Ben Muse

The Bass River Road Net - Late 1832

The towns of Massachusetts were systematically mapped in the early 1830s in response to a state mandate.  Forested and open areas, roads, and significant buildings were identified (although the surveyors and their methods differed somewhat across the state).  Harvard University's Harvard Forest program has created a free online tool that makes it possible to overlay information from these 1830 surveys on a modern USGS topographic map. 

You can access the mapping tool here: 1830 Massachusetts Map Viewing Instructions (but pay attention to caveats - reproduced at the end of this post).  This is easy to use, here I've used it to create a map of Bass River - between Dennis and Yarmouth on Cape Cod - in the early 1830s.  The river appears rather faintly in a modern USGS topo map.  The 1830s roads are superimposed as brown lines, wooded areas in the early 1830s are superimposed as dark green areas:

The End of the Bass River Bridge Corporations

In 1869 there were two carriage bridges running east-west across Cape Cod’s Bass River.  A lower bridge connected the villages of South Yarmouth and West Dennis where Route 28 crosses the river now; an upper bridge connected South Yarmouth and South Dennis higher up the river, at the location of the current Highbank Bridge. These were both toll bridges built and operated by private corporations created by the state in the early 1830s. They were the only toll bridges on Cape Cod in 1869 (Swift, 1897).

In 1870 the state made Barnstable County, and the towns of Yarmouth, Dennis, and Harwich, responsible for buying out the corporations and maintaining the bridges. Why did it do this after almost 40 years of private operation? Were the benefits of this greater than the costs? Who gained and who lost? I may never be able to answer these questions fully but here is a progress report (Here's a pdf version: The End of the Bass River Bridge Corporations):

"Why are Places Located On Cape Cod That Way?"

Here's a neat middle-school/high-school lesson plan on geography/geology from Tom Vaughn: Why Are Places Located On Cape Cod That Way?.  Vaughn tries to get students thinking about the glacial geology of the Cape, and how that's shaped modern settlement patterns.  Some of the students who go through this would learn to see a little better. 

Harvesting salt hay

Eric Williams reports on an old Cape Cod agricultural activity, harvesting hay (Spartina patens) from salt marshes: A missing piece of history (Cape Cod Times, May 22, registration probably necessary after a few days). 

Salt haying took place in marshes along the North American Atlantic coast from very early colonial times (the process is described here: Marshing and Salt Hay - see also the links at the end of this post).