural inland areas, an old fisherman or mariner, more than any other type of person, best represented the glorious past still alive in the present.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Nordic’

sometimes replaced ‘Puritan’ or ‘Pilgrim’ as an ancestral descriptor for old-stock New

Englanders. In the struggle for political and cultural control in New England, elite

Yankees (people of British descent) adopted the term as a way to include other ‘older’

groups of immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Due to their shared Protestant

heritage, Yankees found them as acceptable to include under the new Anglo-Saxon

umbrella. However, newer immigrant groups such as the Catholic Irish and French

72 Charles F. Swift, Cape Cod: The Right Arm of Massachusetts (Yarmouth, MA.: Register Publishing Co., 1897), 7. 73 Karl Baedeker, The United States with an Excursion into Mexico: Handbook for Travelers (New York, N.Y.: Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 100.

Canadians, despite their Old World geographic proximity to the Anglo-Saxons, were excluded.74 While left out of old New England, the new immigrant groups were

increasingly coming to dominate New England. By the twentieth century, Yankees (and

Anglo-Saxons) were numerically a minority in New England even as they remained the

exclusive subjects of its history.75

For some, this minority status was cause for alarm. In the New England

Magazine article “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” author Winfield M.

Thompson criticized the public’s oversight of the crisis named in the title, in contrast to

widespread alarm at the turn of the century over the plight of the New England farmer.

He praised the old fisherman’s reticence, morality, sense of family and community, and

work ethic, but also his tragic fate. “[T]he old fisherman in his green dory, rowing to the

post office for his newspaper, is a dark and pathetic figure that seems to stand for

something which is with us to-day but may be lost to view forever to-morrow.”

Elsewhere Thompson referred to those “of foreign birth” who would soon supplant him.76

The author’s alarming tone revealed contemporary Yankee fears of immigrants taking

their jobs as well as their roles as leaders in their communities. Thompson’s clarion call

74 J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919-1933 (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), 6-8, 12; John Hingham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 139. 75 J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919-1933 (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), 5. This sentiment would begin to change in the 1920s, with ‘Anglo- Saxon’ fading away, replaced by a more general category of ‘white’ that included many of the newer immigrants. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 82-83, 91-98. In other instances, the Anglo-Saxon term appears to remain, but is more broadly defined. See for example, Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 236. “The Anglo-Saxon population that dominated the city [Gloucester] for more than two hundred and fifty years has recently been given vitality and color by large immigrant groups of Portuguese and Italians….” 76 Winfield M. Thompson, “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” New England Magazine 19, issue 6 (February 1896), 675, 686.

65 may have also highlighted the old salt as an important character to seek out during one’s historical vacation along the coast – before it was too late.

During the colonial revival’s nostalgic embrace of the pre-industrial era, coastal tourists increasingly saw such economic depression in a positive light that would have puzzled earlier tourists admiring progress and industry. A writer for Scribner’s Monthly reported in 1873 that, “if Nantucket has few attractions to offer such as arise from present prosperity, there is so scarcely a seaboard town in America so quaint and so interesting on account of the past which one constantly meets in every ramble.”77 A lack of

industrial growth had preserved some older structures that visitors and locals now used as

historic texts. However, they selectively restored and interpreted such buildings to reflect

an idealized past.78

The desire to experience and capture a part of that past took other forms besides

passive tourism. Artists, who had been painting the seacoast since the early nineteenth

century, focused more on the timeless and yet time-worn wharves, schooners, dories,

people, and buildings haphazardly clinging to the shore. The Impressionist style that

artists used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave even bits of

modernity – when they appeared at all – a soft focus that gently blended them into an

unspecified past.79 Art colonies flourished in various picturesque ports, among them

Provincetown and Gloucester80 in Massachusetts, Ogunquit and Monhegan in Maine, and

77 Henry M. Baird, “Nantucket,” Scribner’s Monthly 6, no. 4 (August 1873): 385. Reprinted in Frank Oppel, comp., Tales of Old New England (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1986), 3. 78 James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Modern Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 95. 79 Artists such as Neil Walker Warner, Emile Albert Gruppe, Winslow Homer, Frederick John Mulhaupt, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Anthony Thieme, Rockwell Kent, John Sloan, and George Bellows painted along the New England coast during this period. 80 Gloucester had become quaint by 1892. See Edwin A. Start, “Round About Gloucester,” New England Magazine 12, no. 6 (August 1892): 699.

Old Lyme in Connecticut. Artists, too, were tourists, wishing to associate themselves with the popular subjects they painted. Their popular depictions of the region and its people created a blend of myth and reality that visitors and even locals soon found difficult to tell apart.81

Most coastal communities that had become economic backwaters embraced their

new-found status as quaint and historic beginning in the 1870s. Nantucket took the lead

in promoting itself as an historical refuge of the ideal New England past.

Industrialization and urbanization had bypassed the island in the nineteenth century, and instead it could offer not only historic buildings but also especially quaint people.

Guidebooks, travel narratives, periodicals, and artists from the 1870s onward, portrayed an ethnically pure people of antiquated habits, speech, and dress who were depicted “in a nostalgic light that emphasized their frailty and age, and the sense that they belonged to another world,” according to historian Dona Brown.82

The factor of age is crucial in portraying mariners, whalemen, and fishermen as

examples of living history. These men didn’t obviously resemble a Quaker, Puritan or

Pilgrim Father – and if they did tourists wouldn’t recognize them as such. It is the factor

of age, with its identifier of gray or white hair – most obvious in a beard – which made

old salts the perfect actors in the colonial revival melodrama taking place on a coastal

stage. The promotion of Nantucket’s “characters,” among them old salts, helped remake

the island into a popular historical tourist destination.83 Yet quaint coastal characters

81 William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” and Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 94-95, 164-165 (art colonies), 165-166 (myth versus reality). 82 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 119. 83 “characters” from ibid., 118.

67 were not only found on Nantucket. As the historian John Stilgoe writes in Alongshore, “a rising tide of appreciative if saccharine ‘local color’ writing … introduced the coastal realm – especially to readers of New England Magazine – as a time-forgotten, strange place inhabited by odd locals, by characters. By 1910 the coastal people had become specimens or characters, something they remain – in the popular inland imagination at least – to this day.”84

A postcard from 1906 reveals both Nantucket’s success at promoting its quaint

history and people, as well as another trend of the era. On the front is a lithographic

image of a sailing vessel identified as the “Bark ‘Canton’ Oldest Whaler afloat, New

Bedford, Mass.” In the message space along the right edge, the anonymous sender wrote

to a friend in Burlington, Vermont: “This reminds me of the tales told by ‘old salts’ at

Nantucket.” It is likely that the sender had just visited the island, as New Bedford –

where this card was originally purchased – had long been a transportation hub for people

visiting Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. And as the successor to Nantucket’s whaling

industry, it still had, as the postcard demonstrates, an active fleet of whaleships sailing in

1906, providing a vivid, living illustration to old salt stories told on Nantucket.

Even without the text, the postcard of the Canton still fits into the colonial revival.

The movement broadly defined “colonial” to include history and its associated artifacts

produced into the 1840s.85 But it is likely that neither the person mailing the card nor the

84 John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 312. 85 Roger B. Stein, “After the War: Constructing a Rural Past” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 19.

68 postcard’s maker knew that the vessel had been built in 1836 – and not in America but in

Swansea, Wales.86 It didn’t matter. What counted was that it looked old.

Success of historical tourism depended – and still does – on the availability of historic places, buildings, and material culture for the public to see, enjoy, and purchase in some form – whether as antiques or a postcard of something too large to bring home.

As a result, the commercial side of the colonial revival movement came to include anything that appeared old. For example, a postcard made around 1940 shows two derelict hulks leaning against rotting wharves, with the caption “Old Timer” at the bottom. Though unstated, the setting is Wiscasset, Maine, and the two vessels were the schooners Hesper and Luther Little, built in 1917 and 1918 respectively.87 Though less

than thirty years old at the time of being photographed, the vessels became

indeterminately ancient “old timer[s]” to postcard sellers and alongshore tourists.

New England’s whitewashed diversity

In this era of historical tourism, and commercialized quaint coastal decay, a

genealogically-focused Harvard professor named George Lyman Kittredge had an

unusual but revealing old salt encounter on Cape Cod. Recalled in the preface to Cape

Cod: It’s People and Their History (1930), written by his son Henry Crocker Kittredge,

the father came upon “an ancient and solitary fisherman” having lunch, and decided to

introduce himself. Part of Kittredge’s aim was to bond with the man over a presumed

86 American Shipmasters’ Association, comp., Record of American and Foreign Shipping (New York, N.Y.: American Shipmasters’ Association, 1885), 253. Digitized version accessed from Mystic Seaport, “Ship Register (1857-1900) Search,” http://library.mysticseaport.org/initiative/VMSearch2.cfm (accessed February 6, 2011). 87 Giles M. Tod, The Last Sail Down East (Barre, MA.: Barre Publishers, 1965), 259-260, 262. The hulks were finally removed in 1998 according to Andrew Toppan, “Maine’s Last Big Schooners,” http://www.hazegray.org/features/schooners/ (accessed January 28, 2011).

69 shared heritage, as George’s mother was a descendant of the first settlers of Barnstable in

1639. Puritan blood also meant special bragging rights in the milieu of the colonial revival and fears over ‘swarthy’ new immigrants. It also helped in the WASP social circles around Harvard College. To the author’s surprise, he learned that he was beat: the old fisherman descended from the “Hockanom Indians of Yarmouth.” Quoting nineteenth-century humorist Artemus Ward, George remarked, ‘“He had me there!”’88

George Kittredge’s anecdote in the beginning of his son’s book reveals the

myopic vision many visitors – even, or especially, those of Pilgrims or Puritan descent –

held of the New England coast. After repeating the founding story over and over again, it

gradually eclipsed the region’s diverse history and heritage. Many coastal visitors found

their perceptions shattered upon arrival, especially in Provincetown.

At least since the sixteenth century, the New England coast has always been a

borderland, a place where different cultures and peoples met. European fishermen were

the first to make contact with the native inhabitants of what became New England. But

the native story didn’t end when the Pilgrims dropped anchor off what would become

Provincetown, or after the first Thanksgiving, or after King Philip’s War. They

continued as active and often vital members of the alongshore region’s culture and

economy. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the American whale fishery. As

early as the eighteenth century and continuing in the nineteenth century, Gay Head

88 Henry C. Kittredge, Cape Cod: Its People and Their History (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), v.

Indians from Martha’s Vineyard served aboard whaleships, and were especially prized as boatsteerers, or harpooners, to use the common name for the position.89

They were not alone. At least by the 1630s, the first African slaves arrived in

New England, and both enslaved and freed blacks worked in the whale fishery.90 African

Americans and Native Americans even became captains in rare occasions, as in the cases of Paul Cuffe and Amos Haskins.91 These were only two of the many peoples of color that comprised the industry. Whaleships frequently lost crewmembers during their multi- year voyages, and made up the difference in foreign ports. A visitor to New Bedford in

1860 would encounter people along the waterfront from such diverse places as Africa, the

Azores, Cape Verde Islands, China, Australia, and Polynesia.92 Yankees dominated the crew lists of early nineteenth century whaleships, but as they gradually left to pursue better paying or safer jobs on land, people of color increasingly filled the ranks. By the beginning of the twentieth century, people of color constituted the majority of men employed in the fishery.93 The year the postcard of the Canton was mailed in 1906, the

89 James Templeman Brown, “Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus, and Methods of the Fishery,” in History and Methods of the Fisheries, section V, vol. 2, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 219. 90 James Farr, “A Slow Boat to Nowhere: The Multi-Racial Crews of the American Whaling Industry,” The Journal of Negro History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 160. For a more nuanced look at the racial identities of whalemen of color in New England, see Russel Lawrence Barsh, “‘Colored’ Seamen in the New England Whaling Industry: An Afro-Indian Consortium” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 76- 107. 91 Amos Haskins, a Wampanoag, became captain of the bark Massasoit in 1851. See a photograph and short bio in Nicholas Whitman, A Window Back: Photography in a Whaling Port (New Bedford, MA.: Spinner Publications, 1994), 16. Paul Cuffe was a whaling captain and shipowner in the eighteenth century. See a silhouette portrait and short bio in New Bedford Whaling Museum, “Master Mariners,” Heroes in the Ships: African Americans in the Whaling Industry, http://www.whalingmuseum.org/library/heros/masters/cuffe.html (accessed February 6, 2011). 92 D. H. Strother, “Summer in New England,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 21, no. 121 (June 1860): 9. 93 “By the 1840s, Black sailors constituted about one-sixth of the labor force; and by 1900, African Americans and Cape Verdeans had become a majority.” From the online exhibit New Bedford Whaling Museum, Heroes in the Ships: African Americans in the Whaling Industry, http://www.whalingmuseum.org/library/heros/index_h.html (accessed February 6, 2011). James Farr, “A

71 captain of the vessel was Nicholas Vieira, a man who had emigrated from the Azores.

His successor as captain the following year was Valentine Rosa, originally from the Cape

Verde Islands.94

A similar pattern occurred in the other fisheries. An exhaustive U.S. government

report published between 1884 and 1887 traced how early nineteenth century fishing

crews were predominantly Yankee, but rapidly supplanted by immigrants. The diversity varied depending on the fishery. In the Gloucester halibut fishery of 1880, for example, of 646 crewmen, more than half (393) came from Canadian provinces, with 187 native- born New Englanders and 103 “Scandinavians, and a very few Portuguese, French and

Irish” comprising the remainder. Some of the vessels had Swedish and Norwegian captains, with crews of likewise national origin.95 In the Gloucester cod fishery, of

1200 men, about a third were American born, one-third Canadian, and one-third Swedish

and Portuguese.96

In Winfield Thompson’s 1896 article mourning the passing of the Yankee

fisherman, he looked at the death records in 1895 of all Gloucester fishermen who had

drowned at sea in the past thirteen months. The results indicated not only the extreme

hazards of the industry, but the low percentage of native-born Americans employed in it.

Of 122 fatalities, less than two and a half percent (3 men) were native-born Americans,

with the rest from Nova Scotia (35), Newfoundland (21), Sweden (15), Cape Breton (14),

Slow Boat to Nowhere: The Multi-Racial Crews of the American Whaling Industry,” Journal of Negro History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 159-170. 94 Judith Navas Lund, Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports: A Compilation of Sources (Gloucester, MA.: Ten Pound Island Book Co., 2001), 418. 95 George Brown Goode and J. W. Collins, “The Fresh-Halibut Fishery,” in History and Methods of the Fisheries, section V, vol. 1, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 6. 96 George Brown Goode and J. W. Collins, “The George’s Bank Cod Fishery,” in History and Methods of the Fisheries, section V, vol. 1, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 189.

Portugal (9), St. Pierre and Miquelon (8), Ireland (6), Norway (4), Finland (3), Iceland

(2), Germany (1) and Italy (1).97

In Provincetown, men of Portuguese heritage dominated the fisheries there by

1890.98 One representative Provincetown schooner cited in Thompson’s article had

nineteen of its twenty crewmembers originally from the island of Fayal in the Azores.99

Portuguese captains had been the majority in Provincetown since 1883.100 While vessels

in Gloucester or Boston fleets may have still had Yankees at the helm, this too, would

soon pass. Entering the twentieth century, vessels with names such as Mary E. Silveira,

Leonora Silveira, Walter P. Goulart, and Gertrude DeCosta reflected the increasing

number of Portuguese ship owners in Boston and Gloucester.101

As they became more successful, immigrants and their children were among the

first to embrace new technology, in the form of gasoline engines around 1905.102 At first

small engines only provided auxiliary power for schooners in slack wind. But now that

speed to and from fishing grounds was no longer dependant upon the wind, large motors

meant returning to shore faster and thereby getting the best price for fish. The growing

market for fresh fish also required a shorter time between catching fish and selling them.

Within two decades, specially designed draggers and trawlers were built specifically for

motor-power, retaining only a vestigial mast and sail. The modern vessels both required

97 Winfield M. Thompson, “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” New England Magazine 13, issue 6 (February 1896), 679. 98 Andrew W. German, Down on T Wharf: The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of Henry D. Fisher (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982), 63. 99 Winfield M. Thompson, “The Passing of the New England Fisherman,” New England Magazine 13, issue 6 (February 1896), 679. 100 Andrew W. German, Down on T Wharf: The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of Henry D. Fisher (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982), 74. 101 Ibid., 28, 53, 72, 88. 102 Wesley George Pierce, Goin’ Fishin’: The Story of the Deep-Sea Fishermen of New England (Salem, MA.: Marine Research Society, 1934), 271.

73 less crew and caught more fish in less time – swiftly replacing even the aging schooners retrofitted with engines. Historically-conscious tourists and promoters continued to (and still do) focus on the sailing vessels long after more modern craft had replaced them. In

1936 only one fishing schooner remained in Provincetown that could evoke the romance of sail from generations past (albeit with truncated masts). But even nostalgic tourists couldn’t overlook the modern heritage reflected in the vessel’s name: Mary P. Goulart.103

Yankee reaction to the dominance of immigrants in the fisheries and elsewhere

took many forms. In New Bedford in 1912, an eighty-two year old retired lawyer named

William W. Crapo decided to present a statue to the city to memorialize its rapidly

declining whaling industry. Known as The Whaleman, the statue was explicitly meant to

represent the Yankee harpooner of the early days. In the interest of historical accuracy,

sculptor Bela Pratt wanted an actual harpooner (boatsteerer in maritime parlance) as his

model. As the city newspaper reported at the time,

Accordingly a search was instituted to find an American whaleman of the Captain Ahab type. Augustus G. Moulton of J. & W. R. Wing company was asked if they could produce one, and responded by offering as a model a native of the Cape de Verde islands. The whaleman of the statue, however, was to typify the early Yankee courage … so the outfitters were asked to find a boatsteerer of the old type – the type made famous in “Moby Dick” and other stories of the sea.104

In 1912 no such “old type” white boatsteerer existed, so Pratt settled for a retired one of

Celtic descent named Richard McLachlan, who had served as a harpooner from 1885 to

103 Katharine Smith and Edith Shay, Down the Cape: The Complete Guide to Cape Cod (New York, N.Y: Dodge Publishing Co., 1936), 73. For the transfer from sail to engine-power, see Wesley George Pierce, Goin’ Fishin’: The Story of the Deep-Sea Fishermen of New England (Salem, MA.: Marine Research Society, 1934), 139-140, 156-157, 271, and especially chapter 19, “The Flounder-Dragger and Beam- Trawler.” 104 Old Dartmouth Historical Society, “The Presentation of the Whaleman Statue to the City of New Bedford by William W. Crapo and the Exercises at the Dedication, June Twentieth, Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen,” Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches, no. 38. (New Bedford, MA.: Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 1913), 39; and “The Model,” New Bedford Evening Standard, February 18, 1912, 24.

1895 – one of the few whites to do so in the industry at the time.105 While overlooking

the traditional role that people of color played as harpooners aboard whaleships, the

statue and its commemoration also whitewashed the dominance of people of color in the

industry at the time. Tourists visiting the city in the years after the industry folded in

1925 would encounter a memorial to what had presumably always been a Yankee chapter

of history.

Other responses to the changing American character were more vocal. Anti-

immigrant sentiment reached its peak in the 1910s and ‘20s with the publication of such

vitriolic and alarmist literature as Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against

White World Supremacy (1920) and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race

(1916, in its third edition by 1923). Both books addressed Anglo-Saxon fears of being

replaced by recent immigrants of “Slavic and Iberic races,” as well as African

Americans.106 In response to the perceived threat, Congress passed the Johnson Act in

1924, setting immigration quotas based on the percentage of each group’s population in

America as reported in the 1890 census. By setting the preferred ratio of new immigrants

according to the 1890 census, it favored people from older areas of immigration, “the

stock which originally settled this country” according to a eugenics committee who

lobbied for the legislation.107

105 “As a rule the boat-steerers are foreigners, principally Portuguese, Indians [Native Americans], or Kanakas.” James Templeman Brown, “Whalemen, Vessels, Apparatus, and Methods of the Fishery,” in History and Methods of the Fisheries, section V, vol. 2, The Fisheries and the Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 218. 106 Reports of the Immigration Commission, Statements and Recommendations Submitted by Societies and Organizations Interested in the Subject of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), 731, 757, as quoted in Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 81. 107 Original source unclear, but quoted in Jacobson, 83.

Passage of the act both restricted the numbers of newer immigrants and led to a redefinition of race and ethnicity in America. As historian Matthew Frye Jacobson argues in Whiteness of a Different Color, the year 1924 marked the start of a shift away from “Anglo-Saxon or Nordic supremacy,” and towards a broader category of

“Caucasian” that included many of the newer immigrants. No longer perceived as threatening to change the American character, the immigrants already here, and the smaller numbers that would arrive later, would be easier to assimilate, especially after they became parents of American-born children.108

This gradual change in attitude allowed for perhaps a friendlier outlook in the late

1920s and ‘30s towards the Italian and Portuguese fishermen, seeing them as adding a

harmless cosmopolitan European air to coastal towns. In 1937 the Federal Writers’

Project published Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. In Gloucester it observed that, “The Anglo-Saxon population that dominated the city for more than two hundred and fifty years has recently been given vitality and color by large immigrant groups of Portuguese and Italians and a sprinkling of Scandinavians.”109 The newest

residents to the coast may have achieved newfound respect in the public eye for their

bravery and own seafaring heritage. But no travel narrative, guidebook, or postcard ever

recognized an old fisherman of Portuguese or Scandinavian descent as an old salt.

Standardizing the old salt image for mass consumption

108 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 82-83, 91, 93. 109 Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People (Cambridge, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 236.

Postcards would soon play a critical role in defining and refining the image of the old salt along the New England coast. In turn-of-the-century articles and books focusing on the quaint New England coast, old salts make appearances, but are usually briefly described and often ambiguously illustrated. In Moses F. Sweetser’s travel guide All

Along Shore (1889), he described a hill in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where “the old salts of the village delight in coming up hither, to smoke their pipes, and look off on the blue plain and its islands and sails.”110 In Frank T. Robinson’s August, 1894, article

“The Quaint North Shore,” the author’s search for quaintness concluded in Newburyport

at the edge of a dilapidated wharf, where “a sailor, old and gray” surveyed the waterfront

decay and passing era, of which he was a part. An image of the man is included

elsewhere in the article, with the caption “The End of a Day, Newburyport.”111

However, portrayed in a rumpled jacket and hat, with his beard as the only visual

identifier of age, he lacks any nautical accessories that would flag him as a character

unique to the coast. Without Robinson’s description he could be anyone – even the author himself in a scruffy self-portrait. Until photographs and color illustrations appeared in periodicals and newspapers in the late 1890s, monochromatic etchings of old salts required a bit of the reader’s imagination.

The new medium of postcards would give them a clearer sense of what to look for. First introduced as souvenirs at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (a showcase for new technology) in 1893, the printed picture postcard rapidly became a staple of

American popular culture. It marked the intersection of advances in literacy, printing technology, tourism, and a thirst for information among Americans increasingly on the

110 Moses F. Sweetser, All Along Shore (Boston, MA.: Boston and Maine Railroad, 1889), 26. 111 Frank T. Robinson, “The Quaint North Shore,” New England Magazine 16, issue 6 (August 1894): 666, 668.

77 move. After relying for generations on prints and paintings as visual likenesses of people and places, Americans embraced photography beginning in 1839 for its unprecedented realism at increasingly affordable prices. Once printing technology could reproduce images cheaply onto paper cards, the U.S. Postal Service started rural free delivery in

1896, and Congress reduced the mailing fee in 1898, the postcard grew in popularity.

The “golden age” of postcards, between 1901 and 1915, was a period of high image quality and peak enthusiasm for the practice of mailing and sending them. In 1913 the

United States Postal Service processed almost one billion postcards – ten times the size of the U.S. population. Women outpaced men as both senders and receivers of postcards, but men dominated their production and sale.112

In New England, as everywhere, individuals and businesses created postcards

designed to promote their community or region to a mass audience. For an increasingly

mobile American public, they served as a fast, cheap way to keep in touch, and the

images made them collectable. Sold in nearly every community, postcards offered

tourists an easy itinerary of what they should see, or at least have pictures of. With the

practice of drawing largely extinct among travelers and most not yet owning cameras,

postcards neatly recorded the experience in a handful of selective views.

Postcards existed in souvenir shops alongside a hoard of three-dimensional

keepsakes also vying for the tourist’s attention and purse. For the old salt, his image also

appeared printed on cups and dishes, carved into wooden effigies, and cast into metal

bookends, doorstops, and paperweights. But the postcard remained the most portable,

112 Beverly H. Kallgren, “Postcards,” in The Encyclopedia of New England: The Culture and History of an American Region, eds. Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2005), 1490-1491. Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh, Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s Photography (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 2, 5. The authors attribute the disparity to women traditionally being in charge of social organizing and family communications.

78 common, cheapest, and easily transmitted (via mail) expression of his form. All of these representations are part of what sociologist Dean MacCannell outlines as the five stages through which a sight becomes noteworthy, or “sight sacralization” to use his phrase.

This process works best with artifacts such as Plymouth Rock, but it can also outline how the old salt went from indistinctive to famous.

The first stage is when a sight acquires a name, or is marked off as worthy of being saved. In the early nineteenth century seasoned mariners acquired the label of old salt as a mark of experience and from the public’s perception of him having a colorful persona and life. Being a person of advanced age lent a sense of urgency to his image, as he couldn’t, like a relic, be preserved. The next two stages apply better to artifacts than living people, but involve marking an official boundary around the object and then making that boundary – such as a shrine or museum holding a famous relic – a tourist attraction in itself. Subsequent literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries singled out the old salt as uniquely representing the seacoast due to his age, masculinity, and heritage. He was now a piece of history living somewhere alongshore, and his presence gave an added sense of history to the buildings, beaches, and streets that he inhabited.

The fourth stage in sacralization is mechanical reproduction, and it is this phase which MacCannell argues “is most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object. And he is not disappointed. Alongside copies of it, it has to be The Real Thing.” Postcards, then, are cultural breadcrumbs leading tourists in search of the old men who must live along that coastal marge. The fifth and final stage is when the name of the attraction is adopted by local groups, communities, or regions.

Along the New England coast this is best represented in the businesses that incorporate mariners into their names such as Fisherman’s Outfitter, Friendly Fisherman Fish Market, and the Old Salt’s Appraisal Company. Often such businesses will have a rustic décor in an attempt to match the old salt’s supposed tastes.113 These latter two stages also solved the problem of how to preserve a resource that will eventually die. Photography allowed

old salts to live on visually for decades after their physical deaths, while advertising kept

words such as mariner, sailor, old salt, and fisherman visible in the landscape as echoes

of the types of people who once called those places home.

Surviving postcards from the early twentieth century reveal the codification of the

old salt image. Of ninety-two postcards picturing old New England mariners that I have

located on eBay, made between 1901 and the 1960s, forty-three are unique poses, with

the rest duplicate cards or recycled images. Sixty-two of the ninety-two were made

between 1901 and 1930, showing the popularity of the old salt firmly placed within the

colonial revival era. Of the forty-three poses (six of which are cartoons), an old salt

uniform emerges: thirty eight have beards, eighteen smoke pipes, twenty-two wear full

oilskin suits, while thirty-six wear at least their oilskin hats. Thirty-two are shown

working or posing with tools of their trade – and ten of the remainder are mostly close-up

seated portraits of them still wearing some or all of their foul weather gear – implying

that they still do something salty enough to require it.

Only twenty postcards are labeled with a specific community, with Gloucester

accounting for eleven of these. The rest center on the larger zones of Cape Cod (14),

Cape Ann (6), Maine (3), and New England (2). Curiously, the island of Nantucket only

113 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1976), 43-45. These three businesses exist today in Plymouth, Eastham, and Orleans, Massachusetts, respectively.

80 has one old salt postcard identified with it, despite being the first New England coastal community to market its quaint residents. Three old salt images are used repeatedly for different areas. Merepoint, Maine, Gloucester, and Cape Cod share a cartoon image of two laughing old men resembling nautical Santa Clauses in their blue and yellow oilskins. Shops in Cape Cod, Hampton Beach, Gloucester, and Bar Harbor simultaneously marketed the same close-up portrait of a stern blue-eyed old fisherman published by three separate companies. And one old salt seated on a barrel was in circulation for over forty years, mailed from post offices from Eastport, Maine, on down to East Dennis, on Cape Cod. The anonymity of most old salt postcards allowed any community along the coast to participate in his marketing, making him at once everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Two cards are noteworthy for how they connect the old salt to the past and to the future. One, made between 1901 and 1907 and mailed in 1909 from Gloucester,114

includes a silhouette of a bearded old salt in yellow foul weather gear, against a background image of waves crashing against a rocky shore. The caption, “Brace’s Rock,

Cape Ann Shore & Old Salt, Gloucester, Mass.,” compares the man’s age to the granite bedrock. They are adversaries, yet both are equally evocative of the region and its past – one historic, one geologic. Both are fixed to the coastline, immovable, permanent. The craggy surface of the rock compares to the creases in the man’s jacket, his wrinkled skin,

114 The age of a postcard is determined as follows: the “undivided back” postcards of 1901-1907 have no vertical line on the reverse of the card. The back is meant only for the address. The “divided back” era from 1907-1915 has a vertical line down the middle of the backside of the card, allowing one half for the address, the other for a message. The “white border” era from 1915-1930 has a white border around the image on the front of the card, as well as the now standard divided back. The “linen” era from 1930-1945 shows cards with a textured “linen” finish. The “modern chrome” postcard era of 1939-present exactly reproduces color photographs. See Beverly H. Kallgren, “Postcards,” in The Encyclopedia of New England: The Culture and History of an American Region, eds. Burt Feintuch and David H. Watters (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2005), 1491.

81 and his wavy beard. The breaking waves hint at the risks the man takes in his daily work, his bravery, and his luck or triumph over the elements in living to an advanced age.

The other postcard shows one of the benefits of old age. Made between 1915 and

1930, and postmarked in 1935 from York Beach, Maine, it shows a well-dressed old man in brown slacks, white shirt, vest and pocket watch, standing beside a boy in a white sailor suit standing barefoot on a chair. Behind them is an open doorway of an old house clad in faded gray shingles – the stereotypical old coastal home. The pair poses as grandfather and grandson. The man holds up a large spyglass in one hand for the boy to look through, while pretending to light his pipe with the other. The old salt’s left shirtsleeve is rolled up, exposing his muscular forearm – the type of youthful vigor in old age that first impressed Thoreau and Willis on Cape Cod a century before.

Incongruously, the man still wears his yellow rain hat or souwester, but it pairs with the boy’s sailor cap, and further identifies the grandfather to the viewer as an old salt. The title, “Boyhood’s Outlook,” shows the passing of the torch, in the form of the spyglass, from one generation of mariner to the next. The whole image implies reverence for the past and confidence in a nautical Yankee future.

Not all postcards were about respecting the old salt. A handful of cartoon postcards specifically mocked tourists’ impressions of the seacoast. One, “A Bird’s Eye

View of Cape Cod” made during the Prohibition era, shows an aerial view of the Cape populated entirely by old salts (now standardized in their white beards and foul weather suits), and sprinkled with other popular yet misleading stereotypes of the region including a “clam tree,” patched sailboat, rum runners, “always broke” artists, and a multitude of signs for fried clams. A second postcard dating to 1911 titled “Some Peoples’ Idea of

Cape Cod” includes an old salt in blue oilskins, white beard, pipe, and the webbed feet of a waterfowl.115

A third card mailed in July of 1936 repeats these ideas but brings the old salt

center stage as the largest of these misconceptions. Entitled “What Some Folks Think

Cape Cod is Like,” it shows the Cape Cod railroad traversing mountainous sand dunes, a

tourist studying the Cape with a magnifying glass, a thrifty local nailing down a coin,

cranberry trees, and, occupying the center third of the card, an elderly “native son” with

full white beard, pipe, webbed feet, patched trousers, oilskin hat, and posing with a fish

under one arm and a mended clam rake in the other hand. The month in which this last

card was mailed further places it in the tourist economy. Of the old salt postcards in my

collection with legible postmarks, 42% were mailed in the month of August, 63% in July

and August, and almost three-quarters, 73%, sent between July and September – placing the old salt’s popularity chiefly in the summer tourist season.

The postcard buyers and creators both appear to accept and at times even have fun with the depictions of the old salt. At least some local people helped promote the image, as it provided economic support in what had long been depressed areas.116 Postcards

required their assistance, either as sellers or models. None of these are candid photographs; all are carefully posed. Some men are jolly, others scowl – likely to the photographer’s preference. Paired with salty quotes and captions created by publishers, they became ideal spokesmen for the coast. According to the caption on the back of one

115 These two cards are pictured in James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 68, 89. John Stilgoe also includes a postcard of an imaginary Cape Cod in Alongshore as part of his broader investigation of coastal quaintness. John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 321. 116 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 119; Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 165-166.

83 card, “a jolly old fisherman owes his happy philosophy of life to Cape Cod’s peaceful atmosphere.” The same card also promotes “the health giving climate” supposedly demonstrated in the portrait of the elderly-yet-energetic man still dressed for work.

“Abbie” and “Uncle Roy,” two tourists who purchased and mailed this old salt postcard, in August, 1941, poked fun at the whole genre, and provide a rare sender’s perspective.

Writing from East Dennis, Massachusetts, to family in Radburn, New Jersey, they remarked, “Haven’t seen anybody with a fake beard like this yet, but some of the summer boarders look pretty queer to us (including ourselves).”

Actually the beard was real. While most of the men who performed as old salts are unknown, several rare identified examples provide an important glimpse behind the caricature and show both the mariners’ agency and how they manipulated their identity to function/operate in the new tourist economy.

Old salts helping to craft their own image

Herman Winslow Spooner was not a native of Gloucester, but over several

decades he left a lasting imprint on the landscape and its people. Born in Boston in 1870

he took classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Gloucester

around 1890. In 1896 Spooner married Sarah Gertrude Nutting, who was likely related to

the photographer and antiquarian businessman Wallace Nutting. Starting as a clerk in the

city engineer’s office, Spooner eventually worked his way up to a position as engineer for the Gloucester Water Works. There, he achieved professional fame for planning and supervising the layout of the Haskell Pond Reservoir from 1901 to 1903, and a utility tunnel beneath the Annisquam River from 1904 to 1905. According to his daughter

Dorothy, he worked as an architect and civil engineer on projects from Vermont to

Virginia, though most of his work was in Gloucester. His advertisement in the 1915 city directory lists his skills as a civil and consulting engineer, surveyor, draughtsman, architect, and a designer. With the latter skill he created maps and illustrations for books and magazines, and designed ads for local businesses and the Gloucester-Rockport

Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism.

What the ad curiously left out was that he was also a skilled photographer. By

1897 he had embraced amateur photography and would eventually take over 600 photographs in and beyond Cape Ann, including of flowers, farms, factory interiors, ships, and portraits of notable residents such as Howard Blackburn or visitors such as

Calvin Coolidge. The Gloucester waterfront especially caught his eye as he documented the catching, unloading, weighing, and processing of fish. His interest in photography led him to join other male photographers in founding the Cape Ann Camera Club in

1902. It was around the start of the Haskell Reservoir project that he began photographing old salts. How he first met John Scott, Lemuel Friend, Oliver Emerton, and David Stanwood is unknown, but David Stanwood’s son Addison was also working on the reservoir project at this time. Perhaps Addison, who was also a member of the

Camera Club, introduced Spooner to his father.117

117 Gloucester Daily Times, “Succumbs After Long Illness,” January 16, 1941. R. L. Powers, “Death Recalls Herman Spooner’s Fine Work,” Boston Globe, February 9, 1941. Paul B. Kenyon, “71 Years Later, Gloucester’s Tunnel Beneath the Annisquam Still is Engineering Marvel,” North Shore Magazine, April 2, 1977, 1. Barbara Erkkila, “Spooner photographs, believed lost, now are found, donated to museum,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 4, 1985, A5. The Gloucester Directory, no. 24 (Boston, MA.: Sampson & Murdock Co., 1915). Additional biographical details from letter from Dorothy Spooner Cleveland to Cape Ann Museum Curator Martha Oaks, March 28 1985. All of this material is from the Herman W. Spooner vertical file, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Examples of Spooner’s photographs and design commissions can be viewed in the Herman W. Spooner binders in the library of the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Cape Ann Camera Club detail from Archive Collection #32: Cape Ann Camera Club, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA.

The four retired mariners whom Spooner photographed in oilskins in the first decade of the twentieth century likely already knew each other. Spooner, Emerton, and

Scott lived within a few blocks of each other in downtown Gloucester, while Stanwood and Friend lived in the village of Riverdale two miles to the north. What is surprising is that while it was possible for Spooner to dress up any old man to create a photograph of an old salt, he sought out actual veteran mariners for his anonymous portraits. In the surviving images in the collections of the Cape Ann Museum, Emerton and Scott are each photographed in one pose, Friend in three, and Stanwood – clearly Spooner’s favorite model – in eight. As he is the only one of the four recognized for posing as a

“typical Cape Ann fisherman” in his obituary – likely due to being the only one to have his image reproduced on postcards – his life and late fame are worth examining.

Stanwood was a model old salt.118

The aptly-named David Wharf Stanwood was born in Gloucester in 1826 on

Stanwood Street to one of the city’s oldest families. His ancestor Philip Stanwood had

arrived back in 1652, only ten years after Gloucester incorporated as a town. After

attending local school Stanwood went to sea as a fisherman, eventually rising to captain

and commanding a number of vessels for over forty years before retiring. During his

fishing career he married twice (once widowed) and fathered seven children, the last of

whom was Addison. In true old-salt fashion Stanwood didn’t actually retire upon coming

ashore (likely because he couldn’t afford to) but “engaged in the clam industry and

118 Addresses and death details of Emerton, Scott, Stanwood, and Friend from e-mail correspondence between Sarah Dunlap (Gloucester City Archives) and Jonathan Olly, November 15, 2010 to December 8, 2010. Scott last lived at 6 Procter Street, Emerton last lived at 44 Mansfield Street (before moving to Lynn, MA), Stanwood last lived at 538 Washington Street, and Friend last lived at 35 Gee Avenue, all in Gloucester, Massachusetts. See also “Lemuel Friend Dead at Age of 82,” Gloucester Daily Times, November 4, 1920, 8. “Oliver S. Emerton Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, August 11, 1908, 6. “Capt. David Wharf Stanwood Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 14, 1910, 8.

86 followed other pursuits in keeping with his years.” Throughout his life he was a member of the Riverdale Methodist Episcopal Church, and spent forty years as a member of its choir. In 1901 Spooner copyrighted two photographs of Stanwood, which gives us a date for their collaboration. From around this time until Atwood’s death in 1910, Spooner photographed him in foul weather gear, and often also with pipe and reading glasses as he posed mending a net, reading a newspaper, playing checkers with Lemuel Friend, reading alongside him, sewing a sail, inspecting a net for tears, and posing Santa-style with a boy in a sailor suit. Particularly the latter two poses with the boy echo a statement in his obituary that he was “of a most genial and kindly disposition and at times loved to relate the experiences of his youth and tell of conditions in this city during that period.” After reading the obituary, his life could perhaps best be summed up as a Yankee man of faith, family, friendship, hard work, and humor. An advertiser couldn’t have created a better profile.119

By 1903 a postcard records another image of Stanwood seated on a barrel with the

caption “An Old Fisherman, Gloucester, Mass.” Either Spooner was printing and selling

his own cards, or, more likely, he had joined the ranks of amateur and professional

photographers selling their images to postcard companies.120 By 1908 his pose of

Stanwood mending a net was being published by the Robbins Brothers Company of

119 “Capt. David Wharf Stanwood Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 14, 1910, 8. Stanwood’s photographed poses can be viewed in the Herman W. Spooner binders in the library of the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. 120 Postcard historians Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh state that it was less common for local merchants and photographers to send their images to printers to have them made into postcards, as opposed to a photographer coming from a postcard company to document local scenes and then take orders from local merchants. But either way, for people such as Spooner taking photos for fun and profit, “Even at the height of the postcard craze, the majority of postcard photographers had to find other sources of income out of necessity. A few did postcard work as an auxiliary to a different occupation.” Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh, Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People’s Photography (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 7-8, 59-60.

Boston, but it was the first image that would become the most numerous and widely distributed of all the old salts. Four decades after agreeing to sit in front of a camera,

Stanwood’s anonymous image had sold postcards in three states from the eastern-most tip of Maine to the bent arm of Cape Cod. But Stanwood was long dead. Only weeks before the release of the April 1910 issue of New England Magazine showing him playing checkers with his friend Lemuel on the cover (inside was an article on Cape Ann for which Spooner had taken the photographs), David Stanwood died at the age of eighty- seven, leaving behind his ninety-year-old brother, wife, five children, seventeen grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and a curious legacy as the most photogenic of

New England’s old fishermen.121

Four years after Stanwood’s death, Spooner took on a photography assignment

that provides a glimpse into the motivations of his elderly mariner models. As the

resulting publication by the Home for Cape Ann Fishermen explained,

In the month of December 1909 several old Gloucester Fishermen appeared before the local District Court, pleaded guilty to the charge of vagrancy and asked to be sent away to the Ipswich House of Correction, where they would obtain food and shelter during the winter months. None of these men had a home, none of them had relatives or friends who could care for them, they were without money, the fishing season had been for them a poor one, they were in dire need.122

The judge complied with their request, and the resulting publicity sparked the philanthropic sympathies of John Dixwell of Boston. He paid to have thirteen old fishermen moved from the jail to a Gloucester boarding house, while fellow philanthropist John Hays Hammond purchased and renovated a Gloucester house as a

121 “Capt. David Wharf Stanwood Dead,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 14, 1910, 8. 122 Home for Cape Ann Fishermen, (Gloucester, MA.: n.p., 1914), 1-2. Collection of Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA.

88 retirement home. Opened on January 1, 1912, it offered a safe harbor for between sixteen and twenty aged and indigent mariners of Cape Ann.

As a new charity it needed to advertise itself, and so Spooner contributed photographs of the building’s exterior, interior, and residents for the slim 1914 publication. Away from the photographer’s studio with its nautical props and hearty men, Spooner’s photographs of the home show that retirement for mariners was often far from jolly. The accompanying text includes biographies of two men originally from

Ireland and Newfoundland, who worked hard their entire lives in Gloucester and elsewhere for fifty years or more. But lacking the support of nearby friends and family as

Stanwood enjoyed, too infirm to work, and without savings – this was the life of many of

New England’s old salts. The home did provide some security, but it was limited. Many former fishermen lived on Cape Ann, but few could expect one of the few berths at the home. Those who were not white likely faced an additional barrier to entry. Instead, they all had to rely on whatever skills they possessed, and luck.123

Old mariners navigated the new tourism economy through more than just selling

their image to photographers. Along the coast, those not wanting to continue fishing but

who were still physically able could make goods to sell, rent out recreational boats, act as

a pilot for visiting yachts, and a host of service jobs that required no maritime skills in the

hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, and stores. George Fred Tilton secured possibly the

rarest full-time job in becoming an exhibit of himself. In 1925 eccentric local millionaire

Edward Howland Robinson Green hired the retired captain to interpret and oversee

123 Home for Cape Ann Fishermen, (Gloucester, MA.: n.p., 1914). Collection of Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, MA. Spooner is credited on the back of the publication for providing the photographs.

89 maintenance of an old whaleship that Green had just preserved as a shore-based museum on the grounds of his estate at South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

Born in 1861 in a house built by his great-grandfather in Chilmark, Martha’s

Vineyard, George Fred Tilton ran away from home at the age of fourteen aboard a New

Bedford whaling schooner. That was the start of a forty year adventure on whaling and merchant vessels ranging from Alaska to Hawaii, Argentina, the Canary Islands, Europe,

Greenland, and many more points in between. Tilton endured land sharks, yellow fever, hard drinking, desertion, attempted murder, blizzards, and mutiny. But these paled in comparison to a several month period during the winter of 1897 to 1898 when he walked, with two Siberian companions and sled dogs, along the coast of Alaska from Point

Barrow to Kodiak Island, from where they eventually sailed down to Portland, Oregon, to bring word that the whaling fleet of which they were a part was trapped in the ice and liable to not survive the winter without aid. In 1903 he finally became a captain, and served as a whaling master of two ships on four voyages to the Arctic. After quitting whaling he served four years in the U.S. Navy during World War I before finding himself once again aground, until the organization that owned the Charles W. Morgan, Whaling

Enshrined, Inc., asked him to take charge of their vessel.

So beginning in May of 1925, Captain Tilton began his final command of a vessel encased in a sand berth beside a purpose-built wharf on an estate across the bay from the island of his birth. Over the next eight years he directed the regular maintenance of the vessel and interpreted it year-round to hundreds of thousands of visitors who drove to the estate and climbed aboard for a tour. After apparently much coaxing from visitors who couldn’t get enough of his sea stories, and Harry Neyland, a local artist who had first

90 started Whaling Enshrined to save the Morgan and now helped run it (with Green’s financial backing), Tilton wrote his memoirs, published in 1928 as ‘Cap’n George Fred’

Himself.124

When Tilton died in 1932 at the age of seventy-one, he was enough of a popular

local character that the New York Times published his obituary – a rare honor for a retired

New England mariner. In it, his legend had grown even beyond the salty tales in his memoir. Aside from expected details about his childhood, the walk across Alaska, and final position as Morgan caretaker, the anonymous author of the article credited Tilton with command of no less than eight whaleships. It further attested (more plausibly) that over the past decade his storytelling ability had put him in constant demand as a public lecturer, and several artists had painted his portrait.

But to anyone who tracked down one of these portraits, or flipped to page 292 in

Tilton’s memoir, they were in for a surprise. In his modern, tailored three-piece suit and homburg, he looks nothing like an old salt. But it doesn’t matter. For Tilton stands on the deck of a whaleship where he spins yarns to the delight of visitors (and possible confusion of fact-checking reporters). Whereas nearly all old salts who sought to market their image needed to do so draped in the clothing and tools of their former occupation to distinguish themselves, Tilton had brought ashore his maritime environment, and instead welcomed people onto it. As a man who made a full-time career out of being an exhibit of himself, he was perhaps unique along the New England coast, but not elsewhere in

America.125

124 Biographical details taken from George Fred Tilton, ‘Cap’n George Fred’ Himself (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928). For more on the whaleship Charles W. Morgan, see the beginning of the next dissertation chapter. 125 “G. F. Tilton, Skipper of Whaleboats, Dies,” New York Times, November 2, 1932, 19.

Historian Joy Kasson has written about how William Frederick “Buffalo Bill”

Cody created Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1883 and for the next thirty-three years presented a carefully crafted version of the American West that “blurred the line between fact and fiction, entertainment and education.” Cody’s performers were often actual cowboys, Indians, or Army troops, but they often acted out stories more akin to pulp fiction than reality. These performed memories mixed with the public’s understanding of the West through popular culture to make, Kasson argues, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West into

America’s Wild West. While Tilton was a one-man operation, without a costume or world-touring show, he still, like Cody, shaped the public’s understanding of history through persuasive storytelling in print and in person.126

As Kasson demonstrates through Buffalo Bill, a narrative evolves once it leaves its creator, as others tell and retell the story. Such is the case with a tale spun by an octogenarian former mariner named Hanson Gregory. In 1916 a newspaper reporter named Carl Wilmore sat down with the eighty-five year old former captain at Sailors’

Snug Harbor, a retirement home for seamen in Quincy, Massachusetts, run by a Boston- based relief organization of the same name. In the interview Gregory claimed to have invented the hole in the doughnut as a sixteen-year-old cook aboard a ship in 1847.

Supposedly he and his shipmates were tired of the dense and greasy cakes of dough that, when fried, were often cooked along the edges but still raw in the center. His solution was to take a lid and cut a circular hole in the dough’s center, allowing it to uniformly cook. Upon returning from the history-making voyage to his Camden, Maine,

126 Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2000), 5.

92 hometown, Gregory taught the technique to his mother, who then shared it with others in adjacent towns.

Apparently delighted with this quirky claim, Wilmore printed the tale in

Gregory’s own words, adding that the conversation took place in the company of a

“dozen … pipe smoking fellows who were all eyes and ears,” and that Gregory, despite his advanced age and slight hearing loss, was otherwise “as sound as new timber.” Here,

Wilmore reaffirms the stereotype of the old salt as gregarious and of advanced age but youthful vigor. The news story appeared in several publications that spring, and granted

Gregory belated recognition as the inventor of the doughnut hole.127

His fame continued after his death in 1921.128 Buried in a place of prominence in

the center of the small cemetery of the sailors’ home, the National Bakers Association

provided him with a headstone larger than all the others, with the eternal inscription

“Recognized by the National Bakers Ass’n as the inventor of the doughnut.” Despite his

nomination to the National Doughnut Hall of Fame in 1937 as the modern doughnut’s

inventor, this claim did not go unchallenged. Others fought for the title, including a New

Hampshire sea captain and a Native American from Cape Cod. The debate was “settled”

in 1941 during a meeting of the National Dunking Association, a publicity organization created by the Doughnut Corporation of America two years prior. Gathered at the Hotel

Astor in New York City on October 27, seventy-five people listened to the testimony of

Wampanoag Chief High Eagle of Mashpee, Massachusetts, and Gregory’s great-grand-

127 Carl Wilmore, “‘Old Salt’ Doughnut Hole Inventor Tells Just How Discovery was Made and Stomach of Earth Saved,” Washington Post, March 26, 1916. The story is also reprinted in “The Inventor of the Hole in the Doughnut,” Literary Digest 52, no. 15 (April 8, 1916): 1016. 128 Gregory’s birth and death dates are unclear. In his 1916 interview he said he was born in 1831, but his gravestone states 1832. And his gravestone lists 1921 as the date of death, but a New York Times article on him from 1937 says he died fourteen years prior. The 1920 census lists Gregory as a 87-year-old widower. U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Fourteenth Census, 1920, Quincy, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, series T625, roll 723, p. 81, s.v. "Hanson Gregory."

93 nephew, Fred Crockett, before voting three to one in favor of the latter. In 1946 a former sailor named Le Grand Henderson published a version of the winning story as the children’s book Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the Doughnut.129

By the time friends and family gathered in Rockport, Maine, to commemorate the

supposed centennial of Gregory’s invention, the tale had taken a domestic turn. After

placing a plaque on the side of Gregory’s boyhood home, his second cousin, Charles

Gregory, told the crowd how it was here that the future sea captain invented the doughnut

hole by poking out the center of some dough before it was to be fried on his mother’s

stove. Gone was the doughnut’s salt-water birth, at least in the short account of the

dedication appearing in the Chicago Daily Tribune. But Charles Gregory’s version was

more useful to its audience. It gave the modern doughnut a fixed place of origin –

evoking not only the rugged and independent coast of Maine, but a mother’s kitchen.

During the Cold War the home and hearth were seen as powerful representations of the

American way of life that needed to be defended at all costs. Anthropologist Paul

Mullins, in writing about Hanson Gregory’s story, explains that his tale took hold

because it gave the doughnut industry an ideal face as the inventor of their product. At a

129 “Hailed as Inventor of Hole in Doughnut,” New York Times, January 31, 1937, 34. Captain Roger Q. Shaw of New Hampshire is mentioned alongside Gregory as a potential doughnut hole inventor in Marian Manners, “Savory Doughnuts Prove Boon to Cooking Artists,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1940, A6. “The Compleat Dunkers,” New York Times, September 28, 1941, E1. “Dunkers Satisfied on Doughnut Hole,” New York Times, October 28, 1941, 26. Le Grand Henderson, Cap’n Dow and the Hole in the Doughnut (New York, N.Y.: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1946). Henderson wrote this story based on the version that he heard “while serving as one of the crew of a down-East schooner off the coast of Maine,” and says that this is the true story of the doughnut hole and not Hanson Gregory’s invention in his mother’s kitchen. However, both stories seem to be derivations of the one (or ones) told by Hanson Gregory in the Sailors’ Snug Harbor retirement home.

94 time when New England had a powerful cultural resonance in America, the old salt once again came forward as the best link to the region’s coastal history.130

Whether through portraiture or storytelling, old salts in New England during the

first three decades of the twentieth century used their newfound cultural cache to

participate in the region’s growing tourist economy. Most lacked the luck of finding a

photographer looking for an ideal model, a tourist site looking for a caretaker, or a

retirement home willing to admit anyone in need. But of those who did achieve a bit of

exposure in popular culture, the sheer number of old salt postcards in circulation indicate

his popularity as an icon of the coast, and a collectable souvenir. Postcards in the first

two decades of the twentieth century commercialized and quickly standardized the image

of the old salt for mass consumption.

In this “re-imagining” process, photographers and illustrators (with the

collaboration of their subjects) built upon earlier magazine illustrations of old mariners,

turning what had once been non-descript elderly men into caricatures that tourists would

have a hard time finding in reality. This transformation happened largely during the

postcard’s “golden age” of popularity between 1901 and 1915. Importantly, this change

preceded the watershed moment beginning in the late 1910s, when tourists in

automobiles headed to the coast in record numbers. Having perhaps already received a

postcard of an old salt in the mail from a friend, or read accounts of old salts spinning sea

tales by the seashore, some tourists in subsequent decades would try to find this

seemingly omnipresent fixture of the coast, with varying success.

130 “Honor Sailor Who Invented Modern Sinker,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1947, 6. Paul R. Mullins, Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida, 2008), 49-51.

Hunting the old salt

In the early years of the twentieth century, as the postcard-craze entered its peak,

travel accounts rarely mentioned encounters with old salts. Those that did often fell back

on experiences from decades earlier. Charles Burr Todd’s In Olde Massachusetts (1907), for example, is a compilation of sketches written between 1880 and 1890. Still, his experience matches those that appear through the 1940s: the story-telling old salt. As “a nor’easter howled down the chimney and rattled the ancient casements,” the author and other men crowded around a stove in a seventeenth century inn in Barnstable to listen to

some storytellers, among them “two ancient mariners.” One of them, “a lean old salt,”

delivered his tale in what Todd found to be such a delightfully quaint accent that he tried

to reproduce it in his book:

“But a nor’easter ain’t a sarcumstance to a nor’wester – not one that means bizness. A nor’wester, you see, comes without warnin’; it pounces on ye, and it’s so cold ye’d think it ud cl’ared the space betwixt this an’ the North Pole at a leap. D’yer mind the the blizzard of 1826, Cap’n, wust ever known on the Cape, an’ the wreck of the Almira? No? You was a boy then. …”131

Back in 1849 Thoreau didn’t encounter such a salty accent in his meeting of an old salt;

all of the old oysterman’s quotes, with few exceptions, were perfect in diction.

Todd’s experience was exactly what Hildegarde Hawthorne sought in 1915,

during her ill-fated pursuit of an old salt. On her way across the Cape towards

Provincetown and disappointment, she passed through the quaint towns of Sandwich,

Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Harwich, imagining herself among the “old houses sturdily

remaining where the centuries had met and passed them, and old retired seamen crammed

131 Charles Burr Todd, In Olde Massachusetts: Sketches of Old Times and Places During the Early Days of the Commonwealth (New York, N.Y.: Grafton Press, 1907), 81.

96 with marvelous stories dominating the village life.”132 Had she stopped in the Lower

Cape to tour the houses, she would have been disappointed. In Porter Sargent’s

Handbook of New England (1916), he revealed that in Yarmouth, “half a century ago every other house held a retired sea captain,” but now none remained. Further, the only old salt the guide mentioned had just recently died: “The residence of the late Albert

Crosby, a former sea-captain, contains a notable collection of paintings, which is open to the public.”133 As historian James O’Connell explains in Becoming Cape Cod, “The

more traditional seafaring Cape Cod receded into the past, the more writers, artists, and

tourists sought to recapture it. The modernizing decades between the two world wars

witnessed the elaboration of the myth of “olde Cape Cod” that the region lives off to this

day.”134

Clara Walker Whiteside completely embraced that regional myth, made obvious

in the title of her 1926 book, Touring New England: On The Trail of the Yankee. Living

in Pennsylvania at the time, Whiteside and a friend purchased their first automobile

specifically to tour old New England. Arriving in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1924,

the author immediately “wanted to walk along the wharves and perhaps find an old timer

who might be induced to talk, and I did.” The “old timer” turned out to be a local

blacksmith named Frank E. Brown, working in a waterfront “dingy little shop.” When

she address him as “Captain Brown,” he cut her off by saying, “‘They will keep calling

me ‘Captain’ Brown and I hate it, for I’ve never been out of port in my life, but if I can’t

132 Hildegarde Hawthorne, Old Seaport Towns of New England (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1917), 218. 133 Porter E. Sargent, A Handbook of New England (Boston, MA.: Porter E. Sargent, 1916), 547, 549. 134 James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 64.

97 stop the bunch, at least I can stop you….’”135 Though corrected, Whiteside subsequently

still used “Captain Brown” in every reference to him in her book. To her, he was still an

old salt. Brown’s anger was only in jest, and he humored Whiteside and her companion,

repeating stories first told to him by whalemen that visited his shop to buy supplies. It

likely wasn’t the first time he met nostalgia-seeking tourists.

Apart from Brown’s pleasant tales of whales and whaling, Whiteside found other aspects of the city upsetting. On the wharves outside Brown’s shop, she observed that the city’s “one-third alien population, chiefly Portuguese, meets you everywhere, and it is curious to walk the streets of an American city and see so many un-American faces.”136

To experience old New England, and its old salts, clearly required selective viewing of the modern New England coast.

Other accounts remained stubbornly myopic. By 1935, Joseph C. Lincoln had made a career out of writing popular books and stories depicting the quaint and usually antiquated locals of Cape Cod. More than anyone, perhaps even more than postcards,

Lincoln, according to historian John Stilgoe, “engineered what can only be called the

‘quaintifying’ of the New England seacoast.”137 Writing at least forty-six novels and

stories between 1902 and his death in 1944, Lincoln’s Cape Codders, introduced in

quaint titles such as Keziah Coffin, Blair’s Attic, Silas Bradford’s Boys, Cy Wittaker’s

Place, Cap’n Eri: A Story of the Coast, and Great-Aunt Lavinia, met challenges of the

135 Clara Walker Whiteside, Touring New England: On the Trail of the Yankee (Philadelphia, PA.: Penn Publishing Co., 1926), 191, 196. 136 Ibid., 186. 137 John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 312.

98 present (usually problems brought on by summer people) with old fashioned wisdom, skill, and character.138

By the 1930s, though, Lincoln’s readers who journeyed to the coast must have

noticed the increasing disconnect between his tales and contemporary Cape Cod. In his

Cape Cod Yesterdays (1935), he had to admit that his idealized present was mostly a part of the past. In a conversation repeated in the preface, the author, illustrator, and publisher reminisced over what was disappearing. The illustrator commented, ‘“Might as well ask what has become of the old salts who used to sit on the benches outside those stores and spin yarns. Or the retired deep-sea captains; every Cape town was full of them when I was a boy. Well, they were antiques then and now we are getting to be antiques ourselves.”’ Instead of mourning the loss of an era, in true entrepreneurial spirit they decided to create another book. Yet this one was to be especially for “Cape Codders, the descendants of Cape Codders, and to the many, many Cape Codders by adoption….”139

As the artist pointed out, the celebrated old salt of the Cape was increasingly a memory, but certainly a memory worth perpetuating in print. If nostalgic locals or disappointed tourists couldn’t find an old salt in the present, at least they could in a Joseph Lincoln book.

Though increasingly rare, alongshore writers and visitors continued to pursue old salts in southern New England as late as 1946, when Katharine Crosby wrote Blue-Water

138 Information on Lincoln from John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 312-318; and James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 65-66. 139 Joseph C. Lincoln and Harold Brett, Cape Cod Yesterdays (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown and Co., 1935), ix-x, xiv.

Men and Other Cape Codders. Yet by this time, the popular perception of old New

England had already shifted north, taking the old salt with it.140

Cape Cod changed drastically in the years following World War II. In 1950 the

first stretch of Mid-Cape highway opened, beginning an era of unprecedented development through much of Cape Cod.141 The infrastructure and technology

improvements of the 1950s, such as television, helped bring the region closer into the

national culture, as well as physically easier to reach. Between 1950 and 1960 the

population of the Cape increased by fifty percent, from 46,805 to 70,286.142 This number

does not include the additional flood of summer visitors arriving annually between

Memorial Day and Labor Day. In the postwar years, Americans shrugged off the

imposed frugality of the Depression and WWII, embracing modernity and conspicuous consumption. On Cape Cod, tourists and tourism promoters increasingly focused on natural beauty instead of nostalgic history, revealed in the types of guidebooks and texts published on the region after the 1940s.143 The rapid development and destruction of

Cape Cod’s rural atmosphere had made it both less marketable as unspoiled history and,

in a slowly growing environmental awareness around America, the land, more than the

buildings, needed to be saved for future generations. The sentiment of preservation in the

1950s and ‘60s concerned open space, not history, and culminated in the establishment of

the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961.

140 Katharine Crosby, Blue-Water Men and Other Cape Codders (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1946). 141 James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 97. 142 Ibid., 98. 143 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 213.

100

As for the Cape’s celebrated old salt, postcards that depicted him were in use as late as 1958, but they were only poor reproductions of ones made a half-century before.

New postcards of the Cape’s fishermen reflected a modern, industrial Technicolor world of machines and multi-ethnic workers. A book published right before the war illustrated the impressive diversity of New England’s fishing industry:

[T]he rank and file of the fishing industry are now mostly foreign born; Portuguese and Greeks in Rhode Island; Portuguese on Cape Cod; Portuguese, Italians, and Swedes in Gloucester and New Bedford; Nova Scotians, Newfoundlanders, Italians, Portuguese, Swedes, Icelanders, and Irish in Boston…. The Yankee is little in evidence around the Boston Fish Pier, unless he is there as a dealer. In this sense the once typical New England industry now has very little of New England personnel about it.144

The one exception, the author pointed out, was Maine, the last place where “native-born

fishermen” still followed their ancestors to sea.145

The turn north

During the nineteenth century few immigrants had come to Maine, except to a

small number of manufacturing towns such as Biddeford, Saco, and Lewistown. The

immigrants were also from Canada, and already shared regional ties with at least some

members of the border state.146 Little industrial growth and poor soil kept Maine

impoverished, especially after the fishing industry consolidated to Massachusetts by the

turn of the century. Today, the state still has the greatest percentage of people living

below the poverty line.147 Poverty keeps people working long after most Americans have

144 Edward A. Ackerman, New England’s Fishing Industry (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 291. 145 Ibid., 289. 146 George H. Lewis, “Shell Games in Vacationland: Homarus americanus and the State of Maine,” in Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan, UT.: Utah State University Press, 1997), 250. 147 Ibid., 253.

101 retired – at least those wealthy enough to take vacations. As coastal tourism began in

Maine at the beginning of the twentieth century, visitors saw the Maine locals as they saw the native Cape Codders or Nantucketers: not as poor, but as “hardy, noble, simple, rustic characters.”148

During the Great Depression, images of such self-reliant people became increasingly popular, just as the lifestyle became increasingly unlikely for most

Americans. This type of person, eking out a living from the land or sea, became a symbol of the strength of the region and, argues historian Joseph Conforti, “suggested that the region might endure the depression without political and social upheaval.”149

Many people moved to northern New England in the 1930s to escape the effects of the

Great Depression. But these individuals were not just unemployed factory workers.

They included doctors, farmers, writers, and artists such as Norman Rockwell and

Maxfield Parrish. Writer E. B. White moved to the Maine coast in 1938, settling just west of Bar Harbor in North Brooklin.150

As Nantucket had done in the nineteenth century, Maine promoted tourism as a

solution to its economic woes, officially adopting its slogan “Maine: Vacationland” in the

1930s.151 The plan worked. In 1938 Kenneth Roberts’s Trending into Maine, a glowing

tour of the state’s past and present, complained that southern Maine resembled

Massachusetts, with its “billboards, overnight camps, hot dog stands and fried clam

emporia.” Yet the author was not railing against tourists, but rather leading them farther

148 Ibid., 260. 149 Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 288. 150 Ibid., 289. 151 Ibid., 266.

102 up the coast, arguing that “you’re not really in Maine … until you’ve crossed the

Kennebec.”152

One of these authentic Maine places was Monhegan Island. As early as 1916,

Sargent’s Handbook of New England promoted the island as “inhabited for more than

two centuries by a hardy race of fisherfolk of primitive customs.”153 Such early notoriety was largely due to the island’s popularity among artists since the nineteenth century,

whose ranks eventually included Edward Willis Redfield, Robert Henri, and perhaps

most famously, Rockwell Kent. His 1907 oil painting Toilers of the Sea showed the

rugged independent fishermen of Monhegan carving a living from the harsh coastal landscape of barren rock and frigid water.154

Another artist attracted to the region was N. C. Wyeth, who settled in Port Clyde

Maine (just inshore of Monhegan) in the 1920s and illustrated Trending into Maine in

1938.155 In the chapter “The Gentle Art of Lobstering,” Roberts doesn’t hide the

modernity of the coastal lobstermen, as they leave the harbor in the early mornings with a

“put-put-put” of their motorboats to check their traps.156 Yet Wyeth’s illustrations of the fishermen are distinctly timeless. Two images show men in their dories. A third shows a close-up of a young man at the helm of a larger craft, likely a motorboat due to its size, but he grasps a traditional ship’s wheel that connects to the steering gear with rope. In only one of Wyeth’s book illustrations does he show an automobile, but it so far in the

152 Kenneth Roberts, Trending into Maine (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown and Co., 1938), 340. 153 Porter E. Sargent, A Handbook of New England (Boston, MA.: Porter E. Sargent, 1916), 769. 154 Bruce Robertson, “Perils of the Sea” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 151. 155 Ibid., 151. 156 Kenneth Roberts, Trending into Maine (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown and Co., 1938), 227.

103 distance as to blend in with the landscape.157 More than the text, Wyeth’s illustrations

portray Maine as a timeless reminder of old New England inhabited by strong Yankee

men and women. And in Trending into Maine and elsewhere, Wyeth’s artwork helped spread this image of Maine nationwide, as artists have done since Winslow Homer a half century before.

The 1930s also saw the region claim the term “Yankee” as its own. In 1935 one of the refugees from southern New England named Robb Sagendorph founded Yankee magazine at his home in Dublin, New Hampshire. Originally a Granite State magazine, the astute former businessman and now publisher soon broadened the focus to include all of New England, but concentrated on Vermont and Maine as the heart of

“Yankeedom.”158 The representative Yankee of the magazine was always portrayed as

an old man from either of these two states.159 In conjunction with state and local tourism

efforts, the magazine promoted northern New England as old New England, and opened

up advertising offices by the late 1930s in Boston, Chicago, New York, and Maine.160

The magazine featured stories, articles, town histories, and poetry that emphasized the region’s simplicity, traditions, and self-reliance. Poet Robert Frost was among the

Yankee contributors, as well as an ideal representation of the magazine’s namesake.

Other sources helped popularize the north as the refuge of the Yankee and old

New England. In 1933 A. Hyatt Verrill published Romantic and Historic Maine, whose end pages provide a map of the Maine coast, and indicate immediately where tourists

157 Images from Roberts, 228-229 (The Lobsterman), 280-281 (A Young Maine Fisherman), 348-349 (The Doryman), 360-361 (The Aroostock Potato Harvest). 158 Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 291, 305. 159 Ibid., 293. 160 Ibid., 304-305.

104 could find the state’s “romantic past.”161 Edwin Valentine Mitchell followed in 1939

with Maine Summer, and again featured a map of the Maine coast on the end pages.

However this time the coast south of Portland is omitted, where Roberts had complained

of its non-Maine atmosphere the previous year. Mitchell’s chapter titles, despite the

inclusive book title, are almost entirely coastal, including “The Mast Country,”

“Islandmania,” “Seacoast Inns and Taverns,” “A Kettle of Fish,” and “The

Shipbuilders.”162 The first and last chapters in this list reveal Maine as the last place in

the 1930s where one could witness the construction of large wooden ships, and see an

aging fleet of schooners as they hauled lumber and granite to southern New England.

In 1946 author Robert P. Tristam Coffin, whose surname is rooted in Nantucket

genealogy but was himself born on a Maine island, focused entirely on the seashore with

Yankee Coast. The title advertised the region as the last place where coastal Yankees dominated. And in Maine, the coastal Yankee, the old salt, was a lobsterman. In particular he was the author’s brother, Frank. In a unique Maine adaptation of the old salt encounter, Frank rowed his brother and a friend four miles down the coast one night to harvest lobsters by starlight. After an eight-hour shift at the Bath Iron Works, “[t]his,” the author concluded, “was his way of resting.”163 After collecting a number of lobsters,

Frank built a fire on the beach to cook them, and then sat down to smoke his pipe.164

Though no sea stories accompanied the crackling fire, Coffin proudly reassured his

161 A. Hyatt Verrill, Romantic and Historic Maine (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1933), vii. 162 Edwin Valentine Mitchell, Maine Summer (New York, N.Y.: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1939), 9. 163 Robert P. Tristam Coffin, Yankee Coast (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1947), 17. 164 Ibid., 19.

105 readers that Frank was “one of the last survivors of the old race of oral story-men of

Maine, and the best of the survivors, I believe.”165

While Frank may have lacked the antiquity of some old salts (the author was fifty-

four years old in 1946 and Frank was likely of similar age) such men did populate the

coast, with surprising skill and vigor despite their years. “It is good to see my

octogenarian friends coming home with their white hair against the evergreen,” Coffin

observed later in the book. “They stand up slim and straight in their dories, backing-

water with their slim oars. You would swear they were twenty.”166 Coffin’s observation

carried with it no amazement or surprise at either the men’s vitality or still being hard at

work despite their advanced age. Old men on the water were presumably a common

sight. Yet he ignored, or at least didn’t say, that the men were likely poor, and had no

other means of subsistence should they stop working. Instead, their identification as

Maine lobstermen is sufficient to explain their exemplary work ethic. For unlike the old salts pictured in southern New England postcards of decades earlier, the real old salts of

Maine are not posing idly in a rocking chair or studio, or found retired in a home awaiting the knock of a tourist. Maine old salts are always found with the tools of their trade, if not on the water, then right beside it, and soon to be.

The editors of Look magazine helped disseminate this image to a national

audience the following year, when they published Look at America: New England, their latest in a series of regional guides of the U.S. The book is divided into regions, with each having an introduction followed by a black and white photographic tour. In the book’s opening, it introduces New England with twelve full-color photographs of the

165 Ibid., 16. 166 Ibid., 123.

106 region’s icons, divided among the five states (Rhode Island is oddly omitted).

Connecticut gets the colonial house and apple trees; Vermont, the farm and winter skiers;

New Hampshire, the back road and the covered bridge; Massachusetts, the white New

England church and a modern fishing fleet; Maine, lastly, gets two classic and historic icons of the old New England coast: a lighthouse and an old salt.

Seated outside his fishing shack with the sea just visible in the distance, the Maine lobsterman paints an orange buoy with a stick, eschewing something as extravagant as a paint brush. He wears denim overalls, worn brown shoes, and a yellow raincoat. Around him, over fifty buoys hang from the sides of the shack and an adjacent fence, belying any presumptions the viewer might have about the vigor of a balding old man with white hair and a bushy mustache. But tourists and attentive armchair lovers of the Maine coast by now knew better than to question the stamina of any old Yankee, and especially an old salt.167

Fifty pages later, Look at America presents a photographic essay of Gloucester.

While it does feature an historic house (though a granite breakwater in the foreground

obscures the lower half) and a quiet picturesque harbor, Gloucester is foremost a modern

fishing port. Its fleet of diesel-powered otter trawlers lines an industrial waterfront of

warehouses. Its seamen are mostly young and predominantly Portuguese and Italian.

The iconic white church in the city is Portuguese, not Anglo-colonial. Looking

elsewhere in the book, even such former redoubts of old New England as Cape Cod and

Nantucket have lost much of their quaint, rural character that first attracted vacationers.

Development has either restored the dilapidated buildings or torn them down to build

167 Look, Look at America: New England (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1947), 33 (Maine lobsterman).

107 rental cottages or second homes.168 There are hardly any pictures that do not have

tourists in them.

Maine is different. It still retains its quaint coastal decay of rotting boats and

weathered fishing shacks. It still retains an active fleet of schooners (though most now

operating as ‘dude cruisers’ for tourists). It still has a fishing industry composed of

independent and usually old Yankee men working the water just offshore. It still has old

‘colonial’ houses not yet restored as trophy homes or museums. It still has builders of

wooden boats working with hand tools. And it still has vistas without a single tourist. At

least in 1947 Maine reflects a landscape still quaint, traditional, and unspoiled. In short,

it is the last refuge of old New England in the twentieth century, and the home of the old

salt.

Future books and postcards would only reinforce what many tourists and

transplants had come to believe in the 1930s, and what became obvious to most

Americans after World War II: that northern New England best embodied the beliefs,

practices, and the physical appearance of the region’s past. And along the Maine coast,

that Yankee past was best visible in the character of an old lobsterman, or what tourists

now called an old salt. A 1950s postcard represents the final stage in the old salt’s over

fifty-year journey through coastal New England culture. Entitled “The Old Salt Along

the New England Coast,” it remains curiously non-specific. Yet tourists familiar with the

region would recognize the location from just the image. An old man with gray hair,

beard, and a mustache sits on a wooden crate at the edge of a wharf. He wears his

trademark yellow foul weather hat and jacket, the ends of the sleeves bleached from years

168 Ibid., for images of Gloucester see pages 86-97; for Nantucket and Cape Cod loss of quaintness see photographs between pages 108-141.

108 of salt-water spray. His khaki pants are tucked into brown boots. He holds a yellow buoy and his feet rest on a collection of cork floats and lines. An empty lobster trap is to his right, and empty crates to his left. Off in the distance is a low, granite-lined shore nearly void of vegetation. To tourists, the scene could only be Maine. A half-century of literature and art had taught Americans that Maine was the exclusive source of Homarus americanus, and the lobsterman who pursued him. Now, as the postcard made clear, the only old salts to be found along the New England coast are the old lobstermen of Maine.

Whether Maine was really the last place to find an old salt did not matter, only that people perceived it as true. And Maine is still where tourists seek the old salt today.

Conclusion

The image of the old salt has experienced a significant transformation in the past

century and a half. In the early and mid nineteenth century he was only a curiosity to the

few tourists who strayed beyond the large seaside hotels. Thoreau, as with so many of

his observations, was ahead of his time in seeing value in the character and tales of an old

man, in a region people had not yet begun to visit. However, during the colonial revival

era surrounding America’s centennial and continuing into the twentieth century, coastal

people were widely seen as those of purest English, Pilgrim, Puritan, or Anglo-Saxon

stock. Americans contrasted these noble living ancestors with the thousands of new

immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who were reshaping American society as

the region rapidly industrialized and urbanized.

As unique residents of the coast, fishermen, sailors, whalemen, and others who

made their living on the water best represented the region, and, with the factor of age, its

109 history and racial heritage. Grouped under the label of old salts, they became living links to the past, and essential props for the growing tourist industry struggling to overcome the economic stagnation plaguing most coastal towns. Yet it was that lack of economic growth that kept so many old buildings, vessels, and people seemingly frozen in time. A new generation of historically conscious tourists delighted in the now quaint landscape, as an antidote to their modern societal ills.

Entering the twentieth century, the new medium of postcards commercialized and standardized the image of the old salt, turning a formerly non-descript old man into a coastal icon and popular souvenir. The transformation occurred just as an increasing number of visitors arrived on the coast in their automobiles. Familiar with old salt stories and what old salts supposedly looked like, most people quickly found the popular image to be a myth. The reality of young, mostly immigrant men dominating the coastal fisheries disappointed most and outraged a few. Some protested by retreating into an idealized past or lashing out at the present. Anti-immigrant legislation calmed old-stock

Americans who feared immigrants would eventually supplant them, and led to their broader acceptance of immigrants along the seacoast. However, old-stock Americans would not recognize recent immigrants or their descendants as old salts.

Enough people, though, still found some old salts along the coast to perpetuate the image in southern New England travel narratives (usually Cape Cod) through the 1940s.

But it was in the decade of the 1930s that the image of the old salt had shifted northward, mirroring the relocation of the larger mythic old New England of which he was a part.

The southern New England coast by the 1940s was turning into the congested, urbanized, and multi-ethnic environment that vacationers had originally seen places such as Cape

110

Cod as the antithesis of. Now Americans looked northward to Maine and Vermont as the best representation of an older New England, and an older America. It was a place where independent Yankees made a living from nature and their own ingenuity. Where small towns and their inherent values and traditions still existed. Where postcard views of bucolic and historic landscapes awaited travelers who journeyed beyond the southern parts of Maine that looked so much like everywhere else. And to tourists reaching the

Maine coast, that was where they would find the redoubt of the coastal Yankee, the one they had read about in books, seen in advertisements, and in movies. The old salt was there, they were sure of it. They had a postcard as proof.

For these tourists, during the first three decades of the twentieth century the entire

New England coast had crystallized in their minds into a de facto historical attraction.

But despite the best efforts of promoters – or perhaps as a result of the best efforts of promoters – some left disappointed at not finding the perfectly pickled port of their colonial-revival infused dreams. Some locals debated how far to go to accommodate them. In the summer of 1930, maritime historian Carl Cutler in Mystic, Connecticut, fumed to his friend Albert Reese in New York about the publisher of his upcoming history of the American clipper ship wanting a photograph of the author to help promote the book. Reese wrote back that he should comply, and present himself as an old salt.

“Publicity – my dear Watson – PUBLICITY. You might be taken clothed in oilskins – your rugged features topped by a souwester. Or, seated on a rock on the broad acres of your Connecticut estate, flanked by wife and bairns, looking out over the choppy sound at a sail boat scudding before the breeze in the distance. Publicity being the word, sir.”169

169 Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Albert Reese of Scardale, N.Y., dated July 18, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

111

While Cutler turned down his friend’s half-serious advice, he still wondered how to best connect the American people with their real maritime history – beyond the stereotype of the old salt. But taking cues from the popularity of old mariners, it should be tangible, a direct connection to the region’s Anglo-Saxon founders, and still tap the popular perceptions of maritime New England that brought carloads of tourists to coastal towns from Connecticut to Maine. The solution that his Marine Historical Association settled on during the following decade didn’t involve old salts at all, but the place where they had grown up. To visitor complaints that the coastline of southern New England had lost its sense of history after decades of industrialization and immigration, the MHA would counter by building the perfect nineteenth-century seaport.

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CHAPTER 2

Mystic Seaport: Reconstructing a Maritime Past to Safeguard the Present

Introduction

On November 8, 1941, the bascule bridge at the mouth of the Mystic River

temporarily stopped traffic along Route 1 as it rose to accommodate a unique vessel.

Those in their cars and pedestrians along the shore watched as a Coast Guard tug slowly pushed the large three-masted ship through the narrow passage and then upriver towards its new home. Mostly empty, the century-old whaleship Charles W. Morgan rode high in

the water, showing the peeling paint and patches in its hull from years of neglect and

damage from a severe hurricane in 1938. The Morgan had barely survived its previous

role as a museum ship in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, but now had a second chance

under the ownership of the Marine Historical Association of Mystic, Connecticut.

Acquiring an old sailing vessel was a major goal of the decade-old association.

While museum ships before and since have sat anachronistically at a pier alongside more

modern craft and buildings, the MHA envisioned the Morgan as a crucial waterfront

exhibit in a soon-to-be-reconstructed small New England seaport – the type that would

have launched such a vessel and supplied it with the necessary gear and men for successful global commerce. Re-created historic villages were already popular methods

among American and European preservationists for saving old buildings and trying to

recapture a past ambiance. But no one in America or Europe had tried to fully replicate a

113 maritime setting, locating collections in and along the waters that had spawned this culture.170

And this was not to be a re-creation merely to entertain sea-minded antiquarians or tourists lured from the nearby highway. The founders of the Marine Historical

Association saw their mission as no less than reestablishing America’s dominance in maritime trade and saving the character of the American citizen from its position of gradual decay since the mid-nineteenth century. The seaport, then, would be far from a static display of nineteenth-century structures honoring maritime industry. From its conception in the 1930s to completion in the early 1950s, the seaport became a participant in the cultural and ideological conflicts occurring in America during World

War II and the subsequent Cold War. Over the next decade this reconstructed waterfront village served as the cultural hearth around which the young museum promoted itself, eventually becoming one of the largest and most influential maritime museums in the nation.

170 Under the guidance of antiquarian-architect George Francis Dow, the city of Salem, Massachusetts, built a replica of its original settlement in the seaside Forest River Park in 1930 as part of its tercentenary celebrations. But aside from a replica of the Arbella – the flagship of the fleet which arrived to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony – tied up alongshore, some fish flakes and a small salt works, there were apparently no other connections to its maritime location. Today, Pioneer Village bills itself as the country’s oldest living history museum. The Arbella eventually decayed and the city demolished it, according to Note 33 of Francis J. Bremer, “Remembering--and Forgetting--John Winthrop and the Puritan Founders,” Massachusetts Historical Review, vol. 6 (2004): 38-69. See also City of Salem, “Salem Pioneer Village 1630,” http://www.pioneervillagesalem.com (accessed January 7, 2013); Salem, Mass., Board of Park Commissioners, A Reference guide to Salem, 1630, Forest River Park, Salem, Massachusetts (Rev. ed., 1935. Salem, MA.: Board of Park Commissioners & Portland, ME.: Southworth-Anthoensen Press, 1935); George Francis Dow, “The Colonial Village Built at Salem, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1930,” Old-Time New England 22, no. 1 (July, 1931): 3-14; Salem Preservation Inc., “2005 Marks a Time to Commemorate 375th Anniversary of ARBELLA fleet’s Arrival to Salem in 1630,” The Salem Preservationist 3, no. 1 (May, 2005): 1-2; http://www.salempreservation.org/newsletter/v0301.pdf (accessed January 8, 2013). Erpi Classroom Films made an educational film about the village in 1940 that includes brief clips of reenactors catching fish and mending a net, though it’s unclear whether these activities were done just for the film or were frequently demonstrated to visitors: Early Settlers of New England (Salem 1626-1629) (Erpi Classroom Films Inc., 1940), 10 min., 12 sec.; 35mm; from Internet Archive, “Early Settlers of New England (Salem 1626-1629) - Encyclopaedia Britannica Films,” AVI http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=EarlySet1940&newflash=1, (accessed January 7, 2013).

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While scholars for decades have used museum collections to write American history, fewer have studied the museums themselves and their role in shaping public memory. The majority of books on American museums are by and for a popular audience, with smaller categories comprising institutional histories that often do not put a museum’s development in historical context, or scholarly evaluations of current museum practices in regard to gender, race, and ethnicity. Some excellent exceptions includes

James Lindgren’s works on the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Stephanie Yuhl’s account of the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings in Charleston, and Michael

Kammen and Charles Hosmer’s landmark works on American memory and historic preservation, respectively.171

Aside from a few paragraphs in Kammen and Hosmer, the development of

American maritime museums in the twentieth century has largely escaped scrutiny by historians, despite their status as increasingly popular attractions for coastal tourists who

171 For examples of popular and institutional histories, see Shelburne Museum, American Dreams, American Visions: The Collections of Shelburne Museum (Shelburne, VT.: Shelburne Museum, 2003); James S. Wamsley, American Ingenuity: Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village (New York, N.Y.: H. N. Abrams, 1985); Kent McCallum, Old Sturbridge Village (New York, N.Y.: Harry Abrams, 1996); Edward Knowlton and Mary F. Greaney, The Wells Family: Founders of the American Optical Company and Old Sturbridge Village (Southbridge, MA.: R.D. Wells, 1979); Jean Kerr and Spencer Smith, Mystic Seafood: Great Recipes, History, and Seafaring Lore from Mystic Seaport (Guilford, CT.: ThreeForks, 2007); for museum studies literature see Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Kenneth L. Ames, Barbara Franco, and L. Thomas Frye, eds., Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits (Walnut Creek, CA.: AltaMira Press, 1997); Moira McLoughlin, Museums and the Representation of Native Canadians: Negotiating the Borders of Culture (New York, N.Y.: Garland Pub., 1999); Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance (Lanham, MD.: Scarecrow Press, 2007); for books that put American museums within the larger story of American public history see Catherine M. Lewis, The Changing Face of Public History: The Chicago Historical Society and the Transformation of an American Museum (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Steven D. Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick, Legacies: Collecting America's History at the Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); and Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999).

115 encounter history there that they likely never learned previously in school. Mystic

Seaport, as an example, opened as a public museum in 1934 and received 184 summer visitors that year; by 1954 it welcomed over 100,000 annually in addition to an array of publications both scholarly and general that reached thousands more. While such numbers pale in comparison to an iconic outdoor museum such as Colonial

Williamsburg, which received over 300,000 by the mid-fifties, few regional museums could rely on such wealthy backers as the Rockefeller family. A casual sampling of New

England tourist literature from the 1940s onward puts Mystic Seaport out front as both the most photogenic maritime museum and the largest. James Lindgren has written about the nearby New Bedford Whaling Museum and its idealization of Anglo masculinity in its first forty years, but this is just the beginning (hopefully) of scholarship on maritime museums as sites of both historical entertainment and contested heritage. This chapter is a small step in that direction.172

1929: the state of maritime preservation and the beginning of the MHA

When three men gathered to found the Marine Historical Association in 1929,

there were few places dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the history of maritime

America. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., exhibited a National

Watercraft Collection, started around 1884 and consisting mostly of ship models, in a

172 Mystic Seaport visitor statistics from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 3, 11; Colonial Williamsburg visitor statistics from Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 551. James M. Lindgren, “‘Let Us Idealize Old Types of Manhood’: The New Bedford Whaling Museum, 1903-1941,” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June, 1999): 163-206. See also Phyllis Leffler, “Peopling the Portholes: National Identity and Maritime Museums in the U.S. and U.K.,” The Public Historian 26, no. 4 (Autumn, 2004): 23-48; and a look at the nineteenth-century origins of the Peabody Essex Museum in James M. Lindgren, “‘That Every Mariner May Possess the History of the World’: A Cabinet for the East Indian Marine Society of Salem,” The New England Quarterly 68, no. 2 (June, 1995): 179-205.

116 story of the “progress of civilization.”173 In Annapolis, Maryland, visitors to Maury Hall

at the United State Naval Academy could inspect a hodgepodge of naval artwork, relics,

models, and ordnance.174 The plans and ship models comprising the bulk of the Hart

Nautical Collection at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, existed largely for the use of its

engineering students. Only three museums in the entire country were specifically

devoted to maritime history, and all in Massachusetts: the Peabody Museum in Salem,

the Boston Marine Museum inside the Old State House, and the New Bedford Whaling

Museum. In addition to these, historical societies existed in some coastal communities such as Gloucester, but as with the maritime museums, all of these collections were local.175 None collected large watercraft, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum went

so far as to build a half-scale model of a whaleship in 1916 in its new museum building

so that future visitors could get a feel for how such a vessel once worked.176

The final whaling voyage from New England ended in 1927, but there were plenty of other opportunities to see commercial sailing vessels in the 1920s and ‘30s – mostly in the form of fishing and cargo schooners. But increasingly the owners of working vessels preferred steam propulsion or the internal combustion engine for advantages in speed, and, increasingly, reliability and affordability. Owners of smaller

173 Carl W. Mitman, ed. & comp., Catalogue of the Watercraft Collection in the United States National Museum (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), 1; Howard I. Chapelle, The National Watercraft Collection (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), 3. 174 United States Naval Academy Museum, “History,” http://www.usna.edu/Museum/history.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). 175 As Carl Cutler, one of the three founders, later explained in a November, 1948, article for Connecticut Industry, “At that time, aside from a ‘watercraft collection’ in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the naval collection at Annapolis, there were only four marine museums in America – The Peabody Museum at Salem, the Boston Marine Museum, and the museums at New Bedford and Nantucket. All of these were local in character, and two of them were devoted to whaling and nothing else.” Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Cutler was partially incorrect in his recollection. The Nantucket Whaling Museum of the Nantucket Historical Association opened to the public in July 1930. 176 Jonathan Olly, “Lagoda: A Legacy in Wood, Iron, and Sail,” Nautical Research Journal 49, no. 3 (Fall, 2004): 144-153.

117 sailing craft might cut down the masts and install an engine, but those with larger vessels sailed them until they could no longer produce a profit and then scrapped or abandoned them. As the number of sails in various American harbors gradually diminished, a nostalgic minority of individuals attempted to preserve some noteworthy examples. But aside from the U.S. Navy’s restoration of the USS Constitution beginning in 1927177, there was only one private preservation success in the 1920s: the whaleship Charles W.

Morgan.178

Launched in 1841 from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the wooden-hulled ship

Charles W. Morgan enjoyed a profitable and unusually long life for a whaleship: over

$1,400,000 of whale oil and baleen harvested during thirty-seven voyages over eighty

years. Even before her last voyage ended in 1921 she had a brief film career, appearing

in Miss Petticoats (1916), Down to the Sea in Ships (1922) and Java Head (1923) before

once again being laid up at a wharf in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. At this time Dartmouth-

based artist Harry Neyland began a campaign to save what was now the last American

square-rigged whaleship. By 1924 he had acquired twenty-seven of the thirty-two shares

in the vessel, giving him majority ownership, and convinced millionaire Edward

Howland Robinson Green to permanently house the vessel as an outdoor exhibit on his

waterfront estate of Round Hill in South Dartmouth, a few miles south of New Bedford.

177 The USS Constitution went through two periods of restoration in the early twentieth century: 1906 to 1907 and 1927 to 1931. See, for example, Thomas Charles Gillmer, Old Ironsides: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the USS Constitution (Camden, ME.: International Marine Publishing Co., 1993). 178 While another ship preservation attempt started in the 1920s, it did not succeed until the 1950s. In 1926 sports promoter James Coffroth purchased the 1863 iron-hulled ship Star of India for donation to the San Diego Zoological Society as a museum ship, but it would be thirty years before the ship was restored. See “Old Ship Soon to be Anchored Off San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1926; “Famous Craft Marine Museum at San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1927; Peter Stanford, The Ships that Brought Us So Far (Washington, D.C.: National Maritime Historical Society, 1971) 20-21, 31; and Trudie Casper, ed., “Jerry MacMullen: An Uncommon Man. Part II,” Journal of San Diego History 28, no. 1 (Winter 1982), http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/82winter/uncommon.htm (accessed November 28, 2012).

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Green was the grandson of Edward Mott Robinson, the Morgan’s second owner, and likely joined the cause out of a strong sense of filiopiety.179

Neyland created the non-profit group Whaling Enshrined, Inc. for the purpose of preserving the vessel, and its incorporation certificate laid out an ambitious mission:

To enshrine and preserve the whaleship, Charles W. Morgan, and other relics of the whaling industry; to create and foster an interest in the history of whaling and the trades which are subsidiary thereto; to promote historical research; to collect documents and relics and to provide for their proper custody; to acquire and preserve other vessels of historical interest; to take and hold historic sites and to care for them; and generally to discover, procure and preserve whatever may relate to general history and antiquity.180

Though a whaling museum already existed in New Bedford, Neyland and his group saw

the Morgan as a unique and evocative set piece for telling the history of whaling, and an

outdoor burden that no historical society would accept. Whaling Enshrined focused on

the first two clauses of its mission. Green had the Morgan towed to his estate on May 7,

1925, where workmen moved it into a cofferdam which they then filled with sand up to the ship’s waterline. The vessel no longer floated, but the sand berth protected it from storms and rot. Alongside the vessel Green recreated a whaling wharf, complete with large water-filled casks lying on their sides in tight rows and covered in wet seaweed.

The exhibit mimicked what a wharf in New Bedford looked like when a whaler returned from a voyage. Workers would unload a ship and arrange the casks of whale oil in rows on the wharf, covering them with seaweed to prevent the barrels from drying out in the sun and leaking while the oil awaited processing in a refinery. Nearby, Green added a

179 Morgan biography from John F. Leavitt, The Charles W. Morgan (Mystic, CT.: The Marine Historical Association, Inc., 1973), 3, 77-81. Edward Mott Robinson was the ship’s principal owner from 1849 to 1859 (p.81). 180 Whaling Enshrined’s certificate of incorporation from Series A: Administrative Records, 1925-1947. Mss 45, Kendall Institute, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

119 nineteenth-century shipsmith shop from New Bedford that he purchased that same year – the start of a replica seaport street that never materialized.181

Nonetheless, the site quickly became a major tourist attraction in the region, no

doubt drawn by the theme-park atmosphere of Green’s estate, complete with private radio

station, airport, poolhouse, beach, eighteenth-century windmill, and a blimp hanger in

addition to the ship.182 Attendance logs record that over one million visitors climbed

aboard the Morgan in the first five years. “All kinds of people crowd the whaler’s

decks,” reported the New York Times five months after the Morgan arrived. “Farmers,

tourists, summer visitors from every part of the United States, New Bedford people,

Italian and Portuguese laborers from the cotton mills … fishermen, lobstermen, writers,

sailors, mechanics and men of affairs; and all with their families, so that the vessel is

overrun with children of every size and shade.” Free admission aided in the vessel’s popularity, as did the genial retired whaling captain named George Fred Tilton whom

Green hired to interpret the Morgan for visitors.183

To operate, Whaling Enshrined had a limited membership of thirty-three who paid

regular dues. But the main source of income came from frequent $5,000 checks which

Green wrote to the organization to cover supplies and salaries of the dozen men who staffed and repaired the Morgan. Having a single major revenue stream would later prove to be the organization’s undoing as Green died in 1936 and left no funds in his will

181 “It had been planned to build a museum, boat shop, sail loft, counting rooms, ship chandlery, oil refinery, and candle works.” George Fred Tilton, ‘Cap’n George Fred’ Himself (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928), 291. 182 For details of the elaborate structures at Round Hill, see Barbara Fortin Bedell, Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green and the World He Created at Round Hill (South Dartmouth, MA.: Applewood Books, 2003). 183 Tilton eventually wrote his autobiography, which Neyland illustrated. See ‘Cap’n George Fred’ Himself (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1928).

120 for the vessel’s continued operation. But at least in 1929, the ship at Round Hill represented a preservation success story.184

Despite the thousands who visited Round Hill or watched historical films starring old sailing ships, it was a much smaller minority who moved from passive historical

recreation to actively seeking to preserve the past in some way, such as Green and

Neyland with the Morgan. In nearby Mystic, such rare sentiment led three men to found

the Marine Historical Association. Incorporated on Christmas Day, 1929, by Edward

Eugene Bradley, Charles Kirtland Stillman, and Carl Custer Cutler, the society was

rooted in their maritime ancestry and first-hand experience at sea.

The eldest of the three founders, Edward Bradley was born in 1857 in the western

Massachusetts town of Russell, but raised in Stonington, Connecticut. Like most of the region’s smaller coastal communities, Stonington’s days as a shipbuilding center and port of departure for global voyages were largely past, but a seventeen-year-old Bradley managed to find a local captain in the summer of 1875 who agreed to hire him as a seaman for a voyage from New York to Shanghai aboard the clipper ship Mary

Whitridge. Bradley worked as a sailor for two years in the Pacific before returning to

Stonington in 1877, where he soon married, and eventually worked his way up through the ranks of the Atwood Machine Company to become its vice president and general manager. Along with his decades-long focus to improve his company’s manufacture of

184 Morgan arrival date and attendance figures from Series C, Attendance Records, vol. 1 & 2, Mss 45, Kendall Institute, New Bedford Whaling Museum. Neyland acquisition information from “A Shrine For The Last Whaling Ship,” New York Times, March 22, 1925, 91. Tilton and visitor descriptions from “Last Old Whaler’s Realism Upsets Romantic Visitors,” New York Times, October 4, 1925, X16. Green’s $5000 checks from Series A: Administrative Records, 1925-1947 of Mss 45. Shipsmith shop information from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 118, 121. According to Bedell, the membership of Whaling Enshrined, Inc. was limited to thirty-three people who owned 32 shares in the Morgan. Barbara Fortin Bedell, Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green and the World He Created at Round Hill (South Dartmouth, MA.: Applewood Books, 2003), 67.

121 silk-weaving machinery, he was an active community member and generous local benefactor – with an interest in preserving the age of sail he experienced as a youth.185

Dr. Charles Stillman never went to sea but was the scion of one of Mystic’s shipbuilding families. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1879, he went first to a

Pennsylvania military academy before undergraduate study at Brown University and finally medical school at Columbia, where he graduated with an M.D. in 1907. For the next four years he jointly maintained a practice in New York City and worked as a researcher at Bellevue Hospital in the Pathology Department. The combined workload was apparently too much for Stillman, and in 1911 he took a leave of absence from both to recuperate at his family’s home in Mystic. When his health recovered, Stillman decided to remain in Mystic, where he started a small practice in the large house he shared with his mother, Harriet Edith Greenman Stillman.

A short distance from the house was a low marshy area along the Mystic River named Shipyard Point. In the nineteenth century it had been the site of a shipyard belonging to his grandfather Clark Greenman and his brothers George and Thomas. At some point Stillman acquired the land purely for its sentimental value, though it would later become the site of the organization he would help found. The doctor enjoyed his

Mystic life as a fisherman, yachtsman, amateur artist, and part-time doctor. It was a routine that, with the exception of an appointment as a medical officer in charge of a base

185 Bradley biography condensed from Marion Dickerman, The Three Founders: Dr. Charles Kirtland Stillman, Carl C. Cutler, Edward Eugene Bradley (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965), 34- 42.

122 hospital in Georgia during World War I, continued unchanged until he met Carl Cutler in

1928.186

Like Stillman, Carl Cutler was not born or raised in Connecticut, but he could still

proudly trace his lineage to New England’s founding. As he recalled in his unpublished autobiography written in the third person for the MHA in 1950, as a boy “he found he was descended from one John Cutler, who settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, about

1637, and that his paternal grandmother was Ruth Thomas, whose father was a shipbuilder of Quincy and had helped build the ‘Constitution.’ Her home was near that of the Adams family.”187 Born in 1878 in Kingston, Michigan, Cutler moved at the age of

six with his family to Tiverton, Rhode Island, where his father had accepted a position as

a Baptist minister. The location likely suited the sea-leaning family. The Reverend

Gilbert Cutler had begun a stint as a mariner at the age of fifteen, visiting ports in

England, South America, and the West Indies including one voyage on a whaler. After eight years at sea he came ashore and became a Baptist minister, a job that also kept him on the move. Gilbert’s brother, Captain Roswell Cutler, had also gone to sea at fifteen for what became a forty-five year career under sail.

In the late nineteenth century the maritime industries that had first built New

England still permeated the communities lining Buzzards Bay. Writing decades later,

Cutler waxed about exploring with his cousins the local boat shop and the derelict whaleships laid up along New Bedford’s waterfront – his favorite place in the region.

186 Stillman biography condensed from Marion Dickerman, The Three Founders: Dr. Charles Kirtland Stillman, Carl C. Cutler, Edward Eugene Bradley (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965) 9-14. 187 Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume One,” 23. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. In a letter Cutler wrote to Alexander Wood of Winnetka, Illinois, dated February 15, 1963, he further stated that “My own line goes back to 1637 when John Cutler settled in Hingham and 1620 when John Alden and Pricilla Mullen arrived in Plymouth…” Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

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Equally entertaining were the adventure stories told not only by his father but the old retired mariners whom Cutler met about town or at his father’s parsonage. Upon graduating from high school Cutler worried about his health and decided to copy Richard

Henry Dana Jr. (author of the celebrated Two Years Before the Mast (1840)) and go to sea before continuing his education. With his father along to provide advice, Cutler went to New York and the pair decided on the bark Alice bound for New Zealand. Once at sea

Cutler found his boyhood fantasies of the sailor’s life replaced with deprivation and toil.

In New Zealand he jumped ship and started working his way home – first on the RMS

Gothic to London, and then the steamer Montcalm to New York. Having decided that he had suffered enough, Cutler never went to sea again but gained a first-hand view of the maritime history that would later direct his life / and a love for maritime history.188

After undergraduate study at Brown and law school at Columbia (never crossing paths with Stillman), Cutler passed the bar in 1906 and began work as a lawyer in New

York City. But by the late 1920s he felt he was wasting his life in his chosen career path, and decided to resign to begin writing on a topic he had spent much of the decade researching. “He had come to the conclusion,” Cutler recounted, “that the most interesting thing he could do, would be to write a story of American shipping. It seemed to him that it had never been told in adequate fashion, although his imagination pictured

188 Cutler biography condensed from Marion Dickerman, The Three Founders: Dr. Charles Kirtland Stillman, Carl C. Cutler, Edward Eugene Bradley (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965), 18- 22. Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume One,” 21 (father’s travels at sea), 79, 86-89, 94 (meeting mariners and adventure stories), 96-97 (exploring New Bedford), 105 (uncle’s first voyage), 110-111 (adventure stories), 130 (copying Dana), 133-191 (Cutler’s voyages). Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

124 it as one of the most remarkable and inspiring achievements of all time. It held something, he thought, that should inspire and strengthen America.”189

So in the spring of 1928 Cutler left New York and joined his wife Helen Grant

Irving Cutler and their two children at her ancestral home in Mystic, Connecticut. The

colonial farm suited Cutler as an appropriately inspiring writing center. Aside from the

seaside view, Helen’s father had been a Mystic shipbuilder and Cutler found some of his builder’s models in the barn and outbuildings. This was lucky as Cutler planned to include within his book technical drawings of clipper ships and photographs of replica builder’s models he made and originals that he might find. It was this search for models that led him to Stillman, who had a collection from his shipbuilding Greenman ancestors.

The two teamed up, with Cutler agreeing to buy models he found in various cities and towns along the eastern seaboard for both of their collections, and Cutler using them as source material for his book. Their conversations, though, soon extended beyond collecting and publishing. Cutler credits Stillman with proposing that they start a new organization dedicated to maritime research – one with national influence.190

By the time G. P. Putnam’s Sons agreed in 1929 to publish Cutler’s now-

completed manuscript on the history of the clipper ship (released in 1930 as Greyhounds

of the Seas), Cutler and Stillman had enlisted Edward Bradley in their cause, and the

Marine Historical Association had its founding members. Early next year the men began

enlisting and meeting with fellow maritime enthusiasts. From these conversations Cutler

189 Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 278. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 190 Dickerman, 18-22 and Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 278-288. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

125 wrote the society’s Statement of Plan and Purposes, which outlined the group’s reasoning for the creation of a new type of maritime organization.191

The nine-page document began with Cutler bemoaning the wholesale destruction

of American maritime history in the form of ship models, logbooks, and official records

burned, scrapped, abused, neglected, or sold as junk. But as Cutler and Stillman showed in their initial model-collecting efforts, much could still be salvaged – including photographs, implements, and other three-dimensional material. But collecting was not enough, and here Cutler took aim at what he saw as the fault of other maritime collections. Without naming specific organizations (though there were only a few so the criticism was obvious), he argued that all of the maritime collections were local instead of general, some were staid memorials while others made cursory attempts at public education, and all were more interested in preserving the past than making that past relevant to present and future generations. “It is one thing to have a fine collection and exhibit it to the public in an interesting manner. It is wholly another to make that collection the nucleus of a vital, growing force which shall be the rallying point of an organization capable of playing a worthy part in a living America with a future to face.”

The MHA would fill this void.192

Building a general collection and focusing on maritime education were not ends

in themselves. Cutler and his conscripts saw their ultimate goal as once again redirecting

American culture seaward. And it had slipped far: “Old ideals, lost three-quarters of a

century, must be revived; ancient knowledge recovered…. Above all, the youth of

191 Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 290, 292-296. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association is located in box 1, folder 4 of ibid. 192 Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 4. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

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America must be imbued with the spirit of the seas and all for which it stands.… More than an institute; more than a museum; more than an historical organization; more than a perpetual memorial – although combining the essentials of all – we may look forward to playing some small part, ultimately, in the re-creation of a powerful maritime civilization.”193

At the end of World War I the United States had indeed largely withdrawn from

the world stage. But to Cutler the damage was not years but decades old. In the

conclusion of Greyhounds he pronounced this maritime civilization moribund by 1860, as

America turned inward and fought itself.194 The answer, for at least the men and women reading the Statement of Plan and Purposes, was the sea. “The sea is a perpetual frontier,” Cutler began, outlining America’s salvation in the twentieth century. “From it

have sprung and will always spring those higher qualities invaluable to national well-

being, such as courage, sacrifice, the pioneering spirit of adventure, co-operation, loyalty,

high aspiration and true religion. To bring these factors of soul back, in however small

degree, into the national consciousness cannot fail to be a patriotic service.” With the

western frontier closed, the ocean remained the final and the original place to foster the

best qualities of American citizens. And to bring these back into popular use, the MHA

would lead by example.195

193 Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 4. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 194 “America, which had been sea-minded for two centuries, was nautically decadent in 1855. By 1860 the process could go little farther. There was an utter lack of anything resembling public interest in matters pertaining to shipbuilding or in the exploits of the ships themselves.” Carl C. Cutler, Greyhounds of the Seas: The Story of the American Clipper Ship (1930; reprint, Annapolis, MD.: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 370. 195 Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 4. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Closing of the frontier discussed in Department of the Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part I, Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892), xlviii; Frederick Jackson

127

How the association would start this revival was, somewhat ironically, with the construction of a traditional museum building with storage, exhibition, and meeting spaces. In the future Cutler suggested that the association might add a center for training boys for careers in the merchant marine and navy, but a museum was likely the easier first objective. Where to situate this building and any future developments was the final focus of the Statement. While members were free to argue otherwise, MHA’s officers preferred a rural location generally and Mystic specifically. Aside from the higher cost of urban real estate, institutions based in cities could supposedly only depend on support for projects relevant to that community. Rural locations were “neutral ground,” offered room for growth, and a smaller constituency who could be more amenable to a new social and economic opportunity in town. Historian Michael Kammen has also identified an increased preference at this time for local historical commemorations as opposed to participating in national historical events. As the founders all lived in or near Mystic, this same sentiment of “proud provincialism” made it likely that they would stay for more than just economic and political reasons.196

Geographically and historically, Mystic was located on the region’s main

highway of Route 1 halfway between the large cities of New York and Boston, and

halfway between Bath, Maine, and Baltimore, Maryland – the zone for much of Cutler’s

recent research and collecting. As a small village settled in 1654 in what became the

town of Stonington, it had a centuries-long history of shipbuilding and seafaring but also

Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in American Historical Association, The Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Chicago: American Historical Association, 1894): 119-227; or see the first chapter of Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, N.Y.: H. Holt and Co., 1920). 196 “By the end of the twenties proud provincialism seemed to generate greater esprit than leaving one’s community to celebrate some national anniversary at a distant location. Local commemorations thrived for a decade.” Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 494.

128 an indistinctiveness that made it representative of the small New England seaports that had fostered the ideals which the MHA so badly wanted to resurrect. Whatever the ideological arguments, though, the likely deciding factor for where to base the MHA was that Stillman had offered his family’s former shipyard site to the association should they choose to locate there. To a nascent organization with no funds, a free waterfront location anywhere would be hard to turn down. And so in 1930 the group agreed to stay where their roots already ran deep.197

Nowhere in the Statement of Plan and Purposes did Cutler describe plans for

the reconstructed village/seaport for which the MHA would later become famous. If

Cutler’s recollections are to be believed – and no other evidence exists to corroborate or

refute his claims – then the idea was there but just never made it into print. “He

visualized, in addition, the re-establishment of an oldtime seaport, life size and complete

in all its essentials,” wrote Cutler in 1950, describing Stillman’s vision at the time of the

MHA’s founding. “He was a gifted amateur artist and made pencil sketches, showing old buildings, shops and lofts and ancient ships, ranged the waterfront. They were singularly attractive. There was something to grip the interest and stimulate the imagination of everyone – merchant, shipbuilder, mariner, fisherman, naval architect, model builder, collector, yachtsman, and even the antiquarian. / It was new and different. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Properly carried out, it might even ground a new type of research – more convincing and inspiring. Even Ed – obsessed through he was by

197 For plans for eventual building and sail training and Mystic as best location see Carl C. Cutler, Statement of Plan and Purposes of The Marine Historical Association (n.p., n.d.), 6-9. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. For Mystic history see Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1945).

129 practical considerations – acknowledged its appeal. Looking back, it seems to account, in a measure, for the rather remarkable success of the venture.”198

Ignoring for the moment Cutler’s sense of who comprised the MHA’s target audience – a narrow group of professionals rather than the general public – his writings need to be seen in the context of 1950. Then, the reconstruction was several years along and it would make sense to argue for the expensive project’s completion by tying it to the intentions of the founders. As Bradley and Stillman had both died in 1938, the seaport would be largely the result of Cutler’s vision, both in construction and documentation.199

The earliest reference in Mystic Seaport’s archives to an historical reconstruction is in 1938, with a report Cutler submitted to the MHA’s president outlining their progress since 1929 and recommendations for future growth. Charles Stillman had died that

March, leaving the MHA without a managing director. Recently back from Texas where he had spent a number of years managing an oil investment, Cutler agreed to take his place. That September saw the death of the association’s first president (from 1930 to

1934), Edward Bradley, leaving Cutler as the sole founder to carry on their vision.200

198 Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 291-292. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 199 Mystic Seaport has little of Bradley and Stillman’s professional correspondence in its archives. Charles Stillman’s papers are in two main collections: Coll. 324 and VFM 661, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. There is no collection of Bradley’s papers pertaining to his association with the MHA, though it does have letters and a journal from his time as a sailor, and a certificate from his career as an industrialist. 200 Carl C. Cutler, “Report, The Marine Historical Association, Inc., December 1929 – July 1938, With Recommendations Made and Submitted to Clifford D. Mallory, President, By Carl C. Cutler, Acting Managing Director, The Third Day of August, 1938” in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 9. Excerpt of letter from Cutler to Fred P. Burden of Vancouver, B.C., dated Jan. 26, 1942: “As a consequence of his withdrawal [Mr. Higgins, a lawyer and oil developer], I am home from Texas early in 1938 and took charge of the Marine Museum work which I had started back in 1929, with two other associates. During my years in Texas, the Museum was managed by Doctor Stillman, one of the principal original founders and as he died in March, 1938, it was left to me to carry on the work.” Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

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Though with only eighty-eight members in 1938, the association had developed considerably in the nine years under Stillman’s direction. At the group’s inception its members imagined a purpose-built structure on Shipyard Point for their exhibition, storage, library, and office needs. Member Clifford D. Mallory (later the MHA’s third president) suggested that it resemble an old stone warehouse with a dock “that might have the atmosphere of a whaling dock.”201 But as the nation’s economy worsened into

what became the Great Depression, the association became more practical. Likely to

protect their investment and provide more room for growth, in 1931 Mary Stillman

Harkness, Stillman’s cousin and spouse of millionaire philanthropist Edward Harkness,

purchased for $30,000 a defunct woolen mill for the association located next to Shipyard

Point. Presented by Stillman to the MHA on April 4 on behalf of Harkness (who, along

with Stillman, was a director on the association’s board), the former Mystic

Manufacturing Company site comprised several wooden and brick buildings on one and a

half acres along the Mystic River. The complex dated to 1849 when the Greenman

brothers decided to expand into textile manufacturing on a lot adjacent to their

shipyard.202

Aside from two garages and an office building to be kept temporarily, all other

wooden buildings were quickly demolished within the year due to their decay, leaving

behind four brick buildings. One of these – a one-story former machine shop built

201 Letter to Cutler from Clifford D. Mallory, dated Sept. 17, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 202 Description of Harkness gift from Marine Historical Association, “The Gift of Mrs. Mary Stillman Harkness to The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,” Bulletin No. 5 – April 15th, 1931. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 2. History of the Mystic Manufacturing Company from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 44-50. Membership count from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 3.

131 around 1889 – the MHA renovated over the summer into its temporary headquarters and first exhibition space. Opened in time for the second annual meeting that September, it displayed a collection of artifacts mostly loaned from the members’ own collections. The association invited the public to view the exhibits beginning in the summer of 1934.

Over the next six years the MHA increased its collecting and public access, and continued to rehabilitate the final three buildings as fast as members’ funds, labor, and donated materials allowed. A second exhibition building opened in 1935, and a third in

1938.203

As Cutler typed up the progress of his association in the summer of 1938, tabulating its members (88), land (1.5 acres), museum buildings (4), collection (1001 objects), library (1511 two-dimensional items), and publications (12 pamphlets), he described the next five goals. The first would be to remodel the last and largest of the former mill buildings at a cost of over $25,000. Next was moving the library and artifacts from the smaller buildings into it. Third was “Equipping and fitting out small buildings as old time shipyard shops, lofts, etc., including coopering and carving shops,

blacksmith, treenail and blockmaking shops, sail and mould lofts, saw-pits and spar yard.

Eventually a complete shipyard of early type will be reproduced, fully equipped, so that

the visitor will be able to appreciate to some degree the factors involved in producing

wooden ships.” Though this is the earliest known reference to the re-creation – and it is

purely a shipyard instead of a village – the brevity and specificity of the description

203 Demolition plan from Marine Historical Association, “The Gift of Mrs. Mary Stillman Harkness to The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,” Bulletin No. 5 – April 15th, 1931. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 2. Machine shop renovation details from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 50; for opening dates of the new exhibit buildings and related photos see Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 3-5.

132 implies that it was already known to its audience. It is unclear whether Cutler meant for these shops to go into the vacated brick buildings or new ones to be built on Shipyard

Point, but likely the latter, as was apparently Charles Stillman’s intention. The fourth goal was to find and preserve an old square-rigged ship and possibly other craft, while the fifth was to increase and broaden the collecting of historical records for the library.204

Buoying Cutler’s ambition was an offer which Harriet Stillman made to the MHA

that spring of her property on Greemanville Avenue, her son Charles’s adjacent Shipyard

Point (seven and a half acres in all), and their shared maritime collections, all of which

had passed to her upon his premature death. Despite Cutler’s prediction that Shipyard

Point would be available for immediate use, such was not the case. Stillman chose to

retain the property, in its undeveloped state, until her death – which would not occur until

1949 at the age of ninety four. Her intransigence likely frustrated the other MHA

directors (Stillman was one of fifteen directors on the board), who now had to carry out

their vision on the edge of its future home. In the meantime they would focus on other

goals. They continued to gather tools and equipment with which to stock the planned

shipyard – including material salvaged from the Benjamin F. Packard, one of the last

remaining American-built wooden square-rigged ships, before it was sunk in Long Island

Sound in May of 1938, too decayed for commerce or preservation. Mary Stillman

Harkness again came to the rescue of the MHA in 1940 with a gift to remodel the last,

and with three floors, the largest, of the former mill buildings, in memory of her cousin.

204 Carl C. Cutler, “Report, The Marine Historical Association, Inc., December 1929 – July 1938, With Recommendations Made and Submitted to Clifford D. Mallory, President, By Carl C. Cutler, Acting Managing Director, The Third Day of August, 1938”, pp. 2-5 (statistics), 6-7 (goals) in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1, 1930-1950, folder 9.

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And the directors searched for a ship to add to the proposed shipyard, eventually choosing the whaleship Charles W. Morgan in 1941.205

The importance of ancestry

All of these efforts – ship preservation, building refurbishment, and the association’s own inception and expansion, succeeded through its leaders’ skillful appeal to ancestry. The United States’s centennial celebrations in 1876 had helped spark a growing historical awareness among its citizens. As post-Civil War America witnessed unprecedented social and technological change, the past for many people became a refuge, a place of inspiration, and common ground. Such historical encounters could be through oral or written history, art, food, song, literature, performance, artifacts, buildings or places. In the following decades such reverence broadened from honoring the national founding fathers to one’s own ancestors. In Mystic Chords of Memory, historian Michael

Kammen describes how the practice of ancestor worship took hold in America in the

1880s. One of the earliest efforts dates to 1824 with the establishment of Pilgrim Hall in

Plymouth, Massachusetts, by descendants of the famous settlers to hold a collection of

205 Harriet Stillman’s proposed gift is first mentioned in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of a Special Meeting of Directors of The Marine Historical Association, Inc.,” Bulletin No. 18 – May 12, 1938. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 9. The meeting took place on April 30, 1938. The complete details of the gift are in a letter from Harriet G. Stillman to Clifford D. Mallory, dated August 1, 1938, in box 2, folder 14 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Harriet Stillman’s status as a board member and Cutler’s expectations that due to Stillman’s gift Shipyard Point “is now available for instant use, when needed,” are on pages 3 and 4 of Carl C. Cutler, “Report, The Marine Historical Association, Inc., December 1929 – July 1938, With Recommendations Made and Submitted to Clifford D. Mallory, President, By Carl C. Cutler, Acting Managing Director, The Third Day of August, 1938”, Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 9. Salvage of the Packard is described in Marine Historical Association, “Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc., July 8, 1939,” Bulletin No. 21 – July 15, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 10. Harkness’s gift to rehabilitate the brick building detailed in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the [11th] Annual Meeting of Marine Historical Association, Inc., July 27, 1940,” Bulletin No. 22 – September 1, 1940. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 11.

134 relics. (The hall, as a mausoleum, was the type of institution the MHA dreaded becoming.) But by the late nineteenth century, the practice extended to honoring lineages of no particular importance.

Filiopiety took many forms depending on one’s income and social opportunity.

Wealthy Americans, such as those in the Piscataqua region of New Hampshire and

Maine, restored or remodeled their ancestral colonial homes. Regardless of whether one had a family estate, national organizations such as the Sons of the American Revolution

(1889) and Daughters of the American Revolution (1890) attracted genealogically- minded Americans who wanted to highlight their lineage to further their social standing or to increase their sense of self. Those without such deep roots in America, such as recent immigrants, or denied official recognition and membership on account of racism, such as happened to African Americans, often joined or created organizations with less- restrictive criteria.206

Contiguous with the growth of national ancestry organizations were community

based historical societies interested in preserving the artifacts and structures of their

forebears. The historic preservation movement had started in the mid-nineteenth century

with the preservation of Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters in Newburgh by

the State of New York in 1850, his Mount Vernon estate in Alexandria, Virginia, by the

private Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association in 1859, and the Old South Meetinghouse in

Boston in 1876 by a group of concerned citizens that marked the first successful

preservation effort in the face of development. In the coming decades the movement

206 Richard M. Candee, “The New Colonials: Restoration and Remodeling of Old Buildings Along the Piscataqua,” in “A Noble and Dignified Stream”: The Piscataqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 1860- 1930, eds. Sarah L. Giffen and Kevin D. Murphy (York, ME.: Old York Historical Society, 1992), 35-78 (especially 35-48). Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 215-223.

135 spread nationwide with local, state, and regional organizations selectively preserving pieces of the built environment outside of any museum to meet their current needs.207

The MHA had two major influences: those doing ancestry-based preservation and those creating museum villages. Of the former, three organizations deserve special mention as examples of ancestral-fueled preservation efforts preceding the MHA, and for the attention paid to them by historians. One of the earliest state-wide efforts, the

Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (1889) was able to promote its version of history through preserving structures, building monuments, and holding pilgrimages. Before Colonial Williamsburg or the National Park Service, the APVA was already working to define the character of its home state. It serves as a pioneering example of a group that worked to define American cultural identity, and which individuals in other states emulated with their own preservation organizations. In contrast to later preservation standards, APVA preservationists, to quote historian James

Lindgren, “did not consider the artistry, landscape, or craftsmanship of an antiquity to hold much import. They instead valued these antiquities as symbols of venerated ancestors, time-honored customs, and the cultural environment of early Virginia.”

Basically the APVA was about using relics to inspire the present with the wisdom of their forebears, and more caught up in exercising a form of civil worship than accurately preserving the past – what Lindgren calls a “Gospel of Preservation.” Their campaign involved courting old Virginia families, preserving sites of the “good” past and hoping

207 For the campaign to save the Old South Meetinghouse, see Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) , 94-109. For Hasbrouck House see Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: A History of the Preservation Movement in the United States Before Williamsburg (New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 35-37. For Mount Vernon see ibid., 41-62.

136 that social malcontents would show respect for this golden past, and spreading Virginia’s historical supremacy nationwide.208

Farther north and two decades later, Bostonian William Sumner Appleton formed

the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in 1910 out of a desire to

save the region’s colonial-era homes and artifacts. Collaborating with like-minded

architects and preservationists such as Joseph Chandler, Norman Isham, and George

Dow, he shaped an idealized view of early New England through select preservation and

sharp “restoration” of two dozen properties in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire in the organization’s first two decades.209

Lindgren shows that SPNEA’s preservation work was not a retreat into the past,

but an intervention in the present meant to check what its proponents perceived as the

eroding of Anglo-Saxon cultural power in the face of immigration and urbanization. Old buildings were good for tourism, served commercial purposes, and helped anchor neighborhood identity. While this kind of progressivism was not wholly democratic – anyone could join but only a few controlled SPNEA’s mission – it contained the similar elements of corporate structure, scientific methods, professionalism, and involved the same class of participants as other progressive causes. In reality, while SPNEA became preservation’s first corporation and a model to groups such as the National Park Service,

Colonial Williamsburg, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it created a

homogenized Yankee ancestor that excluded the diversity within New England’s early

population such as Native and African Americans, and all women. We are left with

208 James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 7. 209 For a list of properties see James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 185-186.

137

SPNEA’s legacy of what it felt was important to save, and ambiguity over what is the actual past versus the restored past. As a result, much has been lost that could have presented a more accurate picture of New England’s early built heritage.

In a similar warning of the politics of preservation on a community level, historian Stephanie Yuhl has studied how elite white residents of Charleston, South

Carolina, during the interwar years formed an organization to advocate for the preservation of the city’s antebellum mansions. The Society for the Preservation of Old

Dwellings’s (later the Preservation Society) lobbying resulted in the city creating the nation’s first planning and zoning ordinance in 1931. The ordinance created a Board of

Architectural Review and a historic district in the oldest quarter of the city – where most of Charleston’s elite lived – protecting it from any future development. Yuhl points out that the work of preservationists displaced African American residents through gentrification, and resulted in erasing what had once been racially integrated streets and neighborhoods. These decisions have permanently shaped the understanding of place and race in Charleston for tourists and many of its residents.210

Such were some of the historical lessons available to Cutler, Stillman, and

Bradley at the time they founded the Marine Historical Association, though it’s unknown

how much they followed regional or national preservation efforts. At least two of the

three men, though, used ancestry as a tool in their public lives either before or outside the

MHA. In a brief three-sentence bio written by Stillman for his Brown University

yearbook in 1900, he stated his date and place of birth, names and hometowns of his

parents, and ended with “Ancestors were of Puritan and Seventh Day Baptist stock, the

210 Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

138 majority of them Rhode Islanders from Westerly, Newport, Tiverton and Portsmouth.”

Clearly Stillman was proud of his deep local roots, which were particularly potent in this smallest of states. Cutler also used ancestry as a touchstone, as he explained to his publisher that being from “an old New England sea-faring family” was his greatest impetus for writing Greyhounds of the Seas, and he sometimes asked business colleagues about their origins if one matched a surname that he came across in his research. In the case of his query to Ednah Crosby Farrier, publicity manager of the publisher of Cutler’s book, he was incorrect, but she knew enough of her family’s nineteenth-century genealogy to correct him. Such an exchange suggests that asking about one’s ancestry was not unusual, even among purely business contacts, in the early twentieth century/was among the public details of one’s life in the early twentieth century.211

While such correspondence may have simply contributed towards a good working

relationship, the MHA placed a deeper meaning on one’s roots by initially using it as a

litmus test for membership. At the first meeting in January 1930 of prospective

members, Cutler recalled in his memoirs the names of the dozen or so men and women

who had agreed to join and observed that “All were descendants of early shipping

families, with strong traditional interests in maritime concerns. The country had

211 Charles Kirtland Stillman, “Papers, April 14, 1904 – May 2, 1938,” VFM 661, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Cutler mentions ancestry as main reason for writing his book in a letter from Cutler to Ednah Crosby Farrier (publicity manager at G. P. Putnam’s Sons), dated July 10, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. For an example of Cutler using ancestry in business see letter from Cutler to Ednah Crosby Farrier, dated Oct. 21, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. His letter ends with: “You mention coming from seafaring stock. I wonder if young John Farrier, born in Providence about 1801, who, in 1815, shipped on the schooner Betsey of Stonington, bound for the West Indies, was a connection? John was reported at that time to be 14 years old, 4 feet 10 inches high and light complected. One of his ship mates was William Williams, who was, I think the grandfather of William Williams, collector of the port of New York a few years ago.” Farrier responded the next day that she “feel[s] that the probabilities are that it is not a member of our family since my father’s father came direct from Scotland subsequent to 1801.”

139 thousands more, with similar traditions and interests, constituting a great reservoir of potential support.” A year later in “A Private Communication from the Membership

Committee to the Members of The Marine Historical Association,” the committee, comprised of Cutler, Stillman, and Bradley, called for expanding membership, particularly in cities from Boston to Baltimore. In the “Qualifications for Membership” section it curtly stated that the “essential personal traits and characteristics of proposed new members will be obvious to all our present membership, without further discussion.”

But the founders went on to suggest patriotism and immediate sympathy for the MHA’s mission as qualifiers, while “those with a background of sea tradition or interest in marine affairs should be given special consideration.” The rolls were also restricted to adult American citizens, though foreigners could become “Corresponding members.”

After nine years of cautious growth, Cutler proudly tallied eighty-eight mostly

East-Coast members in a 1938 report to the MHA, and concluded that “Those who have become members, therefore, are almost without exception, persons with a maritime ancestry whose interest and sympathies are natural and require no stimulation or corrective influence.” Presumably such correction would involve someone of Anglo- maritime ancestry explaining to the uninformed why this founding generation mattered – which would be the function of the MHA with its publications and exhibits.212

Whether out of a sense that it finally had a solid core of wealthy members of

Anglo-maritime origin, or that it ran out of such people and needed to look beyond

ancestry to fulfill its goals, the MHA decided in 1940 to broaden its membership rolls.

212 Carl C. Cutler, “Cutler Manuscript, Volume Two,” 296. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. “A Private Communication from the Membership Committee to the Members of The Marine Historical Association,” January 17, 1931, in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 2.

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At the eleventh annual meeting in July of 1940 President Clifford Mallory called for a

“great expansion in membership” and stressed that the only requirement was to be

“genuinely interested in preserving and making vital the memory of what our seafaring ancestors accomplished and the high standards by which they lived. It is only recently that world events have demonstrated with compelling force the part their qualities and principles played in developing and sustaining a fine, beneficent civilization, and the urgent need for a renewed appreciation of the things for which they stood is becoming daily more obvious.” The new war in Europe and the likelihood of American intervention now seems to have placed one’s ancestry second to one’s chosen nationality as an American in Mallory’s eyes. His inclusive language invited in anyone interested in

American maritime history, though the “our” qualifier marks a continuing preference for a certain slice of that history – which would be demonstrated in the preservation campaign for the Charles W. Morgan two years later.

Such an invitation was not new. Preservationists in New England had been using historic structures as tools for instilling immigrants with “American” values and reverence for early Anglo Americans for several decades, such as the Paul Revere

Memorial Association’s restoration of the famous patriot’s seventeenth-century house as a museum in the immigrant neighborhood of Boston’s North End in 1907, and Caroline

Emmerton’s establishment of a settlement house in the restored seventeenth-century

Turner-Ingersoll Mansion (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables) in Salem,

MA, in 1910. Both examples were about restoring buildings as anchors of Anglo-

American culture in neighborhoods now dominated by those recently arrived from other

141 countries, and then using such sites to teach the newcomers about early American history and provide them with role models for values that were supposedly foreign to them.213

Cutler and the other MHA members likely believed that their Yankee ancestry contributed to, if it was not directly responsible for, their success.214 In the late

nineteenth though early twentieth centuries, such thinking permeated American upper-

class white society. Michael Kammen argues that ancestor worship became less intense

by the 1920s from its peak at the turn of the century, “yet it clearly remained a social

force that motivated high-minded people to participate on diverse commemorative

occasions. As with the growing appeal of local observances, however, acts of historic

preservation or tradition-oriented piety increasingly occurred on account of a personal

sense of devotion to forebears.” As maritime preservation has always lagged behind

213 Mallory quoted in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / July 27, 1940,” Bulletin No. 22 – September 1, 1940. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 11. For Paul Revere House restoration see Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 216-218. For House of the Seven Gables as a settlement house see William H. Truettner and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, eds. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1999), 89-90 and The House of the Seven Gables, “The Settlement: Caroline Emmerton,” http://www.7gables.org/settlement_camp.shtml (accessed January 7, 2013). For additional examples of the ties between preservation and immigrants, see James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995) and William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of Immigrants,” in The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1985), 341-361. Despite the popular belief among established Americans that immigrants needed historical tutoring, newcomers and their families were active participants in the Colonial Revival. For example, historian Briann Greenfield has explored the important role of Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century American antique market. See Chapter 2: “The Jewish Dealer: Antiques, Acculturation, and Aesthetics” in Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009). 214 Maybe they were right. A recent scientific study has shown that thinking about one’s ancestors improved subsequent performance on intelligence tests. Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic, and Silke Weisweiler, “The Ancestor Effect: Thinking about Our Genetic Origin Enhances Intellectual Performance,” European Journal of Social Psychology 41, no. 1 (February, 2011): 11-16.

142 land-based efforts, the MHA would continue to use ancestry as a preservation tool long after organizations such as SPNEA had become increasingly professional.215

The MHA had acquired its first vessel in 1931 as a gift from Charles Stillman.

Named the Annie, it was a single-masted racing craft called a sandbagger, built in 1880

and used by a wealthy Mystic owner on Long Island Sound in summer, and the waters off

Georgia and Florida in winter. Initially it may appear to be an odd acquisition, as

yachting was not a part of Cutler or Bradley’s backgrounds or Cutler’s scholarship. But

it speaks to the organization’s attitudes towards ancestry and its membership base. In a history of Mystic written in 1945 by Cutler, he looked back on the Annie as the “ultimate development” of vessels of this design (as recreational vessels were often based on the designs of local working watercraft), but that “The type vanished, partly at least, because it demanded an inexhaustible supply of the ablest and most active young sailor men.

Unfortunately, in the last half of the 19th century, our ships were manned largely by the

sweepings of Europe and the Yankee sailor was fast becoming tradition.” So the

mastless hull that greeted visitors outside the MHA’s museum beginning in 1931

represented the height of local design, but that the sport of racing them died for lack of

seaworthy local men. The sailboat had become a memorial for a supposedly vanishing

race of Yankee sailors.216

Such a public demonstration of filiopiety (and veiled racism) by the MHA needs

to be seem in conjunction with a practical need for money. It made good business sense

215 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 220-221 (belief in biological superiority), 494-495 (ancestor worship as a powerful force). 216 Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1945), 162-163. Maynard Bray, Mystic Seaport Museum Watercraft (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1979), 48-49.

143 for the MHA to court select wealthy Americans interested in maritime history by offering them both an exclusive organization to join and a chance to publicly demonstrate their ancestral pride. In 1939 Cutler predicted in his report at the annual meeting that the eventual “development of shipyard shops will call for services of old shipwrights and descendants of shipbuilders.” The former category makes sense due to the decades-old knowledge an experienced shipwright could contribute to a historical re-creation of his work space, but the call for help from the kin of old-time shipbuilders (who presumably had no such skills to offer) must have been an appeal for money.217

This business aspect of filiopiety appeared in the MHA’s first year in a letter

Cutler wrote to a colleague in Maine. Then, the MHA had just under forty members, but

“some of our members are related to some of the wealthiest men in the world – a fact

which of course is of significance as bearing on the possibility of the Association

engaging in useful work on a large scale in the future. For example, near relatives of two

of the wealthiest families in America built ships in Mystic for nearly a hundred years.”

But wealthy members, or wealthy potential members, did not automatically mean easy

money for the organization. Later that year Cutler wrote to a collector in Massachusetts

and complained that these supporters “regard me with the same amused tolerance they

accord to Fido, and write a check to some old furniture faker for $10,000.00 for a rickety old chest which has perhaps fifty mates in different parts of the country, and pass up

217 Marine Historical Association, “Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / July 8, 1939,” Bulletin No. 21 – July 15, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930- 1950), folder 10.

144 models which are unique.” But gradually Cutler and his associates became proficient fundraisers.218

Using ancestral ties to court rich potential members continued through the organization’s first two decades, visible in the land, buildings, and money given by wealthy families such as the Harknesses, Stillmans, and Mallorys. The association reciprocated by publicizing such acts of generosity along with physical accommodations on the MHA’s grounds such as docking facilities for visiting yachtsmen, commemorative plaques and memorial buildings, a larger dock built in 1948 with funds provided by the

Cruising Club of America (and which received the prestige of appearing as the cover photo on the first issue of the MHA’s new publication, the Log of Mystic Seaport in

1948), and the New York Yacht Club relocating their 1844 clubhouse to the museum grounds in 1949 to guarantee its preservation (and yachting as a part of MHA storytelling).219

The MHA’s filiopiety extended to contemporary sympathy with its members’

ancestral homeland in the British Isles. By the annual meeting in the summer of 1941,

Clifford Mallory had died and been replaced by his brother Philip as MHA president, while far out in the Atlantic Allied convoys battled with German submarines. As

President Roosevelt readied the country for war, so, too, did the museum. On display that day was the newest exhibit: the jolly boat from a British steamer torpedoed in the

Atlantic the previous August, and in which two men had survived a seventy-day, 3000-

218 Carl C. Cutler letter to Charles R. Patterson of Cape Cottage, Maine, dated Oct. 3, 1930 and Carl C. Cutler letter to Ray Baker Taft of Hingham, MA, dated Nov. 21, 1930, both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 219 For story of dock and cover photo, see The Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 1 (October 1948); for acquisition of the New York Yacht Club’s Station 10, see William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 95-99; actually a long-term loan to the MHA, the NYYC moved its clubhouse from Mystic to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1999.

145 mile voyage. Members of the Mallory family had been vacationing in Nassau that winter when the boat was auctioned off to benefit its survivors and war relief charities. Clifford

Mallory unsuccessfully bid on the boat to exhibit it in Mystic, but his death the following

April convinced the winning bidder to loan it to the museum anyway. The jolly boat of the Anglo-Saxon was meant to provide a vivid and contemporary example of heroism, sacrifice, and determination – five men had died aboard it during the ordeal – and show solidarity with the British people.

Indoor exhibits such as the jolly boat, and the planned replica shipyard might appear to be disparate examples of maritime collecting, but managing director Carl Cutler saw the museum and the historical reconstructions as mutually supportive. The library and exhibits were places of research and broad storytelling, while the re-creation offered context for the disparate objects on display in the museum buildings, or in Cutler’s words: “significant, purposeful unity to a mass of material which would otherwise present to the casual visitor a merely picturesque spectacle, or a bewildering accumulation of relics, depending upon his mental background. Together, they make plain an effective, inspiring lesson in patriotism, courage and high achievement.”220

Spoken in the summer of 1939, such lessons now had heightened importance as first the

United Kingdom and then the United States became embroiled in the new world war.221

On the cusp of America entering the war, the association accomplished its single- greatest example of preservation in the Charles W. Morgan. Publicly, the MHA did not

220 Carl C. Cutler, “Report of Managing Director” in Marine Historical Association, “Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / July 8, 1939,” Bulletin No. 21 – July 15, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 10. 221 Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / June 28, 1941,” Bulletin No. 23 – July 22, 1941. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 12. Role of Mallory family in acquiring the jolly boat from J. Revell Carr, All Brave Sailors: the Sinking of the Anglo-Saxon, August 21, 1940 (New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 229-234, 257.

146 consider acquiring the whaleship until sometime in early summer of 1941, when members of Whaling Enshrined decided they couldn’t save the ship. For years the MHA had watched the vessel decay and public support for it wane. A letter from Cutler to

Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall in 1939 failed to produce any state support, and Cutler had to publicly deny that the MHA had plans for the vessel after one of its members inquired in New Bedford about buying it. But privately, the MHA’s president acknowledged that they were the only museum that could take in such an exhibit, though

Mallory hoped the National Park Service or the citizens of New Bedford would rally at the last minute and keep him from having to ask his members for the expected $30-

40,000 needed to preserve it. They didn’t. Instead Whaling Enshrined voted in July of

1941 to give the Morgan to the MHA. So the MHA officers started soliciting offers to remove the ship to Mystic, and by September accepted a bid and started constructing a sand berth on their waterfront.222

With the deal approved, at least Cutler was enthusiastic. Remarking to lithograph

collector Harry Peters in New York that she was “the last real American ship” aside from the USS Constitution, Cutler looked forward to the hundreds of thousands of visitors that

had once climbed over the Morgan in South Dartmouth to now follow her to Mystic.

Such an audience would bolster his and the association’s efforts to create a sense of unity

222 Saltonstall letter mentioned in letter from William H. Tripp to Carl C. Cutler, dated Feb. 21, 1939. Cutler’s public denial of the MHA wishing to acquire the Morgan is in an undated newspaper clipping from the New Bedford Mercury included with a letter to Cutler dated July 15, 1939. Both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Mystic as the Morgan’s last best hope and estimate of her removal and restoration cost in letter from Clifford Mallory to Reginald W. Bird of Boston, MA, dated Aug. 9, 1940 in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Whaling Enshrined’s offer and the MHA’s consideration in Marine Historical Association, “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Marine Historical Association, Inc. / June 28, 1941,” Bulletin No. 23 – July 22, 1941. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 12. The MHA’s acceptance mentioned in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harry T. Peters of New York, N.Y., dated Sept. 7, 1941 in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

147 and pride around their forefathers’ records of accomplishments. And to a former oil business partner in Portland he confided that “We took the job only after the best blood of

Massachusetts had struggled with the problem for three years, and fallen down on it.”

All ancestral preservation efforts, even with the “best blood,” still required deep pockets.

And the MHA’s were now deeper and broader.223

Once the Morgan was safely docked in Mystic only weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the MHA put out a four-page publication to explain their acquisition to the public. Entitled Why the “Morgan” came to Mystic, it evoked the power of ancestry-based preservation and sought to dispel notions that the MHA poached

New Bedford’s history. While the whaling city’s residents were sadly no longer able to

care for the vessel, the Morgan’s preservation in Mystic still represented a triumph of the

two group’s shared “New England Character,” which, according to the unknown author

of the report (likely Cutler), represented the “vigorous root of Americanism.” Following

this train of logic, as American character was supposedly based in New England, and

New Englanders had as a people come of age at sea, then the source of American strength

lay in the crucible of that maritime history. Such an unprecedented preservation effort

showed that the initiative of early New England seamen to overcome hardship and

bravery had not been wholly lost in the subsequent years. And that success, the MHA

reasoned, was due to them preserving maritime history and relics. It was a self-fulfilling

ancestral prophesy. Mystic’s steadily mounting successes embodied “the maritime

tradition which gave birth to the hardihood, endurance and self-reliant common sense so

223 Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harry T. Peters of New York, N.Y., dated Sept. 7, 1941; and letter from Carl. C. Cutler to John C. Higgins of Portland, OR., dated Sept. 19, 1941, both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

148 strongly identified with New England character.” It was a pact. People preserved their history and in turn that history gave them “magnificent character.”224

Mystic’s new museum was itself a perfect complement to the Morgan, being “the

one available spot in all New England completely suited to the re-creation of the

conditions and atmosphere surrounding ships and ship-building during the great days of sail.” Though this site was currently only a collection of renovated former mill buildings

and a swampy peninsula, the fact it had once been a vital place of maritime business was

apparently what mattered. As with the imagined power of (proper) ancestry, the latent

energy was in one’s mind. From the bare ground that once launched famous sailing

vessels the MHA envisioned an “early shipyard and attendant shops, lofts, spar-yard,

tools and equipment” that would be coastal New England’s answer to Virginia’s

Williamsburg. Until then, people were invited to peruse their “romantic exhibits” which

included the Morgan, Annie, a forty-two foot boat restored to look like a now-vanished

type of fishing vessel, the English jolly boat, and the museum’s smaller artifacts and

publications. Using the word “romantic” shows the association using sentimental

language to appeal to members of the public beyond their earlier and narrower group of

224 As historian John Seelye explores in Memory’s Nation, history-centric New Englanders in the early twentieth century dwelt on their supposedly lauditory, centuries-old character and their ancestors’ accomplishments because it was what they had left as the region declined industrially and commercially, relegated to the margins of modern America. Seelye pronounced the living force of old New England that had elevated Plymouth Rock to a political and moral icon of national importance dead by the Massachusetts Tercentenary in 1930. The New England of today exists largely as an outdoor museum of its once central role in American society. While the South did rise again after the Civil War, New England has never regained the political and economic influence it once enjoyed in the early nineteenth century. See especially chapter 25 of John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

149 maritime professionals and enthusiasts. And now that work required the help of everyone who felt “the surge of seafaring ancestry within his veins.” 225

Through luck, another membership drive, and much donated labor and materials,

the MHA was able to maintain the Morgan through the lean years of World War II; it

remains to this day the only surviving American wooden merchant ship of the early

nineteenth century. But calling on only a narrow section of the American population –

those descended from early New Englanders – for support was untenable for the

museum’s postwar goals, particularly the re-creation of a shipyard. As the MHA had

already compared its plans to Colonial Williamsburg, its members were clearly aware of

other historic reconstructions around the country. While it’s unknown which ones the

Marine Museum at Mystic corresponded with aside from Colonial Williamsburg, they’re

worth exploring as both potential inspiration and how Mystic fits into this sentiment of

historic outdoor re-creation in America in the 1940s and ‘50s.226

Influences / Inspirations

The story of Williamsburg’s transformation from historical footnote to popular

living museum began with the Reverend Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, rector of the town’s

Bruton Parish Church and a department chair at the College of William and Mary.

Historian Charles Hosmer credits him as the first American preservationist to propose saving an entire community instead of select historic buildings or sites within it. In a

225 Marine Historical Association, Why the “Morgan” came to Mystic (Mystic, CT.: Marine Museum of the Marine Historical Association, [c.1942]) 226 Mallory called for another extensive membership drive at the 1942 annual meeting. Cutler complained to friends in letters in 1942 and 1943 that with the occasional help of schoolboys and sea scouts, he was largely responsible for keeping the vessel maintained. See letter from Carl C. Cutler to Lt. H. Oliver Hill in Petersfield, England, dated Aug. 16, 1942, and letter from Carl C. Cutler to Albert Reese of Newburgh, N.Y., dated Sept. 12, 1943, both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

150 vision that preceded Charleston’s creation of the nation’s first historic district, Goodwin believed that the importance of Williamsburg rested in its historic cohesiveness. He saw his adopted home as the birthplace of American liberty (one of many places along the

East Coast claiming this title), a sacred font of American character that could not be contained in any single structure. And by the 1920s this “spirit of the past” at

Williamsburg was under assault from the forces of modernity – particularly the automobile and its related infrastructure and businesses. In a note of irony Goodwin sought to reconcile this clash by appealing to two of the nation’s richest industrialists for help.227

His blunt and unintentionally public efforts from 1924 to 1926 to convince Henry

Ford to buy and restore the town failed. More reserved and private courting on

Goodwin’s part eventually earned the full backing of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in late 1927

to restore the town to its eighteenth-century appearance. Rockefeller went public with his

vision (and his status as the project’s sole bankroller) in 1928, and over the following

decades an unprecedented army of historians, architects, urban planners, archaeologists,

builders, and art and antiques experts worked to preserve, selectively demolish, and

rebuild Williamsburg’s historic center.228

Some members of the community balked at the flow of money and experts from

the North, but entering the Depression many found this investment to be a unique stroke

of luck. By 1931, 321 modern buildings had been demolished and thirty-four buildings

227 For Goodwin as first major preservationist, and his beliefs in what Williamsburg represented, see Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:11-12. For Goodwin and Rockefeller seeing CW as a shrine, see Anders Greenspan, Creating Colonial Williamsburg: The Restoration of Virginia’s Eighteenth-Century Capital (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 10-12. 228 Goodwin courting Ford recounted in Hosmer, 12-15; Greenspan, 8-9; and Kammen, 359-361. Goodwin gaining Rockefeller’s support recounted in Kammen, 360-362; Hosmer, 12-33.

151 had been restored, at a cost of $7 million – with the two latter tallies slowly increasing along with new reconstructions. By 1934 the group had reconstructed the Capitol and

Governor’s Palace from archaeological and historical evidence, restored the Wren

Building on the adjacent campus of William and Mary, and visually brought the town’s main street back to an eighteenth century appearance in time for President Franklin

Delano Roosevelt’s attendance that October for its dedication. Tourist numbers surged in the coming years, from over 30,000 in 1934 to over 200,000 in 1941 – encouragement, no doubt, to later builders of outdoor museums.229

What became the living museum of Colonial Williamsburg (CW) proved to be the

single most important preservation project in twentieth century America. First, it was an incubator for the fields of architectural reconstruction and restoration, historical

archaeology, museum management, decorative arts, landscape and interior design, and

historical tourism and historical interpretation. Second, it was a model for imitation or

improvement/set the standard for authenticity. All subsequent outdoor and historic house

museums either copied/built on Williamsburg’s practices or benefited from the enlarged

field of preservation-related scholarship and businesses that grew up in its wake.230

No other group or wealthy individual chose to replicate Rockefeller’s outsized

plan on another American community. Instead, the preferred method for preserving a

group of buildings remained the museum village, an idea that was already a half-century

old when the Marine Historical Association planned their re-creation. The world’s first

229 For restoration as a benefit to Williamsburg, see Greenspan, 32-34. For progress of construction by 1931 see Hosmer, 44. For Roosevelt’s presence at dedication and visitor numbers see Kammen, 362-363 and 367. 230 For prompting new areas of scholarship see Hosmer, 30; for discontent over the “invasion” of Northern money and expertise see Hosmer, 32; for tension between focusing on restoration and public education, see Hosmer, 38-48 and 56-64. For CW as most influential preservation project see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 554-555.

152 open-air museum started on the grounds of King Oscar II’s summer residence of Bygdø outside Oslo (then Kristiania) in 1881. The collection of eventually five buildings (of eight planned) was meant to show the king’s interest in the Norwegian people, as the

Swedish-born king ruled over both countries at the time. The site opened to visitors the following year.

One of these early visitors was Artur Hazelius, who since the 1870s had collected artifacts from Sweden’s vanishing pre-industrial farming culture. He opened his first museum, the Nordiska Museet, in Stolkholm in 1873. Inspired by what he saw in

Norway, he decided to expand beyond exhibiting artifacts in period rooms. In 1888 he secured land on the island of Djurgården in Stolkholm and opened the outdoor museum of Skansen three years later with the first of eventually 150 relocated historic structures and a corps of costumed interpreters. Skansen’s rapid expansion and popularity influenced the creation of other open-air museums in Scandinavia, such as the Norsk

Folkemuseum in 1894, and eventually ones in continental Europe and America. Uniting them all were shared goals of patriotism and concern for capturing what their founders saw as disappearing ways of life.231

231 Oscar II’s museum from Norsk Folkemuseum, “Oscar II’s Collection,” http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/en/Exhibits/The-Open-Air-Museum/Oscar-IIs-Collection/ (accessed January 7, 2013); and Sten Rentzhog, Open Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea (Kristianstad, Sweden: Jamtli Förlag and Carlsson Bokförlag, 2007), 48-51. For history of the Skansen see Skansen, “The Creation of Skansen,” http://www.skansen.se/en/artikel/creation-skansen (accessed January 7, 2013); and Sten Rentzhog, Open Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea (Kristianstad, Sweden: Jamtli Förlag and Carlsson Bokförlag, 2007), 4-32. The Norsk Folkemuseum and Skansen vie for which had the first open air museum. While Oscar II’s collection preceded Skansen, Rentzhog argues that the latter was more influential, as aside from local renown, the king’s collection was “astonishingly unknown in Sweden” and the incomplete project was moribund after 1890 until being incorporated into the collection of the Norsk Folkemuseum years later (p. 51). Oscar II’s collection became part of the Norsk Folkemuseum in 1907 according to Norsk Folkemuseum, “Oscar II’s Collection,” http://www.norskfolkemuseum.no/en/Exhibits/The-Open-Air-Museum/Oscar-IIs-Collection/ (accessed January 7, 2013).

153

Henry Ford was the first person to replicate the Skansen model in the United

States, though it’s unknown how much he knew of the European museums. In 1919 he had decided to restore his boyhood home in Dearborn, Michigan, and the search for correct period furnishings sparked a broader desire to collect Americana of all kinds. In the midst of the colonial revival he quickly became the pre-eminent collector of his nation’s material past. Ford’s scorn for book-based historical instruction is well known, and as an alternative he believed in learning about history through artifacts from those eras. Expanding from collecting small artifacts to industrial machinery and eventually entire buildings allowed him to preserve and exhibit a fuller picture of his idealized past.

By 1924 his zeal for historic architecture had resulted in him buying and restoring his childhood home and schoolhouse in Dearborn, an 1836 tavern outside Detroit that he had visited as a youth, and the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, made famous by

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Wayside Inn proved to be a test bed for his brand of immersive history as he purchased over 2,500 acres surrounding the inn to preserve its rural character and as space for a proposed village reconstruction. He even paid the state of Massachusetts to relocate the adjacent and now automobile-traveled highway. But the distance between Massachusetts and Michigan prevented Ford from closely managing his historical and commercial enterprises, so the village idea shifted in 1926 to Dearborn.232

As had Artur Hazelius, Ford envisioned a museum with an adjacent village of relocated structures. But unlike Hazelius, Ford wanted to showcase industrial history.

For him, American history was a story of progress through invention, and this idea

232 Ford collecting Americana and pre-Greenfield Village restoration projects from Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 353-354. See also Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929-1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford Museum Press, 1979), 3-4, 8, 15-19.

154 stitched together the myriad buildings soon to be moved to a field next to the Ford

Engineering Laboratory. Ford appointed a draftsman named Edward Cutler (no relation to Carl) as architect of the project, and Cutler drew up plans modeled after a New

England village with a central green, church, town hall, and surrounding businesses.

Unlike the fastidious and professional reconstruction work at Colonial Williamsburg,

Ford distrusted specialists and preferred to rely on his own sense of historical accuracy and workers from his factories and dealerships to carry out his plans. Having a budget as unlimited as Rockefeller’s, Ford searched for appropriate pieces for his inspirational collection, particularly buildings from New England, Michigan, and those associated with industrious men such as Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Orville and Wilbur Wright,

Harvey Firestone, and Ford himself. Though taking divergent approaches to historic preservation, Rockefeller and Ford traded ideas and visited each other’s historical projects.233

Edison had the greatest physical presence at the museum. His laboratory from

Fort Myers, Florida, was the first building re-erected in the village, and Edison attended

its dedication in September, 1928, along with the cornerstone ceremony later that day for

the museum itself, named for the octogenarian inventor and modeled on Philadelphia’s

Independence Hall and several other historic buildings. The following October Edison

returned to dedicate the Edison Institute and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his

invention of the incandescent light bulb – re-enacted in the village inside a replica of

Edison’s research laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey. Ford had rebuilt the

233 Village development from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:80-83, 86; Ford and Rockefeller relationship detailed in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 356-358.

155 industrial research complex – the world’s first – on the village grounds using the original foundation stones, topsoil, and also added a surviving boarding house that had once served its workers in New Jersey. Visitors, which included President Herbert Hoover, toured the two-dozen buildings erected so far in the village. The entire complex opened to the general public on June 30, 1933, and as with Skansen and Colonial Williamsburg, quickly became a hugely popular tourist attraction. Named after his wife Clara’s hometown, Greenfield Village was largely complete with over eighty relocated historic buildings by the time Ford suffered a stroke in 1945.234

The legacy of Greenfield Village is several-fold. First, it demonstrated the

viability of the museum village in America as an historical attraction and furthered the

argument that historic buildings – especially groups of historic buildings – had public

educational value. Starting in September, 1929, Ford turned the village into an outdoor

classroom by offering lessons to select local students in the various historic buildings.

By 1937 the program expanded to a full kindergarten through college curriculum. A

person could literally receive all their formal education within Ford’s museum. Next,

Greenfield Village combined education with commerce, as it had staff in the various

shops demonstrating their craft and producing goods for sale – a practice also begun at

Colonial Williamsburg at this time. However, CW went further and also licensed outside

companies to make reproductions. Lastly, Henry Ford’s nation-wide acquisition of

buildings raised the awareness among citizens of the historic structures within their

communities. Some, such as Sandown, New Hampshire, immediately raised funds to

234 For Edison and dedication details see Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929-1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford Museum Press, 1979), 22-23, 30-37, 48, 53; Greenfield Village as largely complete see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 355.

156 restore their meetinghouse upon Ford’s offer to buy it; while town officials in Lincoln,

Illinois, unsuccessfully fought to block Ford’s removal of his recently-purchased former courthouse in which Abraham Lincoln had once worked. Eventually the preservation movement by the 1960s would side with Rockefeller’s approach of preserving historic buildings in situ – though open-air museums would continue to multiply in number and scope for several more decades.235

Preservationists around the country and particularly in southern New England were quick to follow on the examples of Ford and Rockefeller. As it would be cumbersome to catalog every outdoor museum that developed between

Williamsburg/Greenfield Village and Mystic Seaport, I will focus on the three largest and most well known in the neighboring states of New York and Massachusetts as potential food for thought for Mystic Seaport’s builders.236

In Cooperstown, New York, summer resident Stephen C. Clark wished to preserve the ambiance of the quiet community while at the same time help it become something other than just a resort town for wealthy families such as his. Clark’s solution was historical tourism. In 1938 he appealed to the New York State Historical

235 Education opportunities at the Edison Institute and Greenfield Village described in Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929- 1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford Museum Press, 1979), 97-101; Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:56-57 (CW selling consumer goods), 1:87-89 (communities resisting Ford’s collecting of their buildings). As recently as 2000 the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., has continued to add historic buildings to its collection. 236 I am not including among this group Storrowton Village, a collection of nine buildings moved to a re- created New England village between 1927 to 1931 on the grounds of the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Massachusetts; their purpose was to exhibit antiques and crafts that are for sale – not to authentically re-create the past. See Eastern States Exposition, “History of Storrowton Village,” http://www.thebige.com/sv/history/history.asp (accessed January 7, 2013); and Nicholas Zook, Museum Village U.S.A. (Barre, MA.: Barre Publishers, 1971), 47. Nor am I including Pioneer Village in Salem, Massachusetts, as all of its buildings are reproductions. See the first footnote of this chapter. In 1954 the New York Times published an article on the re-created and original villages in New England. See Mitchell Goodman, “The Yankees Re-Create Their Past: Museum Villages Offer a Glimpse of Life In The Old Days,” New York Times, June 13, 1954, XX21.

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Association to relocate its headquarters to the town where he was already preparing to open the National Baseball Hall of Fame the following year. Negotiations between

Clark, one of the heads of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and the association resulted in a promise of a new headquarters for the latter and encouragement for the former to start collecting agricultural and domestic implements from around the county.

Clark’s collecting zeal and the association’s already large holdings led the former to turn his unproductive dairy farm into a farmers’ museum with a small village of local buildings to showcase the collection. In 1944 workmen began reassembling the first building, an 1819 stone general store, on the site of the combined Farmers’ Museum and

Village Crossroads. After acquiring a schoolhouse in 1945, museum staff began touring rural and outdoor museums in Pennsylvania (Mercer Museum, Landis Valley Museum),

Virginia (Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg), and Massachusetts (Old Sturbridge

Village) over the next three years to make sure their developments followed the same high professional standards as other institutions which they admired. By the end of the

1950s the Farmers’ Museum had a complete village of over a dozen structures built in and around Ostego County in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.237

When a staff member from the Farmers’ Museum visited Old Sturbridge Village

in 1946, she found it superior to Williamsburg for depicting the lives of common people

in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The village was the dream of Albert

Wells, one of three brothers who owned the American Optical Company in Southbridge,

Massachusetts. As had Ford and many other Americans, Wells became enamored with

237 Development of the Farmers’ Museum from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:97-109; and Farmers’ Museum, “Historic Structures,” http://www.farmersmuseum.org/farmers/collections/historic_structures (accessed January 7, 2013).

158 collecting antiques in the 1920s. And as had Clark, Albert Wells decided to house his ever-growing collection in period buildings. But it was Albert’s son who suggested in

1936 that instead of a collection of old buildings stuffed with antiques they create a “live village” of the early nineteenth century complete with water-powered shops. J. Cheney

Wells joined his brother Albert on the project, and the pair purchased a former farm along the Quinebaug River in adjacent Sturbridge. After contacting Colonial Williamsburg for advice, they initially hired the Boston firm of Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn to plan the proposed village. Due to the firm’s expensive services and outsized vision, the Wells brothers switched to another Colonial Williamsburg expert, landscape architect Arthur

Shurcliff.238

Inspiration came from other sources as well. In 1938 J. Cheney went to

Stockholm for a business trip and toured Skansen, taking photographs to share with his

family. In 1940 the Wells family sent their curator and superintendent of construction to

Greenfield Village to gather ideas. The two men reported back that the trip taught them

“what not to do,” and Albert concurred from his own earlier observations that it was “a cold, dreary, flat place.” Despite his displeasure at the ambiance of Greenfield Village,

Albert, as had Ford, added historic and new structures with a greater emphasis on their ultimate purpose as exhibition and craft-demonstration spaces than as examples of painstaking architectural authenticity. The point wasn’t a Williamsburg-quality architectural reproduction of a typical New England village, but a place where rural New

England arts and industries could be taught to a new generation. Albert hoped that the

238 OSV as better than CW from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:107. For Wells’s early collecting through the planning of the village see David M. Simmons, The Wells Family and the Early Years of Old Sturbridge Village (Sturbridge, MA.: Old Sturbridge Village, 2000), 18-32; and Hosmer, 1:109-112.

159 production and sale of crafts could make the project self-sustaining – a dream of many museum village founders that never came to pass. His declaration in 1941 that visitors

“will appreciate how the early New Englander’s ingenuity and thrift and self-reliance paved the way for some of man’s greatest material achievements,” echoed the MHA’s hope that their museum would pass on an appreciation for the accomplishments of the region’s founders. Incorporated back in 1938 as Quinabaug Village Corporation, the renamed Old Sturbridge Village opened to the general public in June, 1946, with eighteen original or reconstructed buildings, four of which were working craft shops. Within three years attendance reached almost 40,000, showing both the benefit of the museum’s proximity to major highways and public appetite for historical immersion in the postwar era.239

A final Massachusetts example lay to the west, in Deerfield. In a similar though

smaller version of what took place in Williamsburg a decade before, headmaster Frank

Boyden of the town’s namesake Deerfield Academy had, by the 1940s, worked for

several decades to preserve the town’s old houses and ambiance. For Boyden it was

partly out of a desire to create a private boarding school for elite Yankees, and limit the

presence and influence of recent European immigrants in the town. Boyden’s appeals in

the 1920s to William Sumner Appleton of the Society for the Preservation of New

England Antiquities got him advice about forming a preservation organization, but no

financial help. Both men dreaded new immigrants owning or occupying historic

239 Skansen and Greenfield Village observations from David M. Simmons, The Wells Family and the Early Years of Old Sturbridge Village (Sturbridge, MA.: Old Sturbridge Village, 2000), 27-28. Rest is from Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:113-118. Wells’s quotation is from page 22 of a pamphlet he wrote in preparation for a visit by the Walpole Society in 1941. Pamphlet is listed as Albert B. Wells, Old Quinabaug Village (1941) in Hosmer’s endnotes.

160 properties, and worked to acquire buildings for their respective organizations as funds allowed. Salvation finally came from the parents of one of Boyden’s students, Helen and

Henry Flynt. As had Rockefeller while strolling around Williamsburg, the New York- based couple were impressed with Deerfield’s antiquated charm, and sympathetic to calls for preserving its Yankee character.240

Deerfield already had a deep historical consciousness. It was the site of one of the

first preservation attempts in America when citizens tried in 1847 to save a house that

had witnessed a 1704 raid by Frenchmen and Native Americans. With its hatched-

scarred front door, the house had long been a popular tourist attraction. While the effort

failed and the house was demolished the following year, it sparked other preservation and

commemoration activities, most notably the establishment of the Pocumtuck Valley

Memorial Association in 1870. The association acquired a building in 1880 and

eventually installed what is arguably the first display of period rooms in an American

museum. Other heritage activities included Deerfield citizens participating in a crafts

revival from the 1880s to 1920s and using local antiques for inspiration, and wealthy

residents restoring old houses.241

No doubt familiar with the town’s historical attractions by the time of their son’s

graduation in 1940, Helen and Henry soon bought their first Deerfield property in 1942

and then began a project to buy and restore additional eighteenth and nineteenth-century

structures along the town’s main street. At first their efforts were to benefit the

240 Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 142-143. 241 Deerfield’s preservation history and initial involvement of the Flynts from Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 132-145. For examples of Appleton’s distrust of immigrants, see James Michael Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995), 87-89 (the Norton house), 82-83 (the Boardman house).

161 academy’s building and landscaping needs, but soon the couple began buying houses to create their own string of historic house museums. Following the process at

Williamsburg, they solicited advice from national experts on how to restore and furnish their growing collection. By 1949, when the New York Times trumpeted “Massachusetts

Town Now Another Williamsburg,” the academy and the Flynts each owned a dozen houses, with the latter also owning a store and the village’s 1884 inn. The following year the Times noted that six of the properties were open for tours by their owners – a number that would eventually double. In less than a decade the Flynts’ Heritage Foundation

(later Historic Deerfield) had become the public face of the community.242

While the Flynts’ actions could be seen as continuing a tradition of preserving the

town’s eighteenth and nineteenth century past, historian Briann Greenfield argues that the

couple “undermined traditional patterns of valuing family stories and local heirlooms

with a new emphasis on using Deerfield to define national values.” Both on the scale of

their restoration work and relying on national experts, the Flynts introduced Deerfield to

a national audience. Henry also vocally defined their work as a demonstration of

American patriotism; in doing so, he brought their adopted community into the current ideological war with the Soviet Union. Henry Flynt argued that his “stark village” had

once been nearly destroyed by its enemies, and in its survival, growth, and now graceful

old age it represented American tenacity and cultural refinement. These ancestors had

not shirked in the face of a threat, a theme he set down in a book that he co-wrote with

photographer Samuel Chamberlain in 1952 called Frontier of Freedom: The Soul and

242 Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 142-148. Sanka Knox, “Restoring Deerfield: Massachusetts Town Now Another Williamsburg,” New York Times, September 25, 1949, XX20; Cynthia Kellogg, “An Old New England Town Restored,” New York Times, September 24, 1950, X16.

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Substance of an American Village. As Greenfield outlines, the Heritage Foundation was but one of many cultural organization both public and private using American history as a bulwark against communism. Mystic Seaport would, too, see itself as a player in the ideological debates of the Cold War, as it also irrevocably changed the character of its host community.243

By 1949 the aforementioned five outdoor museums were in full operation, with

three more in the planning stages: the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, Plimoth Plantation

in Massachusetts, and the Marine Historical Association’s seaport.244 While the MHA

copied the ground-up village approach of Ford, Clark, and Wells, they otherwise

preferred Colonial Williamsburg as a role model. Henry Ford, for instance, sought to illustrate a story of progress – including himself and people he admired as exemplars of that progress – in Greenfield Village, whereas the MHA was retrenching into what they imagined as a golden age of maritime history from which important lessons and behavior needed to be resurrected. Supporters of Colonial Williamsburg also felt this way about the town’s eighteenth century history.

Of all the contemporary outdoor museums in America in the 1940s, only Colonial

Williamsburg has a documented influence on the MHA. As early as 1946 the MHA retained a public relations firm that contacted CW to learn of some of their restoration pitfalls.245 In December 1949 MHA Assistant Curator B. MacDonald Steers wrote to

CW board member Vernon Geddy, complementing their “ability to inspire others with

243 Briann G. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 2009), 133 (quotation), 149-150. 244 Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust, 1926- 1949 (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1981), 1:129. 245 Raymond T. Rich to Kenneth Chorley, November 6, 1946, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and 1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia.

163 the spiritual significance of re-creations,” and asked for copies of any public remarks on the subject.246 Continuing CW’s practice of being a clearinghouse for preservation advice, Geddy responded with copies of speeches that he and CW’s president, Kenneth

Chorley, had delivered previously in Charleston and Newport.247 After receiving and

reading the speeches, a delighted Steers wrote back a week later to thank the men and

invited them to Mystic to speak about CW’s restoration “for the inspirational value it

would have to our townspeople and members in the similar job we are attempting

here.”248 Historian Michael Kammen describes Chorley as an evangelist for preservation,

and the specific texts which Steers received were versions of his stump speech that

emphasized authenticity and the economic benefits surrounding such preservation

projects. Whether Chorley or Geddy ever spoke in Mystic is not documented in the

records of either institution. But it’s clear that Steers hoped that the MHA, as it began to

construct a version of Mystic within its grounds, would have as smooth a working relationship with its host community as Colonial Williamsburg did.249

Building the Seaport

As the directors of the Marine Historical Association gathered for their annual

meeting in July, 1945, they could take pride in their spiritual contributions to the war

effort. As Philip Mallory had stated at their annual meeting three years prior, the

246 MacDonald Steers to Vernon M. Geddy, November 26, 1949, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and 1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia. 247 Vernon M. Geddy to MacDonald Steers, December 27, 1949, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and 1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia. 248 MacDonald Steers to Vernon M. Geddy, January 6, 1950, General Correspondence for 1937-47 and 1948-57, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Archives, Williamsburg, Virginia. 249 For Chorley as preservation evangelist and his speeches, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 369-370, 554.

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“fighting qualities” which American servicemen had demonstrated in a succession of

Pacific battles, “were bred into the American bone” by famous maritime ancestors such as John Paul Jones, Oliver Hazard Perry, Stephen Decatur, and David Farragut. But apart from blood, success also depended on servicemen learning about the demands of the sea, and the tradition of American maritime leadership and perseverance, naval and mercantile. “The preservation of this great maritime tradition – the transmission intact of its inspiring, revitalizing message, happens to be the function and chief purpose of this

Association” he stated that year to museum members, emphasizing the MHA’s long- standing objectives for the new war.250

Carl Cutler agreed. In writing that November to a woman preparing a radio

broadcast on a U. S. Army observation post being built on Shipyard Point – through a

quirk of riverine geography the MHA now found itself hosting a military installation – he

stressed that they were different than most museums. They sought to bypass the rare,

beautiful, and valuable for “the crude, homely, everyday things, which would enable us to reproduce a picture of the actual conditions under which American seamen once lived and which they had to meet and overcome in order to accomplish their remarkable

achievements.” If statistics are any indication, their message found a receptive audience.

From 1942 to 1944, twenty percent of the visitors to the museum were servicemen and

women, with the majority coming from an officers’ training school in New London,

Connecticut, at their instructors’ strong recommendation.251 For the MHA the clearest

250 Mallory quoted in “Minutes of the Annual Meeting of Members of the Marine Historical Association, Held at the Museum on Saturday, June 27th, 1942, at 2:30 o’clock in the Afternoon (W.S.T.),” pp. 3-4 in Box 6, folder 4 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 251 Military attendance figures from the “President’s Statement” within Marine Historical Association, “Fourteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal

165 way to reproduce this picture was with a reconstruction – following the trend of other museums in the region.

Now with the war nearly won the MHA didn’t see itself as needing to change its message. In a speech that reads as if written for him by the MHA, Governor Raymond

Baldwin of Connecticut addressed the association’s members at the 1945 meeting in

Mystic and deftly summed up the museum’s beliefs and mission: that maritime ancestors set the standard for self-reliance, courage, and individual liberty; that their successes built the foundation for America’s subsequent rise to a world power; learning of this maritime history can help perpetuate America’s maritime supremacy in the postwar era and check the growing preference for security over self reliance and freedom in American society.

And in order to best convey the spirit of past maritime Americans to present-day ones,

Baldwin pointed to Greenfield Village and Williamsburg. A re-creation at Mystic would, he and his audience believed, succeed in passing on ancestral values through an immersive experience. That a guest politician could so closely mirror the language of his host audience speaks to the ties between American politics and history museums at the end of World War II, and the widespread faith in outdoor museums as reservoirs of

American character. Such ties would grow stronger as the nation entered the Cold War, and cause the MHA to alter its development plans.252

Members of the MHA had ruminated for years over what the reconstruction

would include and resemble. The earliest known image of what it would look like is in

Year Ending June 30th, 1943,” Bulletin No. 27 – July 15th, 1943. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 14: “Annual Meeting, 1943”. 252 Baldwin’s speech from Marine Historical Association, “Sixteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc. Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1945,” Bulletin No. 32 – August 15, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual Meeting, 1945”.

166 an advertisement from late 1941, just after the MHA acquired the Morgan. Captioned

“Buildings of the Marine Historical Association, Mystic, Conn., 1939,” the idealized aerial illustration looks to the west, showing a complex of connected brick museum buildings to the right with Shipyard Point to the left. On the point’s south side two wooden boats on marine railways are under construction, with a collection of small sheds and shops on either side. Anchoring the tip of the point is a ship’s mast doubling as a flagpole, while three tents, another shed, and a tied-up ship and schooner line the peninsula’s north side. With the exception of the tents, which are likely the summer quarters for the planned youth sail training program, the scene resembles the working shipyard that had occupied the site decades before, with small buildings erected as needed and without attention to aesthetics.253

Dating to 1939 or before, the illustration of the finished museum was already outdated by the time Reynolds Printing made the larger advertisement in which it was a part. In July, 1941, architect Francis (Frank) Rogers had written to Philip Mallory about the layout of buildings on the peninsula. A member since 1931, a trustee since 1939, and

Mallory’s cousin, the twenty-nine year old Francis was also the son and employee of

famous architect James Gamble Rogers – the favorite architect of Edward and Mary

Harkness. For at least the past two years Francis had worked as an architect for the

museum. In his letter Rogers agreed with Mallory that the re-creation on Shipyard Point

should have as its center a compact street, both to create “atmosphere” and limit the

distance visitors would have to walk.254 Though not accurate to what had once been

253 Advertisement reproduced in Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 9. 254 Letter from Francis D. Rogers to Philip R. Mallory, dated July 29, 1941. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.

167 there, a row of close-together buildings along a small waterfront street would help to screen out the modern activity surrounding it. Thereafter, MHA’s directors referred to the re-creation most often as the “waterfront street” or “seaport street,” with “Seaport

Street” becoming the dominant name for the project in MHA publications after 1946.

In January, 1945, this new version appeared in the president’s bi-annual report to members. After summarizing the museum’s progress over the past six months and appealing for additional support, the report ends with a watercolor illustration by Francis

Rogers of the proposed seaport street on Shipyard Point. In the right side of the image the Morgan is docked at her wharf that runs perpendicular to a new seawall with a three- masted schooner tied up alongside. A wide cobblestone street runs parallel with the seawall and contains six buildings between one and three stories in height. At the bottom left, a small perpendicular side street contains a single building with a sharply-pitched roof and a wide porch – likely a store or tavern. Arranged in a backwards capital “L”, the seven buildings either abut one another or stand no more than a few feet apart. In their design and proximity to the waterfront, all the buildings are either industrial or commercial spaces. With no modern wires, vehicles or motorized boats in the picture, the scene is broadly nineteenth century. The directors had agreed the previous year to keep most of the museum architecture between roughly 1820 and 1860. Carl Cutler included

Rogers’s MHA tenure from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 35. For Rogers working as an architect for the museum since at least 1939 see letter from Carl C. Cutler to Clifford D. Mallory, dated Aug. 10, 1939. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. For James Gamble Rogers as the Harknesses’ favorite architect, and his son taking over the firm after his death, see Aaron Betsky, James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1994), 4 [favorite], 258nn114&1 [son takes over].

168 the watercolor as one of three images in his history of Mystic, Connecticut, which the

MHA published that December.255

The following June, Philip Mallory sent a letter to the directors about plans for the

annual meeting and included a photocopy of a recently completed painting by Lars

Thorsen depicting the museum’s future growth. In the foreground three new connected brick museum buildings run along Greenmanville Avenue, while in the background

Thorsen copied Rogers’s seaport street layout but added a single building behind the row, suggesting the start of a backstreet. Described as containing only a street with “old local

Maritime industries” the reconstruction was not a traditional museum village. With no modern objects in view, the complete scene resembles a small college next to a tiny seaport. At the July meeting Mallory referred to the painting as showing “the over-all plan that will probably be closely followed,” and announced that it was already on view to the general public in the Stillman Building. That the MHA’s grounds resembled a school was an apt metaphor for their mission. In his June letter Mallory had pledged to the directors that the MHA would “be a powerful influence in molding the thoughts of youths of the Eastern Seaboard, as well as adults…. Basically each visitor should become a better and more intelligent American.” The museum would act as a finishing school for American citizenship.

255 Marine Historical Association, “President’s Half-Yearly Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,” Bulletin No. 29 – January 20, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual Meeting, 1945”. Architecture fixed as early to mid-19th century mentioned in letter from Margaret Mallory to her uncle Philip Mallory, dated June 9, 1944. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1945), 178. The 1860 end date corresponds to when Cutler felt American culture turned away from the sea. See Carl C. Cutler, Greyhounds of the Seas: The Story of the American Clipper Ship (1930; reprint, Annapolis, MD.: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 370.

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A third and final painting arrived that year courtesy of Philip Mallory’s nephew,

Clifford Mallory Jr. Based on Rogers’s watercolor and painted by Howard French, it showed an eye-level view of the street and six buildings across from the Morgan’s wharf.

By including a horse, wagon, and people in period clothing, French presented a prosperous and industrious version of the past that visitors would soon be able to enter.

All three images the MHA reproduced in various publications through the 1940s until photographs of the actual project could take their place.256

The first of the buildings had reached the museum in 1944. That year the MHA

finally had all the material to outfit a shipsmith shop, rigging loft, cooper’s shop, sail loft,

spar yard, and a merchant’s counting house. Writing to a colleague at the American

Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, that February, Cutler explained that

“We expect to set up all this material in reproductions of old-time buildings in full

working order, to show the tools and equipment under the conditions of actual use – the

whole group of buildings to constitute an old-time seaport street fronting on the water

near our museum.” Here Cutler makes a private concession that the re-creation did not

need to have actual historic buildings as long as they appeared old.257

256 Letter from Philip R. Mallory to the directors of the Marine Historical Association, dated June 17, 1946. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Mallory’s quote from the 1946 annual meeting is from a typed copy of the minutes of the meeting in “Minutes of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Members of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., July 13, 1946” in folder 5 of Box 6 within Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Howard French’s painting is reproduced on the backside of the title page of Marine Historical Association, “Seventeenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1946.” Bulletin No. 34 – August 31, 1946. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946”. This painting represented the public face of the re-creation as late as 1949. See the illustration in Carl C. Cutler, “A Memorable Port of Call For All,” The Ensign 37, no. 6 (June-July 1949): 8-11. 257 For list of historic buildings and confidence in replica buildings see letter from Carl C. Cutler to Clifford K. Shipton of the American Antiquarian Society, dated Feb. 3, 1944. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc..

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As it turned out the street would have both. By the end of the year the MHA had acquired two historic buildings. The first was the James D. Driggs shipsmith shop which

Edward H. R. Green had relocated to his estate from New Bedford in 1925. Sitting idle at Round Hill along with the Morgan following his death, the MHA purchased the fifty- nine year old shop and its contents in 1944 from Whaling Enshrined for $50. The sixty- six year old Cutler, Steers, and two other men took the building apart and loaded the pieces onto trucks along with some twenty tons of tools and equipment included in the sale. The men even dug up and removed the dirt floor of the shop, though it’s unknown whether Green had done the same during the first move. Either way, Cutler and his companions saw the soil beneath their feet as integral to the historic atmosphere they wished to re-create – copying Henry Ford when he salvaged the remains of Edison’s laboratory. Staff reassembled the shop along the northern edge of the museum grounds until Shipyard Point was ready for development.258

The second building was a small derelict stone bank from 1833 in the village of

Old Mystic, just up the river from the museum. Cora Mallory Munson, the sister of

Philip Mallory, purchased what the MHA thought was the second oldest bank building in

the state, and gave it to the museum along with funds to restore it as a merchant’s counting house. But the building would remain in Old Mystic for four more years while

258 For purchase and removal of the shipsmith shop see Marine Historical Association, “President’s Half- Yearly Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,” Bulletin No. 29 – January 20, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual Meeting, 1945”; letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harry B. Cutler of City Island, N.Y., dated June 25, 1944. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.; William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 119, 121; and two letters from Carl C. Cutler to John M. Bullard of Whaling Enshrined, dated Jan. 14, 1944 and June 15, 1944 in Series A: Administrative Records, 1925-1947. Mss 45, Kendall Institute, New Bedford Whaling Museum.

171 the MHA dealt with the sensitive issue of how to coax Shipyard Point from Harriet

Stillman.259

In the meantime, they scrambled for how to pay for the project. In the fall of

1945 they unsuccessfully tried to court the Electric Boat Company of Groton,

Connecticut, to donate a building, or, in the best scenario, pay for the entire seaport street

as a memorial for their contributions to the war effort – at an estimated cost of $117,600.

The MHA’s correspondence doesn’t say why the Electric Boat Company declined to

make a large gift, but the MHA not yet possessing the land for which they solicited buildings and money could not have helped their case. They had better luck the following winter when Cutler wrote a five-page letter to Harriet Stillman, pleading that

the museum’s health and future depended on using Shipyard Point now. Aside from

building the seaport street the MHA needed to build a shed from which they could make

major repairs to the Morgan. Cutler succeeded, and the MHA sent out a press release in

March, 1947, announcing Stillman’s gift and a donation of $55,000 from Frederick and

Margaret Brewster of New Haven, Connecticut, to start on the seaport street. An

industrialist and the son of a Standard Oil Company executive, Frederick enjoyed fishing

and yachting and was proud of his Mayflower ancestry. Two anonymous gifts from the couple in the next two years went towards the seaport street, construction of a museum store, Morgan repairs, and part of a yacht dock. When Mallory anonymously thanked the couple at the annual meeting with “to the vision of these descendents of our earliest

259 For acquisition of the bank, see Marine Historical Association, “Fifteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1944,” Bulletin No. 28 – July 15, 1944. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 15: “Annual Meeting, 1944”; and William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 87-90.

172 pioneers we are deeply in debt,” it demonstrated that the MHA’s language and practice of filiopiety still resonated with the public.260

With seed money and ownership of Shipyard Point, the museum’s development accelerated. At the 1947 annual meeting they accepted a gift of a ship from the U.S.

Congress. Built in Copenhagen in 1882 as a sail training vessel for the Danish merchant marine, the Joseph Conrad (ex-Georg Stage) later served as a private yacht and finally as a training vessel for American merchant seamen. Declared government surplus after the war, it would now serve as a dockside sail training vessel for American youth. Reflecting the growing prominence of the museum, admirals William Halsey and Telfair Knight attended, along with now Senator Raymond Baldwin. After repairs to the Morgan and

Conrad, work began on the preparing the ground for the street. By the following summer

workmen had added and graded several feet of fill on the north side of Shipyard Point,

built a stone bulkhead running along the waterside of the future street, started erecting a large shed as a workshop and storage space for spars and small watercraft, completed

260 Estimate for seaport construction in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Nov. 28, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. For pitch to Electric Boat for funding a memorial, see E. A. Olds Jr. to O. Pomeroy Robinson of the Electric Boat Company, dated Dec. 17, 1945 in Box 6 (undated material) of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. The rest of the Electric Boat-related correspondence and document, dating between October and December of 1945, are divided between these two locations. Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Harriet G. Stillman, dated Dec. 5, 1946; Stillman’s agreement to deed land mentioned in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Francis Rogers of New York City, dated Dec. 17, 1946. Both in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Typed draft of untitled press release dated March 3, 1947. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. Brewster’s biographical details from “F. F. Brewster, 86, a Financier, Dead,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 1958, 32. The Brewster’s second gift announced on page 11 of Marine Historical Association, “Nineteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1948,” Bulletin No. 39 – Sept. 6, 1948. Brewster’s third gift in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated May 4, 1949. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.

173 construction of the Seaport Store, and dredged the cove between the point and the northern part of the grounds, where a new dock greeted visiting yachtsmen.261

It is around this time that the Cutler’s correspondence reflects a growing number of voices in the seaport reconstruction, as other people working for the museum sought to identify their projects with it. At the end of the war Mary Harkness had given her grandparents’ house along Greenmanville Avenue to the museum. Two years later the chair of a museum committee restoring the Thomas Greenman House wrote to the directors that they planned to restore it to circa 1842 so as to “dovetail into the planned

Museum picture of an early maritime village” – though the house was several hundred feet from the proposed street and on the other side of the museum’s driveway. Restoring a house with only the finest of antiques also went against the rough and masculine atmosphere of “crude…everyday things” Cutler sought to display on the waterfront. In calling the seaport street a village – a word Cutler and Mallory never used – some museum members clearly had a different concept of what would be built on Shipyard

Point. At this same time, Cutler deflected the idea of relocating a large church to the point. Ostensibly because there was firmer ground elsewhere on the campus, this would also have upset the otherwise commercial and industrial re-creation which Cutler and

Mallory had repeatedly described.262

261 Marine Historical Association, “Eighteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1947,” Bulletin No. 37 – Sept. 1, 1947. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.” Summary of building progress from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 10. 262 Eunice Gates Woods [chair of the Greenman House Committee] to the Directors of the Marine Historical Association, undated, but found in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.” Cutler deflecting plans to move church from “Draft of letter to Mr. Mallory in 1947” in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

174

Another claim on the seaport’s identity came in 1948. In time for the annual meeting Cutler had stakes put in the ground to mark the future locations of the bank, shipsmith shop, sail and rigging loft, and a tavern. Two photographs taken for the report show the bare Shipyard Point in one and the interior of the museum’s new Old Seaport

Store in the other. Converted from a nineteenth century house that Harkness had given to the museum years before, the store was coincidentally situated at the start of the recently graded seaport street. Perhaps eager to state that the MHA had finally built something on the street, some staff echoed the caption of this photo in describing the store as “the first building on the seaport street.”

That the museum promoted its gift shop as the first building in a re-created nineteenth century waterfront meant to instill reverence for maritime ancestors shows a potentially troublesome blending of the museum’s mission with its search for revenue.

Its location made it for visitors a frequent entry and exit point for experiencing the past.

It was an old building. Its name suggested it could be the original seaport store. The publicity photo of the store’s interior shows three boys looking at a rack of postcards at the end of a long wooden counter sparsely stocked with items that include lamps, clocks, ships in bottles, and prints. Managing Director Thomas Stevens proudly pointed out that the counter was the one from the original Greenman shipyard store – further blurring the line between history and commerce. In looking at the picture it is hard to tell whether some items, such as a wooden chair in the corner, are antiques, reproductions, or for sale at all. Perhaps this is intentional; to make you feel like you’re in an old country store and can surprisingly buy stuff. But the building’s purpose was to use history to sell goods –

175 to make consumption a natural part of the immersive historical experience. It was not to teach history, but sell it.263

This commercialization of the museum’s purpose likely bothered Cutler, who had

already warned Mallory that “we should avoid any tendency to a large and pretentious

development, for … it would be inconsonant with the spirit and false to the environment

of the small, early seaport we wish to portray.”264 But that year Cutler apparently either

gave in to the seaport becoming more than just a small industrial/commercial street, or

accepted the broader cultural appeal of a museum village (albeit a maritime museum

village). In a letter to Mallory he mentioned the expanded plans for the waterfront

development to include a “church, school, toyshop, etc.,” but that these wouldn’t fit

logically with industrial buildings on the waterfront so they should go on a new

backstreet. Cutler would never use the world “village,” but that’s what the project would

become.265

Whatever the final reconstruction would look like, the idea that Cutler nurtured

through the 1930s and ‘40s now enveloped the entire project. In 1948 the MHA changed

the name of its museum from the generic “marine museum” to Mystic Seaport, arguing

that they had outgrown the former term. The first issue of the museum’s new

publication, The Log of Mystic Seaport, described the museum’s growth as a resurrection:

“It is unthinkable that the old port of Mystic should not rise again, that click of adze …

263 For staff describing the store as the beginning of the seaport street see a typed page from “Mr. Steven’s talk” in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 19: “Annual Meeting, 1948”; and Stevens again on page 24 of Marine Historical Association, “Nineteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1948,” Bulletin No. 39 – Sept. 6, 1948. The caption for the photograph of the Seaport Store’s interior was likely written by Herb Corey, photographer and publicity manager for the museum. 264 Carl C. Cutler, “Draft of letter to Mr. Mallory in 1947.” Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 265 Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Sept. 25, 1948. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

176 should not again resound up and down the valley…. That is a time and a feeling that no mere museum could recreate.” The site now encompassed seventeen acres, over a dozen mostly historic buildings, two large ships, and exhibits crammed with thousands of artifacts. Visitors could arrive by land or sea. The seaport re-creation had been the catalyst for the name change, as it had brought the museum, and its educational mission, outdoors. Artur Hazelius’s Skansen was now more than fifty years old, but the MHA had brought the open-air museum into the water.266

Many of the details behind the acquisition of the historic buildings at Mystic

Seaport are not in Cutler’s correspondence or the institutional archives. This suggests

that many of Cutler’s papers have not survived, that some acquisitions happened more

through oral communication than written, that the MHA curator did not take part in

acquiring every building, or some combination thereof. A 1951 letter from Mallory to

Cutler names four other directors working with these two men to decide how the

buildings should be arranged – and presumably such group debates also decided what

structures the museum would acquire. The re-creation was no longer Cutler’s dream

alone. Depending on the size and condition of a structure, and Mystic Seaport’s funds, it

could be several years between acquisition, restoration, and public exhibition. Between

1944 and 1954, the museum moved ten of its eventually fourteen principal historic

seaport buildings to its grounds – seven of these between 1948 and 1951. In addition, the

museum either built from scratch or recycled at least eight more buildings to fill in the

gaps of the village between 1948 and 1956.267

266 “Notes On a Name,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 1 (October 1948): 2. 267 Letter from Philip R. Mallory to Carl C. Cutler, dated Feb. 8, 1951. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.

177

To try and picture what the village looked like at any one time is difficult, as the museum staff sometimes moved the replica and recycled structures according to what stories they wished to tell and where. But a rough chronology for the core village buildings with their community of origin and year of arrival at Mystic is as follows: the shipsmith shop (New Bedford, MA, 1944), bank (Old Mystic, CT, 1948), schoolhouse

(Griswold, CT, 1949), chapel (Groton, CT, 1949), ropewalk (Plymouth, MA, 1950),

Buckingham House (Old Saybrook, CT, 1951), sail loft (Mystic, CT, 1951) and Burrows

House268 (Mystic, CT, 1953). Newly-built structures to fill in what they couldn’t locate

include an apothecary shop (1952), wood-workers’ shop (1952), and a tavern (1956).

A visitor’s map at the time of the MHA’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1954

provides an overview of the essentially complete nineteenth-century village (with the

exception of the tavern). To walk down the cobblestone waterfront street (itself completed in 1949), you would pass, from left to right (with age of building in parentheses), the bank (1833), apothecary shop, Burrows House (c. 1812), Colegrove

Memorial (wood-workers’ shop), painting shop (a white shed not on the map but visible in photographs), another shed displaying a hand-pulled nineteenth-century fire engine, the shipsmith shop (1885), and finally end in front of the sail loft (c. 1832), ropewalk

(1824), spar shed, and a replica lobster shack. Behind the waterfront street ran the aptly- named village street containing, from left to right, the Buckingham House (c. 1695/1768), chapel (1889), schoolhouse (c. 1768), and a general store made from a recycled nineteenth century building.

268 Mystic Seaport referred to this house at the time of its acquisition as the Edwards House, but as a result of subsequent architectural research now calls it the Burrows House.

178

In uncomfortable proximity to this re-creation, behind both streets was Mystic

Seaport’s large parking lot for several hundred cars. It was a harsh concession to the founders’ original hopes of creating a believable nineteenth-century seaport atmosphere on Shipyard Point. A screen of trees attempted to separate village visitors from the twentieth-century automobiles, but it would not be until the opening of a larger replacement parking lot outside Mystic Seaport’s grounds in 1959 that allowed the old one to become a village green. The example suggests that for the increasingly business- oriented museum, accommodating ever-increasingly numbers of visitors took precedent over a colonial-revival era idea of walking into an authentic past.269

To tell the stories surrounding every building in the seaport village would be

tedious and unnecessary – and much of that work is already done.270 Instead, I will focus on two: the ropewalk and the chapel. The former represents the original story of industrial maritime history which Cutler and Stillman first wanted to tell with a replica

shipyard. During the Cold War it also stood for the American tradition of fair labor and

free-market capitalism. The chapel represents the domestic turn of the seaport, reflecting

269 Map is found within MacDonald Steers, comp., An Exhibit Guide (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1954). Age of historic buildings from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985). New parking lot mentioned in Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 21. Screen of trees – actually described as “a natural planting” but I’m making a guess – from “On the Grounds,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 5, no. 2 (Spring 1953): 8. MacDonald Steers mentions the problem as “Mrs. Munson has been vehement in her objection to the sight of anything so modern as an automobile seen anywhere near the cobblestone street section. A tall lilac hedge to hide the cars from the old-time section would meet her objectives.” Letter from MacDonald Steers to Francis D. Rogers, dated January 2, 1951. . Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. 270 Peterson and Coope provide histories of twenty-one historic buildings at Mystic Seaport, but devote little attention to the museum’s acquisition, restoration, and placement of them on the campus. The small and anonymous but still historic sheds and barns converted to display buildings are not included, nor are any of the reconstructions. Curiously, there is also no map of the museum showing the locations of buildings. William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985). To fill in the gaps I have consulted issues of The Log of Mystic Seaport and Marine Historical Association - Publicity Department, Ships Buildings and Wharves at Mystic Seaport: A Compendium of Facts (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1965). G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

179 the increased presence of religion in the MHA’s language and activities as another tenet of American cultural superiority during the Cold War. It is by chance that the chapel arrived first, but as the ropewalk represents the original vision, I will begin there.

When MacDonald Steers boasted in the April, 1951, Log of Mystic Seaport, that

“Mystic Seaport is the conglomerate of all the long-forgotten ports of New England. It must be their desired haven, for one by one they find rest for their old bones at Mystic,” the Log’s editor was describing the recent gift to the museum of the nineteenth-century schooner Australia.271 But his claim was equally valid for their collection of historic

buildings. Nearing completion that spring was the village’s largest building, a ropewalk.

A long, narrow building used to make rope from hemp, and, after 1860, manila fibers, the

ropewalk was an essential part of a large maritime community. Mystic once had three in

the nineteenth century. Due to the manufacturing technique, the building’s length

determined the length of rope that could be made within. For instance, a 1000-foot

ropewalk could make about a 600 foot rope. Fires and industrial consolidation later

reduced the number of ropewalks, while technological innovations in the twentieth

century made them obsolete. By mid-century, aside from one at the Charlestown Navy

Yard in Boston, the last ropewalk in America belonged to the Plymouth Cordage

Company in Massachusetts.272

For years the MHA had pleaded with the PCC to consider donating it to the

museum. Finally in June, 1950, they received an urgent call from Plymouth offering the

271 “Our Cover,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 3, no. 2 (April 1951): 1. 272 Ropewalk description, function, and Mystic examples from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 75-79. Plymouth ropewalk as the next-to-last one in the nation in letter from Carl C. Cutler to W. P. Smith of Seattle, WA., dated Dec. 11, 1950. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. I am making an educated guess that Cutler is referring to the ropewalk in Boston as the last one, as I know of no other.

180 structure in advance of its planned demolition for new construction.273 The MHA

scrambled to raise money, and also how to preserve a wooden building that was longer

than the village in which they hoped to place it. Since its construction in 1824, the

building had tripled in width to three walks or rope-making bays, and now stretched for

1,050 feet. Balancing the needs of authenticity with their site limitations, Mystic Seaport

choose to dismantle the building and erect only one bay at a quarter of its original length.

Beginning in October, workmen disassembled the building while Mystic businesses volunteered their labor and trucks to eventually haul 190 tons of material back

to the museum. There, Cutler supervised the building’s slow reconstruction until its

completion the following summer. Inside, two men with fifty and seventy years of experience apiece working for Plymouth Cordage set up the machinery in a space that existed in no other museum. Money to fund the project came from the company and three descendants of Henry Bradley Plant, a Connecticut-born developer and railroad baron in Florida.274

The building’s dedication in memory of Henry Plant on August 3, 1951, revealed

that it represented more than a technological display of an extinct trade. Plymouth

Cordage Company President Ellis W. Brewster addressed the crowd at the annual

meeting that day, and presented the industry and the building as case studies in American

patriotism, character, and entrepreneurship. The fifty-nine year old was head of the

largest maker of cordage in the world, and as his surname and place of work suggested, a

273 Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-First Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1950,” Bulletin No. 43 – October 1950, p. 22. 274 Ropewalk removal, reconstruction and funding details from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 78-79. For elderly PCC workers setting up equipment, see “More of the Past,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1951): 3.

181 direct descendant of Mayflower passenger and Pilgrim religious leader William Brewster.

Exhibiting both modern business success and a deep heritage rooted in faith, he embodied two of the most important values in Cold War America. Life magazine profiled him in a

1948 article on Pilgrim descendants.275 He credited Boston ropemakers as those who had first taunted the British soldiers who later fired into the crowd at what became known as the Boston Massacre. He then quoted a Longfellow poem about the trade, elevating the status of the lowly ropemakers.

But it was the PCC’s founder, Bourne Spooner, who deserved special commendation. Born in Plymouth, Spooner returned from ropemaking in New Orleans to start a cordage company in his hometown in 1824, believing that free men, Brewster explained, produced a better product than those who were enslaved. Quality ropemaking was a demonstration of the superior achievement of free people. The reference to antebellum slavery in the American South likely evoked for his audience comparisons to modern Soviet workers in the USSR.

Brewster ended his remarks with his company’s rock-solid history of profitability, respect for the past, and fairness to workers and customers alike. The whole exercise was free publicity for the company – a chance to demonstrate their patriotism in helping to preserve history (albeit their history) and show that the American system of free enterprise was, in the long run, dependable and beneficial to all. Strictly as an example of preservation, though, in removing the building and reducing its size the ropewalk would not have met the rigorous standards of Colonial Williamsburg. And despite

Cutler’s belief that it would become one of the seaport’s “greatest attractions,” as a static display it could not spark the same sort of empathy with American craftsmen as, say, the

275 “Life Visits the Mayflower Descendants,” Life 25, no. 22 (November 29, 1948): 130.

182 functional shipsmith shop. But though an imperfect restoration, the museum now had one of the rarest of American industrial buildings, and an inspirational story to promote in the history of the PCC and its founder. Neither the museum nor Brewster knew that the same system of capitalism they celebrated would result in a competitor destroying the

PCC through a hostile takeover in the 1960s. But the name of the Plymouth Cordage

Company as an exemplary American business would live on at Mystic Seaport.276

While the MHA couldn’t hope to make their ropewalk productive again, the same was not true for the museum’s Fishtown Chapel. Built in 1889 in a rural part of Groton,

Connecticut, called Fishtown, just outside the village of West Mystic, it served as a non- denominational place of worship and education for local residents until the mid 1920s.

Thereafter, it sat abandoned until the Williams family of Cleveland, Ohio, gave it to the museum and paid for its removal and restoration at Mystic Seaport in the summer of

1949. The family’s connections to the museum are unknown, but it’s likely they had members who currently or once lived in the area, or had ties with museum staff. Set up on the village street next to the red schoolhouse, the chapel represented the latest expression of the MHA’s new focus on religion.277

The museum’s first public ties to religion likely began with Reverend George L.

Farnham, pastor of Mystic’s Congregational church. A Navy veteran of World War I

276 Brewster’s remarks from Marine Historical Association, Annual Meeting, August 3, 1951 (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, n.d.), 2-5. This is an eight-page booklet possibly printed as a souvenir by the MHA for those who had attended the meeting. There is no bulletin number or date of publication. Cutler’s claim of ropewalk as a top attraction in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Augustus P. Loring, Jr., president of the Peabody Museum, dated April 9, 1951. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. End of the Plymouth Cordage Company from Elizabeth M. Fowler, “Personal Finance: Stockholders Should Seek Advice When Considering a Tender Offer, New York Times, June 10, 1968, 69; and “Ellis. W. Brewster, a Descendent of the Pilgrim Spiritual Leader,” New York Times, March 19, 1978, 38. 277 The chapel’s history and donor information from William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 122-125.

183 who became an ordained minister in 1924, he volunteered for duty in World War II as a chaplain for the United States Maritime Service. It was during this appointment that the

New London Evening Day noted that he would speak at the MHA’s 1943 annual meeting

“on the growth and significance of the museum.” By 1946 he was back at his church and also formally serving as Association Chaplain at annual meetings, which he opened with an invocation, acknowledging those who had died in the previous year and sometimes offering a poem, such as Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” Together with his religious and maritime affiliations, Farnham’s election that fall as a representative of the Connecticut

General Assembly likely made him a particularly useful public figure for the MHA.278

The following year other MHA staff began referencing God in their speeches. At the 1947 annual meeting Philip Mallory was fearful that American individualism would be crushed under the growing powers of “stateism,” taking with it everything their ancestors had worked and died for. At least for the museum, the solution was to recall and follow American mariners’ self reliance and “belief in the dignity of the human soul, and of respect for the Almighty.” These traits “developed tolerance and understanding at home and abroad” – a point likely not lost on Mallory’s audience as the Federal

Government became increasingly vigilant that year in rooting out suspected Communists

278 Farnham biography from “Congregational Church Accepts Resignation of Rev. George L. Farnham,” New London Evening Day, Aug. 2, 1950, 7. 1943 speech at Mystic from “Marine Historians to Elect,” New London Evening Day, June 23, 1943, 2. First mention of Farnham as the MHA’s chaplain in Marine Historical Association, “Seventeenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1946.” Bulletin No. 34 – August 31, 1946. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946”. Poem mentioned in typescript copy “Agenda / General Meeting of the Membership @ 2:00p.m., July 28, 1950,” Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 21: “Annual Meeting, 1950.”

184 in American society. It was his hope that visitors would find the museum an inspirational place. “We deal in spiritual values!” he concluded.279

Even Cutler made a rare nod to religion. Writing in the museum’s publication in

1950, he repeated the harsh conditions upon which their ancestors had wrung success.

But now it was that despite these hardships “they did not neglect the things of the spirit,

which the founders of your Association wished to stress above all else.” After two

decades of writing about the museum’s purpose, objectives, and challenges, Cutler

perhaps now saw linking the popularity of religion in twentieth-century America with

ancestral achievement as a new way to try and interest people in their history. As

representative of people who had risen to the challenge, in the summer of 1950 Mystic

Seaport dedicated a bronze plaque on a boulder at the head of the seaport street. It

thanked the Brewsters for their support in establishing the seaport and proved that, to

quote the inscription, “a people inspired under God with a sturdy sense of individual

worth and personal responsibility may work out their destiny unaided and unafraid.”

With the postwar era offering a host of new fears to the American people, Mystic Seaport

offered a solution in studying the inspiring and spiritual ancestors of their collective

American past.280

Emphasizing spirituality at the museum first took permanent form with the

chapel’s arrival. Despite being of a more recent architectural style than they would have

liked, its local origin and small size still made it a good fit for the village. Though the

279 Marine Historical Association, “Eighteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1947,” Bulletin No. 37 – Sept. 1, 1947. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.” 280 Carl C. Cutler, “The Future of Mystic Seaport,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 3 (July 1950): 3. Photo of bronze plaque with hand-written caption “Brewster Plaque – Head of Seaport Street, July, 1950” from Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”.

185 building had scarcely been altered in its three decades of use, Francis Rogers added a steeple to the chapel during its restoration. Some other rural chapels in the area had them, but this one never did. The MHA’s directors likely believed in the white church steeple as an icon of every New England community, and so the seaport village would have one too.281 Rogers’s drawing of the completed chapel became the cover of the

January, 1950, Log of Mystic Seaport. Under a blanket of snow the chapel sits along a lane at the edge of a field. Smoke rises from the chimneys of two houses in the background. In the foreground a man admires a graveyard beside the building, while to the right a couple approaches the chapel along a fence. Within, the Log predicted the space would serve the spiritual needs of youth groups that visited the museum, such as

Girl and Boy Scouts, as well as christenings and weddings.282

At the 1950 annual meeting hundreds of MHA members gathered for the

dedication of the schoolhouse, the chapel, the bank (now remade as a merchant’s

counting house), the 1899 ferry Brinckerhoff as a floating exhibit, and, incongruously placed between the spar shed and ropewalk, a captured WWII Japanese manned suicide- torpedo called a Kaiten. The grouping represents the multiple facets of American culture to which the museum was trying to appeal, including nostalgic history, faith, business,

and nationalism. And by now Mystic Seaport had learned how to skillfully manage its

publicity for this audience. A memo from Managing Director Charles A. Brooks to Herb

Corey, the publicity manager and museum photographer, notes that invitations for the meeting went to “the Associated Press, International News Service, United Press, New

281 At this moment, the MHA’s leaders allowed political and religious sentiment to trump their previous emphasis on authenticity, though it wasn’t permanent. Seaport staff removed the steeple in 1977. William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 125 282 “Our Cover,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 1 (January 1950): 1.

186

York Times, New York Herald Tribune, The New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford papers, and locals papers: Bulletin, Day, Sun, Journal, New London Life, and Providence and Boston papers. The museum will provide them with lunch and darkroom facilities if needed.” At the chapel’s ten-minute dedication service, Reverend Farnham joined

Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal and Jewish religious leaders from houses of worship in

New London and Mystic to perform the service, leading a call to worship, an invocation, scripture reading, hymn, prayer, and finally a benediction.283

The chapel was now officially open as the spiritual center of the seaport, with

vespers held every Sunday during the summer by a rotating list of religious leaders from seven denominations within Judaism and Christianity, in addition to the weddings, christenings, and other services for visitors and staff alike. It was the only historic village building that the public could use in the way that it was originally intended. They were not observers watching a demonstration or listening to a guide, but allowed to practice their faith in this historic museum space – demonstrating that religion was a particularly intimate way to experience the past. Though a novel museum experience in New

England, Mystic, whether intentionally or not, was copying the idea of regular non- denominational services which Henry Ford had instituted in his village’s chapel beginning in 1930. But Mystic’s unique twist to the project came in 1955, when, in an apparent attempt to make the village appear as old as possible – and again placing atmosphere above historical accuracy – it added both the fence and graveyard from

283 Charles A. Brooks memo to Herb Corey, dated July 15, 1950. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 21: “Annual Meeting, 1950.” Dedication ceremonies covered in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-First Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1950,” Bulletin No. 43 – October 1950.

187

Rogers’s 1950 illustration, procuring headstones from the First Baptist Church in North

Stonington.284

The past is present: the ambiguous imagery and language of the MHA and appropriating Mystic’s identity

Simulating an old burial ground wouldn’t have fooled anyone familiar with

Mystic Seaport’s growth over the past decade. But the MHA moving local historic

buildings and materials to Mystic Seaport was part of a long-standing practice of

appropriating the identity of its host community through language, imagery, and the built

environment.

The process started in 1942 with the MHA’s new letterhead. Through 1941 it was

a plain piece of paper with the association’s name in a gothic font and the names of MHA

officers below. But likely in recognition of the museum’s substantial recent physical

growth, they hired artist James McBey to sketch the waterfront. The Scottish-born

McBey was a friend of MHA director Harold H. Kynett, and had sketched throughout

Europe, North Africa, and Palestine before the WWI veteran immigrated to America,

married, and became a citizen in 1942. Then living in Manhattan, McBey visited the

museum in late 1941. He created a profile ink drawing of the MHA’s grounds as viewed

from the north. The brick museum mill buildings are at left with a square-rigged ship at

284 Four-page program handed out at the chapel’s dedication: “Dedication Service, Fishtown Chapel, Mystic Seaport, July 28, 1950,” in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 21: “Annual Meeting, 1950.” Geoffrey C. Upward, A Home for Our Heritage: The Building and Growth of Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum, 1929-1979 (Dearborn, MI.: The Henry Ford Museum Press, 1979), 100. Headstones and fence additions mentioned in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-Sixth Annual Report for the Year Ending December 31, 1955,” Bulletin No. 48, p. 24. The cemetery and the steeple were both removed in the 1970s – apparently dismissed as 1950s sentimentality. See William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 125; and the spiral-bound report “History of the Buildings at the Mystic Seaport Museum, David G. Brierley, 1979” at the G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

188 center (the Morgan), followed by a schooner and smaller watercraft. On Shipyard Point are some low buildings next to a hull under construction.285

While the letterhead itself was labeled “Marine Museum of the Marine Historical

Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut,” the image itself was more ambiguous.

Beginning with this drawing in 1942, the MHA advertised Mystic’s past and future

simultaneously. Ignoring McBey’s signature and date, the scene resembled either the

Greenman mill and shipyard complex in the nineteenth century, or the faithful recreation of it in the twentieth – just the sort of time travel the MHA hoped to recreate for each visitor. The MHA also used the image on the cover of its Log of Mystic Seaport and several annual reports in the late 1940s, including the 1947 report that paired McBey’s drawing with a photo taken at the Conrad’s acceptance ceremony. Perhaps the connection between these two is that the association is on its way to making the dream a reality. Mystic Seaport would use this letterhead unchanged until 1954, when it replaced the text with “Mystic Seaport, a 19th century coastal village recreated by Marine

Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut.” The name change signals the

completion of the village, and the image above as what the visitor could now expect to

find there.286

285 “James McBey, 75, Painter, Etcher,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1959, 43. Friendship with Kynett from Martin Hardie and Charles Carter, The Etchings & Dry-Points of James McBey (San Francisco, CA.: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1997), xxvi. For examples of letterhead, see Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 286 McBey’s imaged appeared in the 1947 and 1948 annual reports. Marine Historical Association, “Eighteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1947,” Bulletin No. 37 – Sept. 1, 1947. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 18: “Annual Meeting, 1947.” Marine Historical Association, “Nineteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1948,” Bulletin No. 39 – Sept. 6, 1948. For example of 1954 revised letterhead see letter from Edouard Stackpole to Carl C. Cutler, dated Dec. 20, 1954. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

189

A second work of McBey’s appears in annual reports from the mid-1940s, and also as the cover illustration for a history of Mystic, Connecticut, that Cutler wrote and the association published in 1945. Signed and dated October 31, 1942, McBey’s etching is from the undeveloped Shipyard Point, looking north to the Morgan on the horizon and the museum’s buildings to the right. With the building-less Shipyard Point and clearly- defined whaleship, it lacks the timelessness of McBey’s first image. But used on the cover of a history of Mystic, it posits the MHA grounds as representing the village’s past in the present. Nowhere else in Mystic could one find a ship of the type that once called

Mystic home.

Curiously, despite hardly mentioning the museum in his text, all three images in

Cutler’s Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (1945) depict the museum.

Aside from McBey’s cover etching and an aforementioned watercolor by Rogers of the imagined seaport street, there is a photograph of three vessels on the MHA’s waterfront.

The caption reads “The Old Ships Come Home – A Section of the Old Port of Mystic.

Pinky Regina M., Charles W. Morgan and the Pilotboat Frances. V-J Day, 1945.” The

Old Port of Mystic was a name the association briefly used to describe its proposed replica village in several publications in the 1940s. As the village of Old Mystic lay just two miles north of the museum at the head of the Mystic River, the similar names must have confused many non-local visitors. The name choice textually relocates the oldest part of Mystic from its location at the head of the river downstream to this former industrial site.287

287 Second McBey image reproduced in the 1944 and 1945 annual reports. Marine Historical Association, “Fifteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1944,” Bulletin No. 28 – July 15, 1944. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 15: “Annual Meeting, 1944”. Marine Historical Association,

190

Further muddling the distinction of where to find the historic heart of Mystic was

Mystic Seaport’s outfitting of its grounds with salvaged Mystic-area buildings and material. Aside from four historic buildings from West Mystic, Mystic and Old Mystic – the sail loft, Burrows House, Baptist Church, and the bank – and attempts to acquire other local buildings, Cutler proposed in a January 1949 letter to Mallory that they remove the granite curbing in front of the Thomas Greenman house along Greenmanville Avenue to use in the seaport street. Cutler had already asked the Stonington Highway Department for permission. The granite curbing outside the Greenman House is still there, so apparently the town either refused his offer or the MHA found a larger supply elsewhere.

A contractor had already located a cache of cobblestones near Westerly, Rhode Island, for Cutler that month. By midsummer, 1500 feet of paving stones removed from a sidewalk along the main street of Deep River, Connecticut, would lead from the cobblestone street to the Stillman Building. The museum would also accept gifts of additional salvaged stone in the coming years from properties in New London and New

York City. To have visitors walk over worn stones on the seaport street was apparently as important to the MHA directors for creating a believable past as actual nineteenth- century buildings.288

“Sixteenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association, Inc. Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1945,” Bulletin No. 32 – August 15, 1945. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 16: “Annual Meeting, 1945”. Carl C. Cutler, Mystic: The Story of a Small New England Seaport (Mystic, CT.: Marine Historical Association, 1945), cover, 175 (Rogers’s watercolor of the seaport), 178 (photo of three ships). “Old Port of Mystic” used in Cutler’s 1945 history, the caption for Howard French’s painting reproduced on the backside of the title page of Marine Historical Association, “Seventeenth Annual Report of The Marine Historical Association Inc., Mystic, Connecticut, For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30th, 1946.” Bulletin No. 34 – August 31, 1946. Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, box 1 (1930-1950), folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946”; and in Hamilton Cochran, “The Old Ships Come Home,” Saturday Evening Post 221, no. 15 (October 9, 1948): 31. 288 For two examples of Cutler pursuing other Mystic buildings see two letters from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Dec. 13, 1948 and Jan. 12, 1949, regarding Clara Wilcox’s barn on Water Street, and letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Jan. 5, 1949, regarding Mrs. Fish’s barn. All three letters in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

191

As years of planning the village led to actual construction work on Shipyard

Point, the language with which the MHA described its plans and work is also ambiguous.

The MHA and the press most often used the verbs “reproduce,” “reconstruct,” and “re- create” (and their variants) to describe the village’s conception and construction. But both in internal correspondence and in several publications, writers also refer to the village as a restoration. The most notable example is in a Saturday Evening Post article from 1948. Though Cutler dismissed the profile of Mystic Seaport as “too Hollywood,” other directors found the unprecedented national publicity flattering, and reprinted copies of the article in booklets to send to all members. A popular magazine writer might be excused for not distinguishing between a restoration and a reconstruction, but even Cutler was not immune to this error. In a 1949 article he wrote for the magazine The Ensign, he used the term exclusively in describing the village. Given the museum’s attention to having the seaport street look as real as possible, one cannot fault a reporter for the

Chicago Daily Tribune for assuming that “generations of seamen have invoked divine guidance and protection for their perilous journeys from within its walls” when describing the formerly land-locked but maritime-sounding Fishtown Chapel.289

Removing curbing from Greenmanville Avenue in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Jan. 15, 1949 in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. Cobbles near Westerly in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Jan. 12, 1949 in Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Paving from Deep River, CT. cited in “of ships and shoes and sealing wax…,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 10; and “A ‘New’ Old Building,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 6, no. 3 (Summer 1954): 4. For New London stone see Mystic Seaport press release dated Feb. 6 [1950] in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Box 4: Properties – Research, Chronological Development, folder “Seaport Street 1949”. For stone from New York City see The Log of Mystic Seaport 5, no. 4 (Fall 1953): 18. 289 Hamilton Cochran, “The Old Ships Come Home,” Saturday Evening Post 221, no. 15 (October 9, 1948): 31. “Too Hollywood” from letter from Carl C. Cutler to Joanna Colcord of Searsport, ME., dated Oct. 13, 1949. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Saturday Evening Post article reprinted by MHA and sent to members mentioned in The Log of Mystic Seaport 1, no. 4 (July 1949): 9. Carl C. Cutler, “A Memorable Port of Call for All,” The Ensign 37, no. 6

192

Mystic Seaport’s expansion was not always to the liking of its host community.

A letter from Cutler to Mallory in 1950 provides a rare glimpse of this interaction in saying that “Robinson [a MHA member] is voicing a criticism which is growing – that is, that local people have no part in planning and do not know what is being done until it is an accomplished fact. … We either have to brush it off … or we have to get more of the local group in on the planning, or, at least establish a closer liaison.” How the men chose to resolve the situation is not recorded in Mystic Seaport’s archives, but Cutler referenced the criticism in an article in the July Log of Mystic Seaport. Entitled “The Future of

Mystic Seaport,” Cutler began by speaking of “divergent views” “coming to light” regarding the Seaport’s development and that such numerous “suggestions, advice and criticisms” “frequently vary 180 degrees”. He saw such input as healthy, and that the museum welcomed all comments and criticism. He regretted that the directors had been unable to answer and meet every suggestion, partly due to their limited time, staff, and resources.

Ignoring the apparent lack of local participation in the museum’s growth, he divided the criticism between those who wanted a typical indoor museum where the finest objects of the past were preserved and exhibited, and the mix of indoor and outdoor, crude and refined objects – which Cutler argued presented a more accurate portrait of the past and which was the course the museum would follow. However, he ended his essay with an appeal for further comments, visits, and volunteers. As the Log was mailed only to museum members, it’s likely that this message did little to assuage the concerns of non-member Mystic residents who wanted a voice in what was becoming an

(June-July 1949): 8-11. Lawrence McCracken, “Seafaring Era Lives Again in Boat Museum,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 27, 1951, H5.

193 increasingly popular regional tourist attraction. But the town and the association were already permanently intertwined as both looked towards celebrating their anniversaries in

1954.290

It appears to be only a coincidence that Cutler, Stillman, and Bradley incorporated

the Marine Historical Association on the 275th anniversary of Mystic’s founding. But

their joint anniversary celebrations twenty-five years later represent an intertwined

historical commemoration as the museum worked with the Mystic Tercentenary

Committee to honor the host community and the most popular attraction within it. On

July 11 several hundred worshippers gathered at Mystic Seaport for an outdoor service

that at least to the Log marked the official start of Mystic’s tercentenary celebrations.

Mystic Seaport played a role in seven of the eighteen events celebrating Mystic’s 300th anniversary between July 10 and 21, 1954. Events at or ending at Mystic Seaport included the dedication service on July 11, a variety show on July 12, a concert of 300 years of American music called “Voices of Freedom” on July 13, a sailing race and a performance by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra on July 15, and finally on

July 17 a historical parade that started in West Mystic and ended at the museum, and evening fireworks. Some 40,000 spectators watched thirteen bands, over a hundred horses, oxen, and ponies, an M-47 tank, thirty-one historical floats displaying everything from a Puritan schoolhouse to a model aircraft carrier, re-enactors, veterans groups,

290 Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Jan. 5, 1950. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Carl C. Cutler, “The Future of Mystic Seaport,” The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 3 (July 1950): 2-3.

194 active military, policemen, firemen, and members of fraternal, civic, religious, and youth groups all parade past.291

To the thousands of visitors who wandered into Mystic Seaport during the twelve-

day celebration, the private museum offered them a space where they could interact with

the most celebrated relics of that community. Though founded decades before the MHA

in 1895, the Stonington Historical Society lacked the MHA’s resources and drive, instead

focusing its efforts on its namesake borough over the outlying villages which included

Mystic. Mystic Seaport, then, had become Mystic’s de-facto historical society. And the

small village found itself, reimagined on the museum’s grounds and in their publications,

as the best representation of a historic New England seaport. While the shipbuilding

industry had once made Mystic famous a century before, the tourism industry now

defined it in the present.292

Mystic Seaport becomes a business / Carl quits

As Seaport staff collaborated with other town residents on the anniversary events,

one name was notably missing from the newspaper articles and photos: Carl Cutler. He

had quit at the end of 1952, capping years of steadily-building frustration as he watched

his museum become, in his eyes, a business. Cutler had first tried to resign back in 1945.

He was exhausted and depressed after seven years of running the museum – the first four

as the only full-time staff member – and felt that he couldn’t do everything required

291 Mystic Seaport listed the events on the back cover of the Summer 1954 Log of Mystic Seaport. Full list of parade participants from “30-Float Revue to Tell 300-Year Mystic Story in July 17 Parade,” New London Evening Day, July 6, 1954, 3. Size of audience from “Estimate 40,000 Watch Hour-Long Parade of Mystic History Climaxing Celebration of Its Tercentenary,” New London Evening Day, July 19, 1954, 11. For details of “Voices of Freedom” concert see “American Music to be Theme for Tuesday Musical,” New London Evening Day, July 12, 1950, 11. 292 Taliaferro Boatwright, “History of the Stonington Historical Society,” http://www.stoningtonhistory.org/about1.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

195 there. It needed “new blood.” Partly through Mallory agreeing to hire a second assistant for him, Cutler agreed to stay, and steered the museum’s postwar planning for the seaport re-creation. As fundraising efforts, gate revenue, and the museum’s mission all expanded in the postwar years, the MHA hired more staff. In 1949 there were nine, in 1950, seventeen, and in 1951, twenty-seven full-time and fourteen part-time staff. One of the architects of this growth was Charles A. Brooks, whom Mallory had hired in 1948 as a part-time staff member to run the new museum store. In 1949 Brooks became the managing director of the museum – a position Cutler had held from 1938 to 1947.293

The additional voices involved in operating the museum, together with its rapid

growth and rising expenses worried Cutler. At the 1951 annual meeting he tried to halt

further expansion of the re-created seaport. “If we complicate their [the members’

ancestors] working-day picture by the introduction of irrelevant features, however

pleasing or diverting, our visitor may be more effectively entertained, but his impressions

will be vague and confused and less likely to be permanent.” Cutler was responding to

suggestions for another street of old buildings that he felt had only a remote connection to

shipbuilding at best. But Cutler may have already suspected that his goal of passing

along the inspiring qualities of his ancestors to present-day Americans was now a distant

second for the other directors to making Mystic Seaport an ever-more popular tourist

attraction. In a letter written to his brother that December, Cutler confided that “In a

293 First attempt to resign from two letters from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated May 8 & 27, 1945. Directors agreeing to give Cutler another assistant in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles R. Patterson, dated July 17, 1945. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. Increases in museum staff from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 10-11. For details of Brooks’s arrival, see letter from Carl C. Cutler to Alan Villiers, dated March 18, 1953. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

196 word, the thing [Mystic Seaport] has been turned into a cold-blooded business concern,” and he would resign.294

Between December and the following April, when he finally submitted his

resignation to Mallory, Cutler stewed and vented his frustrations to family, friends, and

sympathetic colleagues. He stated that he had quit his career as a lawyer decades ago out

of a “desire to do something of permanent value.” He saw the business world he left

behind as “making a nation of spineless workers” while their ancestors had been

independent, hard working, and self-respectful citizens. In starting the Marine Historical

Association, Cutler and his two associates sought to draw attention to what they saw as

these rapidly disappearing “standards and principles of our ancestors.” The solution was

to build an environment that showed how America’s seafaring ancestors once lived, and

to have an organization run it that embodied those admirable ancestral qualities: group

consensus, equal work, respect for the individual, and personal sacrifice to benefit the whole. They practiced what they preached, and it worked.295

But this ethos would eventually collide with the capitalistic spirit that dominated postwar American society. To be fair, wealthy capitalist members were responsible for

the museum’s growth since the beginning, and now in the postwar era it was almost

natural that it would spread from members to the entrepreneurial history they celebrated, and finally to the operation of the association itself. Supposedly this last step began when

Philip Mallory took over the presidency upon his brother Clifford’s death in 1941. The

294 Carl C. Cutler, “Report of the Secretary-Curator,” in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-Second Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1951 and the First New Year (Calendar) Fiscal Year, July 1st to December 31st, 1951.” Bulletin No. 44 – April 1952. Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles Cutler, dated Dec. 22, 1951. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 295 Summary and quotations from two letters: letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles Cutler, dated Dec. 22, 1951, and letter from Carl C. Cutler to Arthur R. Wendell, dated March 22, 1952. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

197 millionaire industrialist – at the time he was president of the P. R. Mallory & Co. electronics firm which he had founded in 1916 – apparently went along with the other directors until the museum’s growing size led him by the end of the 1940s to treat it as another corporation with himself at the head, and his fellow directors in a descending hierarchy.296

Applying his business model to the association, Mallory supposedly hired Brooks

as a business manager in 1949 with a salary that was a fifth of the museum’s income at

the time, and almost three times that of any other employee. Brooks supposedly

promised huge profits through a larger seaport store – “Coney Island stuff” to Cutler –

that would pay his salary; but when this failed, he fired staff to even the balance. Now,

despite years of hard work and low pay to make a museum enormously popular, the

MHA’s creed for Cutler, once true – and written by him back in 1929 and repeated every

year since in speeches, letters, and publications – was now a lie. “Now… the

organization is no different from any soul-less business corporation,” he concluded to his

former secretary in February of 1952.297

On April 22, 1952 Cutler wrote to Mallory that he would resign when it was

convenient to the other directors. The past few months of correspondence had allowed

him to focus his thoughts, and his appeals to Mallory during that time to keep Mystic

Seaport small and focused had failed. He feared that visitors would see it as a poor

imitation of typical museum villages such as Old Sturbridge Village. Cutler repeated his once-private belief that the museum had become a business in violation of the spirit and

296 Mallory’s biographical details from “Philip Mallory, Industrialist, 90, Dies,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 1975, 34. 297 Summary and quotations from three letters: letter from Carl C. Cutler to Charles Cutler, dated Dec. 22, 1951, and letters from Carl C. Cutler to Frances Mott, dated Feb. 22, 1952 and Labor Day, 1952. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

198 intentions of its founders. The MHA was meant to embody and promote their ancestors’ belief in personal dignity and individual responsibility. They were supposed to be

“working side by side on a plane of equal, mutual respect, without reference to wealth, position or grade of service. It was not a business corporation, and was never intended to be. On the contrary it was started solely because of the conviction that the world needed something besides business – something that placed a higher value on sacrifice and devoted cooperation, than on material gains.” In a letter to the MHA executive committee later that year when he agreed to serve as curator emeritus, Cutler understood that the MHA leadership had made these decisions out of a sincere desire for efficiency.

But their ancestors would not have tolerated such efficiency, he argued, and this preoccupation with material prosperity was destroying the association’s soul.298

In repeating his grievances against the MHA, Cutler comes across as idealistic at

best and naïve at worse. Most organizations in American society did not operation on

equality but hierarchy, whether a family, school, church, or corporation. His anti- capitalistic beliefs must have seemed especially foreign – some Americans at the time would have called them socialistic – and hypocritical when his own museum was promoting American capitalism and benefitting from it through corporate and federal donations of money, labor, or materials. The Marine Historical Association would not have been able to accomplish its goals were it not for the gift of a former textile mill by

Mary Harkness, the U. S. Coast Guard helping to extract and then tow the Charles W.

298 Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated April 22, 1952. Reference to Old Sturbridge Village in letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Feb. 21, 1952. Cutler’s papers contain three typed drafts of “To the Members of the Executive Committee of the Marine Historical Association, Inc.” in the undated material in Box 7, folder 9 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. I have quoted from the shortest version.

199

Morgan from Dartmouth to Mystic, or Congress donating the Joseph Conrad as a training vessel, to give but three examples.

In a way, Cutler’s frustrations at the commercial turn of Mystic Seaport mirror the professionalization of various fields since the nineteenth century that pushed out amateurs. Women’s groups had led some of the earliest preservation efforts in the nation, such as the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and the Association for the Preservation of

Virginia Antiquities. But by the early twentieth century, as historian James Lindgren and others have argued, such groups or the women within them were replaced by men who advocated research and scientific restoration over sentiment, and the guidance of trained experts.299

To put another of Cutler’s grievances in context, leading maritime museums such

as Mystic could not be just about entertainment, as the public was largely unable to gain a

maritime history education through formal schooling. Due to changes in the relationship

between museums and universities in American society over the past half century, this

was not a problem faced by land-based history, art, or science museums. Historian

Steven Conn has traced how in the late-nineteenth century, museums were leaders in the

production of knowledge. Museums pursued original research, and made their work

available to the public through exhibits and publications. Only by the mid 1920s, Conn

argues, do universities and colleges surpass museums as knowledge producers, and

299 James Michael Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1993). James Michael Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995). Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). Professionalization of the field of archaeology pushed out amateurs in the mid twentieth century. David La Vere, Looting Spiro Mounds: An American King Tut's Tomb (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), and Donald W. Linebaugh, The Man Who Found Thoreau: Roland W. Robbins and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005).

200 attract the specialist/student visitor into the classroom. In this process, “by the

1920s…an object-based epistemology had largely disappeared from the mainstream of

American intellectual life.” Now, museums “no longer fulfill the role of knowledge production that their founders anticipated.” Since the early twentieth century they have focused on entertaining and educating the general public, and especially school groups in knowledge that was not new and sometimes rather outdated.

For the vast majority of museums, Conn’s analysis is correct. Cutler, Stillman, and Bradley in 1929 adopted the traditional expectation that their new association and its future museum would publish new works of maritime history. But maritime history scholarship did not followed other fields of history into academia, and it remains largely in the hands of amateurs and maritime museums. So by the 1950s Mystic Seaport and its sister maritime museums had for decades shouldered the burden (or challenge) of trying to communicate a history that its audience would likely not have first learned in school – no matter how highly educated.300

In the MHA’s early years Cutler had served as curator, publicist, secretary,

managing director, librarian, ship rigger, preservationist, groundskeeper, and a host of

other jobs that by the 1950s were now the responsibility of staff with specialized training.

How much the museum needed to mirror a business to remain viable is open to debate,

but in order to communicate its mission to a national audience it needed multiple sources

of revenue, trained staff, and museum grounds and exhibits that continuously offered

something new. The museum’s growing bureaucracy allowed it to skillfully use the

media to promote its belief that the lessons of early American maritime history were vital

300 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17-19.

201 to contemporary American society. And unlike in 1929, the museum now had to compete with a new array of entertainment that, on the surface, could be much more compelling. Aiming for a large general audience that was sometimes only stopping off on their way to vacations elsewhere, Mystic Seaport couldn’t only be educational or spiritual. It also had to be entertaining. Places such as Walt Disney’s soon-to-be- constructed Disneyland only had to focus on fun. The businessman had toured Mystic

Seaport in November of 1949, presumably as inspiration as he designed his future theme park.301

The MHA trying to balance scholarship and entertainment is reflected in

Edouard Stackpole taking over as curator from Cutler in January of 1953. Combining the

MHA’s respect for ancestry with its modern business focus, The Log of Mystic Seaport spoke of Stackpole’s great grandfather and grandfather who had served aboard whaleships, while he had led the Nantucket Historical Society, served as editor of

Nantucket’s Inquirer & Mirror newspaper, and written several works of historical fiction along with an upcoming history of New England whaling. Stackpole’s maritime ancestry likely helped him in the application process, and the directors would have appreciated his

ability to write for popular and academic audiences.302

Cutler also hoped to still reach a broad audience with his scholarship. After

quitting the museum, the seventy-five year old built a log cabin as a writing studio in the

woods near his West Mystic home. There, he began a history of American packet ships.

It would be a follow-up to his successful but now out of print Greyhounds of the Seas

(1930). But when it came time to find a publisher for the manuscript, Cutler found a very

301 Walt Disney’s visit mentioned in The Log of Mystic Seaport 2, no. 1 (January 1950): 13. 302 The Log of Mystic Seaport 5, no. 1 (Winter 1953): 3-5.

202 different business climate. An apologetic letter from Vice President Robert Farlow at W.

W. Norton and Company in July, 1959, explained that the dozen years since the two had spoke of publishing such a work “now have brought about changes in the reading public.

Books about the sea unless they are about horrendous adventures or else fiction with a sea background seem not to capture a wide enough audience these days.” Cutler eventually found a safe harbor with the specialty Naval Institute Press. It published

Queens of the Western Oceans: the Story of America's Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines in 1961. But it would be for other writers to adapt New England’s maritime past for popular consumption – and none would be more prolific or successful than a

Massachusetts teacher named Edward Rowe Snow.303

Conclusion

Between 1929 and its silver anniversary in 1954, the Marine Historical

Association grew from three men with a desire to preserve America’s maritime past to an

organization with 4,255 members and a large, dynamic museum with thirty-six staff and

over a hundred thousand annual visitors. There were only three maritime museums in the

U.S. in 1929, and none collected large artifacts nor on a national scale. But family stories

and first-hand sea experience imported in Carl Cutler, Charles Stillman, and Edward

Bradley a love for maritime history and desire to preserve artifacts that illustrated it. As

the person at the heart of this story, Carl Cutler had an aim deeper than saving objects and

telling stories. He believed that the physical environment in which his and others’

ancestors had grown up with in New England was the crucible that created characteristics

303 Letter from Robert E. Farlow to Carl C. Cutler, dated July 10, 1959. For details of Cutler’s cabin see letters in folders 14, 19, and 20 in Box 4 of Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

203 of self reliance, courage, and ingenuity that earned them successful careers and capital that fueled the subsequent industrial growth of America from sea to sea.304

But shortly before the Civil War, the United States had turned from a maritime

nation to one focused on land-based progress and expansion. Despite these

achievements, Cutler and his converts believed that the sea, as a place that could never be

settled or tamed, represented a permanent frontier which promised, through studying the

people who had come of age upon it, to rejuvenate a largely spineless, dependent, and

listless citizenry. In the belief that learning about and imitating ancestors was the key to

success (or survival) in modern society, the MHA was part of a trend of filiopiety

common in historical and genealogical organizations in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. And it was the tool with which the MHA selected its early, mostly

wealthy members, acquired land and buildings for a museum, and raised funds for the

preservation of the whaleship Charles W. Morgan. But though a skillful appeal to

filiopiety was largely responsible for the MHA’s successes in its first fifteen years, such

an approach was inherently exclusionary to the majority of Americans without Yankee

ancestors.

While the Marine Historical Association welcomed everyone by World War II, it

remained fixated on promoting the values it ascribed to early coastal New Englanders –

who represented, in their thinking, the root of American values. The MHA took a two-

fold approach. First, they would practice what they preached and try to operate the

organization according to the principles of their ancestors. Second, they would re-create

their humble nineteenth-century working environment to, as Cutler later explained, “hit

304 Statistics for 1954 from Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 11.

204 our visitor like a blow between the eyes. It should make him go away saying: ‘My God!

What a people!’”305

The idea of an open-air museum of historic buildings where people could connect

with the past was already a half-century old in Scandinavia when the MHA began planning their reconstruction in the 1930s. The Skansen model first took root in the U. S. in the 1920s with Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, but the MHA preferred the ambiance of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colonial Williamsburg as a role model. Beginning in 1941 the MHA pledged that its reproduction would do for coastal New England what Colonial

Williamsburg had done for tidewater Virginia. While the MHA was only one of a half- dozen museum village or village restoration projects around the country by the 1940s, their claim to uniqueness lay in its maritime character and the inherent values therein. It didn’t matter that other sites also regarded themselves as the crucible of American character.

The original concept for the MHA’s village was not a village at all but a waterfront street containing all the shops one might expect to find in a small New

England port. Preserved historic ships would be moored nearby, with possibly an adjacent working shipyard like the one that had existed on the site in the nineteenth

century. As Cutler and other museum staff began moving small industrial and

commercial buildings from southern New England to the museum grounds beginning in

1944, the character of the project changed in two ways.

The first was a blending of the museum’s mission with its search for revenue

through the opening of a faux “old seaport store” at the head of the seaport street.

305 Letter from Carl C. Cutler to Philip R. Mallory, dated Feb. 21, 1952. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

205

Described by some staff as the first building in the historic re-creation, it resembled a nineteenth century general store where visitors could buy a mixture of modern and traditional gifts. The building’s location made it a frequent entry and exit point for visitors experiencing the past, and made consumption a natural part of the immersive historical experience. The second change was the seaport reconstruction taking on the buildings found in a typical village re-creation, including a house, chapel, and school.

Whether the turn towards domesticity was due to outward public pressure from donors and members, an internal decision by the MHA’s leaders, or some combination, is unknown. But the project was no longer only the purview of Cutler.

It’s likely that Mystic Seaport’s directors – the MHA had renamed the whole museum complex after the reconstruction in 1948 – accepted the broader cultural appeal of a traditional museum village, albeit a maritime one. The replica seaport’s structures divided between commercial/industrial and the non-working world of home, church, and school. The United States entered into a cold war with the Soviet Union as the MHA built the village between 1948 and 1954, and the assemblage demonstrated American cultural superiority. Industrial buildings such as the ropewalk stood for America’s centuries-old tradition of fair labor and free-market capitalism, while domestic structures such as the chapel emphasized America’s deep-rooted faith in God that contributed to success in all facets of life. The chapel also gave visitors a chance to join this silent debate with the USSR. By participating in services, weddings, or other events at the non- denominational chapel they could demonstrate that the values of their collective

American ancestors still thrived. The whole re-creation made the museum a showcase of the durability of American capitalism, faith, and education, and served as a collective

206 balm to a host of fears in modern American society. Whatever these were, the solution lay in studying the inspiring and always faithful ancestors of their collective past.

America had met worse challenges throughout its history, and always won.

The seaport reconstruction obviously overlooked darker aspects of maritime New

England. Away from the much-celebrated glories of American capitalism there were labor disputes, corporations that cared little for the welfare of the individual worker, and industrial consolidation and decline – which particularly hurt small communities such as

Mystic. The museum itself sat on a site of commercial failure, as the Greenman brothers could not compete in the post-Civil War era with larger shipyards with better access to cheaper materials and labor. Their shipyard was a casualty of the free market that the museum now trumpeted.306

In its appearance the seaport presented a freshly-painted small community without

class structure, ethnic or racial diversity, or the unsavory side of maritime life that

included brothels, jails, and rooming houses. In a living version of this vision, the MHA

commissioned an “indoctrination film” to show to visitors. Cutler wrote the outline in

1951 of the film that would soon be named Origins of Freedom: The Story of Mystic

Seaport, but it was his successor who wrote the script and steered it to completion for

presentation to visitors beginning in the spring of 1955. In addition to the expected tour

of the museum’s indoor and outdoor offerings, the film crew and their actors recreated a

mid-nineteenth century fitting out and unloading of the Morgan, with segments of the

1922 film Down to the Sea in Ships illustrating the story of a whale hunt in between the

pre and post-voyage dockside footage. In both the decades-old movie and filming around

306 The Greenman shipyard launched its last vessel in 1878. William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985) 13, 16.

207 the seaport street and Morgan’s wharf, the actors present a whitewashed version of history stripped down to its favored Anglo-American roots.307

This is a past that rings hollow to anyone who has read Moby-Dick, but as an

organization with a political and cultural agenda, the MHA felt the need to build its own

idealized view of the past. In doing so it borrowed freely from its host community of

Mystic. Since 1929 it had promoted Mystic as representative of the small New England seaports that had fostered the ideals the MHA so badly wanted to resurrect. Mystic

Seaport subsequently took in local historic buildings and artifacts, while its publications sometimes blurred the distinction between old and new, present and the past. The result was to present Mystic Seaport as the place where Mystic’s past – and therefore New

England’s maritime past – survived in the present.

Mystic Seaport’s expansion was not without criticism by the local community, who felt they were not getting a say in the museum that had appropriated their identity.

But the simultaneous anniversary celebrations of the village and the museum in 1954

showed that they were firmly bonded, and the latter gave the former a level of historical exposure and preservation it would not have otherwise enjoyed. Within the museum’s

grounds, though, the commercialism that had begun encroaching into its operations in the late 1940s soon led to the resignation of the Seaport’s first, and perhaps most idealistic

member, Carl Cutler.

For him the museum’s development into a (non-profit) corporation was an

abandonment of his original intent of a small group working together for little material

307 Carl C. Cutler, “Report of the Secretary-Curator,” in Marine Historical Association, “Twenty-Second Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1951 and the First New Year (Calendar) Fiscal Year, July 1st to December 31st, 1951.” Bulletin No. 44 – April 1952, p. 10. Origins of Freedom: The Story of Mystic Seaport, written by Edouard Stackpole (DVD; Mystic, CT.: De Frenes Co., 1955).

208 gain in the pursuit of common historical goals. Though the museum was a huge success in its large attendance, influence on the practice of maritime public history, and spreading awareness of New England’s maritime past to a national audience, for its only surviving founder it had traded its soul for commercial success. Cutler’s grievances and eventual exit mirror the professionalization of many fields during the twentieth century, as professionally-trained experts pushed out self-taught amateurs with their often unique practices and sense of duty. In a note of irony, the changing climate in the public presentation of history that so frustrated Carl Cutler would be the key to the success of another historian, Edward Rowe Snow.

209

CHAPTER 3

Edward Rowe Snow and the Distilling of Coastal Identity; or, Selling Sea Tales by the Seashore

Introduction

One night in June, 1952, a man worked alone digging on the rocky shore of Isle

Haute off the coast of Advocate, Nova Scotia. The previous day he had hired a fishing boat to take him to the small, cliff-ringed island some thirteen miles out in the Bay of

Fundy. Fearing potentially bad weather, he had left his wife and daughter ashore in the care of a local family. That night he boarded with the four residents who maintained the island’s lighthouse, and traded stories with the keeper and his family about the history and lore of the place. For anyone familiar with Edward Rowe Snow, the purpose of his visit was no mystery. He was in pursuit of buried treasure.

Five years prior Snow had purchased a reputed treasure map, and eventually identified it as made by the eighteenth-century English pirate Edward Low of the island on which he was now digging. Earlier that day he had toured the island with his hosts, taking photographs and sweeping a borrowed metal detector over the section of shore which Low had marked as “The Place.” Snow was not the first to search for treasure on

Isle Haute. Several decades earlier a man had reportedly found $20,000 in gold and jewels at the spot where Snow now found himself digging by the light of a kerosene lantern. After the fourth hole had produced yet more bits of worthless, rusted iron, the keeper and his son had left Snow to finish the day’s digging on his own. Twenty minutes

210 later, Snow’s pick unearthed first ribs and then a human skull that rolled across his feet.

Losing his nerve, Snow scrambled out of the hole, grabbed the lantern and headed back to the lighthouse for the night. The next morning the party returned to the unexpected grave, where Snow uncovered eight coins near the right hand of the skeleton. Snow had found his treasure.

Perhaps more valuable than the coins was the story itself. When Snow returned to the mainland, the news of his discovery attracted the attention of government officials who temporarily confiscated the treasure for Snow’s lack of an export license for gold.

The story appeared in newspapers in Nova Scotia and Snow’s home state of

Massachusetts, and Life magazine brought the story to a wider audience the following month with the article “Red-Taped Gold.” Appearing on July 21, 1952, the three-page article shows Snow combining historical research with the popular romance surrounding pirates and treasure. One of the accompanying photographs, taken by Snow on the island, shows a partially unearthed skeletal hand next to a small box containing coins and some vertebrae he had already collected. Others taken by a Life photojournalist show

Snow back at his Marshfield, Massachusetts home, surrounded by authentic pirate memorabilia including chests, coins, weapons, and human remains.

Life’s portrait reveals a successful writer, collector, and treasure hunter who had admittedly “earned more writing about pirates than by digging for their treasure.” The article prompted “no less than 1,370 letter, telegrams, telephone calls, and personal visits” over the next year, when Snow included a full account of the experience in a chapter of his latest book, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold. His New York

211 publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company, would release at least seven printings of the popular book over the next thirteen years.308

By the 1950s Edward Rowe Snow was more than a lucky treasure hunter and successful writer. In a career that spanned fifty years until his death in 1982, Snow

gained renown as a teacher, author, columnist, radio and television personality, lecturer,

tour guide, photographer, historian, folklorist, and preservationist. During this time,

Snow educated millions of people about the history and lore of the Atlantic coast. While

his stories could range around the globe, from Labrador to Madagascar to China, the

heart of his maritime world was New England. His interest began with his New England

seafaring ancestry and an intense curiosity about the stories within the people and

environment surrounding his Winthrop home on the edge of Boston Harbor.

Key to Snow's success was learning what fascinated the public. Or, to put it

another way, learning what history was commercially viable enough to tell. His interests centered on topics with mass appeal: pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and ghosts. In this way Snow shaped and was shaped by the public's understanding of New

England maritime history and lore. Snow always emphasized that what he told was, to his knowledge, true, and he spent countless hours conducting archival research and interviews. At the same time he applied his skills as a master storyteller to make that

history best come alive. But this entertaining history also had a serious end, as Snow

worked for decades to help preserve the islands of Boston Harbor for public use. Edward

Rowe Snow’s New England was vivid, tangible, and worth saving.

308 “Red-Taped Gold,” Life, July 21, 1952, 37-38, 40. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1953), 107-122. Betty MacDonald, “Coins Found By Treasure Seeker,” Amherst Daily News, June 28, 1952, 1. “Snow Finds Gold Spanish Doubloons in Pirate’s Cache,” Boston Globe, June 30, 1952, 1.

212

In the wake of Snow’s death, scholars have largely overlooked his career and body of work. Almost no scholarship exists on him aside from a bibliographic checklist published in 2007, a regional television newsmagazine story that first aired in 1996, and a multi-part documentary that first aired on the public-access television station in his hometown in 1989. But significant primary sources on Snow remain, including his personal papers at Boston University, and maritime artifacts and photographic negatives at the Peabody Essex Museum. Most of this material is not cataloged, and awaits the perusal of researchers. While Snow’s main book publishers are no longer in business, dedicated fans such as maritime historian James D’Entremont (who also directed and produced the Snow documentary) have brought new editions of seven of his books into print since 2002. Along with these efforts to keep Snow’s memory alive, this chapter serves as a small step toward recognizing Edward Rowe Snow’s importance in helping to create coastal New England’s sense of place.309

Early biography and influences

309 James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007). “Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996. Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, prod. Jeremy D’Entremont (WCAT/Coastlore Productions, 1988-1990 & 1995; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). Snow donated the first batch of his papers to his alma mater in 1969; his widow, Anna-Myrle Snow, donated a second batch to BU in 1992. Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University, Boston, MA. Anna-Myrle Snow donated a collection of photographic negatives taken by her late husband to the PEM in Salem, MA, on August 31, 1987 (accession number 24461). Snow’s daughter and son in law, Dorothy and Leonard Bicknell, donated a collection of maritime artifacts to the PEM on November 15, 1991 (accession number of 25,816). These details are from correspondence with the PEM’s Assistant Registrar for the Permanent Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Carrie Van Horn, “FW: Edward Rowe Snow collection,” e-mail message to Jonathan Olly, March 2, 2011. Updated and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont, Snow’s reissued books are Lighthouses of New England (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2002); A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); The Islands of Boston Harbor (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2004); Storms and Shipwrecks of New England (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2005); Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2006); and Women of the Sea (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2008).

213

In the early twentieth century, as many Americans celebrated their ancestry through various commemorative activities and preservation of family heirlooms and stories, one such family was the Snows of Winthrop, Massachusetts. Born on August 22,

1902, Edward Rowe Snow was the third of four sons of Alice Rowe Snow and Edward

Sumpter Snow. Both parents were from Rockland, Maine, where the third cousins had married in 1889 before immediately moving to Winthrop. Here, Alice ran the household while her husband was the head of Snow & Co., a Boston produce and fruit importer.

Along with the eventual four children, Alice’s widowed mother, Caroline Alden Keating

Rowe, shared their house at 59 Cottage Avenue.

Snow’s New England roots began with the arrival of Stephen Hopkins, his wife, and their four children aboard the Mayflower in what would become the settlement of

Plymouth in 1620. Hopkins wasn’t a member of the religious sect, but he had joined the venture for the opportunity to own land. According to at least one researcher, he was the same Stephen Hopkins who in 1609 was aboard a ship headed to Jamestown, Virginia, when it wrecked in Bermuda. Hopkins made it to Jamestown later that year before eventually retuning to England. Aboard the Mayflower anchored off Cape Cod in 1620 he was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact, and played a prominent role in subsequent negotiations with the Wampanoags.

Nicholas Snow brought Edward’s surname to America in 1623 when the ship

Anne arrived at Plymouth; he eventually married Hopkins’s daughter Constance. A later ancestor, William Nickerson, arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1637 and moved to

Cape Cod three years later. For several decades the Pilgrim elders fought him in court over the legality of a 1656 land purchase Nickerson made in what is now the town of

214

Chatham with a Nauset sachem named Mattaquason. In writing his 1946 book A Pilgrim

Returns to Cape Cod following a seven-week hike there, Snow expressed delight in having discovered in court records that Nickerson also had helped a pirate escape from the nearby island of Nantucket in 1684. He further imagined that his ancestor may have buried treasure from this exchange on some Cape beach.310

Another ancestor of the Snow family came from Ireland. On July 28, 1741, the

Irish immigrant ship Grand Design wrecked on the coast of Mount Desert Island in

Maine. Most of the two hundred passengers died from drowning, sickness, or starvation

before Native Americans brought word of the disaster to the distant English settlement of

Saint George’s (now Warren), Maine. One of the survivors was the now-widowed

Isabella Asbell Galloway. In 1950 Snow tracked down the gravestone of Isabella and the

Warren man whom she married after the rescue, Archibald Gamble. He also located the

keel of the Grand Design in the mud of Ship Harbor with the help of an elderly mariner who had spotted it seventy years before.311

From these early New England pioneers Edward Rowe Snow claimed to have

descended from four generations of sea captains on both sides of his family, with the

exception of his businessman father.312 While this captaincy lineage may be a bit exaggerated, Snow’s family was extensively involved in New England shipbuilding and

310 “Couple Mark Golden Wedding,” Boston Globe, September 9, 1939, B14. Third cousin detail from Frank P. Sibley, “Winthrop Woman’s Adventures as a Girl on Robinson Crusoe’s Island,” Boston Globe, October 23, 1932, B5. Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 17, 353-355; Dolores Bird Carpenter, ed., Early Encounters – Native Americans and Europeans in New England: From the Papers of W. Sears Nickerson (East Lansing, MI.: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 203-204. Hopkins biography summarized from Caleb Johnson, Here Shall I Die Ashore; Stephen Hopkins: Bermuda Castaway, Jamestown Survivor, and Mayflower Pilgrim (Bloomington, IN.: Xlibris Corporation, 2007). 311 Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 161-164. 312 Snow wrote a four-page autobiography that appeared in: Harvard College Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957), [unknown page number].

215 maritime trade for generations. Of this large family, it was Snow’s maternal grandparents and mother who had the most influence on his career.

Snow’s childhood offers ample anecdotes for his later maritime interests, most of which he shared with the public in a half-century of speaking and writing. In 1972 he recalled that:

My interest in gold, sunken treasure, and pirates began in a strange way when I was four years of age. My older brother Nicholas, then twelve, was showing a group of his chums Grandfather’s collection of foreign curios. All of the boys gathered in our parlor. They were looking high on the wall where hung a pirate’s poison dagger. Grandfather Joshua Rowe had captured the dagger after killing the pirate who had held it in a personal duel fought between them, now more than a century ago. At the time of the encounter Grandfather was one of the crew aboard the wrecked clipper ship Crystal Palace, which was ashore in the island of Mindanao, near Zamboanga.313

Snow continued that Nicholas took down the sword and chased the other boys around the room. When their mother Alice intervened and tried to take the sword away, she

received a small cut on her hand. In a bit of theatrics she exclaimed that the poison in the

dagger would kill her; but this didn’t happen and the next day she warned the boys “in

such a dramatic manner and with such vivid imagery” to never again touch the relic.314

This fight with a Filipino pirate was only one of many adventures in the life of

Snow’s grandfather, Joshua Nickerson Rowe. Born in 1837, Rowe grew up in Rockland,

Maine, and first went to sea at the age of twelve. It was on this first voyage that his vessel, the fishing schooner Checker, sank, marooning Rowe temporarily on Amherst

Island in the Magdalen group in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was one of several

313 Edward Rowe Snow, Ghosts, Gales and Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972), 223. 314 Ibid. The story also appears in Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944). A photo of Snow and his mother holding the “poison dagger” is on page 72. On page 7 Snow dedicates this volume “In memory of my grandfather Captain Joshua Nickerson Rowe who fought pirates while on the clipper ship Crystal Palace.”

216 shipwrecks he would endure during his forty-nine year career. As both his parents had just died – his mother in Rockland and his father out west as a forty-niner – Rowe returned to sea; by the age of twenty he was second mate aboard the merchant ship

Crystal Palace when he helped repel Filipino pirates while the ship was ashore for emergency repairs near Zamboanga in 1858.

After surviving this voyage on the Crystal Palace, Rowe became captain of several smaller sailing vessels, served as a navigator about the USS St. Louis during the

Civil War, and returned home to marry Caroline Alden Keating. Their daughter Alice was born in 1868. As was common practice with ship captains, Rowe took his family to sea with him on many voyages, and Alice spent twelve of her first nineteen years traveling to the Caribbean, Europe, and South America. While Alice and Caroline came ashore for good in 1887, Joshua continued sailing, making it home only once more during the next nine years. His life ended unexpectedly, when, as captain of a steamer on the

Yukon River transporting passengers and supplies during the Klondike Gold Rush, he caught pneumonia and died shortly thereafter in a Skagway, Alaska, hospital on October

18, 1898.315

Rowe was only the latest member of Snow’s family to have died while out west.

In 1855 Snow’s forty-eight year-old great-grandfather Captain Richard Keating died in

Calcutta, India, while in command of the ship Kate Sweetland, likely as the result of an illness. A decade later Snow’s great-aunt Eliza Smart Snow drowned at the age of

315 Biography of Joshua Rowe Snow compiled from Alice Rowe Snow, More Stories from the Log of a Sea Captain’s Daughter (Winthrop, MA.: Alice Rowe Snow, 1949). Rowe being shipwrecked while aboard the Checker from Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 78. Joshua N. Rowe married Caroline A. Keating on February 5, 1865, and was acting master of the USS St. Louis according to Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, from their First Exploration, A.D. 1605; with Family Genealogies (Hallowell, ME.: Masters, Smith & Co., 1865), 2:384.

217 twenty-eight when the steamer Brother Jonathan, which had left San Francisco on July

28, 1865 for Port Ludlow in the Washington Territory, sank after hitting an uncharted ledge near Crescent City, CA, during a gale while making for that safe harbor. As Snow recalled almost a century later, “‘Oh, yes, that was your great-aunt Eliza who was lost at sea on the Brother Jonathan.’ How often I had heard that remark in my boyhood days when, on visits to Rockland, Maine, I glanced through the cabinet pictures which once were so much a part of the old-fashioned parlors of the Maine sea captains.” Whether in photographs or the family’s fortunate collection of diaries, letters, charts, and curios, stories of the Snow family were in constant circulation.316

It wasn’t all tragedy. The earliest stories that Snow could recall were told to him

at the age of five by his mother, Alice, about the four and a half years she spent at sea

with her parents aboard the bark Russell from 1883 to 1887 as it sailed from Liverpool,

England, south around Cape Horn, up the South American coast to Lima, Peru, and back

again. Alice had kept a logbook of her voyage, dutifully noting each day’s events and

making occasional drawings. Of all the stories about gales, ice, leaks, sickness, unusual

cargoes, a stowaway, and marine animals, the trips delivering supplies to and from the

island of Juan Fernández captivated young Snow.317 Situated some 400 miles off the

Chilean coast, Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned here in 1704 and lived as

316 Richard Keating’s death mentioned in photograph opposite title page of Alice Rowe Snow, More Stories from the Log of a Sea Captain’s Daughter (Winthrop, MA.: Alice Rowe Snow, 1949) and confirmed in Cyrus Eaton, History of Thomaston, Rockland, and South Thomaston, Maine, from their First Exploration, A.D. 1605; with Family Genealogies (Hallowell, ME.: Masters, Smith & Co., 1865), 2:289, http://books.google.com/books?id=bOtLfyIZBL4C&pg=PR1#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed January 7, 2013). The Kate Sweetland was built in Thomaston, Maine, in 1852 (p. 105). Death of Eliza Snow from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1952), 164. 317 The island at the time was known as Isla Más a Tierra, one of three islands in the Juan Fernández archipelago. But as it is the largest, it has popularly assumed the name of the group. In 1966 the Chilean government renamed it Robinson Crusoe Island.

218 a castaway for four and a half years until his rescue by a passing English ship. The event is believed to have inspired Daniel Defoe to write the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe based on Selkirk’s life.

Alice loved Defoe’s story, and brought her copy of the novel ashore to rub the island’s “romantic dirt” over it. Her subsequent explorations of the island with her family included the cave where Selkirk (Alice preferred to say Crusoe) once lived (and where a German man named Meyers was now living at the time of her visit) and a mountaintop lookout where British naval officers in 1868 had erected a tablet to Selkirk’s fifty-one month stay. There, Joshua recited the William Cowper poem Alexander

Selkirk’s Soliloquy to the delight of everyone present. Snow would later credit Alice’s journal for inspiring him to write his first publication in 1935: the forty-five page Castle

Island: Its 300 Years of History and Romance. A view of the past as romantic now spanned three generations.318

Inspiration also came from other family members and trickled in through his

surroundings. At the age of five Snow’s older brother Winthrop brought him to the

nearby Governor’s Island to explore the ruined Fort Winthrop. As Snow remembered

more than seventy years later, “I still recall the dark chambers, the dripping stalactites,

the dank, dungeon-like smell, and the pitch-black inner room with its hidden entrance….

[I]t left me with a feeling of awe and almost pleasant dread. It was really a boy’s dream

come true.” By the age of seven, Grandmother Rowe was taking Snow on regular visits

318 Alice Rowe Snow, Log of a Sea Captain’s Daughter with Adventures on Robinson Crusoe’s Island (Boston, MA.: Meador Publishing Company, 1944). Snow dedicates his first publication to his mother: “To my mother Alice Rowe Snow whose diary of her visit to Robinson Crusoe’s Island inspired the preparation of this book.” Edward Rowe Snow, Castle Island: Its 300 Years of History and Romance (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 2. Frank P. Sibley, “Winthrop Woman’s Adventures as a Girl on Robinson Crusoe’s Island,” Boston Globe, October 23, 1932, B5.

219 to “important historical sites” that included cemeteries and buildings such as the Old

State House, where they read through “great masses of reference works and scrapbooks.”

He also began to attended historical commemorations, such as memorial services in the summer of 1912 preceding the cutting down of Winthrop’s centuries-old Gibbons Elm, from which Snow secured a small souvenir. Inspiration also came from unexpected places. During visits to his aunt Annabel Snow’s home in Rockland, Snow recalled the stories told by her handyman, Charlie Smith. As a former whaleman he “had made many voyages before his shipwreck on the sea of intemperance. He would talk to us children by the hour about his adventures. He interested me in whaling at an early age, and I would often visit the library to take out volumes on whalers and their experiences.”319

At thirteen Snow bought his first of many canoes, and began exploring the

harbor’s several dozen islands. Eventually he visited all of them. “With each island

conquest,” recalled Snow decades later, “I was anxious to learn what I could about the

tunnels, graveyards, shipwrecks, and dilapidated buildings I found. I soon discovered,

however, that there was not a single modern book or pamphlet that contained the answers

to my questions. I would journey up to the Boston Public Library, where the late Pierce

Buckley would help me as much as he could, and by the fall of 1917 I had amassed a

319 Fort Winthrop visit from Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 177. Caroline Rowe anecdotes from Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 215- 217 and Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 210. Memorial service for the Gibbons Elm were held on June 22, 1912 according to Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 77. Charlie Smith quote from Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 101.

220 considerable amount of information concerning the harbor.” Snow’s career as a historian and storyteller, then, started as a quest to answer questions about his environment.320

Snow didn’t experience drama just through books and other people’s stories. He saw death at an early age. While walking along the Winthrop shore with a friend in April of 1917, the fourteen-year old Snow came upon bodies washing ashore. The week before, a group of thirteen boys from Lynn had taken a motorboat out on a joyride and disappeared later that night. Snow himself almost drowned the following year when he fell through the ice on January 2, 1918, while walking to various islands near Winthrop.

Neither experience deterred him from the water (he continued walking on the ice until

1946), and may have fueled his interests in shipwrecks and lifesaving. He was already an excellent swimmer and a bit of a daredevil, diving off piers and under schooners, and experimenting with breathing underwater using a rubber hose and five-gallon cans.321

His adventurous spirit and wanderlust, like many of his ancestors before him, took him to sea. In the most detailed description of this period in his life, Snow only recalled later that “between 1919 and 1928 I journeyed all over the world, serving in various capacities on sailing vessels and oil tankers, and going ashore whenever the urge presented itself.” This period ashore included working as an extra in three films in

Hollywood and as a lifeguard at four swimming pools along the Pacific Coast. 1928

320 Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1958), 235. Also recounted in Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 112. 321 Boating accident from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1943), 259. Snow falling through ice from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1958), 234-246 and told again in Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 111-121. Snow as early diver from Edward Rowe Snow, Ghosts, Gales and Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972), 224 and “Winthrop By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont (1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008).

221 found Snow working as a lifeguard in Helena, Montana, where he attended Intermountain

Union College on a scholarship, and met his future wife, Anna-Myrle Haegg. The following year he was back in Massachusetts to attend Harvard University. By taking summer classes he managed to graduate early, in 1932, writing a thesis on the history of the Boston harbor islands under the guidance of professor and historian Samuel Eliot

Morison.322

Fifteen years older than Snow, Morison was in many ways his opposite. Born

into one of Boston’s upper-class Yankee families known as the Boston Brahmins,

Morison attended private preparatory schools in Boston, New Hampshire, and Paris

before earning his PhD at Harvard in 1912. With the exception of a few short teaching

appointments at other universities and service during World War II, he would continue to

teach history at his alma mater until retiring in 1955. During a writing career that stretched from the 1910s through the 1970s and included more than fifty books and 150 articles, Morison became one of the preeminent historians in America, winning the

Pulitzer Prize twice, the Bancroft Prize for American history, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Johnson in 1964. At various times he also served as editor for The New England Quarterly, the region’s leading academic journal, and The

American Neptune, the leading academic journal of American maritime history which he co-founded in 1941.

While Snow was also a prolific writer, he preferred short, distinct stories of sometimes unverified veracity over Morison’s biographies and sweeping histories of

322 See Snow’s four-page autobiography that appeared in: Harvard College Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957), [unknown page number]. Snow’s lifeguarding from Edward Rowe Snow, Astounding Tales of the Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965), 197.

222 people, events, and groups. While both men wrote for a popular audience, Morison also wrote textbooks and institutional histories, including the landmark History of United

States Naval Operations in World War II, that he joined the Navy in 1942 to document first-hand and then published in fifteen volumes from 1947 to 1962. As this example demonstrates, along with earlier and later biographies of Christopher Columbus and

Samuel de Champlain, Morison believed in writing about topics from the point of view of having traveled to and through those spaces – usually by sailing. Snow shared this value in first-hand experience, and may have been encouraged to write that way by his mentor.

But aside from that, the two men pursued different facets of the maritime past. As their careers paralleled each others for four decades, the master storyteller and the professional historian likely remained aware of each other’s pursuits.323

After graduation in 1932 Snow drove back to Helena to marry Anna-Myrle, and

the couple then returned east for his first teaching job in Athol, Massachusetts. The next year he was thrilled to move back to the coast to a teaching position at his old high school in Winthrop. For the next thirteen years Snow taught history, math, and English, coached track and football, and started a history club that included field trips around Boston.

Snow was a popular teacher, and the stories he had accumulated since he was a teenager came through no matter what topic he was ostensibly teaching. As former history class student John Domenico recalled in an interview decades later:

He could tell stories to illustrate his points at the drop of a hat. And as treats he would tell us stories about the islands, and that’s I think where he excelled and that’s where he captured all of us and just kept us enthralled for as long as that

323 Alden Whitman, “Adm. Morrison, 88, Historian, is Dead,” New York Times, May 16, 1976, 1. Navy Department Library, Navy History & Heritage Command, “Biographies in Naval History,” http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/morison_s.htm (accessed January 7, 2013); Navy Department Library, Navy History & Heritage Command, “A Bibliography of Writings by Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison,” http://www.history.navy.mil/library/guides/morison_bib.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

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class period ended. And if we could get through the history work early enough in the class we were sure to get some of these stories – the ghosts, the mystery people, the happenings on the islands that he just brought alive. There was something about him, the way he told us – he would frequently darken the room to make certain that the effects were there. And to see this hulk of a man emote before the class, I tell you he just left us with a lot of great memories.

Edward Rowe Snow’s time at Winthrop High School gave him experience perfecting stories in front of an audience, whether in a classroom or on tours with them throughout greater Boston.324

But Snow didn’t limit himself to only working with students.325 The 1930s was a

productive time for Snow, as he began all of the activities that would come to define his

public life. By 1934 he was participating in historical commemorations and leading

harbor tours and giving lectures to a diverse array of groups, from historical and fraternal

organizations to veterans and women’s clubs, as well as the general public. To give an

incomplete sample: he led anniversary celebrations of harbor lighthouses and keepers, the

75th anniversary of the creation of the famous Civil War song “John Brown’s Body” at

Fort Warren, the 250th anniversary of supposedly America’s first rebellion in Boston’s

Fort Hill Square, the 140th anniversary of the USS Constitution evading the British

blockade, sponsored a memorial for a photographer friend killed in a plane crash, and

presided over annual memorial services for families of victims of the sinking of the

steamer Portland during a gale in 1898.

324 “Winthrop By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont (1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). For details of the history club see “Edward Rowe Snow Remembered,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced by Jeremy D’Entremont (1995; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). 325 A student of Snow’s named Louis Cataldo would later, along with colleague Dorothy Worrell, found in 1949 the non-profit historical organization Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., to record Cape Codders’ stories of local history and folklore. These tapes were later archived in the library of Cape Cod Community College. Richard Connolly, “Old Jail Fire Scorches Deputy’s Dream; Restoration Aid Asked,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1973, A58. Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., http://www.talesofcapecod.org (accessed January 7, 2013).

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Additionally, in 1935 Snow chaired a memorial committee that erected a plaque at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, honoring Confederates imprisoned there during the

Civil War. Former Confederate and Union soldiers, veterans groups, and government representatives were among the crowd that gathered on George’s Island for the ceremony on June 9, at which Snow spoke about the significance of the commemoration and read a letter from President Roosevelt commending the event as a demonstration of the nation’s united spirit. By the following year Snow had joined other prominent historians in publicly opposing plans for the destruction of Governor’s Island to enlarge Boston’s airport.326

A relief program during the Great Depression unexpectedly gave a boost to

Snow’s career when the Adult Education Project of the Works Progress Administration

sponsored four talks by Snow on radio WCOP in February of 1937. Broadcasting from

the studio in the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, Snow delivered the four, fifteen minute talks on Boston’s wharves and docks, storms and shipwrecks, legends of Boston, and

New England’s lighthouses and their keepers. The WPA additional sponsored an

evening lecture later that July in a downtown municipal building, where Snow told stories

about the city’s Long Wharf.327

326 “Brave Seas to Unveil Tablet,” Boston Globe, December 3, 1934, 1. “Graves Light’s 30th Birthday Observed,” Boston Globe, September 2, 1935, 14. “Graves Light Anniversary Presentation,” Boston Globe, September 2, 1935, 14. “Group Marks Anniversary of Fall of Minots Light,” Boston Globe, April 19, 1936, A30. “Commemorative Exercises for Song ‘John Brown’s Body’,” Boston Globe, May 24, 1936, A19. “Tablet Dedicated at Fort Hill Square on 250th Anniversary of America’s First Rebellion,” Boston Globe, April 30, 1939, C7. “Mark Anniversary with Air Tour,” Boston Globe, October 18, 1937, 3. “Photographers Plan Ramsdell Memorial,” Boston Globe, September 16, 1936, 6. “SS Portland Disaster Roll Enlarged By Tales at Rites 40 Years After,” Boston Globe, November 27, 1938, B9. “Plaque at Fort Warren to Honor Confederacy,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1935, 9. “Women’s Relief Corps Pays Honor to Confederate Trio,” Boston Globe, June 10, 1935, 2. “Historians Oppose Taking of Governors Island for Airport, Boston Globe, July 23, 1936, 5. “Fight to Save Governor’s Island Fortifications,” Boston Globe, September 5, 1936, 13. 327 List of four scripts in James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 25. For time of broadcast see

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By the time he appeared on radio, Snow was already an author. As early as 1934 his personal stationary describes himself as a “lecturer and writer on the islands of Boston

Harbor,” and 1935 saw the publication of his first two works. The first was the aforementioned booklet on Castle Island, while the second was an expansion of his 1932

Harvard thesis. At 367 pages, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and

Romance, 1626-1935 was the largest publication on the harbor islands (and remains so) and the result of two decades of research. Previously only a few articles and booklets had provided a brief survey of the terrain on which Snow now built his career.328

On the inside of the covers Snow included a map of the islands of Boston Harbor

marked with yacht clubs, forts, lighthouses, reefs, and brief details about the various

places. Drawn by engineers Whitman & Howard, it was based on Snow’s own aerial and

island surveys and U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Chart 246. Included in the empty

spaces of the map are whimsical drawings by Edith Stevens of fish, a whale, and sea

serpents. The combination of accuracy and entertainment signaled that the stories within

the book were written the same way, and the places accessible to boat owners.

This first book also contained all of the main subjects that Snow would focus on

in his subsequent writings and lectures: pirates (more than fifteen buried on Bird Island

and Nix’s Mate), treasure (from the wreck of the French Magnifique found by a keeper

“Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February 15, 1937, 15. “Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February 16, 1937, 19. “Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February 22, 1937, 17. “Radio Broadcasts,” Boston Globe, February 23, 1937, 15. “Speaker to Recall Days of Old on Long Wharf,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1937, 22. 328 Letter from Snow to John Hay Library, August 15, 1934, in Folder 12, Box 2 of “Selected Correspondence, 1913-1993, ‘Seven’ to ‘Zeitlin,’ Hay Manuscripts, Ms. 94.8, Brown University Library. For Boston Harbor islands publications see for example, A Descriptive and Historical Sketch of Boston Harbor and Surroundings: Giving All the Islands, Ledges, Shoals, Buoys, Channels, and Towns from Nahant to Minot's with Their Location and History (Boston, MA.: W.M. Tenney and Co., 1885); William Otis Crosby, Geology of the Outer Islands of Boston Harbor (Salem, MA.: Salem Press, 1888). Patrick J. Connelly, comp., Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1932, “Green Isles of Romance,” (Dorchester, MA.: Chapple Publishing Company, 1932).

226 on Lovell’s Island in 1920), ghosts (at Fort Warren), lighthouses (Boston Light, Graves

Light, Deer Island Light, Minot’s Light, Long Island Light, and range lights on Lovell’s

Island and Spectacle Island) and shipwrecks (from the Magnifique in 1782 to the City of

Montgomery in 1935). Snow never defines the “romance” of his title, but in his calling

Lovell’s Island “the Island of Romance” due to its compact, sixty-two acres containing

“two lighthouses, Lover’s Rock, the treasure, and the pirate’s skeleton, and last but not least, the mysterious underground passageway which shoots off under the Harbor” shows that the recipe includes mystery, legend, geography, and things for visitors to explore. In a nod of recognition to Snow’s hard work, his former teacher Samuel Eliot Morison wrote a favorable review of the book in the December 1936 issue of The New England

Quarterly.329

Perhaps deciding that his abilities as an historian were lacking compared to

contemporaries such as Morison, Snow subsequently entered Boston University and completed a master’s degree in history in 1939, writing a thesis on the history of

Winthrop. Having thanked Dr. Robert Earle Moody in his 1935 book for introducing him to several of Boston’s archives, Snow likely attended Boston University at least in part due to this friendship. Only a year older than Snow, Moody was a new professor at the school, specializing in colonial American history. For the next several decades Snow would frequently thank Moody in his books’ acknowledgements for editorial help and

329 Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 228 (Magnifique treasure found), 231 (City of Montgomery; Lovell’s Island quote), 325 (pirates buried on Bird Island and Nix’s Mate). Samuel Eliot Morison, review of The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 by Edward Rowe Snow, The New England Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Dec., 1936): 744.

227 guidance – particularly “the importance of accuracy and truth.” Snow had found his mentor.330

Snow cared deeply about the people in his stories, who often lived on the geographic and societal margins. First visiting as a youth the people who worked on the offshore islands, Snow returned as an adult to commemorate their service (and of the lighthouses where they worked) and lead educational tours. In December, 1938, he became a substitute “flying Santa Claus” in dropping Christmas care packages of food, candy, cigarettes, reading material, and toys to the keepers and their families stationed at each of New England’s offshore lighthouses, in addition to Coast Guard stations and lightships. Pilot William H. Wincapaw and his son William, Jr. had started the practice in 1929 as gratitude for their dedication to maintaining the navigation aids in often isolated and harsh environments. The junior Wincapaw was a student of Snow’s at

Winthop High School, and after introducing his teacher to his father, Snow began assisting the pair in 1936 on their Christmas deliveries. Over the next decade, when one or both of the Wincapaws was away on business, Snow would assume the role of Flying

Santa, and take it over completely following the elder Wincapaw’s death in 1946.

Edward Rowe Snow would continue the practice, with volunteer pilots and family and friends assisting, until a stroke in 1981 forced him to retire.331

330 “I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Robert Earle Moody of Boston University who willingly gave his time and knowledge in introducing me to several of Greater Boston’s archives.” Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 7. “Robert E. Moody, 82, BU Historian; Worked on Saltonstall Papers,” Boston Globe, April 6, 1983, 1. “Accuracy and truth” quote from the dedication page of Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), v. “To Dr. Robert E. Moody who, more than a quarter of a century ago, taught me the importance of accuracy and truth.” 331 “Flying Santa to be Edward Snow,” Boston Globe, December 23, 1938, 15. “Odd Items From Everywhere,” Boston Globe, December 17, 1940, 24. “Lighthouse Men to Be Visited by Santa Today,” Boston Globe, December 22, 1940, A15. “Santa Plane Drops Presents at Lighthouses,” Boston Globe,

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Perhaps it was Snow’s interest in photography and experience in airplanes that led him to enlist in the Army Air Corps in 1942. Commissioned as a first lieutenant, Snow went to Miami, Florida, for training before finally leaving from New York in November,

1942, for England aboard the steamship Coamo. Sailing without a military escort, Snow recalled standing on the deck of his transport with other soldiers watching an unknown vessel setting off distress rockets into the night as it likely sank. The Coamo arrived safely in Liverpool, but immediately after departing it was torpedoed by the German submarine U-604 on December 2, sinking with the loss of everyone aboard. Assigned to the Eighth Air Force while in England, Snow managed to find time for historical research. In London he browsed library catalogs for unusual stories (finding one about a

“stone-throwing devil” in a seventeenth-century New Hampshire town), visited “the ancient Pirates’ Stairs” which Captain Kidd had descended on the walk to his execution in 1701, and “attempted to find definite evidence that there had been a great treasure aboard the former Dutch vessel [the De Braak] when she foundered [off Lewes,

Delaware] in 1798.” On a visit to the fishing port of Grimsby while temporarily stationed at a nearby airbase, he visited several places displaying relics from the nineteenth-century

English whaleship Diana.332

December 23, 1940, 1. Brian Tague, “The History and Origins of the Flying Santa, 1929-2010,” http://www.flyingsanta.com/HistoryOrigins.html (accessed January 7, 2013). 332 “Santa Goes to War,” Boston Globe, August 5, 1942, 15. The Coamo sailing unescorted mentioned in Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 179. Watching distress rockets from Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 201. Coamo sunk by U-604 from Guðmundur Helgason, “Coamo,” http://uboat.net/allies/merchants/ships/2486.html (accessed January 7, 2013). New Hampshire story from Edward Rowe Snow, Legends of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 42. “Pirates’ Stairs” from Edward Rowe Snow, “I’m Not Afraid of Capt. Kidd!” Yankee, February 1966, 44. Dutch treasure vessel from Edward Rowe Snow, Strange Tales from Nova Scotia to Cape Hatteras (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1949), 267. Diana relics from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1958), 170.

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That winter Snow was transferred to the Twelfth Bomber Command to do photo reconnaissance and sent to North Africa following the Allied invasion in November,

1942. Snow rarely spoke publicly of how he became wounded in the spring of 1943 from shrapnel, but as his daughter Dorothy described in a television appearance in 1995 that, “I remember him saying that there were like nine people when he went to sleep and when he woke up he was in the hospital, and everyone else was killed. And he had trouble with his hearing after that. In fact he had to learn how to walk without a limp….” Evacuated to the Seventh General Hospital in Oran, Algeria, an immobile Snow made the best of his recovery – by telling stories. When a Spanish nurse told him that she had ancestors aboard a Spanish ship that never returned to port in 1813, an excited Snow explained to her “in doubtful French” that it was likely the Spanish ship Sagunto that had wrecked on

Smuttynose Island off the coast of New Hampshire in January of 1813. Snow also entertained his fellow patients, who would walk over to his cot and ask him to tell stories.

“We passed many a lonely night in this fashion,” recalled Snow a few years later.333

Edward Rowe Snow’s injuries permanently removed him from combat. The

British hospital ship Amarapoora brought him and other wounded servicemen to Bristol,

England, later that spring. There, Snow was sent for long-term recovery to Frenchay

Hospital on the outskirts of the city, which had recently been turned over to the

Americans for use as a military hospital. Once well enough to walk, Snow resumed his

333 Photo reconnaissance detail from “Massachusetts: Yo-ho-ho and a Radar Set,” Time, October 15, 1945. Reassignment to Twelfth Bomber Command from Edward Rowe Snow, Legends of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 42. Injury details from “Edward Rowe Snow Remembered,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced by Jeremy D’Entremont (1995; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). Two versions of Spanish nurse anecdote from Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 38 and Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943), 201. Snow telling stories to other patients from Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 122.

230 historical sightseeing. In Bristol he visited the birthplace of Samuel Plimsoll, the politician and social reformer who had advocated for lines on the side of a ship’s hull to indicate when it was fully loaded. He also befriended a drugstore owner who subsequently drove him around the area and helped him seek out unusual sea stories.

They kept in touch for decades. Snow even apparently made it to a bookshop in

Aberdeen, Scotland, before being sent back to the United States. He would draw on the experiences and the stories he had collected during his deployment for the rest of his career.334

In a surprising show of productivity, Snow returned to Winthrop, resumed teaching (Anna-Myrle had been teaching his classes in his place), and managed to write his second book, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast, in

time for publication that December. Since 1940 Snow had managed to write at least one short publication a year, and now he took to writing full-length books in earnest. 1944 saw the publication of Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast and The Romance of

Boston Bay, with Famous Lighthouses of New England following in 1945, and A Pilgrim

Returns to Cape Cod (based on a seven-week hike Snow had taken there that spring) in

1946.

Snow also returned to radio. From April to September of 1945 Snow read his fifteen-minute “New England Sea Tales” that broadcasted over WCOP on Wednesday evenings. In October, 1945, Snow switched to WNAC with a half-hour Sunday radio

334 Hospital ship detail from Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 250. Frenchay and friendship from Edward Rowe Snow, Astounding Tales of the Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965), 34. James C. Briggs, The History of Frenchay Hospital (Bristol, England: Monica Britton Hall of Medical History in association with the Postgraduate Medical Centre, Frenchay Hospital, 1994). Plimsoll visit from Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 65. Aberdeen visit from Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1958), 38.

231 program called “Six Bells,” sponsored by the Boston-based dairy company H.P. Hood and Sons. Broadcasting from radio stations in every New England state except Vermont, the radio schedule section of the Boston Globe described it as a “new adventure series from historic places.” The format, at least initially, involved Snow telling historical stories from the actual places where they had occurred, such as the dungeon of Fort

Independence on Boston’s Castle Island (“Castle Island Duel”), the Captain Thomas

Paine House in Jamestown, Rhode Island (“Captain Kidd”); the steeple of Boston’s Old

North Church (“Paul Revere’s Ride”), the bow of the USS Constitution in Charlestown,

Massachusetts (“Figurehead of Old Ironsides”); the Wiley House in Crawford Notch,

New Hampshire (“New Hampshire Avalanche”); and the John Adams House in Quincy,

Massachusetts (“John Adams”). Balancing his teaching with his writing soon proved unfeasible for Snow, and he resigned from Winthrop High School in May of 1946 to write for print and radio and lecture full-time.335

When Snow wrote an autobiographical sketch in 1957 for a publication for his

twenty-fifth reunion at Harvard, he outlined his extensive local media presence: in

addition to his yearly books he was a veteran broadcaster with his “Five Bells” program

airing twice a week from Brockton, Massachusetts, radio station WBET; his “New

England Sea Lore” program had previously broadcasted from radio WRKD out of

335 Anna-Myrle substituting for Edward from “Winthrop By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont (1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). For a Hood advertisement of Snow’s radio program see “Hood’s Milk,” Boston Globe, October 23, 1945, 9. Boston Globe quote from “Air Attractions,” Boston Globe, October 14, 1945, D48. Note: the names of stories in quotation marks are from a list of scripts found in Snow’s personal papers archived at Boston University. They are not necessarily the titles that appeared on the radio page of various New England newspapers. For instance, the broadcast for March 17, 1946 is listed in the Boston Globe as SIX BELLS: “War with France,” narration by Edward Rowe Snow, from John Adams House in Quincy, WNAC, 3.” “Air Attractions,” Boston Globe, March 17, 1946, C8. Some of the listings, though, for want of space, left out the titles of Snow’s talks and/or his broadcast locations. For list of scripts, see the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 18 (of 1992 Addendum – box 58 overall), Folder “WEEI.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. According to records at Winthrop High School, Snow started teaching on September 1, 1933 and resigned before the end of the school year on May 2, 1946.

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Rockland, Maine; and his “Six Bells” radio program had for a decade been carried by twenty-seven stations throughout New England over the Yankee Network. Further, he was then writing for three newspapers: a twice-weekly “True Tales of the Past” column for the Brockton Enterprise (operating in the same building as WBET), the column “New

England Lore of Sea and Shore” in the Rockland, Maine, Courier Gazette, and a column in the Quincy Patriot Ledger that he would continue under various nautical titles until suffering a stroke in 1981.

Snow wasn’t necessarily tripling his workload in writing books, newspaper columns, and radio stories. He might expand a column into a future book chapter, or edit down a chapter in an out-of-print book for a column or broadcast. For instance, Snow’s

Brockton Enterprise column for March 31, 1956: “True Tales of the Past: All about

Whaling,” came directly from an anecdote in his A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod of a decade earlier. In balancing his work in print, radio, and in person, Snow was a master at getting the most from his writing.336

Predecessor / contemporaries

Snow was not the region’s only famous chronicler of New England, past or

present. In collecting and telling New England stories, Snow was continuing the legacy

of author Samuel Adams Drake from a half-century before. Born in Boston on December

20, 1833, Drake was one of six children of Louisa Maria and Samuel Gardner Drake.

(The family proudly traced its lineage to an English ancestor who had settled in New

336 Snow’s four-page autobiography appeared in: Harvard College Class of 1932, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1957), [unknown page number]. Edward Rowe Snow, “True Tales of the Past: All about Whaling,” Brockton Enterprise, May 31, 1956. Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 101.

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Hampshire around 1640.337) The elder Drake had opened the first antiquarian bookstore

in the United States in Boston in 1830. While he pursued a career as a bookseller, editor,

publisher, and historian specializing in early American and Native American histories,

his son Samuel Adams, like Edward Snow’s great-grandfather, went to California during

the Gold Rush.

In 1858 the now twenty-three year-old Drake moved to the Kansas Territory,

where he worked as a correspondent and editor at three newspapers. It was here that he

wrote his first publication in 1860, a pamphlet for future western travelers called Hints

for Emigrants to Pike’s Peak. When the Civil War broke out he joined the militia of the

new State of Kansas in 1861, and eventually rose to the rank of colonel of the 17th Kansas volunteers. Upon returning to Boston in 1871 he began his final career as a writer of history and historical fiction. From 1873 until 1904 (the year before his death) Drake wrote at least thirty publications, ranging from small pamphlets on the states of Georgia and Florida to massive 400+ page books on New England history and lore.

Unlike his father (who had died in 1875), Drake wrote for young readers as well as adults. The New York publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons sold his American regional histories as “books for the young,” while his Around the Hub: A Boy’s Book about

Boston (1881) tried to more specifically interest boys in the early history of the city.

Drake even tried historical fiction with Captain Nelson: A Romance of Colonial Days

(1879), starting its titular hero in seventeenth-century Boston. For reasons of both

337 Samuel Gardner Drake, Genealogical and Biographical Account of the Family of Drake in America (Boston, MA.: Printed at the private press of George Coolidge for Samuel Adams Drake, 1845), 27.

234 ancestry and profession, Drake was deeply interested in communicating the importance of the past to present audiences.338

For Edward Rowe Snow, Drake mattered most for his scholarship on New

England lore and the seacoast, particularly the books Nooks and Corners of the New

England Coast (1875), and A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1883; revised edition 1901). Snow referenced Drake throughout his career, such as researching and retelling many of the stories in New England Legends, including “The Spanish

Galleon,” a story about a ship’s stolen cargo in eighteenth-century New London, and

“The Spanish Wreck” about the wreck of the Sagunto on Smuttynose Island in 1813.

Both men, in turn, were referencing earlier writings, such as those by Puritan minister

Cotton Mather or the nineteenth-century poet Celia Thaxter. Snow also copied at least

one of Drake’s illustrations. Snow’s story on a duel at Boston’s Castle Island in the

summer of 1817 from Secrets of the North Atlantic Island (1950) includes a hand-drawn

version of the engraving that accompanied Drake’s story “The Duel on the Common”

from New England Legends (1883). Snow even carried a copy of the hefty Nooks and

Corners in his knapsack during his 1946 hike on Cape Cod. Though the two authors’

338 Biographies of Samuel Adams Drake and his father are compiled from Samuel Adams Drake, Catalogue of the Private Library of Samuel Gardner Drake, A.M. (Boston, MA.: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1876); Charles Henry Pope, “Deaths,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register 60 (July 1906): 324; “Drake, Samuel Adams,” in Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the United States, ed. John Howard Brown, 2 (Boston, MA.: James H. Lamb Company, 1900), 512-513; “Drake, Samuel Gardner,” in Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, 2 (New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton and Company, 1888), 225-226. “Col. Samuel A. Drake Dead,” Boston Globe, December 5, 1905, 7. For Charles Scribner’s Sons selling Drake’s regional histories to youths, see the advertisements in the back pages of Samuel Adams Drake, The Making of New England, 1580-1643 (New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886).

235 lives overlapped by only three years, Snow found a literary mentor in the works of

Samuel Adams Drake.339

Writing several decades later, Snow was hardly alone in his craft. In Drake’s wake, professionals and amateurs continued to seek out and publish the region’s stories,

from college professor Horace Beck’s The Folklore of Maine (1957) to plant foreman

Lewis Taft’s Profile of Old New England: Yankee Legends, Tales and Folklore (1965) –

the latter issued by Snow’s eventual publisher, Dodd, Mead and Company. But as

someone also making a living as a popular storyteller outside of academia, Snow’s

closest contemporary in New England was Alton Hall Blackington.340

Born on November 25, 1893 in Rockland, Maine (where Snow often visited family), Blackington served during the First World War as an official photographer in the

United States Navy, stationed in the First Naval District that covered New England.

Thereafter he worked for a decade as a staff photographer for the Boston Herald. He traveled throughout the region with a camera and notebook, documenting events and

339 For examples of Snow quoting and citing Drake, see Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 218, 219, 221, 222; and Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 39, 43, 113, 114, 117. For other mentions see Snow’s Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast (1943), Romance of Boston Bay (1944), Famous Lighthouses of New England (1945), and A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (1946). Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Poetry and Prose (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown, and Company, 1901), 352 (“The Spanish Wreck”), 431 (“The Spanish Galleon”). Snow’s versions appear in Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 212 (“Connecticut’s Spanish Galleon”); and Edward Rowe Snow, Great Storms and Famous Shipwrecks of the New England Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1943), 199-201 (“Isles of Shoals”). Snow’s copy of Drake’s drawing is in Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 60. For the original see Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Poetry and Prose (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown, and Company, 1901), 70. For Snow carrying Drake’s book on Cape Cod see Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 66. 340 Details of Beck and Taft are from the author blurbs on the back cover of the dust jacket for Horace Beck, The Folklore of Maine (Philadelphia, PA.: Lippincott, 1957), and the inside back flap of the dust jacket of Lewis Taft, Profile of Old New England: Yankee Legends, Tales and Folklore (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1965). Beck taught American literature at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, while Taft was a foreman in the Bulova Watch Company plant in Providence, Rhode Island.

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“interesting people, from old ladies who lived in haunted houses with forty cats to

President Calvin Coolidge.” Like Snow, he “poked through country cemeteries and visited local libraries and historical societies” to gather material, as he recalled decades later. By 1927 Blackington started using this material to deliver illustrated lectures to groups around New England, with his most frequent topic being “The Romance of News

Gathering.”341

That same year he also began a regular feature in the Boston Globe of

photographs with captions spotlighting New England people and events, from a

champion twelve-year-old skeet shooter to folks harvesting crabs on Cape Cod. In 1933

he published his first article in the Globe on archaeologists excavating a Native American

shell midden, and would continue to write topical articles for the paper for the next

twelve years in addition to ones for popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest. His

interest in unusual stories and popularity as a speaker led to his first radio program on

station WNAC from 1933 to 1934, a four-month bi-weekly series of “Yankee Yarns” in

1937 on Boston’s WNAC and Providence’s WEAN, and finally a weekly version of his

“Yankee Yarns” delivered in his “Down East nasal twang” on Boston’s WBZ station

from 1942 through 1951.342

341 “A Blackington, ‘Yankee Yarns’ Author, at 69,” Boston Globe, April 25, 1963, 42. The earliest notice for a lecture that I can find is “Harvard Club Hears Photographer,” Boston Globe, February 17, 1927, 17. Quotations from Alton H. Blackington, Yankee Yarns (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954), ix. 342 “A Simple and Beautiful Garden on the Ropes Estate in Salem,” Boston Globe, June 5, 1927, 1. Alton Hall Blackington, “Archaeologists on Cape Cod,” Boston Globe, August 20, 1933, B12. Writing for Reader’s Digest noted in the author’s biography on the back cover of Alton Hall Blackington, Yankee Yarns (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954). “Down East nasal twang” from Ted Ashby, “Blackie,” Boston Globe, January 30, 1953, 13. On page x of Blackington’s first book in 1954 he says that “Yankee Yarns was broadcast practically every week over WBZ, Boston, and the New England stations of NBC” though I can only find his radio show listed in broadcast schedules through 1951. Perhaps he’s also adding his television version of Yankee Yarns that aired in 1953.

237

After his radio career ended, Blackington made several appearances on television

(including the Boston Globe sponsoring his Yankee Yarns for the small screen) while collecting his stories into two popular books: Yankee Yarns (1954) and More Yankee

Yarns (1956). The book jacket for Yankee Yarns shows how Blackington and his publishing company sold the Yankee author and the region’s colorful past. On the front cover are illustrations of a ship, a man swinging an ax, a partial head-shot of a man resembling Lincoln wearing a top-hat, and a colonial woman with bound hands being lead to the gallows for her hanging. The collection promises lively and likely sensational stories of the type that frustrated Carl Cutler’s attempts to publish his maritime history scholarship to the general public.

Between the covers, Blackington’s eighteen tales sweep through all six New

England states and beyond, incorporating “humor, tragedy, mystery, superstition, and violence.” Rural elderly Vermonters forced into hibernation, a giant molasses tank collapse in Boston’s North End, a Cape Cod gold mine hoax, runaway locomotives, and the steamer Portland’s sinking were some of the mostly inland and a few saltwater tales.

As with Snow, Blackington’s research and personal recollections often become part of the story. On the back cover Blackington poses in a three-piece suit at his WBZ microphone with script in hand, while the biography below briefly mentions his Maine roots and Massachusetts residence, career as a writer, photographer, and lecturer in New

England, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., and passion for

“chasing fire engines, gardening and fresh water fishing.” Whether Blackington, Snow,

238

Beck, or Taft, each man’s identity as a New Englander was prominently noted on the book jackets, which sanctioned them as authentic conveyors of their region’s stories.343

Snow and Blackington both published with Dodd, Mead and Company, and an

advertisement for Snow’s Amazing Sea Stories Never Told Before takes up the back flap

of Yankee Yarns’s jacket. But the addition likely didn’t bother Blackington; the men

complemented each other. They were friends, lectured over the same region at the same

time, thanked each other in their books’ acknowledgments or introductions, and

sometimes told versions of the same stories – though Blackington stayed mostly on land

and Snow seaward. When Blackington died on April 24, 1963, his friend continued as a

public storyteller for almost another twenty years.344

While Snow had many contemporaries telling stories about New England, he was,

at least following Blackington’s death, arguably the region’s most prominent storyteller

in terms of length of career, quantity of writings, focus on the maritime past, and

historical legacy on the minds and landscape of New England – both in preservation

advocacy and how peopled perceived hundreds of spaces around New England. In this

way, Snow’s career also invites comparison to his contemporary in Nova Scotia,

folklorist Helen Creighton.

Historian Ian McKay has written about Creighton as a part of his work focusing

on how the tourism industry and cultural producers refashioned the identity of rural Nova

343 Advertisement is “New England’s ‘Best Yarns’ by Alton Blackington,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1953, 11. Quotations from back cover and blurb on inside front cover of book jacket of Alton Hall Blackington, Yankee Yarns (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954). 344 For Snow thanking Blackington see Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (1948) and Great Gales and Dire Disasters (1952). The decapitation of the Andrew Jackson figurehead of the USS Constitution in 1834 is a story both men told. Hear Blackington’s March 11, 1951 broadcast at “The Old Time Radio Flyer 36 ‘Yankee Yarns,’” http://www.squidoo.com/freeoldtimeradioyankeeyarns (accessed August 1, 2011). Snow told the story in his “Six Bells” radio show on February 24, 1946 according to the advertisement “hear the HOOD SHOW,” Boston Globe, February 24, 1946, D29.

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Scotia during the twentieth century. In The Quest of the Folk, he profiles Creighton’s career from the 1920s through the 1970s as she participated in a process by which “as tourism, folklore, and handicrafts all developed in the twentieth century, the people of the fishing villages came to be seen as bearers of Nova Scotia’s cultural essence…. They came to be represented as stout-hearted, resourceful fisherfolk who led a ‘simple life’ by the sea, untroubled by urban stresses, nourished by the natural beauty all around them.”

Born in the coastal town of Dartmouth next to the provincial capital of Halifax, on

September 5, 1899, Creighton started out as a local journalist and soon became intrigued with the stories and songs recalled by people in the rural hinterlands surrounding her home. In 1929 she visited a small fishing community on Devil’s Island at the entrance to

Halifax’s harbor and found what she described as her “gold mine” in the songs and lore that its small population possessed. This and subsequent collecting resulted in her first book in 1932, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia.345

Creighton’s work joined at least six books on Atlantic Canada folklore written between 1928 and 1935. In both the United States and Canada at this time, middle-class collectors such as Creighton believed that they were saving a dying art, and their collecting focused on the oral traditions of rural people of Anglo descent. This “Folk” was not a self-defined group, but rather a category created by outsiders who believed they were a rural, apolitical, and self-sufficient people passively conveying traditional songs, tales, and beliefs without modifying them. McKay traces this fantasy held by urban, modern, and middle and upper class people back to elite Europeans’ fascination with the

“primitive folk” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the tales collected by

345 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 4 (definition of Folk), 7 (“gold mine”).

240

Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Perceived as enduring and antimodern, rural working people became a source of comfort for those stressed by the rapidly changing societies on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Inland, this quaint, rural person was commonly a farmer, artisan, or shopkeeper, while along the coast this folk character could also be an old fisherman or sailor.346

The American folklore revival in the 1930s spurred Creighton’s career as a

folklorist. After being invited to New York in 1936 to share her folksongs, she received

further exposure at home when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation agreed to do

twenty broadcasts on the folksongs of Nova Scotia in 1938 and 1939 based on her field

work. During World War II she took advantage of the desire by cultural and governmental organizations for closer cultural ties between the two nations, first with the

Rockefeller Foundation awarding her a fellowship to attend the Institute of Folklore at the University of Indiana in the summer of 1942, then the loan of recording equipment from the Library of Congress as she collected for their Archive of American Folk Song, and finally four Rockefeller grants from 1942 to 1946 that funded her field work. In

1947 she joined the staff of the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa as a museum adviser, and now had a steady funding source. From this prominent post over the next

two decades Creighton became a nationally-respected folklorist in the 1950s and ‘60s as

she published six books (including a bestseller on ghost stories), made guest appearances

on television, and her work appeared in films, records, a folk opera, and a ballet.347

346 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 8-12 (history of fascination with Folk), 21 (definition of ‘Folk’), 22 (collectors), 26 (where the Folk lived), 44 (six books), 102 (dying art). 347 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 75-86.

241

Throughout Creighton’s career she and other folklorists practiced what McKay calls “cultural selection”: deciding what aspects of the imagined Folk culture were worth documenting. As Snow told stories of New England’s maritime past based on his own interests, Creighton explicitly collected folklore of the Maritimes, and especially songs that excluded class and gender inequality, sexuality, or participation in modern urban society, industry, and capitalism. It was a living past that supposedly needed to be sheltered from corrupting modern influences, whether technology or popular music. The result was a selective version of the culture of the Maritimes that romanticized what were the very hard lives of working-class modern Canadians from diverse backgrounds battling economic exploitation, poverty, dangerous working conditions, and often social or geographical marginalization.348

It’s unknown whether Creighton ever met or corresponded with Snow, though

their interests in Atlantic maritime lore overlapped for several decades. Both reached

audiences through articles, books, lectures, radio, and television. They sometimes sought

stories from the same places, such as the ghosts and legends on Sable Island. Creighton

wrote about the island off the coast of Nova Scotia for a 1931 article, while Snow

actually visited it in 1947 and included his investigation as a chapter of his 1948

Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast. As the shared interest in writing

about ghost stories shows, they both had a romantic view of the past – and both saw the

commercial value in the material they found. As Creighton recorded and disseminated her own version of Nova Scotia’s rural working class, Snow employed his own historical

348 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 100-118.

242 shorthand in writing about what principally interested him: pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and ghosts.349

Learning what sells

Edward Rowe Snow’s 1946 A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod was his last book

published by the Yankee Publishing Company of Boston. While it would continue to

publish smaller pamphlets of his through 1949, Snow switched to the New York-based

Dodd, Mead and Company for his next book in 1948: Mysteries and Adventures along

the Atlantic Coast. The change between publishers affected how Snow wrote, his books’

numerical and geographical distribution, the type of audience they reached, and how

these readers subsequently understood the New England maritime past.350

With the exception of Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast, all of Snow’s

titles for Yankee Publishing contained New England place names, and even Pirates

dedicated almost half of its content to those from New England. The Yankee books

stretched from 319 to 457 pages, contained a bibliography of published and unpublished

sources, and had at least two-dozen pages of illustrations – a mixture of old photographs

and prints (the latter being copyright free), contemporary photographs taken by Snow or

of him as he participates in various stories, and folded maps with the same historical

whimsy as appeared in his first book. The result was beautiful but expensive hardcovers

costing from $3.75 to $4 in the 1940s, or $40 to $49 in 2010 dollars.

349 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 60 (Creighton seeing history as romantic), 59 (commercial potential), 75 (commercial potential). Helen Creighton, “Sable Island,” Maclean’s (December 15, 1931), 14-??. 350 As Snow’s works are the only publications that Yankee appears to have published, it’s possible that he may have self-published them – though in these books the Yankee Publishing Company is listed as having an office at 72 Broad Street in Boston. There is apparently no connection between the Yankee Publishing Company of Boston and Yankee Publishing of Dublin, New Hampshire, which publishes Yankee magazine.

243

The switch to Dodd, Mead and Company standardized, shortened, and shrank subsequent books to make them more accessible to a wider audience. Started in 1839 by former minister Moses Woodruff Dodd to publish religious texts, his successors at the

New York firm by the 1860s changed it to a more general publisher – particularly of popular fiction and juvenile literature. The company eventually published books for

American and British authors such as H.G. Wells, George Barr McCutcheon, Joseph

Conrad, and Agatha Christie; published the New International Encyclopedia for several decades before selling it to Funk and Wagnalls; and published for poets such as Paul

Laurence Dunbar and Robert Service, in addition to a raft of less-famous mystery and detective writers.

When Snow signed up with Dodd, Mead and Company in 1948 he bolstered their non-fiction roster that included works on biography, history, nature, travel, yachting, and the sea. Snow was perhaps the publisher’s most prolific non-fiction writer, with thirty- four books from 1948 through 1981. But he was easily bested by his fiction counterparts, whether Agatha Christie’s over seventy books or Frederick Faust’s nearly 200 works of medical drama, western, adventure, ghosts, and mysteries published by Dodd, Mead, and

Company under various pseudonyms. Snow benefited from his publisher’s internationally-known name and advertising power, and it was this exposure and subsequent commercial success that likely led to the English publisher Alvin Redman reprinting fourteen of Snow’s books in London between 1957 and 1966, and a French press publishing an edition of Snow’s 1963 Unsolved Mysteries of Sea and Shore in Paris

244 the following year. Through a large New York-based publisher, Snow brought his version of maritime New England to a global audience.351

Snow’s books for his new publisher were physically smaller, averaging 276 pages, with sixteen pages of illustrations, no bibliography or footnotes, and the

percentage of titles evoking New England shrank to 26% (9 of 34 full-length books) in

favor of general but dramatic maritime titles such as True Tales of Buried Treasure

(1951), Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (1958), The Fury of the Sea (1964), and

Tales of Terror and Tragedy (1979). However, the majority of stories within these

covers remained tied in some way to New England, whether as the home port of an ill-

fated ship, the site of ghost-haunted towns, or as the place from which the New

Englander Snow set out for his next adventure elsewhere along the Atlantic coast.

Making his titles no longer regionally specific allowed Snow to include dramatic stories

with no New England connection (guaranteeing his pen would never run dry), and also

presumably make his books more marketable nationwide. The unintentional result made the general maritime past a New England maritime past to Snow’s readers. And by removing his list of printed sources (though he would continue to thank in his introduction the places where he did research), these readers could not easily check

Snow’s scholarship, and needed to take him at his word.

Dodd, Mead and Company did not initially lower the cover price of Snow’s books, but postwar inflation made them more affordable. The $4 for his Great Storms in

1943 was equal to $49.87 in 2010 dollars, while $4 in 1950 for his Secrets of the North

351 History of Dodd, Mead and Company from Gregory Ames, “Dodd, Mead and Company,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 49: American Literary Publishing Houses, 1638-1899, ed. Peter Dzwonkoski, 1 (Detroit, MI.: Gale Research Co., 1986), 126-130. Foreign editions of Snow’s books listed in James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 19.

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Atlantic Islands was equal to $35.82 today. For 1951 through 1954 the publisher lowered the cost of Snow’s books to $3 (about $24 today), which made them affordable to a larger audience. If the number of editions which these books went though is any indication

(sales figures for either of Snow’s publishers do not survive), they did attract more buyers. Perhaps because of this success, the publisher raised the price in 1955 back to $4

($32.20 in 2010 dollars). It remained there through 1964, when once again steadily rising inflation made his The Fury of the Sea drop to the equivalent of $27.81. Even at this price they continued to sell well, with Women of the Sea landing in the top five of the non-fiction bestseller list of Boston-area bookshops in early 1963 along with Rachel

Carson’s Silent Spring, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and Samuel Eliot

Morison’s memoir One Boy’s Boston.352

While Snow put together his books based on popular themes, he always made sure that the history therein was visible, evocative, and often tangible. The practice dated to his childhood interests in family relics and stories and explorations of Boston Harbor.

Starting with his first publication on Castle Island in 1935 and in every one thereafter, he

tried to illustrate as many stories as possible with prints and photographs. When dramatic

storms or shipwrecks occurred along the New England coast, Snow was often there

interviewing people and documenting the scene. In Great Gales and Dire Disasters

(1952) he wrote about the scallop dragger Cape Ann, wrecked on Cape Cod’s Nauset

Beach on March 6, 1948, and ended the story with “To introduce a personal touch,

352 “Best Sellers,” Boston Globe, February 17, 1963, 63. The list credits the Old Corner Book Store, Gilchrist’s, Lauriat’s, Bay Colony Bookshop, and the Jordan Marsh Company. As several of these companies had stores outside of Boston, I’m not sure if these books were popular sellers in the city of Boston, Metro Boston, or the region. The prices of Snow’s books are from book reviews or advertisements in the Boston Globe. I calculated the modern equivalents of these prices using S. Morgan Friedman, “The Inflation Calculator,” http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ (accessed January 7, 2013).

246 shortly after the cargo had been unloaded Mrs. Snow and I went aboard and obtained several of the scallops from the remains of the great cargo…. We were able to obtain some thrilling pictures of the wreck as the waves swept in and out around it.” This is an important detail, as it shows Snow as a form of salvager or beachcomber.

Local people have always salvaged usable items from shipwrecks – though for

Snow their value wasn’t in the machinery, cargo, or equipment, but the event itself.

Photographing it, filming it, maybe gathering a souvenir or two, and then writing and speaking about it was how he profited from wrecks. He certainly didn’t wish for disasters, but they were part of coastal life. With a radio show and several newspaper columns he covered them as a journalist. These were important local stories, and he emphasized the heroism of Coast Guardsmen and others who helped save lives. Locals have always told and retold stories of wrecks. But as navigation aids and ship designs improved, the rate of shipwrecks declined and their novelty made them more noteworthy and valuable to a writer and lecturer – particularly if the incident was well documented and included danger and drama. And Snow wasn’t the only curious witness. After the cargo, machinery, and equipment were salvaged from the Cape Ann, tens of thousands of people visited the wreck for a few months before it broke up. Many in this audience would likely also be interested in Snow’s future retelling of the incident.353

Snow also sought what remained of his older stories in the present landscape.

Aside from the obvious historic forts and lighthouses, Snow also directed the reader to sites such as that of the Blue Anchor Tavern on Washington Street where Captain Kidd

once visited (and where the Boston Globe building now stood); a former tunnel in the

353 Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1952), 131.

247 basement of 453 Commercial Street in Boston once used by pirates for smuggling; the grave of pirate John Lambert in Boston’s King’s Chapel Burying Ground; a house in

Wellfleet where Henry David Thoreau stayed in 1849; Dungeon Rock in Lynn, where a man spent over a decade digging for treasure; the Ocean Born Mary house in Henniker,

New Hampshire, where once had lived a woman named by a pirate; engraved rocks in the

Dogtown section of Gloucester that marked where a man was killed while fighting a bull; the grave in Nantucket’s Newtown Burial Ground containing a man’s preserved heart

(and whose belated grave marker Snow helped dedicate); and the burned hulk of WWI submarine chaser S-241 in the mud of the South River near the Marshfield house where

Snow and his wife had moved in 1950.354

Snow also directed readers to relics of the past no longer in situ. A bell formerly

used at Castle Island was, according to Snow’s research, originally from a Scandinavian

ship that Spanish pirates captured in the seventeenth century, who in turn were captured

by English authorities, one of whom later donated the bell to Boston. Twentieth-century

visitors could now see it on a window sill at the Old State House in Boston. A

photograph of Snow examining the bell with a member of the Bostonian Society (that

now owned it) helpfully showed its shape, size, and inscription. Surviving souvenirs

354 For Capt. Kidd see Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 235. For pirate tunnel see Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 42-45. For Lambert grave see Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 53. For house Thoreau stayed in see Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 123-126. For Dungeon Rock see Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 20-30. For the Ocean Born Mary house see Edward Rowe Snow, Legends of the New England Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1957), 64-68. Fog Dogtown see Edward Rowe Snow, Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1978), 240-249. For the preserved heart see Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 128. For the S-241 see Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), 226- 233.

248 from the Boston Tea Party included a vial of tea at the Old State House and one of the tea chests at the Royall House in Medford. For the majority of people who had never seen or held pirate treasure, Snow loaned a silver coin to the Marine Museum at the Old State

House from a cache he discovered on a Chatham beach in 1945, and instructed the curator to let any visitor hold it upon their request.

But the majority of artifacts existed outside of museums, in private hands. Snow collected hundreds of such items from individuals and by digging and diving in the coastal environment himself. To give but one example, at an auction barn in Marshfield in 1951 Snow found a sea chest with a painting of the ship Molo on the inside of the lid – a discovery that gave Snow a new story to investigate and the opening scene for a chapter in his True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953). The chest was one of many artifacts that Snow collected and exhibited at his talks and used in book illustrations, along with weapons, treasure chests, coins, photographs, handcuffs, relics, and human bones. Snow believed that to see and if possible touch pieces of the past made it come alive.355

As Snow’s own extensive collecting demonstrates, the past was also for sale.

Beginning in 1940 with The Story of Minot’s Light, Snow published limited editions of his books with slivers of wood attached to the inside cover and endpapers – usually from famous shipwrecks. Snow likely persuaded his mother to do likewise with limited editions of her two books, which included pressed ferns and whalebone that she had collected during the childhood voyages with her parents. Snow also included silver coins

355 For Castle Island bell see Edward Rowe Snow, Castle Island: Its 300 Years of History and Romance (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 6 and photograph between pages 30 and 31. Tea Party souvenirs from Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 49. For silver coin on loan to Old State House see Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), viii. Molo sea chest from Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1953), 204.

249 from his 1945 discovery in two small printings of True Tales of Buried Treasure (1951), ferns from his mother and wood chips from the schooner Alice S. Wentworth in Women of the Sea (1962), and a small packet of tea from the Boston Tea Party in a special

Bicentennial edition of Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (1974) along with chips of wood from the British frigate Somerset and Minot’s Ledge Light.356

The fragments added few, if any, new details to the stories in the books, but as

scholars Rachel Maines and James Glynn have written, these items are valuable for their status as numinous objects. They are important not “for any visible aesthetic qualities,

but for their association, real or imagined, with some person, place, or event endowed with special sociocultural magic.” They serve as tangible focal points for expressing

emotions about past people, events, and places both real and imagined.

Snow and his readers were hardly alone in loving relics. Back in 1930, as Mystic

Seaport-founder Carl Cutler readied his manuscript on a history of American clipper

ships for publication with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the firm asked if he could secure wood

from the remains of a clipper to include in a special edition of the forthcoming

Greyhounds of the Seas. They had done a similar treatment with explorer Richard Byrd’s

autobiography Skyward: including in the front cover a piece of cloth from the wing of the

aircraft which he had flown to the North Pole. Cutler agreed, and managed to convince

officials in Melbourne, Australia, to mail him a six-foot-long timber from the remains of

the clipper Lightning, which had sat in the harbor mud since catching fire there in 1869.

That Cutler was able to enlist the help of individuals in another country in valuing a piece

of wood from an old hulk points to the universal appeal of objects with numen. And in a

356 For which publications contain ferns, wood chips, or other relics, see James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 7-13, 27.

250 half-century of collecting, writing, and lecturing, Edward Rowe Snow saw relics as an essential part of conveying the past, and selling his version of maritime New England.357

The popularity of pirates

In Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (1958) Snow summarized how he

made a book:

Incredible, miraculous escapes on the high seas from death by drowning and other violent causes, in the face of overwhelming odds, always intrigue those whom the ocean attracts. / Beginning in 1935, when my first book was published, I have received hundreds of letters from readers who have given hints of almost unbelievable adventures on sea and shore. It has taken many years to check these stories, and it was often a hard task to become reasonably certain of the accuracy of what I have been told. From the many score of tales which particularly appealed to me, I chose the ones included in these nineteen chapters. Now I have completed the last fragment of research and rescued the last map and picture from the cellar or attic where they were secreted, and these stories of great sea rescues and survival on the deep are ready to be presented in this volume. Each of these accounts has been checked to make sure that it is not now in print in the same form elsewhere, and they appear here in chronological order.358

Innate interest and reader demand guided Snow’s literary output. This formula of

compiling individual tales sharing a common topic – instead of constructing a history of

that broader topic, such as the evolving technology and practices of survival and rescue at

sea – allowed Snow to quickly write a book a year for his publisher. Surveying the titles

of the thirty-four full-length books which Snow published with Dodd, Mead and

Company annually from 1948 through 1981 show that he grouped his stories around five

357 Rachel P. Maines and James J. Glynn, “Numinous Objects,” The Public Historian 15, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 10. Letter from Carl Cutler to Sherman R. Peabody, the American Trade Commissioner in Melbourne, dated February 6, 1930. Letter from G. P. Putnam’s Sons to Carl Cutler, dated March 3, 1930. And letter from Carl Cutler to Mr. MacGillivray at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, dated Oct. 19, 1930. Coll. 100, Manuscripts Collection, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. 358 Edward Rowe Snow, Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1958), vii.

251 main topics: pirates, treasure, shipwrecks, lighthouses, and ghosts. Snow also listed his expertise in these five topics in advertisements for his lectures.359

Of these topics, pirates and their treasure are at the top. These are two of the

largest research files in Snow’s personal papers that he and his family later donated to

Boston University.360 They appear in nearly every Snow book no matter the title. And

the two titles that remained in print the longest during his lifetime were his 1951 True

Tales of Buried Treasure (sixteenth printing by 1967) and his 1953 True Tales of Pirates

and Their Gold (seventh printing by 1966). A typical Snow book stayed in print for only

a year or two.361

Readers also directly corresponded with Snow. From the beginning of his career

as a popular writer, Snow invites the public to share information with him. The end of

his introduction in True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold was typical: “To each of my

readers I wish the best of luck. Feel free to write me at any time, for I am always

interested.” And they did. In 1946 Snow noted in A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod that

since 1935 he had received “approximately 26,000 letters” from readers. Often the

information or stories they shared appeared in future book chapters, and he often credited

them by name. In 1951 Snow was more specific in saying that in the past eleven years he

had received “43,000 letters and communications about hidden gold and silver” alone.

Snow’s publishing success and receiving at least ten fan letters a day about pirates and

359 Snow reproduced the biographical sketch from these advertisements in Edward Rowe Snow, Bi- Centennial Boston and New England (Marshfield, MA.: E. R. Snow, [c.1976]), 62. 360 Snow gave the first batch of his papers to Boston University in 1969, and his family donated a second set in 1994. 361 Dodd, Mead and Company printed editions of Snow’s Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (1948) in 1955 and 1961, though it’s unclear if the book was continuously in printed from 1948 through 1961. This information from James W. Claflin, Edward Rowe Snow, Author, Historian, Lecturer: A Bibliographic Checklist (Worcester, MA.: Kenrick A. Claflin & Son, 2007), 8-10 and various booksellers’ web sites.

252 treasure points to the strong resonance that these subjects had in American society during the 1950s and ‘60s.362

In writing about pirates, Snow was tapping a centuries-old fascination shared

among people on both sides of the Atlantic (at least those who have never been victims of

them). What historians have called a golden age of piracy lasted from about 1650 to

1730, and breaks down into three generations of pirates. The first lasted until 1680 and

involved Protestant Europeans such as Henry Morgan taking to sea and raiding the ships

and settlements of Catholic Spain – often those in the Caribbean. But it is the second

generation of pirates of the 1690s such as William Kidd and John Avery, and the third

generation from 1716 to 1726 that included Edward Teach or Blackbeard, Mary Read,

Anne Bonny, Samuel Bellamy, and Edward Low that have most captured the popular

imagination with their exploits – and whose ranks include many who once haunted the

New England coast.

Historian Markus Rediker has succinctly written that pirates became such popular

and enduring figures because they were rebels:

They challenged, in one way or another, the conventions of class, race, gender, and nation. They were poor and in low circumstances, but they expressed high ideals. Exploited and often abused by merchant captains, they abolished the wage, established a different discipline, practiced their own kind of democracy and equality, and provided an alternative model for running the deep-sea ship. Shadowed by the grim reaper, they stole his symbolism and laughed in his face. Pirates opposed the high and mighty of their day and by their actions became the villains of all nations.

As men and women who flouted societal rules and cultural expectations, they

simultaneously garnered praise and condemnation depending upon one’s viewpoint.363

362 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1953), x. Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 7. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), ix.

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More precisely, as scholar Hans Turley has written, they became what in popular culture today are called antiheroes – people who both thrilled and repelled the public.

Turley traces the merger of history and fiction surrounding pirates that turned them into these romanticized antiheroes to Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the

Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. First published in London in

1724 (with a second volume in 1728), it arrived when the last of the most famous pirates were being captured or killed, and writers seized upon the sensational reports of violence and daring coming from news-bearing ships and less-frequent trials in courtrooms. Since then it has become (at least to Turley) the most influential book on pirates ever written.

As pirates left behind few, if any records (and actively cultivated their own legends and personality while alive), contemporary writers such as Johnson assembled their biographies in a way that made the legend and reality impossible to untangle. The result was sensationalized and demonized figures which subsequent generations of writers have molded into various romanticized forms according to contemporary needs.364

In Johnson’s wake hundreds of histories, poems, plays, novels, and films for

adults and children alike continued to revise the pirate’s romanticized depiction, from

Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair (1814) to Walter Scott’s novel The Pirate (1832), B.

Barker’s novel Blackbeard; or, the Pirate of the Roanoke (1847), W. S. Gilbert and

Arthur Sullivan’s opera The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson’s

Treasure Island (serialized, 1881-1882; novel, 1883), Captain Hook’s character in J. M.

Barrie’s Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) to the silent film The

363 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 2004), 8, 176 (quotation). 364 Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1999), 2-7, 32, and especially 62-72 (“Captain Avery and the Making of an Antihero”).

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Black Pirate (1926) which starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and brought the swashbuckling pirate into movie theaters as a popular character. Errol Flynn’s pirate captain in The Sea

Hawk (1940) joined Burt Lancaster’s acrobatic version in The Crimson Pirate (1952) to become the most famous pirate films of their respective decades.365

In the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s when first Yankee and then Dodd published Snow’s books on pirates and their treasure, they were no less a staple of American popular

culture – and reflected the technological advances and societal conditions of the time.

Snow demonstrated the abilities of early metal detecting equipment with a discovery of

pirate treasure on a Cape Cod beach in 1945, and by the 1950s was using scuba gear to

search underwater. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a boom in the popularity of diving.

Diving clubs formed to train and equip would-be recreational scuba divers, and a national

certification organization starting in 1959 to codify that training. Popular films and television programs such as Sea Hunt (1958-1961) and The Undersea World of Jacques

Cousteau (1966-1976) stoked the public’s fascination for what lay beneath the surface of the ocean.366

For a subset that included Snow, that fascination included lost treasure. Snow’s

publications were joined by a flood of similar books such as his friend Robert Nesmith’s

Dig for Pirate Treasure (1958), Jane and Barney Crile’s Treasure Diving Holidays

(1954), F. L. Coffman’s 1001 Lost, Buried or Sunken Treasures: Facts for Treasure

Hunters (1957), John Potter Jr.’s The Treasure Diver’s Guide (1960), and Dave Horner’s

365 David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates (New York, N.Y.: Random House, 1995), 171-176. 366 Home movie footage from the 1950s shows Edward Rowe Snow and Anna-Myrle Snow scuba diving in Maine, though Snow had been experimenting with breathing underwater since childhood. See “Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996. National Association of Underwater Instructors, “NAUI History,” http://www.naui.org/history.aspx (accessed January 7, 2013). NAUI held its first instructor certification course in 1960. See Sale Perry and Albert Tillman, Scuba America (Olga, WA.: Whalestooth Publishing, 2001), 85.

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Shipwrecks, Skin Divers, and Sunken Gold (1965). Much to the dismay of archaeologists, recreational scuba divers joined traditional hard-hat divers in destroying shallow-water shipwrecks in the pursuit of anything valuable.

Since 1935 Snow had written about lost treasure and chronicled efforts – including his own – to find some of it. In the introduction to his 1944 Pirates and

Buccaneers, he estimated that there was $35 million (excluding the contents of the fabled

“Money Pit” on Oak Island off Nova Scotia) buried along the Atlantic coast with “at least four locations in Massachusetts alone where the prospects of finding coins are good.” In a 1955 newspaper column he reprinted this excerpt but raised the total to $38.5 million and described the four locations as “where substantial pirate treasure awaits the lucky finder.” In both versions he cautioned that “if five percent of this is recovered within the next century … it will be a miracle.” Still, Snow did not lose faith in the seashore’s hidden bounty. In 1951 he similarly forewarned his readers that only one out of a thousand treasure seekers would ever find something. But, Snow demonstrated through his stories that while treasure was rare, people have found fortunes through hard work and sometimes just luck.

To underscore both of these points, Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure is bookended by Snow’s failures but eventual success. In the third chapter “The Pirate Ship

Whidah’s Baffling Hoard,” Snow recounts the wreck of the ship in 1717 off Cape Cod before confessing that “Personally, I have spent the equivalent of a small treasure hoard at the scene of the pirate ship’s wreck. There I erected a fifteen-foot diving platform as near as possible to that part of the Whidah which was said to contain the cannon [spotted by a local some years earlier]. The weeks went by and the expenses mounted. Diver Jack

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Poole tried his best to salvage a substantial amount of gold and silver from the wreck, but a handful of pieces of eight worth at most one-fortieth of the cost of the operation was all he ever brought to the surface.” A storm later destroyed the platform and Snow gave up.367

The last chapter, “The King of Calf Island,” is devoted to Snow’s 1945 find on a

Cape Cod beach of a small chest containing 316 coins worth almost $1800. As with his later discovery on Isle Haute, more valuable than the treasure was the story. In an earlier

visit to the island of Middle Brewster in Boston Harbor, Snow had found a tattered seventeenth-century Italian book in the basement of an abandoned house. The book had been stashed there decades before by a former pirate turned lighthouse keeper. A friend of Snow’s at the Boston Public Library revealed to him pinpricks above certain letters that suggested a code. After some guesswork Snow realized that it directed him to gold buried on a beach in the Cape Cod town of Chatham. In an amazing stroke of luck, Snow

found the treasure in less than a week of searching with a metal detector. He

subsequently delighted in recounting the story in newspaper articles, lectures, and his

book. Unlike Drake, Blackington, or other chroniclers of New England tales, Snow was

not just the storyteller. In prowling the coastal environment and picking up a shovel he made himself part of the narrative.368

367 Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 15. Edward Rowe Snow, “True Tales of the Past: I’m Interested in Pirates!” Brockton Enterprise, ?, ?, 1955. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), vii, 59. 368 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), 242-272 (“The King of Calf Island”). While Snow states in this chapter that he spent weeks searching the sand for the treasure, but a Boston Globe article from September 19, 1945, states that the code was cracked the night before, while an article from September 28, 1945, announced Snow’s discovery of the treasure. See “Clew Found to Island Treasure,” Boston Globe, September 19, 1945, 1; and Herbert Richardson, “Snow Proclaims Finding $2000 in Old Coins Buried at Chatham,” Boston Globe, September 28, 1945, 16.

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In admitting his failures, Snow sympathized with his readers’ desire for treasure and usually fruitless efforts to find it. But in his eventual triumph, he lent credence to the validity of the other stories he carefully selected and expressed his desire that others would also meet with success. There was also real treasure to inspect at his lectures and on loan at the museum in the Old State House. And in writing about buried treasure and pirates in what were apparently his most popular books, Snow again reaffirmed that exciting maritime history was predominantly New England-based (the majority of chapters being set in New England), and that his favorite coast was stocked with gold, both physically and literarily.

While the allure of treasure and pirates clearly stretched across centuries and cultures, the popularity of Snow’s books on these topics is revealing about the social conditions of the time during which Snow wrote. Rediker and Turley have written that key to the public’s attraction to pirates are their rebel/antihero personas. American society in the 1950s and early 1960s was a time of conformity, of maintaining social order and putting faith in capitalism, government, family, and God. At this same time, rebels thrived in popular culture. Actors such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and musicians such as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash adopted personas that fulfilled a fantasy of risk, adventure, or danger that most Americans in their button-down lives did not experience. And as characters blending fiction and history, the pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similarly enlivened literature, film, and television.

Snow understood his own fascination with pirates as coming from several sources. He opened his True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953) with an anecdote about Robert Louis Stevenson visiting the childhood home of Philip Gosse in England

258 and telling adventures tales to Gosse and the other children. Gosse (1879-1959) grew up to become a naturalist, physician, and, in Snow’s words, “an outstanding writer of true pirate stories” with his The Pirates’ Who’s Who (1924) and The History of Piracy (1932).

Snow wrote to Gosse and received permission to use this story and several others. “Just as Stevenson influenced Philip Gosse,” wrote Snow, “so Gosse and his writings have in turn made me a student of the intriguing subject of piracy.” This story and the personal connection tied Snow’s works to some of the most famous literature on pirates, and perhaps made him stand out in the crowded field of pirate and treasure books.369

As the Gosse example and Snow’s own childhood story of the poison dagger that his grandfather had taken from a pirate demonstrated, children had an early attraction to pirates that was likely due to the decades-old influence of pirate stories written for them, such as those by Stevenson and Barrie and contemporary examples such as Earl Schenck

Miers’s Pirate Chase (1965). Published by Colonial Williamsburg, it shows that even a professional museum wasn’t above pointing out its hometown connection to Blackbeard in an attempt to interest children in American history. But as Snow cautioned in 1953,

Of course, this feeling of adventure which everyone has experienced at one time or another does not mean we accept piracy as right and proper. It is really because the picturesque stories stimulate our imagination that we enjoy reading about these infamous careers. Whatever we think about their cruelty and wickedness, we must admit they were matched by their bravery and fortitude.370

Safely in the distant past, Snow’s pirate stories provided modern readers with vivid

performances of often horrible people who still possessed some redeeming qualities such

as bravery.

369 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1953), vii-viii. “Dr. Philip Gosse, 80, Expert on Pirates,” New York Times, October 6, 1959, 39. 370 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1953), ix.

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But pirate stories themselves had another redeeming quality. As nearly all of these pirates came to early and violent deaths, there was a strong moral lesson embedded in these tales. For instance, in Pirates and Buccaneers Snow opened the chapter on

Edward Low with the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth presiding over Low’s marriage to

Eliza Marble on August 12, 1714 in a Boston church. Snow next said that Wadsworth went on to become the president of Harvard College, while Low a year later became a pirate who eventually became so depraved that his crew set him adrift in an open boat to die at sea. The author clearly showed the intersection between the paths of virtue and vice, and the consequences of each choice.371

Snow devoted ample space to the trials and executions of many pirates – partially because court records and newspapers articles are two of the largest primary sources

about them. He frequently mentioned priests and ministers visiting pirates during their

imprisonment and trials, and administering to them shortly before their executions. None

of these men counseling the sinners was more famous than the Reverend Cotton Mather.

Pastor of the Second Church in Boston from 1685 to 1728, Mather was one of America’s

most influential religious leaders, writing hundreds of books and pamphlets and participating in the major events around Boston, whether encouraging inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, advising his fellow ministers running the Salem Witch Trials, or his more common duties of preaching against sin and counseling accused criminals. The goal was to get the pirates to repent their sins.

While many of the condemned did feel remorse, and gave speeches on the gallows warning others to not follow in their paths, unrepentant pirates such as William

371 Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 183.

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Fly in 1726 instead called for fair treatment of sailors as a way to prevent piracy. For those who were convicted and hanged, their bodies were sometimes gibbeted on Bird

Island or the island of Nix’s Mate in Boston Harbor as a warning against piracy. The untimely deaths of most pirates either in battle or through trial and execution a century or two earlier made them salacious but ultimately safe stories. And to pursue their treasure, whether as a reader of Snow’s books or an active hunter in his footsteps, carried with it no risk of moral corruption.372

Snow’s public reception

Aside from Edward Rowe Snow being able to make a living writing about

maritime topics with wide appeal, his books going through multiple printings, and

receiving a stack of fan mail each day, it’s worthwhile to gauge his public reception

through the reviews that accompanied the publication of each book. For here was the

chance for a public critique of his work, to judge it against not only previous books but those of his contemporaries.

Snow’s books were most often reviewed in the Boston Globe, with an occasional supplemental review in another paper or journal. The newspaper reviews are usually between October and January, which suggests that the publisher released them late in the year in time for Christmas. And several reviewers duly recommend the books as holiday gifts. Dorothy Wayman, in reviewing A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod in 1946, like most

later reviewers found Snow informative and entertaining – “maritime plum duff” for the

372 Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 38, 40-42, 52, 66-67, 137. Snow repeats Fly’s story in Edward Rowe Snow, Piracy, Mutiny and Murder (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1959), 23-34. See also Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 2004), 1-5,

261 book’s “solid facts … so deliciously sprinkled throughout with ‘plums’ in the way of anecdote.” Henry C. Kittredge writing in The New England Quarterly was less enthusiastic about the book, and devoted half the review detailing the factual errors in the text and accompanying map. However, this was a characteristically sharp review by the teacher, writer, and Cape Cod native who took his historical accuracy seriously – and perhaps particularly so for non-locals chronicling his region.373

With few exceptions, the reviews through the 1940s and ‘50s are positive, at

times glowing, such as Whit Sawyer’s claim that parts of Secrets of the North Atlantic

Islands (1950) “will hold you in a spell.” Samuel Eliot Morison gave his second and

apparently last Snow review in New England Quarterly, applauding his former student’s

goal to separate fact from fiction in Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast

(1948), creating “a fine companion for a winter fireside.” J. Malcolm Barter reviewed

True Tales of Buried Treasure (1953) alongside George Woodbury’s The Great Days of

Piracy in the West Indies. Barter found that the history and the compiled tales

complemented each other, as Woodbury was the “down-to-earth writer” and Snow the

“historical romanticist” for his (not-unfounded) belief in buried treasure. Writing for the

William and Mary Quarterly, Martha’s Vineyard newspaper editor Henry Beetle Hough,

however, was frustrated at Snow’s tales being “set down … without any attempt at order

or organization” but concluded that those in Great Gales and Dire Disasters (1952) were

373 Dorothy G. Wayman, “Maritime Plum Duff,” Boston Globe, October 31, 1946, 15. Henry C. Kittredge, review of A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod by Edward Rowe Snow, The New England Quarterly 20, no. 1 (March, 1947): 130-131. For a compilation of other reviews see David Kew, “book reviews by Henry C. Kittredge,” http://capecodhistory.us/20th/Kittredge-reviews.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

262 still “told in an informal style appropriate to Mr. Snow’s purpose” – which presumably was to entertain and inform a general/middlebrow audience with sea stories.374

The only Snow book to receive a review in the New York Times, Edward B.

Garside had nothing but praise in January of 1959 for Great Sea Rescues and its author.

In proclaiming “For my money he is just about the best chronicler of the days of sail

alive,” he gave Snow a valuable quote that he used thereafter in promoting his lectures.

He further described him as the quintessential salty New Englander:

Mr. Snow is one of those rare writing people who is perfectly in tune with his chosen subject. He even looks the part, a big, strikingly handsome man, with a mane of graying hair, rosy complexion and bright blue eyes. No trouble at all to imagine him striding the poopdeck, like any number of his ancestors…

In Garside’s estimation, Snow was a modern old salt, a Yankee who had chosen to remain ashore and chronicle his world for the entertainment and education of the general public. His writing style was “fresh and simple,” and “spiced with just enough quaintly old-fashioned allusion to insure the evocation of the past.” As “quaint” was a term used by writers for decades to describe New England’s old coastal towns and their people, to apply it to Snow’s writings further fixed him as representative of his home environment.375

Snow’s most frequent reviewer in the 1950s and ‘60s was Earl Banner, a Boston

Globe reporter who specialized in covering the city’s fishing industry. Banner started

reporting in 1935, the same year Snow began publishing, and was also a graduate of

374 Whit Sawyer, “Islands and Mystery,” Boston Globe, November 19, 1950, A19. Samuel Eliot Morison, review of Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast by Edward Rowe Snow, The New England Quarterly 23, no. 2 (June, 1950): 282. J. Malcolm Barter, “Pirates and Buried Treasure,” Boston Globe, December 2, 1951, A29. Henry Beetle Hough, review of Great Gales and Dire Disasters by Edward Rowe Snow, The William and Mary Quarterly 10, no. 2 (April, 1953): 322-323. 375 Edward B. Garside, “Salty Yarns of Survival,” New York Times, January 25, 1959, BR16. For the New England coast as quaint see chapter 10 of John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1994), 295-333; and chapter 4 of Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 105-134.

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Boston University and lived in Marshfield. Banner was frank in his reviews. He found the first part of the bestselling True Tales of Pirates and their Gold (1953) “rather heavy going” due to the writing style and the subject matter “heavily padded out with inconsequential detail.” But the book was redeemed by one Hollywood-worthy story of a local female pirate. Of Snow’s Famous New England Lighthouses (1955) he found it satisfying for the “legions of Snow fans who literally eat up his hair-raising tales of derring-do and adventure on the high seas” as well as “a good buy” “for the fellow who reacts even faintly to the spell of the oceans.” And The Vengeful Sea (1956) was

“Snow’s best.” He credited Snow with solving the mystery of the sinking of the steamer

Portland in 1898, and even attempted to bring in new readers with “If you were ‘allergic’ to Mr. Snow’s style and choice of subjects before now, try this one on for size. Few who do will regret it.”376

But three years later Snow went too far. Banner found Piracy, Mutiny and

Murder (1959) “by far the bloodiest, most grisly, and least salty of anything he has

done.” While Banner apparently enjoyed pirate tales and their corresponding violence,

he loathed these “case histories of some of the most brutal and senseless murders in the

history of New England.” Apparently speaking for his audience, Banner concluded that

“we wish Edward Rowe Snow would pick up that oar and head shoreward again.” In

twenty-five years of writing, Snow sometimes included landlocked stories, and disasters

376 “Earl D. Banner, 80 Globe Reporter for 40 years,” Boston Globe, November 1, 1991, 77. Earl Banner, “Many a Pirate Came from Boston,” Boston Globe, November 1, 1953, A29. Earl Banner, “Any Lighthouses Left?” Boston Globe, December 4, 1955, 38C. Earl Banner, “Here’s Snow’s Best,” Boston Globe, October 7, 1956, B18.

264 or violence were part of every book. But Banner enjoyed Snow as a maritime writer, and reproached him when he strayed too far from the waterfront.377

Despite Snow’s subsequent return to maritime topics, Banner found new points of

criticism in Snow’s almost automated schedule of publishing and recycling of stories.

For Women of the Sea he warned that “Snow is beginning to revive stories that he has

related before now,” while his harshest criticism came out for True Tales of Terrible

Shipwrecks (1963). The author was an “outwardly well-adjusted Yankee yarn spinner

[who] was probably driven to turn out yet one more Snow job by the perfectly normal

and healthy desire to make an honest buck.” He specifically called out Snow for his

repeated retelling of two stories, with “large chunks of this current retelling … were lifted

verbatim from Snow’s 1956 offering, ‘The Vengeful Sea’ (and he apologized then for

retelling a story that had been part of his 1943 ‘Storms and Shipwrecks’).” Labeling the

book “yet one more Snow job” turned Snow’s admirable productivity into a fraudulent

attempt to repackage and resell old stories to devoted fans.

At least for some reviewers such as Banner and “P.H.” – who found the writing in

Astounding Tales of the Sea (1966) “old-fashioned and slow-paced” with “Profuse

quotes,” that “while lending to authenticity, slow down the narratives” – Snow was

retreading his past successes to an unreceptive modern audience. While reviewers such

as Robert Soares’s proclamation for Adventures, Blizzards, and Coastal Calamities

(1979) that Snow was “especially worthy of the term master story teller in his vivid

reconstructions of events at sea,” he either didn’t know or didn’t care to admit that at

least three of the chapters were taken from earlier Snow books that were now out of print.

While back in 1948 a reviewer found Snow’s work to be fresh and “more absorbingly

377 Earl Banner, “Ed Snow Goes Ashore,” Boston Globe, December 20, 1959, A25.

265 different than any sea tales told for landlubbers,” by retelling the same stories Snow was shortchanging his loyal readers as well as refusing to change the maritime portrait of New

England that he had carefully crafted from the 1930s through the 1950s. The result was that Snow’s work became outdated just like the era of sail he loved to chronicle.378

Regardless of the opinion of one review of a single Snow book, what mattered more to him were the opinions of the people who inhabited his maritime world. And to them, over decades of visits, interviews, letters and phone calls, he became someone who not only sought interesting maritime stories, but as someone whom this audience sometimes sought as a sort of maritime confessional. They had followed his stories on radio, in the newspaper, and through copies of his books that he often gave during visits or dropped in Flying Santa care packages, and decided that he was fair and knowledgeable enough to be entrusted with the airing of their coastal secrets.

Three examples from Snow’s five favorite topics provide a sense of his position.

When a man named James Staples was about to undergo a serious operation at Boston

Hospital he called Snow to correct details about a shipwreck. Snow recorded their interview on August 20, 1950. Back in February of 1907 Staples was a quartermaster aboard the steamer Larchmont when it collided with the schooner Harry Knowlton off

Block Island. Staples was one of only nineteen survivors. As the passenger list went down with the Larchmont the official death toll was estimated at 131. But Staples confessed to Snow that having counted the passengers as they boarded in New York at the start of the voyage, he believed that at least 332 people had died when the ship sank.

This detail elevated the 1907 collision to the worst maritime disaster in New England

378 Earl Banner, “Two Great Unknowns,” Boston Globe, November 11, 1962, A80. Earl Banner, “More Sea Disasters,” Boston Globe, November 24, 1963, A57. P.H., “Sea Sagas,” Boston Globe, February 20, 1966, A36. Robert Soares, “Of mystery and adventure,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1979, C11.

266 history. Snow didn’t say whether Staples survived the surgery, but he published

Staples’s new figure in Great Gales and Dire Disasters (1952).379

On a more personal scale, when Snow was autographing books in a Boston

department store in December 1954, a man named Augustus Reekast tapped him on the

arm. Snow had previously interviewed him about a murder on Middle Brewster Island in

1923. A boy had been shot by a concealed rifle when he tried to enter the house of the

island’s caretaker. Brought to the nearby Boston Light, he died of his wounds in the

keeper’s kitchen. Now that the shooter in the story had died, Reekast wanted to give the

full details. They met later that evening and Reekast told Snow that the man named

Hjalmar Roos had intended to kill him after he accused Roos of theft. But Roos had

rigged a gun that accidentally shot the boy when he attempted to enter the house instead

of Reekast.380

Lastly, on November 15, 1970 the remains of a large sea creature over thirty feet

long washed ashore at Mann Hill Beach in Scituate. When rumors spread that it was a

sea serpent thousands flocked to the beach, including Snow. Though scientists quickly

determined that it was the decomposing carcass of a basking shark, Snow remained

skeptical that it was not a sea serpent, and duly included the story and photographs of the

carcass in Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (1974). The public stance attracted

the attention of Cameron Dewar, who had worked for Boston newspapers for several

decades. Dewar revealed to Snow that he had been born near Loch Ness in Scotland, and

379 Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1952), 126-127. Edwin J. Park, “Horror is Described,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1907, 1. 380 Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 54-58. Edward Rowe Snow, Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1974), 134-138. Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 235-236.

267 at the age of five or six witnessed the famous monster crossing a field and a road before entering the loch. Perhaps wanting to protect Dewar’s reputation, Snow waited until after his death in 1973 before printing his testimony in Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales

(1977).381

As the Dewar and other examples show, Snow had a deep sympathy for his

subjects and would wait years and sometimes decades for permission to tell a story.382

His open-mindedness about the possibility of ghosts and sea serpents did not enhance his

reputation with academics, but it did help make him a popular public figure, whether as a

source of historical entertainment or a sympathetic listener. As Snow advertised through his books, articles, lectures, and tours his interest in stories centered around shipwrecks, pirates, lighthouses, treasure, and the supernatural, this picture of the maritime past, and of the New England maritime past in particular, was reflected back to him by the fans who shared these interests. Critics rightly pointed out the shortcuts Snow took – either at the suggestion of his publisher or his own initiative – in recycling older stories for current readers. But Snow had a hard time letting go of a good story, and his continued presence on the bookshelf and in regional newspapers from the 1930s until his death fifty years later suggests that his audience didn’t mind. As Snow made a living from interesting stories, people who talked to Snow about an alluring anecdote were well aware of the possibility that they might subsequently play a small role in his coastal productions.

381 David Taylor, “Thousands View Huge Carcass,” Boston Globe, November 16, 1970, 1. Snow is mentioned in this article: “According to Edward Rowe Snow, a chronicler of New England maritime history, such creatures were spotted during the 1700s in Gloucester and Plymouth, and the carcass of a similar creature washed ashore some time around 1850.” Diane White, “500 view burial of ‘sea serpent’ on Scituate beach,” Boston Globe, November 17, 1970, 3. “Cameron Dewar, newsman in Boston for 30 years,” Boston Globe, January 16, 1973, 32. 382 For other examples of Snow waiting decades before telling a story, see Edward Rowe Snow, The Fury of the Seas (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964), 176, and Edward Rowe Snow, Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1977), 222.

268

Artful history

Key to this successful production was the ways in which Snow artfully presented

history in his books and lectures by using a combination of rigorous research and tongue- in-cheek, dramatic performance. In his books for Yankee Publishing he carefully listed his sources in endnotes or a bibliography. He dropped these for Dodd, Mead and

Company, but continued to thank an average of forty-five people by name for their assistance in helping to prepare each book, and the research help of an average of thirteen organizations per book that most often included the American Antiquarian Society in

Worcester, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library, Bostonian

Society, Boston Athenaeum, National Archives (presumably the local branch in

Waltham), Harvard College Library, and the Peabody Museum and Essex Institute of

Salem, Massachusetts.

This documented truthfulness seems to be how Snow sought to distinguish himself among the many New England storytellers. He included the word in four book titles as well as the name of his column in the Brockton Enterprise.383 Since The Islands

of Boston Harbor in 1935, Snow repeatedly emphasized that what he was telling was, to

his knowledge, true. In his early books, when he couldn’t verify the truth himself, he

tried to get the reader as close as possible – whether as an explanation for an explosion in

1901 that came from a contact “with a reputation for truthfulness” or in accounting for a

tunnel built by a pirate under the Boston waterfront with “While we cannot vouch for the

story about him that has come down through the years to the present generation, we

383 True Tales of Buried Treasure (1951); True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953); True Tales of Terrible Shipwrecks (1963); True Tales and Curious Legends: Dramatic Stories from the Yankee Past (1969); Snow’s column written for the Brockton Enterprise was “True Tales of the Past”.

269 believe what follows is essentially correct.”384 Even for this interest in pirates, who were a blend of fact and fiction (a condition that often appealed to writers and readers alike), he attempted to strain out the latter. The preface of Pirates and Buccaneers

(1944) opens with Snow arguing for historical accuracy:

This is no collection of Old Wives’ Tales, half-myth, half-truth, handed down from year to year with the story more distorted with each telling, not is it a work of fiction. This book is an accurate account of the most outstanding pirates who ever visited the shores of the Atlantic Coast. / These are stories of stark realism. None of the artificial school of sheltered existence is included. Except for the extreme profanity, blasphemy, and obscenity in which most pirates were adept, everything has been included which is essential for the reader to get a true and fair picture of the life of a sea-rover.385

And echoed again in the introductions to many of his books, of which these three span

three decades of his writing career:

 Mysteries and Adventures along the Atlantic Coast (1948): “A further reason for this book was my desire to correct many erroneous accounts of adventure and drama along the Atlantic Coast. From time immemorial, it seems, there have been writers who believed it their special privilege to color and exaggerate the truth and thereby mislead the reading public. Their errors have often become accepted as facts, and, frequently, it is too late to set the record straight. But I have tried here to correct many falsehoods and mistakes, and I have found in nearly every case that the truth, although more difficult to discover, has proved more interesting than the ‘colorful’ distortion.”386

 True Tales of Buried Treasure (1951): “Although in this volume you will read of millions of dollars recovered from land and sea, every one of them believed to be true stories, it is naturally impossible for all those who seek it to find buried treasure.” “I have chosen over fifty true stories from almost 600 which I investigated, true stories about the finding of buried treasure.”387

384 Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 195 (1901 explosion at Fort Winthrop). Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 42 (pirate tunnel). 385 Edward Rowe Snow, Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 9. 386 Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), viii. 387 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), vii-viii.

270

 Fantastic Folklore and Fact (1968): “New England is one of the richest regions in the world in folklore and legend, as well as in bizarre but true tales. I have attempted to choose from hundreds of examples some that have interested me the most, and trust you enjoy my selection.”388

In taking the position of discriminating truth-teller, Snow attempted to bond with his

readers over his promise to not mislead them, as so many writers in the past had done. In

the chapters of these and other books Snow stressed his focus on the truth, and took on past and current writers – sometimes by name – who had, to him, preferred “‘colorful’ distortion” over accurate storytelling. Perhaps the best example is how he addressed the story of the Mary Celeste, a brigantine that was found drifting in the mid-Atlantic with no one aboard on December 4, 1872.

In investigating what Snow called “one of the world’s greatest mystery vessels” and “the great mystery of the Atlantic,” he flew to Nova Scotia, where the vessel was launched and spent its early years, in order to reconstruct its history from the beginning.

“I wished to be certain of every fact long before I was ready to report it,” stressed

Snow.389 After spending five and a half pages telling what he felt was the correct version

of the ship’s discovery, he devoted the remaining fourteen pages of the chapter to

covering what other writers have said about the Mary Celeste and his own view of what

likely happened instead. Only four of some eighty-seven accounts of the mystery that

Snow had reviewed “made any pretense of acquainting themselves with the facts,” while

the remainder was either “careless compilers of facts or outright falsifiers of the truth.”

He particularly directed blame at writers Arthur Conan Doyle and P. T. McGrath, and the

otherwise commendable naval historian John R. Spears for their erroneous magazine

388 Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), viii. 389 Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 311, 331.

271 articles; publicity-hungry seamen who claimed to have been part of the crew; and

Laurence Keating’s 1929 book The Great Mary Celeste Hoax, which claimed to solve the mystery but was itself a hoax. Snow ended his chapter with his belief that the only plausible explanation was that the crew feared the Celeste’s cargo of alcohol was in imminent danger of exploding and hastily abandoned the ship.390

In choosing a popular story with New England connections (e.g. in 1872 the Mary

Celeste’s captain was from Massachusetts and the mate from Maine), detailing his own

research of the story, dissecting the poor scholarship of others, telling what he believed

was the true version, and naming other respectable sources for further information

(though long out of print) encapsulates Snow’s approach to writing about the past. And

the example shows that Snow didn’t blindly accept and pass along a story as he first

encountered it – even if that version had more alluring details. Years later in the

dedication of his 1968 book, Snow credited his method to friend and mentor Dr. Robert

Earl Moody “who, more than a quarter of a century ago, taught me the importance of

accuracy and truth.”391

But on this base of facts Snow added salt in the form of dialogue, qualifiers, and

superlatives. Most commonly, Snow used dialogue in many – but not all – of his stories,

whether set in the seventeenth century or the present. The purpose of the dialogue was to

pump up the drama at key points, such as between the captain and second mate of the Dei

Gratia when they first discovered the drifting Mary Celeste:

Let us go back to the year 1872 and join the crew of a British brigantine, the Dei Gratia, almost three weeks out from New York. It is December 4. The position

390 Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 311-325. 391 Edward Rowe Snow, Fantastic Folklore and Fact: New England Tales of Land and Sea (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1968), v.

272

of the vessel is about halfway between the Azores and Portugal, and the course is southeast a half east. The seas are running high, but not dangerously so. The wind is steady from the northeast as Captain David R. Morehouse, master of the brigantine, speaks to Second Mate John Wright. “Mr. Wright, what are we logging?” “Still two knots, sir,” comes the answer. “The wind is falling off.” “Mr. Wright, look there, off the port bow. Is that a sail?” “Yes, sir. In fact, I was about to tell you, sir,” replies Wright. “Why, that’s strange,” continues Captain Morehouse, “for there doesn’t seem to be more than one sail set on her forward stick. But she’s hull down yet, and it’s hard to tell. Here, let me put the glass on her.” A moment passes, and then Captain Morehouse gives a shout! “I can make her out now. […] Why, I can’t see a soul on deck at all!” Half an hour later the Dei Gratia has come up on the strange, crewless brigantine. […] Captain Morehouse is able to reader he name. He spells it out, “M-A-R-Y, Mary, C-E-L-E-S-T-E, Celeste. Why, that’s Captain Briggs’ vessel! We had dinner together in New York the night before he sailed. What can have happened to him?”392

In order to tell the story in the most evocative light, he guides the reader into the past, sets

the place and conditions (based upon actual weather reports and logbook data), and

employs nautical terminology that is both pedestrian and believable. Representative of the dialogue that Snow used in stories spanning four centuries, he does not say whether

Morehouse and Wright actually exchanged these words. There are three possible

explanations. The dialogue is either invented by Snow to give the story more drama,

quoted by Snow from another source that invented it, or quoted from the original speaker

or speakers. As Snow stopped including endnotes and bibliographies when he started

publishing with Dodd, Mead and Company, it’s impossible to fact-check his stories

unless one is already familiar with the primary sources for a given tale. For the vast

majority of Snow’s readers, they just had to guess.

392 Edward Rowe Snow, Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1948), 311-312.

273

Other forms of salt included Snow’s frequent use of superlatives and qualifiers. In an interview for a 1996 television documentary on Edward Rowe Snow, the editor of

Yankee magazine, Judson Hale, recalled Snow’s approach to telling about the past:

He was kind of New England’s P. T. Barnum. And I don’t mean that in any critical sense. But he was able to promote his stories in a kind of flamboyant way. It didn’t mean they weren’t true – they were – but, you know, some of his favorite words were “unbelievable,” “astounding,” “the most incredible rescue feat in the history of New England.” And he would cover himself. He would say “reportedly,” or, “it is said,” you know. He was quite a guy.393

Hale joined the magazine in 1958 and was long familiar with Snow, who had written twenty-one articles for Yankee between 1957 and 1967. Yankee had started publishing in

1935, the same year Snow released his first book, and over the coming decades both

helped to shape the public’s understanding of the region, locally and nationally.394

Whether “the greatest mass execution,” “the greatest cutthroat,” “the greatest lifesaver,” or “the greatest disaster,” it’s easy to find superlatives in Snow’s articles and books. And throughout his writings Snow indeed covered himself with qualifiers such as "it is said,”

“legend has it,” and “was reputed to be.” Often these appear in stories about the

supernatural, or ones set several centuries ago when records of the event are scarce and

the facts mix with legends.395

393 “Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996. 394 Yankee Publishing Inc., “Yankee History: A Brief History of Yankee Magazine,” http://www.yankeemagazine.com/about/yankeehistory.php (accessed January 7, 2013). Historian Joseph Conforti has written about how Yankee magazine helped to shape the regional identity of New England. See Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England; Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 287-309. 395 “[T]he greatest mass execution in New England history” was the hanging of 26 pirates in Newport on July 19, 1723. Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 257. Blackbeard as “the greatest cutthroat of them all” is from ibid., 2. Edward Rowe Snow, “World’s Greatest Lifesaver,” Yankee, August 1964, 54. This is likely Joshua James of Hull, Massachusetts. “[T]he greatest sea disaster ever to occur on the mainland of the North American continent” was the sinking of the steamer Atlantic in 1873 with the loss of 481 lives. Edward Rowe Snow, Great Gales and Dire Disasters (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1952), 13. Great Gales is an excellent example of Snow’s love of superlatives. For an example of a supernatural qualifier: “Every section of Massachusetts has its legend or ghost, and Cape Cod is no exception to the rule.” “Many in

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One story above all best represents Snow’s transformation from a cautious historian to a colorful storyteller: the Lady in Black. Snow’s most popular ghost story was about a female Southerner supposedly hanged as a spy at Fort Warren on George’s

Island in Boston Harbor during the Civil War. His first version appeared in The Islands of Boston Harbor (1935) and begins with:

Every island has its legends, but perhaps the most famous of them all concerns the Lady in Black at Fort Warren. The legend of this famous Lady in Black has been whispered at Fort Warren for many, many years, until now there are quite a few who believe in the existence of this lady of the black robes. I hereby offer the reader the legend without the slightest guarantee that any part of it is true.

Snow then relates in a two-page story how during the Civil War one of the Confederate prisoners at the fort was a “young lieutenant who had been married only a few weeks before.” The man managed to send a message to his wife, who journeyed from the South to Hull, Massachusetts, a peninsula and town a mile from the island. A Southern sympathizer gave her men’s clothing and a pistol, and one “dark, rainy night” she rowed to the island, snuck into the fort, and found her captured husband.

Emboldened by her actions, the prisoners decided to dig an escape tunnel. Alert guards, however, quickly detected the diggers. When Colonel Dimick (the fort’s commanding officer) and soldiers confronted the prisoners, the woman attempted to shoot the colonel. But, the old pistol exploded, killing her husband instead. Dimick ordered the woman hanged as a spy, and as a last request she asked to wear women’s clothing. “After a search of the fort, some robes were found which had been worn by one of the soldiers during an entertainment, and the plucky girl went to her death wearing

Osterville are said to have heard the screech” of the ghost of a girl named Hannah the Screacher, who was killed by pirates and buried along with their treasure to keep the secret two centuries ago on Oyster Island. Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 326.

275 these robes.” Snow ended by chronicling, again without names or dates, “the various times through the years [that] the ghost of the Lady in Black has returned to haunt the men quartered at the fort.”396

This initial version is the shortest and the least specific – no dates, dialogue, or

names of the Confederate woman and her husband. Snow included the story, unchanged,

in The Romance of Boston Bay (1944). But by 1950 his approach had changed. He

included the story as a part of the “Islands of Boston Bay” chapter in Secrets of the North

Atlantic Islands. It now spanned seven and a half pages. Gone is Snow’s disclaimer that the story had no basis in fact. And Snow is remarkably specific. The woman arrived in

Massachusetts aboard a blockade runner two and a half months after receiving word from her imprisoned husband. She made her way from Cape Cod to Hull and studied the fort through a telescope “for a few days” before a Southern sympathizer rowed her to

George’s Island. Snow then describes her evasion of two sentries on patrol in the rain before reaching the fort’s walls and climbing inside. She brought a pick with her in addition to her pistol, which the prisoners would now use to dig a tunnel out of their dungeon, capture the Union soldiers, and turn the fort’s guns on the city of Boston.

After the men spent weeks digging and disposing of the dirt, sentries eventually detected the tunnel and commanding officer Colonel Justin E. Dimick confronted the prisoners ten minutes after the discovery of the escape attempt. Snow adds dialogue when Dimick confronts the prisoners, when the woman threatens to shoot Dimick (who raised his hands in mock surrender but then swatted away the gun), and when she requested to wear a dress for her execution. Snow also details and expands the number of

396 Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover, MA.: Andover Press, 1935), 72-73.

276

Lady in Black encounters, the last of which dated to 1947 and was related to him by the man who experienced it, “Captain Charles I. Norris of Towson, Maryland.” In naming his contact and including his hometown and even the dialogue spoken during the incident, Snow connects the story to the present day and provides a verifiable source that lends credence to the entire story.397

Snow also provides photographic proof for the first time. One of the book’s eighteen illustrations is a cropped old photograph showing eight uniformed men and one woman gathered around a large cannon. The woman wears a dark full-length dress and hat. The caption is unambiguous: “The famous Lady in Black whose ghost still haunts

Fort Warren. This picture was taken just before she was hanged as a spy.” By 1950,

Snow had matured as a writer, adapting earlier stories with dialogue and details that could not possibly all exist in the written records he pursued at local libraries, museums, and archives. The cautious historian whose early books included notes and bibliographies was now a seasoned storyteller whom readers just had to believe, or not.398

The story continued to grow. For the 1964 Yankee article “Boston’s Lady in

Black,” Snow identified the Confederate soldier as Andrew Lanier from Crawfordville,

Georgia, and included not only his wedding date to the still anonymous Mrs. Lanier (June

28, 1861), but the night she arrived on Georges Island (January 15, 1862), and the day of

her execution (February 2, 1862). Snow also includes the full version of the photograph

397 Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 200-202. Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 70-77. 398 The photograph is between pages 84 and 85 of Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950). Snow spells Dimick’s name as “Dimmick” in 1935 and 1944 versions, and as “Dimmock” in the 1950 version, but as his gravestone in the Proprietors Burying Ground in Portsmouth, N.H. says “Justin Dimick,” this is the version I’m using. Russ Dodge, “Justin Dimick,” http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=19852 (accessed January 7, 2013).

277 he had cropped in his 1950 book, which depicted “Part of the garrison at Ft. Warren in

1862. The author feels that the woman in the upper right is very possibly the ‘Lady in

Black,’ herself!” Despite Snow’s precise details, writer Jay Schmidt in a 2003 book on

Fort Warren could not find any evidence that a woman was executed at the fort. Nor does a 1955 PhD dissertation on prison conditions at Fort Warren mention the execution of a female spy. While most of the fort’s official records were destroyed after it was decommissioned in 1946, the lack of any mention in the local newspapers of what would have been a sensational story led Schmidt to conclude that it was merely a popular legend, embellished by generations of soldiers, and blamed for unexplained events.399

Regardless of the veracity of the original tale, in both the 1950 and 1964 versions

Snow concluded with describing how the legend became part of a performance. In

preparation for an officers’ party at some unknown date, one of the fort’s commanders

had a wooden box built into the dirt floor in the “Corridor of Dungeons,” where the

Confederate soldiers had once been imprisoned. Then,

Whenever newcomers enter the Corridor of Dungeons, the ritual first performed at the officers’ dance is repeated. A small soldier, or perhaps a girl, is dressed in black and taken up to the casemate ahead of the others. The “Lady” of the particularly occasion is placed in the coffin and the lid is closed over her. The unsuspecting guests enter the casemate and gather around the story-teller, who, with proper embellishment, tells the tragic history of the Lady in Black. At the end of the story, and usually with a flourish, the narrator swings open wide the cover of the casket, whereupon, with a blood-curdling scream, the Lady in Black leaps to her feet. Visitors who have been fortunate enough to see this performance are never likely to forget it.400

Snow was not describing a bygone practice. In the years following World War II

thousands of visitors began arriving at the now deactivated and mostly abandoned fort

399 Edward Rowe Snow, “Boston’s Lady in Black,” Yankee, July 1964, 68. Jay Schmidt, Fort Warren: New England’s Most Historic Civil War Site (Amherst, N.H.: UBT Press, 2003), 4-5. Minor H. McLain, “Prison Conditions in Fort Warren, Boston, During the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1955). 400 Edward Rowe Snow, “Boston’s Lady in Black,” Yankee, July 1964, 133.

278 even before it officially opened to the general public in 1961. Snow attempted to drum up interest in visiting even before this date, as evidenced in the full-page article he wrote about the fort for the Quincy Patriot Ledger on April 7, 1960 that included a large map with the caption “Tour of Fort Warren Is Mapped for Adventurous Readers.” While

Snow secured permission for the groups he brought to the government-owned island, many others clandestinely explored it on their own.

By the 1960s Snow was leading regular tours of Fort Warren and its Corridor of

Dungeons, where he would tap someone – in one case his daughter Dorothy – to play the

Lady. The example is significant because Snow was largely responsible for disseminating the ghost story to the general public through decades of writing and speaking about it. It had long been part of military culture as Fort Warren soldiers likely invented it after the Civil War and gradually added detail and new sightings, culminating in a tour of the now historic space and an unexpected meeting with the Lady. In Snow continuing the tradition he went from a passive chronicler of coastal lore to a participant in it. But this was only the latest example of Snow as a showman in presenting his own version of coastal New England’s history.401

Snow the showman

401 For thousands of visitors arriving since 1946, see Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 77. Edward Rowe Snow, “Harbor Fort Bears Marks of Many Eras,” Patriot Ledger, April 7, 1960, 14. Snow’s daughter, Dorothy Snow, described playing the Lady in Black during a tour that her father led for her sixth grade class around 1962 in “Edward Rowe Snow Remembered,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced by Jeremy D’Entremont (1995; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). A photograph of Snow with actress Jessie Gill playing the Lady in Black on the day Fort Warren officially opened to the public is in Edward Rowe Snow, “Fort Warren,” Patriot Ledger, September 20, 1961. An example of Snow leading Georges Island tours before 1961 is his approved request to the MDC to bring approximately a hundred people to the island on August 21, 1960. Metropolitan District Commission, Minutes, Card Index, 1893-1972, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.

279

In the fall of 1945 Snow dug up actual treasure hidden by a former pirate on a beach in Chatham, Massachusetts. But he subsequently revised the story when he recounted it six years later in True Tales of Buried Treasure. In the chapter “The King of

Calf Island,” Snow began by telling how in 1934 he first heard of something valuable buried on one of the Brewster Islands in Boston Harbor. In 1940 another source told him of an old book that contained a message and was supposedly hidden in the foundation of a fisherman’s house on one of those islands. Snow guessed it might be Middle Brewster.

Five years later he finally tested this theory, and was surprised to find a seventeenth- century Italian book bound in skin in the cellar of an abandoned house on Middle

Brewster. Upon showing it to a librarian at the Boston Public Library, she pointed out a coded message on one of the pages which Snow quickly unscrambled to read “GOLD IS

DUE EAST TREES STRONG ISLAND CHATHAM OUTER BAR.”

The following week Snow went to Chatham with a metal detector and began searching for the treasure. He returned to the beach “day after day, week-end after week- end,” but only found worthless bits of buried scrap metal. Finally “October came,” when on “a Friday afternoon … the metal detector paid for its cost.” He had already dug six worthless holes that morning when a promising “hit” on the metal detector caused him to return to the boat for a spade. After digging down to a depth past his waist he paused to rest and then continued, eventually hitting rotten wood and then the solid form of what turned out to be a small chest eight inches by six inches square. Prying it open with the spade he found “a collection of silver and gold coins, covered with rust, sand, and ancient

280 bits of newspaper. I sank exhausted against the side of the pit. I had reached my objective! I had found treasure!”402

The exciting account shows Snow making good on years of following tips and

hunches, and then weeks of wandering the beach and digging hole after hole. But it’s not

the entire true tale. Snow’s find of the ancient Italian book in the basement of the ruined house made the front page of the Boston Globe on September 19, 1945, and revealed that the book’s secret code had been deciphered the previous night. Snow announced that he would start hunting for the treasure within two weeks. On September 28, 1945, the

Boston Globe ran the headline “Snow Proclaims Finding $2000 in Old Coins Buried at

Chatham.” Filed the previous day by United Press reporter Herbert Richardson, he detailed how earlier that day he had accompanied Snow, his brother Donald, and a

Chatham fisherman named “Good Walter” Eldridge in a dory to the beach identified in the decoded message. After the brothers had spent six hours searching and dug four treasure-less holes, they tried again and found the chest at the bottom of a nine-foot-deep hole.403

Assuming that the two newspaper articles are accurate, Snow actually found his

treasure in a mere eight days. Snow had deciphered the code on Tuesday, September 18,

and found the treasure the following Thursday on what Richardson suggests, by not

mentioning any previous digging and only that Snow had already “charted the area where

he thought the chest was buried on Nauset Beach,” was Snow’s first day of digging in the

company of a newswire reporter, a local friend (who had supplied Snow with many

402 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), 242-271. 403 “Clew Found to Island Treasure,” Boston Globe, September 19, 1945, 1. Herbert Richardson, “Snow Proclaims Finding $2000 in Old Coins Buried at Chatham,” Boston Globe, September 28, 1945, 16.

281 stories over the years), and his brother. It’s an amazing display of luck. In reconciling the article with the book chapter it appears that Snow omitted the help of his brother in searching and digging for the treasure, as well as the other two witnesses. And he lengthened the time spent searching by at least another eight days – October 5th being the

first Friday in that month and thus the earliest possible discovery date according to the book version. Eldridge does appear in the chapter, as a friend who “from time to time”

rowed over from his nearby home to visit Snow and provide encouragement. Snow was

either mistakenly exaggerating when he sat down to draft his own account, or he was

intentionally making the discovery sound more solitary and difficult. He likely did this to appease the many frustrated treasure hunters who had sent him “43,000 letters and communications about hidden gold and silver” over the past eleven years.404

That the book jacket for True Tales of Buried Treasure features a snapshot of a

beaming Snow at the bottom of a pit with the opened chest in front of him and coins in each hand strongly suggests that he was not alone at the time of discovery, or that he later restaged the photograph. Given his three companions on that day, the former is most likely, though Snow did re-enact moments for the benefit of the camera. In this book one of the photographs is of Snow kneeling at the edge of a hatch in a wooden floor. He’s wearing trousers and a crisply ironed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

Though the caption reads “The author about to descend into cellar of ruined house at

Middle Brewster,” this is from a later visit to the place where he had found the Italian

book, as Snow said in that chapter that he was wearing only swimming trunks and

404 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), 268. Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), ix.

282 sneakers when he first entered the house alone, pried open the cellar hatch, and found the text after a half-hour of searching in the darkness.405

The image recalls an event back in July of 1937, when Snow rescued a boy

trapped on the side of a hundred-foot cliff in his hometown of Winthrop. A group of boys had climbed the cliff, but one nine-year-old “found himself unable to either go up or down” once he reached a gully forty feet up. His cries for help alerted another boy who crossed the street and notified Snow. With another man and a group of boys holding a

rope, Snow lowered himself down the cliff face, grabbed the boy, and brought him up.

The story appeared in several papers including the Boston Post and Boston Globe. The photograph accompanying the latter article shows a courageous Snow on the slope of the cliff, his right hand wrapped around the end of the rope while his left arm holds the boy.

Fifty years later Snow’s wife, Anna-Myrle, revealed in an interview that “We have pictures of him as he reenacted the scene. The poor boy was scared to death and he did reenact it for the people to take pictures of it, believe it or not.” The picture takers were most likely newspaper photographers, as each article includes a different image. For his heroism Snow received a citation from the Humane Society of Massachusetts, and area newspapers got a positive story with dramatic photographs. The lesson that dramatic stories sell better with dramatic pictures was evidently not lost on Snow.406

In 1952 Snow again discovered pirate treasure, this time on the island of Isle

Haute off Nova Scotia. A treasure map once belonging to eighteenth-century English

pirate Edward Low had led him to a spot on the island’s shore where he unearthed eight

405 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), 258. 406 “Man Rescues Boy Trapped On Great Head at Winthrop,” Boston Globe, July 22, 1937, 28. “Winthrop By the Sea,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, directed, written, and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont (1988; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008).

283 coins and a human skeleton. When Snow tried to leave Canada with his booty, customs officials temporarily confiscated the coins for Snow’s lack of an export license. The sensational international story attracted the attention of Life magazine, and Snow worked with German-born photojournalist Eric Schaal on an article. Comprising three pages and nine photographs, “Red-Taped Gold” profiles the successful writer and treasure hunter.

Schaal traveled to Canada to photograph the lighthouse keeper and his wife who had hosted Snow, and also to Marshfield, Massachusetts, where he photographed the treasure map Snow had used, the letter from a Canadian customs officer explaining that they were temporarily holding his eight pieces of “Pirate’s Gold” until he applied for an export license, and Snow himself.

One image of Schaal’s shows Snow in front of his garage displaying his large collection of replica pirate flags and real treasure chests, pistols, swords, and other memorabilia. His two-year-old daughter stands next to him, tugging on a large whale vertebra. The other photograph is of Snow at a typewriter in his study, pointing to the

Low treasure map on a side table that also includes a human skull, vertebrae, and large pile of coins. Behind him are the pirate flags, an articulated skeleton sitting on a stack of chests, a ship model, and another human skull. Stoking the viewer’s appetite for more mystery, the final photograph in the article is of another map showing an island with buried treasure that Snow had yet to identify.

For reasons known only to the two men, Snow supplied the remaining three photographs. The first is of him walking along a rocky shore near his home while trying out a metal detector. The second is a profile photo he took of Isle Haute during either his boat trip to or from the island. The third photograph shows Snow’s growing flair for

284 drama. It’s a close shot of a skeletal hand protruding from a gravely beach next to a cardboard box containing the coins and several human vertebrae which Snow had already collected. The caption reads only “Treasure trove was found amid skeletal bones. Snow took bones into U. S. after certifying that they were not carriers of hoof and mouth disease.” Assuming the skeleton and coins both date to Low’s burial of loot in the same spot, it’s surprising that the bones of the hand remain articulated after two centuries underground. And the hand’s bleached white color is a sharp contrast to both the surrounding gravel and the darker vertebrae in the box. It’s unknown how Snow set up the shot, but in exposing the fingers and placing the box only a few inches away, the hand appears to be reaching out of the ground towards the collected loot.407

Snow continued to employ this romantic presentation of history the following

year with photographs he included in his True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953).

The first of the nineteen photographs in the book set the tone for how the reader should

view the remaining images and presumably the text. The photo shows an excavated

section of beach in which Snow has laid down a skeleton that he owned, wrapped fabric

around the upper torso, put an open iron chest in front with two human skulls inside, and

scattered around four pistols, two swords, and what appears to be a spade. In the

skeleton’s right hand is a stack of coins. The caption identifies the scene as “Pirate

tragedy of centuries ago revealed by shifting sands.” Snow is clearly having fun with his

subject. As with him posing at the settings for some of his stories, he is enjoying the

romance instead of purely reciting the facts.

But the scene is not wholly fictitious. While the “tragedy” and arrangement are

from his imagination, many of the items are recognizable as authentic pirate artifacts – or

407 “Red-Taped Gold,” Life, July 21, 1952, 13 (list of photo credits), 37-38, 40.

285 what Snow believed were authentic pirate artifacts when he bought or discovered them.

For instance, the articulated skeleton is likely that of pirate William Holmes, executed in

Boston in 1820 and whose body was used for medical research before Snow acquired the bones in the twentieth century. One of the other skulls was that of the pirate Blackbeard, which Snow purchased in 1949 in Virginia. And the stack of coins was likely from the hundreds that he discovered in 1945 in Chatham. Having the skeleton’s right hand holding coins was likely a nod to his 1952 discovery on Isle Haute – which Snow recounted in chapter eight and wondered whether the person had “fled from the other pirates with a fistful of gold and silver.” Readers familiar with Snow’s approach to storytelling would likely recognize such images as a romantic ideal that even Snow himself wasn’t lucky enough to uncover – though as the Life article demonstrated, he came closer than most. Snow shared his readers’ frustrations in relating his own failed and costly treasure hunts, but his less frequent and highly publicized discoveries continued to stoke his readers’ imaginations.408

Four additional photos show Snow interacting with the past. The one captioned

“A typical pirate treasure hunt” shows Snow in a suit standing around a shallow hole with

ten others. In the hole stands a boy examining something in his hands, while a man with

a metal detector stands at the side, listening. Another shows Snow, in shirt and tie in

“Captain Gruchy’s pirate tunnel at Boston.” Cobwebs cover his sleeve and back as he

408 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1953), 122. The photographs are between pages 34 and 35. Snow described the provenance of his skeleton in one of the exhibit placards that accompanied his “traveling museum” of artifacts at various lectures. See the placard text for nine artifacts on three typed pages in the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 16. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Snow’s purchase of Blackbeard’s skull described in Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1951), 121. “The coins were found near the skeleton and it is believed that at the time of death, the man (or woman) must have been holding the coins in his hand.” Betty MacDonald, “Coins Found By Treasure Seeker,” Amherst Daily News, June 28, 1952, 1.

286 sits at the truncated end of a brick-lined tunnel built in the 1740s to supposedly smuggle goods from the waterfront to Thomas Gruchy’s mansion. A photograph similar to the one by Eric Schaal has Snow posing in front of his garage in Marshfield with a stack of chests and weapons. Wearing a white dress shirt, Snow grips a pistol in one hand while the other holds open a treasure chest showing the elaborate locking mechanism. A replica pirate flag pinned to the garage wall forms a backdrop. The caption identifies the weapons as having once belonged to pirates Lolonois, Ann Bonney, Madame Ching, and

Ben Avery. The last photo of Snow in the book has him in a white shirt and tie, and smiling as he holds a silver-painted human skull, identified in the caption as that of

Blackbeard.409

Of all Snow’s artifacts, perhaps none was more sensational than the skull which he believed was that of “the greatest cutthroat of them all”: Edward Teach, or

Blackbeard. As Snow related many times over the years, Teach was an English-born pirate who operated in the Caribbean and eastern coast of the American colonies in the

1710s until he was killed during a bloody battle with two Royal Navy vessels off

Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, in November of 1718. One of the sailors cut off

Blackbeard’s head, and it was brought back to Bathtown, North Carolina, as proof of the

British victory. According to Snow, one of the leaders of the town acquired the skull, had it lined with silver, and then turned it into a macabre drinking vessel. The skull then continued in this capacity as part of a college fraternity’s initiation ritual. After the

409 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1953), 122. The photographs are between pages 34 and 35. Snow at various times listed the pirate as “Thomas Grouchy” and “Thomas Gruchy.” See the tunnel story in Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 42-45.

287 fraternity disbanded “about the time of the American Revolution,” it passed into the hands of a tavern owner, and then down through generations of his family.

While Snow was conducting an interview with a ninety-one year-old local historian in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1949, “a chance remark involving Blackbeard led to my later discovery of the infamous pirate’s venerable skull in a nearby section of

Virginia, still with its silver coasting. After considerable discussion, examination, and appraisal, the skull became my property.” Snow included a photograph of his new relic in Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (1950), but waited until the following year before explaining how he had acquired it. But the most sensational aspect of the story of

Blackbeard’s skull happened outside the pages of Snow’s books. If one is to believe his friend Robert Nesmith, Snow eventually knew that his purchase was authentic because on one dark and stormy night the skull talked to him.410

Nine years older than Snow, Robert I. Nesmith was a commercial photographer, numismatist, and authority on treasure hunting. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1891, he worked first as a salesman for Eastman Kodak in Rochester from 1912 to 1919 and then for various photographic services companies in New York City until 1930, when he started his own photography firm, R. I. Nesmith & Associates. Back in 1922 Nesmith first began reading about pirates and their treasure, and like Snow, it became a consuming

hobby that expanded from collecting literature, maps, and documents to authentic relics

and coins. By the 1950s he had established the Foul Anchor Archives in Rye, New York,

that he regarded as “one of the best libraries on the subject of piracy, buccaneering, and

treasure hunting.” By then he was a friend of Snow’s, and he recalled how back in 1945

410 Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1951), 104 (“greatest cutthroat”)-117, 120-121.

288 they had “spent an exciting evening” sorting through the 316 coins from the chest which

Snow had discovered in Chatham. Grateful for their friendship, Snow dedicated his True

Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (1953) to Nesmith, “who has a sincere interest in things piratical.”

Having authored a paper on a sixteenth-century mint in Mexico City for the

American Numismatic Society in 1955, Nesmith wrote a full-size book in 1958 on his favorite subject. Dig for Pirate Treasure surveyed tales “about the pirates and the

Spanish galleons and their treasures, how they were lost or hidden and of the modern searches to recover them.” Like Snow, he asked his readers to send in additional stories about their own treasure finds. And given that Snow was one of the few people to have twice discovered actual buried pirate treasure, Nesmith chose to write a chapter on his famous friend, but not covering a tale that Snow had written about.411

As Nesmith recounted in “The Pirate’s Skull,” Snow sent a telegram one morning

to his New York office asking him to immediately take a train to Boston and stay the

night. Assuming his friend had important news, Nesmith did, and dined with Edward and

Anna-Myrle at their Marshfield home before the men retired upstairs to Snow’s study.

Ever aware of setting the proper mood for a story, Snow made sure he had driftwood

burning in the fireplace and his friend a drink in hand before confessing, in a room

already filled with pirate relics, that he had found the skull of Blackbeard. He produced a

small iron-banded wooden box and opened it to reveal an engraved silver plate fastened

411 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), viii-ix (Nesmith’s early interest in pirates and what this book is about), 13 (Snow’s 1945 discovery), 275 (Foul Anchor Archives quote). Edward Rowe Snow, True Tales of Pirates and Their Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1953), v (Nesmith dedication). “Robert I. Nesmith.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 10 July 2011. http://go.galegroup.com.revproxy.brown.edu/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1000072517&v=2.1&u=prov98893 &it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w (accessed July 10, 2011).

289 to the underside of the lid listing the name of the pirate, the officer who had slain him, and his date of death. Snow then lifted out an object covered in tissue paper, which he unwrapped to reveal a silver-coated human skull.412

Snow went over Blackbeard’s brief biography and then the skull’s strange centuries-long afterlife that culminated with his purchase of it in Virginia. When

Nesmith questioned the skull’s authenticity, Snow offered a new kind of evidence that he had never shared with his readers:

“I know it is the skull of Blackbeard,” said Snow positively. “I’ll tell you what finally proved it to me. I have not told this to anyone; in fact, I don’t dare to. You know that I am a sensible, sober man [Snow was a teetotaler]. You know that I would not try to fool you. I know that this is Blackbeard’s skull because he talked to me. Right here. Last night. Right where I am sitting now.” And while the rain beat on the windows and the firelight flickered, Ed talked on as I stared at the skull and it stared back at me.413

Snow related how the previous night he had been trying to finish a chapter in his next

book, while outside a storm brought wind that “was howling around the chimney and the

eaves. A shutter was loose and banging.” He thought of the lighthouse keepers and

fishermen at work in this weather, and famous shipwrecks that had happened under

similar conditions. Now “torrents of rain beat against the dormer windows. The wind rose almost to screams.” It was then that Snow heard a low voice giving nautical commands. But he was alone. He first dismissed it as some sort of practical joke or a nightmare brought on by overwork. But then he heard the voice again, and Snow, having eliminated what rational explanations he could think of, looked at the silver skull sitting on his windowsill and asked if it had spoken to him. It answered yes, and identified itself

412 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 105-106. 413 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 108.

290 as having formerly been Captain Teach. Only minutes before Snow had been writing about Teach for his chapter. He threw a sheet of paper over the handwritten paragraph.414

Snow paused his story and told Nesmith “I have never been a believer in spirit

manifestations, perhaps because I was never fortunate enough to witness any. But here

was a mystery that demanded consideration – something that could not be explained

away on the theory that my senses had deceived me.” So he then recounted his

conversation with the skull, the full dialogue of which Nesmith provided in his chapter.

After talking about the pirate’s death and rumors about his many wives, Snow asked

Blackbeard for a clue to the location of some of his buried treasure, promising “I can

make you more famous in my next book with a lead to work on, and I will not belittle

your genius, I can assure you.” But just as the skull was giving him directions to a stash

near the town of Nahant just north of Boston, a simultaneous flash of lightning and

thunderclap lit up the room, the skull toppled to the floor, and the power went out. Snow

turned on a flashlight and found that the skull had lost two teeth in the fall, and

apparently its desire to speak. Nesmith concluded the chapter by saying that he agreed

with Snow that the skull was Blackbeard’s, “Because nobody else but Blackbeard and the

Devil knows where his treasures are buried and I am very sure that Ed was not chatting

with the Devil on that stormy night on Cape Cod.”415

It’s hard to know what to make of Nesmith’s account of what Snow supposedly

told him. Nesmith includes most of the dialogue between himself and Snow as they sat

by the fire, which includes the complete conversation between Snow and the skull from

the night before. Nesmith apparently didn’t have a photographic memory to retain such

414 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 107-111. 415 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 111-115.

291 detail. When Nesmith quotes Snow describing Blackbeard’s death and his skull’s subsequent use, these three paragraphs have only a few words changed from the same story told on page 120 of Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure. Either Snow told his story to Nesmith aloud exactly how he had previously written it, and Nesmith exactly remembered and reproduced it, or Nesmith had Snow’s 1951 book open to this page when he was reconstructing the conversation.416

Additionally, when Snow said that he had just been writing about Blackbeard

when the skull started speaking to him, Nesmith reproduces the paragraph that Snow was

working on at that moment. These lines first appeared in print on pages eight and nine of

Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands, and, given Snow’s fondness for not wasting

something that was well written, on page 111 of True Tales of Buried Treasure. He was

therefore working on one of these two books on the night of his supernatural

conversation. As Snow wrote the introduction for the former book on August 7, 1950,

and the latter on June 7, 1951, this encounter with Blackbeard’s ghost and subsequent

conversation with Nesmith occurred some time in 1950 or 1951.417

Nesmith adds one last wrinkle to the story. In the chapter-by-chapter

bibliography at the back of Dig for Pirate Treasure, Nesmith describes his sources for

this chapter as: “The facts on Snow’s discovery of Blackbeard’s skull, as he told them to

my friend Captain Jafar Clarke, together with the historical events in Blackbeard’s life,

are based on history.” Jafar Clarke was a pseudonym which Nesmith apparently used

when writing about lost treasure for popular magazines. While “The Pirate’s Skull”

chapter is written in the first person, Nesmith’s name does not appear in the quoted

416 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 107-108. 417 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 111.

292 dialogue. But at one point when Snow is talking to the skull he mentions his friend Jafar

Clarke, who believed that Blackbeard never buried any of his treasure. Snow wouldn’t likely have referred to his friend by his pen name when talking to any person or a ghost for that matter, so the substitution was likely Nesmith’s choice. Why Nesmith chose to pretend that his pseudonym was a mutual friend who had spoken to Snow is unclear – especially since this twist is only revealed to those readers who flip to the bibliography.

As Nesmith is the book’s author, it’s logical to assume that when a chapter uses the first person, that individual is Robert Nesmith. Perhaps in using Jafar Clarke, Nesmith was just having fun in pretending that his fans did not know his pen name. Or, more likely it was a sign to careful readers that this chapter was a fantastic departure from the more serious and journalistic accounts of treasure hunting in the rest of the book.418

What parts of the chapter were “based on history” were likely the details of

Blackbeard’s life, the skull’s provenance, and that two pirate-obsessed friends met for a

conversation during which Snow showed off his latest purchase. The rest was likely a

collaborative literary performance, as Nesmith likely wouldn’t write a tale about Snow’s

newfound belief in ghosts without his permission. The titular buried treasure in this case,

then, was a colorful but fictitious story tucked in between real ones.

Whether or not Snow spoke to a pirate’s ghost one dark and stormy night, his

public opinion of the supernatural did change over time. In Strange Tales from Nova

Scotia to Cape Hatteras, Snow stated in 1949 that “I, for one, do not believe in ghosts,

but the story which will be revealed in this chapter is perhaps the most outstanding

418 Robert Nesmith, Dig for Pirate Treasure (New York, N.Y.: Devin-Adair Company, 1958), 113, 283. For examples of Nesmith writing under his pseudonym, see Capt. Jafar Clarke, “Treasure of the ‘Thetis’,” Treasure Adventure, Spring 1961. Capt. Jafar Clarke, “Galleon Gold: Who Gets To Keep The Goodies,” True Treasure, October 1966, 18; and Capt. Jafar Clarke, “Confederate Gold in North Carolina,” True Treasure, April 1969, 23.

293 example of unexplained ghost-like happenings ever recorded.” But in Ghosts, Gales and

Gold (1972), he opens a chapter with “A resident of Winthrop, Massachusetts, who was born in Wales, one day took me aside to ask if I believed in the existence of ghosts. I told him I was openminded about ghosts in general, and admitted I believed many ghost stories were founded in fact, but in other cases I was sure that the tales were not supernatural in origin.” The following year, “During the lecture on things supernatural which I gave at the University of New Hampshire … I emphasized my firm conviction that we should accept the possibility that matters which we cannot explain or comprehend may be actualities.” This opinion aligns with a statement from Anna-Myrle in a 1996 documentary that regarding her husband’s view of the past “The possibility was as important to Edward as the fact that it maybe might have been.” By the 1970s, Snow’s historical openmindedness included cryptozoology (by 1944), alternative versions of

New England’s early exploration and settlement (by 1950), and the supernatural (after

1949). Perhaps taking a cue from P. T. Barnum that controversy attracted an audience,

Snow embraced legendary artifacts and colorful stories as vivid, if unorthodox, ways to educate the public about his favorite corners of maritime history.419

419 Edward Rowe Snow, Strange Tales from Nova Scotia to Cape Hatteras (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1949), 61. Edward Rowe Snow, Ghosts, Gales and Gold (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972), 52. Edward Rowe Snow, Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1974), vii. “Edward Rowe Snow,” Chronicle, WCVB-TV, February 2, 1996. For Snow’s belief in cryptozoology: “Boston Bay, according to the records and statements of landsmen and sailors of the last three centuries, has from time to time been visited by that never caught but often sighted denizen of the deep, the sea serpent. There are those who claim with haughty disdain that they know that there is not such thing as this mysterious creature of the ocean. I cannot agree. I believe that we should all look at the possibility with open minds, not necessarily deciding that there must be sea serpents, but perhaps saying, ‘Why not?’” Edward Rowe Snow, The Romance of Boston Bay (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1944), 19. For Snow’s belief in alternate histories: “After a careful study of all the facts, I believe that the Newport Tower [an old stone tower in Newport, R.I.] was built in 1121 by one of the early Norse explorers, Eric Gnuppson, who copied it after a round church of the Holy Sepulchre which he had seen in the Holy Land several years before. But there is no authentic proof of this. The tower remains the island’s secret. Some day we may discover who built it, when it was constructed and why –

294

For the Edward Rowe Snow fans who were intrigued by the artifacts in his books, they could see them in person at his lectures and other public appearances. Surviving lecture flyers show how he promoted himself. They always included a publicity photo of

Snow, the theme (which often coincided with his latest book topic), and usually some of the stories that he would cover. In some cases these are multiple pages, include a lengthy biography and bibliography, and offer more than one lecture – which suggests that they were sent to the operators of potential venues around New England, including schools, libraries, clubs, churches, and lodges. As with his other writings, the flyers continue his preference for superlatives such as “SEA WONDER TALES NEVER BEFORE

REVEALED,” “YOUR ENTERTAINMENT THRILL OF THE 1955 SEASON,”

“NOTHING LIKE IT EVER BEFORE,” and “AN INSPIRED CHALLENGE TO

TELEVISION.” When E. B. Garside wrote a glowing review in the New York Times of

Great Sea Rescues and Tales of Survival (1958) and pronounced its author “For my money he is just about the best chronicler of the days of sail alive today,” Snow judiciously shortened this in subsequent flyers to “called by the New York Times ‘the best chronicler of the days of sail alive today.’”420

By the late 1930s Snow was illustrating his talks with slides and movies, and by

the early 1950s had added a traveling museum of relics. In claiming that he could rival

television, a circa 1952 flyer explained that the audience could see, hear, and touch what

they encountered:

but I doubt it.” Edward Rowe Snow, Secrets of the North Atlantic Islands (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1950), 264. 420 For examples of Snow’s flyers see the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 9 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 49 overall), Folders “Lectures” and “Lecture Circulars”; Box 10, Folder 7; and Box 27, Folders 23 and 24. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Edward B. Garside, “Salty Yarns of Survival,” New York Times, January 25, 1959, BR16.

295

For after his stories and moving pictures have ended, the audience is invited to come forward and examine selected articles which Mr. Snow has placed on the stage, such as pirate treasure chests, gold and silver from uncovered treasures, shipwreck material, pirate daggers, pistols, handcuffs, and scores of other interesting relics of bygone days. You will have the chance to run your hands through genuine pirate treasure!421

Connecting people with the sites and artifacts of history was Snow’s approach to storytelling since his days as a teacher in Winthrop. The cost of these items was part of the allure, as sometimes the flyers would include the insurance value of his “traveling museum.” Around 1952 it was worth $14,000 or the equivalent of $113, 705 in 2010, and by 1954 it had increased to $17,000 or $136,841 today. Included in Snow’s surviving personal papers is the text for placards that accompanied one version of the traveling museum. They are brief, unambiguous, and sensational:

 “THIS TRAVELING MUSEUM OF EDWARD ROWE SNOW PATRIOT LEDGER COLUMNIST IS DRAWN FROM ALL POINTS OF THE WORLD CONTAINING AUTHENTIC, DOCUMENTED ARTICLES PERTAINING TO THE SEA AND THE MEN WHO SAILED IT.”

 “FRAGMENT OF PLANE BROUGHT UP FROM OFF JEWEL ISLAND IN CASCO BAY WHERE FAMED FRENCH ACES ARE BELIEVED TO HAVE CRASHED ON MAY 9, 1927, THE DAY AFTER THEY TOOK OFF IN THEIR AIRCRAFT ‘WHITE BIRD.’”

 “MODEL OF OLD MINOT’S LIGHT WHICH CRASHED INTO SEA DURING STORM OF SAME NAME, APRIL 17, 1851, WITH THE LOSS OF THE TWO KEEPERS, JOSEPH ANTOINE AND JOSEPH WILSON.”

 “SKELETON OF SO-CALLED THIRD CLIFF PIRATE, WILLIAM HOLMES, WHO WAS HANGED IN BOSTON ON JUNE 15, 1820 AFTER BURYING TREASURE AT THIRD CLIFF, SCITUATE. THE BODY OF HOLMES WAS LATER USED FOR DISSECTION BY DR. J. W. WEBSTER, WHO WAS LATER HANGED HIMSELF FOR THE MURDER OF DR. PARKMAN.”

 “TRIPLE WRIST DAGGER, SAID TO BE MOST DIABOLICAL WEAPON EVER INVENTED BY THE DISORDERED BRAIN OF MAN. IT WAS USED BY THE MAN BUCCANEER LOLONAIS DURING HIS PANAMA RAVAGES.”

421 “AN INSPIRED CHALLENGE TO TELEVISION,” [flyer], Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 9 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 49 overall), Folder “Lecture Circulars.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. For notices of Snow giving illustrated lectures in the 1930s see “Among the Churches,” Boston Globe, November 23, 1935, 9; and “Port of Boston,” Boston Globe, November 3, 1938, 15.

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 “THE SKULL OF BLACKBEARD THE PIRATE, WHICH WAS SILVERED AND USED AS A DRINKING MUG BETWEEN 1723 AND 1794, AFTER WHICH IT BECAME AN INITIATION IMPLEMENT DURING UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA RITES.”

 “TREASURE COINS FROM THIRTEEN DIFFERENT TREASURE HOARDS, ALL LOCATED IN NEW ENGLAND. THE SILVER COINS ARE MOSTLY PIECES OF EIGHT, THE GOLD COINS DUBLOONS.”

 “THE THREE DAGGERS ARE ALL CONCERNED WITH PIRACY. THE TWISTED BLADE IS THE CREESE OF MADAME CHING, THE WORLD’S GREATEST PIRATE, THE STRAIGHT BLADE WAS CAPTURED BY CAPT. JOSHUA ROWE IN BATTLE ON MINDANAO WITH PIRATES, AND THE CURVED BLADE IS A DAMASCUS SWORD WHICH ACTUALLY CUT THE HEAD OF BLACKBEARD AFTER HIS BEING KILLED IN BATTLE BY CAPT. MAYNARD.”

 “THE FIRST NOTCHED GUN IN HISTORY, WHICH WAS OWNED BY NEWPORT’S PIRATE TOM TEW, WHO KILLED THIRTY-TWO PERSONS WITH IT BETWEEN 1694 AND 1710.”

 “GIANT TREASURE CHEST OWNED AT ONE TIME BY PIRATE FRANCIS SPRIGGS. THE CHEST HAS A SECRET LOCK IN THE TOP OF THE LID AND WOULD COST $6500 TO DUPLICATE TODAY.”

His specificity and near absence of qualifiers lend authority to the lurid anecdotes, while sparing Snow from having to repeatedly identify each artifact for each viewer. And the placards serve as a starting point for Snow telling further details of these stories that he knew by heart, and likely had told during the lecture that these appeared in.422

Snow’s daughter Dorothy in an interview for a 1990 documentary provided a sense of how the public responded to a Snow lecture:

I have wonderful memories of lectures. … They’d leave way early, and usually get there before the people even thought about expecting him. So some janitor would let him in and he’d start setting things up and people would wander in and go “What are those?” And he’d start talking. And then by the time the lecture started he had this enormous crowd of people asking about things. And afterwards there would often be a question and answer period. And it often would have to be stopped because it would be so late. He never would run out of questions. It was always that the hall had to close, or something had to happen. But they just loved the curios. They are so interesting and so unique that they told a story all by themselves sometimes.

422 For circa 1952 valuation of traveling museum see “The LONGMEADOW MEN’S CLUB,” [flyer], Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 27, Folder 24. For 1954 valuation see “YOUR ENTERTAINMENT THRILL OF THE 1955 SEASON,” [flyer], Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 10, Folder 7. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. For placard text see the three typed pages in Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 16. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University.

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Snow knew that unusual items attracted an audience, and so he also sometimes brought artifacts to book signings and on his harbor tours.423

After Anna-Myrle and Edward moved to Marshfield in 1950 he agreed to take

over a loose-knit touring group that visited sites of interest around Boston. In existence

since 1928, members of the Harbor Ramblers paid a yearly subscription to receive

frequent notices of tours that Snow now scheduled year-round, usually on weekends. In

1962 Snow estimated the group’s membership between 350 and 900 people. Most tours began at Boston’s Long Wharf, and could be a walking trip to Snow’s favorite historic sites around the city, or by boat to the islands and lighthouses in Boston Harbor, or farther a field via boat or plane to Nantucket, Casco Bay in Maine, the Isles of Shoals off

New Hampshire, New York City, or points in between. Writing to a public relations official of a local hospital who had enquired about his trips for their staff, Snow cautioned that “For any one who has not gone on any trips before, it may be more or less

of a shock, because we have adventures and not strictly trips. Every one is welcome,

however, providing they realize that we do not ‘cater to tourists’ as the expression may be, but we really are a group of people who wish to do something different on week ends.” In a form letter to all Ramblers he advised everyone to wear old clothes, dress for the weather, and bring a lunch if they chose. Snow’s version of local history was tangible, gritty, and strenuous.424

423 “True Tales of Pirates and Treasure,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1990; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). This part also includes Anna- Myrle describing Snow bringing a treasure chest to a Jordan Marsh book signing and Snow friend Joe Kolb recalling “Periodically he’d bring various artifacts out with him, on these harbor island tours. It might be Blackbeard’s skull, it might be a pistol carried by John Paul Jones. It could be just about anything.” 424 Snow taking over the Harbor Ramblers recalled by Anna-Myrle in “The Romance of Boston Bay,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). Snow’s form letter explaining the Rambler’s origins and operations is

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Through the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, members climbed lighthouses, scrambled over islands, shared steamed clams, explored coastal fortifications and caves, and commemorated local anniversaries such as the loss of the steamer Portland in 1898 and the Boston Tea Party in 1773. For the 199th anniversary of the latter, Snow somehow acquired some of the original tea – which he brewed and served to members at the spot.

Snow also led tours for specific companies; youth, women’s, and veterans’ groups;

schools, colleges, churches, political and historical organizations, and patriotic societies.

Additionally he sometimes worked for tour companies, narrating lectures aboard harbor

ferries. For those who had not had the opportunity to follow Snow personally, he gave a

virtual tour of Boston’s “ghost spots” for television viewers on Halloween night in 1970.

Having been a guest on various television programs since the 1950s, “the white-haired

storyteller used his most sepulchral tones in an attempt to create an eerie atmosphere,”

noted one viewer, as he recounted – with accompanying ghostly music – tales of death

and heroism and subsequent spectral events – including, of course, his favorite Lady in

Black.

Overall, when it came to the public presentation of maritime history in New

England, Edward Rowe Snow was the region’s most prominent and active storyteller

from the 1930s through the 1970s. But Snow’s enthusiasm into his seventies for

personally leading people on adventures into the past was not wholly about making a

living. Yes, he created a marketable version of maritime New England. But he cared

in Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 8 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 48 overall), Folder “Harbor Ramblers”. Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Estimated size of Harbor Ramblers from letter from Edward Rowe Snow to Frank Donohue, March 8, 1962. Edward Rowe Snow to Nancy McCauliff of the Public Relations Division of Beth Israel Hospital, dated October 28, 1962. Both letters from Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 18 (“Trips”). Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University.

299 deeply about the places he introduced thousands of people to, and no more so than the islands of Boston Harbor. And of all these islands, it was Georges Island, with its historic Fort Warren, that Snow was determined to preserve.425

Snow as preservationist

Edward Rowe Snow’s interest in the fortifications in Boston Harbor dated back to

his explorations of the islands as a child, and then his formal study of their history for his

Harvard thesis and subsequent first book. One of these was Governor’s Island, a short

paddle from his Winthrop home. First owned by Snow’s ancestor Roger Conant in the

1620s, the colony later acquired and leased it to then Governor John Winthrop in 1632,

whose heirs later purchased it. Around 1744 the colony built the first fortifications on the

island, followed by the United States government establishing a fort in 1808 named for patriot Dr. Joseph Warren, who was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The government continued to expand Fort Warren into the 1870s, though it changed the name to Fort

Winthrop with the establishment of Fort Warren on Georges Island in 1833.

No longer a modern defensive position, the island in the twentieth century became a popular recreation site for Bostonians, some of whom built summer cottages. But in the early 1930s government officials began exploring the idea of expanding the city’s airport in East Boston out into the harbor to Governor’s Island. In response, a group of historians formed the Society for the Preservation of Governor’s Island in 1936. Among

425 For the places that Edward Rowe Snow conducted tours and for whom in the 1960s and ‘70s, see correspondence and postcards in Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 37, Folder 18 (“Trips”); and Box 8 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 48 overall), Folder “Harbor Ramblers.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. An example of Snow working for a private tour company is his agreement to do a ten- day block of harbor tours in 1966 for the Boston Harbor Tours company aboard the M/V Provincetown. See the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 3 (of 1992 Addendum – Box 43 overall), Folder “Boston Harbor Tours.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University. Percy Shain, “Viewers given tour of Boston’s ‘ghost spots,’” Boston Globe, November 2, 1970, 38.

300 the members were Snow, his future mentor Robert E. Moody, and long-time preservation activist William Sumner Appleton, who had started the Society for the Preservation of

New England Antiquities back in 1910. With Snow serving as secretary, the group stressed that they were not against “the rightful development of any of Boston’s future activities,” but felt expanding the airport did not have to mean leveling the fort. After rallying the support of area historical and social organizations (which included Snow leading tours of the island and fort), the society convinced the Boston Park Department in

1938 to turn over control of the island to them. The group envisioned repairing the fort and installing a resident caretaker to discourage vandals.426

It was a short-lived victory. With the start of World War II the need for a modern

airport with longer runways became essential. The state acquired title to Governor’s

Island and nearby Apple Island in 1941, and the following year construction crews built a

dike between the airport and Governor’s Island. Four dredges worked year round to

expand the old 325-acre airport into a new 2000-acre one that swallowed Governor’s and

nearby Apple and Bird islands. In the fall of 1946 Fort Winthrop itself was dynamited to

construct a new runway. Snow was surprisingly accepting about the loss of the popular

recreation and historic site, observing that “The leveling of historic Governor’s Island

should be gladly accepted by all Bostonians if it brings a great American plane base here

as a result. Then Boston again would be the port of a century ago, exchanging her white

426 For more on William Sumner Appleton, see James Michael Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995). History of Governor’s Island from Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 124-140. “Historians Oppose Taking of Governors Island for Airport,” Boston Globe, July 23, 1936, 5. “Fight to Save Governor’s Island Fortifications,” Boston Globe, September 5, 1936, 13. “Antiquities Society is Host to League,” Boston Globe, January 17, 1937, B14. “Pleas to Save Governors Island Win Favor of Crowd There, 270-5,” Boston Globe, June 13, 1937, A1. “Governors Island Given Over To Society For Preservation,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1938, B2. “When Boston Dreamed of Vineyards: John Winthrop and Governors Island Were to Supply Old Town With Its Wine,” Boston Globe, September 2, 1945, C5.

301 wings of the clippers for the silver wings of the air.” His comment showed his understanding that Boston needed modern infrastructure to thrive, and as a historian he knew that the expansion of Logan Airport by filling in part of Boston Harbor was how the peninsular city had expanded since the seventeenth century. But Snow would not be so accepting about the fate of Georges Island.427

Located at the entrance to Boston Harbor, Georges Island saw intermittent

military use during the eighteenth century. But in 1834 the federal government began

constructing a massive pentagonal granite fort that encompassed much of the island.

During the Civil War, Fort Warren achieved fame as the birthplace of the song “John

Brown’s Body,” and where thousands of Confederate prisoners were incarcerated. In the

following decades the U.S. Army continually modernized the fort, and it remained in

service through World War II.

Snow had first visited Georges Island in 1926 with his brother, and in the 1930s

led a memorial committee that dedicated a plaque to the fort’s three prominent prisoners,

and conducted a commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Union song. In

at least the latter case and likely in both, he also led participants on a tour of Fort Warren.

Following the destruction of Governor’s Island, Fort Warren became his favorite place in

the harbor. When the U.S. Army decided after the war that the fort was no longer

necessary, Snow participated in the closing ceremony on July 30, 1950. After giving a

history of the fort to the assembled crowd, he temporarily accepted custody of the fort’s

427 William Clark, “Harbor Gives Up 2000-Acre Airport,” Boston Globe, July 15, 1945, B1. Donald Willard, “How Giant Boston Airport Is Being Built From Mud,” Boston Globe, January 20, 1946, D1. Arthur Riley, “From an East Boston Cinder Patch to a Leading World Airport,” Boston Globe, September 28, 1947, A23. “Two Mighty Dynamite Blasts Fail to Destroy Historic Fort Winthrop,” Boston Globe, October 27, 1946, C9. The source of Snow’s quotation is unknown, though it appears in “The Romance of Boston Bay,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). For more on landmaking see Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Boston, MA.: MIT Press, 2003).

302 flag and delivered it to the State House for preservation. What would become of the fort itself was less clear.428

With only a single caretaker to guard the island, salvagers and vandals began surreptitiously stripping anything of value from Fort Warren and causing widespread damage to what remained. The General Services Administration eventually decided to put federally-owned Georges Island, Peddocks Island (the site of Fort Andrews), Lovells

Island (the site of Fort Standish) a portion of Spectacle Island (the site of a garbage dump), and a parcel in East Boston up for auction on November 22, 1957. The announcement grabbed the attention of area residents, businesses, and social and historical organizations, who eyed the properties as either unique real estate investments

or important pieces of the past that should be kept for public use. Among these,

Congressman Richard B. Wigglesworth representing the Massachusetts Thirteenth

District hoped the auction could be delayed until a responsible group could be found to

take over Georges Island, while Edward Rowe Snow announced the creation of a Society

428 Early history of Fort Warren from the first chapter of Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 1-38; Frank Barnes says that construction of the fort began in the spring of 1834. Frank Barnes, Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, GSA Control No. D-Mass-456; Report on Application by Metropolitan District Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for Transfer of Surplus Federal Properties for a Historical Monument (N.p.: National Park Service, April 1958), 16. Metropolitan District Commission, Report Library, Georges Island, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Snow’s early experience with Fort Warren from his confidential report submitted to MDC Commissioner Robert F. Murphy on May 22, 1961. See Edward Rowe Snow, “Report on Fort Warren,” Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. “Plaque at Fort Warren to Honor Confederacy,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1935, 9. “Women’s Relief Corps Pays Honor to Confederate Trio, Boston Globe, June 10, 1935, 2. “Commemorative Exercises for Song ‘John Brown’s Body,’” Boston Globe, May 24, 1936, A19. Anna-Myrle stated in an interview that “When Governor’s Island was taken away, Fort Warren became his most enjoyable place.” See “The Romance of Boston Bay,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). “100th Anniversary of Fort Warren Observed Today,” Boston Globe, July 30, 1950, C3. “Famed Ft. Warren Closed by Army as Surplus Item,” Boston Globe, July 31, 1950, 17. There is a photograph of Snow accepting the folded American flag in an undated (but either July 31 or August 1, 1950) newspaper clipping along with an undated column of his entitled “Fort Warren’s Flag Lowered in 1946” in his personal papers at Boston University. See the Edward Rowe Snow Collection, Box 7 (of 1992 Addendum – box 47 overall), Folder “Fort Warren.” Howard Gottlieb Research Center, Boston University.

303 for the Preservation of Fort Warren to oppose the auction. As the fortifications on

Peddocks and Lovells both dated to the twentieth century, Georges Island, with its massive fort and famous Civil War history, was the iconic property among the list of parcels.429

Despite some local opposition, the auction took place as planned in a Boston courtroom crowded with more than 300 people. The New England Tank Company of

Cambridge bought Lovells Island for $28,000, while a group comprising car-rental executive Richard S. Robie, banker Alan Sturgis, and shipbuilder Isadore Bromfield bought the rest. Snow attended the auction and put in a bid of around $10,000 for

Georges Island before the Robie group eventually won it for $28,000, along with

Peddocks for $35,000, and Spectacle for $4,500. Though Snow later claimed in 1971 that Georges Island “was sold to a group interested in using the deep dungeons and passages for the storage of contaminated atomic material,” the Boston Globe reported the following day that Robie had pledged that the islands would become “the outstanding yachting center of the East Coast, and the finest Summer recreational area on the

Atlantic.” But whatever plans the businessmen had for the islands were immediately halted when the Metropolitan District Commission submitted an application to the GSA on the day of the auction, to acquire Georges Island as a “national shrine” and Lovells

429 For vandalism see Joe Harrington, “Vandals do More Damage Than the Red Coats,” Boston Globe, October 4, 1959, A67. For caretaker and Snow starting SPFW see Fred Brady, “Auctioning of Fort Warren Stirs Ghosts of Lady in Black, Civil War,” Boston Herald, November 3, 1957, A3. For the GSA auction see the classified ad “At Public Auction,” Boston Globe, November 3, 1957, A46 and New York Times, November 3, 1957, 338. For Wigglesworth’s efforts see James J. Collins, “Along the South Shore,” Boston Globe, November 3, 1957, 30. For history of Peddocks and Lovells see Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 167, 179. For list of thirteen organizations interested in saving Fort Warren see page 10 of the Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.

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Island for “a yachting and recreational center.” As a state agency, the MDC had first call on the properties – should the GSA approve their development plans and suitability as a recipient.430

Established in 1893 as the Metropolitan Parks Commission, the MDC since 1920 was responsible for water, sewer, and park operations in Boston and thirty-seven surrounding communities. Among its 1,700 personnel were engineers, maintenance workers, and police officers to manage the almost 13,000 acres of beaches, parks, and parkways under their control. With the power to acquire additional open space for public recreation on behalf of the state, the MDC already had several historic properties under its care. In its application to the federal government for Georges Island it described three.

In 1904 it purchased a seventeenth-century mansion known as the Quincy Homestead in

Quincy and collaborated with the Massachusetts chapter of the National Society of The

Colonial Dames of America to operate it as a museum. In 1919 the MDC accepted title to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, from the association which had gradually built the granite obelisk from 1827 to 1843. And in 1931 the MDC purchased an undeveloped coastal parcel of land in Quincy known as Moswetuset Hummuck – “an area of Indian occupation supposed to have played a significant part in the derivation of the name of our state.” Though unstated, adding an island with a famous Civil War fort would bring the history that the MDC could interpret into the modern era.431

430 “3 Harbor Islands Sold but MDC May Get Two of Them,” Boston Globe, November 23, 1957, 1. Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 33-34. 431 For MDC history and stewardship of historic sites see pages 6 and 7 of the Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957; and Frank Barnes, Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, GSA Control No. D-Mass-456; Report on Application by Metropolitan District Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for Transfer of

305

Since at least the beginning of 1956, the MDC was interested in acquiring the federally-owned islands of Georges, Peddocks, and Lovells in Boston Harbor. But for reasons that are unclear in the surviving correspondence between the General Services

Administration and the MDC, although the GSA offered as early as November of 1956 to not put the properties up for public auction pending receiving their applications for the islands – and waited for them until May 6, 1957 before proceeding with auction plans – the MDC delayed until auction day to submit the one for Georges, with an application for

Lovells submitted a week later. The Commission decided against acquiring Peddocks.432

The Georges Island application shows Edward Rowe Snow playing a prominent

role in the process. In the document’s eighteen pages of text the MDC describes its

organization, finances, experience operating parks, and plans for restoration and

development of the fort as a historical monument. But it turned to Snow to explain Fort

Warren’s historical significance – crediting him by name as “the eminent historian,

author and lecturer of Boston Harbor and the New England Coast.” In his three-page report written on November 6, 1957, Snow summarized the island’s important names and dates, concluding with what he felt were the “five important events which have occurred at the fort.” Aside from the expected “John Brown’s Body” song written in 1861,

Confederate diplomats Mason and Slidell imprisoned in 1861, Confederate vice president

Surplus Federal Properties for a Historical Monument (N.p.: National Park Service, April 1958), 11, 14. Metropolitan District Commission, Report Library, Georges Island, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. 432 “Neglected Islands in Boston Harbor Surveyed as Recreational Centers,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1956, B59. Earliest surviving correspondence showing MDC interest in acquiring islands is letter from Donald L. Kline of the Edwards, Kelcey and Beck consulting agency to Commissioner Charles W. Greenough of the MDC, dated February 1, 1956. See also letter from Regional Director C. H. Cool of the GSA to Charles W. Greenough of the MDC, dated April 29, 1957. For MDC deciding against Peddocks, see “Extract from Records of Meeting, November 7, 1957” on page 9 of the Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.

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Alexander Stephens in 1865, and what Snow described as “The last handshake between a

Union veteran and a Southern veteran” taking place in 1935 during a bronze plaque dedication (which Snow arranged), was #4: “The Southern spy, Mrs. Andrew Lanier, was hanged here. Her ghost is said to haunt the island.” After two decades of writing, lecturing and leading tours, legends were essential to Snow’s manner of describing the past, whether to families on a harbor tour or civil servants reading another government agency’s official application.433

The National Park Service was actually responsible for reviewing the MDC’s

application and submitting a report to the GSA. It found the agency to be relatively

inexperienced in managing historic properties but still an acceptable custodian, and

dispatched NPS regional historian Frank Barnes to make a site visit to help determine

Fort Warren’s historical importance, condition, and feasibility of the MDC’s

development plans. As the acknowledged expert on the history of Boston Harbor and

particularly Fort Warren, Edward Rowe Snow joined Barnes on January 20, 1958 along

with MDC officials to inspect the island. Having explained the historical significance in

the MDC’s application, Snow now had the opportunity to illustrate his case in person.

And having spent two decades leading thousands of people – in 1961 Snow estimated

25,000 – around the fort, Snow knew how to make an audience appreciate it. In Barnes’s

NPS report submitted three months later, he omitted any mention of ghosts in describing

the fort’s significance, but included Snow’s 1941 Historic Fort Warren among his

433 See pages 10 and 16-18 of Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.

307 sources, and concluded that Fort Warren more than met the criteria for historical significance.434

With the GSA approving of MDC plans for both Georges and Lovells, the MDC

took title to both islands on July 14, 1958, and paid the federal government $4,860.06 and

$18,485.06 respectively. Only two days later the Boston landscape architectural firm

Shurcliff & Merrill wrote to the head of the MDC asking to be consultants for the

forthcoming engineering work on the islands. In making their case, company head

Sidney Shurcliff pointed out his experience from 1928 through 1940 in the restoration of

what became Colonial Williamsburg, and site development for Old Sturbridge Village

and the MDC’s own Quincy Homestead property. Shurcliff had worked in Williamsburg

under his father, Arthur A. Shurcliff, who had been the head landscape architect in what

became the most important example of historic preservation in the United States. Having

died the previous year, his son Sidney now led the firm. No doubt in part due to their

reputation in the field, the MDC hired Shurcliff & Merrill to draft the History and Master

Plan for Georges Island, which they completed in May, 1960. For the forty-page

historical research portion, the firm hired Minor H. McLain, who had just completed his

PhD dissertation in 1955 at Boston University on the Civil War prison conditions at Fort

Warren.435

434 Frank Barnes, Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, GSA Control No. D-Mass- 456; Report on Application by Metropolitan District Commission, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for Transfer of Surplus Federal Properties for a Historical Monument (N.p.: National Park Service, April 1958), 3, 9. Metropolitan District Commission, Report Library, Georges Island, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Snow’s tour estimate from page 8 of his confidential report submitted to MDC Commissioner Robert F. Murphy on May 22, 1961. See Edward Rowe Snow, “Report on Fort Warren,” Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. 435 “$400,000 Recreation Plan For Two Boston Islands,” Boston Globe, September 29, 1959, 1. Cost for each island from minutes of MDC meetings on May 1, 1958 and June 5, 1958. Metropolitan District Commission, Minutes, Card Index, 1893-1972, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Sidney N. Shurcliff to

308

Snow’s Lady in Black did not receive mention in McLain’s account of the fort’s history, but Snow was no less involved in the project. He continued to participate in memorial activities and tours on the island – including one for MDC officials on May 16,

1961 during which they discussed the possibility of opening the fort early. Though the

MDC had hoped to open at least part of Georges by the spring of 1959, demolition of most of the derelict modern buildings, repairs to the island’s water supply, and the renovation of docking facilities pushed the final opening to the summer of 1961. In the interim, local newspapers chronicled the physical progress and increasing amounts of capital pledged to the project.

As the opening date approached, Snow submitted a short report to MDC resident engineer Christopher Joyce with his top five concerns: vandalism, the need for a functioning water supply, public toilets, extra guards, and fencing off dangerous areas.

He expanded on these in a confidential twelve-page report submitted to MDC

Commissioner Robert F. Murphy on May 22 at his request, and also promised to draft an hour-by-hour program for the expected July 4 opening. In the report, after giving a brief history of the fort and his experience with it, he went over the three main problems: how to regulate the docks and beach areas, how to handle the flow of visitors on the island, and setting general rules for behavior – including Snow’s preference for only guided tours within the fort for the safety of visitors.436

Commissioner Charles W. Greenough of the MDC, dated July 16, 1958. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Shurcliff and Merrill, History and Master Plan, Georges Island and Fort Warren, Boston Harbor (Boston, MA.: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Metropolitan District Commission, Parks Division, 1960). 436 Edward G. McGrath, “N.E. War Dead Saluted In Every City and Town,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1958, 1. Snow’s tour with MDC officials agreed to in MDC minutes of May 11, 1961 meeting. Metropolitan District Commission, Minutes, Card Index, 1893-1972, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Hope of MDC to open Georges Island in spring of 1959 in letter from Commissioner Charles W. Greenough to Sidney

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But as hard as the civil servants, contractors, and Snow worked to get the island ready by Independence Day, the formal opening did not occur until August 6, 1961.

Beginning that afternoon of speeches to formally dedicate the island as an historical recreation site, Commissioner Murphy in his opening remarks credited the MDC taking custody of the island due to “concerted public demand …. not to allow George’s Island and Fort Warren to fall into the hands of private interests, intent upon commercialization.” He welcomed the public’s feedback and constructive criticism, but ended on a word of caution:

But if the succeeding weeks and months indicate a sparse turnout of visitors and an apathetic attitude toward what the Commonwealth is attempting to accomplish on the public’s behalf, the long-term future of George’s Island and Fort Warren as a historical site – as we want it to become known – accessible to all, may well be in jeopardy.

Included among the subsequent speakers was Edward Rowe Snow, who did his usual part in telling the history of the island and fort to the crowd of two hundred. After all the dignitaries had spoken Snow led tours of the fort, and included, as he did during the ceremony, the Lady in Black. The activism of Snow and other concerned citizens and civic organizations had pushed the MDC to expand its public stewardship to include the

Shurcliff, dated October 20, 1958. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. “$400,000 Recreation Plan For Two Boston Islands,” Boston Globe, September 29, 1959, 1. Barry Cadigan, “Georges Island Project Nearing Completion,” Boston Globe, May 1, 1960, 93. Edward Quarrington, “Island Fort at Boston to Become Picnic Site,” New York Times, August 14, 1960, X23. “Historic Ft. Warren in Boston Harbor being readied as tourist attraction and recreation area,” Worcester Sunday Telegram, November 13, 1960, 16 (Parade Section). “Historic Georges Island Opens July 4 as Tourist Attaction,” Boston Globe, May 17, 1961, 18. James Hammond, “Georges Island Will Be Family Recreation Spot,” Boston Globe, May 21, 1961, 72. John H. Fenton, “New Career Develops For Old Boston Fort,” New York Times, July 2, 1961, XX3. For both versions of Edward Rowe Snow’s 1961 “Report on Fort Warren” and accompanying letters from Snow to Joyce (dated May 18, 1961) and Murphy (dated May 18 and May 22) see Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.

310 islands in Boston Harbor as recreation sites. But in taking on a project that had already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the MDC wanted continued public support.437

And they did come. By late September an estimated 21,400 people had stepped ashore from a variety of personal watercraft and ferries. As for Snow, he was committed to the fort as a public park, and remained a persistent advocate through the 1960s and

‘70s – even if it made him a gadfly to the Commission. Three events illustrate his typical activism. In July 1967 Snow reprinted in his Patriot Ledger column a letter from the president of the Massachusetts Marine Historical League charging that “in general the entire island seems to have slipped into a passive defeated attitude, with certain areas approaching slum-like squalor” due to discarded trash. Snow endorsed his friend’s letter based on his own observations, though the MDC denied the charges. Two years later

Snow wrote to then-Commissioner Howard Whitmore Jr. to express “certain fears regarding the future of Fort Warren” that included a suggested but yet-to-be-dug artesian well among the “so many other items that I have heard about that I am very discouraged.

Why is that people cannot get together and plan a sensible result for this delightful fort?”

Snow frustrated concluded.

His advocacy eventually got him designated by subsequent MDC Commissioner

John Sears as a “Selectman” of Fort Warren, named after the New England town official who helped manage public affairs. While the two men met and discussed the island’s problems, Snow also tried to rally public support. In his June 7, 1972 “Mystery and

Adventure” column in the Boston Herald-Traveler under the title “Fort Warren Needs

437 “Fort Warren Opens As Recreation Area,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1961, 12. For typed copies of the program for the dedication of Fort Warren and the text of Commissioner Robert F. Murphy’s opening remarks see Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA.

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Help,” Snow bypassed his usual historical anecdotes for advocacy in explaining the history behind the island’s perennial lack of fresh water, the possibility of using a desalinization system, and a steadily-growing breach in the island’s seawall that was becoming increasingly costly to fix.438

Snow was hardly alone in his criticism. James Crowley’s July 28, 1974 Boston

Globe article “The Boston Harbor Forts are Crumbling” echoed Snow’s concerns as it

profiled fort curator and laborer Gerald Butler who “clearly cannot keep ahead of the

vandals who wreck his handiwork as fast as he accomplishes it, thanks largely to the

inadequate MDC police force of just three men who cannot be expected to cope with the

boatloads of thousands of school children and adults who are dumped on the island daily

during the summer…. Sightseers and the ravages of time have converted the old fort into

an almost total ruin.” Crowley also revealed that the ambitious restoration outlined in the

1960 master plan was impossible due to the MDC’s budget needing to go toward

maintaining “250 miles of parkways, 12,000 acres of urban parks, the banks of the

Charles, Mystic and Neponset rivers, 26 hockey rinks, 19 pools, 47 playgrounds and 30 miles of ocean beach.” As the now largely uninhabited and abandoned harbor islands did not fall under the constituency of any state legislator, it was difficult for activists to convince the government to spend money on them. Easily accessible urban recreational

spots such as a hockey rink won votes for local politicians instead.439

438 September visitor estimate from Edward Rowe Snow, “Fort Warren,” Patriot Ledger, September 20, 1961. “MDC Officer Challenges Charge of ‘Near Squalor’ at Ft. Warren,” Patriot Ledger, July 21, 1967, 9. Letter from Edward Rowe Snow to Commissioner Howard Whitmore Jr., dated May 5, 1969. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930-2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. Edward Rowe Snow, “Fort Warren Needs Help,” Boston Herald-Traveler, June 7, 1971, B21. 439 James Crowley, “The Boston Harbor Forts are Crumbling,” Boston Globe, July 28, 1974, A6.

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Perhaps what spurred Snow’s activism, aside from his desire that the public deserved access to an island with an important chapter of history to tell, was a clause in the federal application process for surplus property that the MDC had agreed to back in

1957. For twenty years the receiving agency or organization needed to use the property in the manner they had promised; if they violated these terms and conditions the federal government reserved the right to reclaim the property. However, after twenty years there was no restriction on what the receiver could do with their property, so the MDC could, if necessary, close the island to the public, or put it up for sale or lease any time after 1978.

Fortunately this closure never happened, and Snow continued to lead tours of the fort into the 1980s -- though the MDC’s “era of mismanagement” continued. On May

16, 1981 an accidental fire destroyed the chapel inside Fort Warren. It was a space where

Snow had for decades spoken with visitors. Back in the 1930s Works Progress

Administration artists had painted the walls with murals depicting the fort’s Civil War history, and Snow later brought back some of the original artists to do restoration work.

Only two months after the fire, Snow suffered a stroke on July 24, 1981, and remained hospitalized until passing away on April 10, 1982 at the age of seventy nine.440

Although Fort Warren never received the care Snow felt it deserved within his

lifetime, he could still see his advocacy for the islands of Boston Harbor as a success.

440 See pages 3 and 4 of Metropolitan District Commission’s “Fort Warren, Georges Island, Boston Harbor, Mass., Application for Public Park, Public Recreational Area and/or Historic Monument” to the GSA, dated November 22, 1957. Metropolitan District Commission, Secretary’s Office, YT Subject Files, 1930- 2003, Georges Island File, DCR Archives, Boston, MA. For murals painted by WPA artists see Joe Harrington, “Vandals do More Damage Than the Red Coats,” Boston Globe, October 4, 1959, A67. “Fire Destroys Island Chapel,” Boston Globe, May 18, 1981, 1. For more on what one MDC ranger described as the “era of mismanagement,” the chapel, and the chapel fire see “The Romance of Boston Bay,” Edward Rowe Snow’s New England, produced and written by Jeremy D’Entremont (1989; DVD, Winthrop, MA.: WCAT, Inc., 2008). For an example of Snow relating “history diced with imagination” in the chapel, see Dave Arnold, “Step Back in Time at Georges Island,” Boston Globe, August 10, 1980, 1. For Snow’s stroke and death, see John William Riley, “Edward Rowe Snow, 79, Lecturer, Sea Author, Flying Santa Claus,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1982, A1.

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The early groundswell of support that had spurred the Metropolitan District Commission to acquire and open two of the islands in the 1950s subsequently expanded to include all of them. When Snow completed The Islands of Boston Harbor in 1935, the harbor was largely a place for defense, navigation, and commerce. From the half-dozen fortified islands to Little Brewster Island’s lighthouse, Deer Island’s prison, Thompson Island’s trade school for boys, Moon Island’s sewage pumping station, Gallops Island’s quarantine station, Long Island’s hospital and almshouse, and Spectacle Island’s garbage dump, the islands were often used for activities at the margins of society. The loss of two large islands, Governor’s and Apple, to construct Boston’s modern airport was part of the commercial sentiment towards the harbor that trumped recreation.441

But in the late 1950s this feeling was changing – as evidenced by both the MDC’s

plans for recreation centers on the islands and businessman Richard Robie’s similar

intentions for a yachting center. In 1967 the Metropolitan Area Planning Council

(MAPC) – created by the state legislature in 1963 to provide coordinated regional

planning for eighty-three communities in eastern Massachusetts – proposed a $45 million

plan to acquire and develop thirty-one islands in Boston Harbor as recreation sites over

the next decade. The report noted that despite the harbor’s “decay and deterioration”

(which included its famously polluted waters) it was still “the most spacious recreational area closest to the most densely populated areas of metropolitan Boston.” Towns ringing

Boston Harbor largely objected to MAPC’s proposal, for reasons of lost tax revenue, the state taking over town property, and the decades-old sewage problem as what should be

441 Histories of various islands from Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971); and Eric Jay Dolin, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor – A Unique Environmental Success Story (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 54.

314 addressed first. For reasons of opposition and expected cost, the state did not enact the plan.442

Since the nineteenth century Boston and surrounding towns had disposed of

sewage by dumping it directly into the harbor, intending it to be carried out to sea on the

outgoing tide. But growing urban populations and industries into the twentieth century

created more waste than the tides could naturally disperse. The results were frequent

closings of shellfish beds and public beaches, foul odors, debris-filled waters, and a

public that largely turned away from much of the harbor as a place for recreation. Sadly,

the problem persisted until the end of the twentieth century.

The MDC was in charge of sewer systems for greater Boston, but eventually learned, as Eric Dolin chronicled in Political Waters, his history of the harbor, that there was no political incentive to maintain the system. To do so would have required an expanded budget from the state legislature, which would have required raising the sewage rates for residents in the system. As raising taxes was unpopular among voters who were not clamoring to have the harbor cleaned up, the situation for most of the twentieth century was cheap rates and a historic but polluted coastal environment. The

MDC built sewage treatment plants on Nut Island in 1952 and Deer Island in 1968, but the system was still inadequate and poorly maintained for lack of funds and public interest. Only in the 1980s would public pressure in the form of lawsuits result in the legislature creating a new authority to take over the MDC’s water and sewage systems, and the subsequent launch of the massive Boston Harbor Project to build a new treatment

442 Richard McLaughlin, “Marina, Second to None, Planned for Peddocks Island,” Boston Globe, December 1, 1957, 50. Peter F. Hines, “What People Talk About; A Pat on Back for Speaker Thompson,” Boston Globe, October 3, 1963, 26. James Ayres, “31 Islands to Play On,” Boston Globe, March 31, 1967, 1. Ken Botwright, “Shore Towns Cool to Harbor-Islands Plan,” Boston Globe, April 1, 1967, 5.

315 plant on Deer Island and related modern infrastructure. Fully operational in 2001, it resulted in Boston having one of the cleanest harbors in the nation.443

The roots of this eventual success date to the late 1960s, when a growing environmental awareness was causing Americans to reappraise the condition of the places where they lived. In February 1969 two members of the Squantum Women’s Club

(of Quincy, Massachusetts) launched Save Our Shores (SOS), a campaign to preserve and improve the Boston Harbor islands.444 Within a year they had amassed 250,000

supporters nationwide, from governors to sportsmen. Also in 1970 the State Federation of Women’s Clubs backed House Bill 900, which provided “for an accelerated program of land acquisition to create the Boston Harbor … program as a national recreation area and an historic site.” Following the rising popularity of environmental issues among their constituents, and in the wake of the first Earth Day on April 22, the Massachusetts legislature debated a bill that would have the state take control of the harbor islands for conservation and recreation.

Signed into law by Governor Sargent on August 22, 1970, it authorized the

Department of Natural Resources to take the harbor islands by eminent domain, purchase, or gift, and gave the department authority over both public and private land use along the shore of Boston Harbor. Over the next three years the state acquired thirteen islands. In

1971 it hired MAPC to prepare a recreation and conservation-oriented master plan for the

443 History of the sewage problem from Eric Jay Dolin, Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor – A Unique Environmental Success Story (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 1-2, 54-55, 97, and 143-194 (the Boston Harbor Project). Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), “The Boston Harbor Project Timeline: 1986-2001,” http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/harbor/html/soh_bhp.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). 444 In Snow’s 1971 update to The Islands of Boston Harbor, he praised their work on Lovells Island, commenting “The S.O.S. or Save Our Shores group has carried out many projects here and on other islands in an effort to beautify Boston Bay.” Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor, 1630-1971 (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1971), 170.

316 islands. Completed the following year, the plan called for spending $27 million over the next eighteen years including on additional acquisitions, developing infrastructure, conservation, and regular ferry service between the islands and the mainland. But the plan repeatedly failed to secure state funding.445

In a Boston Globe article in the summer of 1976, journalist Michael Kenney

assessed the state of the six-year-old Harbor Islands Park. The preservation of thirty-one

islands was a major victory for conservationists and recreationists. But park access

remained limited and expensive for those who did not own a boat, and development

being the joint responsibility of the Department of Environmental Management and the

MDC had resulted in inter-governmental rivalry over management and funds. Still,

150,000 people had used the park the previous summer, with Georges Island serving as the gateway for most of those visitors. With its large docking facilities built by the MDC between 1959 and 1961, it was also the only island with direct ferry access from the mainland, and served as a hub for a free water taxi to take visitors to neighboring Lovells,

Gallops, Bumpkin, and Grape islands.446

Decades earlier, Edward Rowe Snow had first brought public attention to the

fortifications in Boston Harbor through his books, radio broadcasts, lectures, and personal

tours. First he focused on Governor’s Island, which due to its proximity to the mainland

made it a hugely popular recreation site. The island’s prominent Fort Winthrop gave

445 Mary Sarah King, “Bid to save Boston Harbor wins wide support,” Boston Globe, March 1, 1970, A12. “Hope for the harbor,” Boston Globe, April 26, 1970, A26. David Nyhan, “Sargent OKs taking of islands in harbor,” Boston Globe, August 23, 1970, 22. M. R. Montgomery, “Chalk one up for politicians: Hub’s harbor islands saved,” Boston Globe, August 30, 1970, 91. James Ayres, “Boston Harbor: After five years of controversy, another master plan is being made,” Boston Globe, February 28, 1971, 4A. Deckle McLean, “The Boston Harbor Islands: Plans, Problems and Pleasures,” Boston Globe, March 18, 1973, C12. Anson Smith, “Boston Harbor islands park still a dream,” Boston Globe, February 2, 1975, 2. 446 Michael Kenney, “Harbor park takes shape, but getting there isn’t easy,” Boston Globe, July 18, 1976, 45.

317 those visitors a tangible gateway to two centuries of local and national history. After the state government nonetheless put economic development ahead of historic preservation,

Snow turned his attention to the distant island guarding the entrance to Boston Harbor.

On Georges Island, he recognized that its important history and massive fort made it the historical and physical centerpiece of the storied Boston Harbor islands. While he campaigned for the preservation of Fort Warren from the 1950s until his stroke in 1981, other individuals and organizations built on this early success to advocate for making the entire harbor a park.

While Edward Rowe Snow was not directly responsible for preserving the other thirty-odd islands in Boston Harbor, he did labor for a half-century to interest residents and visitors in journeying out into the often-polluted harbor and learning about its history.

He realized that people do not value what they do not understand. To know the history of a place increased the possibility that it wouldn’t be ignored, vandalized, or demolished.

And this was especially true for the islands without iconic buildings, where Snow had to unearth their history in area archives, from local residents, and clues in the landscape.

For this half-century of research and public education, Edward Rowe Snow emerges as the foremost preservationist of Boston Harbor.

Conclusion

From the 1930s until his death in 1982, Edward Rowe Snow created a

commercially successful and lasting image of New England’s maritime past. The roots

of his interests lay in his family history and curiosity about the landscape and people

surrounding his home in Winthrop, one of the towns ringing Boston Harbor. As he

318 revealed to readers of his books over decades, Snow proudly traced his ancestry to the

Mayflower and was fond of saying that generations of men on both sides of his family had been sea captains. Of these, his grandfather’s experiences as a sailor and captain

(including his fights with pirates) made a strong impression on Snow, who had learned them from his mother. Keepers of family lore, Alice Rowe Snow and other relatives recounted stories that told the entire course of American maritime history through a succession of Snow ancestors. Snow credited his mother’s storytelling for inspiring him to begin writing publications in 1935, and he also continued her preference for a romantic version of the past.

Additional inspiration came through the coastal landscape and local people. By the age of seven his grandmother was taking him to historic sites and archives, his brother was taking him to nearby islands strewn with the debris of three centuries of use, while other family and friends shared their experiences of living at sea and along the coast. At thirteen Snow began exploring the harbor on his own by canoe, with successive trips to the Boston Public Library to answer the questions he encountered in the landscape. His ancestry-fueled wanderlust took him briefly to sea, the West Coast, and then Montana before finally landing at Harvard, where he wrote his senior thesis on a history of the harbor islands. Snow turned it into his first book, and revealed his preference for small, colorful stories of sometimes questionable veracity over broad histories of people, events, or groups. While he later earned a masters degree in history that sharpened his research and writing skills and imparted a determination to be accurate and truthful, Snow would become a popular historical storyteller instead of an academic historian.

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Upon beginning what would be thirteen years of teaching high school math, history, and English, Snow found ways to include his storytelling in his classes. By then,

Snow was organizing and participating in historical commemorations, leading historical tours, and delivering lectures to groups throughout New England about the region’s maritime history and lore. He had perfected his art of storytelling through addressing his students, servicemen and civilians in North Africa and Britain during his wartime service and convalescence, and through speaking with those who had lived along the coast for decades. In 1946 he quit teaching to write and lecture full time. A decade later, at the height of his public exposure, he had a radio show broadcasting throughout New

England, wrote columns for three newspapers in Massachusetts and Maine, lectured in every New England state, and had over two dozen publications to his name. He would continue to write a book a year until 1981.

Edward Rowe Snow was not the only famous storyteller in the region, past or present. Samuel Adams Drake wrote popular history and historical fiction centered on

New England for a quarter century. Snow referred to Drake throughout his career, researching and retelling many of the legends and folklore he had collected decades before. In the mid twentieth century, Snow shared the airwaves, lecture circuit, bookshelves and sometimes even the same stories as his friend Alton Hall Blackington.

However, the latter’s brand of storytelling was mostly landlocked, while Snow favored the sea. At least after Blackington’s death, Snow was the region’s most prominent storyteller, and no one else chronicled the seacoast so thoroughly and for so long.

In changing how the public perceived the past along the New England coast,

Snow’s career draws parallels with Helen Creighton, his contemporary in Nova Scotia.

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Through six decades of writing and collecting folklore, she helped to refashion the popular perception of Nova Scotia’s coastal people as rustic, rural Anglo folk with lives rooted in tradition and free of modern societal ills. While Snow did not similarly help to create an imagined folk culture in New England, he nonetheless shared Creighton’s romantic view of the past and its commercial value. And he still practiced cultural selection in collecting and sharing stories about pirates, treasure, lighthouses, shipwrecks, and ghosts.

After the success of his first book, Snow published his next five through a small

Boston-based company before switching in 1948 to the New York-based Dodd, Mead and Company. The change altered his coastal product for a wider audience. The books were now smaller, shorter in length, had fewer pictures, no endnotes or bibliography, and the number of titles referencing New England dropped to a minority – even as the majority of the stories remained connected to the region. Making his titles generally maritime instead of regionally specific made them more marketable to a national audience. The result of this transformation, however, made the general maritime past a

New England maritime past to Snow’s readers, who also could now not easily check his scholarship and had to take his sometimes incredible stories at his word.

Thanks in part to lower prices and better marketing, Snow’s books sold well through the 1950s and ‘60s. Within them, Snow always sought to make the history visible, evocative, and often tangible. He participated in many of the stories, either as a witness or a later researcher hunting for pieces of the story in local libraries, archives, museums, and the landscape. He would point out the locations of his stories, relics from them in local museums and homes, and sometimes include fragments of wood, tea,

321 plants, or even silver coins in limited editions of books. It was all a part of Snow’s belief that artifacts and place were essential to his brand of maritime New England.

More than any other subjects in his imagined coastal realm, pirates and their treasure accounted for Snow’s most popular books, much of his fan mail, and his most dramatic personal adventures. Snow became one of the few people to find buried pirate treasure, though he made more money writing about it. For centuries before Snow, writers had fed the public’s appetite for stories of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century pirates who provoked terror and fascination on both sides of the Atlantic. Contemporary historians have since credited this popular fascination for pirates to their status as rebels.

At the time of Snow’s writing in the 1940s through 1960s, pirates enjoyed wide resonance in popular culture alongside people such as actors and musicians who also adopted rebel or antihero personas. This was at a time when American society focused on conformity and faith in capitalism, family, government, and God. But unlike Johnny

Cash or Elvis, pirates were safely in the distant past, and their early and often violent deaths in battle or governmental executions brought a strong moral lesson to Snow’s salacious tales.

Book reviews published in the Boston Globe give a sense of how the public received his work. Through the 1940s and ‘50s they’re largely positive, as critics approved of his superlative-laced dramatic sea stories and Yankee identity that sanctioned him as an authentic chronicler of his region’s history and lore. But when

Snow drifted too far inland with his stories, at least one reviewer spoke for the multitude in wishing he would head seaward again. Despite this return to maritime topics, entering the 1960s Snow’s books met increased criticism in their almost automated appearance

322 each holiday season, in his increasing habit of recycling stories from out of print books, and a writing style that some found outdated. Whether this behavior was due to the suggestions of Dodd, Mead and Company or his own initiative is unknown. But by the end of his literary career Snow was largely retelling a portrait of maritime New England that he had carefully painted from the 1930s through the ‘50s.

Irrespective of how Snow’s books were judged by critics, he cared more about the thoughts of the people who inhabited his maritime world. Through his work as a Flying

Santa, and his decades of visits, interviews, letters and phone calls, he became someone that coastal New Englanders trusted to fairly tell their stories, hold their secrets for as long as they asked, be open-minded about their beliefs in ghosts and sea monsters, and in general be the voice for people living at the margins of society.

In order to remain a trusted source for disseminating coastal history and lore,

Snow always listed where he did archival research and thanked the dozens of people by name that helped with each book. It was this emphasis on accuracy that appears to be how Snow distinguished himself from his many yarn-spinning contemporaries. While it wasn’t often possible for readers to verify that Snow’s version of an event or historical figure was correct, in detailing his exhaustive research, his debunking of details that, while alluring, just weren’t true, and his presence in many of the chapters as either witness or careful investigator, marked him as a trustworthy historical guide.

But onto this base of facts Snow added salt: in the form of dialogue, superlatives, and qualifiers. Whether describing contemporary or centuries-old events, Snow added dialogue at key points to increase the drama. And by focusing on stories that were

“unbelievable,” “astounding,” or “the greatest” gave him a means to compete for the

323 public’s attention in an increasingly crowded literary market. Qualifiers such as “it is said” or “allegedly” allowed Snow to preserve his claim of truth telling while at the same time not have to exclude a great story just because he couldn’t verify it.

The Lady in Black is the best example of Snow’s salt-infused historical storytelling, and illustrates his transformation from a cautious historian in 1935 to a seasoned storyteller by 1950. Snow dropped his original disclaimer that the story had no basis in fact as he recounts precise details, dialogue, and even photographic evidence that she existed. In Snow blending the history of Fort Warren with a ghost story passed through generations of soldiers, he created a plausible tale that couldn’t be unraveled into fact and pure fiction. It was also one that people could take part in. Snow was largely responsible for setting down and spreading the story of Mrs. Lanier to the public through more than forty-five years of writing and lecturing. Once the fort became a state park, he continued to keep the story alive as a public performance by having a volunteer hide in a

“coffin” in the fort’s former dungeon and surprise unsuspecting tour groups.

This was only the most famous example of Snow as a showman. When Snow discovered actual pirate treasure on Cape Cod he improved the story for his latest book by making his hunt seem longer and more solitary – likely to appease frustrated treasure- seeking fans. Snow also re-enacted events for the benefit of the camera, and took his own photographs of treasure finds that could test the bounds of plausibility. The story of

Blackbeard’s skull talking to Snow on a dark and stormy night continued his playing with the boundaries of fact and fiction, this time in collaboration with a fellow writer.

But while Edward Rowe Snow made a living from creating and selling an abridged version of coastal New England, he genuinely cared for the places where such

324 history had taken place – and no more so than the Boston Harbor islands. When government officials considered destroying Governor’s Island in the 1930s, Snow joined other historians in starting a preservation society and convinced the city to turn the island over to them. While this victory lasted less than a decade before the island was absorbed into the airport, Snow had better success with Georges Island.

Once again he joined others in calling for the fort to be preserved, and put together a preservation society that opposed the government auction. Behind the scenes he worked with the MDC to put together a convincing application, and then found himself accompanying the NPS historian in touring the island to determine the viability of the MDC’s proposal and the fort’s historical significance. Once the federal government gave the island to Massachusetts, Snow remained involved, pressing for it to be opened to the public as soon as possible, and submitting reports to the MDC on how to manage it. Through the 1960s and ‘70s he remained a critic of the commission’s lack of policing and maintenance – likely out of fears that, if ignored, the fort would decay to the point where it would cease to be a public park.

While Snow fought for the future of Georges Island, others picked up the message he had been championing since the 1930s: the islands of Boston Harbor were valuable for their history and as recreation sites for millions of people living in the region. He began leading tours of the islands and harbor when it was largely a place of industry. Now decades later, a rising environmental awareness throughout American society caused people to see the harbor as a heavily abused environment that deserved protection. By the 1970s this had become a reality as the state passed legislation to begin taking each harbor island through eminent domain to form a novel kind of state park.

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The legacy of Edward Rowe Snow exists in monuments and public parkland, literature, and public memory. Reaching an audience of millions through decades of writing, radio and television broadcasts, lectures, and tours, he provided the public with an easily consumable portrait of the New England coast. It was once the haunt of pirates, contained millions of dollars of lost treasure, historic and romantic lighthouses, tragic shipwrecks that should not be forgotten, and supernatural stories to be debated. Points of entry for Edward Rowe Snow’s New England were bookshops, auditoriums, boat decks, and city streets. Each place visited in text or in person was a compilation of colorful anecdotes that were easy to digest and share – which accounts for the continuing popularity of even centuries-old stories that Snow revived and polished for new generations. His stories live on decades after his death. Without the resources of a large museum or government agency, Snow devoted his life to educating the public about the history and lore of the New England coast. But while Snow could only re-create the past through his storytelling, the federal government would attempt to create a historical preserve in the modern landscape of Cape Cod.

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CHAPTER 4

Toward a More Natural History: Cape Cod National Seashore, 1955-1989

Introduction

At noon on August 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy sat at his desk in the Oval

Office, surrounded by supporters of Senate bill S. 857. Using twenty-two pens (to later distribute as souvenirs) he signed the act authorizing the establishment of Cape Cod

National Seashore. Afterward he remarked that “This act makes it possible for the people of the United States through their Government to acquire and preserve the natural and historic values of a portion of Cape Cod for the inspiration and enjoyment of people all over the United States.” The creation of Public Law 87-126 capped six years of debate in state and national legislatures, media, and public meetings since the National Park

Service published a report on the nation’s vanishing public coastal lands in 1955. It detailed the urgent need to create national seashore parks, with Cape Cod high on the list.447

Having co-sponsored park legislation himself two years prior with fellow

Massachusetts senator Leverett Saltonstall, and having a family vacation home on Cape

Cod, Kennedy was long familiar with the rapid postwar development on the peninsula and the widespread belief that “old Cape Cod” was rapidly disappearing.448 In creating a

447 Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 54. “President Uses 22 Pens to Sign Cape Park Law,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1961, 1. 448 See for example, Frank Falacci, “Builders Carve Up Cape While Park Bill Droops,” Boston Globe, August 29, 1960, 1; and Earl Banner’s six-part “Preserving Our Beaches” series in the Boston Globe from

327 national park spanning six coastal towns, the federal government was assuming a large role in the preservation and interpretation of New England’s maritime past. But it needed to do so in a living landscape containing some of the nation’s oldest communities and an ever-growing number of visitors. And Kennedy pairing the need to protect natural and historic values for the public good echoed the mission of the National Park Service since its founding in 1916.449

But beyond providing an interpretation of northern coastal history and nature to a

mass audience (though this was important in contributing to the Cape’s nationwide

recognition), the Cape Cod National Seashore is worth studying as the capstone of a

regional image. Beginning with planning documents and extending through three

decades of preservation and interpretation, the Cape Cod National Seashore has come to

include all the components of the modern portrait of coastal New England. It includes

old salts and other individuals leading traditional lifeways, Mystic Seaport’s emphasis on

preserving noteworthy historic structures, and the dramatic coastal history and lore

beloved by Edward Rowe Snow. Into this mix the Park Service added the final element:

the preservation and interpretation of (coastal) nature that has always surrounded these

cultural stories. Until the NPS efforts on Cape Cod, non-profit organizations interested in

July 22, 1959 to July 27, 1959. Not everyone mourned the loss of “old Cape Cod.” Resort operator and Cape resident Mari Kenrick wrote a letter to the editor of the Cape Cod Standard-Times, which the New York Times reprinted as “In Defense of Modernity,” New York Times, October 23, 1960, X31. Kennedy himself said in 1959 that “If a park of this nature is not established on Cape Cod, there is every danger that much of the Cape will become a mere extension of the suburban civilization which typifies so many of our lives. If we act sensibly now, while the opportunity remains, we shall have preserved for America and for our people a priceless heritage to be enjoyed many times over, not only by this generation but by those which follow.” Quoted in Gloria Negri, “…JFK Walked Its Beaches, Sailed Its Waters,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1966, 1. 449 The National Park Service Act charged the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Quoted in National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 21.

328 preserving parts of the New England coast largely focused on either history or nature.

The NPS combined them.450

The Park Service, however, does not operate in a vacuum. From its creation in

1961 through 1989, Cape Cod National Seashore reflects changing attitudes towards nature and history within the Park Service as it influenced and was influenced by the

American public. As the National Park Service built the park, their portrait of the past – of what should be preserved and interpreted for the public – would not go unchallenged.

Historiography

The extensive scholarship on North American parklands has largely addressed the iconic western ones, leaving the coast understudied.451 An important Canadian

450 Leading historical organizations such as Mystic Seaport (est. 1929) and the Society for the Preservation of New England (est. 1910; later renamed Historic New England) are typical of those focused on preserving and interpreting cultural history. The Massachusetts Audubon Society (est. 1896) and the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History (est. 1954) are representative of organizations focused on environmental education and conserving the natural world. The Massachusetts Audubon Society is the largest conservation organization in New England, and has established ninety wildlife sanctuaries in Massachusetts encompassing 34,000 acres. In 1958 it purchased what has became the 1100-acre Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary on the Bay side of Cape Cod with funds provided in part by the Avalon and Old Dominion philanthropic foundations of siblings Ailsa Mellon-Bruce and Paul Mellon. See Mass Audubon, “About Mass Audubon,” http://www.massaudubon.org/about/index.php (accessed January 7, 2013); and Priscilla H. Bailey, “The 50th Project: The Austin Years,” http://www.massaudubon.org/blogs/wellfleetbaynaturalhistory/the-50th-project-the-austin-years/ (accessed January 7, 2013). A rare exception to this history/nature division in preservation is The Trustees of Reservations, a non-profit organization that since 1891 has sought to “preserve, for public use and enjoyment, properties of exceptional scenic, historic, and ecological value in Massachusetts.” The Trustees of Reservations, “Our Mission,” http://www.thetrustees.org/about-us/our-mission/ (accessed January 7, 2013). TTOR currently manages more than one hundred Reservations in the state encompassing almost 25,000 acres. 451 For an overview of books on the National Park Service, the park system, and individual parks see Horace M. Albright and Marian Albright Schenck, Creating the National Park Service: The Missing Years (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Horace M. Albright and Robert Cahn, The Birth of the National Park Service: The Founding Years, 1913-1933 (Salt Lake City, UT.: Howe Brothers, 1985); Thomas R. Cox, The Park Builders: A History of State Parks in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 1988); Lary M. Dilsaver, ed., America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994); William C. Everhart, The National Park Service (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1983); John Ise, Our National Park Policy: A Critical History (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961); Polly W. Kaufman, National Parks and the Woman’s Voice: A History (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); David Louter,

329 exception, Alan MacEachern’s National Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada,

1935-1970 looks at the history of the first four national parks in Atlantic Canada (Cape

Breton Highlands (est. 1936), Prince Edward Island (est. 1937), Fundy (est. 1948), and

Terra Nova (est. 1957)) through their selection, expropriation, development, and management. Unlike in the frontier of western Canada, the eastern part presented a special challenge to the Canadian National Parks Branch in that the geography was smaller and flatter, without the glaciers, large waterfalls, and mountains of famous parks such as Banff and Jasper. The land had been home to Anglo and French settlers for over two centuries – and Native Americans for centuries before that. Additionally, the wildlife was smaller and less abundant than out west. MacEachern aims in part to restore the human history of these areas, and show that the national parks are a blend of nature and culture – echoing historian William Cronon’s argument that wilderness is a cultural construct.452

According to MacEachern, because Parks officials saw these as imperfect sites for a park (settled, little big game, no Western-type dramatic vistas), they allowed tourist

Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks (Seattle: Washington University Press, 2006); National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005); Hal K. Rothman, America’s National Monuments: The Politics of Preservation (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Hal K. Rothman, The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism (Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); Richard West Sellers, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997); Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2002); Harlan D. Unrau and George Frank Williss, Administrative History: Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s (Denver, CO.: Denver Service Center of the National Park Service, 1983); Conrad L. Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980); and two works that study the park movement and conservation in Canada: Janet Foster, Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); Tina Merrill Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2006). 452 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90.

330 development on a scale that was not acceptable out west. Eastern parks, then, became destinations for mass tourism, while the western parks retained a more elite status, and audience. Within these four parks, attitudes surrounding their conception were solidified in how each park was developed. They therefore exist as snapshots of Parks Canada’s view toward what blend of culture and nature was appropriate. It developed Cape Breton and PEI as resorts for the masses; Fundy in New Brunswick was designed with less infrastructure for more passive recreation, while Terra Nova on the eastern coast of

Newfoundland remained the most “wild,” with a focus on the intellectual appreciation of nature over cultural amusement.453

The National Park Service no doubt followed Parks Canada’s developments along

the Atlantic Coast and inland during these decades. Created in 1911 as the world’s first national park management organization, Parks Canada’s existence (then called the

Dominion Parks Branch within the Department of the Interior) was used by American

park advocates in their successful push for legislation establishing the National Park

Service five years later. Parks Canada counts its coastal properties as national parks or

national park reserves, while the National Park Service in the 1930s created a separate

designation of national seashore, owing to a greater range of activities allowed in the

latter, such as recreational and commercial fishing, and later, hunting. Since 1937

Congress has designated ten national seashores and four national lakeshores, creating

new preservation and conservation challenges for the National Park Service in regard to

public access, wildlife management, and erosion control.454

453 Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal, QC.: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001). 454 For Parks Canada used in Congressional argument to establish the NPS, see William C. Everhart, The National Park Service (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1983), 164. For origins of the national seashore

331

No scholar has followed MacEachern’s lead and written about national seashores in relation to one another. Administrative histories exist for Assateague, Padre Island,

Point Reyes, and Cape Hatteras national seashores, along with an array of other NPS- produced histories and reports covering parks’ founding legislation, vegetation, geology, and cultural resources. The most useful model for talking about Cape Cod National

Seashore is Lary Dilsaver’s history of the conflicts surrounding conservation on

Cumberland Island National Seashore since its authorization in 1972.455

Eighteen miles long and anchoring Georgia’s southern coastal boundary,

Cumberland Island’s human history started 13,000 years ago as first Native Americans

and then Europeans beginning in the sixteenth century altered the island and harvested its

resources to suit their needs. Spanish missions yielded to English forts and later English

and then American plantations through the Civil War. From the 1880s through the 1960s

the Carnegie and Candler families owned most of the island, erecting large mansions as

vacation retreats. The 1950s and ‘60s were marked by negotiations between island

owners, the National Park Service, environmental groups, and state and local officials who all recognized the public value of a largely undeveloped stretch of coastal land. The

Park Service originally planned for extensive recreational development on the island to accommodate some 10,000 visitors per day, but pressure from environmental groups

idea see Douglas W. Doe, “The New Deal Origins of the Cape Cod National Seashore,” The Historical Journal of Massachusetts 26 (Summer 1997): 139-156. For hunting and fishing see Cameron Binkley, The Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: The Great Depression through Mission 66 (Atlanta, GA.: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 2007), 31, 38-39, 185-190, 216 (Sections 3 and 4 of the 1937 legislation establishing CHNS), 217 (1940 amendment to 1937 legislation allowing hunting). Online version at http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/caha/caha_ah.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013). 455 Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004). For a partial list of histories and other reports on properties within the National Park system, see National Park Service, “Park Histories,” http://www.nps.gov/history/history/park_histories/ (accessed January 3, 2013).

332 eventually led to an act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard

Nixon in 1972 that the island would be preserved, as stated in the enacting legislation, “in its primitive state.”456

Through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, Dilsaver explores the related issues of how to

preserve the island’s cultural resources in regard to cost, historical worth, and in balance

with preserving natural resources; and then the same concern with the cost and extent of

ecological restoration, and conflict with historic resources. This dual preservation goal

also accompanied a Park Service mandate to encourage public use of these resources.

Whether in debating how much money to spend on deteriorating buildings, whether to

remove non-native species such as the popular but destructive feral horses, and

negotiating with inholders, Dilsaver shows that the aims of conservationists,

preservationists, and recreationists have created conflicts with no easy solution. And he

anchors his study within the National Park Service’s administrative history and the

federal government’s evolving environmental policy. The debates that surrounded the

use and management of Cumberland Island are also reflected, with regional variations, at

other national seashores being established in the second half of the twentieth century.

The story of Cape Cod’s national seashore offers an important comparison to this

portrait. Cumberland Island tells a Southern coastal history of Native Americans,

European powers battling for control of the coast, plantations using enslaved labor, and the post Civil War development of the seacoast as a vacation spot for wealthy families.

Cape Cod follows a northern development pattern (similar to that of Atlantic Canada) of

Native Americans and early European explorers, small towns, the rise and fall of

456 Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 99 (10,000 visitors per day), 109 (“primitive state”).

333 subsistence agriculture, and a twentieth-century growth in the coast as an increasingly democratic tourist destination. The Park Service envisioned and built Cape Cod National

Seashore to accommodate large numbers of tourists who could drive directly into the seashore from surrounding metropolitan areas. It designed Cumberland Island, too, for large-scale recreation, but public opposition coming at the height of the American environmental movement both pushed the Park Service to have the northern half of the island designated as wilderness, and allow only 300 visitors per day on 16,000 acres of island parkland. In the contest between nature, history, and recreation on Cumberland,

Dilsaver concludes that after thirty-two years nature is faring best.457

Even at more than twice the size of Cumberland with 44,600 acres, the millions of visitors to CCNS each year have resulted in a significant impact on the seashore’s natural and cultural resources.458 This is through greater physical use and extensive Park Service infrastructure to accommodate them: roads, hiking and biking trails, visitor centers, restrooms, parking lots, and interpretive exhibits at significant natural and historic sites around the park. On Park Service maps these and natural and cultural sites are all clearly

457 For CCNS as site for mass tourism: “If the Great Beach area had the status of a major public seashore, it would unquestionably attract increasingly large numbers of people from the country at large and from Canada, besides those who would come from New England and metropolitan New York.” National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 34. And “Now it is within a day’s travel of nearly one-third of our Nation’s population – less than 300 highway miles from all six New England capitals and New York City.” National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1959), 2. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 5 (300 visitors), 260 (nature faring best). 458 In only its second summer of operation in 1963 and with limited infrastructure, CCNS already had more than 700,000 visitors. Frank Falacci, “Even Critics Now Admit: National Seashore Cape’s Biggest Asset,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1964, 42A. Almost five million visited the Seashore in 1972 according to Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 40. CCNS’s acreage from Conrad Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 199. The NPS’s current park pamphlet for CCNS also repeats the 44,600-acre figure. Of this total area, about 27,700 acres are land while the remaining 17,000 acres are marsh and water. James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 116.

334 marked within a solid green block of public land running from Chatham in the south to

Provincetown in the north. But once on the ground, one finds that the seashore’s boundaries are largely invisible and contain numerous inholdings. This hybrid cultural and natural history preservation contributes to the whole outer Cape being perceived as one massive and immersive preserve. As the Cape Cod National Seashore quickly became one of the region’s leading tourist attractions, its operation was contested by local individuals and communities who sought to maintain their traditions. This clash would become most prominent in the 1980s involving a collection of shacks built on the dunes outside Provincetown, and it indicated a shift in the eight-decade relationship between the public and the Park Service in New England.

The National Park Service and its arrival alongshore

The entry of the federal government into managing part of coastal New England

came just weeks before the establishment of the National Park Service itself on August

25, 1916. On July 8, President Woodrow Wilson designated Sieur de Monts National

Monument on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Congress later expanded and renamed it

first Lafayette (1919) and then Acadia National Park (1929). Back in 1872 with the

Yellowstone region of the Montana and Wyoming territories, Congress had first begun creating federally-managed parks from federally-owned land of impressive scenic value in sparsely-populated regions of the country – usually in the West. In 1906 Congress authorized the president (as part of the landmark Antiquities Act) to establish national monuments for their scientific, scenic, or historical value. Now four decades later fourteen national parks, twenty-one national monuments, and the Hot Springs

335

Reservation all under the oversight of the Department of the Interior became the responsibility of its newly-minted National Park Service.459

More coastal units soon followed Acadia: in Hawaii (Hawaii National Park,

1916), Alaska (Katmai (1918) and Glacier Bay (1925) National Monuments), Michigan

(Isle Royale National Park, 1931), and Florida (Everglades National Park, 1931). If the

land within a park’s authorized boundaries was not already federally owned, it could take

years or even decades for private groups and the states or territories to acquire sufficient

land for the park to be formally established. The standard federal legislation authorizing

each new national park did not include funds for land acquisition. While these coastal

parks represented important conservation victories, they were located far from populated

areas and intended as places of inspiration and education, not active recreation. As

Dilsaver writes, the Park Service administration believed that state parks were better

suited for recreation, and in the 1920s it began coordinating with state governments on

park planning and staff training – becoming by default the national leader on public

recreation.

Entering the 1930s, both the Roosevelt administration and Congress pushed the

Park Service to carry out studies identifying sites specifically for their recreational value.

As part of this larger initiative to increase the number of public recreational areas, the

Service launched a series of nationwide coastal surveys in 1934. Though the surveys

recommended twelve areas along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts that met their criteria for

459 National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 12-21. This is the updated and expanded third edition originally written by Barry Mackintosh and first published in 1985.

336 national importance, only Cape Hatteras secured Congressional authorization to become the first national seashore on August 17, 1937.460

Seven months after Congress authorized Hatteras, the National Park Service made its second investment in New England. Taking advantage of new powers granted to the

Secretary of the Interior by the Historic Sites Act of 1935, the National Park Service

chose to establish the first national historic site in Salem, Massachusetts, on March 17,

1938. Located in the heart of what once was one of America’s main ports in the early

nineteenth century, the site centered on eighteenth-century Derby Wharf and an adjacent custom house in which Nathaniel Hawthorne had once worked. Apart from the powerful cultural aura that New England held in 1930s America at the end of the Colonial Revival

era, the decision was likely also practical. The Treasury Department transferred its

ownership of the custom house to the Park Service, while the city and state governments

arranged to purchase the adjoining wharf. But Cape Hatteras was not so fortunate. With

much more expensive and extensive land acquisition requirements before it could be

established, the development of it, and the national seashore model it pioneered, would

have to wait.461

460 National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 19, 26-27. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 77-79. National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth recalled that the 1930s coastal studies “resulted in the selection of about fifteen areas for possible inclusion in the national park system…,” while Our Vanishing Seashore cites twelve, as does Dilsaver. Conrad Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 192-193. National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 9. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 79. 461 “Nation Will Save Its Historic Sites,” New York Times, August 11, 1935, N4. “Customhouse Made Hawthorne Shrine,” Boston Globe, June 7, 1936, A16. “Plan Salem Restoration,” New York Times, August 2, 1937, 6. “Great National Park Project at Salem Centers Around Derby Wharf, Boston Globe, August 8, 1937, A8. “Historic Sites of Salem to be Saved,” Aiken Standard and Review, September 29, 1937, 7.

337

Impetus to create the CCNS, and the place of history and nature in that argument

The prosperity of the postwar era brought renewed attention to America’s

coastlines in the 1950s, as commercial and residential development steadily encroached

into formerly remote areas. Continuing a long history of private interests molding the

shape of the park system (the Rockefeller family, for instance, had donated most of what

became Acadia National Park), the Mellon family came to the aid of both the nascent

Cape Hatteras National Seashore and the seashore model. Siblings Ailsa Mellon-Bruce and Paul Mellon were millionaire philanthropists and heirs of industrialist Andrew W.

Mellon. Ailsa and Paul each headed their own philanthropic foundations, the Avalon and

Old Dominion, respectively. In 1952 the siblings agreed to split with the state of North

Carolina the amount needed by the federal government to buy the necessary land on Cape

Hatteras. The funds allowed the Park Service to quickly buy a majority of the land, and it formally established the seashore on January 12, 1953. As the Service continued with

remaining land purchases and infrastructure development, the Mellons agreed in 1954 to fund new studies of the coast along the Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific, and Great Lakes.462

The results in the 1955 National Park Service report were obvious in its title: Our

Vanishing Shoreline. The thirty-six page booklet chronicled a “seashore fever” as

developers, residents, businesses, and tourists flocked to the nation’s coastline in every-

growing numbers. Photographs of endless lines of shoreside cottages, hotels, tourist

attractions, and overcrowded beaches, along with industrial and military sites on the

coast, contrasted with a smaller number of photos of undeveloped coastline with its

462 Cameron Binkley, The Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: The Great Depression through Mission 66 (Atlanta, GA.: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 2007), 97-102, 197-198 (coastal surveys). Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 79-80.

338 unique vegetation, wildlife, and quaint scenes – some of these within parks, but most not.

A large uncaptioned photo of an old salt talking to an attentive boy as they sat on a driftwood stump on an otherwise deserted beach conveyed the peacefulness, generational bonding, and human presence rooted in the landscape that required protection. Wearing rubber boots and rolled up sleeves exposing muscular forearms, the man appears to be taking a break from some maritime occupation to share a story. Arguing that “a people’s heritage is threatened” through unchecked development, the Service outlined a three point need for conservation, wildlife preservation, and recreation. The few remaining undisturbed “natural” areas should be preserved as reminders of the balance that existed before Europeans arrived, and for their future study by scientists.

Seeking to bring millions more Americans to the coast would seem to run counter to calls for conservation, but the Park Service saw a balance of recreation areas and restricted conservation lands within a national seashore as the best way to get public support. The reasoning also followed the prevailing view of conservation as an efficient use of natural resources. Should the Service do nothing, much of the land would quickly be lost to private development, and the resulting beachfront erosion and dune migration would harm everyone.

Of the twelve areas recommended in the Service’s 1935 report on the Gulf and

Atlantic coasts, only Cape Hatteras became a national seashore. Of the remaining eleven possibilities only one was now left: Cape Cod’s Great Beach. Needing to start over, Our

Vanishing Seashore detailed a new air, land, and water-based survey covering 3,700 miles of Atlantic and Gulf coast in eighteen states from Maine to Texas. Of this entire stretch only 240 miles (six and a half percent) were in federal or state ownership as sites

339 for public recreation – and more than half of this was in Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Acadia and Everglades national parks, though the latter two had little beach area for recreation. Weighing factors such as accessibility, insect problems, biological, historical, and archaeological values, fishing, beach conditions, and difficulty of acquisition, it detailed the opportunities in each state.

Of sixteen prime areas, Our Vanishing Shoreline spotlighted three: Cumberland

Island, Georgia; Fire Island on the south shore of Long Island, New York; and the Great

Beach of Cape Cod. With almost as much text as the other two combined and described last, Cape Cod was the clear main candidate for leading the postwar growth of the national seashore program. The Great Beach was less than 300 miles from six state capitals and metropolitan New York but still maintained along its thirty-odd miles a

“priceless feeling of remoteness.” Its history was iconic, and its landscape contained

“spectacular” dunes and rich plant and animal biodiversity. The seashore survey party concluded,

There is no longer any comparable area in the New England region that exhibits all the outstanding values desirable and suitable for extensive seashore recreation. For these reasons alone, the Great Beach area of Cape Cod merits preservation as a major public seashore of the North Atlantic coast.463

The Cape’s desirability was shared by more than just the report’s authors. Between 1949

and 1959 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts built the limited-access Mid-Cape

Highway between the Sagamore Bridge and Orleans, opening the interior of the

463 National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 9 (old salt), 27 (statistics), 33. “Seashore Fever” and “A People’s Heritage Is Threatened,” are titles of two of the five sections of the report. Looking at the photo credits at the end of the report, the old salt photo was taken by Florida State Park Service photographer William Z. Harmon. But as the NPS didn’t caption the photo, it became a scene that could, at least for the moment, be found anywhere in the “vanishing seashore.” As evidence of the photo’s adaptability, correspondent Earl Banner (Edward Rowe Snow’s most frequent book reviewer) included the old salt photo as evidence of the unspoiled beaches threatened by development. Earl Banner, “Too Many Beach Cottage Colonies Are Turning Into Seaside Slums,” Boston Globe, July 22, 1956, A2.

340 peninsula to extensive commercial and residential development; within this same decade the Cape’s population increased by fifty percent, from 46,805 to 70,286. “Extensive seashore recreation” would happen on the Cape regardless of NPS involvement, but without federal intervention it would be more commercial and more exclusive.464

Beyond the Great Beach’s recreational assets of size, accessibility, proximity to

metropolitan areas, and the growing development pressure due to this proximity, it is

worth examining the place of nature and history within the National Park Service’s

argument for national importance. A Park Service report on the Great Beach followed

Our Vanishing Shoreline later that year, but it carried out a new and larger study from

May 1957 through September 1958 that incidentally coincided with the arrival of

Mayflower II in Provincetown Harbor as the replica Pilgrim ship retraced the original

1620 journey from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts.465 Experts both within and

outside the Park Service in biology, geology, history, and archaeology each provided

reports. As these comprised forty-five, thirteen, four, and three pages of text,

respectively, even before evaluating the content the emphasis on the nature of the outer

Cape is clear. The emphasis was echoed in an accompanying map of land use within the

proposed seashore that marked eleven “areas of biological interest,” four “areas of

geological interest,” and only three “areas of historical interest.” Of these three, one is

464 James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 97-98. Charles H. W. Foster also concluded, commenting on the results of an economic evaluation of the CCNS’s impact, that by the late 1960s “Although much of the profitable business increase would probably have occurred without establishment of the Seashore, the land value, the motel and restaurant business, and the permanent population increases were definitely the results of the Seashore.” Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 37. 465 The Mayflower II was built as a commemoration of the wartime unity between the U.S. and Great Britain. It departed from Brixham, England, on April 20, 1957, and took a longer and more southerly route to Massachusetts due to the need to avoid ice. Plimoth Plantation, “The Journey of the Mayflower II,” http://www.plimoth.org/media/mayflower-2/index.html (accessed January 7, 2013).

341 the 1620 landing site of the Pilgrims, and the second is a spring where they first gathered fresh water. The third is unidentified, but it is where Deacon John Doane and his family resettled after leaving Plymouth with six other Pilgrim families in 1644. A stone monument to Doane placed by a descendant in 1869 marked the homestead site at the time of the NPS survey.466

The Cape’s geology had long attracted amateur and professional geologists, and

its layers of glacial deposits and subsequent modification by water and air created “some

of the most spectacular dunes along the Atlantic coast” as well as eroding beachside cliffs up to 175 feet in height that provide “awesome and impressive” views. “This combination of a thick deposit of easily eroded rocks and the violent action of the sea gives the area its character and makes its geology of national significance,” concluded

Park Service naturalist Bennett Gale. The Cape also formed a natural compliment to the geological story told at Acadia National Park. As the latter dramatically illustrates glacial erosion, Cape Cod is the result of glacial deposits.467

For the biological argument, the Cape was important “for its number of distinctly

different plant and animal associations, and for its controlling effect upon these

associations by environmental factors.” As glaciers receded at the end the last ice age,

plant and animal species typical of a northern climate established themselves. But

subsequent warming of the climate led southern species to migrate northward, making the

466 National Park Service, The Cape Cod Study Group, A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958). Map follows page 19 of the main report. Though the Doane site is not identified on the map, subsequent NPS publications, and present signage at the location, name it. No other historic sites are nearby. For an article discussing John Doane and his home site that includes text of the monument, see Earl Banner, “Eastham is Gateway to Cape Cod Park,” Boston Globe, August 11, 1961, 7. 467 National Park Service, The Cape Cod Study Group, A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 5 (“awesome and impressive”). Bennett T. Gale, “Geological Report on a Portion of Cape Cod,” 12 (“national significance”), 13 (glacial deposits) as an appendix of ibid.

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Cape a biological mixing zone. This geologically and biologically rich area contained six plant communities (beach grass and beach pea dunes, fresh water marsh, salt marsh, pitch pine woods, bearberry heath, and saline meadow) and served as a major wintering ground for waterfowl.468

For his report, Park Service historian Frank Barnes immediately presented “the

basic ‘national historical significance’ of the Great Beach area” as the Pilgrims making

their first landfall in North America at Cape Cod in 1620. A full-page map tracks their

“three expeditions” on and along the Cape during four weeks in November and

December of that year. He identified where they found a cache of Native American corn

(Corn Hill, Truro), where they first found freshwater (Pilgrim Spring, Truro), and where they first met Native Americans (First Encounter Beach, Eastham).

“Almost equally important,” according to Barnes, was that Cape Cod served as a landmark in the Age of Discovery. He identifies Bartholomew Gosnold as first naming

Cape Cod, Samuel de Champlain making landfalls in 1605 and 1606, then Henry Hudson and John Smith. Barnes also postulated that earlier explorers Verrazano and John Cabot also sighted the Cape, as well as generations of anonymous Northern European fishermen and even Vikings. It’s unstated, but the high cliffs at what is now the town of Truro were most likely the first sight of land for these explorers as they entered the region.

The report is frustratingly non-chronological as Barnes then moves from discussing the Cape as likely starting America’s whaling era in the seventeenth century and continuing to participate into the twentieth century; the nineteenth-century rise of the

Cape’s fishing and oyster industries and attendant salt works, lighthouses, and

468 National Park Service, The Cape Cod Study Group, A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 7.

343 shipwrecks that rivaled Cape Hatteras for the title “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”469 He then comes ashore to chart the first permanent Pilgrim settlement in 1637, the gradual establishment of towns, the 1752 Atwood House in Chatham as the best surviving prototype of the “Cape Cod cottage” so common in twentieth-century American suburbs, and the local events of the Revolutionary War. Anecdotes of the first and second world wars get a sentence each, as does “Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless station in the

United States (1903), remains of which are still visible today on the beach at South

Wellfleet.”

For Barnes, the European explorer and Pilgrim-landing history were of national significance, and the rest mostly of regional or local importance. He oddly ignored the nineteenth-century visits of Henry David Thoreau, who is cited in the summary of these individual reports as naming the Great Beach, and a quotation of his graces the main report’s frontispiece: “A place where a man can stand and put all America behind him.”

But even Barnes’s narrow noteworthy history would not be easy to communicate to future park visitors, as none of these sites except Pilgrim Spring were within the proposed seashore boundaries.470

The archaeological report found much the same problem. Park Service

archaeologist John Cotter identified the first Native Americans as arriving on the Cape

around six to seven thousand years ago, briefly described their subsistence activities, and

then moved into the contact period with Europeans. The only sites he describes in detail

are the landing sites of Champlain in Chatham and the Pilgrims in Provincetown, Corn

469 In writing about shipwrecks, Barnes consulted Edward Rowe Snow’s Famous Lighthouses of New England (1945). As Barnes wrote his report in 1958, he had met Snow in January of that year during a Park Service investigation of Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. 470 Frank Barnes, “Cape Cod in History,” in A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed National Seashore, National Park Service, Cape Cod Study Group (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 1-5.

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Hill, the First Encounter Site, and Pilgrim Spring. Of these, archaeological evidence existed only at Corn Hill and the spring, with the latter “much disturbed by amateur diggers.” His summary is discouraging for the Cape’s archaeological prospects and national merit:

In summary, the traces of prehistoric man on Cape Cod are present but limited. Human occupation waxed and waned until the advent of the white man. By the time modern ethnographers were studying the surviving Indian life of New England in the early 20th century and late 19th, there were no more Indians on Cape Cod.471

Perhaps especially damaging in hindsight was Cotter’s erasure of any contemporary

Native Americans on the Cape. Barnes likewise makes no mention of Native Americans aside from their brief encounter with the Pilgrims in 1620. While a vibrant Wampanoag community lived in Mashpee some thirty miles from the proposed seashore, it would be a struggle for them into the twenty-first century to get the full scope of their experience – prehistoric, historic, and contemporary – on Cape Cod acknowledged within the park’s boundaries.

The Park Service distilled all of this evidence the following year into the richly-

illustrated seventeen-page Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal. As with the

seashore itself, it interwove the natural and historic elements that were worthy of

preservation. It included quotes from not only Thoreau but Henry Beston, whose account

of living in a shack on the Great Beach for a year was published in 1928 as The

Outermost House, a modern landmark of American nature writing. Eleven of the

seventeen photographs were either of purely natural settings or contained at most a few

visitors or distant buildings that appear insignificant in the dramatic and biologically rich

471 John Cotter, “Archeological Evidence at Cape Cod,” in A Field Investigation Report on a Proposed National Seashore, National Park Service, Cape Cod Study Group (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1958), 3.

345 landscape. To summarize the Park Service’s argument, the “old” Cape was vanishing as a tide of development was replacing “the natural open spaces long cherished as an

American birthright.” It acknowledged the local preservation efforts by individuals, towns, and the state but felt that only national protection could meet the conservation goals of the Cape’s advocates against encroaching coastal development. In a likely attempt to appease local residents fearing eviction to create a wilderness, the park’s boundaries would exclude the residential and commercial parts of the six outer Cape towns.472

Thoreau’s Great Beach was the most prominent part of the seashore, but the

inland landscapes with their diverse plants and animals were also basic parts of the

Cape’s charm and distinctive character. The Park Service defined national significance

as “scenic, scientific, or historic stature so great, so precious as to make its preservation

the concern of all Americans.” That Cape Cod had drawn artists, writers, scholars, and

nature lovers for more than a century attested to its public appeal. The report repeated

the earlier report’s significant story of glaciation and erosion, the mix of plant and animal

species from the north and south, and the valuable role of the Cape as a bird nesting

ground and migration stop. The animals living offshore were equally rich in diversity

and number.473

472 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1959), 2-3. A Globe letter to the editor by Catherine Murphy of Truro read in part: “First, I protest the avowed purpose of destroying more than 300 years of hard-won settlement … and of returning most of it … to a state of wilderness.” “Cape Park Plan Outrageous,” Boston Globe, April 29, 1959, 16. Other town residents said that Truro “may have to go out of business.” Grace Des Champs, “Truro’s 250th Birthday May Be Last,” Boston Globe, August 9, 1959, A32. For more on the local opposition to a national seashore, see Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978). 473 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1959), 3-6.

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“Significant history” was again defined as the Pilgrims first making landfall there, and in Cape Cod later hosting “many of New England’s famed fishing and whaling fleets.

Courage sailed those fleets; faith awaited their return. The men and women Cape Cod reared have bequeathed to America a proud, intrepid heritage.” Here the historical argument is sharpened to Cape Cod as the place of Pilgrim beginnings, and this bravery and faith perpetuated by generations of mariners and their families. This view of maritime New England synched perfectly with the mission of Mystic Seaport since 1929 to restore American character by educating people about their proud Yankee roots.

Either the National Park Service independently shared the belief of Mystic Seaport founder Carl Cutler that the best of American character came from its maritime culture, or the museum’s decades of national evangelism was bearing fruit.474

To convey the outer Cape’s history and charm the report included four

photographs by famed photographer, writer, and artist Samuel Chamberlain, who had

also photographed Mystic Seaport that year for his book Mystic Seaport: A Camera

Impression.475 The doorway of an old Cape Cod house, a meeting house, a windmill, and

a close-up of a fishing vessel’s nets with Provincetown in the background neatly matched

the themes of home, faith, and industry at the heart of both Mystic Seaport’s

interpretation of the past and important symbols in America during the Cold War.

Continuing the theme of industry, and again aiming to secure the backing of local

business-minded Cape Codders, the report was careful to point out that businesses

474 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1959), 6-7. 475 With over thirty publications written and illustrated by Chamberlain (usually with his photographs) on historic sites and areas within New England (including Old Sturbridge Village and Historic Deerfield) between 1936 and 1972, his obituary years later reflected that “travelers throughout New England could not enter an antique store, drugstore, bookshop, or art gallery without coming across some of Mr. Chamberlain’s works.” “Samuel Chamberlain, artist in many fields,” Boston Globe, January 11, 1975, 25.

347 outside of the park would benefit from large numbers of visitors wanting food, lodging, and goods and services. As the original economic base of the Cape had shifted from fishing and agriculture to tourism, to preserve the Cape’s natural features would guarantee the perpetuation of the qualities upon which this recreational economy depended.476

The pitch within Cape Cod: A Proposal is visually beautiful and simultaneously

urgent and inspiring in tone, but it was hardly new information. Area residents and

visitors had been debating the merits of a national seashore on Cape Cod since local

weekly newspaper The Cape Codder published the first rough details of a park

development plan back in 1956. The subsequent contentious five years of meetings, proposed legislation, studies, debates, and hearing between federal, state, and local officials, private organizations, and citizens that culminated in John F. Kennedy signing

S. 857 into Public Law 87-126 on August 7, 1961 is outside the scope of this chapter and

is the subject of a separate book.477

Aside from authorizing America’s second national seashore, the bill created a

number of new precedents. The park’s boundaries were detailed in the law. Congress for

the first time appropriated money for purchasing and improving parkland.478 Hunting,

476 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore: A Proposal (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1959), 10 (fishing nets), 11 (doorway), 12 (meeting house), 13 (windmill), 14, 16. 477 A chronology of CCNS history is available in Appendix A of Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 87. Foster’s book is a history of the first twenty years of the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, on which he served as the first chairman. For the legislative history of CCNS written by the former managing editor of The Cape Codder, see Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978). Burling also covers local park proponents and opponents. 478 Part of Congress’s newfound willingness to fund NPS projects was that it had already approved more than a billion dollars for a ten-year restoration program that NPS director Conrad Wirth had named “Mission 66” in preparation for modernizing NPS staff, management, and infrastructure in time for its fiftieth anniversary in 1966. William C. Everhart, The National Park Service (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1983), 25-27; and National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington,

348 fishing, and shellfishing within the park would still be allowed. An advisory commission composed of representatives appointed by the federal government, Commonwealth, county, and six towns would guide the NPS’s development and management of the park.

And the law guaranteed that individuals who owned “improved property” (defined as “a detached one-family dwelling”) within the park’s boundaries as of September 1, 1959 could keep their property in perpetuity. Those properties developed afterward, as various versions of seashore legislation were making their way through Congress, were still subject to eventual condemnation and purchase by the National Park Service. These compromises did not satisfy all park opponents, but what those who had endorsed479 and protested480 the seashore could likely agree on was that Cape Cod was a place of special significance that should be preserved for future generations; it should not be allowed to become just like anywhere. As the National Park Service now had a mandate and funds to begin building the park, how to actually preserve and interpret the seashore’s nature and history would be the next challenge.481

D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 64. Ethan Carr, Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). 479 Renowned architect and Harvard architecture professor Serge Chermayeff, wrote an editorial in the Globe supporting the park, despite having a home and studio within its proposed boundaries. “His Studio and Cottage Involved, Yet Favors National Park on Cape,” Boston Globe, April 19, 1959, A2. 480 Renowned historian and Harvard history professor Samuel Eliot Morison wrote an editorial against the proposed CCNS, based on his observations living adjacent to Acadia National Park. “Four Reasons Why Historian Morison Opposes National Park on Cape Cod,” Boston Globe, March 29, 1959, A2. See also editorial by Annie Murphy refuting SEM’s reasons. “Unless Professor Has Alternate Plan,” Boston Globe, April 6, 1959, 12. 481 Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 20-21 (significance of CCNS legislation), 56-65 (text of law). The text of Public Law 87-126 is also printed in Appendix G of Foster, 102-111. In 1964 correspondent Frank Falacci concluded “The great furor over establishment of the Federal seashore has died its death and today several of its staunchest foes are ready to admit the Seashore is rapidly becoming one of Cape Cod and New England’s best assets.” Frank Falacci, “Even Critics Now Admit: National Seashore Cape’s Biggest Asset,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1964, 42A.

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Planning the park: placing the human past in a natural history

Echoing the Park Service’s mission of conservation and recreation, Law 87-126

required “that the seashore shall be permanently preserved in its present state” and

developed in a way that protected the flora, fauna, “physiographic conditions,” and

historic sites and structures. The Park Service would establish trails, observation points,

exhibits, and other necessary infrastructure to accommodate the public’s appreciation of

these cultural and natural resources, as well as allow camping, swimming, boating,

sailing, hunting, fishing, and other recreational activities where appropriate. While the

Park Service would duly pursue conservation and preservation as specified in the CCNS legislation, from the onset the emphasis was on nature. Cape Cod National Seashore was created not to protect history but to save undeveloped coastal land – land which had important stories to share about the natural and human world. This land would be used by millions of people each year, but only as visitors.482

Studying a copy of the 1963 Master Plan for Preservation and Use, shows how

the Park Service sought to balance the interpretation of nature and history. The seashore’s master plan was the result of research dating back to the first coastal surveys, and planning by experts in various sciences, history, architecture, engineering, and management. It required the input and approval of the director of the Park Service, and

482 Quotation of Law 87-126 from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 110. For emphasis on nature, the 1963 brochure for CCNS stated that “Natural features are Cape Cod’s most important asset. Preservation of these features is the chief aim of the National Park Service.” National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963). In the 1955 report Our Vanishing Seashore it stated that the seashore “is entitled to better treatment as a part of the natural heritage of the Nation,” with this “better treatment” focusing on conservation, wildlife preservation, and recreation. National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 15-21. See also Earl Banner, “Cape’s National Seashore Masterpiece of Nature,” Boston Globe, August 10, 1961, 17.

350 the staff and heads of the Northeast Regional Office in Philadelphia, the Eastern Office of

Design and Construction in Washington, D.C., and the seashore’s superintendent, staff, and Advisory Commission on the Cape. At each stop various specialists contributed to the maps, narrative, and drawings. Even after Director Conrad Wirth’s final approval on

April 17, 1963 the document continued to evolve for several more years according to changes in need, budget, and evolving ideas within the NPS outside of this single, comparatively small park. In May the Boston Globe publicized the master plan with a large map detailing the seven swimming beaches, nineteen natural areas, fifteen historic sites, visitor centers, and various trails.483

The plan drew upon the earlier geological, biological, and historical arguments to

present the park’s interpretive theme as “the natural history of Cape Cod” with four sub

themes: “1. Glacial - The origin of the landscape. 2. Postglacial - Continuing change in

the landscape. 3. Biological - Environments created by glacial and ocean influences.”

And “4. Historical - Man on Cape Cod – interaction of man and nature.” In telling the

history of Cape Cod beginning with glacial formation, human inhabitation became a

small fraction of this story. And the human history the park would tell would be

inseparable from its environment.484

This hierarchy was also reflected in the park’s staffing. With divisions of the

Superintendent’s Office, Administration, Protection, Maintenance and Operations, Plans

and Programs, and Interpretation, this latter group would “provide interpretive and

information services for Seashore visitors. Basic functions include research, guided tours,

483 “Final Plan for the Cape Cod National Seashore,” Boston Globe, May 26, 1963, 60. 484 National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-2 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”

351 audiovisual programs and orientation.” A chief naturalist would head the department, with a naturalist and historian serving under them. Beginning with only a permanent staff of three year-round employees, the master plan envisioned adding by 1967 a full- time clerk-stenographer, three more naturalists, two more historians, four park guides, a museum curator, and a biologist. Seasonal staff of three more clerks, ten ranger- naturalists and ten ranger-historians would complete the roster.485

The slightly greater emphasis on nature-focused staff speaks to the Park Service’s

dominant focus on nature more generally but is also understandable given the greater

number of floral and faunal resources to monitor and potentially interpret for the public.

As Frank Barnes’s survey of the seashore’s history in 1958 concluded, much of it was not rooted in the landscape – or at least it was not easily visible. But archaeological and

historical base maps detailed well over a hundred sites for possible investigation and

future interpretation within the seashore, from pre-historic Native American shell heaps

to sites of seventeenth through twentieth-century Euro-American buildings both intact

and long-vanished. In this way, an ancient shell heap at Pilgrim Heights and Henry

Beston’s Outermost House (1927) were duly logged alongside sites of now-vanished huts

built by the Massachusetts Humane Society for shipwrecked sailors (c.1800) and the

elegant house built for a whaling captain (1868). And in a selection that would surely

please Edward Rowe Snow as well as other lovers of New England lore, the Park Service

identified Hog Island as a “possible site of Captain Kidd Pirate Treasure.” Choosing sites

485 National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-16, G-17 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”

352 that were buried, fully intact, anonymous, famous, and even apocryphal shows the Park

Service’s open-mindedness as to what stories it could eventually tell.486

While the master plan included the findings of a Historic American Building

Survey conducted between 1959 and 1962 that identified eighty-six historic structures

within the seashore, the Park Service controlled only eleven of these by 1965 and planned

for seven to be exhibits. As the above maps showed, this was only scratching the surface.

The plan emphasized that further “history, archaeology, and natural history research will

be initiated to determine those areas of the seashore where protection, preservation and

interpretation will be the prime objectives.” That many sites flagged in various maps of

the master plan for their historic, archaeological, and natural history importance

overlapped pointed to a necessary double or even triple focus when Park Service

personnel or interpretive exhibits guided visitors through these areas.487

Interpretation within the seashore required extensive infrastructure. Four visitor

or interpretive centers would anchor each corner of the park and serve a specific purpose.

The Nauset Visitor Center would be at the main entrance to the seashore in Eastham,

while the Ocean View Visitor Center would be at the northern end of the Cape in the

isolated dunes outside Provincetown. Both would orient visitors and cover historic and

natural history themes. The Nauset Maritime Museum would be housed in a former

486 National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-20, G-23, G-24 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).” 487 National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-2, G-33 (natural history map), G-35 (natural history map), Developed Area Narrative 1 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).” For HABS survey see Frank Falacci, “Land Acquisition to Cost U.S. Over $16 Million,” Boston Globe, September 30, 1962, A7 and an article by CCNS historian William Burke in the seashore’s official newspaper: William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 10.

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Coast Guard Station on Nauset Beach and “be devoted to the colorful history of Cape

Cod’s relation to shipping” – a euphemistic way of saying the museum would focus on shipwrecks and lifesaving. Lastly, the Griffin Island Interpretive Center on the park’s narrow Cape Cod Bay side “would be devoted to natural history interpretation. It would also be the Park research center as well as having subsidiary historical and archaeological importance.” Scattered throughout the park would be interpretive shelters housing exhibits on one or more themes, “exhibits-in-place (historic houses),” interpretive trails

“dealing with specific ecological niches of the Seashore,” and markers describing specific events or phenomena. Tours both conducted and self-guided would cover history, natural history, and archaeology. Bicycle trails also would be built. U.S. Route 6 would function as the central artery of the seashore as it ran parallel to much of its length, with secondary roads branching off into the park for each interpretive area, vista, beach, or center. Most of these secondary roads already existed, as they led to residences, businesses, and beaches now a part of the park. This infrastructure neatly balanced history and nature for public enjoyment – each received their own center, with the two visitor centers both covering nature and history themes.488

What architectural style all of these new structures would assume – in a landscape prized for both its nature and history – was the subject of some debate. Josiah Childs was the only architect of the ten-member Advisory Commission, and in order to bolster support for the contemporary architecture-style envisioned by the Park Service’s design office in January, 1963, he wrote to twelve of the leading architects in America for help

488 National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-14 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).”

354 on selling modern to traditional Cape Cod. The response from Walter Gropius, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, emphasized the project’s cultural importance and that there was no room for historical sentimentality:

The looks of these installations and buildings will give evidence of the cultural status of the American people in the twentieth century. Only a fresh and imaginative contemporary design approach can result in a worthy solution of this challenging task… The Cape Cod shore is not a museum; it lives, it grows, it changes. It would be against its inherent tradition if we should try to preserve an external ‘cosmetic’ uniformity. A creative attitude only, not an imitative one, will keep this unique region of New England alive. New buildings in this area, therefore, must be invented, not copied. They must be blended into the existing scenery of landscape and buildings with tact, and understanding for its peculiar scale and its characteristic materials, but using the design language of today. We cannot go on indefinitely reviving revivals. Architecture must move on, or die. Its new life comes from the tremendous changes in the social and technical fields during the last generations. Colonialism cannot express the life of the twentieth-century man.…489

At times quoting from his own Scope of Total Architecture (1955), Gropius understood

the attention that the Cape Cod National Seashore would receive from visitors nationally

and abroad in the coming years. And though his declaration that the region was not a

museum might rankle those who had sought to preserve and promote “old New England,”

it was hard to ignore the modern development that was reshaping the region. At least

within the national seashore, this architectural theme was a modern-style hexagonal

structure clad with wood shingles on its roof and siding. The design originated with

Donald Benson, Chief of Architectural Design at the National Park Service’s Eastern

Office of Design and Construction in Washington, D.C. But his design aesthetics came

from a larger movement predating Childs’s query.490

489 Walter Gropius, “On the Desirable Character of Design for the Cape Cod National Seashore,” Record Group 79, Box 2, National Archives, Waltham, MA. 490 Gropius’s non-Cape comments beginning with “We cannot go on indefinitely…” are from Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1955), 75. Maureen K. Phillips,

355

In sharp contrast to the earlier rustic architecture that defined national park buildings in the early twentieth century, postwar Park Service architects practiced a modern style that typified the era and offered the benefits of being cheaper and faster to build and easier to maintain. Back in 1956 Park Service Director Conrad Wirth had secured the endorsement of President Eisenhower and more than a billion dollars in funding from Congress for a ten-year program to modernize National Park Service staffing, management, and infrastructure in time for its fiftieth anniversary in 1966.

Years of lean funding for the Park Service through the Depression, World War II, and the

Korean War had collided with massive postwar interest in recreation among the

American public. The needs of the latter quickly outstripped the capacities of the former.

Named “Mission 66,” the program reshaped the Park Service visually and structurally – most noticeably to the public in the facilities built in current and new parks during this ten-year Golden Age of Park Service expansion.491

The Mission 66 style, in representing a modern and capable Park Service, would

define Cape Cod National Seashore’s buildings. Benson’s design entered the seashore’s

landscape in the form of two interpretive shelters built in 1963 at Pilgrim Heights and

Marconi Station with hipped hexagonal roofs covered in wood shingles and supported on

wooden posts set in a hexagonal concrete platform. They set the architectural motif for

the seashore as bathhouses, another interpretive shelter, and two visitor centers all copied

the hexagonal shape and materials, with the latter also including bricks and large plate

glass windows. The master plan defended the choice as a blend of old and new as

Historic Structure Report: Salt Pond Visitor Center, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: NPS Northeast Cultural Resources Center, August 1999), 4. 491 National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 64. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 183-187, 202.

356 shingles were a traditional building material “that blend in color and texture with the sand and bespeak the climactic needs of a northeastern shore building.” Also, the plan’s writers felt that to use indigenous Cape Cod architecture for the shape would have been incompatible with the modern function of these new types of twentieth-century structures.492

Not everyone was convinced. In corresponding with one renowned architect in

January of 1963 Childs had complained bitterly that some of his colleagues on the

Commission were barely aware of the twentieth century, and saw the Cape’s eighteenth century architecture as the only answer to any building need. As the design for the park’s signature visitor center in Eastham (designed by Benjamin Biderman, Benson’s colleague at the EODC) came before the Advisory Commission the following year, Foster recalled that “more than a few acid comments were made about ‘that beehive thing’ destined to command the horizon overlooking scenic Salt Pond. Why not a nice, simple, Cape Cod cottage, Chatham’s McNeece asked?” Similar sentiment surrounded construction of the second visitor center for the Province Lands a few years later.493

As the traditional Cape Cod style house had become a common design in many twentieth-century American suburbs, McNeece was not alone in being frustrated that the

region’s signature building type was not being reflected in the region’s new and heavily

visited park. But as the first national seashore created in more than twenty years – and in

492 National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), Developed Area Narrative 9 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).” 493 Josiah H. Childs to Pietro Belluschi, January 14, 1963, Record Group 79, Box 2, National Archives, Waltham, MA. The Eastham visitor center designed by Benjamin Biderman from Maureen K. Phillips, Historic Structure Report: Salt Pond Visitor Center, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: NPS Northeast Cultural Resources Center, August 1999), 4. Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 28.

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President Kennedy’s home state – there was a lot of public attention on the park and its buildings. The National Park Service had decided that the best way to promote the park, and thereby its own work, was by not pickling the architecture. The only old looking buildings that visitors would encounter within the park’s boundaries would be historic, and clearly labeled as such. But in deferring to the traditional use of unpainted wood shingles on the park’s signature buildings, it was, ignoring the hexagonal shape, another example of interpreting Cape Cod’s inseparable natural and human histories.

Generations of builders in the wake of the Pilgrims had harvested the region’s cedar trees for rot-resistant building material (as a later handout for one of the park’s nature trails made clear). And as the buildings weathered in the salt air in the coming years they would also come to match the color palate of the surrounding landscape.494

Building the park: how the Park Service actually interpreted nature and history

The National Park Service acquired its first piece of the future national seashore even before passage of its enabling legislation. On July 5, 1961, George and Katherine

Higgins donated their colonial Atwood-Higgins House and forty-three acres of land on

Bound Brook Island in Wellfleet to the Department of the Interior, with the stipulation of

retaining lifetime residency. Starting in 1919 upon inheriting the estate, Higgins had

spent four decades restoring the property in memory of his ancestors. In addition to the

circa 1730 Cape Cod-style house he added a garage (1923), barn (1924), guest house

494 For public attention see Maureen K. Phillips, Historic Structure Report: Salt Pond Visitor Center, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: NPS Northeast Cultural Resources Center, August 1999), 3. The later handout, distributed from the visitor center in 1968, was the four-page “Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail,” which states in part, “The white-cedar is valued as a lumber tree. The wood is lightweight, moderately soft and easy to work. The heartwood ranks as one of the most durable woods. It can be used for siding, poles, small boats and pails.” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.8 Visitor Center Handout 1968.”

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(1929), summer house (1936), and country store (1947) among lesser structures – creating a whimsical farmstead that echoed larger village museums in the region such as

Old Sturbridge Village and Mystic Seaport. While George died in 1962, Katherine would continue to live on the property until 1975, and the house would not open to the public for tours until 1976.495

While an impressive gift and display of faith in the mission of the Park Service,

there were some 3,000 properties within the boundaries of the seashore that it would seek

to survey, appraise, and purchase from owners. Hundreds of pre-1959 houses would,

however, stay in private ownership. It was the most complicated property acquisition in

the Park Service’s history. As it needed to acquire a significant amount of land before it

could start building infrastructure and accommodating eager Cape visitors (locals already

enjoyed access to their town’s beaches), the Park Service started with properties already

government-owned. Land acquisition officer George Thompson arrived on the Cape in

October of 1961 and organized a small staff at the seashore’s temporary headquarters in a

U.S. Coast Guard Station at Nauset Beach in Eastham, which the Guard had

decommissioned in 1958. Just a few miles north along the Great Beach was the 1,800-

acre Camp Wellfleet, an Army training site from World War II which the Park Service

had moved to acquire soon after passage of the seashore bill. By the end of the following

August the Army had completed decontamination of the site, removing live ammunition

that littered the area. The first park visitors were allowed to wander around the property

495 Marsha L. Fader, Historic Structure Report: The Atwood-Higgins House, Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1980), 2. Larry Lowenthal, Historic Assessment: Atwood-Higgins Property (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts, 1996), 1. William Burke, “Landscape of Memory or Historical Folly? The Debate over George Higgins’ Whimsical Farmstead on Bound Brook Island, Wellfleet,” Seashore News, July and August 2009, 9. Emily Donaldson, Lauren H. Laham, and Margie Coffin Brown, Atwood-Higgins Historic District Cultural Landscape Report and Outbuildings Historic Structures Report, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 2010), x-xi.

359 beginning in October after they had checked in with an on-site caretaker. The access roads around the camp’s perimeter had already been closed to vehicles to allow vegetation to begin reclaiming the scarred landscape.496

But the major public lands on the outer Cape lay to the north, in Truro and outside

Provincetown. There, some 6,100 acres comprised the Province Lands State Reservation and the Pilgrim Spring State Park.497 The former was one of the oldest public lands in the

country, having been purchased and set aside by the Plymouth Colony around 1650 as a

fishing base, and subsequently inherited by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and finally the

Commonwealth. With about a thousand acres, the smaller state park dated only to 1956, when Truro residents successfully petition the state to acquire a property that a developer

was having graded and marked for house lots. While the site contained “unspoiled dunes,

marsh, and Atlantic beach,” it was of unique importance because it was reputed to

496 CCNS as “the most complicated land purchase ever contemplated by the Department of the Interior” according to Lewis A. Carter, “Help: Needed to Check Erosion and Ruin,” Boston Globe, February 22, 1957, 83. See also Frank Falacci, “Cape Park Skipper Has Big Task Ahead,” Boston Globe, March 11, 1962, E10. For Thompson setting up shop at USCG station see Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 17; and decommissioned in 1958 from Lance Kasparian, U.S. Coast Guard Nauset Station, Dwelling and Boathouse, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore (Philadelphia, PA.: Northeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 2008), 50. For Camp Wellfleet acquisition, cleanup, and open to public see Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 15-16; and “Cape Seashore: 100 Appraisals in the Works on Properties,” Boston Globe, October 14, 1962, 15. 497 Sources disagree on the acreage of these properties. National Park Service maps of Cape Cod National Seashore from 1963-1967 list the former Province Lands State Reservation at 4,400 acres, and the former Pilgrim Spring State Park at 1,700 acres. However, according to a newspaper article on the seashore’s dedication in 1966, “At the ceremony, Gov. Volpe will present deeds to the Federal government for the Province Lands area in Provincetown and the former Pilgrim Springs State Park in Truro, comprising 5402 acres of parkland.” James B. Ayres, “JFK Cape Project Real – On His Birthday,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1966, 1. State senator Edward Stone, who introduced the 1956 bill to take the land around Pilgrim Spring for a state park said in a letter to the editor that the acreage was “nearly 1000 acres,” and that the state was trying to purchase an adjacent parcel of land the following year. Edward Stone, “Says Pilgrim Spring Within State Tract,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1957, 18. Similarly, Francis Burling said that in December 1957 state Commissioner of Natural Resources Francis Sargent met with NPS officials and “said that the State was in the process of purchasing the land between the Pilgrim Spring and the Province Lands (1,000 acres). He promised to work towards the transfer of these lands by the State to the Federal Government for the National Seashore.” Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 11. However, CCNS maps from 1963 through 1968 show significant private land still separating these two former state properties.

360 contain the spring where the Pilgrims had first found fresh water after making landfall on the Cape in 1620. With a possible national seashore coming to the outer Cape, the state had done no more than put up a sign by the developer’s dirt road leading into the park as officials had promised to turn the land over to the Park Service. As the bureaucracies of the state and federal governments slowly moved to transfer the lands, they finally became part of the national seashore in 1963 – though Massachusetts would not formally hand over the deeds until the park’s dedication three years later.498

For the seashore’s first full year in 1963, the Park Service issued a large pamphlet with a stylized lighthouse on the cover with its lower half as a Pilgrim hat.

Inside it described with a map and extensive text the four areas open to the public, and more generally the history and natural features of the park. At the conclusion of the latter the Park Service stated frankly that “Natural features are Cape Cod’s most important asset. Preservation of these features is the chief aim of the National Park Service.”

While the seashore’s enabling legislation charged it to practice conservation, recreation,

498 History of Province Lands from “Legislative Research Council Report on Legal Background of the ‘Province Lands’ at Provincetown, Massachusetts” (Boston, MA.: State House, Legislative Research Bureau, January 4, 1961), 1 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, folder “Province Lands History 16.9.6” and Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 3. “Unspoiled dunes” from Senator Edward Stone editorial “Says Pilgrim Spring Within State Tract,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1957, 18. For brief history of Pilgrim Spring State Park see Earl Banner, “Preserving Our Beaches III: Builders Nosed Out By State At Cape,” Boston Globe, July 24, 1956, 17. Earl Banner, “Preserving Our Beaches IV: Millions for Highways, Little for Recreation,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1956, 19. Earl Banner, “Preserving Our Beaches VI: Egbert Hans’ Report And What Came of It,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1956, 11; and Earl Banner, “Cape Park or Not – View From Highland Light Hard to Beat,” Boston Globe, August 13, 1961, 11. For debate over whether the site includes the actual Pilgrim Spring see Earl Banner, “Cape Shrines in Doubt: Where Did Pilgrim Land?” Boston Globe, May 12, 1957, A6; Earl Banner, “Where Did Pilgrims Land? III: Historian Places Water Site Mile From Present Tablet,” Boston Globe, May 14, 1957, 22; Edward Stone, “Says Pilgrim Spring Within State Tract,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1957, 18; and Francis P. Burling, The Birth of the Cape Cod National Seashore (Plymouth, MA.: Leyden Press, 1978), 5-6, 11. For state finally handing over title at 1966 dedication see James B. Ayres, “JFK Cape Project Real – On His Birthday,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1966, 1.

361 and preservation, the Park Service historically was about protecting large natural areas for public enjoyment.499

As for the seashore’s four public areas, the Province Lands contained a lookout

tower and two beaches. Coast Guard Beach contained the park headquarters/visitor

center, a swimming beach (the town of Eastham had voted to turn its Atlantic beaches

over to the seashore earlier that year), and a temporary amphitheater for illustrated

evening history and nature-themed talks such as “Preservation of Salt Marshes,” “Strange

Creatures of the Sea,” “Revival of Cape Cod Drift Whaling,” “Cape Cod Architecture,”

“Origin of Cape Cod,” “Ranger Activities at Cape Cod National Seashore,” and

“National Parks – Nature’s Last Frontier.” Often supplemented by guest speakers from

surrounding communities, seashore staff gave lectures on not only the seashore’s main

themes, but also on the operation of the Park Service itself. They were, after all,

promoting a federal organization that did not have a strong presence in New England, and

that beginning in the late 1950s and through the 1960s had at times a contentious

relationship with the six towns of the outer Cape as the Park Service moved to acquire

private and town land for the seashore and enact regulations.500

But the park’s interpretive future in 1963 was best on view at Pilgrim Heights (an

area within the former Pilgrim Spring State Park) and the Marconi Station site within the

former Camp Wellfleet. At both sites, modern hexagonal interpretive shelters contained

exhibit panels that told of each spot’s interwoven nature and history, while nearby were

499 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963). This and other brochures are in the Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, Folder “CCNS – Programs/Brochures 3.4.27B.” 500 Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 24 (Eastham turning over beaches), 32-33 (contentious relationship).

362 newly-created self-guided nature trails. At Pilgrim Heights, three panels discussed the glacial kettle pond around which Native Americans once lived, the wanderings of the

Pilgrims in 1620 as they made key “discoveries,” and then the early Native American-

Pilgrim relationship. One loop trail took visitors by the spring “believed to have been used by the Pilgrims” – and identified with a stone and bronze marker placed there in

1926 – while another loop trail took visitors through what the Park Service soon called

Small’s Swamp.501

Similarly, within the boundary of the former Camp Wellfleet was the site where

radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi had chosen to built the first wireless station in the

United States in 1901-02. Operational in 1903, it transmitted messages until wartime

security concerns shut it down in 1917; it was dismantled in 1920. Forty-three years

later, visitors encountered a hexagonal shelter containing a scale model of the station in a

large glass case, and exhibit panels detailing Marconi’s invention, the history of the

station, its visible ruins, and finally an explanation of coastal erosion. The bluff that once

contained Marconi’s station was steadily crumbling into the ocean – and taking the last

remnants of the station with it. It was a dramatic story of both human ingenuity and

nature’s destructive power. Leading away from the cliff edge, a nature trail guided

visitors through White Cedar Swamp. Eventually, improved markers would provide

greater detail of the human use and nature at both these sites. Park rangers led daily

walks here as well as into Nauset Marsh adjacent to the visitor center, Pilgrim Heights,

and among the Province Lands’ ponds and beech forest.502

501 Quotation from 1963 park brochure. 502 Marconi Station history from the interpretive markers at the site. See also the 1963 brochure: National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1963); National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1963” in Cape Cod

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At the end of the summer the Boston Globe assessed the seashore’s accomplishments. It now controlled 9,265 acres. An estimated 3,336 people visited daily in July and August. There were now nineteen uniformed personnel (14 of whom were seasonal). Fifteen lifeguards supervised the park’s three beaches. Both the guided walks and evening programs were hugely popular, with a single nature walk attracting

300 participants, while one evening program drew an audience of 700. More than

700,000 people visited from across the United States and abroad. By any estimation the seashore was a success.

What the Globe did not mention was that in June the Park Service had purchased the former house and barn of whaling captain Edward Penniman in the Fort Hill area of

Eastham. The previous year it had acquired one of the Hill’s two large former farms, and in 1964 it would acquire the second. With the entire hill (actually two hills – Skiff Hill and Fort Hill) under its ownership, the woods and fields would soon host more interpretive options for the public. But as Fort Hill was the first part of the seashore that visitors encountered as they arrived from the west along U.S. Route 6, the photogenic and elegant Penniman House would become one of the seashore’s most prominent historic sites, and a main story within its historical interpretation.503

In subsequent years the Park Service expanded on the framework of its first full

season. Some 750 dignitaries, guests, and visitors met at the seashore’s headquarters in

National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” David A. Kimball and Vernon G. Gilbert, “Interpretive Prospectuses for Cape Cod National Seashore, Ocean View, Pilgrim Springs, Marconi Site, Camp Wellfleet Overlook [1963]” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Admin Files,” Folder “D18 – Interpretive Prospectus.” “1963 Accomplishments, Division of Interpretation,” Record Group 79, Box 19, National Archives, Waltham, MA. 503 Frank Falacci, “Park’s 1st Season Reported Good One,” Boston Globe, September 1, 1963, 9. Frank Falacci, “Even Critics Now Admit: National Seashore Cape’s Biggest Asset,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1964, 42A. Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 47.

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Eastham on October 11, 1964 for a ceremony to honor Henry Beston as the Department of the Interior declared his Outermost House a national literary landmark. The designation was part of a larger Park Service effort to identify and officially recognize both natural areas and historic properties that were nationally important; as most of these

(including the Outermost House) were outside federal control and would never join the national park system, the Park Service hoped to encourage the public to recognize their value and continue to preserve them. For his part, the seventy-six year-old Beston praised the federal government for forever protecting his beloved Great Beach, and, quoting from his The Outermost House, advised the crowd to “Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills and her seas.” Beston had donated the house and surrounding 60 acres of dunes to the Massachusetts Audubon Society back in 1960, and as it remained private property the Park Service did not include the house on seashore maps that staff handed out daily at the visitor center. But Beston’s message of honoring the earth would gain greater weight within the park by the end of the decade.504

Far from the solitude-providing dunes described in Beston’s book, a new policy

from the Park Service’s administration threatened to alter how Superintendent Gibbs and his staff managed the growing park. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in July 1964

had signed a memorandum recognizing that the parks which Congress had created in the

preceding decades belonged to one of three types of areas – natural, historical, or

recreational – and should be managed as such. Natural areas would be managed to

restore and maintain their natural environment, though significant historic features would

continue to be maintained. Preservation of the built environment would dominate in

504 National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 64. Herbert A. Kenny, “Now A National Monument: Outermost House Feted,” Boston Globe, October 12, 1964, 8.

365 historical areas, while outdoor leisure activities would take precedence over conservation and preservation in recreational areas.

Udall’s memorandum, prepared by Park Service Director Hartzog and his staff, coincided with criteria set by the Recreation Advisory Council. The six-member

Cabinet-level council had the previous year proposed the construction of recreational areas within 250 miles of major urban centers for large-scale public use. The recently- opened Cape Cod National Seashore largely fell into this category by default, as according to the Park Service’s own history of the system’s evolution, many of the national seashores and lakeshores being created at this time would have been categorized as natural areas were it not for their allowance of hunting.505

Superintendent Gibbs and his staff having to put the outdoor recreational needs of the public ahead of preservation and conservation on Cape Cod was against both the spirit and the language of the law that President Kennedy had signed in 1961. Under the chairmanship of Charles H. W. Foster, the Advisory Commission protested the new categorization through much of 1965. After significant correspondence and meetings with Park Service officials, the Commission won a rare and unusual exemption. As

Foster recalled in his history of the Commission’s first twenty years,

Although the formal designation was never changed, the Advisory Commission won agreement in principle from Director Hartzog that the legislative language would prevail. The agreement was fortified by special language in the fiscal year

505 National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 66, 72-73, 75. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 244-246. The Recreational Advisory Council’s recommendations were released as “Federal Executive Branch Policy Governing the Selection Establishment, and Administration of National Recreation Areas, Policy Circular No. 1, March 26, 1963.” For complete text see the section “Policy on the Establishment and Administration of Recreation Areas” in Chapter 5 “Questions of Resource Management: 1957 – 1963” in America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents, ed. Lary M. Dilsaver (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994), http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/anps/anps_5g.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

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1966 appropriations act inserted by Senator Leverett Saltonstall expressing the underlying conservation philosophy of the Seashore.506

Had the Advisory Commission not fought the recreational area designation, the

preservation and interpretation of both historic and natural features would have had

secondary importance to accommodating the recreational needs of visitors. As Udall’s

memorandum was released after the seashore’s master plan was approved, it’s uncertain

exactly how a recreation focus would have altered the seashore’s development – likely

more roads, parking areas, beaches with bathing facilities, hiking and biking trails, and

even sites for camping, concessions, and athletic fields. Outside of Cape Cod National

Seashore, these three categories would persist in the park system until the Service enacted

a new management policy in 1975 that recognized that each park should be managed

according to its individual historic and natural assets and recreational potential. It would

officially abolish the categories two years later.507

While still getting to pursue its original legislative management direction, 1965 still brought dramatic changes in the operation of the seashore. The previous fall, work had started on renovating former barracks and other buildings at Camp Wellfleet into classroom, administration, and living space for up to one hundred underprivileged young men participating in the new federal Job Corps program that emphasized classroom education and gaining practical job skills. A program of President Johnson’s War on

Poverty, it chose Cape Cod to host one of the first four Job Corps centers in the nation.

The pairing of training center and seashore echoed the Civilian Conservation Corps

506 Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 29. 507 Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 29, 90. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 88.

367 camps that had created significant and lasting improvements in state and federal parks during the Great Depression. By June eighty-one enrollees resided at the Wellfleet

Conservation Center, and over the next five years hundreds of youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one worked alongside park rangers as they practiced tasks such as construction, landscaping, vehicle repair, fire and insect control, building nature trails, dune stabilization, and reforestation.508

Partially with the help of this extra labor, the seashore saw major projects finished by year’s end. Nauset Light Beach opened. Restoration work began on the Penniman

House. Seashore headquarters relocated to purpose-built administration buildings near

Marconi Station. The park’s largest glacial erratic called Enos Rock (or Doane Rock) was now accessible via a new trail off the main road between the Nauset Coast Guard station and the seashore’s new Salt Pond Visitor Center which opened that July. For at least the past two years the park’s interpretive staff had collected artifacts and information for the center’s exhibits, which the Park Service’s Eastern Museum

Laboratory in Washington D.C. actually fabricated and installed in the visitor center’s museum wing in September (the other wing being an auditorium). The lab was also in charge of the park’s outdoor exhibits, with presumably the seashore staff providing images and information as well as feedback.509

508 For Job Corps as CCC successor see Jean Dietz, “How Cape Job Corps Will War on Poverty,” Boston Globe, December 18, 1964, 18. For progress of Job Corps camp see Jean Dietz, “A Chance to Grow… Job Corps Is Launched,” Boston Globe, June 20, 1965, A7. Jean Dietz, “Wellfleet Job Corps Center,” Boston Globe, June 27, 1965, A44. 509 Opening of new attractions from National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965); National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, 1965, Cape Cod National Seashore,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” For collecting see “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” July 1, 1964, page 3, Record Group 79, Box 3, National Archives, Waltham, MA. Penniman House restoration first mentioned in “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” June 2, 1965, page 4. Salt Pond Visitor Center opening mentioned in untitled minutes of

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Lastly, workmen in December completed the third and final interpretive shelter in the seashore at Skiff Hill, part of the recently-acquired Fort Hill area. Its exhibit panels detailed the plant and animal life within Nauset Bay that the shelter looked out on, as well as the story of significant Native American inhabitation along the shores of the bay.

To present dramatic and hands-on evidence of this lengthy tenure, the Park Service had located a twenty-ton rock in the marsh below the hill which they dragged up and placed in front of the shelter. Deep grooves and flat areas on the boulder’s surface showed where Native Americans for years had used it to grind their stone tools. And as with

Pilgrim Heights and Marconi Station, visitors could head from the shelter down a new self-guided nature trail – this one through a swamp noted for its red maple trees. As park attendance reached 2.3 million visitors by the end of 1965, the Park Service was gaining an ever greater audience to communicate its version of coastal New England.510

With 13,000 acres in federal control in 1966, the Park Service formally

established Cape Cod National Seashore in a ceremony held on Memorial Day. Some

3,000 people crowded the lawn of the new Salt Pond Visitor Center built on a bluff

beside U.S. Route 6, and overlooking the eponymous Salt Pond. Senator Ted Kennedy of

Massachusetts read from Thoreau’s Cape Cod to convey how his late older brother had

January 5, 1966 staff meeting, page 1. Museum Lab mentioned in “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” April 7, 1965, page 2; untitled national seashore staff meeting minutes of August 4, 1965, page 3; “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” September 1, 1965, page 1; and “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” November 29, 1966, page 2. All from Record Group 79, Box 3, National Archives, Waltham, MA. 510 Weight of rock from current exhibit signage at Skiff Hill Interpretive Shelter. For details on move of “Indian Rock” and construction of the shelter see “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” September 1, 1965, page 2; “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” October 6, 1965, page 3; “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” November 3, 1965, page 2; untitled minutes of national seashore staff meeting, December 1, 1965, page 3. Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 51-53. Attendance figure from untitled minutes of national seashore staff meeting, January 5, 1966, page 2. Record Group 79, Box 3, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

369 valued the region and sought to protect it. Among those attending were a delegation from the Federation of Eastern Indians, whom a photographer for the Associated Press photographed in their full regalia walking with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

The Native Americans were a visual reminder that the Native history of the region did not stop with the prehistoric and colonial-era stories told within the seashore’s exhibits.511

As visitors toured the park in record numbers – the visitor center’s museum room at times was crammed with as many as 200 people in a space designed for thirty-five – infrastructure improvements continued, as well as the attention of the Intrepretive

Division to balancing its nature and history themes. While the Penniman House would remain closed to the public even after its exterior restoration, it finally received outdoor signage in 1966. Seashore historian Edison Lohr continued to gather artifacts for the eventual lifesaving museum in the Nauset Coast Guard Station, and by the following year he reported that everything was on hand. However, as the Park Service’s budget had shrank in the wake of Mission 66’s completion, and the Park Service was using the Coast

Guard Station on a year by year permit basis from the Coast Guard, both a lack of money

and outright ownership stalled the museum for the foreseeable future. The seashore’s

Griffin Island Interpretive Center was likewise yet to be built.512

In 1967 the number of guided walks led by park rangers either daily or every few

days had increased to ten: Pilgrim Springs History, Great Island, Tidal Marsh, Nauset

Marsh, Seashore, Skiff Hill, Pilgrim Lake Dunes, Hatches Harbor, Fort Hill History, and

511 13,000 acres from James B. Ayres, “JFK Cape Project Real – On His Birthday,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1966, 1. Gloria Negri, “…JFK Walked Its Beaches, Sailed Its Waters,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1966, 1. Associated Press photo in author’s collection, found on eBay. 512 Crammed museum room from untitled national seashore staff meeting minutes for September 7, 1966, page 2. Lohr acquires everything for maritime museum but stymied from “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” November 1, 1967, page 6. Charles Foster said that the first significant budget cuts for the park came in 1968. Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 34.

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Atlantic White Cedar Swamp. The walks’ names and descriptions in the interpretive program handout divide into either history or nature, with only Hatches Harbor and

Seashore walks described as combining the two. However, as the types of flora present, such as non-native apple trees, grape vines, and roses all now growing wild, and the cultural names of ostensibly “natural” areas implied, human history was present even on a nature walk and vice versa. Not ignoring other methods of exploring the park, up in the

Province Lands the Park Service opened the first of three bicycle trails in the seashore that September. The ribbon of asphalt running through a beech forest and dunes was the first ever bicycle trail built by the Park Service, and attested to a federal emphasis on encouraging physical fitness that had started with the Kennedy administration. Booklets available to riders duly chronicled the natural and human history visible along the paths.513

The National Park Service’s careful integration of history, archaeology, and

nature in its exhibits, talks, walks, and trails represented a sharp contrast to the way

maritime public history had traditionally been practiced in New England – best

represented through Mystic Seaport. The region’s most popular maritime museum had

brought the open-air museum model into the water with its construction in the 1940s and

‘50s of a typical nineteenth-century New England seaport village. Museum visitors could

inspect historic vessels docked at wharves adjacent to a model community that had

513 National Park Service, “Revised Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1967,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.7 Visitor Center Handout 1967.” National Park Service, Bicycle Trail Guide: Province Lands, Pilgrim Heights & Nauset Areas, Cape Cod National Seashore (Harpers Ferry, W.V.: Harpers Ferry Job Corps Civilian Conservation Center, National Park Service, [c. 1969]); and National Park Service, Bicycle Trail Guide: Province Lands & Nauset Areas, Cape Cod National Seashore (Hyannis, MA.: U-Pedal-It Inc., [c. 1969]), both in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.” William Burke, “Wild Ride: The Curious History of the Province Lands Bike Trail,” Seashore News, July and August 2010, 10.

371 equipped such vessels for global trade and fishing. Nature existed in the materials used to construct buildings and vessels, and the marine animals and derivative products harvested from the sea, but Mystic Seaport otherwise excluded the role that the maritime environment played in a coastal village. Representative of this approach was the museum’s attitude toward the salt marshes on its property. At Mystic’s annual meeting in 1946 the board of dir ectors thanked E. A. Olds Jr. “for the conveyance to the association of the five acres of salt marsh formerly owned by him in Greenmanville avenue. It was felt that this land, while useless now, may be of considerable importance in the future development of the museum’s holdings.”514

As the Marine Historical Association would soon fill in the marsh along Shipyard

Point to create level high ground for the village, wharves, and adjacent deep water to dock its vessels, it practiced a traditional attitude of subduing nature for the sake of

progress. Nature, even in the minds of early twentieth century American conservationists, existed to be used efficiently for human benefit. Shipyard Point for the

Association was a tabula rasa for carrying out their museum vision, and not a valuable ecosystem to be preserved in its own right. The “useless” salt marsh donated by Olds to the Association was likely filled in for a parking lot. While conservation organizations elsewhere in the region such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society valued and protected coastal lands such as salt marshes, they were dedicated to conservation and not promoting history. However, at Cape Cod National Seashore the National Park Service married the two approaches in interpreting maritime history as intertwined with its environment. At

Pilgrim Heights for instance, in order for visitors to see the famous spring they had to

514 Quote from newspaper clipping from the New London, Connecticut, Evening Day, July 15, 1946, in Mystic Seaport Museum Archives, Annual Meeting, Box 1, 1930-1950, Folder 17: “Annual Meeting, 1946.”

372 leave their cars behind and walk down a winding trail through woods that while ecologically different than what the Pilgrims saw (interpretive markers identified plants and features), still provided a sense of their frantic search for fresh water that distant

November. History at the national seashore was environmental and immersive.

By the late 1960s the Cape Cod National Seashore was more than simply showing that natural and human history were inseparable. As the visual imagery of the seashore’s literature demonstrates, the image of the national seashore was becoming more environmental than cultural. The national seashore’s branding had begun with the first full brochures handed out in 1963, as a stylized lighthouse/Pilgrim hat graced the cover.

In 1965 a stylized tern was added above the lighthouse and remained there until a 1969 redesign created a condensed, pocket-size brochure without any illustrations besides a map and small photos of marsh grass and the Nauset Coast Guard Station.

But the trend continued in the summer interpretive programs handed out at the visitor center. The cover of the first program in 1963 featured a drawing of the seashore’s Cape Cod Light atop the high cliffs in Truro. The next year it was a watercolor of a marsh that mimicked the photo used on the later map. For 1965 through

1967 a pen drawing of a tern hovered above a dune dotted with beach grass.515 For 1968

the image became a simple line drawing within a circle of a tern flying above a dune

topped with beach grass and “Cape Cod National Seashore” printed on the dune face.

This has been the emblem of the national seashore ever since, appearing on clothing,

signage, and promotional literature. This visual transformation would also be evident in

515 Naturalist David Spang recalls in a newsletter of the Friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore that the design was created by Patsy Gilbert, wife of Chief Naturalist Vernon C. “Tom” Gilbert. David Spang, “Memories of the Seashore’s Early Days,” The Shore, Spring/Summer 2011, 6. Friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore, http://www.fccns.org/newsletters/TheShoreSpringSummer2011.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013).

373 the publication of the new master plan already being prepared in 1968. The original cover of the 1963 plan had the Pilgrims’ Mayflower on its title page. Published in 1970, the new master plan’s cover featured a single tern.516

This environmental turn was also evident at individual sites within the park, and

the National Park Service’s adoption of an environmental education program called

NEED. Visitors walking along the Fort Hill Trail in 1969 were provided with an

extensive eleven-page handout describing thirteen stations at which they were to read the

handout’s relevant paragraphs. For station #5, at an overlook of the entire hill area, the

message was frank and contemporary:

The importance of Fort Hill-Skiff Hill, for us, is that most of the mistakes later made in our westward expansion and land use had already been made in the Eastham section of Cape Cod. Cape settlers did not intentionally abuse the land: it is just that Eastham is so small and fragile that 250 years of improper land use impoverished the soil almost beyond saving. As we continue down the path toward the marsh, we can answer some questions and leave some for you. We shall note how the Cape was reduced from great forests, valuable swamps, good farmland and superb shell and ocean fishing to no forests, disappearing swamps, wind-blown farmland and poorer and poorer fishing. These are of course not purely local problems – they are national.517

Gone is the traditional American narrative of heroic settlers who tamed the landscape and embodied values of faith and hard work that their descendants should follow. What replaces it is a subjective and heartbreaking story of decline and destruction of nature by humans as they expanded westward over the next three centuries. The seashore’s history

516 The illustration of the cover of the 1963 version of the master plan mentioned in Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 17. National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970). For CCNS maps and brochures from 1962 through 1990 see Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, Folder “CCNS – Programs/Brochures 3.4.27B” and Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folders “Handout Materials 1965,” “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966,” “3.7 Visitor Center Handout 1967,” “3.8 Visitor Center Handout 1968,” and “3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.” 517 “Fort Hill Trail (Eastham),” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.”

374 was no longer the “interaction of man and nature” as the 1963 master plan had stated, balancing the two forces. Instead, man was doing significant harm to nature.

This imbalance became the new interpretive theme of the 1970 master plan: “The story of Cape Cod is the history of natural forces and man’s effect on this landscape.”

But instead of merely illustrating environmental damage on the Cape as a cautionary tale for the public, the National Park Service embraced activism with its adoption two years prior of the National Environmental Educational Development program. As explained in the master plan, an increasing number of visitors to the seashore were urban residents with little experience in or knowledge of nature and humanity’s relationship to it. “If such visitors are to respect the resources of the Seashore, refrain from activities which damage those resources, and support continued preservation, they must understand the environment and man’s dependence upon it.” With the seashore by now having completed its infrastructure development (the Province Lands Visitor Center opened in

1969); and an extensive amount of interpretation of natural and man-made change was available through its exhibits, programs, and trails, it was an excellent place to educate the public. The Park Service’s answer was a residential environmental education program where school groups were given dormitory and classroom space to study

“natural forces and the effects of man’s tinkering with them.” Hopefully the immersive experience within a national seashore would impart a greater respect for the land, as

Mystic Seaport had hoped its Yankee museum village would do for the American character.518

518 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 7, 46. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 210 (NEED). Retired seashore naturalist David

375

The master plan identified the Nauset Coast Guard Station as the temporary headquarters for the program, as it still planned to convert the station into a lifesaving museum. But the Park Service’s reduced budget for the seashore in the wake of Mission

66’s completion, and competition for federal dollars from programs such as President

Johnson’s War on Poverty, NASA, and the escalating Vietnam War would contribute to the Griffin Island Center never being built, and the NEED program remaining in the

Coast Guard Station into the present. A “home-made” lifesaving exhibit opened in the garage of the Coast Guard Station in 1970 and continued to be open for limited hours through 1978, after which it was relocated to a refurbished former lifesaving station in the Province Lands. A living history program demonstrating a turn-of-the-century lifesaving drill would start that same year on Coast Guard Beach, and switch to the

Province Lands beside the former station the following summer.519

But the Cape Cod National Seashore’s major period of growth was now over by

the start of the 1970s. It hoped to acquire more of the 7,519 acres of private land still

within its boundaries, but the rest of its 44,000 acres was in public ownership (state,

federal, or towns). And the master plan still outlined a strong mission of restoring and

interpreting the historic areas and buildings within the seashore; of the more than eighty

historic buildings identified in the HABS survey, only the Penniman house and barn were

Spang says that the Province Lands Visitor Center was built smaller and with only one wing due to budget cuts, according to a 5/24/12 conversation. 519 Park Service reduced budget from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 34; and May 24, 2012 conversation with David Spang, who began as a naturalist at CCNS in 1963 and worked for the next forty-two seasons; he still volunteers at the seashore. “Home-made” from page 2 of “Briefing Statement: Interpretive Operation at Cape Cod National Seashore,” November 3, 1978, Cape Cod National Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “The Cape Cod Interpreter.” Dates for the lifesaving exhibit are from surveying the summer interpretive programs, 1970 through 1977, and park newspapers for 1978 and 1979. For NEED temporarily housed at Nauset CG Station and a Life Saving Museum still planned for the space, see National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 45 (museum), 47 (NEED).

376 interpreted as exhibits in place. Subsequent improvements in the park would come from working with the pieces of the built environment already within its boundaries.520

The larger context of how the NPS saw history, nature, and tourism in the 1960s and ‘70s as the environmental movement emphasized an ecological understanding of nature

As the development of the first decade of infrastructure and interpretation within

Cape Cod National Seashore demonstrates, it was the product of a long line of laws,

regulations, and decisions originating in Washington, D.C., where the federal government

itself was subject to evolving attitudes within American society surrounding the study, preservation, and promotion of nature, history, and recreation. Originating as an organization largely tasked with preserving and welcoming the public to large iconic

“natural” parks in the American West, the National Park Service in the 1930s significantly increased its presence eastward – particularly with its acquisition of historic

sites controlled by other federal agencies. Laws such as the Historic Sites Act of 1935 and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 gave the National Park Service greater authority and responsibility to document, advocate for the preservation of, and sometimes acquire sites of national historical significance.521

Along with this focus on history came an understanding in the 1930s to also

accommodate the recreational needs of Americans – a vision that included the nation’s

seashores and lakeshores. The long-envisioned designation and development of Cape

Cod National Seashore eventually occurred within the National Park Service’s Mission

520 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 51 (public ownership), 54 (Penniman). 521 National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 28, 51-52, 65.

377

66 drive to modernize its infrastructure, staffing, and expand the number of parks. Its successor program, Parkscape U.S.A., sought to further grow the system in time for

Yellowstone’s centennial in 1972. During these two programs the Park Service also expanded its law enforcement program to handle the increasing attendance and resultant conflicts between people and nature, and people themselves. And it expanded interpretive programs, emphasizing both environmental education and living history.522

But this growth occurred during the American environmental movement, and revealed the Park Service leaders’ limited interest in biological science. While the Park

Service created more “natural” parks, enforced regulations protecting nature, and emphasized environmental education, these were not rooted in an ecological understanding of the parks. As Park Service historian Richard Sellars makes clear in his history of the Service’s management of its natural resources, the National Park Service

throughout its history has always put scenic preservation and recreational tourism above

scientific study of the park system’s natural resources.

Since the 1930s, a rival faction within the Park Service led mainly by wildlife

biologists advocated scientific study to preserve the ecological integrity of a park and to

limit development to areas where it would cause the least harm. But especially during the

rapid expansion of Mission 66 and Parkscape U.S.A., this viewpoint found little

sympathy among the NPS leadership, particularly given Park Service Director (1951-

1964) Conrad Wirth’s background in landscape architecture and his successor George

Hartzog’s (1964-1972) shared enthusiasm for growing the park system. Within their

tenures the system experienced its largest period of expansion yet, with ninety-eight

522 Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 205-210.

378 permanent additions from 1952 through 1972. Of these, twenty-eight were recreational areas, sixty-one historical areas, and only twelve natural areas. While the Park Service had its 1916 mandate “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same…,” Secretary Udall’s 1964 memorandum (one of an array of internal documents over the bureau’s history that interpreted and reinterpreted this mission) tilted the balance according to each park’s main category as history, nature, or recreation. As Mission 66 and Parkscape U.S.A. progressed they would run up against evolving attitudes in American society towards nature, and Congressional legislation.523

While historians have long debated the origins of the modern American environmental movement,524 it had become part of mainstream American culture by the end of the 1960s. In the postwar wake of large-scale American suburbanization, infrastructure development, the widespread adoption of pesticides, and a wealthier populace able to afford an ever-greater range of goods, a growing public concern arose over the resulting accelerated environmental destruction, pollution, and consumption of

523 Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 204-210. Tally of NPS additions from National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 67, 70, 72. 524 For the origins of conservation and the later environmental movement see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 2001). Richard William Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Thomas P. Jundt, “The Origins of the Environmental Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2008). Tina Merrill Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2006). Daniel J. Philippon, Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 2004). John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (1975; Corvallis, OR.: Oregon State University Press, 2001). Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York, N.Y.: Hill & Wang, 1993). Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle, WA.: University of Washington Press, 2002). Adam Ward Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

379 resources. What had once been the regrettable but acceptable costs of modern society, such as the polluted Cuyahoga River catching fire in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952, had become by the time of another Cuyahoga fire in 1969 emblematic of what were now environmental disasters that received nationwide publicity and significant public outrage.

At the heart of this concern for the environment was the word ecology – an understanding that organisms had complex, interdependent relationships with their environment and each other. Rachel Carson’s 1962 best-selling book Silent Spring brought this scientific term into the mainstream as she dramatically demonstrated the damage that understudied chemicals were having on not only the natural ecosystems but the humans who lived within and depended upon them.525

The belief that man was upsetting the harmony by which the natural world

operated dated back to the nineteenth century with such proto-environmentalists as Henry

David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh. Critics of American expansion into, and the

subjugation or destruction of nature had existed since the early nineteenth century, and

citizens by the 1860s were already working to regulate pollution, manage finite natural

resources, and set aside public lands for preservation. But what had once been the radical

criticism of a small number of advocates for nature became within a century – through

advances in science, technology, public education, communications, expansion of voting

rights and political activism, and an increased pressure on the natural world by a growing

nation – a mainstream movement that sought to curb mankind’s destruction of nature, and

in doing so help protect itself.526

525 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 239-241. 526 For Thoreau and Marsh see Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (New York, N.Y.: Hill & Wang, 1993), 46-53. For regulating pollution see John T. Cumbler,

380

For modern environmentalists and their spiritual founders, the roots of this destruction originated with the arrival of the first Europeans. Successive waves of colonists and their descendants used the land without regard for how their actions upset the natural order or ecosystem. The virgin continent was a place to be tamed and put to productive use. But the idea of wilderness soon underwent a sea change. Historian

Roderick Nash released the book Wilderness and the American Mind in 1967 as

Americans were taking an ever-growing interest in their environment. He traced the contemporary positive view of wilderness to the nineteenth century, as Americans began to reimagine the wilderness as an asset over a liability. For much of the century it had been a place to seek the sublime, and with the frontier deemed closed in the 1890s, its use now expanded to include escaping the constraints and stresses of urban modernity and to restore mental and spiritual health. Wilderness advocates began campaigning to protect what few wild places America had left. At the time of Nash’s writing, wilderness was now legally defined, governmentally designated, and heavily visited.527

As Americans’ European ancestors became the (if unintentional) villains in this story of environmental decline, and their descendants tried to limit pollution and save

Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790-1930 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001). For managing finite natural resources see Richard William Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Though communities and colonies in America have set aside common land for public use since the seventeenth century (such as the Boston Common and Province Lands outside Provincetown in Massachusetts), the federal government deeding the Yosemite Valley and nearby Mariposa Grove to the state of California in 1864 for use as a public park was the first state park in the nation, and set a precedent for the establishment of the first national park – Yellowstone – in 1872. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 12-13. 527 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1983). Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (1967; New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1982). Nash assigned wilderness appreciation only to the urban elite. For a rural perspective of how local people in the Adirondack Mountains interacted with the environment and practiced a “moral ecology,” see Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 2001).

381 what remained, there were important consequences to this version of history as it became part of government policy as well as popular culture. The National Park Service had adopted this narrative by 1958 in Our Vanishing Seashore, when it chronicled the coastal plant and animal communities and concluded,

Since Europeans came on the scene, this native life has been sharply disturbed, often destroyed, and the balance of nature upset. The few remaining examples of natural plant-animal communities along the seacoast should be zealously preserved and protected from further modification…. Even at this late hour we can save some of our native seacoast life if areas can be given permanent protection.528

Once Cape Cod National Seashore was established, the story of decline was eventually

repeated in the park’s interpretation.

Going further, the 1963 paper “Wildlife Management in the National Parks”

(popularly known as the Leopold Report) was both the first of its kind as an outside

review by five leading scientists and wildlife advocates on how the Park Service managed wildlife, and received nationwide publicity for its criticism of present practices and recommendations. Submitted to Secretary Udall, the committee reported that “As a primary goal, we would recommend that the biotic associations within each park be maintained, or when necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man. A natural park should represent a vignette of primitive America.” As Park Service historian Sellars critiqued in

Preserving Nature in the National Parks, this language “inspired a patriotic, ethnocentric goal – to maintain the landscape remnants of a pioneer past” that ignored how Native

Americans perceived the land and that they could ecologically impact it.529

528 National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 19. 529 “Goal” in A.Starker Leopold et al., “Wildlife Management in the National Parks: The Leopold Report,” March 4, 1963. National Park Service,

382

Scholars have subsequently debunked the myths that Native Americans – the outnumbered and persecuted hero of the story of American environmental decline – did not significantly alter flora and fauna, and that true wilderness, free of human influence, existed. But the popular stereotype of the “Ecological Indian” – that Native Americans were proto-ecologists and aware of the systemic consequences of their actions and sought to maintain the natural balance – has proven to be lasting in American culture, and one which many Native Americans have embraced.530 Perhaps in recognition of the deep and extensive footprint on the land, whether from Native or Euro-Americans, the 1964

Wilderness Act used a more practical definition in evaluating wilderness by its present appearance of wildness and lack of development.531

Intended to protect extensive undeveloped areas of land within federal ownership, the Wilderness Act signed by President Johnson in 1964 created a legal definition of http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/leopold/leopold4.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). For a hard copy, see A. Starker Leopold et al., “Wildlife Management in the National Parks,” in Transactions of the Twenty-Eighth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, ed. James B. Trerethen (Washington, D.C.: Wildlife Management Institute, 1963), 1-43. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 214. 530 Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 21. 531 For wilderness as a cultural construct, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90. For Native Americans shaping their environment, and their subsequent removal to create “wilderness” see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1999); Philip Burnham, Indian Country, God's Country: Native Americans and the National Parks (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000); Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); and Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis, eds., Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Public Law 88-577 (the Wilderness Act) defines wilderness “as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.” “The Wilderness Act,” September 3, 1964, http://wilderness.nps.gov/document/wildernessAct.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013).

383 wilderness and established a National Wilderness Preservation System to designate wilderness areas within land managed by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Believing that they were already doing a satisfactory job in protecting natural resources, Park Service leadership resisted passage of the Act, which required a survey of federally-owned lands, and those with at least 5,000 acres of supposed “wilderness” were to be designated as such and kept that way in perpetuity. In the midst of a massive building program it did not want to lose the authority to decide where it could develop. The Park Service eventually complied in recommending areas within its park system to be declared as wilderness, but environmental groups and

Congress frequently contested the Service’s recommendations for being too conservative or overlooking certain areas entirely. Representative of such battles, the Park Service’s plan for developing Cumberland Island National Seashore for large-scale recreational use was defeated by local and national conservation advocates, who eventually succeeded in having a significant portion of the island protected under the Wilderness Act.532

At the height of the environmental movement, and in the same year that Congress

established Cumberland Island National Seashore, the NPS issued the two-part National

Park System Plan in 1972 that divided American history (part 1) and natural history (part

2) into thematic categories and assigned its “natural” and “historical” parks to these

categories. The gaps showed where the Park Service was not adequately representing

history and nature and were targets for future expansion. But even as the NPS used

ecological and scientific characteristics in deciding where to grow the system, it was

“only grudgingly,” according to Sellars, “accepting ecological science as part of park

532 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (1967; New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1982), 221-226. Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 191-194 (opposition to act), 211-212.

384 management. The Park Service may have thought of itself as being ecologically aware, but it remained largely uninformed about its biological resources and oblivious to the ecological consequences of park development and use.”533

Within Cape Cod National Seashore there were definitely nowhere near 5,000

acres that had escaped human development in the preceding three centuries, so the

Wilderness Act did not apply to the Cape as it did on Cumberland Island. And the 1970 master plan did echo the Park Service’s preference for scenic preservation and accommodating tourists as it discussed the state of and recommendations for improving recreation, an ecologically-based interpretation, public environmental education, and resource management (erosion control, dune stabilization, insect and plant disease control, and fire suppression), but not scientific study of the park by the Park Service itself. While the Park Service stated in promotional literature that “natural features are

Cape Cod’s most important asset” and preserving these features was its chief aim, recreation ruled on Cape Cod.

While the public face of the seashore by the second half of the 1960s was nature – represented in its emblem – the promotion of recreation largely trumped ecological concerns. Partly this was following the aforementioned sentiment of the National Park

Service leadership, and partly it was due to local factors. At the time of the seashore’s creation significant development already existed within its boundaries, from hundreds of homes and businesses to the Provincetown Airport in the Province Lands. To create the park required the support of many of these inholders as well as recognition of some traditional activities not normally allowed in national parks, such as hunting, fishing, and

533 Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1997), 213, 341 note 22. National Park Service, The National Parks: Shaping the System (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2005), 67.

385 the off-road “beach buggies” that roamed the dunes and headed out to favorite fishing spots. The Massachusetts Beach Buggy Association, for example, was an early proponent of the national seashore. In this instance the master plan did call for carefully studying the effects of the vehicles on the dunes’ ecology – the only ecological study mentioned in the text. But within or outside the master plan there was no discussion of taking the seashore back to some imagined state of wilderness. The seashore’s enabling legislation specifying that it “shall be permanently preserved in its present state” – unlike

Cumberland Island’s requirement to be preserved “in its primitive state” – was recognition that Cape Cod was not a wilderness, nor a purely “natural” area. It was a landscape extensively modified by first Native Americans and then European settlers and their descendants.534

Within the seashore were areas imprinted with both natural and human stories,

though the former physically dominated the latter. The master plan classified the

seashore’s 27,700 acres of land into “general outdoor recreation” of 4,400 acres including beaches, visitor centers, airport, the Highland and Marconi Station areas, and house-lined roads; “natural environmental areas” encompassing 21,800 acres that were largely undeveloped but often riddled with inholdings; “outstanding natural features” comprising

450 acres of Nauset Marsh; “primitive areas” of 770 acres within mostly Great Island; and eighty-odd “historic and cultural sites” estimated at three acres per site for a total of

240 acres. While encompassing a vastly smaller area of the national seashore, and

534 Pat Harty, “Beach Buggy Casters Like Cape Park Plan,” Boston Globe, June 8, 1958, 56. National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 49-50. Quotation of Law 87-126 (“present state”) from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 110. Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 109 (“primitive state”).

386 situated within nature, history in the park can be divided into three categories: Native

Americans, the outer Cape as a place of entrepreneurism, and a benevolent government working hard to protect its people.535

Cape Cod’s Native history

After exploring the creation, planning, construction, and environmentalism at

Cape Cod National Seashore, it is important to now focus on the types of human stories

told within the park. Since the late-nineteenth century, tourists, consumers, and regional

boosters have prized Cape Cod as an especially historic place – with families, old

buildings, artifacts, and stories sometimes extending back to the seventeenth century.

And Cape Cod National Seashore has adopted this narrative, beginning with the region’s

Native Americans. I have grouped the dozens of stories that visitors encounter into three main categories: Native American/Contact history, the Cape’s history of industry and entrepreneurism, and the federal government’s history on Cape Cod.

Visitors walking through Cape Cod National Seashore by the late 1960s experienced an ecologically-influenced interpretation of both Native American and Euro-

American history that stood in contrast to many of New England’s historic sites and historical attractions which overwhelmingly celebrated the region’s Anglo colonial era.

At CCNS one could find ancient shell heaps along the Small’s Swamp Trail, a boulder at

Skiff Hill once used to sharpen stone tools, evening programs such as “The Indian on

Cape Cod” and “Welcome, Englishmen,” Native-American-derived words such as Pamet

and Nauset describing the seashore’s geography, and an exhibit at the Salt Marsh Visitor

535 National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 37.

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Center that described the lives of the Cape’s Native Americans using illustrations, archaeological artifacts, and a diorama of Champlain visiting a Native American village at Nauset Harbor. All of these were points of entry to a Native past on Cape Cod, but it was a history that ended shortly after the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 – and as a result occupied only a minor segment of the park’s historical interpretation.

While explorers and Pilgrims were the major thrust of the historical argument for creating the seashore, a part of both the narratives of early explorers, such as Champlain, and the Pilgrims were encounters with Cape Cod’s Native Americans. Decades of archaeological excavations dating back to the 1940s guided this interpretation, expanding both what anthropologists knew about how prehistoric and historical Native Americans lived and their dates of habitation to 10,000 years before the present. Though historical interpretation for CCNS has overwhelmingly focused on Euro Americans, it’s important to spotlight the less prominent but still ubiquitous Native narrative, and how it contrasted with the story of the region’s modern Native Americans. A twentieth-century visitor within the park could easily conclude that the Cape’s Native history ended in the seventeenth century. But it did not.536

536 “The Indian on Cape Cod” lecture from National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1966” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” “Welcome, Englishmen” lecture from National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, June 28-Labor Day 1969” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” unlabeled folder. Diorama mentioned in description for Station 5 of “Fort Hill Trail (Eastham),” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.” Artist and amateur archaeologist Ross Moffett wrote extensively on the Native American archaeology of Cape Cod in the 1940s and ‘50s. Ross Moffett, “A Review of Cape Cod Archaeology,” Massachusetts Archaeological Society Bulletin 19, no. 1 (October 1957): 1-19. National Park Service archaeological surveys began in 1958, with the most extensive by Park Service archaeologist Francis P. McManamon, who conducted the Cape Cod National Seashore Archaeological Survey from 1979 to 1981 and resulted in a multivolume report “Chapters in the Archeology of Cape Cod” published between 1984- 1986 and 2011. For a full list of CCNS archaeological surveys and excavations see National Park Service, “The Archaeology of Cape Cod,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/the-archaeology-of-outer-cape- cod.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

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To the Park Service, the Nauset Indians of Cape Cod who encountered the

Pilgrims in 1620 as they explored what is now Truro and Eastham were a cultural and political group distinct from the adjacent Wampanoags of southeastern Massachusetts, and who collapsed in the seventeenth century under the weight of post-Contact factors such as disease and Anglo settlement. But according to anthropologist Bert Salwen, the modern concept of a “tribe” began to emerge only in the seventeenth century as a result of this upheaval, and political and territorial divisions on Cape Cod at the time of contact are extremely difficult to determine. In his estimation, the Native Americans living in southeastern Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, can all be organized into the Wampanoag or Pokanoket group, which inhabited southern New

England along with the Pawtucket, Massachusett, Narragansett, and Pequot-Monhegan.

And, at the time of the national seashore’s creation in the 1960s, there remained two vibrant Wampanoag communities in what are today the towns of Mashpee on Cape Cod and Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard.537

From the seventeenth century through the twenty-first, Wampanoags have fought

to improve their economic and political status as well as cultural prominence. This

section of the dissertation reviews the limited portrait of Native Americans at CCNS in

the twentieth century and then moves beyond it – showing how area Wampanoags have

sought to maintain their history and culture in a region popularly defined as the home of

Yankees. As no historical survey exists of the place of Native Americans within New

537 “The Nauset Indians, a branch of the Algonquian linguistic stock, inhabited all of Cape Cod except for the extreme western end in which the Wampanoag tribe lived. They had a loose affiliation with the Wampanoags. Those Nauset villages on the upper Cape were dominated by the Wampanoags while the ones more distant on the lower Cape enjoyed relative independence. Six Nauset villages were located in the proximity of what is now Cape Cod National Seashore.” Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 14-20. Bert Salwen is quoted in Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 72- 73.

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England public history, this section offers an in-depth look at Native American cultural and political activism in southeastern New England from the 1920s to 2011. In the latter half of this story, Cape Cod National Seashore’s creation and rise to become the region’s most popular tourist destination makes it an important potential site for the public to learn about Native history, colonial and contemporary.538

* * *

The seventeenth century was a devastating time for the Wampanoags in what is

now southeastern New England. As English settlers expanded beyond Plymouth, the

attendant diseases, warfare, ecological and economic practices, and proselytism soon

fragmented Wampanoag culture. The area that includes the present town of Mashpee

was home to a Wampanoag community that converted to Christianity, and, with the help

of missionaries Richard Bourne and his son Shearjashub, built a meeting house in 1684

and secured title to the land in the Plymouth Court for the “Praying Indians.” For almost

the next two centuries the Mashpees endured colonial (beginning in 1746) and then state-

appointed guardians that limited their ability to self-govern, missionaries who similarly

did not advocate for their best interests, the dispensation of commonly-held land and

538 For a starting point on the modern history of Native Americans in New England, see Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985). Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997). Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991). Thomas Dresser, The Wampanoag Tribe of Martha’s Vineyard: Colonization to Recognition (Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2011). Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979). Shepard Krech III, ed., Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994). Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987). Ronald Rudin, Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey Through Public Memory (Toronto, ON.: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

390 resources to non-Native Cape Codders in transactions both legal and not, and numerous appeals to colonial and state officials for redress.

In 1834 the Mashpees finally succeeded in petitioning the state to remove their white overseers and grant them a greater degree of self government with the establishment of Mashpee as an Indian District. But the arrangement lasted less than forty years as the Massachusetts legislature made the Mashpee (and all other Native

Americans in the Commonwealth) citizens in 1869 and then incorporated Mashpee as a town the following year. A predominantly Wampanoag community of 227 residents on

Martha’s Vineyard was similarly incorporated as the town of Gay Head in 1870. While the majority of the district’s residents (an 1859 state report listed 371 Mashpees and 32 non-Mashpees) voted against incorporation, Cape Cod’s legislators supported the move, possibly as the incorporation act put the town’s remaining common land (excluding meadow and hay land) up for public auction. Most of Cape Cod had long been deforested for agriculture, making the Mashpee land exceedingly valuable. The result was devastating for the Mashpees, however, who could not afford to buy most of the land that they had communally shared for centuries. But, they would continue to control the town’s government for almost a century.539

The Wampanoags of Gay Head and Mashpee may have lost their legal status as

Native Americans with the incorporation of their Indian Districts into towns, but they did

not abandon their Native American identity in the coming decades. They continued to

practice folk medicine, share folktales, foodways, hunt, fish, and make handicrafts and

539 History of Mashpee Wampanoags summarized from Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 76-119; and Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 34-37. Gay Head incorporation from Thomas Dresser, The Wampanoag Tribe of Martha’s Vineyard: Colonization to Recognition (Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2011), 105-107.

391 tools for their own use and for sale to the public. By the 1910s they were a visible part of the Cape’s tourist economy, described in guidebooks and promoted through postcards.

One card mailed in 1916 shows a comic drawing of Cape Cod with stereotypes of both locals and visitors. In the upper Cape, a “Mashpee Indian” wearing a single feather and wrapped in a blanket sits beside a teepee while smoking a pipe. The card remained in use through the 1930s, while additional ones through the 1960s continued to label Mashpee as a distinctly Native American town through stylized Indians and teepees. This presence on the Cape’s tourist map was evidence of the region’s Wampanoags maintaining a cultural identity – albeit one that popular culture erroneously and incompletely interpreted.540

In the early twentieth century, as the colonial revival movement witnessed a

renewed interest among Euro-Americans in the history, material culture, and lineages of

their ancestors, a similar cultural revival occurred in Native American communities and

was supported by whites who held a romanticized view of the “noble Indian.” Members

of some eastern Native American tribes including the Mashpee adopted dress and other

elements of western Native American tribes in a demonstration of a new pan-Indian

identity and solidarity. The pan-Indian movement also saw the establishment of

organizations to promote and preserve Native rights and culture. Southern New

540 Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 136-137. For examples of folklore see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 14, 24-25, 42, and 57. Postcards are in author’s collection. For a brief description of Mashpee and its Native history, see Porter E. Sargent, A Handbook of New England (Boston, MA.: Porter E. Sargent, 1916), 567-568. See also, Welcome to Cape Cod; Road Map and Directory (Hyannis, MA.: Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce and Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Hotel Association, [c.1930]); Eleanor Early, And This is Cape Cod! (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936), 190; Chapter 4 “Mashpee, the Indians’ Town” in Katharine Crosby, Blue- Water Men and Other Cape Codders (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1946), 51-58; and Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. (Boston, MA.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 26, 593.

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England’s indigenous population also fought popular perceptions among the American public and state and federal governments that they had lost their Native identity through centuries of inter-marriage with Anglo Americans, African Americans, and Portuguese

Americans.541

The revival and celebration of local Native identity was visible through individual and group action. Plymouth’s celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing included Wampanoags from Mashpee as well as members of the Passamaquoddy and

Penobscot tribes in Maine. At the tail end of festivities, a large bronze sculpture of seventeenth-century Wampanoag leader Massasoit was erected on Coles Hill in Plymouth on September 5, 1921, overlooking Plymouth Rock. Charlotte Mitchell

(Wootonekanuske), a descendant of Massasoit, unveiled the statue but later decried the anniversary as a “farce” for celebrating the arrival of a group that eventually caused the death of most of the Wampanoag people. Her anger and charges of racism would be picked up by Native Americans at Plymouth almost a half-century later.542

541 For Native American revival see Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 130. For Native American identity and blood in Southern New England see Ann McMullen, “‘The Heart Interest’: Native Americans at Mount Hope and The King Philip Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard Krech III (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), 168. Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979), 139-148. Ann McMullen, “Blood and Culture: Negotiating Race in Twentieth-Century Native New England” in Confounding the Color Line: Indian-Black Relations in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 261-291. 542 Postcards of Passamaquoddy Chief William Neptune seated inside a birchbark teepee at Plymouth and two Penobscot men paddling from Old Town, Maine to Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the Tercentenary are in the author’s collection. The two men in the birchbark canoe are identified as Newell Tomah and Johnnie Ranco in “Indian Braves Visit Hampton,” Hamptons Union, June 23, 1921, http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/newspapers/hamptonunion/1921/19210623.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). Participation of Mashpee Wampanoags mentioned in Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979), 150. “Massasoit Statue Ready for Casting,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1920, 6; “Indian Princess Unveils Bronze Statue of Massasoit,” Boston Globe, September 6, 1921, 3; “Should Have Killed Pilgrims, Says Last of the Wampanoags,” Boston Globe, September 18, 1921, 56.

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At home, Mashpee Wampanoags restored and rededicated their seventeenth- century meetinghouse in 1923 in a ceremony that included the president of Harvard recounting the church’s history and his university’s role in helping to fund the missionary work. In the fall of 1928 Mashpee leaders joined other local Native Americans at

Herring Pond on the outskirts of Plymouth to form the Wampanoag Nation, electing the

Reverend Leroy C. Perry as supreme sachem. Perry had already been elected in 1923 as the leader of the Wampanoags by another pan-Indian organization, the Indian Council of

New England, which later became the National Algonquin Indian Council. Perry assumed the Indian name of Ousa Mekin, which he translated as Yellow Feather, and appointed the leadership of the Mashpee Wamapanoags, which included a chief, medicine man, and secretary.543

The new “nation” also organized its first powwow in the summer of 1929 in

Mashpee which included a religious service, speeches by white and Native dignitaries,

historical commemorations, dances, a marathon, games, and a beauty contest in the three-

day event. Annual powwows dated back to the early 1920s in Mashpee, and evolved

from a traditional annual homecoming that had been practiced for generations. When a

Boston Globe article the following year listed the celebrations being held in various

communities to mark the state’s tercentenary, Mashpee held an “Indian pow-wow by

descendants of native New England tribes.” It was the only event among the 103 listed

towns and cities hosted by actual Native Americans, as opposed to historical pageants in

543 Frank P. Sibley, “Mashpee’s Indians Rededicate Chapel,” Boston Globe, September 10, 1923, 4. Development of pan-Indian organizations discussed in Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 131; Ann McMullen, “‘The Heart Interest’: Native Americans at Mount Hope and The King Philip Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard Krech III (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), 171-173 (includes biography of Leroy Perry); and Francis G. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cape Cod’s Indian Town (West Franklin, N.H.: Amarta Press, 1979), 150-151.

394 towns such as Natick that included European-Americans playing the parts of historical

Native Americans. But Mashpee was different. Its powwow was a demonstration of

Native American continuity in the wake of the European colonization that the other communities so lavishly commemorated.544

Around 1930 Perry became involved in interpreting the collections of the private

King Philip Museum to the public. Owned by industrialist Rudolf Haffenreffer, the museum collected the material culture of North American indigenous groups, and

Haffenreffer sought to involve those living in southeastern New England, whether as individuals or pan-Indian organizations. By 1931 he had hired Perry as an educational interpreter who lived on the museum grounds in Bristol, Rhode Island, and spoke with visitors. The full-time appointment, though apparently ended by 1933 when Perry became pastor of a church in Gay Head, was unique according to Smithsonian curator

Ann McMullen, who writes that large urban museums in the early twentieth century occasionally employed Native Americans to demonstrate crafts or interpret exhibits, but that New England museums largely did not hire Native educators as permanent staff until the 1970s.545

Wampanoag activism and cultural celebrations continued long after the colonial

revival. In 1951 Gay Head became the last town in the state to be connected to the

electricity grid. It was the result of Wampanoag women and white neighbors getting

enough of the townspeople to pledge to pay for electricity that the local power company

544 Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 132. The web site of the Mashpee Wampanoags describes its 2012 annual powwow as the 91st, dating the practice to 1921. Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/ (accessed January 7, 2013). Louis Lyons, “First Complete Guide to Tercentenary,” Boston Globe, June 1, 1930, B1. 545 Ann McMullen, “‘The Heart Interest’: Native Americans at Mount Hope and The King Philip Museum,” in Passionate Hobby: Rudolf Frederick Haffenreffer and the King Philip Museum, ed. Shepard Krech III (Bristol, R.I.: Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, 1994), 169, 173-174.

395 agreed to install the infrastructure a decade earlier than it had planned. Wampanoag cultural activities also expanded that decade when Helen Attaquin (Princess Running

Water) and her family, descendants of Massasoit, began sponsoring semi-annual powwows in Middleboro, Massachusetts, in 1954. Involving Native Americans from tribes across the country, the events grew from perhaps fifty people taking part in the first one in October of 1954 to more than 700 at a June, 1955, powwow.546

Whether and to what degree Wampanoags should participate in Anglo-American

commemorations was a topic of increasing debate from the 1950s onward. When the

Mayflower II, a replica of the vessel that brought the Pilgrims to America, arrived in first

Provincetown and then Plymouth in the summer of 1957, Wampanoags both participated

in the festivities and performed in contrast to them. When the Mayflower II arrived in

Provincetown Harbor on June 12, 1957, Clinton Marcellus Haynes (Chief Wild Horse)

was a popular subject for newspaper photographers as the Mashpee Wampanoag, wearing

a large feathered headdress and other regalia, shook hands with Mayflower crewmen

from a boat moored alongside during the official reception. That evening in Plymouth,

three Mashpee Wampanoags acted in the first performance of the Pilgrim pageant “A

New Tomorrow” held on the town’s waterfront, and for which Helen Attaquin served as

a consultant. The following day when the Mayflower II arrived, Wampanoag Charles D.

Harding Sr. (Chief White Feather) was a part of the official reception line of

546 Earl Banner, “Last Town in State Gets Electricity Tonight,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1951, 1. “Hark, the Tom-Tom: Indians to Powwwow at Middleboro Next Week-End,” Boston Globe, October 10, 1954, 29. “Indians Gather at Middleboro for Big Powwow,” Boston Globe, October 17, 1954, 44. “Indian Pow-Wow in Middleboro Attended by 700,” Boston Globe, June 20, 1955, 16.

396

“descendants and distinguished personages” to greet the captain and crew as they came ashore.547

While a select few Wampanoags added a dash of multiculturalism to the twelve-

day Mayflower celebration, some protested the lack of significant Native participation.

An “Indian Day” held on June 15 was actually a large gathering of the Improved Order of

Redmen, a national fraternal organization that appropriated Native American traditions,

regalia, and tribal structure. They had also participated in the Plymouth tercentenary, and

had contributed much of the funds for the statue of Massasoit. As “tribes” from seven

states paraded, performed a sun dance, fire dance, and presented an “authentic headdress”

to the cabin boy of the Mayflower, Wampanoag Lorenzo Jeffers (Mittark) of Gay Head

sourly commented that “There isn’t one authentic Indian in the crowd.” Jeffers would

become supreme sachem of the Wampanoag Nation in 1960 upon Leroy Perry’s death,

and become increasingly politically active. As criticism of the lack of Native American

involvement in the Mayflower celebration also surfaced in newspaper editorials, Helen

Attaquin announced that she would sponsor a two-day powwow in East Bridgewater to

present “a pageant of life of the Indians before the coming of the white man, including

dances, songs and tribal ceremonies.” Aware of the political statement of the powwow,

particularly given the “Indian” performances held in Plymouth, Attaquin invited Vice

547 For photos of Haynes shaking hands with crewmen, see Leonard Lerner, “Thousands Greet Mayflower,” Boston Globe, June 13, 1957, 1, 17; “Mayflower II Reaches Port, But in Tow,” Washington Post, June 13, 1957, A2; and “Mayflower II Arrives,” Christian Science Monitor, June 13, 1957, 6. “Indians to Join Plymouth Fete for Mayflower II,” Boston Globe, May 30, 1957, 12. Joseph F. Dinneen Jr., “Newest Citizen Among Plymouth Ship Greeters,” Boston Globe, June 12, 1957, 1. White Feather’s legal name of Charles Harding Sr. (1905-1980) is mentioned in obituary of his wife: “Eleanor Harding, 94, Was Elder of Mashpee Tribe,” Vineyard Gazette, January 2, 2004, http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?12975 (accessed January 7, 2013).

397

President Richard Nixon – in town that Saturday to tour the Mayflower and give a speech

– though he did not attend.548

Post-Plymouth, the Wampanoags sought another venue to tell their own stories in

1958 by starting a temporary museum in Gay Head, where Attaquin would be serving as

curator by 1965. The Mashpees would open their own tribal museum in 1973. The

1960s marked a period of increased political activism among the Wampanoags as Jeffers became supreme sachem in 1960, appeared at a State House hearing in full regalia to

argue for land for an Indian Museum in 1962, helped to found the Federated Eastern

Indian League by 1963, and hosted the first-annual American Indian Festival in 1965 in

Boston to raise money for scholarships for Native American students. 1966 brought increased national prominence for the Wampanoags as the Department of the Interior designated the cliffs at Gay Head a national landmark – in part due to Wampanoag advocacy. At the dedication ceremony on July 30th where Secretary of the Interior

Stewart Udall spoke and unveiled a plaque, Brave Grand Moose549 gave an invocation in

the Wampanoag language and Jeffers led a Native American dance. Two months prior

Jeffers was part of a delegation of the Federated Eastern Indian League that met Udall

while attending the dedication of Cape Cod National Seashore.550

548 Improved Order of Red Men contributing funds for Massasoit statue see “Massasoit Statue Ready for Casting,” Boston Globe, August 8, 1920, 6. Details of Indian Day from Robert B. Carr, “Mayflower Stays at Pier for Close-up Viewing,” Boston Globe, June 15, 1957, 1. Lorenzo Jeffers quoted in Robert B. Carr, Redmen Heap Honors Upon Bark’s Cabin Boy,” Boston Globe, June 16, 1957, B1. For Jeffers succeeding Perry see Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 142. For Perry’s obituary see “Funeral Today At Oak Bluffs Of Indian Chief,” Boston Globe, June 28, 1960, 25. Charles Ogilvie, “Still Time To Recognize Indians” [editorial], Boston Globe, June 20, 1957, 28. M. D. Kountze, “Isn’t Bay State Missing the Boat By Not Promoting Indian Folklore?” [editorial], Boston Globe, June 25, 1957, 14. “Wampanoag Indians To Hold Powwow In East Bridgewater,” Boston Globe, June 16, 1957, B38. 549 Though the Boston Globe article uses the name Brave Grand Moose, the name was likely Great Moose, the Indian name of Wampanoag tribal historian Russell H. Gardener. 550 Eleanor Sayre, “Gay Head Indians Open Their Museum,” Boston Globe, August 28, 1958, 20. For mention of Helen Attaquin as 5th grade teacher in New Bedford and curator of the Gay Head Museum, see

398

Following the visit, Wampanoag Historian Russell Gardener (Great Moose) wrote to CCNS Superintendent Stanley Joseph to thank him for the reception and recognition that the group received at the dedication. Gardener also apologized for the limited Native presence at the dedication, and complemented him on the wigwam diorama in the Native

American exhibit at the Salt Pond Visitor Center. While the exhibit emphasized archaeology and the historic and prehistoric Native past – perpetuating the problem of the invisibility of living Native Americans on the Cape – Gardener nonetheless apparently appreciated that Native Americans at least anchored the seashore’s history. He also revealed to Joseph his own strong interest in archaeology, having just returned from a week-long camping trip on the Vineyard where he “charted over 300 of an original 400

Indian wigwam sites on my ancestral family lands there, as well as extensive shell heaps and abrading stones and a village mortar as well.” Gardener appended his letter by saying that he would be happy to collaborate on any future projects involving Native

American history. In reply Joseph thanked Gardener and his group for attending, for his complements on the exhibit, and for presenting a map to the Visitor Center the he felt would “add to our knowledge of Indian activities in this area.” While Joseph didn’t address Gardener’s offer of collaboration, the dedication and subsequent correspondence between the two was a starting point in the public dialogue between the seashore’s staff and local Wampanoags.551

Earl Banner, “Gay Head Road Threatens War,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1965, 1. For history of Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Museum see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 76-77. “Indians Beat War Drums for Equal Rights,” Boston Globe, February 27, 1963, 5. Joseph Bradley, “First Indian Festival is Wild, Eerie, Beautiful,” Boston Globe, July 25, 1965, 7. Edward Jenner, “Vineyard Cliffs Made U.S. Landmark,” Boston Globe, January 2, 1966, 52. Gloria Negri, “…JFK Walked Its Beaches, Sailed Its Waters,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1966, 1. “Udall to Speak at Gay Head Cliffs Dedication,” Boston Globe, July 30, 1966, 5. 551 Russell H. Gardener to Stanley C. Joseph, June 8, 1966; and Stanley C. Joseph to Russell H. Gardener, June 21, 1966, Record Group 79, Box 7, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

399

By the mid-1960s the hordes of tourists flocking each year to the Cape Cod

National Seashore and the postwar building boom finally reached Mashpee. As the

Mashpees’ annual powwow welcomed 5,000 visitors in 1966, the town’s population had increased by half between 1960 and 1970, rising from 867 to 1,288, and the decade before that it had doubled. The 1960 census also showed a non-Native majority in the town for the first time. The population increase and the eventual permanent loss of political control polarized the community into Native and non-Native, each group with a different attitude toward development and access to the town’s land, water, and natural resources. As the Mashpee Wampanoags held a dedication ceremony in 1970 at the end of a decade-long restoration of their seventeenth-century meetinghouse (that, in a sign of the tribe’s increased political prominence, included Massachusetts Governor Francis

Sargent as a guest and speaker), they were headed toward greater confrontation with their non-Native neighbors both due to internal pressures and the outside influence of the national Native American rights movement.552

In 1970 the past complaints from Native Americans about their limited roles in historical commemorations at Plymouth in 1921 and 1957 crystallized into an actual

protest. Taking advantage of the town’s national prominence each Thanksgiving, a group

of young Native American activists called the United Indians of New England called for

a “national day of mourning” and announced a series of demands that included returning

current and former Indian reservations in Connecticut and Massachusetts to Native

control, and the implementation of a Native American studies curriculum in all schools.

552 5,000 visitors cited in “Rights War Dance,” Boston Globe, July 11, 1966, 13. Population figures and Native/Non-Native schism in Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 138-139. Robert Sales, “Wampanoag Church Restoration Complete,” Boston Globe, August 17, 1970, 3.

400

The purpose of the day of mourning was to raise awareness of modern American Indians, show their unity, provide a forum to “speak the truth,” and to dismantle the “untrue glass image of the Pilgrims.” More than one hundred Native Americans from across America including Gay Head Wampanoags gathered on November 26, and protested by covering

Plymouth Rock with sand, temporarily occupying the Mayflower II, and making speeches protesting the Vietnam War and the disease, poverty, and death suffered by Native

Americans since the arrival of the Pilgrims. The statue of Massasoit served as a rallying point. Subsequent annual National Days of Mourning revealed a division between the conciliatory older Wampanoag leader Lorenzo Jeffers, who sought to exercise soft power through his participation in Pilgrim-related commemorations, and younger Native

Americans such as Wampanoag Frank James, head of the United Indians of New

England, who balked at such appeals for collaboration and friendship.553

553 List of demands and purpose of day of mourning quoted from Andrew F. Blake, “Indians plan day of mourning at Plymouth on Thanksgiving,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1970, 4. “Robert Carr and Andrew Blake, “Indians Take Over Mayflower II,” Boston Globe, November 27, 1970, 1. For Jeffers participating in Pilgrim commemorations, see Paul Kneeland, “Parade marks anniversary of the Pilgrims,” Boston Globe, September 13, 1970, 57; George M. Collins, “Dr. Graham lauds the Pilgrims,” Boston Globe, December 21, 1970, 3; Ann-Mary Currier, “20,000 see parade in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 28, 1971, 49; and Paul J. Deveney, “Pilgrim descendants give thanks to Massasoit,” Boston Globe, November 25, 1973, 29. For examples of Native criticism of history, Anglo historical celebrations, and counter protests see Rayleen M. Bay, “The Pilgrims and the Indians” [editorial], Boston Globe, December 31, 1970, 6; Janet Riddell, “Those non-Indian Indians,” Boston Globe, April 11, 1971, A3; Joe Pilati, “Indians, antiwar veterans mark holiday in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 26, 1971, 18; Ann-Mary Currier, “20,000 see parade in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 28, 1971, 49; “Indian tribes plan protests at Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 22, 1972, 3; “50 Indians protest at Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 24, 1972, 11; Paul J. Deveney, “Chief says town exploits Indians,” Boston Globe, May 7, 1973, 19; Paul J. Deveney, “Let’s throw out that pumpkin pie, say Indians,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1973, 33; and Tony Chamberlain, “Plymouth Thanksgiving plans criticized by Indian leaders,” Boston Globe, November 5, 1973, 3. For literature on the larger Native American rights movement, see for example, Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, 1969). Troy R. Johnson, Red Power: The Native American Civil Rights Movement (New York, N.Y.: Chelsea House, 2007). Paul Chaat Smith, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York, N.Y.: New Press, 1996). Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2012).

401

Both approaches achieved results, perhaps most noticeably at the living history museum of Plimoth Plantation. Incorporated on October 2, 1947, the organization sought

“the creation, construction and maintenance of a Pilgrim Village as a memorial to the

Pilgrim Fathers” and the “historical education of the public with respect to the struggles of the early settlers, the expansion of that settlement and the influence of the Pilgrim

Fathers throughout the world…” Plimoth’s founder and first president was Henry

Hornblower II, a Harvard-trained archeologist and anthropologist. A 1948 newspaper article outlined the plan for constructing a Pilgrim village and an Indian village on a plot of land near the center of town, but in the interim Hornblower oversaw construction of the first replica seventeeth-century house on the Plymouth waterfront in 1949 to drum up support for his full-scale plan, adding a Fort Meetinghouse in 1953 and a second house in

1955. With donations of land and funds from the Hornblower family and ancestral organizations, in May of 1957 workmen in Pilgrim garb began laying out the permanent

Pilgrim Village on a 100-acre tract two miles south of downtown. The ambitious construction plan called for nineteen houses, the Fort Meetinghouse, a grist mill, trading post, and an Indian village.554

By 1960 – the second full season for the museum – five houses lined the village

street ending with the Fort Meetinghouse and all surrounded by a palisade, with a nearby

Indian campsite. By the following year archaeologist Donald Viera was working at the

campsite, demonstrating how Native Americans made stone-tipped arrows, dugout

canoes, and other examples of Native technology. Inside the Pilgrim Village and over at

554 Plimoth Plantation incorporation date, purpose, and first buildings on Plymouth waterfront from Jean Poindexter Colby, Plimoth Plantation: Then and Now (New York, N.Y.: Hastings House, 1970), 97-98. Hornblower’s education mentioned in Alison Arnold, “351 years later,” Boston Globe, November 12, 1972, B29. “Plymouth Is Rebuilding Early Pilgrim Village,” Boston Globe, August 21, 1948, 11. “Colonial- Garbed Artisans Start Pilgrim Village Work,” Boston Globe, May 5, 1957, C29.

402 the Mayflower II, costumed interpreters spoke with visitors about seventeenth-century life and the tasks they performed, while mannequins provided static interpretation. The

Native American campsite consisted of a longhouse constructed of saplings and clad in bark – a structure that in the seventeenth century would have housed several Native

American families.555

At the end of the decade as Plimoth continued to fundraise among Pilgrim

descendants to erect more houses, it always strove towards achieving greater realism,

whether in how the houses were furnished or adding live animals, farming, and food

preparation – even if the changes went against visitors’ romantic expectations of Pilgrim

or Native life. But although Plimoth had been committed to a dual portrait of

Pilgrim/Native lifeways since at least 1948, the focus through the 1960s was

overwhelmingly on America’s humble origins and not multiculturalism. Representative

of this approach, in August of 1964 the State Department sponsored an educational

exchange program that brought four Jordanian students and their teacher to Plimoth as

part of a month-long tour of the U.S. As reporter Betsy Ervin recounted in the Boston

Globe, “Their conception of America as a land of opportunity was reinforced Thursday in

a visit to the Plimoth Plantation. ‘It gave us a vivid picture of the beginnings of

American history,’ said Boullata [the Jordanian teacher]. ‘From very simple beginnings,

you built in a very short time a wonderful civilization.’” Her comments could have easily

been about the re-created seaport village at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, which also

555 Joe Harrington, “Pilgrim Village Replica, Mayflower II at Plimoth,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1960, 40 (costumed interpreters and five houses). “‘Heritage Day’ at Plimoth Plantation,” Boston Globe, November 19, 1961, 4 (Viera). Joe Harrington, “He Produces Arrowheads With Tools Indians Used,” Boston Globe, July 9, 1962, 7. Jean Poindexter Colby, Plimoth Plantation: Then and Now (New York, N.Y.: Hastings House, 1970), 108-109 (mannequins and costumed interpreters). Jean O’Brien Erickson, “Seeing the First Thanksgiving,” Boston Globe, November 21, 1965, A21 (costumed interpreters). Jean O’Brien Erickson, “The First Pilgrim Village Recreated at Plymouth,” Boston Globe, July 15, 1962, 45 (description of Indian campsite).

403 sought to inspire the public with the humble beginnings and impressive accomplishments of America’s hardworking Yankee forebears. Newspaper coverage of Plimoth similarly overwhelmingly focused on the Pilgrim reenactors and their village – particularly around

Thanksgiving as the living history museum became one of the major stops for the thousands of tourists visiting the colonial town.556

But by 1973 Plimoth Plantation had responded to the Native Americans’

Thanksgiving protests. That year it agreed to add a Native American to its board of

trustees, improved what it thereafter called the “Wampanoag Homesite,” now had five

Native Americans on its staff (including as interpreters), and had implemented a Native

American Studies program with Helen Attaquin as its director. One of Plimoth’s

directors, archaeologist and Brown University professor James Deetz, sympathized with

Native American complaints that many of the historical offerings in the town could be

offensive, and he sought greater Native involvement in not only Plimoth’s program, but

collaboration with town officials and museum directors to correct the problems.

Plimoth’s director admitted that much of their reforms were a direct result of the annual

National Day of Mourning. The injustices that alarmed Native Americans included a

wax figure of Miles Standish killing a Native American at the Plymouth National Wax

Museum, the annual (since 1921) Pilgrim Progress that featured costumed actors carrying

Bibles and muskets reenacting the Pilgrims’ walk to church for a service, and a display of

Indian bones at Pilgrim Hall, the oldest public museum in the United States and a shrine

556 Beth Stanbrough, “Plimoth corrects ‘mistakes,’” Boston Globe, August 10, 1969, A18. Paul P. Feeney, “The Way It Really Was at Plimoth,” Boston Globe, September 14, 1969, 37. Margaret Good, “At Plimoth” [editorial], Boston Globe, October 5, 1969, A36. Betsy Ervin, “Jordanian Students Delighted, Admire American Civilization,” Boston Globe, August 2, 1964, 36. Bruce F. Smith, “Plymouth Expecting 15,000,” Boston Globe, November 21, 1965, 6.

404 of Pilgrim relics. As a result of petitioning by both Jeffers and James, Pilgrim Hall turned over the remains to the Wampanoags, who reburied them in Mashpee.557

That year marked the beginning of a trend of area museums and historical organizations voluntarily removing Native American skeletons from collections to repatriate to local Native American tribes for reburial. Seventeen years before Congress would pass the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990),

requiring federal agencies and institutions receiving federal funds to return all human

remains and artifacts removed from Native American graves, it was a reversal of more

than two centuries of looters, antiquarians, and then archaeologists excavating graves in

pursuit of profit, scholarship, or both, with their findings put on public display, stored,

sold, or destroyed.558 In 1932 a Harvard student named James Andrews was charged

with digging up Native Americans skeletons on a farm in Dartmouth, Massachusetts,

without a town permit. Calling himself a “martyr to anthropology,” he bemoaned that “In

the Southwest they did up Indian graves every day, but in this part of the country local prejudice hampers our work.” Andrews pleaded no contest and was allowed to keep the skeletons, which went to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. He resolved to secure the proper permits before his next trip to “hunt skeletons of Indians at Mashpee and other Cape sections.” As the Mashpee town government in 1932 was run by Native Americans, they

557 Paul J. Deveney, “Plymouth museum votes in Indian,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1973, 7. Paul J. Deveney, “Let’s throw out that pumpkin pie, say Indians,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1973, 33 (details of grievances). Bruce Smith, “10,000 Visitors Expected for 343d Thanksgiving in Plymouth,” Boston Globe, November 22, 1964, 48 (description and history of Pilgrim Progress performance). For return of bones to Wampanoags, see J. Deveney, “Plymouth museum votes in Indian,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1973, 7; and Paul J. Deveney, “Pilgrim descendants give thanks to Massasoit,” Boston Globe, November 25, 1973, 29. Pilmoth Plantation’s web site dates the creation of the Wampanoag Homesite to 1973, which suggests that it was a significantly expanded version of the campsite that had been in existence by 1960. Plimoth Plantation, “About Us,” http://www.plimoth.org/about-us (accessed January 7, 2013). 558 Edward Rowe Snow found several Native American graves on an eroding cliff face in 1941 on Thompson’s Island, and wrote an article about the discovery and Peabody Museum archaeologist Frederick P. Orchard’s subsequent excavation of one skeleton. Edward Rowe Snow, “Skeletons of Mysterious Indians Discovered on Thompson’s Island,” Boston Globe, August 3, 1941, D3.

405 held legal control over who, if anyone, could excavate Native graves. But the same cultural vigilance and legal protection would be more lax or nonexistent elsewhere, as

Mashpee and Gay Head were the only towns in the state run by Native Americans.559

Forty-one years later, anthropologist William Simmons in a rare gesture of respect

arranged to return Narragansett remains that he had excavated seven years prior from a

Jamestown, Rhode Island, burial ground at the request of the town. In storage at

Harvard’s Peabody Museum since 1965, the remains were now reinterred in a section of

the original Jamestown site after consultation with members of the local Narragansett

community. Twenty-five Narragansetts participated in the May, 1973, reburial ceremony

along with some two hundred white observers, in what the Reverend Harold Mars of the

Narragansett Indian Church in Charlestown, Rhode Island, summarized as “There have

been so many desecrations. But this is the first restoration.” It’s unclear if this was the

first such reburial of Native American remains, as the remains from Pilgrim Hall were

also reburied at this time, but it was the start of a local trend toward reburying Native

remains in consultation with the appropriate Native American tribe. In November 1974

Frank James led a march to Pilgrim Hall, where the director of the Pilgrim Society was

forced to sign a “treaty” before turning over the bones of what was apparently a sixteen-

year old Wampanoag girl that had been dug up on Cape Cod in 1863 and later displayed

at the museum. James announced that she would be reburied in Barnstable.560

559 “Harvard Man Freed in Opening of Graves,” Boston Globe, June 12, 1932, A8. 560 Lenny Glynn, “Reburial in Rhode Island,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1973, E16. “Indian protest gets bones back from museum,” Boston Globe, November 29, 1974, 21. The identification of the bones as belonging to a Wampanoag girl may be incorrect, for in 1863 in the Cummaquid section of Barnstable, farmers unearthed a skeleton that was believed to be the grave of the sachem Iyanough, who died in 1623. The bones and grave goods were subsequently put on display at Pilgrim Hall, as described in Edward Rowe Snow, A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Boston, MA.: Yankee Publishing Company, 1946), 209-211. One of Snow’s former students, Louis Cataldo, eventually founded the non-profit historical organization Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., which owns the Iyanough gravesite. Tales of Cape Cod, Inc., “A Brief History of Tales

406

In a more conciliatory and significant action for area Wampanoags two years later, a joint Wellfleet Historical Society-National Park Service-Wampanoag tribal ceremony was held on May 30, 1976 on a site within Cape Cod National Seashore. Back in 1953 the remains of a sixteenth-century Wampanoag woman were discovered during the excavation for a house in Wellfleet. Since then they had been on display at the town’s historical society. But recognizing that such an action was now culturally insensitive, the organization joined the Park Service and members of the Mashpee Wampanoags on Great

Island as the latter performed burial rites. A granite stone marked the new grave, reading

“Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow. Reinterred here May 30,

1976.”

Aside from belated recognition that Native American remains deserved the respect afforded to those of European Americans, the ceremony was important for showing the Wampanoags reaffirming their deep cultural claims to the landscape now included within Cape Cod National Seashore. All in attendance recognized Wampanoag culture as dating back some 400 years, or at least that the Mashpee Wampanoags were the closest descendants to the woman. The trend of archaeological digs removing history from the landscape was in this instance reversed, with modern Wampanoags being allowed to consecrate land that had once been inhabited by their ancestors. Ten years to the day after the seashore’s formal establishment, this small ceremony affirmed that

Native Americans were a part of the seashore’s history, part of American history, and as the quotation stated, responsible for the success of the colonists in the New World. Some

of Cape Cod,” http://www.talesofcapecod.org/history (accessed January 7, 2013). See also the planned reburial of a Wampanoag child’s skeleton on display at Philips Academy’s Peabody Museum: Deborah Fitts, “350 years later, Indian child to be given a second burial,” Boston Globe, December 25, 1975, 62.

407

Native activists would charge that lives and land were not given but taken by the newcomers, but perhaps occurring during America’s bicentennial year the stone’s inscription sought to heal instead of divide.561

The feeling of unity between Native and European Americans existed only at the

gravesite. As part of the Native American rights movement, the 1970s witnessed a number of lawsuits brought by Indian tribes seeking the return of tribal lands that they argued were illegally taken from them in violation of the federal Nonintercourse Act of

1790, which stated that Native American land could not be sold without the approval of

Congress. The act applied to all Native American tribes whether or not they were federally recognized, and while a succession of Congressionally-approved treaties had relieved western tribes of their lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the act had not been used in the eastern United States. For the moment the federal government was receptive to Native land claims, and local Native Americans responded. The

Wampanoag Tribal Council of Gay Head followed the path of the Passamaquoddy and

Penobscot tribes suing for land in Maine when they announced their intention in

November, 1974, to sue in federal court for the return of 250 acres of common land from the town. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council did the same in August of 1976, seeking the return of 16,000 acres of land in Mashpee and adjacent Sandwich from 146 defendants.562

While the town of Gay Head held a special meeting and voted to return the 250

acres to the tribe on December 9, 1976 (the town’s selectmen were all Wampanoag), the

561 “Town gives proper burial to a 16th Century Indian,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1976, 5. 562 Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 3-5. Nick King, “Gay Head Indians to sue for land,” Boston Globe, November 28, 1974, 53. “Indian tribe files suit to recover 16,000 acres of land on Cape Cod,” Boston Globe, August 27, 1976, 12.

408 town of Mashpee and its co-defendants decided to fight the lawsuit. In a case that has been well covered by scholars and will only be summarized here, the Mashpees needed to prove that they were a tribe before they could proceed with their lawsuit under the

Nonintercourse Act. In the fall of 1977 the Mashpee Wampanoags’ history and culture was debated in federal court in Boston with testimony by anthropologists, historians, and tribal members themselves, among other witnesses. An all-white jury concluded the following January that the Mashpees did not meet the definition of a Native American tribe. Subsequent appeals by the Mashpees to the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme

Court were also dismissed. Individual members of the Mashpee tribe brought another lawsuit in December of 1981, but in 1983 it was also dismissed.563

While the Wampanoags lost their attempts to recover ancestral land in Mashpee,

they focused on strengthening their cultural traditions, fighting for aboriginal shellfishing rights, and pursuing federal recognition of their tribal status. Successes came slowly. In

1987 the Wampanoags of Gay Head received federal recognition. 1993 witnessed the

launch of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, a collaborative effort between the Wampanoag bands of Assonet and Herring Pond and the Wampanoag tribes of

Aquinnah (the town voted to change its name in 1998) and Mashpee to resurrect their formerly shared language. Two years later the Massachusetts Supreme Court affirmed the Wampanoags’ aboriginal rights to hunt and fish, while in 1997 the town of Mashpee agreed to transfer ownership of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Museum over to the

563 Samuel Allis, “Gay Head voters will decide on Indian land claim,” Boston Globe, November 14, 1976, 15. “Gay Head votes return of 250 acres to Indians,” Boston Globe, December 10, 1976, 4. Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 3-65. Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 9-65, 151-158. James Clifford, “Identity in Mashpee,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 277-346.

409

Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council. As relations between the town and Mashpees had soured in 1976 the latter increasingly distanced themselves from the institution, and the town found itself owning an Indian museum that it was not enthusiastic to operate. A decade later, in 2007, the Mashpees finally received federal recognition as a tribe, bringing to close a decades-long campaign for public recognition as not simply Native

Americans, but a tribe with a cohesive and continuous history and culture.564

A comparatively minor victory came in 2011. On May 14 two new exhibits at the

Salt Pond Visitor Center officially opened. The first was a large round map of Cape Cod

in the center of the lobby. Framed by informational panels, one focused on Native

Americans history and included a photograph of Vernon Lopez (Silent Drum), the current

chief of the Mashpee Wampanoags. In the museum wing of the Visitor Center, the

second exhibit was entitled “People of the First Light.” As the press release explained,

This new section interprets Wampanoag culture and history through artifacts; photographs and art; a partial wetu (home); and oral histories. Cultural specialists from the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes consulted on the project and prepared several display items. A major theme of the exhibit is that the Wampanoag culture continues to thrive on Cape Cod. The exhibit includes two listening stations with eight interpretive messages by local Wampanoag discussing cultural topics.

“This exhibit is very compelling,” said [seashore Superintendent George] Price. “We’ve been aware that the absence of the Wampanoag story in our museum is a

564 Fight for aboriginal shellfishing rights detailed in Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The Land Claims of the Mashpee, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New England (Boston, MA.: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 61-62; and Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 157-158; with the 1995 legal victory described in Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, “The Mashpee Wampanoag Timeline,” http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/timeline14.html (accessed January 7, 2013). Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, “Project History,” http://www.wlrp.org/History.html (accessed January 7, 2013). For seeking federal recognition, see Clifford, 345; and Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, “The Mashpee Wampanoag Timeline,” http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/timeline15.html (accessed January 7, 2013). For history of Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Museum see Russell M. Peters, The Wampanoags of Mashpee: An Indian Perspective on American History (Somerville, MA.: Media Action, 1987), 76-77; and Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, “Museum,” http://mashpeewampanoagtribe.com/museum.html (accessed January 7, 2013).

410

deficiency, and we’re happy to now be telling a more complete story of the people on Cape Cod.”565

Forty-six years after the Visitor Center opened with exhibits on the natural and human history of Cape Cod, the Wampanoags finally achieved recognition in the park’s permanent interpretation566 that they exist as a modern, vibrant culture. A major refurbishment of the Visitor Center’s museum in 1989 had not changed the depiction of

Cape Cod’s Native Americans from the past tense.567 But now, a celebration of that culture accompanied the opening as Wampanoag dancers and singers performed, and artists demonstrated weaving and carving.

In a nod to the bulk of the seashore’s Native history occurring before a written record, a May 3rd press release announced that the final event in the dedication would be a gathering of archaeologists and members of the public for “A Carns Conversation” to

565 “Cape Cod National Seashore Announces New Permanent Exhibits at Salt Pond Visitor Center,” CCNS press release, February 23, 2011, on CCNS web site, http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/cape-cod- national-seashore-announces-new-permanent-exhibits-at-salt-pond-visitor-center.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). 566 It’s unclear from the titles and descriptions (if provided) of evening programs held at the Salt Pond and Province Lands visitor centers from 1963 onward when Native Americans on Cape Cod began to be discussed in the present tense, though one held on August 16, 1984 in the Province Lands Visitor Center by Daejanna Wormwood is the first to have a description referring to current Wampanoags. Called “Eninuoug: The First People of the Narrow Land,” it was described as “Long before European colonization of Cape Cod, Native Americans had developed a rich and diverse culture. This slide program will trace the peopling of Cape Cod from the earliest archaeological evidences up through the current state of the Wampanoag Federation.” National Park Service, “Evening Programs and Special Activities August 12 – August 18, 1984, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown area,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Programs 84.” 567 Articles in the Cape Cod Times beginning in December of 1987 covering plans for a new museum within the Salt Pond Visitor Center make no mention of expanding the Native American part of the current exhibits, nor that it would even be retained. For example, “The Cape’s natural environment – an array of plant reproductions and stuffed animals – will be shown as the basis for stories on whaling and commercial fishing, 19th century life, sea-rescue techniques, and the beginning of tourism and other industries.” Excerpted from Joyce Starr, “Seashore to create Cape Cod museum,” Cape Cod Times, December 18, 1987. And a detailed 1989 article similarly describes the newly-refurbished museum only by its natural history and Euro-American human history: “Within about 5,000 square feet of floor space are five display platforms, each on a specific theme: natural settings, a combination of commercial fishing and whaling; a combination of navigation, shipbuilding and agriculture (cranberry farming and sea hay harvesting); maritime safety and sea rescue; and architecture and every-day life.” Excerpted from Joyce Starr, “Salt Pond center ready to reopen: Cape artifacts to fill museum,” Cape Cod Times, July 3, 1989. See also “New showcase for Cape history,” Cape Cod Times, February 12, 1989, which states that the museum “will showcase an expanded collection of artifacts from 19th and 20th century Cape Cod.”

411 recall the sixteen months of archaeological fieldwork that resulted when winter storms in

November 1990 eroded a portion of Coast Guard Beach to reveal a site that Native

Americans used seasonally between 2,100 and 1,100 years ago. Some of the excavated items were now on display in the new exhibit. The day was an important demonstration of both the persistence of Wampanoags who maintained their culture over the centuries, and in the value of that culture being reflected in the most prominent tourist attraction and educational venue on Cape Cod. Millions of visitors would now be introduced to the

Cape’s living indigenous residents, and the seashore now counted the Wampanoags among its collaborators.568

A place of (past) entrepreneurism

After the story of Cape Cod’s first inhabitants and subsequent explorers and

settlers, the second category of CCNS history was the outer Cape as a place of

entrepreneurism. Shore and pelagic whaling, fishing, shellfishing, cranberry cultivation,

ship and boatbuilding, salt making, commercial agriculture, communications, and

hospitality comprised many of the main local industries developed between the

seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But due to poor soil, limited infrastructure,

industrial consolidation, and geographic isolation, Cape Cod’s economy and population

declined beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and only began to recover in the 1930s,

568 “Cape Cod National Seashore Exhibit Dedication and Celebration of Wampanoag Culture Slated for May 14,” CCNS press release, May 3, 2011, on CCNS web site, http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/cape- cod-national-seashore-exhibit-dedication-and-celebration-of-wampanoag-culture-slated-for-may-14.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). James W. Bradley, “The Carns Site,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/the-carns-site.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). This web summary of the Carns site is drawn from James W. Bradley, Archeological Investigations at the Carns Site, Coast Guard Beach, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: Northeast Region Archeology Program, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, 2005), http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/upload/FinalCarnstreportweb.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013).

412 largely as a result of the tourism industry that would after World War II become the

Cape’s main economic engine.569

However, two historic sites within the park – the remains of a former wireless station designed by Guglielmo Marconi, and the mansion of whaling captain Edward

Penniman – allowed the National Park Service to nonetheless tell stories of successful businesses and men that countered this larger narrative of decline. Though the seashore’s

1961 boundaries purposely excluded developed areas – which would have served as ideal sites to interpret the region’s commercial activities such as fishing and whaling – there are other sites of industry located within the seashore. Of these, Marconi station and

Penniman’s house are among the park’s signature historic sites due to the extent of Park

Service investment in public access and interpretation.570571 Such a focus on innovation,

industry, and internationalism reflected important values in Cold War America. And in

the half century of the seashore’s operation, these sites are major destinations for park

569 James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a Seaside Resort (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003), 8. 570 Other sites of industry within CCNS include a twenty-seven acre former commercial cranberry bog in the Pamet Valley in Truro that includes a nineteenth-century building used as a workspace and living quarters. The bog operated until 1961 and the Park Service purchased the property in 1963. However, though the Park Service has stabilized the bog house, the site is sparsely visited and has minimal parking, signage, and interpretation – making it not one of the Seashore’s signature historic sites. According to the Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Report (1973), the proposed restoration and interpretation was on hold due to a lack of funds. In 1978 the Park Service began offering guided walks through the abandoned bog, and the following year the tour included a portion it was restoring. It became a self-guided nature trail in 1980, though rangers continued to offer guided walks. Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 57-58. National Park Service, Site Plan, Pamet River, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (n.p.: National Park Service, September 1999); Leslie P. Arnberger, “Superintendent’s Annual Narrative Report (1973)”, p. 4, in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Seashore Historian’s files, Folder “Atwood Higgins – general history.” “Seashore adds new nature trail,” Summer Sandings, August 1-September 1, 1980, 2. 571 Other sites demonstrating entrepreneurism include the Highland Links Golf Course (1892), the oldest course on Cape Cod, and Highland House (1907), a former hotel. Both are NPS-owned and located adjacent to each other and Highland Light in North Truro. But the NPS does not interpret these sites; the golf course is leased to the town, and the Truro Historical Society maintains a museum in Highland House. Highland Links Golf Course, “About,” http://trurolinks.com/about/index.html (accessed January 7, 2013). Truro Historical Society, “Highland House Museum,” http://www.trurohistorical.org/intro.html (accessed January 7, 2013).

413 visitors, with their stories echoed in the Salt Pond Visitor Center’s museum and in public programming.

Marconi Station

At the end of Wireless Road in South Wellfleet stands a hexagonal interpretive

shelter at the edge of a bluff, with adjacent scattered bits of debris that include bricks,

wood, concrete, and rusted chain. At the start of the twentieth century the site was the

location for a bold experiment in wireless communication. Italian inventor, electrical

engineer, and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) began experiments with

wireless communication as a child by sending Morse code between homemade

transmitters and receivers in his backyard; by 1895 he had increased the distance to a

mile, and, following a move to England where he found greater encouragement and

financial support for his work, transmitted eight miles by the spring of 1897, and

successfully sent a message twenty miles across the English Channel in 1899. As

Marconi incorporated the Marconi International Marine Communication Company in

1900, a dozen wireless stations were already operating, and innovative ship-owners were

installing his equipment.

With the goal of bridging the Atlantic with his wireless technology, Marconi

arrived on Cape Cod in 1901 and selected an eight-acre site in Wellfleet that would be the

counterpart for a station at a site called Poldhu in south Cornwall, England. But separate

gales in September and November of that year toppled the circle of twenty wooden broadcasting masts at both Poldhu and Wellfleet, respectively. After designing new towers for Poldhu, Marconi was able to receive a signal (the letter “S”) from the English

414 station using a kite antenna at Signal Hill outside St. John’s, Newfoundland, in December

1901. It was the first successfully received transatlantic wireless transmission. As engineers at South Wellfleet rebuilt using a more stable design of four rectangular wooden towers similar to those erected at Poldhu and a new station at Glace Bay, Nova

Scotia, Marconi sent the first message across the Atlantic to Poldhu from Glace Bay in

December 1902. Though the Wellfleet station missed the start of transatlantic wireless communication, it transmitted its first messages on January 19, 1903, relaying mutual greetings between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII. Having inaugurating wireless communication between the United States and Great Britain, the

Wellfleet station expanded and continued operating until 1917, when the federal government shut it down along with other commercial radio stations. Technologically outdated even before the war, and the site’s erosion having been a concern to Marconi engineers as early as 1906, the station was not reopened after the war and its towers and machinery were scrapped in 1920.572

Some forty years later Marconi was not forgotten on Cape Cod. The station site

became one of the first two designated historic sites of the new Cape Cod National

Seashore – the other being Pilgrim Spring in nearby Truro. In 1963 the National Park

Service dedicated its interpretive shelter at the site of Marconi’s station. The hexagonal

roof sheltered a scale model of the station within a glass case, and interpretive panels

described the site’s history, namesake, and the dramatic erosion that was quickly sending

the station’s remnants into the ocean below. The Park Service removed a plaque that the

572 History of Marconi and his stations summarized from the 31-page booklet John V. Hinshaw, Marconi and his South Wellfleet Wireless (Chatham, MA.: Chatham Press, Inc., 1969). Hinshaw’s booklet was produced in cooperation with the Cape Cod National Seashore, and copies were available at the visitor centers as well as through the publisher, as stated in the booklet’s copyright page. Today, Parks Canada operates national historic sites at Signal Hill and Glace Bay.

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South Wellfleet Historical Society had erected in 1950 at the junction of Route 6 and

Wireless Road commemorating Marconi, installed it beside the interpretive shelter in

1963 but had it recast the following year to correct factual errors. Seashore brochures beginning in 1963 directed visitors to the first wireless station built in America, while

Marconi and his station became a part of the evening public programs and guided walks offered by park staff.573

The value of Marconi’s wireless station to the Park Service was several-fold.

First, among the rural separate parcels of public land that comprised the initial national

seashore, it was pure luck to have an internationally significant historic site located on the

grounds of the former Camp Wellfleet. And, as discussed earlier in this chapter, it was a

site where the Park Service could jointly discuss natural processes and human history –

increasingly important in the coming years as the Park Service interpreted human history

within a larger story of natural history. The adjacent Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail

along with a large parking lot and restrooms also guaranteed the cliff-top site significant

foot traffic. And though a ruin, the site was not a failure. It was a place of innovation – a

demonstration of a “pioneering spirit” according to a booklet on the station’s history

published in 1969 and available at the seashore’s visitor centers. And a new station in

Chatham replaced the one at Wellfleet, pointed out a c.1977 park brochure, and was “still

the most heavily used ship-to-shore radio station on the East coast.” That the Park

Service interpreted Marconi’s station as a step along a path of progress is also evident as

573 John V. Hinshaw, Marconi and his South Wellfleet Wireless (Chatham, MA.: Chatham Press, Inc., 1969), 30 (shelter dedication and plaque). Recast bronze plaque discussed in letter from Superintendent Robert F. Gibbs to Regional Director, Northeast Region, March 16, 1964, and in contract signed between the firm of Henry T. Crosby & Son and Vernon C. Gilbert Jr. of CCNS, May 18, 1964, Record Group 79, Box 19, National Archives, Waltham, MA. Evening public programs included “Marconi and His South Wellfleet Wireless” (1964) and “Marconi’s Thunder Factory” (1967), while in the mid and late 1970s park rangers either offered guided walks at the Marconi site or were available there to answer visitor questions.

416 early as 1964 in the revised text which the Park Service selected for the bronze plaque at the site. It reads:

SITE OF FIRST UNITED STATES TRANSATLANTIC WIRELESS TELEGRAPH STATION BUILT IN 1901-1902 MARCONI WIRELESS TELEGRAPH COMPANY OF AMERICA PREDECESSOR OF RCA TRANSMITTED JANUARY 19, 1903 THE FIRST U.S. TRANSATLANTIC WIRELESS TELEGRAM ADDRESSED TO EDWARD VII KING OF ENGLAND BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

In an attempt to curtail foreign dominance of American radio communications, the

General Electric Corporation (GE) bought a controlling interest in the Marconi Wireless

Telegraph Company of America in 1919, a subsidiary of the British-owned company that

Marconi founded in 1900. G.E. incorporated the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) later that year and put the Marconi business and assets under the new name. By the

1960s RCA had become a major American electronics company.574

The plaque’s text identifying RCA as the successor to Marconi’s company creates

for it a humble beginning, much like the nearby Plimoth Plantation exhibited the crude

living conditions of America’s pioneering English ancestors. Far from simply a coastal

ruin, the station site at South Wellfleet, then, becomes a birthplace of a major American

brand that by the 1960s spanned from music to television to computers. The plaque’s

emphasis on inaugurating wireless communication between American and British leaders

574 John V. Hinshaw, Marconi and his South Wellfleet Wireless (Chatham, MA.: Chatham Press, Inc., 1969), 5 (“pioneering spirit”). Glen Kaye, Marconi and His South Wellfleet Wireless (Wellfleet, MA.: National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, [1977?]). This and other brochures are in the Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, Folder “CCNS – Programs/Brochures 3.4.27B.” Brief history of the creation of RCA from chapter 30 of Linwood S. Howeth, History of Communications- Electronics in the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), unpaginated text uploaded by Thomas H. White to his web site, “United States Early Radio History,” http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw30.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

417 in 1903 conveniently sidestepped the start of transatlantic wireless messaging the previous month within the British Empire, and evoked the long history of cooperation between the two countries most recently evident locally in the 1957 voyage of the

Mayflower II. Commemorating both international unity and business success were important values in Cold War America as the U.S. participated in a technological arms race with the Soviet Union and relied on strong diplomatic and cultural ties with its

European allies.

Penniman House

A half century before Guglielmo Marconi arrived in Cape Cod looking for a

station site, a whaling captain named Edward Penniman was launching his own

European-inspired construction project. Born in 1831 on his family’s farm in the Fort

Hill section of Eastham, Penniman first went to sea at the age of eleven as a cook aboard

a Grand Banks fishing schooner – a voyage that ended in shipwreck. At the age of

twenty-one he joined New England’s burgeoning whale fishery by signing on as a

crewman of the bark Isabella of New Bedford. Just eight years later in 1860, the newly married Penniman became captain of the Minerva II, also of New Bedford. At the conclusion of a second voyage commanding the Minerva II, Penniman returned to

Eastham in April 1868 with his wife, Betsey Augusta Knowles, and hired master builder

Nathaniel Nickerson to erect a house on twelve acres of that land that Edward purchased

from his father.575

575 Biography condensed from Andrea M. Gilmore, Historic Structure Report, Captain Edward Penniman House, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Atlantic Historic Preservation Center, National Park Service, 1985), 12-13; and Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and

418

The resulting two-story mansard-roof house reflected the financial success of the whaling captain. Built in seven months in the Second Empire-style widely popular in

1860s and ‘70s America, it included indoor plumbing, a kerosene chandelier, fine wallpaper and woodwork, and a cupola, from which, at least according to family lore

Edward could look out to sea. A matching barn was added to the property in 1880, by which point a whalebone gate comprised of two upright jawbones welcomed people to the estate. Penniman’s success in the whaling industry allowed him to retire to Eastham in 1884 after six voyages in command of four different vessels. There, he lived as a gentleman farmer with his family until dying in 1913 at the age of eighty two. The property then passed to his wife, and then to their daughter Betsey Augusta Penniman, who died in 1957. Her niece Irma Penniman Broun inherited the property, and owned it with her husband before selling to the Park Service in 1963.576

The Fort Hill area was a last-minute addition to the boundaries of the proposed

national seashore, which by 1961 included a developer’s plans for a subdivision on the

former farm that comprised the southern portion. With the exception of two inholdings, the Park Service acquired all of Fort Hill (geographically comprising Fort Hill to the south and Skiff Hill to the north) by 1965. With the Penniman property containing the hill’s only Park Service-owned historic buildings (the other two houses having been kept by their owners), they would become a valuable part of the hill’s eventual interpretation.

Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 33-34. 576 Andrea M. Gilmore, Historic Structure Report, Captain Edward Penniman House, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Atlantic Historic Preservation Center, National Park Service, 1985), 2 (property succession), 3 (plumbing), 14 (property succession), 22 (Second Empire), 25 (cupola); and Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 34 (barn and whalebone gate). Kerosene lantern mentioned in current Fort Hill pamphlet: Glen Kaye and Mike Whatley, Fort Hill Trail (Wellfleet, MA.: National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, n.d.).

419

Park rangers began offering guided walks around Fort Hill in 1964, which specifically became Fort Hill History walks the following year. As the Red Maple Swamp Trail opened at Skiff Hill in the summer of 1966, Fort Hill History walks saw their description in park programs expand from “this area features considerable evidence of former Indian activity” of the previous summer to now encompass “early Indian sites, historic exploration, and settlement of the area.”577

That the Penniman House was now nearing the end of a two-year exterior

restoration that included exterior interpretive signage likely resulted in its addition to the

Fort Hill History tour. A map handed out at the visitor center beginning in 1966 shows

the Fort Hill History Walk as a loop trail connecting Penniman House, the interpretive

shelter at Skiff Hill, and a parking area/overlook atop Fort Hill itself. The extensive

eleven-page “Fort Hill Trail” handout provided to visitors in 1969 begins at Penniman

House and walks the reader back in time through three centuries of ecologically

destructive practices, Europeans explorers, Native Americans, flora both foreign and

native, and the Park Service’s plans for managing the land. (The 1970 master plan would

call for the scene to be restored to the 1850-1890 period.) The section on Penniman’s

house identifies it as “representing the great age of whaling, [and], Eastham’s best

example of 19th century Victorian architecture” with following paragraphs describing the architecture, the newly reinstalled whalebone gateway, lore surrounding the house, and

577 For Fort Hill development plans and NPS land acquisition see Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 47-48. Red Maple Swamp Trail now open mentioned in Edward Jenner, “Cape Cod National Seashore Park Expecting Record Year,” Boston Globe, May 8, 1966, 47. National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1964”; National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, 1965, Cape Cod National Seashore”; and National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, 1966, Cape Cod National Seashore,” all in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.”

420 the then-prohibitively expensive cost of restoring the interior to allow public access. In

1980 park rangers finally began offering tours of the house’s interior.578

With only the Penniman House’s grounds open to the public for the first fifteen

years of Fort Hill’s interpretation, it still became a major historic site for the seashore.

Visually it was the most ornate building within the park, and Fort Hill was the first part of the national seashore that visitors encountered as they drove north up Route 6 – and the most visited aside from the beaches. The multi-colored house became the subject of

postcards, photographs, artwork, and even juvenile literature with the publication of

Wilma Pitchford Hays’s The Ghost at Penniman House (1979). With the Skiff Hill

interpretive shelter focusing on Native American and natural history, Penniman House

provided a late nineteenth-century bookend of the decline of both the whaling industry and subsistence farming on the Cape. All together, the Fort Hill area compactly conveyed the Cape’s human history for visitors, from prehistoric Native Americans to the twentieth century. And finally, the property served as a physical reference point for the seashore’s evening programs about whales and whaling offered at the visitor centers, such as “Old Whaling and Scrimshaw” (1964), “Thar She Blows,” (1967), “Whales and

Whaling” (1973), and “Whales” (1982). When the Park Service expanded its Salt Pond

578 Penniman House restoration first mentioned in “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” June 2, 1965, page 4; and was complete with the exception of staining the roof according to “Minutes of Cape Cod National Seashore Staff Meeting,” January 7, 1967, page 3, Record Group 79, Box 3, National Archives, Waltham, MA. Installation of aluminum-clad interpretive signage in 1966 from Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 51 (installation of aluminum- clad signage), 55 (re-create landscape appearance to c. 1850-1890). See also National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), list opposite page 32. Untitled map of Nauset area of CCNS found in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” “Fort Hill Trail (Eastham),” Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “3.9A Visitor Center Handout 1969.” The first tours of the Penniman House’s interior listed in “Summer Activities,” Summer Sandings, August 1-September 1, 1980, 3.

421

Visitor Center museum exhibits in 1989, Penniman family artifacts would be included among those used to illustrate the local whaling industry.579

In the life of Edward Penniman, the Park Service had a Horatio Alger-type story

of an Eastham boy who rose from modest means to achieve success in the global

American whaling industry. While the text for the interpretive outdoor signage installed

in 1966 is unknown, the current one installed around 1984 briefly chronicles his whaling

career, the spouse and three children who at times accompanied him at sea, and his return

home to build “the costliest house in town, a monument to the fortune he made in whale

oil, baleen, spermaceti, and ivory. The whaling industry soon declined, however, as

petroleum replaced whale oil. Today the National Park Service is preserving the

Penniman House as one of the most outstanding sea captains’ homes on Cape Cod.”580

This last sentence illustrates the transformation of Penniman in the Park Service’s interpretation into an old salt. In the center of the panel is a large photograph of an elderly Penniman sitting in his elegant parlor. The captions of two smaller photographs illustrate that “Captain Penniman enjoyed a colorful retirement here with his family. He died in 1913 at age 82.” And, “From the cupola on the roof, Captain Penniman could watch his family at play, while keeping one eye on the sea.” As the National Park

579 Fort Hill as most visited part of CCNS after the beaches from William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 10. Wilma Pitchford Hays, The Ghost at Penniman House (Middletown, CT.: Xerox Education Publications, 1979). Of the evening talks listed, some were offered repeatedly over several years, while others only ran once. See the corresponding “Summer Interpretive Programs” for talks up through 1977, while later ones were advertised through a handout listing the week’s programs. The 1982 “Whales” evening program (which combined natural history and whaling history) is listed in “Cape Cod National Seashore, Weekly Programs, Salt Pond Visitor Center, Week of July 11, 1982,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Evening Program Printed Schedules – 1982 + other 1982 schedules.” For a description of the Penniman family artifacts to be included in the expanded museum (and are still on exhibit), see Joyce Starr, “Seashore to create Cape Cod museum,” Cape Cod Times, December 18, 1987. 580 Age of current outdoor signage at the Penniman House from Lynn Kneedler-Schad, Katharine Lacy, and Larry Lowenthal, Cultural Landscape Report for Fort Hill, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1995), 51.

422

Service had included a photo of an old yet rugged man in work clothes telling a story to a boy on a beach in its Our Vanishing Seashore report back in 1955, it was familiar with the old salt as a coastal icon and his value in promoting the seashore to the public. And on Cape Cod, visitors had recorded their experiences and sought new encounters with the region’s loquacious old mariners since Henry David Thoreau lodged with “the Wellfleet oysterman” in 1849.581

But Captain Penniman was different. Here was a version of the old salt updated

for the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s: owner of the most expensive house in

town, having made his fortune in a risk-prone industry, and enjoying a comfortable

retirement into an advanced age. An ornate sea captain’s home would have been out of place on Mystic Seaport’s re-created rustic village street. But on Cape Cod decades later,

Penniman and his house allowed the Park Service to present for millions of visitors a story of a successful and literal captain of industry that ran counter to the outer Cape’s overall economic decline during this same period, and longer narrative of ecological degradation. On Fort Hill the house and Penniman were a bright spot in what especially during the ecologically-influenced park interpretation of the late ‘60s and ‘70s could seem a depressing story. Though most Cape Codders at least in the first half of the

twentieth century lived in homes more modest than Penniman’s, the Park Service would continue to focus on rare and iconic buildings as it sought to preserve and interpret

government-built structures within Cape Cod National Seashore.

581 National Park Service, Our Vanishing Seashore (Washington, D.C.: National Parks Service, 1955), 9. For Thoreau’s encounter with the Wellfleet Oysterman, see chapter 5, “The Wellfleet Oysterman” in Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 1: 104- 135. See also chapter 1 of this dissertation.

423

* * *

An important postscript to these two stories of Cape entrepreneurism is one that the Park Service did not extensively interpret, but is still worth mentioning for demonstrating the NPS’s investment in historical archaeology. According to local tradition, Wellfleet’s Great Island was once the site of a colonial trading post or tavern.

And local diggers had unearthed pipe stems, spoons, and an eighteenth-century coin on the eastern side of the island. Subsequent NPS archaeological surveys identified the remains of a colonial structure there, and maps in both the 1963 and 1970 CCNS master plans mark the site as a trading post. Great Island was one of the more remote areas of the seashore. Park rangers began offering guided walks through the Great Island Natural

Area in 1967 exploring its natural and human history, and were initially by reservation only, strenuous, and limited to small groups. The trail would open to non-guided hikers in 1970.582

Amid this increasing public access, the Park Service contracted archaeologists

from Plimoth Plantation to excavate the supposed tavern or trading post. Under the

leadership of Brown University anthropology professor and Plimoth Plantation assistant

director James Deetz and his graduate student Eric Ekholm (also a research associate at

Plimoth), a team excavated the site in two seasons in 1969 and 1970. They unearthed thousands of artifacts including clay pipes, ceramics, glassware, nails, plaster, bricks, whalebone, clam and oyster shells, and animal bones. The amount and types of pipe stem

582 Eric Ekholm and James Deetz, “Wellfleet Tavern,” Natural History 80, no. 7 (August-September 1971): 48-57. For first mention of a Great Island guided walk, see National Park Service, “Revised Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1967,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.7 Visitor Center Handout 1967.” For first mention of a self-guided Great Island hiking trail, see National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, June 20 – Labor Day 1970,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Handouts for 1970.”

424 fragments and European ceramics suggested a date range of 1690 to 1740 for what the archaeologists concluded was a two-story, wooden tavern built to support a shore- whaling operation on the island. As local shore-whaling waned in favor of pelagic whaling in the early eighteenth century, the tavern was abandoned.583

At the conclusion of the 1970 season Ekholm and his team backfilled the site to

preserve it. That same summer, park officials opened the island’s trail to non-guided

hikers, which included the tavern site along its route. While exhibit panels and a Great

Island Trail brochure (beginning in 1977) describing the tavern and excavation eventually

became part of the trailside interpretation, neither the dig nor the tavern were ever

mentioned in the seashore’s “Summer Interpretive Programs” or maps. It was apparently

only with the new exhibits in the Salt Pond Visitor Center in 1989 that seashore visitors

got to see artifacts from the tavern site.584

Though never becoming a popular destination due to its remoteness, lack of any

visible historic features, and the Park Service preferring to keep the island as a relatively

undisturbed natural area, the tavern excavation is still an important story for Cape Cod

National Seashore. The Park Service had included the seashore’s potential

archaeological contributions when arguing for its creation in the late 1950s and early

1960s; and the agency had pioneered the practices of historical archaeology and the

583 That the bore diameters of clay pipes changed over time was a discovery of archaeologist J. C. Harrington. Lewis Binford subsequently converted Harrington’s data into a formula for dating pipe bores which archaeologists still use today. George L. Miller, “J. C. Harrington, 1901-1998,” Historical Archaeology 32, no. 4 (1998): 3. 584 A draft of the text for a Great Island brochure, copyrighted 1976, and what is presumably the first edition of the published brochure, Glen Kaye, Great Island Trail (Wellfleet, MA.: National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1977), are both in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Great Island 7.51.” “Some 18th century artifacts found in an archaeological dig at Great Island in Wellfleet also will be featured. They include 17th century brass spoons, shards of locally crafted and English-made pottery and pipe bowls and stems.” Excerpt from Joyce Starr, “Seashore to create Cape Cod museum,” Cape Cod Times, December 18, 1987.

425 public awareness of historical archaeology dating back to the 1930s at Jamestown,

Virginia – for which the Great Island dig benefited.

At Jamestown, the National Park Service had first collaborated with the Civilian

Conservation Corps on a series of excavations from 1934 to 1942, and then on its own from 1954 to 1957. The arrival of University of Chicago-trained archaeologist J. C.

Harrington to Jamestown in 1936 began a new era of professionalization and public education. Apart from improved excavation techniques and record keeping, he began public tours to the formerly fenced-off dig site. Through his excavations in the eastern

U.S. and his scholarship in the 1950s and ‘60s he was an early advocate for the importance of historical archaeology. Up through the early postwar era when Harrington began publishing papers such as “Historic Site Archaeology in the United States” (1952) and “Archaeology as an Auxiliary Science to American History” (1955), North American archaeologists had primarily studied Native American cultures.585

A fellow early proponent of historical archaeology was John Cotter, and his

career similarly illustrates the ties between academia and the NPS that made the subfield

an integral part of both in the 1960s and ‘70s. The same year that Cotter contributed the

to the 1958 report on the proposed CCNS, he also wrote an account of the Jamestown

Archaeological Project (1934-1957). First published by the NPS in 1958, Archaeological

Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia was an important early contribution to the field – with a revised edition published in 1994. Cotter had worked for the NPS since 1940 and

585 Biography of J. C. Harrington compiled from Edward B. Jelks, “Jean Carl Harrington, 1901-1998,” SAA Bulletin 16, no. 5 (November 1998), http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/SAA/publications/SAAbulletin/16- 5/SAA17.html (accessed January 4, 2013). George L. Miller, “J. C. Harrington, 1901-1998,” Historical Archaeology 32, no. 4 (1998): 1-7 [opening dig site to visitors, p.3]. J.C. Harrington, “Historic Site Archaeology in the United States,” in Archaeology of Eastern United States, ed. J. B. Griffin (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 335-344. J. C. Harrington, “Archaeology as an Auxiliary Science to American History,” American Anthropologist 57, no. 6 (December 1955): 1121-1130.

426 a decade later became the head archaeologist at Colonial National Historical Park (which includes Jamestown). Earning an anthropology Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of

Pennsylvania where he had begun his doctoral studies in 1935, Cotter joined the university’s faculty in 1960. The following year he taught the first course in historical archaeology offered by an American university. In 1967 he was also one of the founders of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Harrington, Cotter, and their peers led the professionalization of historical archaeology in the 1960s and ‘70s, as it expanded into consulting businesses, government agencies, academic departments, popular magazines, professional societies, and, as at Cape Cod National Seashore, public history sites.586

Prior to that, academically-trained archaeologists had primarily focused on classical

(ancient Greece and Rome) and prehistoric cultures, leaving the excavation of the more

recent past to self-taught amateurs.587

During this flowering of the field in the 1960s, Dr. James Deetz emerged as one of the most respected historical archaeologists working in America at this time.

Historical archaeology can be defined as the subfield of archaeology that studies the surviving material culture of literate, historical-era societies. In the Americas, this period begins with the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and Deetz broadened this

586 John Cotter biography compiled from Mark Rose, comp., “A Life Dedicated to Archaeology,” Archaeology, February 22, 1999, http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/cotter/life.html (accessed January 4, 2013). Susan D. Ball, review of Archaeological Excavations at Jamestown, Virginia by John L. Cotter, Historical Archaeology 32, no. 2 (1998): 111-113. Daniel G. Roberts and John L. Cotter, “A Conversation with John L. Cotter,” Historical Archaeology 33, no. 2 (1999): 6-50 [started at UPenn in 1935, p. 11]. 587 Perhaps the most famous of these amateurs working in the twentieth century was Roland W. Robbins (1908-1987), who discovered the foundation of Thoreau’s famous one-room cabin at Walden Pond in 1945. While the window washer, painter, and self-taught archaeologist was eventually ostracized by the professionals of the field he loved, he nonetheless made important contributions to early historical and industrial archaeology – including promoting archaeology to the public (through lectures, field schools with school groups, and the public lending a hand) and consulting – and worked until around 1980. Donald W. Linebaugh, The Man Who Found Thoreau: Roland W. Robbins and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005).

427 study to include the impact of European culture on indigenous peoples. He also strove to make his field understandable to the general public, through not only his work for

Plimoth Plantation, but writing books that included Invitation to Archaeology (1967) and

In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (1977). As this latter title suggests, Deetz pioneered the approach of studying small things to illuminate wider social processes and complex histories. An English-made wine bottle excavated at Great

Island, for instance, suggests not only the drinking habits of Cape shore whalers in the early eighteenth century, but also trade practices with the mother country.588

The Great Island dig gained wide publicity in local newspapers, magazine

articles, and in Deetz’s 1977 book. Though it never attained the level of Park Service interpretation that Marconi’s station and Penniman’s house enjoyed, the Great Island

tavern excavation is still an important archaeological achievement. It was one of the first

American digs to accurately use British ceramic types to date the site, and overall was a noteworthy careful and sophisticated excavation as the field of American historical

archaeology professionalized. As the tavern’s thousands of artifacts went to Plimoth

Plantation for storage and analysis, the Park Service turned its focus toward preserving

and interpreting the historic government buildings that still dotted the length of Cape Cod

National Seashore.589

588 For an overview of the field of historical archaeology, see Alan Mayne, “On the Edges of History: Reflections on Historical Archaeology,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (February 2008): 93-118. For James Deetz’s specific contributions, see ibid., 97, 105. For book-length histories of historical archaeology, see Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, eds., Historical Archaeology (Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 589 “Archeologists Dig 18th Century Wellfleet Tavern,” The Cape Codder, September 25, 1969, 16. Dawn Anderson, “Down Under Plymouth (and Wellfleet),” Yankee, February 1971, 76. Eric Ekholm and James Deetz, “Wellfleet Tavern,” Natural History 80, no. 7 (August-September 1971): 48-57. James Deetz, Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, N.Y.: Published for the American Museum of Natural History by the Natural History Press, 1967). James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early

428

The federal government’s long tradition of helping its people

The third category of CCNS history was the outer Cape as a place where the

government has long sought to help its citizens by providing navigation aides, rescuing

those in distress, and, finally, in an era when water-borne traffic is both safer and less

frequent, the government addressing a new need for public recreation by forming the

seashore itself. Interpretation for five surviving lighthouses, a single lifesaving station,

and a constant stream of annual programming brought this governmental history to life.

The federal government’s concern with maritime safety on the outer Cape dates to

the first decades of the new republic. With Boston as a major American seaport (and

location of the first lighthouse built in the colonies back in 1716), heavy sea traffic passed

by or around the sandy arm of Cape Cod as vessels headed east toward Europe or

southward along the Atlantic coast. To aid navigation, the federal government

constructed the first permanent lighthouse on Cape Cod on the highlands of Truro in

1797. Other lighthouses soon followed, with lights at Chatham (a pair in 1808), Race

Point (1816) and Long Point (1827) near Provincetown, and Nauset (three in 1838) on

the Atlantic Coast in Eastham. Erosion, decay, and improved technology prompted the construction of newer towers at these locations in the coming decades, with the current

American Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977). The significance of the Great Island excavation was discussed in an email with Dr. Patrick Malone, who participated in the dig. Patrick Malone, “Re: Chapter,” e-mail message to Jonathan Olly, September 30, 2012. For the Great Island tavern artifacts stored at Plimoth Plantation, see Alan T. Synenki and Sheila Charles, Archeological Collections Management of the Great Island Tavern Site, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Div. of Cultural Resources, North Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, 1984), 4.

429 version of Highland Light built in 1857, Chatham in 1877, Race Point in 1876, Long

Point in 1875, and Nauset receiving one of Chatham’s 1877 towers in 1923.590

But lighthouses were just navigational aides; they could not prevent maritime

disasters, nor aid those in distress. To help with individuals and ships needing rescue, the

Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts formed in 1786, and the

following year began building rescue huts along the state’s coast to shelter shipwreck

survivors. The Humane Society has erected a series of huts along the outer Cape by

1802, and began adding lifeboats to its network of Massachusetts stations in 1806.

During the nineteenth century the system expanded with aid from private donors and the

federal government, which began funding the construction and operation of volunteer-run

stations in 1848, and adding a paid full-time keeper to each station in 1854. A division of

the Treasury Department administered the loose network. By 1871 the Humane Society

owned 78 lifeboats and 92 structures including huts and boathouses along the

Massachusetts coast, all manned by volunteers during disasters. That year, advocates in

the Treasury Department successfully lobbied Congress to fund an expanded network of

stations and hire lifeboat crews to man them. The network coalesced into the United

States Life-Saving Service in 1878, an independent agency within the Treasury

Department.591

590 Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 41-42. 591 Dennis L. Noble, “A Legacy: The United States Life-Saving Service,” 2-3. Report is available through a link via U.S. Life-Saving Service Heritage Association, “History of the USLSS,” http://www.uslife- savingservice.org/history_of_the_uslss (accessed January 7, 2013). The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “History,” http://www.masslifesavingawards.com/history/ (accessed January 7, 2013). Lance Kasparian, U.S. Coast Guard Nauset Station, Dwelling and Boathouse, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Barnstable County, Massachusetts (Philadelphia, PA.: National Park Service, Historic Architecture Program, Northeast Region, 2008), 18.

430

On Cape Cod, nine stations were built in 1872-1873 to replace those of the

Humane Society: Race Point and Peaked Hill Bars outside Provincetown, Highland and

Pamet River in Truro, Cahoon Hollow in Wellfleet, Nauset in Eastham, Orleans and

Chatham in their namesake towns, and Monomoy on Monomoy Island in Chatham. The

Life-Saving Service later built four more: High Head (1883) between Peaked Hill Bars and Highlands stations, Wood End (1896) near Long Point Light, Old Harbor (1897) in

Chatham, and Monomoy Point (1902) at the southern tip of that island.592

At each station lived a keeper and crew, who patrolled the beaches day and night

looking for distressed vessels. But in the coming decades the construction of the Cape

Cod Canal in 1914, and advances in technology such as motorboats, aircraft, and

electronic communication and navigation equipment reduced the number of accidents and

the need for so many stations and surfmen. While the U. S. Coast Guard (formed in 1915

through the merger of the U. S. Life-Saving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service)

built a new station house at Race Point outside Provincetown in 1931 and a new dwelling

and boathouse at Nauset in 1936 to replace the outdated original stations, in the 1940s it

began decommissioning the rest on the outer Cape. In 1958 the Coast Guard also

decommissioned Nauset Station, leaving active stations in only the towns of Chatham

and Provincetown.593

592 Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 44-45. Richard G. Ryder, Old Harbor Station - Cape Cod (Norwich, CT.: Ram Island Press, 1990), 2. 593 Lance Kasparian, U.S. Coast Guard Nauset Station, Dwelling and Boathouse, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, Eastham, Barnstable County, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: National Park Service, Historic Architecture Program, Northeast Region, 2008), 28-29 (station closures and consolidations), 44-47 (construction of new Nauset Station). For new Race Point Station see Maureen K. Phillips, Race Point Coast Guard Station, Station House Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown, Massachusetts (Lowell, MA.: National Park Service, Historic Architecture Program, Northeast Region, July 2005), 3.

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With the authorization of Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961, the National Park

Service was quick to acquire Nauset Station, which it used as its headquarters until 1965, and then as the site for the Park Service’s residential National Environmental Education

Development program by 1970. Both the seashore’s 1963 and 1970 master plans had called for a lifesaving museum at Nauset Station, and the 1965 “Interpretive Prospectus” provides a look at what the Park Service envisioned:

It is the courage and resourcefulness of the lifesavers, shipmasters and crew which this museum will seek to present, as it can, more effectively than could any other interpretive media. The theme of life-saving, which we propose to develop, would roughly cover the historic period of 1700 to the present, and would be accomplished through exhibits and audiovisual effects portraying the work of the Massachusetts Humane Society (roughly 1786-1871), the Lighthouse Service (about 1790-1939), the Lifesaving Service (1871-1915), and the United States Coast Guard (1915--). The latter organization ultimately absorbed the lifesaving, sea-rescue functions of the older services, with the Lighthouse Service coming under Coast Guard jurisdiction as well. The proposed museum will be unique in that the central theme will not be minimized or made subordinate to the usual maritime subjects so extensively and well-developed elsewhere.594

The subjects so “well-developed elsewhere” were likely the stories told by maritime

museums all along the New England Coast, from Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut,

to the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. These private non-profit

museums told stories of shipbuilding, maritime trade, and fisheries that dominated (if

they were included at all) any mention of the role of the federal government in helping to

enable these pursuits through building and maintaining navigational aides, enforcing

maritime laws, and performing sea rescues. The federal government, then, was left to tell

594 Vernon G. Gilbert and Edison P. Lohr, with assistance from Merdith B. Ingham Jr. and Marc Sagan, “Interpretive Prospectus for Cape Cod National Seashore [May 1965],” 23, in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Admin Files,” Folder “D18 – Interpretive Prospectus.”

432 its own history, which within the boundaries of the Cape Cod National Seashore fell to the National Park Service.595

To implement this plan, the main floor would be exhibition space, with the

basement as storage and the second and third floors devoted to storage, restrooms, and

possible future exhibits. The main floor would include maps situating the Nauset

Lifesaving Museum and locations for all past and present lighthouses, and the stations of

the Humane Society, Life-Saving Service, and Coast Guard. Two display cases would

contain clothing and personal effects of surfmen as well as ship and boat models. A wall

panel would illustrate the history of the Lighthouse Service. A diorama would show

surfmen performing a sea rescue. And finally, an audiovisual room would contain an

automated slide lecture narrated in part by a retired Coast Guardsman. Out in the

adjacent garage, the staff hoped to display a surf boat, a beach cart containing all of the

typical rescue apparatus, and a bell from a Coast Guard lightship that sank in a hurricane

off Martha’s Vineyard in 1944 with the loss of all hands.596

These exhibits were an amalgam of traditional and innovative museum exhibit

techniques. The use of display cases, models, and a diorama dated to the nineteenth

century, while the focus on surfmens’ material culture continued an interest in collecting

objects documenting daily life that history museums such as Mystic Seaport had

embraced by the 1930s. With the museum’s exhibits organized along a central theme of

595 For NEED temporarily housed at Nauset CG Station and a Life Saving Museum still planned for the space, see National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 45 (museum), 47 (NEED). The planned “Nauset Maritime Museum” is described in National Park Service, The Master Plan for Preservation and Use, Cape Cod National Seashore (Washington, D.C.: NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, 1965), G-14 in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “Administration, structure CCNS 1960s (Handbook for Supt?).” 596 Vernon G. Gilbert and Edison P. Lohr, with assistance from Merdith B. Ingham Jr. and Marc Sagan, “Interpretive Prospectus for Cape Cod National Seashore [May 1965],” 23-25, in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Admin Files,” Folder “D18 – Interpretive Prospectus.”

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Cape Cod lifesaving, they continued what at the time was the new approach of thematic history exhibits developed by leading American history museums in the 1950s such as the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. And like the Farmers’ Museum, the displays were to be without romanticism (as was common in history exhibits during the colonial revival, and Edward Rowe Snow’s storytelling), but they were still a shrine to a special breed of men. It was not wrong for the Park Service to celebrate those who risked their lives in what could be extremely dangerous jobs. And telling about the sailors, surfmen, and lighthouse keepers working in the harsh Atlantic weather and water was also part of the Park Service’s goal of situating human history within a larger natural history of the area. But the resulting heroic portrait prevented a more critical understanding of the history of coastal navigation and rescue. They were not simply saints rescuing the distressed.597

The most innovative part of the whole museum was the audiovisual room.

Having a person describe their job in their own words via video or audio recordings

would become an increasingly common museum practice in the late twentieth century.

But the Nauset Lifesaving Museum unfortunately never came to fruition. As explained

earlier, budget cuts and the growing focus of the National Park Service on environmental

education and interpreting natural history through the 1960s and ‘70s kept NEED based

at Nauset Station, and relegated the museum to a “home-made” exhibit of lifesaving

597 History of history museum exhibits from Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, eds. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3-37.

434 equipment in the station’s garage, where it remained open for limited hours from 1970 through 1978.598

With the story of lifesaving on the outer Cape denied significant exhibition space,

the National Park Service still saw the topic as important and compelling. And so did the public. Evening programs by staff and guest speakers at CCNS on shipwrecks and

rescues began in 1963 and continued annually. Demonstrating the potential mass appeal

of these topics, an August 8, 1966 Boston Globe article covered a recent evening lecture

by brothers Howard and Bill Quinn. More than a thousand people crammed the

seashore’s temporary amphitheater built into a bluff above Coast Guard Beach to hear the speakers, who showed slides and movies as they spoke of local shipwrecks. In 1966

Howard was a director of the Eastham Historical Society (located conveniently across the street from the new Salt Pond Visitor Center), while Bill was a director of the Orleans

Historical Society. The latter Quinn was also a commercial photographer, and his photos of Cape Cod scenes, such as octogenarian brothers and fishermen Ralph and Alexander

Hunter of Chatham, were among his many images of Cape Cod that went into postcards, books, and other media. The creation of the national seashore not only brought increased visitation to the outer Cape; the talents of the Quinns and other individuals who knew how to craft and promote a marketable version of Cape Cod gained a large national audience through the seashore, much as Edward Rowe Snow had accomplished through

598 Park Service reduced budget from Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 34; and May 24, 2012 conversation with David Spang, who began as a naturalist at CCNS in 1963 and worked for the next forty-two seasons; he still volunteers at the seashore. “Home-made” from page 2 of “Briefing Statement: Interpretive Operation at Cape Cod National Seashore,” November 3, 1978, Cape Cod National Archives, box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” folder “The Cape Cod Interpreter.” Dates for the lifesaving exhibit are from surveying the summer interpretive programs, 1970 through 1977, and park newspapers for 1978 and 1979.

435 his dozens of books on New England maritime lore and decades of lecturing throughout the region.599

As the Quinns and others continued to present regular talks on shipwrecks and lifesaving, an unexpected chance to preserve part of this history surfaced in 1973 when

the Park Service purchased nineteen acres of coastal land in Chatham. On the property

was the former Old Harbor Life-Saving Station. Built in 1897 and decommissioned in

1944, the Coast Guard had sold the building in 1946, after which it became a private

residence. It was now only one of two former life-saving stations left on Cape Cod; the

other, at Cahoon Hollow, had been heavily altered and turned into a restaurant. By 1977

rapid coastal erosion put the Old Harbor Station in imminent risk of collapse. Despite the

objections of two successive seashore superintendents who argued that the cost of

moving the station was prohibitively expensive, strong support for historic preservation

among the public, elected officials, and the Park Service’s Regional Office – particularly

in the year following the Bicentennial – resulted in Congress appropriating funds for the

relocation. A crane loaded the station onto a barge in November, 1977, and though

delays in construction of a new foundation at Race Point kept the station docked in

Provincetown through the winter, riggers finally moved Old Harbor Life-Saving Station

into place in May of 1978. After a partial restoration the station opened to visitors in

May of 1979.600

599 George McKinnon, “Crowd Hears Shipwreck Tales,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1966, 79. 600 Peggy A. Albee, Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, Building Conservation Branch, Cultural Resources Center, North Atlantic Region, June 1988), 34 (sale of Old Harbor), 38-39 (objections over cost of relocation and funding), 41-45 (move). For Cahoon Hollow Station turned into a restaurant, see Berle Clemensen, Historic Resource Study, Cape Cod National Seashore (Denver, CO.: National Park Service, 1979), 46; and The Beachcomber, “Cahoon Hollow Life Saving Station,” http://www.thebeachcomber.com/restaurant/cahoon-hollow-station (accessed January 7, 2013). For opening of Old Harbor Station, see “Activities,” Summer Sandings, Summer 1979, 3. Date of

436

That summer, the lifesaving story exhibited in the garage of Nauset Station moved to Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, along with a new living history program. Park rangers were on duty at the station to talk about the history of lifesaving on the Cape, while staff dressed in replica Life-Saving Service uniforms performed a drill on the beach with the type of lifesaving apparatus in use when the station was new. The practice had begun the previous summer on Coast Guard Beach. It emerged from both a children’s sea rescue program started in 1975 in which kids used their imagination and some props to recreate a lifesaving drill on Cape Cod Beach, and the implementation around this same time of a full Beach Apparatus Drill by staff at Cape Hatteras National Seashore using replica equipment. The success of the re-enactment at Cape Hatteras resulted in its adoption at other national seashores including Cape Cod. The program continues to this day.601

The summer of 1979 also saw the start of another facet of interpreting governmental history within Cape Cod National Seashore when park rangers began leading regular tours inside Highland Light (also called Cape Cod Light), and giving talks on its history. Aside from their obvious value and purpose as navigation aides, in the centuries since construction of the first Cape lighthouse in 1797 they had also become

May 1979 as opening of Station also mentioned in “Disabled Access to be Built for Old Harbor Museum,” Summer Sandings, Summer 1985, 2. For restoration still not complete in 1980s, see Peggy A. Albee, Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, Building Conservation Branch, Cultural Resources Center, North Atlantic Region, June 1988), xiii-xiv. In 2008 Old Harbor Station was fully restored. See William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 10. 601 For first description of beach apparatus drill, see “Activities,” Summer Sandings, Summer 1979, 3. For first listing of children’s sea rescue program, see the “Conducted Walks and Activities” in National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, July 1-Labor Day, 1975, Cape Cod National Seashore,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Handout Material and Schedules 1975.” Description of children’s sea rescue program and start of Beach Apparatus Drill at CCNS provided by former park historian, South District interpretive supervisor, and public information and outreach chief Mike Whatley (at CCNS 1977-2001), and shared in Bill Burke, “Re: CCNS history question,” email message to author, September 14, 2012.

437 local landmarks and popular tourist sites. Henry David Thoreau visited Highland Light several times in the 1840s and ‘50s, and lodging at least once with the lighthouse keeper.

Lighthouses were perhaps the seashore’s most evocative buildings. Though they remained the property of the U. S. Coast Guard, the 1970 master plan called for eventually acquiring and interpreting them, along with Coast Guard stations.602

The first two opportunities came in 1965, when the Park Service purchased a pair

of wooden former lighthouses. Back in 1892 the federal government had replaced the

three brick lights at Nauset with three moveable wooden towers, so the latter could be

easily moved when threatened by coastal erosion. In 1911 two of the wooden towers

were decommissioned, and sold in 1918. In 1920 the new owner moved them to a plot of

land on nearby Cable Road and converted them into a single cottage. The remaining

third wooden tower was decommissioned and sold in 1923, replaced with one of the cast

iron towers from Chatham. The new owners also turned this tower into a cottage.

Finally purchasing this last wooden tower in 1975, the Park Service reunited it with the

other two in 1983 on a cleared lot on Cable Road just west of the still-functioning Nauset

Light. With the completion of restoration, “The Three Sisters” opened to public tours in

1989. They maintain their original north-south orientation, albeit just inland from where

they once faced the Atlantic.603

602 For what is possibly the first listing of a regular Hightland Light tour, see “Activities,” Summer Sandings, Summer 1979, 3. “The Highland Light” in Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865; reprint, Boston, MA.: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1896), 2: 31-67. National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts: Master Plan (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1970), 54. 603 A. Berle Clemensen and William W. Howell with H. Thomas McGrath and Elayne Anderson, Historic Structure Report, Three Sisters Lighthouses, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts (n.p.: National Park Service, January 1986), 64-67. Exact dates for NPS buying the Beacon and Twins, and when the exhibit opened to the public, is from National Park Service, “The Three Sisters Lighthouses,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/the-three-sisters-lighthouses.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). That the National Park Service did not move the lighthouses to an ocean-front lot was apparently due to cost and Eastham property owners complaining that the towers would block their view of the ocean. Superintendent

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By 1989 the National Park Service has reached its present state of interpreting the history of federal government services to navigation and maritime rescue on Cape Cod.

The preservation and interpretation of lifesaving, lighthouses, and the men and women interacting with them matured between 1963 and 1989. The Park Service would acquire, move, and restore additional government-built structures in the coming years. And it would continue to revise exhibits and programs about lighthouses, shipwrecks, and lifesaving. As these stories of constructing buildings, training men, and saving lives are mostly in the past, the creation of Cape Cod National Seashore in the late twentieth century stands as the most recent and prominent example of the federal government addressing the needs of people on Cape Cod. The National Park Service had worked hard to sell the public on the idea of national seashores since the mid 1950s. And since

1963, park rangers have regularly presented evening programs on what they do (“Ranger

Activities at Cape Cod National Seashore” (1963)), the importance of their work

(“National Parks: Nature’s Last Frontier” (1963)), reminded the public that the national parks belonged to them (“Your National Seashore” and “Your National Parks” (both

1972)), as well as celebrated significant Cape Cod National Seashore anniversaries with special programming.604

Herbert Olsen’s suggestion of moving them to two miles north to Wellfleet was also unpopular with Eastham residents. “He [Herbert Olsen] said that four sites in Eastham originally proposed for the lighthouses were all rejected by owners of shore property who said the towers would obstruct the views from their houses.” Excerpt from “Northeast Journal,” New York Times, (Late Edition, (East Coast)), February 22, 1987, A42. 604 The National Park Service moved both Nauset Light and Highland Light back from the eroding shoreline in 1996, and received ownership of them from the U. S. Coast Guard shortly before the relocations, according to William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 11. But in an earlier 1998 article, Burke stated that “Ownership of both lights will pass from the U.S. Coast Guard to the National Park Service,” so presumably it was a multi-year process. William Burke, “New Life for Old Lights: Nauset and Highland Celebrate the Past and Look to the Future,” The Cape Cod Guide, the official newspaper of Cape Cod National Seashore [summer?] 1998, cover. New exhibits at the Salt Pond Visitor Center opened in 1989, and included displays on lighthouses, navigation, and lifesaving: “Within about

439

The benefit of this narrative to the Park Service is several-fold. First, private non- profit history museums in New England focus on preserving and interpreting the significant places, people, and things within their own community and/or region – which is a narrative that may not prominently, adequately, or correctly address federal history or federal sites. Next, lifesaving, lighthouses, and maritime disasters are topics popular with the public; and, as Edward Rowe Snow learned in the 1940s when he sought to make a living through writing and lecturing, attracting and keeping an audience comes through learning what excites the public, and what they’ll pay for. The difference between Snow and Cape Cod National Seashore, however, is that most visitors come (and pay) to use the beaches; learning about history and nature are ancillary benefits. Lastly, stories of lighthouses guiding ships to safety and uniformed government-paid and trained men literally saving thousands of lives since the nineteenth century were excellent public relations for the federal government. Through the 1960s and ‘70s as the American public became increasingly dissatisfied with the actions of the federal government both at home and abroad, they demonstrated loudly and in great numbers for reform. The National

Park Service could count itself, then and now, among the more beloved federal agencies and a reminder of government integrity and competency. But, it did not escape public

5,000 square feet of floor space are five display platforms, each on a specific theme: natural settings, a combination of commercial fishing and whaling; a combination of navigation, shipbuilding and agriculture (cranberry farming and sea hay harvesting); maritime safety and sea rescue; and architecture and every-day life.” Excerpted from Joyce Starr, “Salt Pond center ready to reopen: Cape artifacts to fill museum,” Cape Cod Times, July 3, 1989. National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, Cape Cod National Seashore, 1963” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “3.6 Visitor Center Handout 1966.” National Park Service, “Summer Interpretive Program, July 1- August 31, 1972, Cape Cod National Seashore,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, Box “Misc Admin Files/Interp Files (History),” Folder “Schedule 1972.” For list of 20th anniversary activities, see handout “Cape Cod National Seashore, 20th Anniversary Special Activities, Friday, August 7, 1981, Salt Pond Visitor Center, Eastham, Massachusetts,” in Cape Cod National Seashore Archives, General History File, folder “Twentieth Anniversary.” And most recently: “Plans Unveiled for Cape Cod National Seashore for 50th Anniversary in 2011,” CCNS press release, December 22, 2010, on CCNS web site, http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/plans-unveiled-for-cape-cod-national-seashore-for-50th-anniversary-in- 2011.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

440 admonishment for its decisions within Cape Cod National Seashore or elsewhere. And in the mid 1980s that public protest would center on the dunes outside Provincetown.

Dune shacks and the emergence of shared authority

The last story in the creation of the modern interpretation of history within Cape

Cod National Seashore concerns a cluster of nineteen shacks built in the early to mid twentieth century among the dunes bordering the Atlantic coastline of Truro and

Provincetown. It was here beginning first in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s that members of the public organized in opposition to the Park Service’s plan to remove non-

historic, “unimproved” structures in an effort to return the dune landscape to a natural

setting. Their success started a new chapter in shared authority between the Park Service

and residents who lived next to and within the national seashore. The history of the dune

shacks is covered in detail in both National Park Service and private publications, and

will be summarized here.605

The present dune shacks have several precursors. When the federal government

began building a string of life-saving stations along the outer Cape’s Great Beach in

1872, it also built a series of huts midway between each station both to shelter shipwreck

survivors and serve as a meeting point for the surfmen who patrolled the beaches between

each station. These were modeled on the rescue huts first erected along the coast by the

605 Regina T. Binder, “Comprehensive Conservation Treatment & Management Plan for the Dune Shacks of Provincetown, Massachusetts” (master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1990). Josephine C. Del Deo, The Dune Cottages at Peaked Hill Bars: A Survey (unpublished paper, Chanel Cottage, Peaked Hill, Provincetown, MA.: n.p., 1986). Josephine Del Deo, Compass Grass Anthology: A Collection of Provincetown Portraits (Provincetown, MA.: Three Dunes Press, 1983). Emily Donaldson, Margie Coffin Brown and Gretchen Hilyard, Cultural Landscape Report for Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown and Truro, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and National Park Service, 2011). Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005).

441

Humane Society of Massachusetts. The life-saving stations also shared the shore with fishermen who built shacks for storing gear, and as spaces for work and recreation.

Eventually the surfmen and later Coast Guardsmen began building shacks to accommodate visiting family, friends, and other guests to help cope with the stations’ isolation. In the early twentieth century as Provincetown increasingly began attracting artists and other tourists, locals began renting out these shacks to visitors.606

The most famous, grandest, and one of the earliest of these adapted residences

was the original 1872 Peaked Hill Bars Life-Saving Station. Previously abandoned by the Life-Saving Service due to severe erosion (it built a replacement nearby), playwright

Eugene O’Neill and his family used it as a summer residence from 1919 to 1924, and in

which he wrote a number of plays including “Anna Christie” (1920), winner of the

Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Erosion finally toppled the station in 1931, but by then a small

community of shack dwellers had followed in O’Neill’s wake and joined the Coast

Guardsmen in the dunes outside Provincetown. Responding to need and environmental

factors, residents moved and rebuilt their shacks over the years, often using salvaged materials. They were usually single-story wooden structures, with at most a few rooms and no indoor plumbing or insulation. A cook stove and basic furnishings outfitted the

rustic interior. The dunes simultaneously provided solitude to pursue one’s work, a

cheap place to live, and a nearby stimulating group of artists, writers, actors, Coast

606 Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 16-18, 21-24. The shacks were also similar to the detached cabins that comprised tourist camps or tourist courts in which American motorists lodged along American highways in the 1920s. See chapter 6 “Early motels: 1925-1945” in Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1979).

442

Guardsmen, fishermen, hunters, vacationers, and others who formed a distinct dune shack society by the 1920s and into the coming decades.607

The formation of Pilgrim Spring State Park and then Cape Cod National Seashore

presented challenges to this bohemian community of some two-dozen shacks in Truro and Provincetown. The state decided that some dune shack residents were squatting on now public land and should go, but took no physical action to evict them. Charles H. W.

Foster, commissioner of the state’s Board of Natural Resources and chair of the newly- formed Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, reassured residents in

December of 1962 that the state would not order their buildings removed. The state was content to leave this situation to the National Park Service to solve as it would take over ownership of the Province Lands in 1963 and Pilgrim Spring State Park in 1966.608

In response to fears of eviction and demolition, several dozen shack owners

formed the Great Beach Cottage Owners Association in 1962. That they chose the word

“cottage” as opposed to “shack” indicated their argument to be considered as “improved”

properties – though each structure varied in size, construction, and amenities. The

seashore’s incorporating legislation exempted the Park Service from condemning

“improved property” built before September 1, 1959, with this term defined as “a

detached, one-family dwelling … together with so much of the land on which the

607 Jessie Martin Breese, “A Home on the Dunes,” Country Life, November 1923, 73-75. Emily Donaldson et al., Cultural Landscape Report for Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown and Truro, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and National Park Service, 2011), 37-38. Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 39. 608 Emily Donaldson et al., Cultural Landscape Report for Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown and Truro, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation and National Park Service, 2011), 47. Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 25. “Cottages May Stay In Park Transfer,” Provincetown Advocate, December 6, 1962, 9.

443 dwelling is situated the said land being in the same ownership as the dwelling….” Like

Foster, the seashore’s first superintendent, Robert Gibbs, pledged in 1962 to work with shack owners to find a fair solution. To bolster their public image, GBCOA members recalled well-know artists and writers who had spent time in the dunes, such as O’Neill, painters Jackson Pollock and Wolf Kahn, poet Harry Kemp (the “Poet of the Dunes” who had long called for building a replica of the Mayflower, and got to take part in the festivities dressed as a Pilgrim when the ship visited Provincetown in 1957), critic and essayist Edmund Wilson, dance critic Edwin Denby, conductor Joseph Hawthorne, choreographer Todd Bolender, novelists Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer, and composer

Marc Blitzstein.609

While the dune dwellers did comprise a decades-old artistic community,

Superintendent Gibbs nonetheless stated that, by law, any owner of a structure in the park

would need to show proof of ownership of the building and land in order to permanently

remain – a request that eventually only one of the shack owners, the Malicoat family,

could fully document. Such formal agreements were not how the community

traditionally operated. Though not required by the CCNS’s enabling legislation, Gibbs

secured permission from his superiors in Washington to grant leases to the shack owners

of up to twenty-five years or the owner’s lifetime. Within a decade, eventually all but

609 Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 36 (list of 40 members of GBCOA circa 1962). Section 4d of Public Law 87-126 quoted in Charles H. W. Foster, The Cape Cod National Seashore: A Landmark Alliance (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 108. Gibbs’s pledge to find a fair solution from “Cottages Are Safe From Bulldozers,” Provincetown Advocate, September 13, 1962, 1. “‘Poet of Dunes’ Gets Honor Spot During Reception,” Boston Globe, June 13, 1957, 14. List of famous dune dwellers from “Dune Dwellers Seek To Keep Rights To Habitations Used By Creators,” Provincetown Advocate, April 18, 1963, 8.

444 one owner signed deals with the Park Service. With the legal status of the shacks for the moment settled, life on the dunes largely continued as before.610

Entering the 1980s, a number of leases began to approach their termination dates, and the deaths of two elderly shack owners – Charlie Schmid in 1982 and Leo Fleurant in

1984 – revived public concern over the Park Service’s eventual plan for the dune shacks as their properties came under its ownership. In the previous two decades the Park

Service had demolished a few shacks, but there was hope in the community that the Park

Service would soften its stance. It did not. In the summer of 1984 the Park Service demolished Schmid’s shack, prompting significant public outcry. Schmid had been a beloved, eccentric resident of the dunes who bought his shack in the late 1950s and enlarged it into a quirky three-story local landmark.611

In an effort to not lose another part of the dunes’ bohemian past, concerned

citizens formed the non-profit Peaked Hill Trust to come up with a plan to save the

610 Gibbs requiring title to building and land as required by CCNS enabling legislation from “Dune Dwellers Write To Udall,” Provincetown Advocate, September 2, 1965, 2. Malicoat shack as only one protected by a deed from Allison Blake, “In the dunes; windblown shacks hold mute testimony to fast- disappearing solace,” Cape Cod Times, January 26, 1986. For how shacks were transferred among owners, see Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 41, 123-126. Gibbs getting permission from Washington officials from “Dune Dwellers Want Guarantees,” Provincetown Advocate, September 23, 1965. For all shack owners save one eventually settling with NPS in the first decade, see Wolfe, 37. Grace Bessay continued her civil suit from 1967 until finally agreeing to a twenty-five year lease in 1991. Joyce Starr, “Dune shack owner prevails,” Cape Cod Times, November 23, 1991. 611 For Leo Fleurant’s obituary, see Peter E. Howard, “He was the patriarch of the dunes,” Cape Cod Times, April 6, 1984. For details of Schmid and destruction of his shack as catalyst for launching the dune shack preservation movement, see Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 37-38. In the summer of 1984 the NPS actually demolished three shacks: Schmid’s and two in Chatham. Of the latter two, one had recently become the property of the NPS after its owner gave up his lease, while the other was demolished after the owner, William H. Eldridge, moved the shack back from the eroding shoreline in the winter of 1982-1983 without first securing NPS permission. The NPS judged the action in violation of the owner’s lease and after a year-long argument with Eldridge, took ownership of the shack and demolished it – to the anger of the owner and the town of Chatham for not first filing a notice of intent. The Chatham story shows that there were alongshore primitive shacks/cottages/cabins elsewhere in Cape Cod National Seashore, but the article referring to these two demolished buildings as “cabins” and “camps” linguistically puts them in a different conversation than the more famous and contested dune shacks of Provincetown and Truro. Robin Lord, “Battle to establish beachhead,” Cape Cod Times, June 26, 1984.

445 remaining shacks. There were more than two-dozen in the early 1960s, and now nineteen remained, with only one of these (the Malicoat family’s shack) protected from demolition for being on documented private land. The National Park Service allowed the Trust to start a pilot program in the summer of 1986 managing and renting out two shacks with time still on their leases; it also agreed to halt demolitions on the two shacks it currently held, while it carried out a study to determine if the shacks had historic value. If the shacks could be found eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the

Park Service would not demolish them.612

Budget cuts delayed the study but in 1987 the NPS concluded as part of a survey

of all the seashore’s historic structures that the shacks did not qualify for nomination to

the National Register of Historic Places because many were often moved and rebuilt, less

than fifty years old, and had only “ephemeral ties” to the famous individuals cited by

shack supporters. As Superintendent Olsen was quoted as asking the previous year,

“Where’s the documented evidence of who occupied these shacks?” Two years later he

repeated that “Eugene O’Neill did do some writing at the Peaked Hill (sand) bars, but that

shack’s gone. It went into the sea long ago. No writer of national note stayed there for a

significant amount of time.” His comments highlight the value that the National Park

Service placed at that time in the written record over oral histories of current and former

dune dwellers. This oral-versus-written debate also played a prominent role in the 1977

federal trial of the Mashpee Wampanoags over whether they were a Native American

612 Estimate of shacks in early 1960s from Robert J. Wolfe, Dwelling in the Dunes: Traditional Use of the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, Cape Cod (n.p.: National Park Service, August 2005), 9. “Seashore to study cottages’ history,” Cape Cod Times, December 17, 1985. Operation of the Peaked Hill Trust discussed in Allison Blake, “Non-profit group trying to save shacks,” Cape Cod Times, April 25, 1986; and “Residents Move to Preserve Historic Shacks Among Provincetown Dunes,” New York Times, October 19, 1986, 55. Superintendent Olsen saying shacks need to be found historically or architecturally significant to escape demolition from Teresa M. Hanafin, “Historic Beach Shacks on Cape Threatened,” Boston Globe, June 15, 1986, 1.

446 tribe. The written record said no, their oral testimony of their history and current lifeways said yes; and the jury sided with the written evidence.613

But even as the Park Service certified its conclusion of the dune shacks as non-

historic with the report, support for the Trust and the shacks steadily grew as the story

spread from local to regional papers, and the New York Times began answering public

queries over how people could stay in the shacks. And before the shacks could be torn

down, the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC) needed to rule whether it agreed

or disagreed with the NPS findings, as NHL nominations needed state approval to

proceed. In the culmination of a “flood of public interest” in the MHC’s decision, some

200 people packed the Provincetown town hall for a public hearing in August of 1988.

Clearly responding to all forty speakers being in favor of saving the shacks, the MHC

unanimously agreed in its official ruling in September that the shacks were historic and

deserved listing on the National Register. A week before the decision, U.S.

Representative Gerry Studds and Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy had added

their support to the town officials, state environmental officials, organizations and individuals backing the listing of the shacks. One MHC commissioner emphasized the need to save the dune shacks in light of the loss of another piece of the shore’s cultural

heritage: Henry Beston’s Outermost House, swept out to sea during a storm in 1978. In

response to the ruling, a Park Service representative said that it would rethink its position

613 Budget cuts delaying NPS study mentioned in Allison Blake, “Non-profit group trying to save shacks,” Cape Cod Times, April 25, 1986. Brian Pfeiffer, Historic Structure Inventory, Cape Cod National Seashore (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, 1987). “Ephemeral ties” quoted in Susan Diesenhouse, “Remote Shacks on Cape Are Caught Up in Storm,” New York Times, September 18, 1988, 51. “Where’s the documented…” from Peter E. Howard, “Group labors to save Cape’s last historic beach shacks,” Providence Journal, August 10, 1986, A1. “Eugene O’Neill did…” from Robert Correia, “It’s a no-frills life on the barrier; on Provincetown dunes, a struggle to preserve bohemian way of life,” Providence Journal, August 21, 1988, A14.

447 on demolition; that winter Superintendent Olsen suggested that some use of the shacks might be included in the seashore’s revision of its 1970 master plan.614

The debate then moved onto Washington, where the keeper of the register would

make the final decision. The Park Service relented slightly in January, 1989, agreeing

that one of the shacks was eligible for listing as the long-term residence of poet Harry

Kemp; in doing so the NPS showed how it assessed historical worth. As the MHC

argued that the shacks were historic when viewed collectively, the National Park Service

insisted that each shack be eligible on its own. Fortunately, on May 12, 1989 Keeper of

the Register Jerry Rogers agreed with the MHC that the shacks were eligible for listing as

a single historic district due to their “significant association with the historical

development of American art, literature and theater, and for their representation of a rare

and fragile property type.” Accepting the decision, the Park Service agreed to

incorporate the shacks into its long range planning of Cape Cod National Seashore.615

While the National Register decision could not protect the shacks from destruction by nature, neglect, accidents, or an NPS use that conflicted with the desires of shack proponents, it marked the point when public activism changed the way the Park

Service valued the structures within Cape Cod National Seashore. This was not new a

614 Stanley Carr, “Q and A,” New York Times, August 7, 1988, travel section, A4. “Flood of public interest” from Allison Blake, “Dune shacks decision delayed,” Cape Cod Times, July 21, 1988. Details of MHC Provincetown hearing from Kay Longcope, “State panel leans toward preserving Cape shacks,” Boston Globe, August 27, 1988, 13. Outermost House mentioned in Allison Blake, “State historical panel votes to save dune shacks,” Cape Cod Times, September 15, 1988. Belated political support mentioned in “Decision due on dune cottages,” Cape Cod Times, September 14, 1988. NPS rethinking its position from Dana Fulham, “Mass. acts to protect shacks on Cape dunes,” Boston Globe, September 15, 1988, 38. Possible inclusion of shacks in next CCNS master plan from Allison Blake, “Dune shacks win historic protection,” Cape Cod Times, May 13, 1989. 615 Allison Blake, “Park agrees dune shack is historic,” Cape Cod Times, January 19, 1989. NPS arguing for each shack nominated to the Register individually while MHC backs group listing from Pamela Glass, “Lawmakers: Dune shacks historic,” Cape Cod Times, February 4, 1989. “significant association…” from Allison Blake, “Dune shacks win historic protection,” Cape Cod Times, May 13, 1989. CCNS including shacks in long-range planning from Allison Blake, “Historic designation leaves dune shacks’ future still unclear,” Cape Cod Times, May 18, 1989.

448 new phenomenon; public protests curbed the NPS’s plans for large-scale recreational development of Cumberland Island National Seashore back in 1972, and eventually resulted in getting a significant portion of the island designated as wilderness. And the present national seashore system owes its origins to the Mellon family funding a series of studies of the Atlantic, Gulf, and Great Lakes coasts in the 1950s. On Cape Cod, this fight revealed a difference in what the Park Service and organized members of the public felt was worth preserving. According to the latter, the standard practice of the Park

Service and other preservation-conscious organizations for most of the twentieth century

– saving the “best” buildings such as the Penniman House for their impressive architecture or long associations with famous people or events – was inadequate.616

Representative of this low regard for the less-distinguished structures within the

park, back in 1968 the National Park Service gave a halfway house to Mystic Seaport to

add to their outdoor exhibits. Built in the 1870s on the shoreline between the Cahoon

Hollow and Pamet River Life-Saving Stations, it was the only surviving hut on the Cape.

As the remote alongshore location put the house at risk for destruction by vandals or

nature, and made it inaccessible to most visitors, the Park Service apparently decided to

relinquish instead of relocating it elsewhere in the park. And even a decade later, CCNS

superintendents saw the Old Harbor Life-Saving Station down in Chatham as not viable

to interpret in place and too expensive to relocate. It was also the last surviving unaltered

example of its kind on the Cape. It took the intervention of regional Park Service

616 Lary M. Dilsaver, Cumberland Island National Seashore: A History of Conservation Conflict (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 5 (300 visitors per day), 109 (“primitive state”), 149-164 (debate between public and NPS over extent of development), 261-262 (summary of debate over development). Cameron Binkley, The Creation and Establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore: The Great Depression through Mission 66 (Atlanta, GA.: Cultural Resources Division, Southeast Regional Office, National Park Service, 2007), 197-198 (coastal surveys).

449 officials and a sympathetic Congressman to save the station. By these two examples, the

1960s represents the nadir in preservation at CCNS, with a growing assumption of responsibility for at least the seashore’s major historic structures in the late 1970s.617

The dune shacks achieving preservation as part of a historic district in the 1980s, however, indicates that by this decade the Park Service had come to agree with the public’s sense that the historic value of structures was not necessarily due to individual distinctiveness, but in the way they told a story as a group within their environment.

Though opposed on the park-level for the aforementioned reasons, the rural historic district was a tool by which the Park Service had evaluated properties since its publication of Cultural Landscapes: Rural Historic Districts in the National Park System in 1984. Cultural landscapes were the rural equivalent of historic districts, which, since becoming federally-designated with the passage of the 1966 National Historic

Preservation Act, highlighted collections of historic buildings that created an urban or suburban area’s distinct character. The rural version was “a geographically definable area, possessing a significant concentration, linkage, or continuity of landscape components which are united by human use and past events or aesthetically by plan or physical development.” History was not only evident in structures, but in how people had modified the landscape to suit their needs. And since the early 1980s, the NPS has

617 Halfway House described in William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 109-111. See also the results of an archaeological dig at the site of another halfway house: Edward J. Lenik, “The Truro Halfway House, Cape Cod, Massachusetts,” Historical Archaeology, Vol. 6 (1972): 77-86. Peggy A. Albee, Old Harbor Life- Saving Station, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Historic Structure Report, Cape Cod National Seashore, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts (Boston, MA.: National Park Service, Building Conservation Branch, Cultural Resources Center, North Atlantic Region, June 1988), 34 (sale of Old Harbor), 38-39 (objections over cost of relocation and funding), 41-45 (move). Richard Ryder recalled that “Moving the station to a spot closer to the bay side of North Beach was considered, but it was felt that the expenditure of money could not be justified. The Park Service wanted to use the building, but it was so remote that relatively few visitors could get to it.” Richard G. Ryder, Old Harbor Station - Cape Cod (Norwich, CT.: Ram Island Press, 1990), 55.

450 published guidelines for evaluating and nominating cultural landscapes to the National

In the dunes of Truro and Provincetown, the 1,500-acre Peaked Hill Bars Historic

District includes eighteen shacks (the Malicoat shack is excluded because it remains on

private property), their outbuildings, and the web of roads, paths, and other cultural

features which the community had built over more than seventy years in response to the

environment. As Jack Kerouac had stated in a letter supporting the initial GBCOA

efforts to preserve the community, “They [the shacks] are not at all ‘inharmonious with

the park landscape’ but actual museum-like adjuncts to the real meaning of the Park. The

cottages are definitely a part of the response to Place, just as you would not remove old

adobe dwellings from a park in the American Southwest.” Having stayed in a dune shack

in 1950 while working on the manuscript for what became his celebrated novel On the

Road, Kerouac understood that a place’s history was not confined to the sites preserved

and so designated by authorities. Public input mattered, and after 1989 the public

continued to advocate for the seashore’s historic assets – most recently convincing the

Park Service to document and preserve a number of Modern houses built in the 1950s,

‘60s, and ‘70s. And on March 15, 2012, after years of meetings, studies, articles, and

debates, the National Park Service finally listed the Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars

618 As an example of members of the public arguing for the shacks’ value as a group: “Comments collected by the Association [the GBCOA] from artists and writers who were former dune dwellers indicate a strong desire to preserve the structures as an oasis of solitude and inspiration needed for creative thinking by workers in the arts.” “Dune Dwellers Seek To Keep Rights To Habitations Used By Creators,” Provincetown Advocate, April 18, 1963, 8. That the shack owners mobilized to create the Great Beach Cottage Owners Association shows that they valued the community as a whole over each individual’s shack. In the 1980s the MHC, Senators Kerry and Kennedy, and Congressman Studds also argued, based on pressure from their constituents, that the shacks were historically important as a group. Pamela Glass, “Lawmakers: Dune shacks historic,” Cape Cod Times, February 4, 1989. Robert Z. Melnick with Daniel Sponn and Emma Jane Saxe, Cultural Landscapes: Rural Historic Districts in the National Park System (Washington, D.C.: Park Historic Architecture Division, National Park Service, 1984), 8. Cari Goetcheus, “Cultural Landscapes and the National Register,” CRM Magazine 25, no. 1 (2002), http://crm.cr.nps.gov/archive/25-01/25-01-11.pdf (accessed January 3, 2013).

451

Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Shared authority is now the norm at Cape Cod National Seashore, and discussions between the Park Service and the public continue over the management, use, and interpretation of the seashore’s history and historic places – and not least of all the dune shacks.619

Conclusion

In 1961 when President Kennedy signed Senate bill S. 857 into law, he began a process by which the National Park Service would seek to preserve and interpret the history of Cape Cod at a time when rapid coastal development threatened to permanently alter its cherished sense of place. Cape Cod National Seashore represented a contrast to

the typical modes of preserving and presenting history alongshore in that the federal

government acquired more than forty miles of the New England coast and then sought to

selectively preserve and interpret the historical resources therein. And over the following

three decades, changing attitudes toward nature and history, both among the populace and

within the government, would be reflected in how the National Park Service acted on

Cape Cod.

619 For the list and links to NPS publications and documents on the dune shacks, see National Park Service, “Dune Shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/parkmgmt/dune-shacks- of-the-peaked-hill-bars-historic-district.htm (accessed January 7, 2013). Jack Kerouac quoted in “Dune Dwellers Seek To Keep Rights To Habitations Used By Creators,” Provincetown Advocate, April 18, 1963, 8. For Modern architecture, see William Burke, “Fourteen Momentous Events in Preservation of History at Cape Cod National Seashore,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 11; William Burke, “I Don’t Understand It, It Doesn’t Look Old to Me,” Seashore News, 2008-2009, 9. Electronic copy available at: http://www.nps.gov/caco/historyculture/upload/CCNS%20Modern%20Architecture.pdf (accessed January 7, 2013). The NPS in 2006 leased one of the Modern houses it owns to the Cape Cod Modern House Trust. It seeks to eventually restore and put to educational and cultural use all seven of the Modern houses owned by CCNS. Cape Cod Modern House Trust, “About Us,” http://www.ccmht.org/ (accessed January 7, 2013). “National Park Service Formally Lists the Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District on the National Register,” CCNS press release, March 19, 2012, on CCNS web site, http://www.nps.gov/caco/parknews/national-park-service-formally-lists-the-dune-shacks-of-peaked-hill- bars-historic-district-on-the-national-register.htm (accessed January 7, 2013).

452

During these first thirty years Cape Cod National Seashore has come to represent the main parts of the New England coastal brand: people practicing traditional lifeways, the preservation of significant historic structures, and evocative coastal history and lore.

The NPS modified this portrait further by interpreting this history and culture within a larger narrative of environmental change – merging the usually divided approaches of non-profit conservation organizations focusing on nature and history museums preserving history. As was the mission of the NPS since its founding in 1916, on Cape Cod and elsewhere it was tasked with preserving and interpreting both of these elements for the

American people while accommodating their recreational needs. This was a mandate with at times conflicting goals.

Cape Cod National Seashore was not the first national seashore or the Park

Service’s first site in coastal New England. The NPS was involved in managing and interpreting coastal New England since the establishment of Acadia National Park in

1919 and Salem National Historic Site in 1938. Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1931 was the first in a new type of park, emerging from a federal push to expand the number of public recreational areas. By the 1950s the National Park Service realized it was crucial to quickly acquire the last undeveloped areas of coastline for preservation and public use.

Cape Cod’s Great Beach (so named by Thoreau) was at the top of the list of potential national seashores for being the last great undeveloped stretch of New England coast, its proximity to urban areas, and accessibility. In building the argument for the Great Beach,

NPS studies focused on biology, geology, archaeology, and history. The historical argument for its national importance centered on early explorers using the Cape as a landmark, as the beginnings of the Pilgrim narrative in America, and their descendants

453 industriously settling it and helping to build New England’s iconic fishing and whaling fleets. Support for the park was mixed, as residents at first feared the loss of land, homes and businesses, and being inundated with tourists. But in what became the Cape Cod

Model, the boundaries excluded developed areas, homeowners within park boundaries could keep their property, the public could still hunt, fish, and gather shellfish in the park, and an advisory commission composed of members appointed by the federal and state governments and the six towns would guide the Park Service’s development and management of CCNS.

In planning the park, Law 87-126 authorizing Cape Cod National Seashore echoed the Park Service’s mission to conserve history and nature for public enjoyment.

But from the beginning the emphasis was on preserving nature. The public support that had brought CCNS to fruition centered on the loss of undeveloped coastal land – not on the loss of the Cape’s history. This focus was reflected in the 1963 master plan, which set Cape Cod’s natural history as its main interpretive theme, with human history only a small fraction of this story – a hierarchy also evident in the park’s staffing as a chief naturalist headed the interpretation division. Park infrastructure, though, was divided evenly between history and nature, with each having their own building (a nature center and a maritime museum, though neither were eventually built), and both visitor centers covering natural and human history themes. The park buildings were also to be in a bold modern style as championed by the leading contemporary architects in America, and would present the Cape as innovative instead of quaint and pickled.

Setting up their temporary headquarters in a decommissioned former Coast Guard station in Eastham in the fall of 1961, the Park Service immediately began acquiring land.

454

Over the next nine years it would build the seashore’s infrastructure. Among the thousands of properties within the seashore that the Park Service slowly purchased,

Province Lands State Reservation, Pilgrim Spring State Park, and the former Camp

Wellfleet formed the core of the new park. Within these latter two areas, interpretive shelters completed in 1963 at Pilgrim Heights and Marconi Station showcased what became the park’s mode of outdoor interpretation. Each contained exhibit panels and models showing the site’s interwoven history and nature, while adjacent walking trails also interpreted the nature and history visible in the landscape. Back at the temporary headquarters, rangers presented evening illustrated history and nature-themed lectures and also led daily guided walks. In the next six years the Park Service added an additional interpretive shelter at Skiff Hill, more trails and ranger-guided walks, the first bicycle paths in a national park, bathing facilities at six Park Service-run beaches, additional static interpretation at natural sites such as Enos Rock and historic sites such as the Penniman House, the Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham with its small museum, and the Province Lands Visitor Center in the dunes outside Provincetown. The National Park

Service’s careful integration of history, archaeology, flora, fauna, and geology in its exhibits, talks, walks, and trails, were a sharp contrast to the history-in-a-bottle approach of maritime museums such as Mystic Seaport that either ignored nature in its interpretation or subdued it in the quest to preserve and promote Yankee history. At

CCNS, history was environmental and immersive.

By the late 1960s the image of the seashore was becoming more natural than cultural. In 1963 its brochures first featured a stylized lighthouse/Pilgrim hat on the cover, with a tern added above it in 1965. That same year an illustration of a tern also

455 began appearing on the interpretive programs handed out at the visitor center, and in

1968 became the modern circular logo of a tern hovering above a dune that represents

Cape Cod National Seashore to this day. The covers of the 1963 and 1970 master plans also switched from picturing the Mayflower to a tern. This environmental turn was also evident in the residential environmental education program NEED taking over the former

Nauset Coast Guard Station that the Park Service intended for a maritime museum, in the park’s interpretation for Fort Hill showing the denuded landscape as evidence of the damage humans had wrought on the fragile environment over the centuries, and in the master plan’s new theme of a history of natural forces on Cape Cod and man’s effect on that landscape.

Cape Cod National Seashore was a part of the Park Service’s efforts to increase the number of parks, and modernize park infrastructure and staffing as part of its Mission

66 and Parkscape U.S.A. development programs. These successfully raised the National

Park Service’s profile, the number of visitors, and its Congressional funding. But as this growth occurred during the American environmental movement, it also showed that NPS leadership was more interested in scenic preservation and recreational tourism than scientifically studying each park’s natural resources. Since the 1930s a minority within the Park Service had advocated this latter approach so that each park’s ecological integrity could be preserved while necessary development was limited to the less- environmentally-sensitive areas. But in what was the National Park system’s largest period of expansion to date, adding ninety-eight units between 1952 and 1972, biological science remained of limited interest to Park Service leadership, and only twelve percent

456 of these new sites were acquired as important natural areas as opposed to ones with significant history or recreational potential.

The Park Service’s pro-growth attitude clashed with the American environmental movement that became a part of mainstream American culture by the end of the 1960s.

Citizens were alarmed at the increasingly apparent environmental destruction, pollution, and resource consumption that were part of postwar American suburbanization, infrastructure development, population growth, and consumerism. Modern environmentalists traced the root of this destructive behavior to the arrival of the first

European settlers in the seventeenth century, who, along with their descendants, harvested natural resources and modified the land without regard for how their actions upset the natural order, or ecosystem. As the more-enlightened Americans of the present- day were working to limit pollution and protect what remained, there were important consequences to this narrative of decline as it became part of government policy and

American popular culture. The National Park Service used it when describing the need to acquire the last undeveloped stretches of coastline in the 1950s, and in the interpretation of Cape Cod National Seashore a decade later. The Leopold Report of 1963 called for restoring wildlife to parks as they existed at the time of the arrival of white settlers – an ethnocentric narrative that imagined a supposedly pristine natural world unimpacted by the Native Americans who had actually lived in and modified such landscapes for centuries.

And the environmentalists pushing for what became the 1964 Wilderness Act also sought to preserve areas that had supposedly escaped human modification during the course of American history. Believing that it was already doing a satisfactory job of

457 preserving wild areas, the National Park Service opposed the passage of the bill and only reluctantly designated wilderness areas within its parklands – often as the result of pressure from Congress and environmental advocates. But as Cape Cod had been extensively developed since the seventeenth century, it was exempt from being defined and protected as wilderness. And while the public face of the seashore by the latter half of the 1960s was nature, the promotion of recreation mostly trumped ecological concerns.

Situated within nature, historical interpretation in the park fell into three categories: Native Americans up to the point of contact with Europeans, Cape Cod as a place of entrepreneurship, and the federal government working to protect its people.

Evidence of the Native American story on Cape Cod existed in place names, exhibits in the visitor center, as topics of evening programs, in archaeological features visible at interpretive shelters and along trails, and in the narratives of early explorers and the

Pilgrims as they explored the outer Cape. Decades of historical and archaeological research by the Park Service and others informed this interpretation, and helped to present a chronology of Native American life that dated back 10,000 years. But all of these sites presented a story of Cape Cod’s Native Americans in the past tense. Visitors could easily conclude from a visit to the park that Native Americans no longer lived on

Cape Cod.

But Cape Cod’s Native Americans had not vanished. Though apparently not interpreted in the present-tense in Cape Cod National Seashore’s programs until the

1980s and in museum exhibits until 2011, it is valuable to contrast this absence with the story of the two vibrant Wampanoag communities which existed nearby: in the town of

Mashpee on the Cape, and in the town of Gay Head (later Aquinnah), on Martha’s

458

Vineyard. Both endured oversight by colonial and then state officials, the loss of commonly-held land and resources, and numerous petitions for redress before both were incorporated as towns in 1870. During the early twentieth century colonial revival as

New England communities celebrated their Anglo past, Native Americans, too, underwent a cultural revival as eastern tribes adopted dress and other elements of western

Native American cultures in a showing of pan-Indian identity. Wampanoags participated in Anglo-American commemorative activities as early as the 1920s, a decade that also saw the formation of Wampanoag and New England Native American political organizations, and the start of large annual powwows in Mashpee. Wampanoags participated individually in the festivities surrounding the arrival of the Mayflower II to

Provincetown and Plymouth in 1957. But the celebrations also provoked bitterness among some Native Americans for their only token inclusion.

In the wake of the Mayflower II, Wampanoags on Gay Head started their own museum while the 1960s began a period of increased political activism as Wampanoag leaders started what was to be an annual Native American festival in Boston, organized the Federated Eastern Indian League, attended the 1966 dedication of Cape Cod National

Seashore in full regalia as members of the League, and successfully advocated for the cliffs of Gay Head to be declared a National Landmark by the Department of the Interior.

By 1970 the nationwide Native American rights movement had reached coastal

New England. Rising anger over Pilgrim commemorations at Plymouth resulted in the first of what has become an annual National Day of Mourning each Thanksgiving.

Starting that year, Native Americans held protests and demanded that performances and exhibits offensive to Native Americans be changed. More broadly, they hoped the day

459 would demonstrate Native American pride and push for greater Native American rights and education. Responding to the protests, Plimoth Plantation in 1973 expanded its portrayal of Native life in its living history museum, added Native Americans to its board and staff, and started a Native American studies program.

That year also marked the start of local museums returning sets of Native

American remains to the appropriate Native American tribe for reburial – seventeen years before NAGPRA made the practice a federal law. It was a reversal of a centuries-old practice by which looters, antiquarians, and archaeologists dug up Native remains for profit or science. On Cape Cod, the Wellfleet Historical Society joined the National Park

Service and Mashpee Wampanoags in 1976 to rebury a skeleton that the society had exhibited since 1953. The reburial on Great Island within the national seashore was both a belated recognition that Native American remains deserved the same level of respect as those of Euro Americans, and showed Wampanoags reaffirming their deep cultural claims to the landscape now a part of Cape Cod National Seashore.

The late 1970s brought great discord for area Wampanoags as the Mashpees lost their lawsuit against various property owners in the town when a jury concluded that they did not meet the legal definition of a Native American tribe. The following decades, however, brought gradual cultural and legal improvements as Gay Head Wampanoags received federal recognition as a Native American tribe in 1987, a project to reconstruct the Wampanoags’ extinct spoken language began in 1993, and the Mashpee

Wampanoags finally received federal status as a tribe in 2007. A comparatively minor victory came in 2011 when the museum at the Salt Pond Visitor Center opened a new exhibit that finally addressed contemporary Wampanoags and was made in consultation

460 with tribal members. While the practice of shared authority between the Park Service and its constituents began with the successful effort to save the dune shacks from demolition in the 1980s, the inclusion of Wampanoags in creating exhibits remained delayed – possibly due to the Mashpees’ non-recognized status until 2007.

One area of the park’s historical interpretation that did not have to wait decades to be properly told was of the outer Cape as a place of entrepreneurship. Many types of industries started on Cape Cod in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, from fishing to tourism. And the two most prominent sites of industry within Cape Cod

National Seashore, in terms of the Park Service’s investment in public access and interpretation, are the location of a former wireless station designed by Guglielmo

Marconi, and a mansion built by a successful whaling captain named Edward Penniman.

Mentioned in the historical argument for the national significance of the Great Beach back in 1958 and fortuitously located within the former Camp Wellfleet when the seashore first opened, Marconi’s station existed as only a ruin of scattered wood, bricks, iron, and concrete at the edge of a cliff. But the site allowed the Park Service to jointly talk about the start of wireless communication and the dramatic erosion constantly reshaping the shore. And nor was it the site of failed enterprise, but a place of innovation. It was simply replaced by advancing technology (another station nearby took its place), and remained a monument to Anglo-American cooperation and a convenient humble origin point for what became one of the leading American electronics firms.

These latter stories of international cooperation and technological prowess carried strong resonance in American society during the Cold War.

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Captain Edward Penniman’s 1869 mansion was an unexpected acquisition to the park in 1963, but similarly demonstrated American enterprise in chronicling one man’s success in the American whaling industry. The building served as an anchor for the Park

Service’s interpretation of Fort Hill, and as a physical reference point in its programs on whales and whaling. Though Cape Cod whaling was over by the 1960s the house was a grand monument to the industry, and a bright spot visually and historically in Fort Hill’s larger narrative in the 1960s and ‘70s of environmental degradation. And Penniman himself allowed the Park Service in the 1980s to tell a Horatio-Alger story of the local boy who eventually built the grandest house in town and retired as a wealthy old salt – a narrative that combined one of New England’s most famous coastal icons with that decade’s emphasis on conspicuous consumption.

The last category of history in the park was of the federal government’s long tradition on Cape Cod of helping its people. Beginning with the first lighthouse at the end of the eighteenth century, the federal government expanded into operating lifesaving stations along the outer Cape in the late nineteenth century and finally, with less frequent marine disasters by the mid-twentieth century, created the park itself to accommodate the pressing need of Cape Codders and visitors for public recreational space. Though initial plans for a life-saving museum at the former Nauset Coast Guard Station succumbed to the NPS’s environmental education needs and a reduced budget, growing public support for historic preservation in the late 1970s resulted in the relocation of the last largely- unaltered life-saving station from Chatham to Provincetown. Eventually restored, it became the home for the lifesaving museum and the start of a living history program in

462 which men in replica Life-Saving Service clothing perform a beach rescue drill.

Subsequent preservation efforts have restored or saved former and active lighthouses.

The importance of these actions to the National Park Service was threefold.

Federal history was not, the Park Service believed, told adequately by maritime museums from Connecticut to Maine, which focused on shipbuilding, maritime trade, and fisheries over any discussion (if at all) of the federal government’s role in enabling these pursuits via building and maintaining navigational aides, enforcing maritime laws, and performing sea rescues. Stories of lifesaving and shipwrecks were also perennially popular with the public. And, such tales of guiding lights and government-trained men literally saving thousands of lives resulted in positive public relations for the federal government at a time of intense public frustration and protest in the 1960s and ‘70s over its policies at home and abroad.

The National Park Service is unquestionably one of the most popular agencies in the federal government, but its actions are not above public reproach. Throughout its history various constituencies shaped the creation and management of the national parks.

And on Cape Cod, this practice emerged during the 1985 to 1989 public campaign to save the dune shacks in Truro and Provincetown. Built in the early to mid twentieth century, the dune shacks by the 1920s comprised a Bohemian community of artists, writers, actors, fishermen, Coast Guardsmen, and others who enjoyed the company, cheap living, and inspiration afforded by the isolated dunes. But the creation of Cape

Cod National Seashore put the dune dwellers on a path of conflict with the NPS. A compromise of limited leases quelled the debate until 1984, when the NPS began to demolish the shacks with expired leases. Dune shack proponents formed a non-profit

463 organization to work with the NPS on managing the shacks, while a contentious debate between the public, the NPS, and the MHC culminated in the shacks being declared eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 – effectively saving them from demolition.

The fight is significant for being the first time that public opposition changed how the Park Service valued the cultural property within Cape Cod National Seashore. They disagreed with the Park Service’s narrower definition of what was historically significant.

Though crude shacks lacked the traditional architectural merits of the Penniman House or the international significance of Marconi’s wireless station, their preservation could broaden the park’s historical interpretation to include working class dune dwellers. This is public history now: a shared authority between the Park Service and its constituents over the preservation and presentation of history within Cape Cod National Seashore.

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CONCLUSION

The subjects of the four chapters of this dissertation together form a portrait of coastal New England that coalesced by the late 1960s. A half century later it remains distinctive and commercially successful, promoted by everyone from park rangers to bed and breakfast proprietors. But this portrait is not static. Old salts, Mystic Seaport, the coastal stories promoted by Edward Rowe Snow, and Cape Cod National Seashore have continued to evolve to reflect the needs of visitors and locals, and larger changes in thinking about public history and the environment.

In postwar America the practitioners of public history encountered new challenges as the nation suburbanized, modernized, and diversified. New forms of education and entertainment became increasingly accessible. Public history has changed greatly in the last sixty years, reflecting these changes. Historical organizations gradually abandoned filiopiety to attract larger audiences. They hoped that the resulting increase in revenue would help them to expand facilities, exhibits, and to hire additional and professionally trained staff. To better compete for tourists’ dollars they also made their content more understandable and entertaining. Curators updated their exhibits from displays of collections to thematic exhibits where artifacts helped to convey the importance of patriotism, democracy, capitalism, family, and other values at the center of

American society during the Cold War, and then to a more diverse set of stories toward the end of the century. Museums also sought new revenue streams – most commonly

465 through ever-larger gift shops such as Mystic Seaport’s Old Seaport Store, designed to integrate consumption with experiencing the past.

The audiences of these organizations dramatically changed as well. As wealthier whites moved to suburbs and raised families, urban public history institutions especially saw a significant shift in their local (potential) audiences. New populations of immigrants arrived with their own cultural heritage, sometimes lacking interest in or knowledge of local history and culture. And long-established minority groups such as

African Americans, which had long been ignored or underrepresented in the collections, exhibitions, and staffing of historical organizations, demanded a broader historical story.

In order to remain solvent and relevant, historical organizations began seeking new grants and partnerships. They applied for grants from local, state, and national philanthropic organizations as well as a variety of new governmental agencies supporting the arts and humanities. Federal support for historic preservation beginning in the 1960s was also a boon for organizations based in or owning historic properties. In competing for funds, institutions needed to justify their needs and how their communities would benefit. With grantors wanting recipients to address a broad audience, historical organizations increasingly began collaborating with each other and non-traditional groups such as churches, schools, and businesses on projects that could include festivals, exhibits, and documentaries. Rooted in the pre-war work of collectors of folklore, music, and oral histories, and spurred by the social movements of the 1960s, the American public’s interest in stories of common people blossomed in the 1970s. These first-person recollections have become a staple of books, exhibits, and other cultural productions.

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The ongoing Mass. Memories Road Show represents the value which institutions continue to place on individuals telling their own stories.

Pushing this focus on diversity, in the wake of the civil rights movement in the

1960s, racial and ethnic minorities began increasingly demanding more inclusive storytelling from established public history practitioners. They also simultaneously established their own organizations for celebrating their cultural heritage. The New

Bedford Historical Society, for instance, formed in 1996 to document and interpret the contributions of people of color in the city. Since then it has not only worked with New

Bedford’s oldest and largest historical organization, the Old Dartmouth Historical Society

(1903), to expand coverage of people of color at its whaling museum, but launched its own public history projects. And Mystic Seaport, as detailed later in this conclusion, partnered with other local organizations in the 1990s to secure state funding for a replica of the schooner La Amistad, site of a famous slave rebellion, and then created a new non- profit to run it. A few years prior in 1989, Cape Cod National Seashore had acquiesced to public protests over its plan to demolish what it considered non-historic dune shacks.

These examples of greater public engagement in the field of public history in the late twentieth century have resulted in authority shared between public history organizations and citizens who expect to be included in projects about the groups and communities to which they belong.620

A Memorial for New Bedford

620 Morag MacLachlan, “Historical society celebrates 10-year anniversary,” Standard-Times, February 27, 2007. For an example of a major museum dealing with all of these changes, see Catherine M. Lewis, The Changing Face of Public History: The Chicago Historical Society and the Transformation of an American Museum (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).

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This section focuses on the efforts since 2004 to create a memorial to fishermen in the seaport of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The process required artists and members of the general public, city government, and the fishing community to agree on a design and location, and to raise the necessary funds. Everyone involved was influenced by the portraits of New England’s fishermen in more than a century of books, articles, news stories, films, advertising, public monuments and other media. While popular culture has celebrated the old salt for more than a century, the fishing industry has not accepted the old salt as the idealized representation of itself. Instead, as the latest monument design suggests, the fishing community in New Bedford instead prefers to show a life-size portrait of fishermen who value family above all.

The old Yankee fisherman celebrated in popular culture had moved north to

Maine in the 1930s, but fishing and tourism remained important and intertwined industries all along the coast. In addition to the direct economic value generated by fishing fleets and supporting businesses, fishing provided each host community with an iconic American character admired for his bravery, tenacity, and hard work. In recognition of how fishing has shaped these communities, many erected monuments as places of memory for those connected with the fishing industry. These have also become tourist attractions in their own right.

The most famous fishing monument in the nation belongs to Gloucester,

Massachusetts, an eight-foot tall bronze statue of a fisherman in foul weather gear gripping a ship’s wheel as he stands on a slanted deck. Likely a composite of several men including Gloucester fishing captain Clayton Morrissey, sculptor Leonard Craske’s statue was funded by the city and state and dedicated in 1925 as a belated part of the

468 city’s 1923 tercentenary. Based on actual fishermen and not a generic stereotype, the statue represents how the artist and the city’s memorial committee imagined the industry: masculine, individualistic, and heroic. Since then, the statue has become an icon of the city, appearing on everything from t-shirts to Hollywood films, and served as both a tourist destination and site of fishermen’s memorial ceremonies. The design also mirrors the logo of Gorton’s, the city’s famous seafood processor. Braced at a ship’s wheel in his yellow foul weather gear, the gray-bearded Gorton Fisherman became the company’s logo for its fish products in 1904, and is a pop culture icon in his own right.621

But Gloucester’s statue was not the first such iconic memorial to New England

fishermen. A decade before, in 1913, the city of New Bedford dedicated The Whaleman,

a bronze statue of a bare-chested man standing in the bow of a whaleboat about to throw

a harpoon. A gift of William Wallace Crapo, a retired lawyer and one of the founders of

the Old Dartmouth Historical Society ten years prior, it was meant to memorialize the

city’s vanishing whaling industry – but with an explicitly Yankee face at a time when the

ranks of the whale fishery were predominantly men of color. The statue expressed

concerns of the city’s Anglo-American elite who sought to preserve and celebrate their

heritage in an era when the city’s population was rapidly increasing due to immigrants of

mostly Portuguese and African origin employed in the booming textile industry.622

621 For state and city splitting the cost, see “Accept Model of Fisherman,” Gloucester Daily Times, September 10, 1923. For Craske studying local fishermen, see “Memorial Model On Exhibition At Library,” Gloucester Daily Times, October 5, 1923. Several people are reputed to be the source of the statue’s features, including Morrissey, Herbert Thompson, Charles Newell, Louis Andrews, and Colin Clements. Paul Kenyon, “Who is the Man at the Wheel?” Gloucester Daily Times, December 15, 1978, 8. Barbara Erkkila, “The Story of the Statue,” Gloucester Daily Times, May 25, 1983. Marilyn Myett, “‘Man at the Wheel’ is Gloucester,” Gloucester Daily Times, June 7, 1968. 622 Old Dartmouth Historical Society. “The Presentation of the Whaleman Statue to the City of New Bedford by William W. Crapo and the Exercises at the Dedication, June Twentieth, Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen,” Old Dartmouth Historical Sketches, no. 38. (New Bedford, MA.: Old Dartmouth Historical Sociey, 1913), 39; and “The Model,” New Bedford Evening Standard, February 18, 1912, 24. James

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By mid century commercial fishing emerged as the leading industry in New

Bedford. In the 1950s the New Bedford Port Society, founded in 1830 to aid members of the maritime community, began holding outdoor pier-side memorial services for those who had died at sea, as well as installing marble memorial tablets on the interior walls of its Seamen’s Bethel, joining those erected in the nineteenth century to lost whalemen. A tourist attraction since Herman Melville used it as inspiration for his “Whaleman’s

Chapel” in Moby-Dick (1851), it continues to hold weddings, funerals, baptisms, and memorial services. (As a concession to repeated public queries following the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick, the Port Society built a stylized fiberglass ship’s bow to serve as the pulpit.) Despite the laudatory efforts of the Port Society to publicly memorialize lost mariners, some community members felt the need for an outdoor monument, and tried unsuccessfully to create one in the 1970s and ‘80s. The sinking of the fishing vessel

Lonely Hunter in 2003, however, sparked the latest effort to create a monument to New

Bedford fishermen. And since 2004 this process has shown how the fishing community and artists differed over the portrayal of New England’s iconic fishermen, and awareness by all parties that a design would publicly enshrine that image in perpetuity.623

In the early morning hours of September 8, 2003, the fishing vessel Katrina Lee

collided with the Lonely Hunter twenty-eight miles east of Nantucket as the latter vessel

was stopped in the water as it pulled up its scallop dredge. The smaller of the two

vessels, the Lonely Hunter capsized, killing crewmen Jose DaCosta Jr. and John

Lindgren, “‘Let Us Idealize Old Types of Manhood’: The New Bedford Whaling Museum, 1903-1941,” The New England Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June 1999): 163-206. 623 New Bedford Port Society, http://portsociety.org (accessed December 22, 2012). Peter Glatchford, “Port Society assists fishermen year round” [editorial], Standard-Times, February 3, 2004, A12. History of efforts to build a monument from Jack Spillane, “A city’s unseen fishermen,” Standard-Times, January 25, 2004, A1.

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Beauvais. Three months later on December 14, the New Bedford scalloper Atlanta capsized and sank twenty-seven miles south of Chatham, Massachusetts, resulting in the deaths of crewmen Stephen Viator and Kenneth Toolis, and Captain Francisco Pereira.

The casualties were only the latest in an almost annual tally of fishing accidents.624

As described by Standard-Times columnist Jack Spillane in the January 2004

article “A city’s unseen fishermen,” the mother of Jose L. DaCosta Jr., Caroline DaCosta,

wanted to install an outdoor plaque to commemorate the city’s lost fishermen. Spillane contrasted New Bedford’s lack of an outdoor monument with well-known ones at

Galilee, Rhode Island, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. In Gloucester, citizens had demonstrated their bolstered community pride in the city’s fishermen surrounding the filming and release of what would be the blockbuster film The Perfect Storm in 2000

(about the loss of the F/V Andrea Gail in 1991) by adding next to their iconic statue a

bronze and granite cenotaph listing the names of fishermen lost since 1716. Private

donors paid for the project. And a year later, following their own private fundraising

campaign, the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association dedicated a bronze statue

nearby to the women who have always been an essential part of the fishing

community.625

624 Caroline DaCosta, “One mother’s road to healing from fatal fishing accident,” Standard-Times, January 20, 2005, A17. Sarah Martineau, “Scalloper capsizes; two dead, one missing,” Standard-Times, December 15, 2003, A1. Sarah Martineau, “At sea, life on the edge becomes a routine,” Standard-Times, December 21, 2003, A1. 625 Jack Spillane, “A city’s unseen fishermen,” Standard-Times, January 25, 2004, A1. David Arnold, “Putting names to Gloucester’s loss,” Gloucester Daily Times, March 17, 2000, B1. Efforts to honor Gloucester women in the fishing industry date to the 1940s. James Shea, “Fisherman’s wife statue – idea hailed, then spurned,” Gloucester Daily Times, July 31 1971. “Union Officials Give Assurance That Fishermen Will Raise Funds for Statue,” Gloucester Daily Times, n.d. but labeled “8 – ‘45” in pencil. Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association, “The Memorial,” http://www.gfwa.org/memorial/memorial.html (accessed December 22, 2012).

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Hoping to emulate this success, Caroline DaCosta organized with other members of the New Bedford fishing community to form the Fishermen’s Tribute Fund in January

2004. Their mission, as described in a May 2004 editorial, was brief but challenging: “to create a modern-day tribute to honor all men and women, past, present and future, within the fishing industry, especially those who have lost their lives in pursuit of their profession.” Toward this goal, the FTF began fundraising through appeals to businesses and individuals, and hosting events such as dinners and an annual 5K run/walk (starting in 2006). For its part, the city of New Bedford agreed in August 2004 to set aside a parcel of land at Fort Taber Park, the city’s southernmost point. Additional fishing deaths in 2004, 2005, and 2007 underscored the dangers of the industry, and the FTF’s calls for publicly recognizing this sacrifice with a monument.626

In September 2007 the FTF issued a call for proposals for monuments, which it expected to cost around $1 million. A year later it publicly revealed eleven proposals submitted by artists nationwide, and from this list it named five finalists to create maquettes of their designs: a bronze statue of Poseidon with four waterfalls and a net displaying sea creatures; a granite eastern-rig scalloper with a bronze statue of a helmsman; a bronze fisherman gutting a pile of codfish at his feet; another bronze fishermen hauling in a net; and an abstract sculpture comprised of four sections of a black granite wall. Announced on April 17, 2009, the winner was Marshfield, Massachusetts, artist Joseph Ingoldsby’s sixty-three foot granite fishing vessel. A chart of Georges Bank

626 FTF formation in January 2004 mentioned in Don Cuddy, “New Bedford Fishermen’s memorial design to be announced,” Standard-Times, April 16, 2009; and Jennifer Lade, “Final Design for New Bedford Fishermen’s Monument revealed,” Standard-Times, April 18, 2009. Caroline DaCosta, “Creating a tribute to the fishermen” [editorial], Standard-Times, May 9, 2004, B2. Jack Spillane, “City OKs space for fishermen’s memorial,” Standard-Times, November 16, 2004, A4. “Fishing tragedies,” Standard-Times, November 14, 2008. Brian Boyd, “Funds build for fishermen’s monument,” Standard-Times, July 30, 2006, A2. Jack Spillane, “Push to build fishing monument gathers steam,” Standard-Times, February 11, 2007.

472 and Nantucket Shoals was to be carved into the granite deck, while five bronze friezes set into the sides of the wheelhouse depicted the flounder, lobster, cod, scallop, and tuna fisheries.627

The design was a large, unique, and inclusive monument to New Bedford’s

diverse fisheries, but by the following summer Ingoldsby had withdrawn from the project

after disagreements with the FTF over the design, construction, and inadequate funds.

The FTF vowed to continue raising awareness and money, and come up with a new

design. Finally, two years later in June 2012 the FTF revealed a new plan. Owing to

height restrictions and Fort Taber Park as a site perhaps better suited to memorializing

military history than fishing history, the FTF proposed a new location a few blocks north

on a city-owned jetty at the intersection of Nina Street and East Rodney French

Boulevard. The new design was largely the product of the FTF itself. They provided a

sketch to sculptor and Bristol Community College art professor Erik Durant, who refined

the design and created a maquette. Slightly larger than life, the bronze sculpture depicts a

kneeling fisherman, seabag at his side, either greeting or saying goodbye to his wife and

two children. This simpler memorial reduced its fundraising needs. The FTF estimates a

multi-stage building process with the monument itself costing $110,000, and the rest of

the site construction bringing the total price to about $300,000.628

627 Don Cuddy, “Committee seeks designs for fishing monument,” Standard-Times, September 24, 2007. Jennifer Lade, “Public to have its say on New Bedford fishing monument,” Standard-Times, September 12, 2008. Don Cuddy, “5 designs vie for New Bedford fishermen’s memorial,” Standard-Times, January 19, 2009. Jennifer Lade, “Final design for New Bedford Fishermen’s Monument revealed,” Standard-Times, April 18, 2009. Joseph Ingoldsby, “New Bedford Fishermen’s Monument,” http://josephemmanuelingoldsby.com/sub_fishermen_monument.html (accessed December 22, 2012). 628 Don Cuddy, “Financial, artistic obstacles sink proposed fishing monument,” Standard-Times, June 3, 2010. Deb Shrader, “Your View: Effort for fishing monument still afloat” [editorial], Standard-Times, June 11, 2010. Deb Shrader, “Your View: Tribute Fund works to honor fishermen” [editorial], Standard- Times, May 6, 2011. Don Cuddy, “Fishermen’s monument project back on track with new site and design,” Standard-Times, June 4, 2012.

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The efforts of the Fishermen’s Tribute Fund over the past eight years speak not only to the challenge of raising money for public history projects, but to larger challenges facing coastal communities as they endure increased government regulation of the fishing industry in the face of declining fish populations, often annual deaths of fishermen at sea, economic fluctuations in the price of seafood and the cost of operating a fishing fleet, and a variety of characterizations which outsiders have about fishermen and their families. Unlike William Crapo privately choosing sculptor Bela Pratt, or the FTF first seeking nationwide proposals to determine the best design, members of the community have now come up with their own, which focuses on family as opposed to themes of masculinity, technology, or man versus nature. And, mirroring recent efforts in Gloucester, they are funding the monument not through one or two donors but hundreds over a period of years. It’s a more complicated and time-consuming process, but it is closer to the community speaking for itself.

This latest chapter in building a monument to New Bedford’s fishermen also shows the tension between local efforts to properly memorialize those lost as sea, and awareness that a monument was also important to the city’s image. Locating the statue along the shore of a residential neighborhood in south New Bedford, three miles south of the city’s national park and tourist center, is evidence that the community is erecting the statue for itself, not tourists. The old salt of a century ago is not a part of the proposed fishing family sculpture, but his absence shows fishing communities taking a more direct role in their image-making. He was always a character plucked from the local environment and used by his consumers to champion a preferred identity. In popular

474 culture he may be immortal, but in coastal communities the old salt is not worth grieving over.

Facing Slavery in New England

Another shift away from the coast’s historically myopic focus on Yankee

seafaring came in commemorations of the story of the Amistad in the 1990s. It was a

story that eventually involved the nation’s leading maritime museum. When Mystic

Seaport’s founders began assembling artifacts, buildings, and watercraft in the 1930s and

‘40s, they envisioned at first a replica nineteenth-century shipyard with everything

needed to build and repair ships. They felt that re-creating this environment would have

a transformative effect on visitors, causing them to be more self-reliant, industrious, and

maritime-focused. When construction of the site began after World War II, the replica

shipyard evolved into a replica seaport village – reflecting the importance of family and

faith along with industry and entrepreneurism during the Cold War. However, by the

time of the village’s completion in the 1950s, the museum’s new leaders had abandoned

these goals in place of amusement and creating greater awareness of maritime history.

Mystic’s historical narrative remained Yankee-focused for the next three decades. But

the sesquicentennial of a famous international maritime incident would help prompt a sea

change in the way Mystic Seaport interpreted and celebrated the past.

On June 28, 1839 the coastal schooner La Amistad left Havana, Cuba, with fifty-

three Africans who had been illegally captured and smuggled to Cuba that spring aboard

the slave ship Tecora from what is now Sierra Leone. Two Spaniards, Jose Ruiz and

Pedro Martez, purchased forty-nine men, three girls and a boy to work on Cuban sugar

475 plantations. But five days into the voyage on July 2, one of the enslaved Africans, a twenty-six year old rice farmer named Sengbe Pieh, freed himself and with the other captives took over the ship. In the ensuing fight, two Africans and two of the five crewmen died; two other sailors escaped in a small boat. Not knowing how to navigate the vessel, the Africans forced the surviving Ruiz and Martez to sail them back to Africa.

But while the Spaniards complied and sailed La Amistad east during the day, at night they reversed course in the hopes that another vessel would sight them and come to their aid.

After sixty-three days of zig-zagging up the Atlantic Coast of the United States, in which time everyone became increasing weak and desperate, and eight Africans died of sickness, the USS Washington finally intercepted La Amistad off Long Island, New York, and brought it to New London, Connecticut.

Jailed in New Haven on charges of mutiny and murder, the forty-five surviving

Africans became the center of an international legal and political debate over which nation had jurisdiction to hear the suits brought by multiple plaintiffs, the status of the

Africans as slaves or kidnap victims, and the morality of slavery itself. While Great

Britain and the United States had outlawed the international slave trade three decades earlier, and worked to enforce that ban among all nations, slavery as an institution was still legal in the United States. As the most divisive issue in American society at the time, pro and antislavery advocates fiercely debated the practice nationally and locally, with the cause of the Amistad Africans becoming a rallying point for abolitionists who provided financial and legal support. When a District Court judge eventually ruled in favor of the Africans on January 30, 1840, the administration of President Martin Van

Buren feared the decision would anger the Spanish government (which considered the La

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Amistad case the responsibility of its legal system), and appealed to the U.S. Supreme

Court. But with former President John Quincy Adams helping to argue the Africans’ case before the court, it ruled on March 9, 1841 that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and ordered them released. Once abolitionists raised funds for their travel back to West Africa, the remaining former La Amistad captives finally arrived in Freetown along with American missionaries on January 15, 1842.629

This dramatic fight for freedom and early legal victory for human rights continued

to resonate in American society more than a century after the Civil War ended American

slavery. Perhaps its longest single champion was writer, artist, and editor Warren Q.

Marr II. In 1962 while working for the American Missionary Association he created the

Amistad Awards program to acknowledge people working to improve human relations,

particularly in the sciences and arts. In 1966 Marr co-founded the Amistad Research

Center. First a division within the Race Relations Department of Fisk University, the

center eventually became an independent institution at Tulane University and the largest

independent archive specializing in the history of African Americans and other ethnic minorities.630

A decade later Marr brought the Amistad story onto the water. In 1976, as part of

America’s bicentennial celebrations, the non-profit organization Operation Sail held a

gathering of large sailing vessels or “tall ships” from around the world that culminated in a parade in New York Harbor. First held in 1964 in conjunction with the New York

629 Summarized from Amistad America, “The Amistad Story,” http://amistadamerica.net/the-amistad-story/ (accessed December 22, 2012). 630 Christopher Harter, “Marr, Warren Q., II (1916-2010),” http://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/archon/?p=creators/creator&id=164 (accessed December 22, 2012); and Amistad Research Center, “History of the Amistad Research Center,” http://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/index.php/about-us (accessed December 22, 2012).

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World’s Fair, Operation Sail or OpSail seeks to promote sail training and foster international goodwill through gatherings of sailing vessels from many nations. One unusual participant in 1976 was the schooner Western Union. Then editor of the

NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, Marr wanted to acknowledge the significant role that people of color had played in American maritime history. In order to include this story in the parade of tall ships, Marr raised funds to charter the schooner Western Union, temporarily rename it La Amistad, and sail it in the parade. Recognizing the significance of the vessel, New York Times reporter Warren Hoge noted that “The [1839] incident was central to the origins of three great social sea changes for blacks – civil rights, public education and the missionary movement – all of which are documented in a shipboard museum.”631

Believing that an actual replica could play an evocative role in telling the Amistad story, Marr and an associate, Donald Harewood, formed Amistad Affiliates in 1989 with the goal of eventually building a vessel. They found strong support in Connecticut, where the Amistad Committee had formed the previous year to spread awareness of the story as its 150th anniversary approached. Named after the group that abolitionists had

formed in 1839 to defend the Africans, the local committee sought to erect a permanent memorial and to educate the public about the event’s value in promoting justice,

humanity, and interracial cooperation. Under the leadership of chairman Alfred Marder it successfully fundraised among New Haven’s schools, businesses, and houses of worship, and dedicated a ten-foot bronze monument outside New Haven’s city hall (and site of the

631 Amistad America, “Organizational History,” http://amistadamerica.net/organizational-history/ (accessed December 22, 2012). Warren Hoge, “Namesake of Schooner Slaves Took Over Joining Operation Sail,” New York Times, May 12, 1976, 43. Operation Sail, Inc., “1964,” http://www.opsail.org/past-events- 1964.php (accessed December 22, 2012).

478 jail that held the Africans during the trials) on September 18, 1992. The triangular monument by sculptor Ed Hamilton is comprised of three scenes in bas-relief that depict the story through its most famous participant, Sengbe Pieh: in West Africa as a rice farmer before his capture, on trial in an American courtroom, and ready to board a ship to return home.632

While the dedication of a monument often marked the culmination of commemorative activities, the 1990s witnessed unprecedented nationwide interest in the

Amistad story. A half-dozen books had been written about the revolt in the past half- century, but an equal number would be published over the next decade.633 More generally, public history institutions were becoming increasingly interested in including more diverse histories in the exhibitions and programs.

632 Formation of Amistad Affiliates descried in Christopher Harter, “Marr, Warren Q., II (1916-2010),” http://www.amistadresearchcenter.org/archon/?p=creators/creator&id=164 (accessed December 22, 2012); and along with the Amistad Committee in Amistad America, “Organizational History,” http://amistadamerica.net/organizational-history/ (accessed December 22, 2012). Mary Ann Limauro, “A Struggle for Justice Receives Its Due,” New York Times, September 20, 1992, CN 19. Ed Hamilton, “The Amistad Memorial, New Haven, Connecticut,” http://edhamiltonworks.com/amistad.htm (accessed December 22, 2012). Additional history of both the Amistad Affiliates and Amistad Committee are described in Melinda Tuhus, “New Haven Embraces the Amistad, Again,” New York Times, July 9, 2000, CT1. 633 For a sampling of fiction and non-fiction on the Amistad story, see Emma Gelders Sterne, The Long Black Schooner; the Voyage of the Amistad (New York, N.Y.: Aladdin Books, 1953). William Owens, Slave Mutiny; the Revolt on the Schooner Amistad (New York, N.Y.: J. Day Co., 1953). Christopher Martin, The Amistad Affair (New York, N.Y.: Abelard-Schuman, 1970). Mary Cable, Black Odyssey; the Case of the Slave Ship Amistad (New York, N.Y.: Viking Press, 1971). B. Edmon Martin, All We Want is Make Us Free: La Amistad and the Reform Abolitionists (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1986). Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1987). Barbara Chase-Riboud, Echo of Lions (New York, N.Y.: Morrow, 1989). Helen Kromer, Amistad: The Slave Uprising Aboard the Spanish Schooner (Cleveland, OH.: Pilgrim Press, 1997). Suzanne Jurmain, Freedom’s Sons: The True Story of the Amistad Mutiny (New York, N.Y.: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1998). Bernard Vincent, Amistad: Les Mutins de la Liberté (Paris, France: Archipel, 1998). Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Gary V. Wood, Heir to the Fathers: John Quincy Adams and the Spirit of Constitutional Government (Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2004). Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2012). Matthew J. Christensen, Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2012).

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Mystic Seaport was a part of this trend, having started the Paul Cuffe Memorial

Fellowship in 1989. Named for a successful Massachusetts businessman, mariner, educator, and abolitionist born to African and Native American parents in 1759, the fellowship was offered annually to scholars studying minorities in American maritime history. But the fellowship reflected a developing sea change to Mystic Seaport’s mission, as it formally redefined itself in 1992 from an institution centered on New

England to now being “The Museum of America and the Sea” (a title it trademarked). As museum president J. Revell Carr recalled six years later,

Because of the physical dominance of our outdoor exhibits of buildings and ships representing nineteenth-century maritime New England, many perceived Mystic Seaport as a New England museum. We had, however, been functioning for decades under a statement of purpose that called for the much broader mission “to enhance man’s knowledge and understanding of the sea’s influence on American life.”

As no other American maritime museum was telling this national story, Mystic Seaport, with its extensive exhibits, library, publications, programs, Munson Institute (teaching graduate-level maritime history courses to teachers, scholars, and students since 1955), and a maritime studies program for Williams College undergraduates (since 1977), decided that it was in the best position to be the de facto national maritime museum.

Such a decision culminated a nearly fifty-year effort since the end of World War II to grow the museum’s audience beyond its Yankee roots.634

Toward this goal of telling an inclusive portrait of America that acknowledged the

roles of class, race, gender, and ethnicity in its maritime history, Mystic Seaport added its

634 J. Revell Carr, foreword to America and the Sea: A Maritime History by Benjamin W. Labaree, William M. Fowler Jr., John B. Hattendorf, Jeffrey J. Safford, Edward W. Sloan, and Andrew W. German (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport, 1998), x. Mystic Seaport, “Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship,” http://www.mysticseaport.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPage&page_id=BA0F6A5D-D0B2-1CEA- 5778CABEA131F76E (accessed December 22, 2012).

480 first African-American board member in 1994, planned its first race and ethnicity conference for the following year, and concluded an oral history project begun the previous fall on Connecticut’s last (and largely Portuguese-American) commercial fishing fleet in Stonington. But perhaps the most noteworthy event for Mystic Seaport in

1994 was the state of Connecticut awarding it and the Connecticut Afro-American

Historical Society $2.5 million to build a replica of La Amistad. The story had broad appeal for various political and cultural reasons. For the state it was an investment in the tourism industry (the state’s third largest industry by 1998), which economically was centered in southeastern Connecticut and anchored by Mystic Seaport, Mystic Aquarium,

Foxwoods Resort Casino, and the soon-to-be-built Mohegan Sun casino. But it was also a way to continue a public discussion about not just the incident but also its broader themes of justice, and interracial tolerance, cooperation, and education. Granted, the

Amistad story was not about slavery within the state of Connecticut: though the state issued gradual emancipation laws in 1784 and 1797, there were still several dozen enslaved African Americans at the time of the Amistad incident, and the state would not abolish slavery until 1848. However, to those teaching the Amistad story – which put the state in a progressive light for its abolitionist sentiment – it could also serve as an entry point for talking about more challenging topics such as the legacy of slavery in

America.635

635 Mystic Seaport’s diversity efforts detailed in Joe Wojtas, “Museum Tries to Make a Point: At Sea, Everyone is Equal,” New York Times, March 5, 2000, CT1. $2.5 million state grant mentioned in Mystic Seaport, “1990s & 00s,” http://www.mysticseaport.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPage&page_id=0F34239B-65B8-D398- 7553278503964B2D (accessed December 22, 2012). Carolyn Battista, “And Still the Stonington Fleet Will Fish,” New York Times, December 4, 1994, CN1. Mystic Seaport, “The Stonington Oral History Project,” http://www.mysticseaport.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPage&page_id=DAEE3CF5-B0D0-D05E- 1A270EB902D292DD (accessed December 22, 2012). For importance of tourism industry in Connecticut, see Fred Musante, “A German film crew, a little help from the Amistad and Titanic: Here Come the

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Public discussion and memorialization of the Amistad story in Connecticut was part of a broader trend in New England beginning in the 1990s of communities, institutions, and individuals engaging in an unprecedented public dialogue about the region’s racial diversity and role in American slavery from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. While a few scholars starting in the 1940s wrote about New

England African-American history,636 historian Joanne Pope Melish recalls encountering a whitewashed past during her upbringing in 1950s Connecticut and again in Rhode

Island a decade later:

I discovered that the narrative of New England slavery was not untold exactly, but it was a kind of private narrative, told in discrete, isolated places from which it had never emerged to disrupt the public narrative of a “free, white New England.” In fact, a virtual amnesia about slavery in New England has a history almost as old as the history of local slavery itself.637

Published in 1998, Melish’s Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in

New England, 1780-1860 helped to deconstruct this popular myth as it traced how New

England states gradually ended slavery in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries

and then purged this experience from its collective memory – effectively denying the

thousands of black New Englanders a place in the region’s history, and making American

slavery into a distinctly Southern institution. Publications by scholars such as Melish

joined the dedication of African-American heritage trails, universities and historic house

Tourists,” New York Times, July 19, 1998, CT1. Douglas Harper, “Slavery in Connecticut,” Slavery in the North, http://www.slavenorth.com/connecticut.htm (accessed December 22, 2012). 636 Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1942). Arthur Zilversmith, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973). William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro- American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). For an example of an early New England African-American narrative, see Briton Hammon, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (Boston, MA.: Green & Russell, 1760). 637 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Empancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780- 1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), xiii.

482 museums recognizing their connections to slavery, memorials and commemorations of significant events involving people of color, and the Amistad replica as some of the ways in which New Englanders began to address this legacy of black exclusion from New

England memory and public history that continued through much of the twentieth century.638

Recognizing that a unique project in this historical awakening was unfolding, in

1995 the New York Times began covering Mystic Seaport’s plan to re-create the vessel. It

focused on the director of the museum’s shipyard, Quentin Snediker, as he searched for

historical descriptions of La Amistad to come up with a design that balanced historical

accuracy with modern safety requirements and the needs of a floating museum. With his

white beard, anchor tattoo, and traditional sailing experience, he reminded more than one

reporter of an old salt – but he was one who could deftly speak about the project’s

technical details, historical basis, and opportunity for talking about racism and forgotten

history. While Mystic had for decades maintained and expanded its fleet of historic

vessels (building a marine railway in 1957 and significantly expanding the shipyard in

the 1970s to continue restoration work and foster traditional shipbuilding skills), Snediker

also pointed out that this would be the first large one built from scratch.639

638 See, for example, the Connecticut Freedom Trail; the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail in CT and MA; the Black Heritage Trail in Boston, MA; the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, MA; Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice; and “A Thousand Ships: A Ritual of Remembrance Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade” held in Providence, R.I., on October 4, 2008. 639 For Quentin Snediker described as an old salt, see Bill Ryan, “Reconstructing a Spanish Ghost Ship and a Tale of Slavery,” New York Times, March 12, 1995, CN1; and David M. Herszenhorn, “In a Replica of a Famed Slave Ship, Lessons From the Past,” New York Times, March 26, 2000, 237. For construction of shipyard see Mystic Seaport; The First Fifty Years: A Chronological Survey (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1980), 21, 32-33.

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As Snediker continued his research and an architectural firm worked on the final design, Mystic Seaport in 1996 joined with three other educational organizations – the

Connecticut Afro-American Historical Society, the Amistad Committee, and the Amistad

Associates – to incorporate Amistad America as a new non-profit educational organization that would independently operate the vessel and its programs. As a requirement of the state grant, the coalition raised an additional $650,000, bringing the project’s expected two-year construction cost to $3.1 million. Decades after Mystic

Seaport founder Carl Cutler’s emphasis on self-sufficiency and incremental museum growth, large public history projects by the end of the twentieth century were a complex network of public and private funding, and often collaborations between educational organizations. Private funding came largely from the Phoenix Home Life Mutual

Insurance Company, the United Church of Christ, and the Southern New England

Telephone Company.640

The Amistad story received an unprecedented level of international attention when

director Stephen Spielberg made it the subject of his next film, Amistad, released in

December, 1997. Back in March, Mystic Seaport hosted a film crew for four days of shooting as its waterfront stood in for nineteenth-century New Haven; the hold of the

Charles W. Morgan became the lower deck of La Amistad. That the seaport village was a cinematically convincing re-creation of a nineteenth-century New England seaport would

640 Robert A. Hamilton, “A New Amistad, With Human Dimensions,” New York Times, December 28, 1997, 374. Private funding from “Slave Ship to Be Rebuilt as a School,” New York Times, March 9, 1998, B5.

484 have pleased Cutler and the other staff who built it. While a box-office disappointment, the movie produced a noticeable increase in museum visitation.641

Construction of the Amistad began on March 8, 1998 as hundreds of people –

including dancers from Sierra Leone and that country’s ambassador to the U.S. – packed

the interior of the shipyard’s construction shed for the ceremonial laying of the two-ton

wooden keel, upon which the rest of the vessel would be built. Over the next two years,

museum visitors watched Amistad being built by Mystic’s shipwrights with the help of

students from a maritime vocational high school in New Haven – the vessel’s eventual

home port. An international crowd of 10,000 people witnessed the Amistad’s launch into

the Mystic River on March 25, 2000. Delivering the keynote address of the dedication

ceremony, a descendant of Sengbe Pieh, Samuel H. Pieh of Tennessee, spoke of the

strength inherent in recognizing diversity in society, and his hope that the Amistad would

help to combat racism that was still prevalent in America and around the world.642

Pieh’s emphasis on celebrating diversity recalled a statement made earlier that month by Mystic Seaport’s president to a reporter: “The same diversity that makes up our country is woven through its maritime history. We have a fundamental and moral obligation to tell that story accurately. More importantly, the audience we serve is diverse. We have to tell the story that people are a part of.” In the wake of the Amistad’s

641 Amistad, directed by Stephen Spielberg (DreamWorks, 1997). Filming locations from Mystic Seaport, “Amistad - Freedom Schooner,” http://www.mysticseaport.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPage&page_id=E34E80E5-A366-D9FD- B8C506D310A9DA0B (accessed December 22, 2012); and Amistad America, “FAQ,” http://www.amistadamerica.net/faq/ (accessed December 22, 2012). Fred Musante, “A German film crew, a little help from the Amistad and Titanic: Here Come the Tourists,” New York Times, July 19, 1998, CT1. 642 “Slave Ship to Be Rebuilt as a School,” New York Times, March 9, 1998, B5. David M. Herszenhorn, “In a Replica of a Famed Slave Ship, Lessons From the Past,” New York Times, March 26, 2000, 237. Students’ participation described in Melinda Tuhus, “New Haven Embraces the Amistad, Again,” New York Times, July 9, 2000, CT1.

485 launch, this emphasis would continue to be reflected in the museum’s exhibits, courses, publications, and programming.643

After the Amistad received its spars, rigging, sails, and other gear later that spring,

it embarked on its first voyage in July to New York City under the command of Captain

(and Mystic Seaport trustee) William Pinkney to take part in OpSail 2000. Thereafter,

from its homeport in New Haven, the schooner began visiting American seaports along

the East Coast, Great Lakes, and Gulf Coast to fulfill its mission of public education

about the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, and serve as a means by

which individuals and communities could address racism and intolerance. International

voyages in 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 additionally brought the vessel to ports in Canada,

the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Twelve years after its launch, the Amistad remains a

unique example of historical organizations collaborating to overcome more than a

century of myopic focus on Anglo Americans and recognize that the seacoast of New

England, and the rest of the nation, was and remains a diverse and conflicted place.644

The significance of the Amistad extends beyond addressing race and being collaborative public history. It brought knowledge of Mystic Seaport to the world.

While the Amistad is the official tall ship and goodwill ambassador of Connecticut, it is also advertising for Mystic Seaport’s investment in traditional wooden boatbuilding, maritime history, and diversity. And the example of Amistad as a roving ambassador has

643 Joe Wojtas, “Museum Tries to Make a Point: At Sea, Everyone is Equal,” New York Times, March 5, 2000, CT1. 644 Megan Fulweiler, “New Amistad Prepared For Maiden Voyage,” New York Times, April 23, 2000, TR3. Nina Siegal, “Amistad Replica Departs Early; Problems With Pier Are Cited,” New York Times, July 7, 2000, B2. Richard Weizel, “Students Make Floating History Lesson Something Personal,” New York Times, December 31, 2000, CT2. Amistad America, “Voyages,” http://amistadamerica.net/voyages/ (accessed December 22, 2012). For a biography of the Amistad’s first captain and the schooner’s travels under his command, see “Captain William ‘Bill’ Pinkney,” http://www.captainbillpinkney.com/Home_Page.html (accessed December 22, 2012).

486 since been applied to the museum’s most important artifact: the whaleship Charles W.

Morgan. After the extensive training of shipyard staff in building a large vessel from scratch in 1998-2000, and restoring the eastern-rig dragger Roann (a New England fishing vessel built in 1947) in 2004-2008, the next restoration project was the Morgan.

Hauled out of the water in November 2008, the $5 million restoration was expected to take three years. But a year into the restoration Mystic Seaport’s administration decided, after a four-month study, that by spending an additional $2 million on what was now a $6 million project they could make the vessel not simply sound for static floating display, but fit to sail to nearby New England ports: New London, Newport, New Bedford, and possibly as far as Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary just off the northern tip of

Cape Cod.645

Such a daring, difficult, and expensive plan evokes the vision of Mystic Seaport’s

founders: that the region’s past be used to rejuvenate the present. Mystic Seaport staff

(along with help from outside companies, organizations, state and federal governments,

and individuals) are stepping into the shoes of nineteenth-century New Englanders to

continue traditional maritime practices, and combine them with new technologies that in

themselves perpetuate the region’s status as a place of innovation. The Charles W.

Morgan is planned to begin its thirty-eighth voyage in 2014. Projects like these make the

645 Joe Wojtas, “Setting a Classic Afloat: A 70-Ton, 61-Foot Fishing Boat Is Being Restored in Mystic,” New York Times, January 30, 2005, P3. “Mystic Seaport to Re-Launch Roann,” Mystic Seaport press release, May 9, 2008, on Mystic Seaport web site, http://www.mysticseaport.org/files/site_files/Visit/2008_Press_Room//2008._Roann._online..pdf (accessed December 22, 2012). Joe Wojtas, “Whaling Ship Hauled Ashore for Restoration,” New York Times, November 16, 2008, CT5. “Mystic Seaport Announces Charles W. Morgan Restoration Plans,” Mystic Seaport press release, September 17, 2008, on Mystic Seaport web site, http://www.mysticseaport.org/files/site_files/Visit/2008_Press_Room//2008._CWM_Restoration._online..p df (accessed December 22, 2012). “Mystic Seaport Trustees Approve Plans to Sail Charles W. Morgan,” Mystic Seaport press release, September 28, 2009, on Mystic Seaport web site, http://www.mysticseaport.org/files/site_files/Visit/2009_Press_Room//2009._CWM_sails_BOT_vote._onli ne..pdf (accessed December 22, 2012).

487 case that the leading museums, maritime or otherwise, are not simply dusty repositories of treasured artifacts, but rather dynamic, inclusive, permeable, and collaborative institutions. And Mystic Seaport, in adapting its mission to match a diverse national audience, and sending out historic vessels to outside communities, makes itself an important port of call not only for those interested in maritime history, but also for those interested in other aspects of American history.

Aside from publicity, the museum using its collection puts it at the forefront of maritime public history practice while following those of Native American museums which allow community members to study and even use ceremonial objects. Curators moving artifacts down from storage shelves or allowing them to travel encourages collaboration with organizations aside from other museums. The seaport village in the

1940s and ‘50s was about preserving and telling a story of Yankee industry, faith, and family. In building the replica Amistad and restoring the historic Charles W. Morgan,

Mystic is diversifying this portrait but also ensuring that the nineteenth-century stories and artifacts at the heart of its collections remain visible and useful to a twenty-first century audience, both within the museum grounds and wherever museum education programs and the two ships visit.

From Snow’s Stories to Everyone’s Stories

As the Amistad entered its fifth season of operation in 2004, another significant

non-traditional public history project was beginning in Massachusetts. As described on

the project’s website, the Mass. Memories Road Show (MMRS) “is an event-based

public history project that digitizes family photos and memories shared by the people of

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Massachusetts.” Based in UMass Boston’s Department of Archives and Special

Collections at the Joseph P. Healey Library, the MMRS democratizes the process of sharing local history stories with a global audience through the university’s online digital archives (http://openarchives.umb.edu). The project can be seen as a successor to

Edward Rowe Snow’s twentieth-century efforts to document and share his favorite local

history stories through lectures, guided walks, books, articles, radio, and television.

However, in contrast to Snow researching and then selectively dispensing stories that

both fit his desired portrait of the region and allowed him to make a living, MMRS

allows any resident to contribute their story to a collective portrait of Massachusetts,

accessible for free by anyone with an Internet connection.646

An example of twenty-first century digital public history, the MMRS is an outgrowth of UMass Boston’s Massachusetts Studies Project, an educational resource (in the form of professional development training and online databases) for teachers and students that seeks to connect curriculum to the state’s history, culture, and environment.

As the name suggests, it was partly inspired by the popular PBS television series

Antiques Roadshow – which visits a community, and area residents bring in antiques for expert appraisal – as well as the Library of Congress’s American Memory historical collections (that document American history and creativity through digitized maps, prints, sheet music, still and moving images, sound recordings, and written documents).

The project’s leaders have also drawn from other online digital history projects including the Maine Memory Network, Coney Island History Project (New York), Charlestown

Digital Story Project (Maryland), Worthington Memory Project (Ohio), Orlando Memory

646 University of Massachusetts Boston, Open Archives, “Mass. Memories Road Show,” http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15774coll6 (accessed December 22, 2012).

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(Florida), and The Organic City (California). Addressing a concern of historical societies of the scant material in their collections documenting twentieth-century local history, the

MMRS’s three goals are to collect digital copies of photographs and the personal stories surrounding them, make these available in a free searchable online archive, and foster community building as members of a town, city, or neighborhood both help to organize and then participate in the event.647

Each road show is the result of six to twelve-months of collaboration between

UMass Boston staff and those who wish to bring the event to their community. A local planning team is formed from as diverse a cross section of the community as possible, from senior citizens and members of youth groups through businesses, schools, historical and cultural organizations, and local government. With help from UMass staff, they select a date and indoor public space to host the event, organize volunteers and translators

to help staff it, provide non-technical equipment, create and distribute promotional

materials, recruit contributors, and pay a $500-1000 community participation fee to

647 Massachusetts Studies Project, “Who We Are,” http://www.msp.umb.edu/whatis.html (accessed December 22, 2012). “‘Historical societies say there’s a lack of 20th-century local history material for research,’ [project manager of MMRS Heather] Cole said. While there are many collections of artifacts from earlier periods, historians are beginning to worry that there won’t be enough material for future historians to study everyday life in the 20th and 21st centuries.” Quoted in Robert Knox, “Pictures solicited for history: Duxbury project records ‘everyday’ past,” Boston Globe, October 21, 2010, GS1. MMRS goals described in University of Massachusetts Boston, The Mass. Memories Road Show Project Handbook: A Planning Guide for Local Communities (Boston, MA.: University of Massachusetts Boston, 2006), 5. Inspiration for MMRS listed in Joanne Riley and Heather Cole, “The Mass. Memories Road Show: A State-Wide Scanning Project,” in Digitization in the Real World: Lessons Learned from Small and Medium-Sized Digitization Projects, eds. Kwong Bor Ng and Jason Kucsma (New York, N.Y.: Metropolitan New York Library Council, 2010), 224-225. Websites for the public history projects that Riley and Cole credit are: Maine Historical Society, “Maine Memory Network,” http://www.mainememory.net (accessed December 22, 2012). Coney Island History Project, http://www.coneyislandhistory.org (accessed December 22, 2012). University of Maryland, Baltimore County, “Digital Stories from Charlestown: The Project,” http://stories.umbc.edu/ctds.php (accessed December 22, 2012). Worthington Libraries and the Worthington Historical Society, “Worthington Memory: An Online Scrapbook of Worthington History,” http://www.worthingtonmemory.org (accessed December 22, 2012). Orange County Library System, “Orlando Memory,” http://www.orlandomemory.info (accessed December 22, 2012). Sarah Mattern and Seamus Byrne, “The Organic City,” http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/ (accessed December 22, 2012).

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UMass Boston. Aside from helping the planning team, UMass Boston staff holds a training session for local volunteers, sets up the event, manages it, provides necessary paperwork, signage, technical equipment, and a videographer, archivists, and trained

“Roadies” (people who have volunteered at previous road shows) to assist local volunteers at the event. Sponsored by UMass Boston and Mass Humanities (a state programming and grant-making organization), road shows are organized around the experiences of current and former members of the host community, and occasionally along a theme, such as World War II, the Boston Harbor Islands, or Boston public housing.648

For those wishing to participate in a road show, they are asked to bring in up to

three photographs representing themselves, their family, and/or their community – though

people have also brought in three dimensional artifacts as varied as a clock, jewelry, and

an apron. Digital photographs can be brought in on a CD or USB flash drive. Usually

scheduled for about four hours on a Saturday, visitors enter the event space and move

through a series of stations: a Welcome Station, where contributors are registered; an

Information Station, where staff helps contributors fill out forms for each photo; a

Scanning Station where images are scanned and then projected onto a screen for

everyone in the room to see; a Video Station, where visitors are invited to be recorded by

a videographer as they tell a three to four minute story about their photos; a Keepsake

Photo Station, where participants are photographed holding their photos, with copies

going to the individual and the archives; a Preservation Station, where professional

archivists give advice on how to best care for family documents and photos; and a Local

648 University of Massachusetts Boston, The Mass. Memories Road Show Project Handbook: A Planning Guide for Local Communities (Boston, MA.: University of Massachusetts Boston, 2006), 4, 8-9.

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History Station, where a local historian or reference librarian can help identify photos and provide historical context. During and after the process, contributors are welcome to watch others share their images and stories.649

Following each road show, UMass Boston staff transfer the scanned images and

information on the paper records to the online database, tagging each photo with subject,

date, contributor, location, and any other comments. The staff provides partnering

institutions with digital copies of all images and videos taken during the road show, and

advice if the community wishes to enact other scanning events on their own. Participants

are also invited to join an online social network, the Massachusetts Studies Network

(http://mastudies.ing.com), which connects individuals working in history, culture, and

environmental fields in the state.650

Since the first Mass. Memories Road Show in Norwood on October 23, 2004, it

has visited nineteen additional towns and cities, and collected more than 4,000 photographs and stories. As a representative example, on September 17, 2011 the

Massachusetts Archives in Dorchester hosted a thematic Road Show on the Boston

Harbor Islands with volunteers from the environmental and educational non-profit organization Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands (FBHI). According to Patriot Ledger staff reporter and columnist Sue Scheible (whose newspaper was a media sponsor of this

MMRS, and where Edward Rowe Snow had worked as a columnist), the event drew 107 people, half of whom contributed 193 images and thirty-nine of the fifty-four were filmed

649 University of Massachusetts Boston, The Mass. Memories Road Show Project Handbook: A Planning Guide for Local Communities (Boston, MA.: University of Massachusetts Boston, 2006), 6-7. For three- dimensional artifacts brought in as well, see Joanne Riley and Heather Cole, “The Mass. Memories Road Show: A State-Wide Scanning Project,” in Digitization in the Real World: Lessons Learned from Small and Medium-Sized Digitization Projects, eds. Kwong Bor Ng and Jason Kucsma (New York, N.Y.: Metropolitan New York Library Council, 2010), 235. 650 University of Massachusetts Boston, The Mass. Memories Road Show Project Handbook: A Planning Guide for Local Communities (Boston, MA.: University of Massachusetts Boston, 2006), 21.

492 sharing the stories behind their images. Attendees included those who had grown up on the islands, current residents, visitors, and even a graduate student researching World

War II Italian POWs detained on Peddocks Island.

According to Joanne Riley, director of the Massachusetts Studies Project and creator of the MMRS, “It was everything we hoped for. People came and reflected what we know is the variety and richness of the Boston Harbor Islands, both their history, and the uses made of them.” Such contributors included seventy-nine year old Burleigh

“Bud” Roberts of Weymouth, who had attended the Farm and Trade School on

Thompson Island in the 1940s, and shared photos and memories of this experience at the road show. As Bud’s wife, Peggy, commented to Scheible, “It has just been a wonderful day for my husband. He loves talking about this and he had so much stored up inside to tell.” As a result of this initial meeting, Roberts later donated an album of photographs taken on the island between 1942 and 1949, forming a new special collection at UMass

Boston’s Joseph P. Healey Library.651

As Bud Roberts’s experience demonstrates, the Mass. Memories Road Show is significant in showing how digital public history can both bolster institutional knowledge

651 For a list of past and current road shows, see University of Massachusetts Boston, Open Archives, “Mass. Memories Road Show,” http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15774coll6 (accessed December 22, 2012). For attendance and contributor statistics, and Riley quote, see Sue Scheible, “Video: South Shore has strong showing at Harbor Islands Road Show,” Patriot Ledger, September 19, 2011, http://www.patriotledger.com/lifestyle/50_plus/x66188844/70-share-Boston-Harbor- Island-photos-at-Mass-Memories-Road-Show (accessed October 25, 2012). Staff reporter Scheible writes a weekly column every Tuesday in the Patriot Ledger called “The Good Age,” about life after age fifty. For Joanne Riley as the one who started the MMRS, see Sarah Murphy, “Photo Gallery: ‘The stories behind the photos’ in Falmouth,” Falmouth Bulletin, October 5, 2009, http://www.wickedlocal.com/falmouth/news/x1128394072/PHOTO-GALLERY-The-stories-behind-the- photos-in-Falmouth (accessed October 25, 2012). For Bud and Peggy Roberts attending road show, see Sue Scheible, “Good Age: Boston Harbor Islands have lifelong meaning,” Patriot Ledger, September 20, 2011, http://www.patriotledger.com/lifestyle/50_plus/x827643625/VIDEO-Harbor-Islands-show-is-full-of- surprises (accessed October 25, 2012). For Bud Roberts donating album to start new library collection, see Sue Scheible, “A Good Age: Weymouth student, 79, tells ‘real story’ of old Farm & Trade School,” Patriot Ledger, November 1, 2011, http://www.patriotledger.com/lifestyle/50_plus/x1138517837/A-GOOD-AGE- Former-student-fondly-recalls-Harbor-Islands-school (accessed October 25, 2012).

493 and engage the public by acknowledging that their personal histories are important.

Digital collections are an answer to the problem of local historical societies and libraries not having the resources to acquire, catalog, and preserve physical photographs and documents even if there are willing donors. Digital files are duplicable and affordable to store; through, there are still technical requirements for accessing these digitized documents and photographs. And as Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen argued in

Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998), Americans demonstrate widespread interest in the past in their daily lives and seek to personalize it.

But they also prefer history that is active and collaborative. Edward Rowe Snow demonstrated this through researching his own family history, and engaging the public through sharing artifacts, telling stories, and leading them on outdoor rambles.652

While engaging the public, Edward Rowe Snow and other chroniclers of local history still told a top-down history of their own selection; MMRS has the potential to tell a more inclusive portrait of a town, city, or neighborhood and the state as a whole. As the MMRS’s own handbook states, they are not trying to tell a comprehensive history of the state, but a self-portrait comprised of individuals whose stories are equally representative of a community. Rosenzweig and Thelen expressed concern that race particularly created boundaries in the production of history, as each group often did not make connections between their stories. MMRS’s emphasis on involving a community’s

652 “While the history wars have often focused on content – what should be taught in classes or presented in exhibits – our respondents were more interested in talking about the experience and process of engaging the past. They preferred to make their own histories. When they confronted historical accounts constructed by others, they sought to examine them critically and connect them to their own experiences or those of people close to them. At the same time, they pointed out, historical presentations that did not give them credit for their critical abilities – commercialized histories on television or textbook-driven high school classes – failed to engage or influence them. / Given this preference for history as an active and collaborative venture, many respondents found fault with a school-based history organized around the memorization of facts….” Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1998), 179.

494 disparate groups and organizations, and then preserving and presenting the resulting images and stories from all of these participants equally, creates raw data from which any researcher can begin to make connections that span time, race, class, and gender.653

As testament to both the legacy of Edward Rowe Snow and the story-telling

potential of crowd-sourced photos, MMRS’s online database contains three that reference

him. The first photograph shows Snow posing in 1981 in front of the Bay State Cruises

ticket office on Long Wharf with five members of the Boston Harbor Islands Volunteer

Corps (which incorporated in 1982 as the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands). The

contributor-provided description mentions Snow having led tours of George’s Island,

“narrated countless trips on the Bay State boats,” and was an honorary member of the

BHIVC. The second photograph, taken on Spectacle Island in 2010, shows four

volunteers of the FBHI, one of whom the description identifies as being “one of the prime

movers in starting the memorial to Edward Rowe Snow on George’s Island.” The third

photo, taken in 2011, shows six participants of the Island Ambassadors summer program

for high school students as they re-create a historical clam bake on the shore of

Thompson’s Island from “instructions…taken from an historical account in a book

written by Edward Rowe Snow.”

These three photographs, submitted by three different people, together tell a brief

but surprisingly accurate story of a man who for decades told stories about the Boston

Harbor Islands, was honored with a memorial due to his importance in the twentieth-

century history of the harbor; and, long after his death (in 1982), members of the

653 University of Massachusetts Boston, The Mass. Memories Road Show Project Handbook: A Planning Guide for Local Communities (Boston, MA.: University of Massachusetts Boston, 2006), 5. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1998), 187.

495 community are still consulting the stories he preserved and shared with the public. This biographical sketch is but one of the thousands of stories which users of the MMRS database, and participants at its road shows, can make from this growing collection of primary sources. Due to limited funding it will take the MMRS decades at its current rate of progress to visit all 351 communities in Massachusetts. But it is still a goal worth pursuing, and the MMRS is a model for how other states can practice inclusive public history in the digital age.654

The work of Edward Rowe Snow and the Mass. Memories Road Show are both

examples of populist history, but take different approaches. Snow’s stories usually fell

into one of five categories (ghosts, pirates, etc.) with proven commercial appeal. They

often involved him. He focused on local people and made heroes of them. And while he

often incorporated photographs and artifacts for greater realism, the veracity of the stories

themselves were often unverifiable. In the end, Snow was a master storyteller and not

simply conveying what he heard from others or read in libraries and archives. The

MMRS, meanwhile, uses no categories except community. It also focuses on local

people but they choose what stories to share. There is no polished final story to publish –

just pieces. While everyone can be a consumer of Snow’s stories, everyone in

654 “Edward Rowe Snow with Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands Volunteers,” photograph. 1981. “Mass. Memories Road Show” Collection, ID UASC-0140-0047-0606-0003. University Archives & Special Collections Department, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15774coll6/id/986 (accessed October 25, 2012). Incorporation date of the FBHI from Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands, “About Us,” http://www.fbhi.org/about-us.html (accessed October 25, 2012). “Two Long-Serving Volunteers – FBHI,” photograph. 2010. “Mass. Memories Road Show” Collection, ID UASC-0140-0047-0007-0002. University Archives & Special Collections Department, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15774coll6/id/1053 (accessed October 25, 2012). “Thompson Island Ambassadors' Summer Program Recreating an Historical Clam Bake,” photograph. August, 2011. “Mass. Memories Road Show” Collection, ID UASC-0140-0047-0621-0001. University Archives & Special Collections Department, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, http://openarchives.umb.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15774coll6/id/1080 (accessed October 25, 2012). For more on the Island Ambassadors, see National Park Service, “Island Ambassadors and Green Corps,” http://www.nps.gov/boha/parkmgmt/islandambassadors-greencorps.htm (accessed October 25, 2012).

496

Massachusetts has the potential to be a contributor of their own stories via the MMRS.

But unlike Snow, who depended upon ultimately selling his stories – his final product – the MMRS’s website with its detailed database isn’t the only product; the process of storytelling and community collaboration at each stop along the road are at least as important.

Seeing History in the Salt Marsh

In its second visit to Cape Cod, the Mass. Memories Road Show came to Truro on

August 15, 2009, the result of a partnership between the town’s public library, library friends, tercentennial committee, historical society, and council on aging. Among the

photographs that contributors shared that day were a set showing the construction of the

White Village Cottages between 1949 and 1953. In response to the tourism boom

following World War II, Casimiro and Maria Dias built the row of white rental cabins

along a strip of beach between Route 6A and Cape Cod Bay. The earliest image, from

1949, shows a bulldozer grading the lot prior to construction, with the operator looking

across the roadway toward a coastal marsh ringed by high sand dunes. The marsh’s name

was Pilgrim Lake, but in the nineteenth century it had been a navigable body of water

called East Harbor.655

When Maria Dias brought her photographs to the Mass. Memories Road Show,

Truro’s East Harbor was in the eighth year of a joint state, local, and federal tidal

655 The Diases’ story is based on descriptions for the eight photographs which Maria Dias brought to the road show. For the described image, see “Preparing the lot upon which the White Village Cottages were built,” photograph. 1949. “Mass. Memories Road Show” Collection, ID UASC-0140-0038-0026-0004. University Archives & Special Collections Department, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, http://www.massmemories.net/images_mmrs/width800/38.26.4_800.jpg (accessed October 25, 2012). The current online location of these Truro images is http://www.massmemories.net/Truro.php, though in 2013 all images on this site will be moved to the Open Archives website at UMass Boston.

497 restoration project -- the second of three currently underway in the park, and the largest of many such efforts along the New England coast. In 1961 when National Park Service staff first arrived on Cape Cod to begin constructing the national seashore, they inherited a coastal environment that had been modified first by Native Americans, and then more extensively by Anglo settlers and their descendants over the next three centuries. In a process replicated throughout the region, settlers cleared forests for farming and settlement. They dammed New England’s abundant rivers for hydropower, and diked, drained, and filled coastal marshes to create additional arable land and to hopefully reduce the numbers of biting insects such as mosquitoes and greenhead horse flies. This behavior was typical of most Americans’ negative attitudes toward marshes and swamps, and a need for additional buildable land around America’s burgeoning coastal cities.656

On the outer Cape in the area that would become Cape Cod National Seashore, between 1860 and 1930 construction of dikes and causeways restricted the tidal flow of forty-two percent of the coastal marshes – principally in East Harbor (1868; 719 of 719 acres), and the Pamet River (1869; 158 of 388 acres) in Truro; Wellfleet’s Herring River

(1909; 1000 of 1100 acres), and Provincetown’s Hatches Harbor (1930; 198 of 420 acres). The ecological consequences of these actions were not understood at the time.

But by the 1960s and ‘70s, as part of advances in science underpinning the American environmental movement, scientists began to understand how wetlands helped to reduce coastal flooding, provide critical habitat for aquatic wildlife, and filter pollutants from the water.

656 See David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003).

498

Shortly after Congress authorized the creation of CCNS back in August of 1961,

NPS staff had set up a temporary headquarters in Eastham and began a decades-long process of acquiring public and private properties that would eventually total more than

40,000 acres. On this mix of open and forested land the NPS worked through the 1960s to build the park’s infrastructure: roads, parking lots, hiking and bicycling trails, interpretive shelters, two visitor centers and amphitheaters, administrative headquarters, beach bathhouses, restrooms, and interpretive panels at natural and historic sites. The

Park Service innovatively choose to interpret these sites together, such as the site of

Marconi’s first wireless station in America offering a place to talk about technology and entrepreneurism as well as coastal erosion. Whether indoors or outdoors, visitors could learn from static exhibits or a team of highly-trained park rangers offering lectures, guided walks, and answers to visitors’ questions about the park or Cape Cod’s natural or human history. CCNS’s diverse recreational opportunities and accessibility made it immediately popular as a tourist destination, welcoming over two million visitors in its third full year of operation.

In addition to building infrastructure and documenting, preserving, and interpreting historical resources in the seashore’s early years, NPS personnel and outside researchers began to study the park’s fauna, flora, and environmental processes such as bluff erosion, dune migration, and sand deposition – and the impact of human activity.

CCNS added its first full-time scientist, John Portnoy, in 1979. In the 1980s he and other scientists and park staff began studying the effects of late-nineteenth and early twentieth- century dikes and causeways on the salt marsh ecosystems within the park.657

657 John Portnoy, Charles Roman, Stephen Smith, and Evan Gwilliam, “Estuarine habitat restoration at Cape Cod National Seashore: the Hatches Harbor prototype,” Park Science 22, no. 1 (fall 2003): 52

499

As CCNS ecologist Dr. John Portnoy explained in a 2002 issue of the seashore’s newspaper, these actions had profoundly altered the local ecosystem:

Invasive plants which were normally kept out of the tidal wetlands by saline and water-logged soils replaced the highly productive native salt marsh grasses within a few decades. Habitat for the fish, shellfish, and marsh birds of the estuary was eliminated. Peat drainage produced strong acids, poisoning soils and water and stressing the few fish that remained. Mosquito larvae, a major target of salt marsh diking, are extremely tolerant of poor water quality and proliferated in the diked marshes especially in the absence of predatory salt marsh fish. Salt marsh diking and drainage also led to the slow but inexorable subsidence (sinking) of the very wetlands that protected coastal homes and other structures from storm surges.658

While the NPS had already acquired and restored historic structures such as the

Penniman House and Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, it was a more complex question of

whether the NPS should also, in executing its mandate to conserve history and nature,

attempt to restore important specific ecosystems within the park. If so, explained Portnoy

and CCNS historian Bill Burke in the seashore’s official guide, any action would need to

weigh the potential benefits and costs to both natural organisms and the human neighbors

who worked, lived, and owned property adjacent to or within these areas.659

At Hatches Harbor outside Provincetown, the need in 1986 to repair the dike that bisected the marsh prompted a discussion over whether to restore tidal flow to the restricted upper portion. The dike had been built in 1930 in an attempt at mosquito control. As the marsh’s upper-portion dried out and turned into a freshwater-brackish

water wetland, such conditions allowed the entry of plants that were not native to salt

marshes – most notably the common reed (Phragmites australis). After a decade of

(marshes and acreage diked). Scientists learning about value of wetlands mentioned in Beth Daley, “Midge Swarms May Be Nature’s Revenge,” Boston Globe, July 27, 2003, A1. For Portnoy and other scientists beginning to study CCNS marshes, see Bridget Macdonald, “Science at the National Seashore: Past, Present and Future,” Seashore News, September 1 – October 31, 2011, 8. 658 John D. Portnoy, “‘Pilgrim Lake’ or ‘East Harbor’? Seashore, State and Truro Deliberate the Fate of a Long-Disturbed Estuary,” Activity Guide, no. 6 (2002), 10. 659 William Burke and Dr. John Portnoy, “Mending the Park: The Debate Over ‘Undoing History’ to Restore Critical Ecosystems,” Cape Cod Currents (1999), 1.

500 fundraising and planning involving ten local, state, and federal agencies, the National

Park Service replaced the dike’s original two-foot wide culvert in January 1999 with four large seven-foot by three-foot culverts with adjustable gates to gradually increase the saltwater flow over a period of years and allow the environment to slowly adapt. By doing so, scientists hoped to restore about sixty to ninety acres within the diked area. The large culverts were a compromise to removing the dike itself, as the latter was needed to protect Provincetown’s airport (built partly within the marsh in the 1940s) from hundred- year storms. In 1997 scientists had begun monitoring salinity, tide heights, vegetation, sedimentation, nekton density (the aggregate of organisms in a body of water that swim independently of currents), and mosquito numbers on both the natural and tide-restricted sides of the dike. After three years the newly-tidal area was making slow progress back to a healthy salt marsh. But the Hatches Harbor project still served as a prototype for future interagency collaboration on salt marsh restoration.660

The National Park Service had more immediate success with Pilgrim Lake. At the turn of the twenty-first century it has suffered more than a century of environmental decline. In 1868 workmen built a dike across the 1,000-foot inlet of navigable East

Harbor as part of constructing a railroad line to Provincetown. By the time of the first documented fish survey of the former harbor in 1911, the water had become nearly fresh.

But it was never a healthy lake. No longer connected to the tides of Cape Cod Bay, (a

700-foot-long, four-foot-wide culvert had clapper valves that only allowed excess water

660 John Portnoy, Charles Roman, Stephen Smith, and Evan Gwilliam, “Estuarine habitat restoration at Cape Cod National Seashore: the Hatches Harbor prototype,” Park Science 22, no. 1 (fall 2003): 52-57. William Burke and Dr. John Portnoy, “Mending the Park: The Debate Over ‘Undoing History’ to Restore Critical Ecosystems,” Cape Cod Currents (1999), 1 (decade of fundraising). Town of Provincetown, “Airport History,” http://www.provincetown-ma.gov/index.aspx?NID=273 (accessed November 5, 2012). Dan Hamilton, “Winging It: To Eliminate Mosquitoes in the Hatches Harbor Marsh System,” Cape Cod Voice 4, no. 25, April 21-May 4, 2005, 11 (dike protecting airport from 100-year storms). Rich Eldred, “Hatches Harbor restoration efforts offer puzzling results,” Cape Codder, April 5, 2002, 9.

501 to leave the lake), the water was stagnant and supported a limited number of freshwater species. Officials introduced freshwater fish to control the numbers of breeding insect, but periodic outbreaks of midges and mosquitoes over the coming decades still harassed the residents and vacationers in the community built on East Harbor’s former inlet at

Beach Point.661

A massive fish kill of some 40,000 alewives in September 2001 due to low

dissolved oxygen finally prompted action between town, state, and federal officials to devise a restoration plan for Pilgrim Lake. Though some locals worried about bacteria from the lake polluting the seashore if they were reconnected, and state officials initially balked at introducing salt water because it would kill the freshwater fish, all parties

eventually agreed to permanently open the culvert to tidal flow in November 2002. In

less than two years the changes were dramatic, summarized in the August 9, 2004 Boston

Globe article “In Truro, A Dying Lake Now Overflows with Life; Restoration Project a

Boon for Ecosystem.” Park Service scientists and officials excitedly reported increased

salinity, clearer water, and an “explosion in marine life” that included bivalves,

crustaceans, fish, and submerged plants (seagrass and eel grass). The first horseshoe

crabs arrived in what scientists were once again calling East Harbor in 2009. Though by

2011 freshwater vegetation still dominated East Harbor except near the limited tidal

exchange around the narrow culvert, state and federal government agencies are currently

studying the possibility of putting in a twenty-five to seventy-five foot-wide culvert in

661 Cape Cod National Seashore, “East Harbor Tidal Restoration – background,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/naturescience/east-harbor-tidal-restoration-background.htm (accessed November 5, 2012). For insect outbreaks and the introduction of fish to combat the problem, see Beth Daley, “Midge Swarms May Be Nature’s Revenge,” Boston Globe, July 27, 2003, A1; and Peter Schworm, “In Truro, A Dying Lake Now Overflows with Life; Restoration Project a Boon for Ecosystem,” Boston Globe, August 9, 2004, B1.

502 place of the current one to allow tidal flow into more distant parts of the marsh. It’s only a fraction of the exchange East Harbor once enjoyed, but it represents the necessary compromise between ecological restoration and human habitation.662

With even the limited tidal exchange in East Harbor significantly reviving its

marine life, the National Park Service moved toward its latest and most complex tidal

restoration project on Cape Cod in 2005 when the Cape Cod National Seashore joined

with the town of Wellfleet to form the Herring River Technical Committee (HRTC) to

determine the feasibility of restoring the Herring River estuary. As with Hatches Harbor

in 1930, the state had approved construction of a dike across the mouth of the Herring

River in 1908 to reduce mosquito populations. And as with East Harbor and Hatches

Harbor, reduced saltwater flow allowed freshwater and upland species to replace much of the upper portions of the salt marsh. Drainage caused by the diking and subsequent straightening and channeling of the river also allowed Wellfleet residents to build on its

former floodplain. In the 1970s the dike and its floodgates were repaired only after

intense debate among residents, scientists, and state and federal officials. In the

following three decades as scientists tracked the river’s still-declining health and

restoration potential, a coalition of governmental agencies and non-profit organizations

began discussing solutions.663

662 Date of fish kill from Cape Cod National Seashore, “East Harbor Tidal Restoration – background,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/naturescience/east-harbor-tidal-restoration-background.htm (accessed November 5, 2012). Number of alewives killed from Peter Schworm, “In Truro, A Dying Lake Now Overflows with Life; Restoration Project a Boon for Ecosystem,” Boston Globe, August 9, 2004, B1. For concerns of locals and state officials, see Beth Daley, “Midge Swarms May Be Nature’s Revenge,” Boston Globe, July 27, 2003, A1. For marine life and culvert replacement, see Brian Canova, “East Harbor undergoes renaissance,” Cape Codder, June 24, 2011, 12. 663 Cape Cod National Seashore, “Herring River Restoration Project,” http://parkplanning.nps.gov/projectHome.cfm?projectID=18573 (accessed November 5, 2012). Cape Cod National Seashore, “Herring River History – Important Events,”

503

The HRTC’s resulting Conceptual Restoration Plan in 2006 demonstrated that it was feasible to restore the river. As a result, the towns of Truro664 and Wellfleet and

CCNS appointed the multi-agency Herring River Restoration Committee in 2007 to work

toward developing a comprehensive restoration plan for what is the outer Cape’s largest

estuary. The eight current members of the committee represent the towns of Wellfleet

and Truro, CCNS, NOAA’s Restoration Center, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA’s

Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the state’s Division of Ecological

Restoration. At the end of 2012 the committee is currently seeking public comments on a

draft of an Environmental Impact Statement/Report, which assesses the results of taking

no action to restore the river, or the results of three possible courses of tidal restoration.

Once approved, the multi-agency coalition will then develop a detailed comprehensive

restoration plan before any physical alteration of the Herring River estuary and its main

dike can begin.665

After more than two decades of planning and more than a decade of physical

modification of the salt marshes within its boundaries, this latest chapter of the Cape Cod

National Seashore demonstrates the complex, interconnected relationship between

preserving history and nature in national parks. Tidal restoration is a complex undertaking incorporating local, state, and federal agencies, non-profit environmental and educational organizations, public education and feedback, millions of dollars in funding,

http://www.nps.gov/caco/naturescience/herring-river-history-important-events.htm (accessed November 5, 2012). 664 Some of the brooks and kettle ponds that eventually drain into the Herring River are located in the southern portion of Truro. 665 Friends of the Herring River, “Herring River Restoration Committee,” http://www.friendsofherringriver.org/Herring-River-Restoration-Committee.htm (accessed November 5, 2012). For the Herring River Conceptual Restoration Plan, see Cape Cod National Seashore, “Herring River Conceptual Restoration Plan,” http://www.nps.gov/caco/naturescience/herring-river-conceptual- restoration-plan.htm (accessed November 5, 2012).

504 and decades between project conception and some sort of resolution. The dike construction projects of a century ago also were the result of local and state collaboration, but occurred without a modern ecological understanding of the marshes which they altered. And as these projects aimed to improve the economies of outer Cape towns by creating more arable land for development and a mosquito-less environment attractive to tourists, they also represent a shift away from the traditional fishing, shellfishing, and small-scale farming that had dominated each town’s economy before the rise of the tourism industry in the twentieth century.

The projects currently taking place at Hatches Harbor, East Harbor, and Herring

River are also part of a larger movement to restore the health of aquatic ecosystems nationwide. Building on the understanding of ecology that spread from scientists to mainstream public acceptance in the 1960s and ‘70s, subsequent long-term scientific studies of ecosystems such as those in the salt marshes of Cape Cod gradually revealed how the environment changed over time, both due to natural processes and human influence. By the 1990s, this data met with growing public awareness and dissatisfaction with chronic local conditions in wetlands and marshes (e.g. invasive species and fish kills) to contribute to the passage of new environmental legislation (e.g. the Estuaries and

Clean Water Act of 2000), governmental programs (e.g. NOAA’s Restoration Center

(1991)), and non-profit organizations (e.g. Restore America’s Estuaries (1995)) to conserve and restore these environments and their dependent species. Dam removal projects beginning in the 1990s are some of the most dramatic examples of this new era of ecological restoration, but the work within the outer Cape’s salt marshes is no less

505 significant for the potential to improve environmental conditions for both native flora and fauna and neighboring human communities.666

Though tidal restoration projects within CCNS may involve the alteration or

removal of century-old earthen structures, this does not mean that the National Park

Service is privileging nature at the expense of history. Rather, as CCNS historian

William Burke and ecologist John Portnoy explained to readers in the seashore’s Cape

Cod Currents in 1999,

Any decision to attempt ecosystem restoration must be tempered by the need to preserve cultural features that are recognizably Cape Cod and have their own set of public values and benefits. For most visitors and local residents these cultural features would include antique Cape houses and traditional homesteads, cranberry bogs, open heathlands and even dune shacks, all of which occupy human- disturbed landscapes. Therefore, each park restoration program includes deliberate consideration of both natural systems and human changes to the land.667

At Hatches Harbor, East Harbor, and the Herring River, the National Park Service, in collaboration with members of the public, other governmental agencies, and a raft of scientific and historical research, has concluded that these structures have harmed people and native salt marsh plants and animals. And the dikes have created a degraded environment different from that experienced by generations of Cape Codders before the era of major dike construction began in the 1860s. To restore the environment is to also restore an historic nature. But the dikes cannot be wholly removed due to the need to

666 NOAA’s Restoration Center funded one ecological restoration project in New England in 1997, but forty-four in 2002, according to Beth Daley, “Midge Swarms May Be Nature’s Revenge,” Boston Globe, July 27, 2003, A1. The Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, was the first dam removal project in the United States authorized by the federal government against the wishes of the owners. For a sampling of articles, see Peter J. Howe, “US ends Maine dam's license as environment gets the nod,” Boston Globe, November 26, 1997, A1. Ellen Goodman, “A sea change on the Kennebec River,” Boston Globe, July 19, 1998, E7. Scott Allen, “Waters of Maine river run freer; dam breaching makes history,” Boston Globe, July 2, 1999, A1. Scott Allen, “Bringing Back Mother Nature: For the new environmentalism, taming nature is passe and preserving it is not enough. Enter the restorationists,” Boston Globe, October 17, 1999, Sunday magazine section, 1. 667 William Burke and Dr. John Portnoy, “Mending the Park: The Debate Over ‘Undoing History’ to Restore Critical Ecosystems,” Cape Cod Currents (1999), 1.

506 protect cultural features such as the airport, farmland, and houses. As a result, tidal restoration projects are a necessary compromise between the needs of current inhabitants both human and wild. Whether to restore an environment to how it possibly looked and functioned fifty, a hundred, or several hundred years ago – and what name to use for these places – is a debate that will continue at Cape Cod National Seashore between the

Park Service and its partners long into the future. Proponents of a national park on Cape

Cod back in the 1950s saw a simpler goal of preserving a place of national importance for public enjoyment. But subsequent decades of advancement in the fields of science and history, and the public’s shifting attitudes towards nature and the past, means that the

Park Service’s management practices within CCNS will continue to evolve.

* * *

Whether commemorating New England’s fishermen, addressing the neglected place of race and slavery in New England maritime history, documenting and sharing local stories and photographs online, or restoring the historic salt marsh ecosystem, these four examples update the portrait of coastal New England created by individuals, companies, museums, and state and federal agencies in the first six decades of the twentieth century. Old salts, whether self-promoting or sought out by professional cultural producers, have largely vanished into popular culture where they remain immortal on key chains, restaurant signs, and as stock characters in television commercials and films. The fishing industry’s shrinkage due to declining populations of marine animals and resultant governmental regulation of how, when, and where it can fish these stocks, is creating fewer new fishermen compared to several decades ago.

Some of these men will spend their career in the industry and age to become actual old

507 salts – but ones unlikely to visually resemble nautical Santa Clauses. But as long as fish, crustaceans, and shellfish remain offshore, New Englanders will harvest them. Their bravery will keep alive the cultural stereotype, as well as the need for fishing communities to memorialize those who perish in one of the nation’s deadliest occupations.

While New Bedford and Gloucester have historic bronze statues honoring their mariners, many of the New England ports from which fishermen work have no public monument to them. This is more likely in smaller communities with fewer resources, residents, and visitors, but even Boston lacks one. Communities without such monuments are not necessarily demonstrating a lack of gratitude for their fishermen; memorial services, festivals, indoor plaques, and memorial structures and parks are some of the ways that these communities still honor those who work and sometimes die at sea.

Of the existing outdoor memorials, this dissertation has not attempted to tabulate their number and types along the entire New England coastline. But, almost all date from the twentieth century onward, and range from a utilitarian granite and concrete platform topped with an old anchor in Rockland, Maine (and which serves as a stage during the city’s annual seafood festival), to artist-commissioned bronze sculptures such as a lobsterman measuring a lobster in Portland, Maine, and a large stylized hand pulling up a net containing representative local marine animals in Chatham, Massachusetts. Though few in numbers, monuments’ power as focal points for community memory and tourist attractions continues to drive memorial projects from Lubec, Maine, to Provincetown,

Massachusetts. Each of these communities will debate in the coming years what aspects of their fishermen to memorialize, whether their heroism, modernity, traditionalism, or

508 debt to family. No single characteristic will emerge, just as there are many ways to honor

New England’s fishing heritage.668

Edward Rowe Snow as a man is largely unknown in New England to those who grew up after his death in 1982. Though a Massachusetts native, I only learned about him in 1996 when I saw an episode of the television series Chronicle – which remains the only regionally-broadcast television documentary on Snow. The work of dedicated fans

– most notably maritime historian Jeremy D’Entremont – has resulted in new editions of

seven of his books since 2002.669 Whether these create new generations of Snow readers

remains to be seen. But the local stories that he documented and shared live on in their

respective communities, and projects such as UMass Boston’s Mass. Memories Road

Show and National Public Radio’s traveling StoryCorps are rediscovering in the twenty-

first century the value of first-person storytelling. As Snow demonstrated in an

unsurpassed way over his six-decade-long career, people care most about the history to

which they are connected. As a proud Yankee, he told tales involving mostly other Euro-

American men. On his travels throughout New England Snow did speak with a diverse group of men and women. But his resulting books reflected the broader exclusion of

most people of color from public presentations of New England’s past in the mid-

668 For the memorial wall and park planned for Lubec, Maine, see Lost Fishermen’s Memorial Association, “About Us,” http://www.lostfishermensmemorial.com/about.htm (accessed December 24, 2012). For the nascent effort in Provincetown to create a memorial, see Provincetown Fishermen’s Memorial, “About,” https://www.facebook.com/ProvincetownFishermensMemorial/info (accessed December 24, 2012). Taking inspiration from Gloucester, a group is trying to build a large bronze monument to all Maine fishermen in Portland, Maine, depicting two men in a fishing dory in rough seas. Maine Fishermen’s Monument Commission, “The Monument,” http://www.mainefishermensmonument.org/monument.html (accessed December 24, 2012). 669 Updated and edited by Jeremy D’Entremont, Snow’s reissued books are Lighthouses of New England (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2002); A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); The Islands of Boston Harbor (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2003); Pirates and Buccaneers of the Atlantic Coast (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2004); Storms and Shipwrecks of New England (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2005); Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2006); and Women of the Sea (Beverly, MA.: Commonwealth Editions, 2008).

509 twentieth century. Fortunately, in the wake of Snow’s popularization of coastal tales, new generations of public history producers and consumers create and desire more diverse and inclusive narratives of the region.

Mystic Seaport’s seaport village exists as a testament to both nineteenth-century entrepreneurism as Carl Cutler intended, and mid-twentieth-century efforts at historic preservation and historical re-creation. Mystic Seaport added the last historic building to its campus in 1970 – the Thomas Oyster Company building, which it restored from 1978 to 1984.670 Since then, this coastal New England portrait has remained largely fixed, while the museum to which it belongs has broadened its focus to the full sweep of

American maritime history. But the hope which Mystic Seaport’s founders placed in the

teaching potential of New England maritime history has not been misplaced, as the

waterfront just south of Shipyard Point has again become a place of shipbuilding and

vessel restoration with the Amistad, Roann, and Charles W. Morgan. While the village

remains a monument to the museum’s origins as a Yankee institution, it is fitting that

“The Museum of America and the Sea” is located along the “Old Coast.”

The Morgan is testament to how Mystic Seaport’s storytelling has changed since the 1940s. Mystic staff and supporters preserved it as an act of Yankee filiopiety, and then built the museum around it. During the Cold War it represented America’s proud maritime legacy of industry, bravery, and entrepreneurism. In the 1970s it increasingly served as a means to keep alive traditional wooden shipbuilding skills. And at the end of the twentieth century, it finally became a site to talk about race, ethnicity, class, and

670 William N. Peterson and Peter M. Coope, Historic Buildings at Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT.: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1985), 115. Though Mystic Seaport acquired the Rossie Velvet Mill adjacent to its campus in 1973, I’m not counting it as an exhibit building because the former mill functions as the museum’s Collections Research Center and is not an exhibit in itself.

510 gender. The museum has assembled a list of all known officers and crew, and is currently seeking to hear from their descendants as they continue the Morgan’s restoration – echoing themes of family and personal stories evident in New Bedford’s planned monument and the MMRS. What once was legend is now personal.671

Cape Cod National Seashore in the coming decades will need to look at its ecosystems beyond the limited salt marshes, as it debates whether or how to alter the forests which have grown in the past half century in areas that once offered visitors

sweeping views of the shore as Thoreau had known them. As on CCNS, all of New

England has experienced extensive reforestation since the mid-nineteenth century when

three quarters of the land was cleared for agriculture. With over four million visitors

each year, the seashore is arguably New England’s most popular tourist site.672 As a

result, it has a major role in defining the history and nature of coastal New England for visitors and locals. With this prominence comes the responsibility of the seashore’s federal stewards to work with the public to determine what kind of nature they would like to see.

A curious statistic is that the number of visitors to Cape Cod National Seashore

has remained relatively constant – fluctuating between four and five million people

annually since the 1970s. As Cape Cod’s population has doubled in that time, it suggests

a combination of the infrastructure supporting the park having reached its carrying

capacity (full beach parking lots and clogged roads) and other places and activities

increasingly drawing both locals and visitors. In fulfilling its mission of preservation and

671 Mystic Seaport, “My Ancestor Sailed on the Charles W. Morgan,” http://library.mysticseaport.org/exhibits/MorganOrder.cfm (accessed December 24, 2012). 672For CCNS annual visitor statistics, 1964 through 2011, see National Park Service, “Cape Cod NS,” https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park Specific Reports/Annual Park Visitation (All Years)?Park=CACO (accessed November 10, 2012).

511 recreation, the National Park Service will have to weigh the merits of whether and how to improve public access, and how and what stories they tell resonate with current and potential audiences. Creating healthier and more historically accurate coastal ecosystems does benefit people and nature, but the projects will wither if public sentiment shifts from our current focus on environmental concerns such as global warming, pollution, and sustainable natural resources. Back in 1967 the Park Service built the first bicycle paths in any national park on the Cape. In the future such improvements could include more infrastructure to accommodate our growing reliance on computers and smart phones, and more basic experiential activities such as overnight beach camping.

Overall there is now a greater level of participation in this regional identity- making by ordinary members of the public than in the 1960s. But beyond participation, the stories and venues for them will continue to evolve. Waterfront festivals have proven enormously popular in the past decade, whether about seafood (Maine Lobster Festival,

Rockland, ME. (since 1947)), folklife (Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, Portsmouth,

N.H. (since 2000)), ethnicity/religion (St. Peter’s Fiesta, Gloucester, MA. (since 1920s), heritage (Eastport Pirate Festival, Eastport, ME. (since 2006), or a combination (Working

Waterfront Festival, New Bedford, MA. (since 2003). Regardless of a festival’s name, each typically contains contests, demonstrations, music, food, and booths by sponsoring non-profits and businesses. More museums and cultural organizations will also incorporate alongshore. Cape Cod, for instance, despite being one of the most famous coastal regions in America did not have its own maritime museum until a group organized in 1998 and finally opened the Cape Cod Maritime Museum in 2004.673

673 Maine Lobster Festival, “Our History,” http://www.mainelobsterfestival.com/about/our-history/ (accessed December 24, 2012). Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, “A Brief History,”

512

Whether at museums, festivals, or in other public spaces, the stories being shared need to collectively tell a more inclusive history. In the chaste colonial revival era, museums often ignored topics of crime, punishment, sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity.

Public history practitioners have made strides in these categories, particularly since the

1990s with race, class, and ethnicity. But even some non-controversial topics have mostly escaped the view of public historians, such as Maine’s once massive sardine industry. Despite being one of the former centers of sardine canning, Eastport, Maine, has chosen a generic pirate festival to draw visitors and celebrate its coastal setting – echoing Snow’s focus on the perennially popular pirates. Apart from these specific topics, it’s also essential for museums, libraries, and archives to collect from the twentieth century, a period that witnessed the transition of many industrial waterfronts to places of recreation. In the process, they’ll need to be careful to not then deflate maritime history to only the recent past – to set aside the long view to deeply document what’s in living memory.

Moving from collecting to exhibiting, for public history sites to accommodate multi-lingual residents and visitors, more exhibits and programs should be in these languages – particularly if their stories are the subjects of such exhibits. As this dissertation has shown, in the 1980s public activism resulted in shared authority with historical organizations over preserving and interpreting the past. As New England has a rich legacy of international trade, many museums possess important collections of

http://www.newenglandfolknetwork.org/pmff/history.html (accessed December 24, 2012). St. Peter’s Fiesta, “St. Peter’s Fiesta History,” http://www.stpetersfiesta.org/history.html (accessed December 24, 2012). Eastport Pirate Festival, http://www.eastportpiratefestival.com (accessed December 24, 2012). Working Waterfront Festival, http://www.workingwaterfrontfestival.org (accessed December 24, 2012). Cape Cod Maritime Museum, “A Short But Impressive History: From the Maritime Museum’s Opening in 2004 to the Present,” http://www.capecodmaritimemuseum.org/history.html (accessed December 24, 2012).

513 artifacts from cultures around the world. These artifacts offer an opportunity for collaborating with institutions in other states and countries, and immigrant groups here, to tell about this long history of cultural exchange. The libraries, archives, festivals, and museums that become vital to their communities are ones which become centers for exchanging ideas – in ways that are both educational and entertaining.

All visitors, however, learn versions of the past long before they reach one of these places. With the rise of the Internet in the 1990s and especially following the profusion of digital cameras and cell phones in the 2000s, ordinary members of the public have extensively documented what they find notable about coastal New England. These collectively shape our understanding of place as we consult sites such as Yelp.com,

Wikipedia.com, RoadsideAmerica.com, Flickr.com, and other favorites to find the best museums, seafood shacks, beach cottages, and whatever else fits our imagined ideal of a place we’ve yet to visit – or fills in the incomplete portraits of places we’ve already been.

All of these sites thrive on individually submitted content and feedback. And so long before any visitor arrives at Mystic Seaport or Cape Cod National Seashore, they are already more informed via images, maps, reviews, and a raft of maritime popular culture than any coastal visitor from decades before. But a flood of individuals’ digital testimony – like the online database of the Mass. Memories Road Show – does not necessarily result in a coherent or accurate narrative of people and place. It’s up to public history producers to help clarify and broaden that vision.

The New England seashore remains a place to find deep-rooted history as well as a lively debate among residents and visitors over what words, things, and spaces should be preserved and promoted – and for whom. This composite portrait of coastal New

514

England will change in the coming decades, but for now, these stories define America’s

“Old Coast.”

515

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