The following article is by the travel writer Sydney A. Clark and describes the history of the house up to around 1930. It is not known where or when the article appeared; the text and images come from photocopies of the printed article and contain no clues as to the publication. [Only one photo is good enough to include here. There are other photos appeared with the original article.]
As the pioneers built
A Cape Cod Home of the Late 17th Century
By Sydney A. Clark
My Cape Cod summers sometimes start in March and stretch to December. They are known as rubber summers by envious friends who think of the Cape only as a week-end paradise or as the “Cape Of The Blessed Fortnight,” stolen from the year’s grind in a city office. To me this curious clutching arm of pine-clad sand dunes is home. In particular an old colonial house near the Massachusetts Bay end of the ship canal is home. It was built in 1690, when Peregrine White, the first white child born in New England, was a hale old man of seventy years. He may even have seen it building for he lived in Marshfield only thirty miles distant.
In no essential is its appearance changed today from the form it took in Peregrine’s primitive day. To be sure plumbing, electricity and telephone have invaded its old timbers, but they have done so with circumspection and with deference due to the aged. The house, though troubled with dark suspicions, has been unable to keep the invaders at bay. It has nervously fingered its lovely old beaded woodwork around the windows. It has creaked its eighteen-inch floor boards in apprehension. It seems even to have lowered its ceiling beams in a perplexed frown. The Rogers group in the “front room” halts its eternal game of checkers to ask the grandfather clock what all this business means anyway. Wasn’t everything all right without these fancy and very dangerous innovations? How I wish I could put this house of ours into words that could talk to you. Tradition asserts categorically that it was built in 1690 but the builder's name is not certainly known, for all local deeds and records were destroyed in a fire which consumed the Barnstable County records some years ago. Apparently a man named Morey secured a land grant of thousands of acres from the British crown (recently donned by William III) and erected this pioneer home to shelter his family. The architect who designed it, very possibly Morey himself, did not set to work to build something in self conscious Colonial style. He merely built in the only way he knew, and the result breathes the spirit of that unhurried age when a house was definitely the product of craftsmen. The machine age, however clever at camouflage, cannot duplicate it.
Take, for instance, the hand carved woodwork around the library doors, windows and fireplace, with the beaded effect characteristic of New England. It is full of little imperfections and yet it is exquisite in the whole. It reflects the warmth and personality of the man whose rough hands fashioned it. Though crude and humble it is comparable in spirit to the handiwork on the miserere seats of any English cathedral, or, to be specific, the great church of Boston in Lincolnshire. In each case the artisan had plenty of time and enjoyed what he was doing.
There is a brooding quality about the whole house which must have spelt protection and comfort to the early dweller. It still spells coziness to us who dwell in it today. The outside door to the living room opens just under the roof. The rambler rose vine circles about the low kitchen door. The trumpet vine clambers easily to the roof tree. An enormous old patriarch grape vine, rooted in the very heart of the flagstone porch, dominates the whole front of the house and produces excellent Concords which depend in luscious clusters before all who enter our home in late September and October. In several of the rooms the ceiling beams are so low that six-footers have to duck their heads. The door of the “green room”, a bedroom upstairs, is so very low that one cannot walk erect through it if one is over ten years old. It has bumped the cranium of each adult in the family times without number, for we cannot believe it is really as low as it looks.
The dominant color of the house is white. Indeed snow color and “weather color” are the only possibilities for a Cape Cod exterior. The blinds are painted green to harmonize with the vines that run riot over all four sides. The interior too is addicted to egg-shell white and the wall papers are sober except in the “peacock room” where my mother tried a bizarre effect which has stood the test of twenty-five years. Vain peacocks dispute the walls with golden pheasants and other birds of brilliant plumage.
Our fireplace is our joy and pride, and
incidentally it furnishes the resilience for our rubber summers, for it
is the only heating apparatus the house boasts. It is really a
three-in-one affair, three separate fireplaces opening from the three
rooms into one vast central chimney. The largest fireplace swallows five
foot logs of birch, pine or apple tree as easily as a city dweller’s
fireplace swallows bits of kindling. On chill November days we often
burn a half a tree at a time, touching it off perhaps with a segment of
“fire-resisting roofing.” which flares up with a fine spectacular roar.
My mother had a Scotch couplet painted above the fireplace.
A sicht sae delightsome I trow I ne’er spied
As the bonnie blithe blink o’ my ain fireside.
My family has possessed this house a mere quarter of a century, perhaps ten per cent of its life up to now. When my father and mother first saw the place it was badly run down and was inhabited by a family of squatters who paid a nominal rent when and if they had the money. A friendly horse looked out of the kitchen window and whinnied at my parents as they approached. The legal business of acquiring the property was long and tedious but it was worth the trouble. The last two decades of my father’s life were enhanced beyond measure by his delight in “building back” the old place to its former estate. He even added a touch which Morey and the later inhabitants had unaccountably neglected, the Cape Cod windmill, designing it in the shape of those famous veterans which still exist at Yarmouth, Pocasset and elsewhere. As a concession to practicality he left it sailless and made the interior a three-story dormitory for use in family reunions, when we often have between a dozen and a score of the immediate family in unsolemn conclave assembled. My father saw, and passed on to our generation, the romance of the old house and the colorful persons who dwelt therein.
He also bequeathed some interesting old pieces of furniture which he had inherited from General Artemas Ward, not to be confused with the famous humorist, whose pen name was the same except for the spelling Artemus. Artemas Ward was appointed in 1775 commander-in-chief of the forces of Massachusetts Bay Colony by the local congress. Of course he never lived in the Cape Cod house of ours but his furniture looks as if it had always lived here. There is a gigantic walnut secretary, and a grandfather clock, each of which almost scrapes the ceiling. There is a highboy and a horsehair sofa. There are numerous characteristic chairs, including one ancient comb-back painted the color of dried-up mustard. How any Colonial general or his grandmother could ever have rested his or her head in any comfort on this lofty “comb” is more than I can understand. Perhaps Colonial necks were more swan-like than those of today.
A typical Colonial bit in the furnishings consists of a walnut fire screen perhaps eighteen inches square and adjustable to any height desired. It is intended to keep the hot glare of the open fire from the face of anyone who sits near it reading or “snoozing”. We use it all the time and cannot understand why an article so practical should be so utterly discarded by a practical age.
The romantic story of our home can be authenticated for nearly a hundred years by dwellers in the village. The fire which destroyed the county records did not destroy or even scorch their memories. Paul Crowell married Sally Sears in East Dennis, far out on the Cape, and the happy turtledoves sailed hither in a packet and made their love nest in the spot where I am writing. Paul begat and Sally bore sixteen children (or perhaps only fifteen as the more conservative descendants say) and the next to the youngest was Hiram who became, after enough decades, the “Grampa Crowell” of whom the village still talks.
Of course the story of the house, like that of every Cape Cod house, is intimately bound up with the sea and no prolonged sea story ever lacks its tragedies. Four of Hiram’s brothers were swallowed by the great deep and lost without trace, two at a time on two separate occasions. It is said that their mother, Sally Sears Crowell, out of the depths of a sorrowing heart, then made this pathetic vow, “Never hereafter shall my boys sail in pairs. Not more than one son to a ship. I will not let the sea take two at one.” (She still had eleven children left.)
I see the vision of Calvin Crowell, youngest of Paul and Sally’s sixteen children, bringing his parents a gift of a newfangled oil lamp with a wick that somehow drew up the oil and kept on burning without burning out until all the oil was gone. To Papa Paul and Mamma Sally it was an invention of the devil himself. They feared it and would have no traffic with it.
I can see Tom and Tempe, Shadrach, Aurelia and Noble, but I shall leave those visions and jump forward to a figure of the present moment, my mother, who is one of the most colorful persons that ever dwelt in the old house. In her eighty-fifth year her eye is not dimmed nor her natural strength one whit abated. Her enormous energy is the wonder of all who know her and the envy of juvenile grandmothers who feel old in their seventies.
My mother has two odd little men of terra cotta and iron, adorning the lawn. The terra cotta figure, given to her by a well known poet, she named Zaccheus because he was small of stature. Then she acquired the iron figure, which has a shockingly Rabelaisian cast of countenance. Mother liked him from the start but was perplexed as to a name. She thought him unworthy of any Bible name but figured that she could fall back on the Apocrypha. This she did, and the little iron man was named Tobit. The following is Tobit’s own modest appraisal of himself, “I, Tobit, have walked all the days of my life in the way of truth and justice, and I did many alms deeds to my brethren.” Frankly our Tobit does not look like that kind of man, but you never can tell.
My mother’s chief pride is her Ebenezer pile. Recalling that Samuel set up a stone to commemorate a victory over the Philistines and called it Ebenezer, meaning “Hitherto hath the Lord led us,” she set up a similar stone at the entrance to the grounds. I do not know what victory it commemorates unless it is man’s victory over the pernicious Cape Cod mosquito, which is now little more than a swinging memory. My mother makes it a social requirement that every visitor to her Cape Cod home shall add a stone to the Ebenezer pile and no one ever refuses. The pile grows year by year.
My visions have become the realities of today but perhaps a hundred years from now some dweller in this house will be seeing visions of my generation and will be writing down amusing anecdotes about our life in the motor car and radio age. The visions move in slow procession through the ages but the old house lingers on and lends its kindly shelter to all who come beneath its roof.