Ben Muse

Downtown South Yarmouth About 1910

Here's a great old postcard of South Yarmouth center. The source at Wikipedia says 1910.

Route 28 won't be upgraded until 1933, and then it will come in through the yard on the left and exit towards Bass River across the way, just in front of the first building on the right. It's not obvious, but Bridge Street already runs off to the right at that spot.

A hundred years before, a ropewalk extended from the first building north, along the side of the road, where the line of buildings is. If you follow the road forward and slightly to the left, you can go to Yarmouthport, Weir Village, or South Dennis.

If you bear hard right just in front of the first building, you will come to Bass River in a quarter mile and can head across the new bridge to West Dennis. I'm a little surprised that the road to the river isn't better marked or more obvious.

Source: Wikipedia, Hugh Manatee

I'm guessing those automobiles have a 12 mph speed limit. In September 1907, the Yarmouth selectmen published new automobile regulations. The speed limit through this intersection, and down Bridge Street, was 12 miles an hour: with this condition - that all autos and motor cycles "shall come to a standstill at the corner of said South State Highway [Main Street in South Yarmouth - Ben] and Bridge street... before proceeding in either direction around the corner of said streets."

Walk forward a bit, to a point in the road just between the first two trees on the right.

First, turn around and look back where you just were:

Now, turn left, and look down (what the sign above says is) Bridge Street:

Keep standing here (at the head of Bridge Street), and turn to your left again:

Walk down the row of trees, turn, and look back where you started:

You were originally standing about 100 feet down the road on the left. This card dates to 1917. In 16 years, Route 28 will be driven through the second building from the right of the picture. Did you see the dress in the store window?

The reverse of this postcard had an important message:

Jumping forward to 1936, and looking down the new section of Route 28:

and now a little later:

Source: I believe this is from an ad on eBay.

...and later still:

In the mid-sixties:

Source: my postcards

 

Minor edit April 17, 2011. Speed limit edit added November 26, 2011. New pictures added November 27, 2011. Minor, but substantive, editorial changes same day.

The Salt Boxes of South Yarmouth

People began to open cottage colonies on the Cape in the early thirties, as more visitors began to come to the Cape in their own cars, and as demand grew for inexpensive places to stay.

The Salt Box cottage colony opened on the shore of Bass River, just north of the Bass River Golf Course, in 1938. 

Bainbridge Crist, a South Yarmouth historian, wrote about it in The Register in 1978.  You can find a copy of his article here: A baroness came, and so did a countess, in the heyday of Yarmouth's Salt Boxes. 

 
The Salt Box development is the set of roads south of the intersection of Oyster Cove Road and Salt Box Road.  Source: Google maps.

Anchor Dragging

Many years ago Bass River was a small, but busy, commercial port.   In 1802 there were 21 vessels, some ranging between Boston and the West Indies, others fishing locally.  In the early 20th Century, a sailing packet still kept a regular schedule between South Yarmouth and New Jersey.  Coastal vessels used the roadstead off Bass River to wait for favorable winds before passing into the Atlantic around the southern tip of Monomoy Island.  At times over 100 sailing ships might ride at anchor offshore.

This traffic supported and depended on a variety of ancillary businesses: warehouses, lumber yards, and boat yards.  Many of these ships lost things overboard, among other things - anchors, supporting another business: anchor dragging. 

In 1941, former anchor dragger Wilfred W. Fuller recalled the business.  There were a lot of ways to lose an anchor:

The Corps of Engineers looks at Bass River

Sometime in the fall of 1894, or the winter or spring of 1895, Captain Bixby of the Army Corps of Engineers visited Bass River to see if  river entrance navigation improvements were a worthwhile way to spend federal money. 

The main concern was a bar, off the mouth of the river:

From the apparent mouth of the river to its outer bar in Nantucket Sound, i.e., to the deep water of Nantucket Sound, the distance is about 1.5 miles, measured along the boating channel, this channel, as marked by stakes (cut down by the ice each winter and replaced every spring) being from about 60 to 600 feet in width; the depth on the outer bar

He wasn't enthusiastic about the value of investment in navigation. The small population and limited industry adjacent to the river meant that the demand for river traffic was small; there were also readily available substitutes in Hyannis Harbor, the wharfs at Dennisport, and the local railroad; a prospective mid-Cape canal down Bass River would shift the river mouth to the east, potentially negating the value of any work done on the existing mouth; the work would be relatively expensive in comparison with the benefits.

His report is here (pdf files): Download Corps Engineers - Bass River - 1895; title page here: Download Corps Engineers - Title Page - 1895.  A nice picture of a quiet river in the late 1890s.

The Bass River "Road" Net - 1644

Charles Swift was a 19th Century newspaper editor and historian.  His 1884 history of Yarmouth, available on Google Books, has a map of Old Yarmouth in 1644 (Old Yarmouth including the current towns of Dennis and Yarmouth).

The Pilgrims reached Plymouth in 1620.  Written records place English settlers in Old Yarmouth along Cape Cod Bay by 1638-39.

Early on, some began to settle along the upper ponds of Bass River.  Samuel Rider was evidently there about 1639 and Francis Baker on the east side of Follins Pond about 1641.   One person lived close to Nantucket Sound by 1644, and Swift's map shows a road running from north to south on the western side of his map.  Swift doesn't mention other settlers between Follins Pond and the mouth of Bass River, except for Richard Berry who lived near the mouth of the river by about 1649.

Map of Yarmouth (which included what is now Dennis) in 1644 (From Swift via Google Books)

The Google edition is dated 1884, so this is Swift's conjectural map of the area 240 years earlier.  He doesn't describe his sources, but I don't think he had sketch maps circa 1644.  I assume the map is an amalgam of information about the places where early settlers made their homes, a knowledge of the 19th century road system, local tradition, and common sense.  These roads must have been more like primitive trails at this early date.  The map doesn't show any Indian trails.

The main road ran from east to west, a mile or so south of the Bay.  The map shows another road branching south from this, running around the southern side of Mill Pond, and then north and around the northern and eastern sides of Follins Pond.

Compare this to the road net in 1832: The Bass River Road Net - Late 1832.

"Capturing Cape Cod History"

Since 2002, writers associated with the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth have been publishing short essays on Cape Cod history, and especially Yarmouth history, in the mid-Cape paper, The Register.  This fall, the society put these together into a book: Capturing Cape Cod History.  Some of the essays have information about the economic history of Bass River.

Bass River in the late 19th Century.  From University of New Hampshire's Dimond Library via David Kew's Cape Cod History web site.

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).