Elevating Under-Represented Histories

Tony Andrews Farm

Founded by Tony Andrews, a Cape Verdean immigrant, the farm highlights several aspects of Falmouth history and the development of the Cape Verdean presence in town

The Tony Andrews Farm is a market gardening operation that today grows strawberries, turnips, peas, pumpkins, corn, sunflowers, and mums. The farm offers a pick-your-own program and offers a Halloween event and hayrides. The farm represents several key aspects of Falmouth history—the growth of market gardening and specifically of strawberry cultivation, the role of the cranberry industry in East Falmouth, and the development of a significant Cape Verdean presence in this section of the town. 

Tony Andrews (1905-2006), then Tony Andrade, came to the United States before 1926, as a crew member of a Cape Verdean vessel. The number of Portuguese people in Falmouth—both white and nonwhite, as the Cape Verde Islands were then part of Portugal—rose substantially between 1895, when it stood at 81 persons, to 658 twenty years later. Their presence may largely be attributed to the growth of both cranberry and strawberry cultivation in the town. Indeed, in 1895 those Cape towns that experienced the greatest increases in the value of agricultural property and products were those with the largest populations of Portuguese. In that year Falmouth stood fifth among the fifteen towns in the value of its farm products.  

By the turn of the century it had become clear to farmers in Falmouth and elsewhere on Cape Cod that the era of general farming had passed. Falmouth’s agricultural economy, based for most of the 1800s on the production of corn and grains, grew less viable as improved rail transportation brought basic foodstuffs from western farms into eastern markets at far lower prices. The arrival of the Old Colony Railroad in Falmouth in 1872, however, had a positive effect on Cape agriculture. Farmers turned to specialized agriculture focusing on single crops— cranberries, strawberries, turnip, and potatoes in Falmouth—that could thrive in the peculiar Cape soils. Rail brought such products to more and wider markets, thus making it possible to sustain their cultivation. And the presence of a growing number of tourists encouraged farmers to turn as well to market gardening, which served the needs of consumers close by. 

By 1922 Falmouth farmers produced 750,000 boxes of strawberries a year, and the town was the largest shipping point for that fruit in New England. Much of the strawberry and cranberry cultivation took place in Teaticket and East Falmouth. One local source described these areas in 1925:  

“These two villages are inhabited today almost entirely by the Portuguese, who through their diligence and industry have won for themselves the unstinted praise of those who know them. Where today there extend in ever-increasing dimensions whole fields given over to strawberries and turnips, there existed only a few years ago a waste of scrub pine and oak. Due also to the industry of the Portuguese, Falmouth has taken its place as one of the foremost strawberry-growing centers in the entire country, since the production in the last few years has approximated a yield of one and one-half million quarts of berries each year. The fields that extend to each side of the state road through the East Falmouth district are models for well-cultivated farms.”

Upon his arrival in the United States Tony Andrews came to Falmouth to live with his uncle Peter Andrews, who was born on the Cape Verdean island of Fogo in 1880; when he registered for the draft during World War II he signed his name Pedro de Andrade. According to a brief history of the farm his uncle sent Andrews to Nova Scotia to acquire papers, and upon his return to Falmouth the two began to buy land from Howard Swift of the Coonamessett cranberry bogs.  

With his brothers Frederick and Russell and with capital from a Boston investor, Swift developed the bogs from woodland in 1890 and 1891. By 1900 the brothers operated twenty-five acres of cranberry bogs and hired 128 harvesters, most of them from Cape Verde and the Azores. Tony Andrews worked for the Swifts on these bogs in his earliest years in Falmouth, and he was among those to whom the Swifts sold land. The Swifts held mortgages on the properties of many Portuguese immigrants. According to a 1990 oral history, Tony Andrews and his uncle spent five years clearing the acreage they bought from the Swifts and began to grow strawberries. They later grew turnips and kale, a popular vegetable among people of Portuguese descent, but strawberries were the most consistently profitable crop. Both he and his uncle Peter also worked at Fort Edwards Air Force Base during the Second World War. 

Information from MACRIS historic inventory form FAL.BD. Image credit  Tony Andrews Farm 

Cape Verdean Club of Falmouth

The Cape Verdean Club of Falmouth shares information about culture, language, and history. Formed in the early 1940s, it is said to be the oldest of its kind in the US

About the beginning of the 20th century, an influx of Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants settled in East Falmouth, consisting primarily of sailors and laborers. The Cape Verdean Club of Falmouth was formed about 1941 and is said to be the oldest of its kind in the U.S. and the only Cape Verdean Club in Falmouth (Cabo Verde Network 2016).

The Cape Verdean Club of Falmouth acquired the property at 126 Sandwich Road in 1945 and built the club building about 1955. The club educates the public about Cape Verdean culture, language and history. The building is used for social dances, dinners, concerts, and an annual festival; it is available to rent for social use.

Information and image credit from MACRIS historic inventory form FAL.2287

North Harwich Cranberry Bogs and Depot Storage Building

Cape Verdeans settled in East and North Harwich and Pleasant Lake, with strong ties to the cranberry industry in the late 19 ^th  and 20 ^th  centuries

The commercial cultivation of cranberries began in the Pleasant Lake section of Harwich around 1850 and quickly spread to other areas with appropriate growing conditions. Prior to 1870 pickers and bog workers on Cape Cod were drawn from the family or the community. The industry grew quickly and by the end of the nineteenth century, growers started building larger bogs and harvesting larger crops. Labor shortages followed, and growers were forced to import laborers from the cities. Conveniently, Massachusetts at the turn of the century was bloated with a hearty labor pool of itinerant laborers. By the late 1890's, two ethnic groups would become the foremost hirelings in cranberry work in southeast Massachusetts - the Finns and the Cape Verdeans.

The Cape Verdeans who worked in the Harwich bogs settled in North Harwich and in the area on Queen Anne Road at the crossing of the railroad tracks. The Cape Verdean population grew in these areas and many original settlers and descendants continue to live in North Harwich and the surrounding area. A cooperative "screening house" or processing plant was established at the North Harwich train depot. By 1910 the United Cape Cod Cranberry Company had established itself in a building on the northwest corner of Depot Street and the intersection of the Railroad tracks. The building is extant today as Depot Storage.

Information from North Harwich historic inventory form HRW.H. Image credit  Harwich Historical Society 

Mariners from Cape Verde and the Portuguese Islands

Cape Verdeans and Portuguese Islanders played an important role in Cape Cod’s whaling industry and other maritime pursuits in the late 19 ^th  century

Provincetown has a rich seafaring history of whaling and fishing. At one time, Provincetown’s harbor was home to over 150 fishing schooners and a large portion of its mariners were from the Portuguese islands – the Azores and Cape Verde.

Estimates range widely but one dissertation reckons that from 300 to 600 Azoreans served on American whaling vessels by the time of the Civil War – about 3 percent of total crew members in those years.  In Provincetown, only 5 percent of the town’s residents were from the Portuguese islands in 1860, but by 1900 they made up nearly 45 percent of the population. Similarly, in 1865 only 10% of Provincetown’s fishing captains were of Portuguese descent, but by 1885 they dominated the industry. 

Throughout New England, the Azores were known as ‘the Western Islands whaling grounds,’ and Yankee captains used this area not only for whaling but also for replenishing supplies and acquiring sailors. In the mid 1800s, Yankee whaling captains recruited Portuguese sailors with increasing frequency.  Both archipelagos offered men experienced in whaling or fishing, with long histories of shore whaling.

Given conditions in the Azores and Cape Verde archipelagos, it’s easy to see why their residents were eager to sign on to a whaling voyage and emigrate to Cape Cod. In addition to crop disease, earthquakes, drought, famine, and unpaid or poorly paid labor, Cape Verdeans had the further incentive of leaving the islands to escape slavery.  The desire to avoid conscription into the Portuguese military was a significant push to join a whaling crew.  

In 1939, Joseph Antone, born on the Cape Verdean island of Santo Antao in 1876, described how he came to join the crew of the Provincetown whaling schooner Agate when, at the age of fifteen, he was sent one day on an errand by his father:

At that time, travel was done on a mule or horseback and I knew my trip would take a whole day and night. As I was descending a mountain, my gaze fell upon the ocean. There was a square-rigged vessel passing by with all her sails set, bound south’ard. Somehow, as I gazed at that schooner, a feeling welled within me, and before I knew what was happening, I felt myself yearning for life at sea. Knowing that I was building castles in the air, I thought it best to continue my journey.... The following morning I dressed slowly, even though it was a cold November morning. As I gazed out of the window, I noticed a small sailing vessel had entered the harbor, and I made up my mind not to return to my father’s house. I engaged myself on this little vessel to cross the channel to St. Vincent, Cape Verde. 

Once he arrived at Saint Vicent’s Port Grandee, Antone signed on to the crew of the Agate, which had sailed from New Bedford in mid-October 1891 with a “skeleton crew” to recruit whalemen in Cape Verde. He and six others joined the crew there. 

Another whaleman who made his way to Provincetown was Henry Mandly (1848–1944) who came from the Azores as a fourteen-year-old cabin boy on the New Bedford whaling ship Bartholomew Gosnold, which left New Bedford in mid-September 1862 bound for the Indian Ocean. The vessel was at sea for more than three years, and by the mid-1870s Mandly was living in Provincetown, where he married in 1875 and assumed his first command, of the schooner Quickstep, in 1876.  He moved with his family to New Bedford between 1883 and 1889, but maintained his Provincetown connection, serving as captain of the Manta from Provincetown in 1906. 

His brother Antonio J. Mandly (1844–1929) shipped as a cabin boy on the packet Kate Williams when he was eleven years old.  His first command was the New Bedford schooner Franklin in 1883 and again in 1885; on this second voyage he claimed credit with a Provincetown schooner for bringing to port a lump of ambergris then valued at fourteen thousand dollars.  He was master of twenty-two whaling voyages after 1896—including seven on the schooner Ellen A. Swift from Provincetown between 1905 and 1911. 

Another Cape Verdean whaleman, John Theophilo Gonsalves, born on Brava in 1854, left his native place as a cabin boy on the New London whaling bark Roman, probably on its 1869 voyage. Gonsalves began an exceptionally long career as a whaling master when he sailed out of Provincetown as captain of the 1890-91 voyage of the schooner Rising Sun, which he again commanded in its 1892-93 voyage. As is the case with many Portuguese-born mariners, his years of greatest activity were after 1900.  Gonsalves was listed (as a master mariner) in city directories only between 1918 and 1924 and is scarcely if ever listed in federal censuses, no doubt because he was rarely on land.  He wrote on his 1924 passport application that he had lived in both Provincetown and New Bedford but had “been at sea most of the time, on all kinds of sailing ships, mostly whalers.” 

The Boston Globe noted in 1910 that the industry faced a “scarcity of experienced masters.... A few of the captains of an older day are still available, but those who must be looked to if a larger fleet is to be sent out to take advantage of the profitable market must be the Portuguese and Cape Verde mariners.”  

The Portuguese contributions to Provincetown are celebrated in the annual  Provincetown Portuguese Festival  and The Blessing of the Fleet.  In 1947, two Provincetown fishermen made visit to the neighboring port of Gloucester for their annual Blessing of the Fishing Fleet celebration.  The tradition was a way to honor and help protect New England men whose lives were dependent on the sea.  Inspired by their trip, the travelers brought the festival tradition to Provincetown. 

This custom of honoring the fishing community has thrived and expanded into a four-day Portuguese Festival & Blessing of the Fleet celebration held each year on the last weekend of June.  The festival celebrates the proud seafaring heritage and Portuguese influence in the area with three days of music, dancing, parades, great food, games, music and more, culminating in the Blessing of the Fleet. Decorated boats parade through town, and past the bishop who blesses the boats with hopes for a safe and prosperous year on the water.

Information from  “New Bedford Communities of Whaling: People of Wampanoag, African, and Portuguese Island Descent, 1825-1925”  (National Park Service Ethnography Program, 2021), Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik, and the  Provincetown Portuguese Festival 

Eugenia Fortes

Civil rights pioneer Eugenia Fortes fought for equality, founding the Cape Cod NAACP chapter and leaving a lasting legacy of justice

Civil rights activist Eugenia Fortes was born in Brava, in the Cape Verde Islands, on November 14, 1911. Her father, Antonio, traveled to America, and Fortes had to wait until she was nine years old before being able to join her father. After a journey of thirty-one days, Fortes arrived in Whaling City, New Bedford, Massachusetts.    In 1928, Fortes found work at the artificial pearl company in Hyannis, and two years later, became a housekeeper for a family in Hyannisport. She remained in that position for the next twenty-seven years, and in 1957, she became a cook at a local school until her retirement in 1968. An outspoken activist for the poor and racial equality, in 1945, Fortes and a friend visited East Beach in Hyannisport, which was then segregated. Asked by the police to leave, Fortes refused. The following year, a group attempted to buy the beach and privatize it, but Fortes stepped forward in a town council meeting and lambasted the idea, telling of the discrimination she faced.    Fortes founded the Cape Cod chapter of the NAACP in 1961, but by then, she was already well steeped in the Civil Rights Movement. One of the tenants who rented her cottage from her was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and in 1955, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. spent Thanksgiving and Christmas on Cape Cod. In 1961, when the Freedom Riders came through Hyannis, Ted Kennedy came to get a report from her to be delivered to the White House. As a fighter for the poor, Fortes sent food and clothing to impoverished counties in the Deep South for twenty-five years.    Fortes was a member of the Hyannis library board of directors for forty years, and was on the United States Civil Rights Commission for fourteen years. She also received numerous awards for her civil rights work. In 2004, the beach Fortes refused to leave in 1945, East Beach, was renamed Fortes Beach. Fortes passed away on Friday, May 19, 2006 at the age of 94.

Information from NOAA oral history interview and  The History Makers 

“They Also Faced the Sea”

Photographs of five hard-working Portuguese women whose families were the backbone of Provincetown’s fishing industries, displayed on Fishermen’s Wharf

This photo installation, first erected in 2001, celebrates the Portuguese roots found in Provincetown, and the hard-working women who embody it. The Portuguese matriarchs of Provincetown featured in “They Also Faced the Sea” are Eva Silva, Mary Jason, Bea Cabral, Frances Raymond, and Almeda Segura. The black and white photographs were taken by Norma Holt, a longtime member of Ptown’s artists community.   

Portuguese immigrants were drawn to Provincetown by its large harbor and the evolving fishing and maritime industries there.  As the whaling industry began to take off in the 1800’s, whaling ships often left their ports in Europe with skeleton crews, stopping in the Azores to pick up skilled Portuguese whalers for the journey.  Many of the Portuguese fishermen and whalers ended up settling in Provincetown, with their families and extended families joining them on the Outer Cape. The hard-working Portuguese fishermen soon dominated the whaling and fishing industries, with their families settling in the west end of Provincetown.  As the railroad made its way to the end of the Outer Cape in the late 1800s, bringing tourists to the area, Portuguese women began taking in boarders while their husbands were away at sea. Housing these visitors was a way of making a little extra money for the fishing family and it began a tradition of accommodating visitors.

Information from  “They Also Faced The Sea”: An Intriguing Provincetown Story 

First Encounter Beach

Site of the first encounter between the English Pilgrims and members of the Nauset Tribe in December 1620

First Encounter Beach’s unusual name comes from the fact that the beach was the site of the first encounter between the English Pilgrims and Native Americans, specifically members of the Nauset Tribe in December 1620.

Soon after the Mayflower arrived in Provincetown Harbor, the Pilgrims began to explore nearby places with a sometimes callous lack of courtesy and respect for the people who lived there. A crew of 16 men armed themselves according to Bradford under the conduct of Captain Myles Standish. In their travels, they encountered a half-dozen Natives with a dog, who retreated into the woods at the sight of the English militia. Continuing on, they discovered a Native village site where they found “heaps of sand newly paddled with their hands, which, they digging up, found in them divers fair Indian baskets filled with corn, and some in ears, fair and good, of divers colors, which seemed to them a very goodly sight.”

The Pilgrims pilfered the corn, which was a store of the Natives’ seed and food for the coming season. On the 28th of November, about 30 men assembled on their shallop and conducted a voyage into the mouth of the Pamet River, where they discovered two wetu recently vacated. They also discovered and took more corn that according to Bradford “is to be noted, a special providence of God, and a great mercy to this poor people, that here they got seed to plant them corn the next year, or else they might have starved.”  They showed no consideration for those Natives’ intentions for the same seed. Bradford justified this in the name of God: “The Lord is never wanting unto His in their greatest needs; let His holy name have all the praise.”

On the 16 ^th  of December, the Pilgrims set out again in the shallop to explore the bay of Cape Cod, making camp at the mouth of the Herring River in today’s Eastham. It was there they made their first encounter with Nauset warriors, engaging in early morning combat.  The Nauset men cried out a warning before letting arrows fly at the party of Englishmen, who were made vulnerable as they had just scattered, some to the shore to tend the shallop while the others remained at their camp. Taken by surprise, they took their weapons and answered the barrage of arrows with musket shot. Edward Winslow wrote that he was among four men at the camp, “which was first assaulted. They thought it best to defend it, lest the enemy should take it and our stuff.”

While we cannot know for certain what provoked the Nauset attack, the taking of their “stuff” by the Englishmen could not have left them feeling warmly toward those English interlopers. In his manuscript,  Of Plymouth Plantation , which was written some 40 years after the Mayflower arrived, Bradford claims the intent was always to return the corn, but that was hardly clear at the time, given the manner in which the English exploration party invaded the village of Nauset and wantonly took what they pleased.

Also, it had hardly been six years since an English ship had carried away seven men from their village, never to return. This was a devastating loss. It was followed by a deadly plague left behind by European adventurers killing tens of thousands of Wampanoag. What can be clear is that the Nauset people truly had little reason to welcome the Englishmen and made their dread and displeasure known. Eventually, the Nauset warriors cried out to end the encounter as it had started, and they retreated into the forest. Having the last word, the English party pursued them about a quarter-mile into the forest. “Then we shouted all together several times, and shot off a couple of muskets and so returned; this we did that they might see we were not afraid of them nor discouraged.”

Later that day, the shallop, buffeted down by an early winter storm, with broken rudder and then broken mast, was blown into Plymouth Harbor, landing at Clark’s Island. Thus this day that began in violence ended with refuge near their new home.

Information from  Eastham 400  and Race to Colonization by Linda Coombs

Old Indian Meetinghouse

Built in 1684, the Indian Meeting House in Mashpee reveals the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s struggle for sovereignty over their land

The first Indian Meeting House in Mashpee was built in 1684 and located approximately two miles northeast of the current site. Oral tradition among the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe states that the existing building was constructed in 1684 and moved to the current site, though the existing building may have been constructed in 1758. The building houses a single large meeting room, a small entry area and a small second floor gallery. The history of the meeting house and how its use was affected by laws regarding Indian guardianship reveals the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's struggles for sovereignty over their land.

In 1644, the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court passed legislation promoting the conversion of New England Indians. Missionary John Eliot enabled this by publishing the first Christian religious writings in the Indian language — "Catechism in the Indian Language" in 1653. Shortly after that time, in 1657, the Reverend Richard Bourne began preaching in Mashpee. Richard Bourne was a colonist and missionary who settled in Sandwich in 1637. Bourne was instrumental in protecting the land of the Mashpee Indians, then also known as the "South Sea Indians." The Indians, unfamiliar with the English practice of ownership or title transfer of land, were losing land to the colonists through questionable practices. Bourne interceded for the Indians in deflecting grants of their land to white settlers. In 1664, Bourne petitioned the general court at New Plymouth colony on behalf of the Mashpee Indians to allow them to form a governmental body to manage their own affairs. The Court gave authority to six Indians, with Bourne as overseer, and in 1665, Plymouth colony records show that Sachems Weepquish and Tookenchosin deeded over to the South Sea Indians the land in and around Mashpee, Santuit and Cotuit. The following year, Bourne witnessed a grant of the same land by Sachem Quatchatisset to the South Sea Indians. For his work, Bourne is credited with earning the support of the Cape Cod Indians during King Philip's War in the mid 17th century. While conflict rose between the colonists and the Indian King Philip (Metacomet) over colonial expansion, the Indians on Cape Cod pledged support to the Plymouth government in 1671.

Richard Bourne died in 1682, but his son Shearjashub Bourne continued his work. The first Mashpee meetinghouse was erected in 1684 on Bryant's Neck, southwest of Santuit Pond, one of only two Indian churches built in the Plymouth Colony, the other being in Sandwich. Following construction of the meetinghouse, on October 14, 1684, several Mashpee Indians deeded meadows and marsh at the Mashpee River to Rev. Bourne's son, Shearjashub, "in consideration of good Securities to us allredy given by Sheirjasheb Bourn of Sandwich... for the building of a meting house at mashpee aforesaid for our use and for the use of the rest of our neibours". Shearjashub was named Superintendent of the Indians. Continuing to pursue his father's goals, he procured confirmation of the territory granted to the tribe in 1665. In 1685, Plymouth Court confirmed and secured Mashpee title to the "South Sea Indians." The court also stated that no part of the land was to be granted or purchased by English people without consent of all the Indians.

After Richard Bourne's death, Simon Popomonet, an Indian preacher, served at the meetinghouse until his death in 1729. During Popomonet's tenure, beginning in 1693, the Indians were subjected to outside guardianship under overseers appointed by commissioners of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the same time, the New England Company, a missionary society to the American Indians which operated from 1649 to 1776, also monitored the Mashpees and distributed some funds.

Joseph Bourne, great grandson of Richard Bourne, served as preacher at the meetinghouse from 1729 to 1742. Apparently, the condition of the meetinghouse deteriorated during his tenure, for in 1737 the Mashpee Indians made an effort to raise funds for its repair. Peter Chenachussen, Josiah Peter, and Obadiah Attequin of the Mashpee Indians petitioned the colony to allow them to rent parcels of their land to raise money to repair the meetinghouse. The petition was rejected.

Solomon Briant, another Indian preacher, replaced Joseph Bourne from 1742 to 1758. During his tenure, in 1746, a law was passed pertaining to all Indian plantations in the Colony which provided three guardians for the Indians with the power to allot land and meadow to each Indian family, with the remainder of the land available to be let out to "suitable persons." The income was to support services for the plantation's inhabitants, and any prior agreements between the Indians and outsiders regarding sale of resources were voided. This new law, while perhaps intending to prevent unjust transfer of Indian lands, provided many opportunities for corruption and exploitation. It also confirmed that similar grievances were being filed in Indian lands outside of Mashpee.

In 1753, the Indians petitioned the legislature, complaining that their meetings were held at a tavern because there was no house near there that would admit the one hundred persons which met upon such occasions. In response, the Rev. Gideon Hawley, a missionary, was sent in 1754 by the Commissioners for Indian Affairs in Boston to observe the Indians. Rev. Hawley notes in his papers that he was empowered to fix a spot for a new meeting house for the Marshpee Indians and to prepare them for reception of an English minister. The new meeting house and its pastors were to be supported by a grant from Daniel Williams, an Englishmen and active member of the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Lands. Williams died in 1711 and left a provision in his will to "give the remainder of my estate to be paid yearly to the College at Cambridge [Harvard] or to such as are employed to manage the blessed work of converting the poor Indians there." The Hon. Thomas Hubbard, Indian Commissioner and Treasurer of Harvard College from 1750 to 1773 (and associated with Society for the Propagation of the Gospel), wrote to Deacon John Hinckley in Barnstable in October 1757 to advise him that he had bought ten thousand feet of seasoned boards, and 16 m of good shingles for the meeting house at Marshpee. A report from Rev. Gideon Hawley states that Hinckley, a carpenter, finished the meeting house in December 1758.

The Rev. Hawley served as pastor in Mashpee from 1758 until his death in 1807. Throughout Hawley's tenure, the Indians struggled over the treatment by their guardians. In return for Hawley's pastoral services, the Mashpee guardians determined that the Indians should convey 5 acres of land to Hawley and lease him 30 acres of cleared land. In 1763, the General Court ended the guardians and created a "coalition" government with limited self rule. The Mashpee Act of 1763 stated "...the Indian and mulatto inhabitants and proprietors of Mashpee be and hereby are impowered in the month of March, annually to meet in the public meeting house in said Mashpee, then and there to elect..." a moderator and five overseers (two to be English), a town clerk, a treasurer, two wardens, and one or more constables. Hawley was one of the people who negotiated these governing powers for the Indians. In 1780, this law was repealed by the Massachusetts Legislature. A new Act was created, reinstating white overseers as guardians of the Indians.

In 1795, Rev. Gideon Hawley addressed the Massachusetts senate, noting that white neighbors were still trying to acquire land within Mashpee's boundaries. He noted that the lands "... are more coveted by the-white people than formerly. The people multiply by means of the fisheries. Wood at many of the other towns on the Cape is very scarce. At Mashpee it is plenty. Great numbers have located themselves near this plantation and are eagerly anticipating opportunities to come into the possession of the Indian interest." The shortage of wood was so severe in the region that some Cape Cod towns established laws limiting the removal of wood or timber from common lands and from unfarmed lands.

With William Apes, the Mashpee Indians began an organized call for self government. Apes petitioned the governor with nearly 100 signatures from people in the District. The petition requested the right to rule themselves and to forbid future cutting or carrying of wood from the plantation. Rev. Fish in turn advised the governor that he should take action to prevent an Indian uprising in Mashpee. This resulted in Apes' book, also known as "The Pretended Riot Explained," a collection of writings in explanation of the poor treatment which led to the Indians' request to rule themselves. The book was effective in guiding public sentiment to support the Mashpee Indians and their plight. On March 31, 1834, the Indian District of Marshpee was established. The Act called for a commissioner to keep a list of Mashpee proprietors qualified to vote and to call a meeting to elect a clerk, three selectmen and one or more constables, all proprietors of Mashpee. This was followed by the Parish Enactment Law of March 21, 1840, which addressed the dissatisfaction with Rev. Phineas Fish and his control of the meeting house and parsonage. The Parish Enactment Law allowed the proprietors sole rights to their meeting house and the parsonage lot.

The governing form continued to change, however, and in 1870, an Act to Incorporate the Town of Mashpee was passed, abolishing the district and removing the restrictions which prevented non-Indians from acquiring land in Mashpee. The Act also included provisions to divide common land and sell it at auction. By 1878, approximately 2,500 acres, including 187 parcels, had been sold, and most had been purchased by people outside the Mashpee Indian community.

Information from National Register listing

Early Native American Whaling Sites

Samuel Crook, a Wampanoag whaleman, maintained shore whaling rights in Wellfleet in the mid 1700s

Mayflower Pilgrims wrote that they saw Wampanoags butchering a Pilot whale near what is now Wellfleet in early December 1620.  From this and other 17 ^th  century accounts, it is clear that whales were an integral part of the marine ecologies of the Wampanoag world.  For thousands of years, five species of plankton-eating, baleen whales (right whale, common finback, sei, minke, and humpback) plied the waters of the Gulf of Maine.  Long-finned pilot whale or blackfish – likely the species the Pilgrims called grampus – was more common in the late summer and early winter, when mass strandings took place on the Cape.

As Wampanoag people settled into their homelands, their understandings of whale species grew through careful observation.  In turn they maintained and enriched an archive of cetaceous wisdom generation after generation, including knowledge of whale habits and foodways, and of where and when whales might be seen alive or found dead.  The Wampanoag, especially on Cape Cod and the Islands, remembered and reused named locations or traditional places where drift whales commonly stranded or washed ashore after death.  After contact with colonial settlers, Indian access to such places and to the drift whales themselves – which were considered the gifts of Maushop – was carefully maintained for more than a century by deeds and regulations.

One example of preserving these rights is told through documents regarding Samuel Crook and a whaling rights controversy at Billingsgate (now part of Wellfleet but originally part of Eastham) in 1757-59.  More than fifteen petitions, depositions, letters, memorials, and reports from the case seemingly tell a story, common in the later seventeenth century, of the loss of traditional Wampanoag rights but they also reveal how the Wampanoag world of whaling was changing at that time.  

Samuel Crook was Wampanoag and part of the local community known as Punonkanits or Potanumaquit (a subgroup of the Nausets).  He was a skilled boatsteerer who captained a crew of 5 non-native colonists.  While lands at the southern tip of the harbor had been conveyed to Eastham proprietors by ancient sachems, they had reserved rights for the Wampanoag to whale on Billingsgate Point, maintaining longstanding indigenous traditions of resource use.  A committee found in January 1759 that the non-native who owned the land had agreed “that the petitioners and others of the Neighboring Indians and their heirs, shall forever hereafter have a good right to whale on Billingsgate Point and also to cut thatch for their whale houses.”

Along-shore whaling was undertaken by Wampanoags in vessels that were 20-foot-long cedar boarded boats or dugout canoes manned by crews of 6, primarily from November to March when right whale cows and calves frequented the waters of southeastern New England.  Their bases of operation were often small, impermanent sites with single story houses or wigwams and a wooden mast with rungs so one of the crew could climb higher to observe spouting whales.

To date, sites of historic along-shore whaling have been identified along the inner shore of Cape Cod from Barnstable to Truro, including sites at Sandy Neck in Barnstable, Black Earth in Dennis/Yarmouth, Billingsgate in Wellfleet, and Ryders Cliff-Hogback in Truro. Each along-shore whaling station was located near or within a Wampanoag homeland, so it is no surprise Indians played key roles as boatsteerers and harpooners and oarsmen.  Because this took place in winter months it also integrated well with Wampanoag traditions and kept native men close to their local communities.

As Wampanoag land base and traditional resource locations were being lost to growing colonial populations, shoreside whaling in the early 18 ^th  century seemed to be a pathway to economic survival.  Whaling also exposed non-natives to Wampanoag community and brought newcomers to Mashpee.  Whaling and global travel may have informed Wampanoag men as community activists in the 1790s – encouraging them to argue for their liberty and equality.

Information from  “New Bedford Communities of Whaling: People of Wampanoag, African, and Portuguese Island Descent, 1825-1925”  (National Park Service Ethnography Program, 2021). Image credit USGS

Mashpee Wampanoag Museum

The Avant House is one of the earliest surviving residential structures in Mashpee and today is home to the Mashpee Wampanoag Museum

The Avant House, built circa 1830, is home to the Mashpee Wampanoag Museum and is one of the earliest surviving residential structures in Mashpee, built during a time when there were still numerous wetus or wigwams recorded in the area. While the Half Cape style is a typical architectural form in the region and most Cape Cod towns have numerous residential structures from earlier periods, few structures in Mashpee pre-date this building. In 1762, Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, visited Mashpee and described 75 families living there in approximately 60 wigwams and 6 houses. Under the control or guardianship of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony through much of the 18th and 19th century, the Mashpee Indians could not employ persons to build residences on the reservation until 1725, so few structures were built there during the 18th century. With the creation of the Indian District of Mashpee in 1834, limited self-government was allowed, and homes of a more permanent style were constructed.  

The house is also significant for its association with the development of Mashpee, its various owners and inhabitants representing the variety of ethnic groups and trades that were common in the community as it evolved from a plantation to a district to a town. Finally, the Avant House is significant for its association with Timothy Pocknet, a locally prominent Native American who owned and lived at the property from 1863 until his death in 1888. 

The original owner of the house is believed to have been Captain John Phinney, born on Nantucket in August 1808. During Phinney's ownership, the property was described as one-half acre, with houselot and buildings. In the early 1800s, parcels of land were sometimes granted to persons who made improvements to the land, such as cultivation or construction of a building. The Act of 1819 recognized such private ownership of real estate acquired by the industry of the proprietor. Phinney may have acquired the property by making such an improvement - perhaps by building the house. Phinney was one of the twenty white families living and owning land in Mashpee as listed in the 1820 Mashpee census. John Phinney was married to Chloe H., born at Spring Hill near the Quaker Church on April 15, 1804. They had six children born in Mashpee between the years of 1836 and 1846.   

In 1863, the property was sold to Timothy Pocknet, a Wampanoag. Timothy Pocknet was born in 1804 in Mashpee, the son of Benjamin and Lois Pocknet. Lois was the daughter of Jeremiah and Reliance Squib. The Squibs came to Mashpee in the late 1700s, but the Pocknets (various spellings are found - Pognet, Pognett, etc.) are named in the earliest written records of Mashpee. Timothy Pocknet first married Ann Mingo Brown, a widow, and second another widow Leah Lewis Queppish. Leah was the daughter of James Lewis, recorded in Mashpee Vital Records as a runaway slave. Timothy and Leah accumulated many acres of land, as recorded in the "Records of Deeds, Allotments and Proprietories Held in Severalty by the Proprietors of Marshpee." Timothy Pocknet owned 60 acres near John's Pond in the western part of Mashpee, distributed to him as part of the Act of 1842, which divided a major portion of Mashpee's lands into private ownership by setting off 60 acres for each male and female proprietor of the age of 21. Other large parcels were acquired from his brother, Joshua Pocknet, totaling approximately 65 acres. In addition, Timothy Pocknet owned 7 acres of cleared and pasture land across the road from the house. Leah Pocknet also owned substantial lands from her first husband, John Queppish, who was involved in agriculture, and approximately 20 acres inherited from her mother and father.  

In the Records of District Meetings of Mashpee, Timothy Pocknet was appointed a "Pound Keeper" for most years between 1865 and 1876. The pound keeper was likely responsible for managing cattle and other animals, and for keeping them from running on common lands. Timothy Pocknet was also one of those who signed a letter to the Governor and Council in 1833 regarding an organized call for self-government. This call was led by William Apess, a Pequot preacher residing in Mashpee at the time, and ultimately resulted in the Act Creating the District of Mashpee in 1834. Timothy Pocknet died in 1888. When Leah Pocknet died in 1890, after 27 years of Pocknet ownership, the house was sold to Lysander B. Godfrey. In the deed, it is referred to as the "Timothy Pocknet Homestead."  

Lysander Godfrey was born in Mashpee in 1845, the son of Samuel Godfrey who was born in the West Indies, a mariner, and Hannah Mye. Hannah's ancestors probably trace back to Newport Mye, who is listed by Reverend Gideon Hawley as "a Negro" in 1776. Lysander Godfrey is called a mariner in the deed, but he also purchased many acres of bogs and sand for cranberry cultivation. By this time in Mashpee's history, several people were involved in the cranberry business. Lysander Godfrey married Mary C. of Glasgow, Scotland, in Scotland according to the 1900 census. Mary predeceased Lysander, who later married a neighbor, the widow Angeline Pompey Lewis. Upon Godfrey's death, the house and one-half acre of land were purchased in 1918 by one of their mortgage holders, William Makepeace, for $550. Makepeace was also involved in the cranberry business. The property was then passed to Fletcher Clark, on February 19, 1919, and to George E. Avant on March 12, 1919.  

George E. Avant was the son of John Avant and Susan Low Avant. George Avant married Mabel Pocknet, the daughter of Willard Pocknet and Anna Attaquin, on March 8, 1910. George Avant was a meat inspector and a farmer who, like several previous owners of the house, gathered a significant amount of land. In 1925, a few years after their purchase of the Pocknet Homestead, the Ayants also bought the adjacent Lovell farm, which contained a house and bam. After George Avant's death, the property remained the home of Mabel Avant. Mabel Avant served as Town Clerk and as Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Historian. She was a local authority on tribal matters, a strong political advocate, and a "Medicine Woman" of the Mashpee Wampanoags. Her home was considered the story telling center, and she is remembered for her storytelling of Indian legends and superstitions.  

In the 1960s, the development boom in Mashpee brought concern over the loss of Wampanoag history and prompted individuals to identify a site for a Mashpee Wampanoag Museum. Town meeting approved the purchase and restoration of the former Avant House for this purpose, and Barbara Peters, conservator of Carl A. Avant, sold the property for $4,400 to the inhabitants of the Town of Mashpee, on February 10,1970. The museum was established under the guidance of several Wampanoag descendants and the Mashpee Historical Commission in 1970. It opened in July 1973, with a dedication ceremony on July 15th. The museum was closed for several years in the late 1970s while the Town and the Wampanoags were embroiled in a land suit regarding the rightful ownership of the land in Mashpee. The museum was subsequently re-opened and since then, the town and the Wampanoag Tribal Council have negotiated a transfer of ownership of the building. The Town of Mashpee gave the museum to the Tribal Council in early 1998.

Information from National Register listing

South Mashpee School

The South Mashpee School is the remaining one of two schools constructed in 1831 to serve the Mashpee Wampanoags

The South Mashpee School was one of two schools constructed in 1831 to serve the Mashpee Indians, but it is the only one that survives. It was originally located in South Mashpee, at the southwest corner of Great Oak Road and Red Brook Road. There had been no school houses in Mashpee until 1831, when the State Legislature voted to spend $400 to build two schools. In 1835, the Selectmen and School Committee of Marshpee (Mashpee) District petitioned the State General Court, asking that the Mashpee Indians be granted a larger sum of money from the State's School Fund than would be granted proportionally. The Selectmen pointed out that they had been unable to develop schools or hire schoolmasters because the State, as guardians of the Mashpee Indians, had taken their property and held it for sixty years, not allowing them to make money from its sale or lease. The petition was supported by Benjamin F. Hallett, Counsel for the Marshpee Indians. 

The State determined that the Mashpee Indians should have one hundred dollars every year to help them educate their children. The State had previously allocated $50 per year to the Indians of Martha's Vineyard for public schools. This was one of many complaints about the treatment of the Indians by the missionary Rev. Fish, who served from 1811 to 1835 and was believed "to have been asleep over his flock" for not having garnered funds for the Mashpee Indians similar to the missionary on Martha's Vineyard. Rev. Fish also denied the Indians use of the meetinghouse and as a result, most meetings, including some between the Indians and their counsel, Benjamin F. Hallett, were held in the schoolhouses. Fish was accused of only preaching to the whites in the meetinghouse which was intended for the Indians. The Mashpee Indians, however, still paid approximately one third of the support of the minister, while the other two thirds came from the fund administered by Harvard. William Apes, a Pequot preacher from Connecticut who was adopted by the Mashpees in 1833, preached in the South Mashpee School and remained in Mashpee until 1836. 

The building was used as a school until it closed in 1901. After that, children from South Mashpee were sent to the North Mashpee School. At the time that it closed, there were nine students at the South Mashpee School, ranging in age from 5 to 14 years old. A school photo from that time shows students Ernest Haynes (age 8), Sylvester DeGrasse (age 8), Clinton Haynes (age 7 – he later became Chief of the Wampanoag Tribe for 17 years, as well as Great Sachem of all New England Tribes), Beatrice DeGrasse (age 7), Consuelo DeGrasse (age 11), John Newcomb (age 13), Blanche Pocknett (age 14 – she later attended the Swain Art School and graduated from Tuskeegee University with a nursing degree), and Cedric Newcomb (age 9). 

The South Mashpee School has been moved twice, once in 1975 to the grounds of the Old Indian Meetinghouse, and again in 2008 to the grassy park adjacent to the Mashpee Town Archives and a short walk from the Mashpee Wampanoag Museum.

Information from Meetinghouse National Register listing. Image credit Mashpee Historical Society

Herring Pond Indian Cemetery

The Herring Pond Indian Cemetery dates back more than 150 years. It contains 16 marked graves and a number of unmarked graves

This cemetery has been in use for over 150 years, from at least 1849 until the present, and contains 16 marked graves. There are a number of unmarked graves in the cemetery which may predate the earliest stone. The cemetery lies within the boundaries of the Herring River Lot of the former Herring Pond Reservation. When the common land of the reservation was divided, this lot was a part of a parcel of land given to Herring Pond Indian Salome Johnson, a widow who lived with her children, Anthony and George. The graves in the Indian Cemetery are all Herring Pond Indians, and include several members of the Johnson family, including Anthony. Other surnames represented include Thompson, Fowler, Conant, Chumack, Powell and Harding. A chief of the Herring Pond Tribe, Charles D. Harding, Sr., also known as Chief White Feather, was buried here in 1980.

When the Pilgrims of Plymouth and Sandwich arrived, Cedarville was the location of Comassucumkanet, the center of settlement for the Herring Pond Indians, members of the Wampanoag Tribe. Europeans affected the Herring Pond tribe almost immediately, using their land for farming, fishing and harvesting lumber. Missionaries built the first meetinghouse for the Indians in what is now Bourne in 1675. The third meetinghouse of the Herring Pond mission, built ca. 1850, still stands on Herring Pond Road. The Herring Pond Reservation, encompassing 3,000 acres in three parcels, was set up by 1700. The three parcels were known as the Great Lot, located north of Great Herring Pond; the Meetinghouse Lot, along the southeastern edge of the Pond; and the Herring River Lot, extending west from the Herring River. The land was held in common ownership by all of the residents until 1850, when it was divided into parcels and given to the individual members of the tribe.

By the time a census of the Indians living on the Herring Pond Reservation was conducted in 1861, there were only 67 members of the group were left. None of the residents were pure Herring Pond Indians, having intermarried over many generations with white and black settlers and members of the Mashpee tribe. Many current residents of Cedarville are descendants of the Herring Pond Indians. Names like Swift, Harding, Cahoon, Hirsch, Fletcher, and Nickerson, among others, indicate Native American ancestry.

Information from MACRIS historic inventory form BOU.800

Burying Hill, Sacrifice Rock and Manomet River

Burying Hill is the site of the first meeting house for Indians in Plymouth Colony, established by Richard Bourne and Thomas Tupper soon after the establishment of Sandwich in 1637

Burying Hill in Bournedale is the site of the First Meeting House (not extant) and burials for Native Americans who resided in the area. The hill is one of the highest points north of the Cape Cod Canal and is situated at the base of what used to be the old Manomet River Valley. At the eastern edge of the hill stands a low stone retaining wall, which marks the edges of the area. Stone steps lead up from this side to a stone monument with two tablets, partially obscured by rhododendron bushes.  

The top tablet reads: "THIS HISTORIC SITE PRESENTED TO THE TOWN OF BOURNE, MASS. IN MEMORY OF NATHAN BOURNE ELLIS HARTFORD, A DIRECT DESCENDENT OF RICHARD BOURNE, BY HIS SONS EZRA COLEMAN HARTFORD, NEWTON KEITH HARTFORD, NATHAN BOURNE ELLIS HARTFORD, FEBRUARY 12, 1951."   

Below this, the larger tablet reads: "BURYING HILL, SITE OF THE FIRST MEETING HOUSE FOR INDIANS, PLYMOUTH COLONY, ESTABLISHED BY RICHARD BOURNE AND THOMAS TUPPER SOON AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SANDWICH, 1637. BY THEIR INFLUENCE PEACE WAS PRESERVED THROUGHOUT THE CAPE DURING THE PERILOUS TIMES OF INDIAN WARFARE."

Prior to the arrival of English settlers in the early 1600s, the area around present-day Bournedale was inhabited by several Native American tribes, most notably the Comassakumkanet tribe. Megansett Way, an early Native American trail passes through the area. Initial relations between the Native Americans and the settlers were good and in 1621, when the Pilgrims' crop failed, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford purchased a large supply of corn from the Native Americans to support the colonists throughout the winter. However, relations between the Native Americans and the English deteriorated as increasing numbers of colonists began to arrive.

The town of Sandwich, which at the time included all of the present-day town of Bourne, was founded in 1637 by Thomas Tupper and a group of settlers from Lynn or Saugus. The first settlers bought much of their land from the Native Americans while several people, including Richard Bourne and Thomas Burgess (Burge), received grants from the colonial government for larger tracts of land. Sandwich was settled so quickly that the Native Americans were soon forced off of much of their land, and by 1693 a reservation, called the Herring Pond Reservation, was established to provide them with enough land for their survival.  When surveyed in 1706 and 1707 by a joint committee of Native Americans and English colonists, Herring Pond Reservation covered approximately 2400 acres of land (Jacobs 1996:2).

Relations between the Native Americans and colonists worsened after the establishment of the reservation, for though it was intended to be a secure plot of land, the colonial government sold parcels of it in order to generate extra income for the colony. This was a serious problem as the reservation was located near Herring Pond and Herring River and consequently was a popular place to settle. Bournedale, locally known as Herring River Village, was settled soon after Sandwich as the colonists discovered the Herring River and realized its potential as a source of food, fresh water and power. The major landowner in the Bournedale area was the Reverend Richard Bourne who had been given a large tract of land by Governor Bradford. Bourne established, with the help of Thomas Tupper, a meeting house on "Burying Hill " which was the first meeting house for the local Native Americans.

Information from MACRIS historic inventory form BOU.I

Solomon Attaquin, Mariner

Solomon Attaquin, a Mashpee native, became a whaler, coastal trader, hotelier, and community leader, serving his community for decades

Born 28 January 1810, Solomon Attaquin began whaling at the age of fourteen and worked on coastal traders until his late twenties. By then, he had amassed some capital and used it, along with funds supplied by partners, to build a vessel from timbers harvested on the reservation. The Native of Mashpee became a coastal trader, carrying supplies and passengers between the Cape and Nantucket. By 1840 Attaquin had retired from the sea, and he built and opened the Hotel Attaquin, where for the next fifty years he hosted visitors who came to fish Mashpee’s famous trout streams including Daniel Webster and Grover Cleveland. Coupled with his knowledge of Mashpee’s ecology, Attaquin’s “native fishing and hunting instincts guaranteed good sport to all whom he induced to try a day with rod or gun at Mashpee.” Throughout his long life, Solomon Attaquin also served his community as a selectman, postmaster, tax collector, fish warden, and parish moderator, and he often traveled to Boston to present petitions and meet with legislators, a lifetime of commitment that began with the Mashpee Revolt in 1833.

In 1861, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Indian Affairs compiled tables with information about Native Americans in communities across the state. In that year, it cited 6 Wampanoag communities on the Cape and Islands, where between 25% and 67% of adult men (16 years and older) made a living as mariners or in closely related industries.  The communities at least partially on Cape Cod were Mashpee, Yarmouth, and Herring Pond. Given their location near the shore and commercial ports, it is not surprising that large percentages of their adult men engaged in seafaring as an occupation. 

The Mashpee Indian community, also called Marshpee in the nineteenth century, exemplified this pattern.  In the 1861 census, then Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Milton Earle listed 51 men in Mashpee who made their living at sea – almost half of the adult male population, which was counted as 110 at the time. That included 41 native-born Mashpees, 8 so-called “foreigners” (men of color who had married into the community), and 2 Wampanoag from other places.

In Yarmouth’s Indian community, 19 of the 39 adult men made their living at sea (49%), and in the Herring Pond community, 9 of the 24 adult men made their living at sea (38%).  In all three of the Cape’s Native American communities in 1861, a substantial percentage of adult men made their living in maritime industries.

Information and image excerpted from  “New Bedford Communities of Whaling: People of Wampanoag, African, and Portuguese Island Descent, 1825-1925”  (National Park Service Ethnography Program, 2021)

Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum

The People of the First Light exhibit at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum shares the history and culture of the Wampanoag Tribe

The People of the First Light exhibit at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum (PMPM) shares the history and culture of the Wampanoag Tribe, the original inhabitants of Cape Cod, from the perspective of the Indigenous Wampanoag. This exhibit, curated by SmokeSygnals, a Native American creative agency, provides a unique perspective on the complex relationship between the Wampanoag people and the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Information from the  Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum 

Cape Cod Museum of Natural History

The Wampanoag exhibit at the Museum of Natural History uses artifacts and other objects to show how the people who inhabited this land lived

People of the Land: The Wampanoag exhibit at the Cape Museum of Natural History was produced in collaboration with Plimoth Plantation and modern day Wampanoag and shows how the people that inhabited this area lived, using artifacts which were recovered from archaeological excavations as well as objects which have been produced for the exhibit to show how materials, food, and vessels would have been made and used.

Information and image credit from  Cape Cod Museum of Natural History 

Black Slaves and Freemen

Research tying Black slaves and freemen to prominent maritime families in Brewster

There is clear evidence that slavery existed on Cape Cod in the 18 ^th  century. Researchers at the Brewster Historical Society have found wills, estate inventories, and diaries of prominent Brewster residents that identify slaves. These documents from the 1700s record the buying and selling of slaves, as well as slaves bequeathed to other family members.

In one instance, the 1716 will of Major John Freeman provides for the release of his slaves. His will states “freedom for my negroes” and leaves each of them four acres, a horse, and a cow. The will also states “I desire my children to put them in such way as they may not want.”

Slaves are further acknowledged in a town-wide “Enumeration of Slaves” from 1754, which is pictured above. The document records eight male and six female slaves in the town of Harwich, which until 1803 included the lands of today’s Brewster. A transcript of the document reads:

Harwich, December [first?] 1954

According to the Order of the General Court we the subscribers have taken an account of the number of the Negroes Slaves in the Town of Harwich and find them to be Viz: eight males and six females.

To the Honorable

Josiah Willard, Sec’try

Barnaby Freeman

Jabez Snow, Assessors of Harwich

The National Park Service ethnographic report “New Bedford Communities of Whaling” which focuses on African American and West Indian whalers from 1825-1925, notes that in 1820 6,740 free people of color lived in Massachusetts, with about 13% (or 876) living on Cape Cod, Islands, and Plymouth County.  Based on these numbers, it’s possible that at least several hundred free people of color were living on Cape Cod in the early 1800s.

Information and image from the  Brewster Historical Society ; additional information from  “New Bedford Communities of Whaling: People of Wampanoag, African, and Portuguese Island Descent, 1825-1925”   (National Park Service Ethnography Program, 2021)

Abolition Movement

A Black family involved in the abolitionist movement

Free black residents were engaged in Cape communities in the early 1800s.  Research by the Falmouth Historical Society uncovered information about Annes and Joseph Ray, a free black couple who settled on Falmouth’s Main Street in 1806 and raised their family there.  Annes Ray was one of 73 Falmouth women who signed an anti-slavery petition in 1840 (and one of two free black women to sign that petition).

Annes lived in Falmouth with a black family named Harrington. She was probably related to them by blood or adoption. She got married there on March 30, 1806, to Joseph Ray of Westerly, Rhode Island. Joseph’s father, Thomas, had been noted on the 1790 Census as an “Indian.” The Ray family history tells us that Thomas had African ancestry as well. Joseph and Annes settled in a house on Main Street, about where Ace Hardware (or Eastman’s) is today. Joseph worked as a mail carrier. He delivered the mail between Martha’s Vineyard and Falmouth. People long remembered how he would row his boat across the Sound. His postal career lasted 28 years.

Annes and Joseph had seven children. The oldest was Charles Bennett Ray, born in Falmouth on December 24, 1806. He would become a big name in the Underground Railroad. Charles attended the village school and learned shoemaking. But in his teens, he left Falmouth. He attended Wesleyan Seminary in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, studying theology, after which he studied at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He left that school after a few months due to protests from other students. In 1832, Charles moved to New York City, where he opened a shoe store and later became a minister. In 1850 he was listed in a New York directory as “Reverend.”

Charles became involved with the antislavery movement in 1833, the same year of the forming of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He took in escaped slaves daily and hid them in his house. It was a sanctuary for them, and also a meeting place where the subject of slavery would be discussed. Whenever plans for an escape were agreed upon, Charles could be relied on to see them through. By 1839 Charles was the sole editor of a newspaper, The Colored American, and continued until 1842 when he suspended its publication.

In 1839-40, the Falmouth women signed their anti-slavery petition. Did Annes Ray, influenced by her son, bring the petition to Falmouth? The petition was narrowly focused on abolishing slavery only in the District of Columbia. States’ rights prevailed at the time, and it made sense to start with an area where abolition might actually be approved. The petition was addressed to the U.S. Congress, which controlled the District of Columbia through exclusive jurisdiction and had the power to eliminate the slave trade within its borders. In 1839, women could not vote, and there was some doubt as to whether they had the right to petition Congress. The Falmouth women’s petition was noted and referred to the national archives, but Congress chose not to act on it. Still, it was an important outlet for the women. Although they did not have a vote, they had done what they could to make their opinion known.

Meanwhile, in 1834 Charles Ray had married Henrietta Green Regulus, who died two years later during childbirth. In 1840 he married again, this time to Charlotte Augusta Burroughs, who was born in Savannah, Georgia around 1825. They had seven children. Three daughters (Charlotte, Florence, and Henrietta) earned a living as schoolteachers. Charlotte was the first African American female attorney in the U.S., but turned to teaching when her law practice didn’t attract enough business. Her sister Florence also became an attorney, and Henrietta a poet.

Charles’s father, Joseph Ray, died in Falmouth in 1846 of consumption, aged 67. The widowed Annes went to Nantucket to live with her daughter Elizabeth, who had married a barber named Abraham Nahar. The Nahars took part in a movement to desegregate Nantucket schools. In the census of 1860, Annes H. Ray, aged 84, is listed as living on Nantucket in Elizabeth Nahar’s household.

Annes spent her final years in New Bedford with her granddaughter Caroline DelPrado. She was known as a voracious reader who read almost every book in her minister’s library. Annes passed away at age 90 in 1866. She lived to see the ratification of the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. Votes for women came fifty-four years later, in 1920. Her son Charles died in New York in 1886 and was honored as a hero of the Underground Railroad.

These are the words of the women’s petition:

To the House of Representatives of the United States

The undersigned women of Falmouth, deeply convinced of the sinfulness of Slavery, and keenly aggrieved by its existence in part of our country over which Congress possesses exclusive jurisdiction in all cases whatsoever, do most earnestly petition your honorable body, immediately to abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia, and to put an end to the slave trade in the United States. We also respectfully announce our intention to present the same petition, yearly, before your honorable body, that it may at least be a memorial of us, that in the holy cause of Human Freedom “we have done what we could.”

Information and images from Falmouth Historical Society  Museums on the Green 

Migration

The story of Black migration from the South and early Black neighborhoods lost to development

Some neighborhoods on Cape Cod were developed by Black families and other people of color who migrated north in the early 1900s. While several of those neighborhoods look very similar today, others were heavily impacted by development driven by changes in zoning.

From 1916 to 1970, roughly 6 million African Americans moved from small southern towns to the Northeast, Midwest and West. For many, the great Black migration was a move away from Jim Crow laws, lynchings, debt slavery and rural poverty to a somewhat better life in urban factories. For those who continued on to Cape Cod, it was a journey to smaller communities where neighborhoods were still largely segregated by race and job opportunities were primarily available in farming and the service industries.

In the early 1900s, the neighborhood around Yarmouth Road and Rosary Lane in Hyannis was primarily home to Black and Cape Verdean families, including the Best, Brito, and Pina families.  Aerial photographs show a cluster of small houses there from the 1930s through the 1950s, surrounded mostly by undeveloped land, with a path connecting to the train track west of Yarmouth Road. 

By the 1970s, other forms of development begin to surround the roughly two dozen small residences in the neighborhood – notably Barnstable Airport and large commercial developments.  In the 2009 aerial photo, the few remaining residences are hemmed in by large commercial developments, marking a complete change from the wooded residential neighborhood they had originally invested in. 

Some of the small residential buildings still remain today but they are crowded by large parking lots and commercial buildings, and many are in poor condition, reflecting how the area is no longer desirable for raising a family. 

Information from Jeanne Morrison and aerial images from the Cape Cod Commission’s  Chronology Viewer 

Eugenia Fortes

Civil rights pioneer Eugenia Fortes fought for equality, founding the Cape Cod NAACP chapter and leaving a lasting legacy of justice

Civil rights activist Eugenia Fortes was born in Brava, in the Cape Verde Islands, on November 14, 1911. Her father, Antonio, traveled to America, and Fortes had to wait until she was nine years old before being able to join her father. After a journey of thirty-one days, Fortes arrived in Whaling City, New Bedford, Massachusetts.    In 1928, Fortes found work at the artificial pearl company in Hyannis, and two years later, became a housekeeper for a family in Hyannisport. She remained in that position for the next twenty-seven years, and in 1957, she became a cook at a local school until her retirement in 1968. An outspoken activist for the poor and racial equality, in 1945, Fortes and a friend visited East Beach in Hyannisport, which was then segregated. Asked by the police to leave, Fortes refused. The following year, a group attempted to buy the beach and privatize it, but Fortes stepped forward in a town council meeting and lambasted the idea, telling of the discrimination she faced.    Fortes founded the Cape Cod chapter of the NAACP in 1961, but by then, she was already well steeped in the Civil Rights Movement. One of the tenants who rented her cottage from her was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and in 1955, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. spent Thanksgiving and Christmas on Cape Cod. In 1961, when the Freedom Riders came through Hyannis, Ted Kennedy came to get a report from her to be delivered to the White House. As a fighter for the poor, Fortes sent food and clothing to impoverished counties in the Deep South for twenty-five years.    Fortes was a member of the Hyannis library board of directors for forty years, and was on the United States Civil Rights Commission for fourteen years. She also received numerous awards for her civil rights work. In 2004, the beach Fortes refused to leave in 1945, East Beach, was renamed Fortes Beach.  Fortes passed away on Friday, May 19, 2006 at the age of 94.

Information from NOAA oral history interview and  The History Makers 

Reverse Freedom Rides

Story of how southern segregationists bused African Americans to Hyannis and other northern cities in the early 1960s

In May of 1962, a series of buses began to arrive in Hyannis carrying Black families and individuals from the South. The passengers were told that President Kennedy would greet them at his summer home in Hyannisport and provide them with jobs and housing. In actuality, the buses were part of a scheme by Southern segregationists to challenge Northern anti-segregation policies, and they used lies and false promises to dupe the riders into accepting tickets that would bring them to Northern cities like Hyannis.

The bus scheme was a response to the black and white activists known as Freedom Riders who mobilized in the summer of 1961 to integrate interstate buses and bus terminals that were still segregated in the south.  The Freedom Riders boarded Greyhound buses and rode across the south, where they were often greeted by mobs armed with bats and firebombs.  Southern segregationists were still furious over the school desegregation fights of the 1950s and saw the Freedom Riders as provocateurs, believing there was no way that Northern liberals actually cared about integrating interstate transit or advancing civil rights.  They were convinced it was a plan to embarrass the South and gain Black votes for the Democratic party.

Southern segregationists answered the Freedom Rides with the “Reverse Freedom Rides,” using buses to send African Americans to Northern cities. Amis Guthridge, a lawyer from Arkansas who helped spearhead the Reverse Freedom Rides, challenged President Kennedy and the Kennedy family: “We’re going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy... and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro.” Guthridge and others organized Citizens Councils that developed flyers and radio commercials to advertise and attract African Americans to accept the bus tickets.  They focused on single mothers with many children, and men who had gotten entangled in the criminal justice system.  While they envisioned sending thousands to the North, only a couple hundred were sent on buses to Hyannis, New York, New Hampshire, Indiana, Idaho, Minnesota, California, and elsewhere.

The first Reverse Freedom Rider to arrive in Hyannis was David Harris, a 43-year-old army veteran who came on May 12, 1962. News coverage provided notice that the bus was coming, and more than 100 people were waiting to welcome Harris, including Senate candidate Ted Kennedy and lots of reporters.

In the weeks and months to come, the buses kept arriving but without the crowd of spectators. Instead, a small crew of Hyannis residents, including civil rights activist Margaret Moseley and NAACP members Joseph and Doloras DaLuz, would listen for media reports that more Reverse Freedom Riders were on their way, then gather religious leaders, the local NAACP chapter, and a group of concerned residents to help. The group, organized by the Reverend Kenneth Warren, called themselves the Refugee Relief Committee.

Lela Mae Williams and her seven children arrived in May of 1962 and were brought to a bus stop near the Kennedy's Hyannisport home. Williams arrived in her best dress, prepared to meet the President, before learning that she had been lied to. She and other passengers were brought to the Normal School dormitory, now the School Administration Building next to Barnstable Town Hall, where they were met by the Refugee Relief Committee. Other buses were greeted at the Zion Union Church in Hyannis, now the Zion Union Heritage Museum.

Moseley was in charge of greeting the new arrivals, who typically arrived with only a shopping bag and perhaps one change of clothing.  The committee convinced the Normal School to open its dormitory to the new arrivals, with bedding provided by the local jail. When the summer semester started and students came back to the dormitory, the committee convinced the governor to lobby for nearby Otis Air Force Base to open its barracks.

Almost 100 Reverse Freedom Riders were bused to Hyannis in an effort to embarrass President Kennedy.  With the help of the Refugee Relief Committee, some of the riders eventually found jobs and housing and assimilated into Cape Cod society. Victoria Bell, who arrived in Hyannis with her 11 children, stayed on the Cape and worked as a nurse and an advocate for the poor.  Others moved on to Boston and other large cities or decided to return to their homes in the South.

Information from  NPR . Image credits Associated Press

The Roost Motel

A story of segregation in the north, the Green Book and the first hotel in Barnstable to welcome people of color

The Roost was the first hotel in the town of Barnstable that welcomed persons of color. According to Paul Noonan, a black rooster sign was placed on the highway, which people of color would recognize. (Local historian Jim Gould could not confirm this.) The Roost had 13 units. The oldest building, facing the entrance from Route 28, is the former office, "Manchester", a two-story hip-roofed building, with centered doorway under a broken pediment. "Jefferson", the former restaurant, to the southwest, is an elongated one-story gabled structure, with two shallow cross gables on the south side. "Lexington", lying between the two oldest buildings, is a one story, L-shaped gabled cottage, with the inner part of the "L" partly roofed over. Behind them, "Groton" and "Hamilton" are hip-roofed one story cottages, probably part of the original motel.

The motel was opened in 1947 by Jamaican born Henry Alexander Hylton of Brooklyn, NY (1905-1991). The main building (now "Manchester") was a two-story frame structure which may have been built earlier by Harry A. Amaral, who sold it to Hylton with surrounding land facing state Route 28. This building housed the office, a laundry in the basement, and rooms for rent. The restaurant, now "Jackson", was added quite early. Outlying cottages appeared by 1968. The cook from about 1953 onward was North Carolina native Anna "Annie" Louise (Davis) Kearney (1881-1971), the wife of the cook for the Marstons Mills elementary school, Oscar Kearney. Hilda (Gomes) DaLomba worked as a maid.

An annual guidebook, called the Green Book, was published for African-American travelers from 1936 to 1967 to help them find accommodations where they could vacation without hassle. The Green Book was founded and published by Victor Hugo Green, a New York City mailman, and it became “the bible of black travel” during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against African Americans and other non-whites was widespread. The guide was little known outside the African-American community. Shortly after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed the types of racial discrimination that made the Green Book necessary, publication ceased. 

While the Roost Motel was not listed in the Green Book, a few other properties on Cape Cod were listed. Zilphas Cottages on Oakneck Road in Hyannis is listed in the Green Book beginning in 1940; Kalmar Village in Truro is listed (under Provincetown) in the Green Book beginning in 1957; and Wagon Wheels in Buzzards Bay is listed in the Green Book beginning in 1961.

Learn more about the Green Book at the Smithsonian Museum's on-line exhibit:  The Negro Motorist Green Book  

View copies of the Green Book in the New York Public Library’s collection:  The Green Book  

Information also from MACRIS historic inventory form BAR.2127. Image credits Library of Congress and New York Public Library

Margaret Moseley

Margaret Moseley was a local community peace and civil rights activist who played an important role in fair housing and desegregation efforts on Cape Cod

Margaret Moseley (1901-1997) was born in Dedham, Massachusetts in 1901 and attended Dorchester High School as one of only two black students in her class. Even though she had lots of friends, she was never invited to gatherings outside school, which she realized was due to the fact that she was black and not accepted by her friends' families. During this time, Margaret's experiences of ostracization began to build a sense of difference and injustice within herself, acknowledging that the only reason for differential treatment was due to her complexion. This continued until she graduated from high school in 1919.

After Margaret graduated, she and the only other person of color at her school, Ruth, were determined to work together and decided to study nursing. They tried Massachusetts General and other hospitals in the area to be accepted for training, but not one hospital would take them.  The women were told that the hospitals "did not accept colored people for training." Ruth ended up going to Freedman's Hospital in Washington D.C. while Margaret kept attempting to find work in Boston.

At twenty-one, Margaret married and had a son, Frederick, a year later. She lived in the country for the first 14 years of marriage then moved back to greater Boston and found a small home to live in. As her family grew, they decided to move to a two-family house. After only a few months of living there the landlady sold the property and the new owner immediately evicted them, saying that he "didn’t have to give a reason, that there was nothing in the law that compelled him to give a reason for eviction" and later admitted that the decision was based on race. Margaret went to see a lawyer to fight the decision but was told that "according to the laws of Massachusetts at that time, a landlord could evict a tenant for any reason he wished. The owner of property—usually a man—could do anything he pleased with the property. The tenant had no protection in the law. Race or religion or any other difference was not protected."

Due to her experiences of racial discrimination in finding work and housing, Margaret decided to become more involved in local activism. She was a founding member of a consumers’ cooperative in Boston in the 1940s, served on the board of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Freedom House in Roxbury. She was president of the Community Church in Boston, and Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  In 1958 when Martin Luther King visited Boston, she presented him with a check to support his civil rights work.  She kept expanding and expanding her efforts.

After moving to Cape Cod in 1961 with her husband Emerson, she immediately joined a group that was talking about organizing a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She helped form the local chapter of the NAACP as well as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) which is committed to peace and racial and social justice for all. One of the main reasons that Margaret helped form a local chapter was due to the prevalence of discrimination and segregation in housing. That led her to be a founding member of the Community Action Committee of Cape Cod, and the Fair Housing Committee on Cape Cod.

In May of 1962, Southern segregationists hatched a scheme to challenge Northern anti-segregation policies, coaxing poor black families from the South to get on buses to the North where they were told they would be provided with jobs and housing.  When these Reverse Freedom Riders arrived by bus in Hyannis, they were greeted by a quickly organized group of volunteers.  Margaret met each bus when it arrived and played a vital role organizing housing, food, and new jobs for those displaced from the South.  Margaret made sure the people had food and took them to the grocery store. Friends and colleagues admired her ability to address a need in the community with courage and wisdom.

Margaret was also active in the Unitarian Church of Barnstable, becoming a founding member of the Social Responsibility Committee, and the first woman to chair the Prudential Committee, the governing body of the church. She was also on the boards of the Cape Cod Section, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Elder Services of Cape Cod and the Islands. Margaret Moseley died in 1997 at the age of 96.

Information from  Harvard Square Library  and  Wickedlocal.com . Image credits Harvard Square Library

Zion Union Heritage Museum

A museum with a mission to celebrate demographic diversity

The Zion Union Heritage Museum celebrates the African-American and Cape Verdean population as well as other ethnic and demographic diversity in Barnstable and on Cape Cod.  Its exhibits collect, preserve, and share the unique history and contributions of People of Color to the region's past.

Information from the  Zion Union Heritage Museum 

Provincetown's Art Colony

See LGBTQ history and the arts scene on the Outer Cape revealed in the incredible art collection displayed in Town Hall

Town Hall displays an impressive collection of paintings by master artists who lived and taught in Provincetown. The diversity and breadth of their painting styles reflects the even greater diversity of literary, theater, and visual artists who came to Provincetown in the early 1900s, reinforcing a community of openness and acceptance.

Provincetown’s fishing and whaling success had already been declining as maritime industries moved to larger and deeper ports, and the Portland Gale of 1898 knocked them down severely, destroying many of the town’s wharves and sinking over a dozen vessels in the harbor.  As the town turned to tourism as a means of recovery, the arrival of artists helped define the town’s evolution to a diverse and open community. 

Provincetown’s development as an art colony began in 1899 when Charles Webster Hawthorne, a famous American portraitist, arrived and opened the Cape Cod School of Art, the first outdoor summer school for figure painting.  Hawthorne saw Provincetown as a perfect place for artists and creatives, with beautiful light and expansive vistas.  He encouraged a large group of artists, writers, and actors from New York, many of whom were gay, to come to Provincetown.  

Hawthorne also brought students.  By 1915 as many as 90 students were enrolled to learn his style of impressionist painting ‘en plein air’.  He brought his classes daily to Provincetown’s beaches, wharves, and side streets where he would give demonstrations, and students would paint Provincetown characters and scenes in natural light.  

Only a year after Hawthorne’s arrival, E. Ambrose Webster, a ground-breaking American Modernist painter who had studied the later work of Monet, opened his own Summer School of Drawing and Painting in Provincetown.  He settled permanently in Provincetown, purchasing a home on Bradford Street, painting and teaching until his death in 1935.

The community attracted both traditional artists like Hawthorne, and more avant-garde artists like Webster, Ross Moffett, and the Provincetown Printers, who developed a unique method of woodcut printing that lent itself to cubist styles developed by Agnew Weinrich and Blanche Lazzell.

As the town marketed itself to visitors, it highlighted the breadth of its artist community and its status as an unusual and accepting outpost.  The Provincetown Players, known for their avant-guard and experimental theater that helped launch the career of Eugene O’Neill, and the tramp poet Harry Kemp were among those promoted for their connection to Provincetown.  Others were ‘confirmed bachelors’ like American Modernist painter/essayist Marsden Hartley and American painter Charles Demuth, and ‘maiden ladies’ like American woodblock print artist Ethel Mars and American painter/printmaker Maud Hunt Squire.  The diversity of Provincetown’s art colony was broad, and it helped fuel an economy to replace the waning maritime industries.

In 1914, artists and business community members founded the Provincetown Art Association, holding their first annual exhibition in the summer of 1915.  The next summer, a Boston Globe headline declared “Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown,” noting over 300 artists and students in town and six schools of art. 

New art schools continued to be founded.  Hawthorne’s student, Henry Hensche, opened the Cape School of Art in 1930, where he continued teaching and plein air demonstrations for more than 55 years.  In 1935, abstract modernist painter Hans Hoffmann opened his Summer School of Art, where he taught and painted for 30 years while also maintaining his New York school in the winter.

Provincetown’s large artist population included a critical mass of gay, lesbian, and genderfluid individuals, but also provided an accepting community of openminded people to support them.  Karen Krahulik’s book “Provincetown” points out that while artists typically came for the summer months, those who joined the town’s year-round queer community represented a diverse crowd, including white upper-class Yankees, working class Portuguese natives, residents of mixed Yankee and Portuguese heritage, and a variety of wash-ashores of neither Yankee nor Portuguese background.  As natives and permanent residents who were clearly entrenched in the community, they were generally accepted by the broader community, opening the door for others seeking inclusivity and open-mindedness.

Information from Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik and Provincetown: The Art Colony by Nyla Ahrens. Image credit  Art Institute Chicago 

AIDS Support Groups

Story of the AIDS epidemic and LGBTQ health issues in Provincetown

Story coming soon.

Commercial Street Parades and Demonstrations

LGBTQ civil rights efforts on Cape Cod

Story coming soon.

Image credit Library of Congress

Openly Gay Male Guesthouses

The story of how an old captain’s house was made into one of Provincetown’s first openly and exclusively gay male guesthouses

The building at 5 Winslow Street was constructed in 1840 as the residence of whaling Captain Ezra Cook.  Approximately one hundred years later, in 1946, it was purchased by Peter Hand and converted into one of Provincetown’s first openly and exclusively gay male guesthouses. 

Peter Hand and his partner Edward Daminger first came to Provincetown for a vacation in 1932.  They were living in Quebec and, unlike many bachelors and artists who visited Provincetown in the early 20 ^th  century, did not realize the town was gay friendly before they visited.  After discovering Provincetown, Hand returned there with his partner each year until 1946, when he bought the old captain’s house.  Hand’s decision to convert the building to a gay men only guest house made it unique.  The location was perfect, providing close proximity to the bustling center of town, but relative quiet on a side street below the Pilgrim Monument.

Karen Krahulik’s book “Provincetown” notes that Hand and his partner were some of the town’s many visitors who rented from Portuguese families and enjoyed their stay enough to return repeatedly.  When fishermen’s wives rented rooms to him and other men, Hand recalled, “We became one of the family.  They cried when we came, and they cried when we left.  And we did too.”

Information from Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik

Ace of Spades

First lesbian bar in Provincetown and allegedly the longest continuously running lesbian bar in the United States

The Ace of Spades Club was the first bar in Provincetown that catered to lesbians.  Run by John and Frances Atkins, it was located to the rear of 193 Commercial Street, facing the beachfront, and provided a place where women could express their desires for other women freely.  For many years, it was the only bar in Provincetown that catered specifically to women, and it was allegedly the longest continuously running lesbian bar in the United States.

Postwar regulations that criminalized dancing between same-sex couples played a role in defining the interior layout, which did not have a dance floor but had small tables tucked close together with stools made from small barrels. The ceiling and walls were hung with a variety of objects that could have been scavenged from the beach, creating a beachcomber theme in part the work of Jeanne “Frenchie” Chanel.  The Ace of Spades differed from Provincetown’s gay men’s clubs in that it didn’t have drag performers or regularly scheduled sing-alongs.   

Karen Krahulik’s book “Provincetown” notes that gay women fondly recalled the Ace of Spades as a small and dark but cozy bar with wooden barrels standing in as stools, a stench of stale liquor, and a sign-in book by the door.  The club welcomed all residents during the 1950s and 1960s, though local officials required all nightclubs in Provincetown to be members only, a rule that may have been occasionally enforced.  Lesbian and gay patrons were sometimes reluctant to become club members because it would add their name to a list that could be potentially harmful in the hands of anti-gay selectmen.  Restricting access to members and their guests, however, allowed bar owners to throw out any unruly or unwanted patrons.  Interestingly, the club rules also stipulated that no women could tend bar and that all women had to be seated before they could buy a drink.

“Building Provincetown,” David Dunlap’s community-sourced website of Provincetown history, notes that in 1961 the proprietors of the Ace of Spades refused to admit the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, who was with Gore Vidal when she couldn’t produce ID.  The bar had several iterations.  Pamela Genevrino and Linda Gerard reopened the place as the Pied Piper in 1971. Susan Webster took over in 1986, added the “After Tea T-Dance” to attract men, and changed the name in 2000 to PiedBar, which drew a very mixed clientele.

Information from Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort by Karen Christel Krahulik and Building Provincetown by David W. Dunlap (book and  on-line resource ). Image credit Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum

Annes Ray

Annes Ray of Falmouth was a free black woman who petitioned against slavery. Her son became a hero of the Underground Railroad

Annes Ray was a free black woman who lived in Falmouth in the early 1800s. Research by the Falmouth Historical Society has uncovered information about her family and her involvement in anti-slavery efforts. 

Annes lived with a black family named Harrington and was probably related to them by blood or adoption. On March 30, 1806, she married Joseph Ray of Westerly, Rhode Island. Joseph’s father, Thomas, had been noted on the 1790 Census as an “Indian.” The Ray family history tells us that Thomas had African ancestry as well. Joseph and Annes settled in a house on Main Street in Falmouth, about where Ace Hardware (or Eastman’s) is today.

Annes and Joseph had seven children. The oldest was Charles Bennett Ray, born in Falmouth on December 24, 1806. He would become a big name in the Underground Railroad. Charles attended the village school and learned shoemaking but left Falmouth in his teens. He attended Wesleyan Seminary in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, studying theology, after which he studied at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He left that school after a few months due to protests from other students. In 1832, Charles moved to New York City, where he opened a shoe store and later became a minister. In 1850 he was listed in a New York directory as “Reverend.”

Charles became involved with the antislavery movement in 1833, the same year of the forming of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He took in escaped slaves daily and hid them in his house. It was a sanctuary for them, and also a meeting place where the subject of slavery would be discussed. Whenever plans for an escape were agreed upon, Charles could be relied on to see them through. By 1839 Charles was the sole editor of a newspaper, The Colored American, and continued until 1842 when he suspended its publication.

In 1840, Annes Ray and 72 other Falmouth women signed an anti-slavery petition and sent it to the United States House of Representatives. Annes Ray was one of two free black women to sign that petition. The petition was narrowly focused on abolishing slavery only in the District of Columbia. States’ rights prevailed at the time, and it made sense to start with an area where abolition might actually be approved. The petition was addressed to the U.S. Congress, which controlled the District of Columbia through exclusive jurisdiction and had the power to eliminate the slave trade within its borders.

Did Annes Ray, influenced by her son, bring the petition to Falmouth? In 1839, women could not vote, and there was some doubt as to whether they had the right to petition Congress. The Falmouth women’s petition was noted and referred to the national archives, but Congress chose not to act on it. Although women did not have a vote at the time, they had done what they could to make their opinion known.

Several years later, in 1846, Annes’ husband, Joseph Ray, died in Falmouth of consumption, aged 67. The widowed Annes went to Nantucket to live with her daughter Elizabeth, who had married a barber named Abraham Nahar. The Nahars took part in a movement to desegregate Nantucket schools. In the census of 1860, Annes H. Ray, aged 84, is listed as living on Nantucket in Elizabeth Nahar’s household.

Annes spent her final years in New Bedford with her granddaughter Caroline DelPrado. She was known as a voracious reader who read almost every book in her minister’s library. Annes passed away at age 90 in 1866. She lived to see the ratification of the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. Votes for women came fifty-four years later, in 1920. Her son Charles died in New York in 1886 and was honored as a hero of the Underground Railroad.

These are the words of the women’s petition:

To the House of Representatives of the United States

The undersigned women of Falmouth, deeply convinced of the sinfulness of Slavery, and keenly aggrieved by its existence in part of our country over which Congress possesses exclusive jurisdiction in all cases whatsoever, do most earnestly petition your honorable body, immediately to abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia, and to put an end to the slave trade in the United States. We also respectfully announce our intention to present the same petition, yearly, before your honorable body, that it may at least be a memorial of us, that in the holy cause of Human Freedom “we have done what we could.”

Information from Falmouth Historical Society  Museums on the Green . Image credit Falmouth Historical Society

Anna Howard Shaw

Anna Howard Shaw, pastor of the East Dennis church from 1879 to 1885, later became an important women’s suffragist

Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) of Osterville was a reverend, physician, and suffragist.  Shaw was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, and came to Lawrence, MA in 1851 with her family.  She was a pioneer in claiming her call to the ministry at a time when most churches would not ordain women. Shaw was the second woman to graduate from Boston University School of Theology in 1878 (she was the only woman in her class), and one of the first women to be ordained in any branch of Methodism. When she started preaching at Dennis Union Church in 1879, she was not yet ordained, but in the spring of 1880 she was ordained and given a gift of a communion set so that she could serve two congregations in East Dennis and Dennis. Shaw served in Dennis until 1885, and her communion set can be seen at Dennis Union Church where it is on long term loan from the Dennis Historical Society.

While serving Wesleyan Methodist Church in East Dennis, Shaw earned a medical degree from Boston University. In 1885, at age thirty-nine, she broadened her activity from pastoral and healing ministries to also become the “master orator” for social justice concerns, organizing and lecturing throughout the world for the causes of temperance, woman’s suffrage, and peace. She developed a close friendship with Susan B. Anthony and traveled widely to lecture for the cause of woman’s suffrage. Shaw was the first ordained woman to preach in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, and London, and the first woman to deliver a sermon in the State Church of Sweden. In 1904, Shaw succeeded Miss Anthony in the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she served as president for over a decade. She was on the campaign trail almost constantly with company that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglas, and US presidents.

In 1892, Shaw purchased property on Sea View Avenue in Osterville (Wianno) and built a summer cottage she named “The Haven” that served as a meeting place for the early women’s activists. 

Shaw’s reflections on her Wianno house and the Cape were noted at the end of her life: “I am happy in having known and loved the Cape as it was, and in having gathered there a store of delightful memories. In later strenuous years, it rested me merely to think of the place.” For over thirty years Lucy E. Anthony, niece of Susan B. Anthony, was her friend, secretary and companion, living with her at Moylan, PA and before she died Anna Shaw gave the Wianno house to Lucy.

Information from MACRIS inventory form BRN.2034,  The Cape's Own Female Trailblazers: Part 2 ,  Our History | Dennis Union Church , and  About Anna Howard Shaw . Image credit Boston University Anna Howard Shaw Center

Eugenia Fortes

Civil rights pioneer Eugenia Fortes fought for equality, founding the Cape Cod NAACP chapter and leaving a lasting legacy of justice

Civil rights activist Eugenia Fortes was born in Brava, in the Cape Verde Islands, on November 14, 1911. Her father, Antonio, traveled to America, and Fortes had to wait until she was nine years old before being able to join her father. After a journey of thirty-one days, Fortes arrived in Whaling City, New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1928, Fortes found work at the artificial pearl company in Hyannis, and two years later, became a housekeeper for a family in Hyannisport. She remained in that position for the next twenty-seven years, and in 1957, she became a cook at a local school until her retirement in 1968. An outspoken activist for the poor and racial equality, in 1945, Fortes and a friend visited East Beach in Hyannisport, which was then segregated. Asked by the police to leave, Fortes refused. The following year, a group attempted to buy the beach and privatize it, but Fortes stepped forward in a town council meeting and lambasted the idea, telling of the discrimination she faced. Fortes founded the Cape Cod chapter of the NAACP in 1961, but by then, she was already well steeped in the Civil Rights Movement. One of the tenants who rented her cottage from her was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and in 1955, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. spent Thanksgiving and Christmas on Cape Cod. In 1961, when the Freedom Riders came through Hyannis, Ted Kennedy came to get a report from her to be delivered to the White House. As a fighter for the poor, Fortes sent food and clothing to impoverished counties in the Deep South for twenty-five years. Fortes was a member of the Hyannis library board of directors for forty years, and was on the United States Civil Rights Commission for fourteen years. She also received numerous awards for her civil rights work. In 2004, the beach Fortes refused to leave in 1945, East Beach, was renamed Fortes Beach. Fortes passed away on Friday, May 19, 2006 at the age of 94.

Information from NOAA oral history interview and  The History Makers 

Rachel Carson

A statue honoring influential environmentalist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is located in Woods Hole, where she studied

Rachel Louise Carson (1907 - 1964) was a renowned environmentalist, biologist, and writer. She is most known for her groundbreaking and influential 1962 book Silent Spring, which expounded on the dangers of man-made pesticides, especially DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), to the environment, and is credited with launching the environmental movement. Before Silent Spring catapulted Carson to the environmental world stage, she was already an admired biologist known for her trilogy of books about the sea which were inspired by her time in Woods Hole.

Born in 1907 near the Allegheny River in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Rachel spent a large portion of her childhood outdoors, wandering the fields and woods of her farm with her mother. In 1925 she left for the Pennsylvania College for Women (PCW) intent on majoring in English and becoming a writer. Rachel published multiple stories in the student newspaper, including "The Master of the Ship's Light," her first college sea story. Rachel continued writing pieces for the newspaper but increasingly spent time in the biology lab. Introductory biology was taught by Miss Mary Scott Skinker, a woman who changed Rachel's life. Rachel was quite captivated by Skinker, which led to her following Skinker to Woods Hole for a summer research project, the first time she had ever lived near the sea (Lepore, 2018). Rachel spent six weeks at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) as a beginning investigator in zoology, after having earned her bachelor’s degree at Pennsylvania College for Women.

Woods Hole was then dominated by the rambling Victorian headquarters of the U.S. Fish Commission. The Fish Commission laboratory next to it had windows across its entire length looking seaward. Spencer Baird, the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the first U.S. Fish Commissioner, had chosen Woods Hole as the site of the commission’s field laboratory in 1871. It had a pleasant climate, beautiful vistas, and access to a variety of marine habitats. These same virtues, in addition to its easy accessibility by train from Boston, led a larger group of scientists and teachers to join with Baird to locate the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole in 1888 as an educational center for marine biological study.

Rachel was immediately enchanted with Woods Hole and the scientific lifestyle. In a letter to a friend, she writes enthusiastically that “The town is much more attractive than I’d expected to find it... One can’t walk very far in any direction without running into water.” The genesis of all Carson’s sea books, but particularly The Sea Around Us, belongs to this first summer at Woods Hole. It was then that she “began storing away facts about the sea”—facts discovered in scientific literature cataloged in the MBL library, by dissection at the research table, in dialogue with others, and experienced with each walk along the Cape Cod shore. Rachel was what was called a “beginning investigator,” using her time to further define her research on the cranial nerves of reptiles that she had begun at PCW so that she would be further along on a project suitable for her master’s thesis at Johns Hopkins.

Rachel did not spend all of her time at Woods Hole in the laboratory. During her time there she met scientists from the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and was invited on a deep-sea collecting trip. During that trip and through association with the Fisheries’ scientists, Rachel identified the bureau as a place with rich research potential. During the voyage, Carson wrote early parts of her second book, The Sea Around Us, a study of the history, ecology and uses of the ocean. The Sea Around Us (1951) spent months on nonfiction bestseller lists, won the National Book Award, and made Carlson world famous.

Rachel’s six weeks at the MBL were both a rewarding intellectual experience and an intensely spiritual time. Comfortable working in a coeducational atmosphere where her research work was validated by her peers, she reaffirmed her decision for science. Although she had come to Woods Hole full of self-doubt about her skills, she left with a heightened sense of worth as a scientist, much more secure in her ability.

Rachel began graduate study in zoology at Johns Hopkins, completed a master’s degree, and entered a Ph.D. program in 1932. As the Depression took its toll, she had to leave graduate school to take a better-paying job, in the public-education department of the Bureau of Fisheries, and brought in extra money by selling articles to the Baltimore Sun. Rachel blended her talents as a biologist and a writer at the bureau in Washington, where she worked from 1936 to 1952, eventually becoming chief editor of the agency’s publications. Early in her time at the Bureau of Fisheries, Rachel drafted an eleven-page essay about sea life called “The World of Waters.” The head of her department suggested that she send it to The Atlantic. After it was published, as “Undersea,” she began writing her first book. The book was called “Under the Sea-Wind,” her first book in the sea trilogy.

Rachel began writing another book about ocean ecology. The Sea Around Us appeared in 1951 in The New Yorker as a three-part Profile of the Sea with the encouragement of the managing editor of the magazine, William Shawn. Her series were the magazine’s first-ever profile of something other than a person.  Rachel built a cottage in coastal Maine with her book earnings and started writing her next book, The Edge of the Sea. After the book was published in 1955, Shawn, the managing editor of The New Yorker, urged Rachel to write another one.

This next book would be different. Rachel had wanted to write about the destruction of the environment and the use of pesticides like DDT for civilian use since 1945. She had previously pitched a piece to the Reader's Digest about the pesticide DDT, which had been sold during the war to the military to kill lice in order to stop the spread of typhus. Chemical companies started selling DDT and other chemicals commercially after the war was over for application to personal property like farms and gardens. Rachel, after reading government reports on the state of fish and wildlife, became alarmed to learn that DDT hadn't been tested for civilian use.

Carson did her research for the book from home. During this time however, she became sick and in April of 1960 had a radical mastectomy. The rest of the year involved radiation, further surgery, injections, and a slew of other illnesses. Rachel was afraid of dying before the release of the book, and against the judgement of those close to her, she kept going and in January of 1962 submitted to The New Yorker an almost complete draft of the book.

“Silent Spring” appeared in The New Yorker, in three parts, in June 1962, and as a book, published by Houghton Mifflin, in September. It had an immediate impact. At a press conference at the White House on August 29th, a reporter asked President Kennedy whether his Administration intended to investigate the long-range side effects of DDT and other pesticides. “Yes,” he answered. “I know that they already are, I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book” (Lepore). When Carson was interviewed by CBS, she wore a heavy wig since she had lost her hair and was not shown standing due to her deteriorating spine.

Rachel Carson died of cancer on April 14, 1964, less than two years after Silent Spring was published. The book is credited with "provok[ing] the passage of the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act (both 1972); and leading to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1970" (Lepore, 2018). Even though Silent Spring was arguably the most environmentally impactful publication of the 20th century, it's easy to forget that she was the "scientist-poet of the sea" long before her interest in backyard pesticides. In 1980, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Information from  Smithsonian Magazine ,  Marine Biological Laboratory ,  The New Yorker , and Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear. Image credit Wikipedia/Laura A Macaluso PhD

Alice Stallknecht Wight

Alice Stallknecht Wight was a mural artist who began painting in the 1920s. Her work is displayed at the Atwood House Museum

Alice Stallknecht Wight captured Chatham residents and American presidents in her mural art.  She was born on March 4, 1880, into an affluent middle-class family in New York City and aspired to a career as a professional artist since childhood. Her father, an amateur painter, inspired Alice's love of art. In 1898, Alice enrolled at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, where the illustration course was taught by Daniel Beard, primarily remembered as the founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Through Beard, Stallknecht was first introduced to a sympathetic portrayal of the working class that would emerge 30 years later in her murals.

Despite this promising start, Alice did not pursue a career after graduation. Instead, she chose to marry Carol Wight, a student in classics at Johns Hopkins University, and they had a child. In the following years, Carol, who had dropped out of school before graduating, suffered a nervous breakdown. Burdened with financial and health problems, they retreated to the small town of Chatham, Massachusetts in 1910. 

Like many aspiring female artists, before and since, Alice found herself overwhelmed by the responsibilities and trials of domestic life. Beneath the surface, she continued to draw, paint, and make prints and collaborated with her husband on a children’s book although it was never published. Moreover, she stayed involved in the fine arts by teaching her son, Frederick, to draw and paint. By promoting his career, Alice recovered her own.

In 1916, when John Singer Sargent returned from Europe after an absence of thirteen years to install his murals in the Boston Public Library, Alice consulted him to ask his opinion of Frederick's watercolors. Sargent invited both of them to his Boston studio which was filled with his mural paintings and offered encouragement to a young artist. When Frederick enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1918, Alice enrolled in the Life Drawing Class taught by Edwin H. Blashfield, the leader of the mural movement. Blashfield had recently published Mural Painting in America, a book that summarized the achievements in the field and outlined the objectives of American mural painters. In 1925, when Frederick was studying art in Paris, Alice accompanied him on a Grand Tour of France, Italy, and England.

By then she was in her forties, her son was an adult, her husband was gainfully employed, and she had both the time and the money to paint. During these years she produced three life-size portraits of the American presidents, Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson, a series that was inspired, perhaps, by Wilson’s death in 1924. The size of these portraits was the first indication that Alice was attempting to paint on the scale of murals, which inspired her to paint the three murals now on display in the Mural Barn at the Atwood Museum in Chatham. 

In 1931 or 1932, Alice was working with the Chatham Congregational Church on an idea for a monumental mural of Christ Preaching to the Multitude which was her first attempt at mural painting. The mural was completed in early August 1932, and it was installed in the vestibule of the church, placed so that when one entered through the front doors, one was confronted immediately by the painting. It was mutually agreed that the work was on loan and (at the request of either the artist or the church) it could be removed at any time.

In 1935, Stallknecht went on to paint a second mural for the church, The Circle Supper, which consisted of 20 separate canvases intended to be hung together. Again, Christ appears in the midst of recognizable Chatham locals, all of whom had posed for Stallknecht in her house. The mural resided in the Congregational church in the upper level of the building, behind the pews and facing the altar, between 1935, the year of its completion, and 1943, when the Church Committee voted to have both murals removed and subsequently transferred to Alice's property.

Stallknecht had purchased an abandoned railroad building, moved it to her property, and had hung the first two murals and the life size Presidential portraits that she had done earlier, opening the building to any interested visitor who happened along. She then painted a third mural cycle, entitled Every Man To His Trade, to hang on the wall opposite the Circle Supper. Like The Circle Supper, the mural consisted of separate portraits intended to be hung together. Christ the carpenter is surrounded by 28 canvases depicting portraits of more than five dozen Chatham townspeople plying their various trades. The life-size figure of Christ dominates the composition at the center. He is a humble working man, identifiable solely by the carpentry tools that lie at his feet, and the still life with fish in the canvas below him.

Stallknecht's paintings were only occasionally shown outside of Chatham. In 1950 she participated in a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Two years later she had a one-person exhibition at the Rockland Museum in Maine. When Ninfa Valvo, curator of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, saw Stallknecht's work on Cape Cod, she organized an exhibition of her easel paintings that traveled to the Pasadena Art Museum and the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in 1958. The murals were never seen outside of Cape Cod in her lifetime, but in 1977 they were exhibited at the Municipal Gallery of Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.

Through her larger-than-life murals, Stallknecht became a storyteller of epic proportions in which she selectively used her considerable artistic skills to create the most dramatic and most memorable series of images she could. Her work is full of allusions to the history and art of the past, and transformed Christian iconography in a way that created a more modern vision of how religion plays a part in American democracy. It can be argued that she is one of the most important painters of religion in 20th-century America, but what is known for sure is that through her three Chatham murals, Stallknecht succeeded in creating a marvelous portrait of a New England town.

Information from  Who am I - Alice Stallknecht ,  Alice Stallknecht - Artist  (Chatham Historical Society) and  Woman's Art Journal . Image credit Chatham Historical Society