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Wellfleet

The Wellfleet Oyster: A Brief History of the Precious Mollusk

Diamond Jim Brady once spat out an oyster served him at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant. “That’s not a Wellfleet oyster!” exclaimed the Gilded Age gourmand.

Discriminating diners have long prized the Wellfleet oyster for its merroir—the flavor that comes from the clear air and salty, plankton-rich seawater it ingests. Plump and clean, the Wellfleet oyster has a briny sweetness with an undertone of seaweed.

For centuries, the tasty meat and the hard gray shell of the Wellfleet oyster attracted an indigenous settlement, which gave way to a town. From Wellfleet’s immense oyster beds, fortunes were made, a culture developed and commercial networks spread along the Eastern seaboard. Wellfleet oysters wrapped in copper wire traveled across the Atlantic to royal tables. In tin cans they rumbled overland in covered wagons to the prairies and mountains of the West. They even contributed to the epic U.S. victory in the 1980 Olympics.

But in the centuries since the English, the French, the Africans and the Finns came to Wellfleet, the oyster has gone through dark days. Pre-Revolutionary gluttons doomed the wild Wellfleet oyster to extinction. The beds recovered, but so many oysters slid down so many gullets that they nearly disappeared again.

Wellfleet Oyster

Wellfleet lies just above the elbow of Cape Cod, and wraps like a fishhook around harbor, five miles long, two miles wide and open to the south.

Estuaries, clear and cold, feed into the harbor and the Atlantic. The Herring River, Blackfish Creek and Duck Creek carry diatoms and protozoa from the rich salt meadows along the border. Big, fast moving tidewaters feed the oysters twice a day, and at low tide the oysters are exposed to air, which makes them hardy.

Thousands of years ago, a year-round Native American community lived near the immense Wellfleet shellfish beds. Unlike most coastal New England Indians, the Native people didn’t migrate to the interior during the winter. They called themselves the Pononakanet, a branch of the Nausets, and in 1979 a discovery of 56 Native skeletons in an ossuary dated their bones to the 11^th century.

They piled shells along the forest edge to protect against storms and make it easier to get to the shore. Henry David Thoreau saw Native shell middens in nearby Truro during a visit to Cape Cod. He found oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes, and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds. “I picked up half a dozen arrowheads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them.”

Europeans Arrive

Samuel de Champlain sailed into Wellfleet Harbor in 1606, and the tremendous oyster beds so impressed him he called it Port aux Huistres.

A decade after Champlain’s visit, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast. When the Plymouth colonists arrived they found so many indigenous people had died they couldn’t bury their dead. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor.

The Mayflower had sailed past Wellfleet before anchoring in Plymouth Harbor, but soon enough the colonists discovered the oyster beds. They reminded them of Billingsgate, the London fish market famous for its foul-mouthed fish wives. So “Billingsgate” it was.

Billingsgate fish market in 1736 by Arnold van Haecken .

By 1644, the Plymouth settlers set their sights for another settlement on the Lower Cape from Truro to Chatham, the wrist to the elbow. They called it Eastham.

‘Then I do’

Bradford, the story goes, looked out to Billingsgate Island and asked the Pononakanet sachem, George, “Who owns that?” “No one,” replied George. “Then I do,” Bradford said.

William Bradford

Over time, the Europeans edged out the indigenous people. Some of those who survived the white man’s diseases converted to Christianity and moved to a Praying Indian town.

The last of the tribe, Delilah Sampson Gibbs, a widow, died sometime after 1838.

Billingsgate Bivalves

The European settlers learned how to tong for oysters. They’d lean over the side of a flat-bottomed boat with clumsy, 20-foot poles and grab them with the gripping teeth at the end.

In 1665, a randy Portuguese whaler and oysterman named Jacobus Loper started hauling Billingsgate oysters in his sloop. He had an easy sail from the protected harbor to Boston and Salem, and oysters travel well. Unlike scallops and soft-shelled clams, they can live for long periods in the shell outside of water.

Others quickly caught on to the oystering business. In the decades before the American Revolution, the burgeoning towns along the coast consumed vast quantities of the cheap, nutritious and highly portable Wellfleet oyster.

The town jealously guarded its beds from interlopers. By 1674 Eastham Town Meeting voted to apprehend any out-of-towners taking oysters from Billingsgate Bay.

Wellfleet Oysterman

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing made their famous trek along the Lower Cape and learned about the extinction of the Wellfleet oyster.

They stayed at the home of John Young Newcomb and his family. Thoreau mistook the 87-year-old oysterman for a scarecrow. He immortalized him as the Wellfleet Oysterman in the posthumously published Cape Cod.

John Young Newcomb house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

The merry old man loved to talk. His conversation, coarse and plain, would have suited Rabelais, Thoreau noted. He told story after story, ejecting his tobacco juice right and left. The old man’s shots seasoned breakfast of eels, applesauce and green beans.

Newcomb was born in 1762, when Billingsgate still belonged to Eastham. He remembered hearing the guns at Bunker Hill and seeing George Washington ride down a Boston street, bowing gracefully to the crowd.

When Newcomb was a year old, Billingsgate broke off from Eastham. Billingsgate chose to change its name to “Wellfleet” after the famous “Wellfleet” or “Wallfleet” oysters of England’s Blackwater Bay. The revolution loomed as Newcomb reached his teens, but the town was more concerned about the disappearance of the oyster.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

In 1773, the town voted to regulate the oyster fishery.“ That meant keeping outsiders off the beds.

Some people said the split caused the oysters to go away. Others blamed God’s wrath, ground frost, or pollution from a stranding of pilot whales.

Newcomb said Wellfleet’s quarrel with the neighboring towns about gathering oysters, yellow specks appeared in them. Providence then caused them to vanish. At least that was the most common explanation.

The real reason the oysters went away: probably the harvesters who stripped the beds. They didn’t realize juvenile oysters needed to attach themselves to something hard, like a shell, to survive. Instead, they burned the oyster shells for fertilizer and plaster. They also cut down the forest, which caused blowing sand to smother the young oysters.

American Revolution

After the Wellfleet oyster disappeared, the town’s population fell to 1,113 in 1790, down from 1,235 when the American Revolution broke out.

But Wellfleet’s oyster industry gradually recovered with the help of oysters from away. Aquaculture had gone on since the Romans did it in the first century, and Wellfleetians found they could do it too.

Oystermen began bringing oysters from Buzzard’s Bay and Narragansett Bay, fattening them up in Wellfleet’s estuaries and giving them time to acquire that special Wellfleet relish. Then they started bringing oysters in coastal schooners from the Chesapeake Bay.

jonathan carnes corners the pepper market

Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market.

In 1802, 40-year-old John Young Newcomb bought a share in the schooner Lydia, and then opened an oyster shop in Salem.

By the time Thoreau came to visit in 1849, Wellfleet natives supplied and kept nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts. Newcomb told him the business was still good and improving.

Wellfleetians positioned themselves throughout the oyster industry even beyond Massachusetts. There were Atwoods, Dyers, Holbrooks and Freemans working in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Providence, Dover, N.H., Lewiston and Saco, Newburyport and Lynn.

The Golden Age of the Wellfleet Oyster

“In the palmy days of the Wellfleet oyster business, forty or fifty sail of vessels were engaged each winter in transferring the product to the Boston market,” wrote historian Simeon L. Deyo.

From 1830-1870, Wellfleet monopolized the oyster business in New England. And what a business it was, thanks to the tin can and a widespread frenzy for oysters.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French invented canning so they could feed their armies on the march. Canning then found its way to Boston by the 1840s. There, the William Underwood Company canned large volumes of Wellfleet oysters. Union Army soldiers during the Civil War developed a taste for them; so did the pioneers migrating west.

Mawhinney Oyster Saloon in Philadelphia

By then, oystermania had taken hold of America. Starting around 1820, oyster cellars, oyster bars, oyster lunchrooms and oyster parlors sprang up all over the Eastern seaboard. Many were just plain eating dens with big heavy tables and floors covered with sawdust. They served booze and cheap oysters, raw or roasted on the half shell, oyster stew, maybe some clams, some toast or some pie.

Oyster cellars, a few steps down from street level, meant adult fun– beer, nightlife, the demimonde, the sporting life, prostitution. Charles Dickens relished his visit in 1842 to an oyster cellar in New York’s seedy Five Points neighborhood.

Ever-ready Resource

In 1848, Boston had 69 oyster houses and oyster peddlers went door to door. According to Rambles in Old Boston,

Oystermen usually appeared in the evening, carrying their heavy burden, in the shell, on their shoulders in a kind of saddle-bag, crying, “Oys! Finey Oys! Buy any Oys?” They opened the bivalves at the purchaser’s door, throwing the shells into another part of the bag.

In 1857, an Englishman named Charles MacKay visited the United States and commented on the only class difference in America: Some people washed down their oysters with champagne, some with beer.

Elegant restaurants served oysters, but so did housewives of modest means. They were cheap and nutritious. Homemakers viewed them as “the ever-ready resource” because of their “suitableness for all occasions.”

Fresh oysters were shipped west, first in wagons full of ice and then in train cars. In Illinois, a congressman named Abraham Lincoln used to hold oyster orgies in which huge quantities of the bivalve were consumed.

Big Business

In 1826, Hawes Atwood opened Atwood’s Oyster House on Union Street – still in business as the Union Oyster House. Daniel Webster often ate there, downing six dozen Wellfleet oysters at a sitting. Atwood built an imposing house in Everett, a town he helped found.

Union Oyster House

In New York City, Wellfleet’s Libby family established the famous Libby’s Oyster House on Fulton Street in 1839. It lasted more than a century. Unpretentious, Libby’s had chefs and waiters described as “despotic and opinionated but highly skilled.” It served Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, served New England clam chowder every day and had a hard-and-fast rule: No Manhattan Clam Chowder served in here.

Isaac Rich, born poor in South Wellfleet in 1801, built a fortune on oysters. He started off with an oyster stall on Boston’s City Wharf, then moved into warehousing, shipping and banking. In 1869, Rich cofounded Boston University.

The oyster also gave Brigham and Women’s Hospital its start. Peter Brigham, a Vermonter, began selling oysters and fish in Boston while still in his teens. Eventually he amassed enough money to leave $1.3 million for a new hospital after his death.

Oyster Wealth

The Wellfleet oyster made Wellfleet a real town. Local businessmen built Commercial, Enterprise, Mercantile wharves to service the vessels along the busy waterfront.

First Congregational Church

The Duck Creek Shipyard produced schooners, The white clapboard Congregational Church went up in 1850 with a town clock that still chimes ships’ time. Houses floated over to Commercial Street from Chequasset Neck, Griffin Island and Bound Brook. Tradesmen built shops along the long main street. Timothy Daniels ran a store across from Uncle Tim’s Bridge – a favorite motif of plein air painters – connecting Hamblen Island to the village.

There were still oil works for rendering oil from the pilot whales that washed ashore, saltworks to make salt for cod, chandleries to supply the ships.

Aquaculture

Then in 1870, the Old Colony Railroad opened to Wellfleet. The town gathered, celebrated, listened to speeches and poems. One speaker said the railroad would do for the Cape’s fisheries what it had done in Chicago for midwestern grain.

It didn’t. The railroad instead carried Wellfleetians to the mainland — to stay. The population declined along with the oyster beds.

That year, Wellfleet selectmen took notice. They began requiring permits to work the beds. Then in 1876, they adopted the grant system, leasing sections of flats to people who then cultivated and bedded oysters.

It got harder to bed oysters from the south, as northern oyster dealers had caught on to the idea. They found it cheaper for them to bed their own oysters nearby than to pay for freight from Wellfleet.

Wellfleetians then tried to plant oysters – that is, deposit seed, or spat, onto a bed of cultch. E.P. Cook got the first grant. He scattered shells along the sandy bottom, then caught and planted spat. He moved the young oysters around to different water depths to enhance their growth.

Oyster spat

But oyster planting was an inexact science, and often it failed.

In 1878, S.R. Higgins deposited seed from the Taunton River, and it lived and thrived. Oyster planting slowly increased. In 1889, Wellfleet had 30 acres of grants. Twenty years later, it had 2,400.

It wasn’t enough. Simeon Deyo in 1890 wrote, “the oyster and the oysterman are, so far as these shores are concerned, slowly, but surely, passing away.”

The harbor filled in. People moved away, as they had been every decade since 1840. The fish began to disappear.

In 1898, Fred Snow brought the last load of fish aboard the schooner Pleiades into Wellfleet Harbor.

Sealshipt

In 1911, a big, modern oyster company called Sealshipt came to Wellfleet.

Actually, it was a trust, and in 1910 the New York Times reported that the Sealshipt Oyster System was trying to monopolize the Atlantic Coast oyster business.

Sealshipt had developed a sanitary container for shipping oysters and marketed it heavily through its 25,000 retail agents. That was a big deal at the time. Exposes of adulterated and unsanitary food had riled the public, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Sealshipt employed up to 125 people, who worked six days a week from 7 am to 5 pm. Another 600 worked at the Sealshipt office in Boston. They only got Thanksgiving and Christmas off, worked by the light of kerosene lamps and shipped 50 barrels of oysters a day.

Things were looking up for the Wellfleet oyster. In 1909, 22,500 bushels of Wellfleet oysters were harvested from the flats – about a fifth of the haul during the palmy days of the Wellfleet oysters. Still, an improvement.

Sealshipt lasted three years. In 1914, the business was sold at foreclosure.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

Lorenzo Dow Baker, the Banana King, came into this world on Bound Brook Island in 1840. He founded the Boston Fruit Company, which evolved into United Fruit, which evolved into Chiquita Banana.

Baker envisioned a different future for his hometown, one based on tourism and aquaculture.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

In 1886, he built the luxurious 62-room Chequasset Inn on Mercantile Wharf, which had served the now defunct mackerel fleet. Baker brought his Jamaican staff in the summer north from his Titchfield Inn, which he ran in Jamaica in the winter. He billed the Chequasset as a cruise without the seasickness.

Sportsmen and their families came for the duck hunting, fishing, tennis and billiards. Guests could stroll among the fashionable elite along the boardwalk. A full orchestra entertained dinner guests.

Then in 1905, Baker added a funny little shed with a pitched roof to the side of the Chequasset Inn. He let a Dr. David Belding conduct his shellfish research from what was actually the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries Shellfish Laboratory and Quahog Hatchery.

David Belding

Belding, a brilliant shellfish biologist and a medical doctor, laid the foundation for modern aquaculture in that shed. He wrote groundbreaking reports on bay scallops, quahogs, oysters and soft-shell clams that have yet to be surpassed. Belding also served in the Army Medical Corps in World War I, wrote books and worked as Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology at (appropriately) the Boston University School of Medicine

It would be a long time before Belding’s research bore fruit. The Wellfleet oyster continued its slide.

Things got worse. A typhoid epidemic in 1924 was blamed on oysters, while Prohibition closed the oyster cellars and taverns where they were so gleefully consumed. In 1936, David Atwood closed Wellfleet’s last oyster company. The town turned to tourism, improving the roads, creating a dump, bringing in electricity.

The Return of Dr. Belding

Scallops and quahogs overtook oysters as Wellfleet’s main crop during the Depression. Then during World War II, the Army set up a training camp for amphibious landing craft at Wellfleet. The vessels churned up so much silt they smothered the oyster beds.

By 1956, Wellfleet oysters were only planted by individuals doing it as a side hustle on small private beds. The good news was that people started following Dr. Belding’s advice, and it seemed to work. The town bought seed from the state and encouraged fishermen to bring in their shells to one section of the flats so they could collect oyster seed.

In 1966, Dr. Belding, then in his 80s, returned to Wellfleet to join the newly created Shellfish Advisory Board. Wellfleet worked with other Cape towns and the state to revive the Wellfleet oyster. They started a cultching program, planting bushels of scallop shells to catch oyster seed.

Wellfleet Harbor today

Miracle on Ice

In 1980, an artist, entrepreneur and fisherman named Paul Suggs formed the Mud Hake Oyster Company. It signaled a new era and new energy in the Wellfleet oyster industry. Suggs got a grant, and he got good at shucking. Two days a week he’d take his oysters on the road to sell them.

Suggs then decided to sell Wellfleet oysters at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He bought up the local product in the weeks beforehand – 80 bushels of oysters, 25 bushels of mussels and 40 bushels of clams.

In a rented U-Haul, he led friends, wives and children to Lake Placid. They set up a raw bar at the Ancient Mariner Hotel and started selling shellfish as fast as they could shuck them. One day Suggs was walking through the Ancient Mariner restaurant wearing a Wellfleet oyster T-shirt. Someone yelled, “Hey Wellfleet, hey Wellfleet!” The voice belonged to a member of the U.S. hockey team.

Suggs got to talking with the hockey players, who told him how much they wanted to win their game against the Soviet team the next day. The Soviets had dominated Olympic hockey through the 1970s, and their army had just invaded Afghanistan.

Suggs said he held the key to victory. He would give them all the Wellfleet oysters and clams they could eat for free, if they promised not to have sex that night and dissipate all that energy. He guaranteed they’d win if they kept their promise.

Both sides kept their end of the deal, and the next day the U.S. hockey team won in the last 10 seconds of the game – the Miracle on Ice.

End Notes

With thanks to The Famous Beds of Wellfleet, A Shellfishing History, by D.B. Wright. according to History of Barnstable County, Mass., 1620-1637-1686-1890 by

Images: Wellfleet oysters by Paula O via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Map of Wellfleet, Boston Public Library via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Miracle on Ice magazine cover By Copyright by Sports Illustrated/Photographed by Heinz Kluetmeier, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25356046. Union Oyster House by By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434529. Wellfleet’s First Congregational Church By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093285. Oyster spat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35474428. First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. This story updated in 2022.

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Camp Edwards, Cape Cod’s World War II City

One year before Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought the United States would never enter World War II. They might have thought otherwise had they visited Camp Edwards, where workers toiled at a blistering pace to build a city for 36,000 soldiers.

The Army brass, like many others, had been slow to realize war was coming. Or that it would have to shelter and train millions of new soldiers. Only when Hitler’s armies marched into Paris in June of 1940 did the Army put its building program into full gear. It succeeded, in part, because of one man, Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, and one army camp – Camp Edwards, at the western end of Cape Cod.

Soldiers training at Camp Edwards om 1942.

It had taken three centuries for the Cape to develop into 15 towns with 37,295 people in them. The Army would nearly double its population in 125 days. Contractors would build 1,406 structures, including barracks, mess halls and officers quarters – along with 13 chapels and 217 recreation buildings. Workers at their busiest put up 30 buildings a day.

As one of the first of 159 military installations built for World War II, Camp Edwards was the proving ground for the construction of nearly every other army camp. New construction techniques were developed amid the scrub pine and sand. At Camp Edwards, contractors started using standardized plans, prefabricated units and assembly line construction.

After the war, large developers used the methods adopted at Camp Edwards to build new suburbs. Many G.I.s returning from war would buy a home in a new suburban development built in much the same way their old barracks had been built.

Charles Hartman

In 1941, Sen. Harry Truman led a committee investigating the military’s hasty build-up for the war. He singled out Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, who had headed the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps in the crucial months before the United States entered World War II.

“You seem to have been the only man in the War Department dealing with construction matters that at least contemplated a plan for the future,” Truman said.

Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman

Hartman, a West Point graduate and Harvard MBA, was a colonel in the Quartermaster Corps when he began working on modern designs for military installations. The Army at the time had plans from World War I called the Series 600 cantonment. They included drawings for crude barracks heated with stoves, outbuildings and administrative quarters.

Hartman saw problems. Standard barracks, for example, were designed for 250 men. In a fire, many of them wouldn’t get out. The plans also depended on lengths of lumber no longer available.

Series 700 Cantonment

So he began updating the drawings, called Series 700, in 1934. He had to do it on the side with just a few men.

“But we had no money, and whatever money and men we could devote to the job had to come out of anything we could get — a sideline rather than a fixed job,” he later told Truman’s committee.

In 1938,as Hitler rose to power, money finally became available. So Hartman found a warehouse and filled it with 80 architects and draftsmen. They designed everything an army camp would need, from barracks to bakeries.

Basketball courts at Camp Edwards

They didn’t know why they were doing it. After the senseless carnage of World War I, most Americans wanted to stay out of European wars. Hartman’s boss, Gen. Owen Seaman, wouldn’t approve the plans.

“I don’t think myself or anybody else ever contemplated we would have the army that we have now … Or that we would have a war,” Seaman said in 1941.

The drawings for the 700 series cantonments remained in draft form, unapproved, unused. Hartman then left for California on another assignment.

Hitler

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. President Roosevelt issued an order adding 27,000 men to the army and 100,000 to the National Guard. The War Department didn’t really come up with a plan to put them anywhere, other than in tents on old fairgrounds. Then , the brass figured, they could train in Europe. They didn’t reckon with Hitler.

In April 1940 German troops occupied Denmark and Norway.

In June, France fell. England prepared for an invasion. And America finally began planning for war.

German soldiers march along the Champs Elysees, June 14, 1940

On June 26, 1940, four days after France surrendered, Congress expanded the army again to 375,000 men. In August, it federalized the National Guard. Then in September it created the first peacetime draft by passing the Selective Service Act.

Housing Shortage

Hitler’s occupation of Europe caught the Army flat-footed. Within U.S. borders, the Army only had space for 300,000. Within nine months it would need to shelter and train more than a million soldiers. That number quickly increased – to 2 million — and then, by 1942, 8 million.

Draftees would start showing up in two months, but plans to put them in tents did not fly. The American people had made it clear that their boys needed to be treated well if they were going off to fight a war. Congress had bowed to that public pressure. The Selective Service Act ordered that no soldier could be drafted until the government had provided “such shelter, sanitary facilities, water supplies, heating and lighting arrangements … as may be determined … to be essential to public and personal health.”

A Series 700 barracks at Camp Edwards. 100,000 others were built.

Charles Hartman returned to head the Construction Division in March of 1940 as Seaman’s replacement. He discovered some of the Series 700 plans had been modified and some destroyed. There were no layouts for the hundreds of camps that would soon be built. So he quickly assembled a group of draftsmen to redraw plans for over 300 kinds of buildings.

Meanwhile, he anxiously waited for Congress to appropriate the funds to start building. That didn’t happen until September of 1940.

Alma Mater

In the middle of the war, an Australian newspaper described the “graduates” of Camp Edwards.

“Ack-Ack crews on Guadalcanal, “seahorses” of the Army’s Engineer Amphibian Command in North Africa, submarine-hunting pilots over the North Atlantic and even cooks in Port Ethan Allen, Vt., call Camp Edwards, New England’s largest military establishment, their ‘alma mater’,” the story read.

But in the fall of 1940, Camp Edwards was little more than a rustic National Guard facility called the Massachusetts Military Reservation. It had been chosen because it was flat, well-drained, cheap, near transportation and a population center, and it had a good water supply.

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration had built 63 buildings and two 500-foot grass runways, called Otis Field.

But as Camp Edwards it would need 1,406 structures, including 438 barracks, 184 mess halls, 54 officer quarters, 28 storage buildings and 82 hospital units. They would accommodate 1,674 officers and 30,159 enlisted men, including a medical battalion and a signal battalion.

One feature of Camp Edwards and all the army camps would persist after the war: segregation. The Army built separate accommodations for two quartermaster truck companies of “colored” troops at Camp Edwards.

Building Camp Edwards

On Sept. 12, 1940, three days after federal money became available, construction began. The site hadn’t even been laid out yet, and no one had ever actually used Hartman’s Series 700 designs.

The Army hired the Charles Main architect-engineering firm of Boston and Walsh Construction of New York. Eighty-one field architects worked frantically – laying out corners and staking out footings — to keep one step ahead of the builders.

Series 700 buildings

Another 300 architect-engineers adapted 600 drawings to the site, making as few revisions as possible and then handing them over to Walsh. Then Walsh’s draughtsmen added specifications for things like footings, framing, heating and electrical. Those documents were checked and then sent to Main’s drafting department, which came up with blueprints the construction foremen could use.

The blueprints worked so well that 50 copies were made and sent to the other Army camps under construction.

Concrete Poured

Walsh began pouring concrete on Sept. 18, 1940, six days after signing the contract.

A rail spur was built from Falmouth to bring a staggering amount of building materials: 63 million board feet of lumber, 5 million square feet of fiber board and 26,000 kegs of nails.

The Army’s low wages didn’t attract enough skilled carpenters. By Sept. 28, Walsh had hired 930 carpenters – but needed as many as another 1,500. So the contractor divided up the construction crews into two primary groups. One worked on substructure and one worked on superstructure. Walsh divided those groups into 30 subgroups, each headed by a superintendent. Those subgroups were further divided into 15-man work crews, each with its own motor pool and timekeeper. Every crew did one thing – pouring foundations or framing the deck or framing the walls and so forth. Prefabricated doors and windows arrived by train.

Peacetime Army

On Nov. 15, 1940, a wire service reported more than 12,000 workers were putting Camp Edwards in shape for the new peacetime army. Thousands more would join. To manage that enormous workforce required another innovation: a central office handled payroll. Armored cars drove to the construction sites to distribute paychecks. At peak construction, armored cars delivered 18,593 paychecks.

Nearly a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the 68th Coastal Artillery arrived at Camp Edwards. Then on Dec. 19, 1940, the first batch of draftees arrived. In January came the Yankee Division of the Massachusetts National Guard.

Construction continued after the soldiers came. Contractors poured concrete for the runway in 1942 and built facilities for the Army Air Corps.

Amphibious Training

Camp Edwards added an Amphibian Training Center after the military drew up plans to invade North Africa in December 1942. Army contractors then built satellite camps for training amphibious assault units along the Cape’s beaches. In the summer of 1942, soldiers practiced invading Wellfleet, Cotuit, Osterville, Martha’s Vineyard and Washburn Island in Falmouth. They also tested the first seasickness pill.

American troops launching an amphibious assault on North Africa.

With the invasion of Africa came German and Italian prisoners. To house them, the Army built a camp for 2,000 POWs at the southern end of the runway. Soon members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps went to work harvesting cranberries, building Sandwich Road in Bourne and cleaning up trees blown down by the hurricane of 1944.

There was still more building to be done. The Army built a convalescent hospital at Camp Edwards for wounded soldiers. Some 2,500 nurses who had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps trained there.

To train soldiers for urban combat during the invasion of Europe, the Army built a mock German village within Camp Edwards. Called Deutschedorf, three main streets were lined with Gestapo headquarters, a beer garden, a restaurant, houses and shops. Most had only three sides, with details like flowerboxes and birdhouses to add authenticity.

And still there was more. Camp Edwards built a processing center for soldiers that had gone AWOL. Then it built a processing center for soldiers returning from war. By 1944, Camp Edwards had capacity for 1,945 officers and 34,108 enlisted personnel.

Influence of Camp Edwards

In the late 1980s, the Department of Defense and the National Park Service undertook a history of the U.S. Army’s mobilization effort during World War II.

In a case study of Camp Edwards, author Keith Landreth called it one of the most well-organized and resourceful programs of the mobilization effort.

“Innovative techniques … were all developed at Camp Edwards and all served to enhance and facilitate efficiency and speed in construction,” he wrote.

Authors of the overall study concluded that the Army’s camp structures represented a building technology that would soon sweep the country.

Aerial view of Levittown, Pa., in 1959.

“In the push for speed in the mobilization construction a variety of construction techniques were developed that would soon have mass application,” they wrote.

“From a moribund depression-era construction industry rose a national effort that not only met the demands of the war, but changed forever many design and construction practices and techniques,” the authors wrote. “The effect of the mobilization program can still be seen across American, particularly in the construction of residential developments.”

Aftermath

Camp Edwards was designed to be temporary, and much of it is gone now. The Army deactivated it after World War II. It got busy again when the Korean War broke out.

Collapsed buildings at Camp Edwards

The Air Force then took it over and it evolved into Otis Air Force Base. Closed, then reopened, it is now Joint Base Cape Cod. These days it provides training for the Massachusetts Army and Air National Guard and facilities for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Charles Hartman was hospitalized in December 1940 and soon retired from the Army. He died on Feb. 14, 1962. He belongs to the Quartermaster Hall of Fame.

Images: German troops marching in Paris By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-036-09A / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483600. Photos of Camp Edwards courtesy Library of Congress. This story updated in 2022.

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The True Story of the Jenny Lind Tower (and a Few Good Tall Tales)

People often wonder how and why the Jenny Lind Tower ended up on the sand dunes of North Truro, Mass. It’s an improbable sight, a medieval stone tower like a rook on a chessboard, rising high above the scrub oak of the Outer Cape. Even odder, it stands next to a radar tower that looks like an upside-down ice cream cone, a feature of the North Truro Air Force Station.

You can’t really get close to the Jenny Lind Tower, as no road or footpath leads to it, but you can see it from the Highland Links golf course.

The Jenny Lind Tower

It’s named after Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano. P.T. Barnum brought her to the United States in 1850 for a 15-month concert tour. Lind dreamed of raising enough money for free schools throughout Sweden, so she agreed to the exhausting, but lucrative tour.

Her tour had a lasting impact on both the United States and Sweden. Baby cribs and cottage furniture bear her name, and so do parks, streets and a town in California. She did pay for free schools in her native country. And a couple of legends about her persist on the Outer Cape.

The Jenny Lind Tower Story

Before Jenny Lind arrived in the U.S., Barnum mounted a publicity blitz promoting “the Swedish Nightingale.” Lindmania swept the country. When her ship docked in New York, as many as 40,000 people greeted her on the piers.

Barnum saw to it that people could buy all sorts of Lind merch. A grocer in Lynn, Mass., sold Jenny Lind sausages. A Boston barroom opened under the name Jenny Lind Hotel. You could buy Jenny Lind change purses, watches and shoes. A Jenny Lind tea kettle even sang after a few minutes on the stove.

Lindmania reached a fever pitch by the time she reached Boston, where she gave several concerts. The biggest venue was the Fitchburg Railroad Depot, which had a second-floor auditorium.

P.T. Barnum

Barnum, typically, oversold the tickets for the Fitchburg Depot concert. That angered the people who couldn’t get in and they began to riot. So Jenny Lind climbed to the top of the railroad depot’s stone tower and began to sing, calming the crowd.

A railroad lawyer from Boston, Henry M. Aldrich, got swept up in Lindmania and attended that concert. Then in 1925, fire destroyed much of the railroad depot. Two years later, Aldrich paid to have one of the still-standing towers removed to land he owned on Cape Cod.

So goes the story.

The Fitchburg Railroad Depot

The Real Story

But Henry M. Aldrich could not have seen the Jenny Lind concert at the Fitchburg Depot in 1850. He wouldn’t be born until 1867.

Perhaps his father had seen the Swedish Nightingale. The senior Aldrich, like his son, was a lawyer for the Fitchburg Railroad. So Henry M. Aldrich probably had the tower moved to Truro because of his family’s association with the railroad, not with Jenny Lind.

In 1927, Henry Aldrich and his wife May bought property in Truro. They then hired five men to rebuild the Jenny Lind Tower on it. Eventually they built five cottages on their 100-acre property around the tower.

According to the only record of anyone using it, Aldrich and his family climbed it to watch a solar eclipse in 1932.

When Henry Aldrich died, his children sold or donated the property to become part of the Cape Cod National Seashore.

What Really Happened

There really was a riot over Jenny Lind at the Fitchburg depot. An eyewitness, Charles G. Rosenberg, described what happened that night, Oct. 12, 1850, in his book, Jenny Lind in America. He did not, however, witness any singing from any tower.

Jenny Lind

The Fitchburg Depot was on Causeway Street, an unfashionable part of town. People weren’t allowed inside until 8 p.m., but many showed up two hours earlier. By 6:30 p.m., a thousand people surrounded the train depot. Many lost their wallets to the pickpockets who followed Jenny Lind and may have loved her even more than her audience did.

At 7:50 p.m., the crowd burst through the doors and up the narrow stairways. The surging mob tore coats off shoulders, crushed hats and ruined gowns. Some women fainted, wrote Rosenberg.

The auditorium had poor acoustics and poor visibility from many seats. When the orchestra began playing, few could hear it. Meanwhile, the heat rose to an intolerable degree, so people began smashing windows to let in cool air. The tumult then paused briefly when Jenny Lind appeared.

“I caught a few notes, with sufficient distinctness, to see that at the least, one half of her voice had been frightened out of her,” wrote Rosenberg.

During the evening, half of the hall had emptied, and the remaining half crammed to suffocation. What was more singular, he wrote, was that no one left until the end, even though they couldn’t hear or see anything.

Jenny Lind only got angry at Barnum the next day, after her fears had subsided.

Back to Boston

She made a return trip to Boston on the tour. At 31, Jenny Lind came back to secretly marry her 22-year-old piano accompanist, Otto Goldschmidt. Samuel Ward, her banker and brother of Julia Ward Howe, had offered his home in Louisburg Square for the ceremony.

Jenny Lind and Otto Goldschmidt

Goldschmidt was a serious musician, not a boy toy. They’d known each other for six years. He came from a wealthy German Jewish family and had studied under Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann.

On May 29,1852, the couple left for home in Europe. They had three children and lived – it’s true – happily ever after.

Ghosts of the Jenny Lind Tower

But there’s another legend associated with the Jenny Lind Tower. It has to do with Black Sam Bellamy, the pirate who died in a shipwreck off Cape Cod (and whose bones may have been recently discovered). Bellamy had a mistress, Maria Hallett, who gave birth to Bellamy’s baby. The child died and she spent a short time in jail.

According to local lore, she lost her mind or withdrew from society and moved to a shack in Wellfleet. People called her ‘Goody Hallett’ or ‘The Witch of Wellfleet.’ Today her ghost is said to haunt the Outer Cape. At sundown she screams and curses at the passing ships. The ghost of Jenny Lind then climbs the tower to sing and drives away Goody Hallett. Or maybe she sings to calm the rage of Goody Hallett.

Image of Jenny Lind Tower: By Kevin Rutherford, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15579473. Jenny Lind Tower poster By Chemical Engineer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62154874. This story last updated in 2022.

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Mr. Marconi Builds a Radio Station on Cape Cod and Comes to the Rescue of the Titanic

On Jan. 18, 1903, Guglielmo Marconi sent a message from his Cape Cod station, the first radio transmission to cross the Atlantic from the United States.

Nine years later, his Cape Cod wireless station would send a message to the Carpathian, requesting its help in rescuing survivors of the sinking Titanic.

Marconi was a 29-year-old Italian nobleman whose ambition, inventiveness and love of fine food took him to a windy cliff in South Wellfleet, Mass.

He aimed to transmit news and private messages to ships sailing the Atlantic that paid for the service. By the time his invention played a key role in rescuing the RMS Titanic‘s passengers, Marconi had a monopoly on the business.

Marconi

Born April 25, 1874, Marconi made his first wireless transmission at the age of 20 by making a bell ring across a room.

Guglielmo Marconi

After his successful bell experiment, he went outside on his father’s estate and transmitted signals a mile and a half away. He gradually figured out how to send wireless signals over longer and longer distances.

He moved to England with his mother, where he managed to send a signal 3.7 miles over Salisbury Plain in 1897. Two years later, his signal crossed the English Channel. He then went to the United States to demonstrate his wireless signal, sending reports of the America’s Cup race off Sandy Hook, N.J., to the New York Herald.

In December 1902, Marconi sent a signal from a station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, to his station in Cornwall, England, the first radio transmission to cross the Atlantic from North America.

But he had bigger ambitions: a U.S. wireless station that would compete with the undersea cables that crossed the Atlantic.

South Wellfleet

The inventor had spent months hunting for the right land on which to build his first U.S. station. He searched along the coasts of New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. He wanted a remote spot, but not too far from drinking water, labor, supplies, a rail line and a hotel.

In February 1901, Marconi arrived in Provincetown with his assistants. A Cape Codder named Ed Cook showed them around in his wagon.

When Cook took him to Highland Light in North Truro, Marconi believed he found his spot. But the locals thought Marconi was a charlatan and refused to sell him land.

Wellfleet

Next they went to South Wellfleet, where Marconi found an eight-acre parcel of land on top of a 130-foot cliff. Wellfleet Harbor was nearby, and so was a railroad station and a telegraph office.

Marconi in 1901

Cook owned the land. Marconi bought it from him for a song, then made him general contractor. While laying plans for the station, Marconi stayed at a nearby inn, but couldn’t stand the food. He earned a lasting reputation as a snob among the locals because he had food and wine shipped from Boston and New York.

Marconi left Richard Vyvyan to supervise construction of the station, including cottages, a transmitter building, a kerosene engine and an array of antennae mounted on 20 200-foot masts.

Men called riggers built the masts as they swayed in the slightest breeze. The locals predicted the masts wouldn’t withstand the first Atlantic storm. They were right.

When the station was finally finished, the transmitter sent off such a spark it could be seen four miles away. It made a sharp, deafening crack that forced workers to cover their ears. The electricity escaped through drainpipes and stove flues, even the clothesline. The housekeeper grew used to getting a shock when she hung up the washing.

In late November, a nor’easter struck Cape Cod and toppled the masts, nearly killing Richard Vyvyan. Another crashed through the roof of the transmitting room.

Success, And a Rescue

Marconi decided to rebuild the station, with four 210-foot towers that supported the antennae. By January 1903, it was ready.

He sent a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII in London. It praised wireless telegraphy and greeted the monarch.

Edward replied from Sandringham with thanks and good wishes.

RMS Titanic

Marconi raced to notify the press, and congratulations poured into Cape Cod.

Marconi realized the South Wellfleet station was unstable, and built a new station in Chatham.

The company had put its operators and equipment on board some of the most prestigious ocean liners of the day. Two Marconi operators aboard the Titanic sent distress messages for several hours after the ship struck an iceberg. A neighboring vessel, the Carpathia, received the messages and steamed 58 miles to rescue 700 passengers.

After an inquiry into the tragedy, the U.K.’s postmaster-general concluded, “Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi…and his marvelous invention.”

Today, little is left of the Wellfleet station. Much of it was dismantled during World War I as a security measure. The sea claimed much of the rest of it. The site is now part of the Cape Cod National Seashore and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo of the remains of the Marconi Station in Wellfleet by Flffy’d. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. With thanks to Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. This story was updated in 2022.

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Black Sam Bellamy, The Pirate Who Fought Smart, Harmed Few, Scored Big

Black Sam Bellamy became the wealthiest pirate in history not because of greed but because of anger – anger at the English system that exploited poor country boys and sailors like him.

British press gang

After his early death in 1717 he left a legacy of folklore on Cape Cod and a ship loaded with treasure off its coast. In 1984, treasure hunters found his ship and in 2018 archaeologists believed they found his remains.

Black Sam Bellamy ran his pirate operation democratically. His men were slaves and Indians and sailors pressed into service. Bellamy treated them equally and let them vote on important decisions.

In a famous speech attributed to Bellamy, he scorned the wealthy merchants he plundered: “They rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.”

Pirate historians have traced Bellamy’s career, summarized by Colin Woodard as ‘Fight smart, harm few, score big.’

Robin Hood of the Sea

Bellamy and his crew captured 53 ships before he died in a shipwreck at 28. They called him Black Sam Bellamy because he eschewed the fashion for powdered wigs and wore his black hair tied with a black satin bow. He had good manners, dressed neatly in fancy clothes, and he always wore four ornate dueling pistols in his sash.

Black Sam Bellamy called himself ‘Robin Hood of the Sea,’ and his men called themselves ‘Robin Hood’s men.’ There is no record of him ever killing a captive, and he often returned captured ships and cargo if they didn’t suit his purpose.

We know little of Black Sam Bellamy’s early life, though he is presumed to have been born in Devon in the west of England. The woman who was probably his mother died in childbirth and was buried Feb. 23, 1689. His parents were likely tenant farmers, hovering on the edge of starvation like half of England.

Bellamy left home at a young age for a port – London, Bristol or Plymouth. He became a ship’s boy at 13 at the outset of the War of Spanish Succession. By the end of the war in 1712 he was a skilled sailor.

Turn to Piracy

Gold recovered from the Whydah

No one knows how Black Sam Bellamy ended up on board a British ship. A press gang may have grabbed him. In the early 18^th century, Britain didn’t have anywhere near enough sailors. The press gangs tricked country boys into signing up or simply kidnapped and forced them on board ships.

Once in service, ship captains routinely cheated sailors of their wages. They gave the sailors vague IOUs instead of wages, or paid them for their last voyage just before they left port for the next. Sometimes they simply didn’t pay them at all.

Black Sam Bellamy sailed to Cape Cod in 1714 or early 1715 to seek his fortune, arriving in Eastham where he may have had relatives. There he had an affair with the beautiful Maria Hallett, all of 15. After impregnating Maria he sailed to Florida to recover Spanish treasure with his friend from Rhode Island, Paulsgrave Williams. Others got to the treasure first.

The two men turned to piracy under Benjamin Hornigold, but the crew mutinied and elected Bellamy as their captain.

Hen-hearted Numbskulls

In 1717 Bellamy and his crew captured the Whydah Gally, a slave ship he refitted as a flagship with 28 guns. The Whydah had an advanced weapons system capable of attacking any man-of-war in the Americas.

In a year, Black Sam Bellamy and his crew raided 54 ships along the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. All in all they captured treasure worth $120 million today, according to Forbes magazine. That made him the top-earning pirate.

The Whydah Gally also captured a sloop under the command of a Capt. Beers. Black Sam Bellamy wanted to let him keep his ship, but his crew had voted to burn it. Bellamy asked the captain to join the pirates, and Beers declined. That allegedly inspired the speech attributed to the pirate:

I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you.

Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls.

They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?

Black Sam Bellamy Lost and Found

Map of the Whydah wreck

The Whydah and the Mary Anne, commanded by Williams, headed north to New England. Williams and the Mary Anne broke off to Rhode Island, where he wanted to visit his family. Bellamy continued on, perhaps to Eastham to see Maria, but a terrific Nor’easter on April 26, 1717 wrecked the Whydah off the coast of Wellfleet. Black Sam Bellamy and all but two of the 142 men on board perished.

Eventually, 102 of the bodies from the Whydah Gally were buried in a mass grave. The Mary Anne was shipwrecked a few days later, leaving seven survivors.

In 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford rediscovered the Whydah in 14 feet of water and five of sand. The Whydah’s artifacts can be seen at Expedition Whydah Sea-Lab & Learning Center in Yarmouth, Mass.

Since Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah, archaeologists continued to search the site. In 2018 they announced they may have found the remains of Black Sam Bellamy himself.

Legacies

The U.K. Telegraph reported scientists found a femur encased in a mass of iron, stone, silver, gold, tools and weapons. They also found pieces of a crushed helmet, indicating a violent death. And they discovered an ornate pistol wrapped in a ribbon that probably belonged to Black Sam Bellamy.

In 2016, an Englishman from Devon came to the Whydah Pirate Museum with documents that showed he was descended from Black Sam Bellamy. Scientists from the University of New Haven tested the bones for a DNA match with the presumed descendant. They found the man’s DNA didn’t match Sam Bellamy’s.

However, in 2021, investigators from the Pirate Museum announced they’d found six pirate skeletons in hard masses of minerals from the shipwreck site. Clifford said he hoped to identify the pirates and connect them with any descendants.

Black Sam Bellamy did leave another legacy. Maria Hallett gave birth to Bellamy’s baby, who died. She spent a short time in jail. According to local lore, she lost her mind or withdrew from society and moved to a shack in Wellfleet. People called her ‘Goody Hallett’ or ‘The Witch of Wellfleet.’ Today a meadow in Wellfleet is known as Goody Hallett Meadow.

With thanks to The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard. This story about Black Sam Bellamy was updated in 2023.

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