History Archives

Provincetown History Snippet: The Provincetown Airport

August 23, 2019

History

Constructed in the 1940s, with a runway first paved in 1948, the Provincetown Municipal Airport consists of developed airside and landside areas maintained for airport facilities and operations, surrounded by undeveloped areas that consist of grasslands,...

Provincetown History Snippet: Who is Dorothy Bradford?

August 16, 2019

History

Dorothy May Bradford was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, about 1597, the daughter of Henry and Katherine May. At the age of 16, she married 23-year old William Bradford in Amsterdam, and returned with her husband to take up residence in Leiden,...

Provincetown History Snippet: Who Are John Reed and Louise Bryant?

August 2, 2019

History

Few people have lived through such earth-changing times; journalist John Reed famously wrote about “ten days that shook the world” in reference to the Russian Revolution, which he and Louise Bryant both observed first-hand; but before that, they...

Provincetown History Snippet: Whorf’s Wharf

July 26, 2019

History

The long line of Whorf fishermen and sea captains goes back to John Whorf, born in Provincetown in 1760. Thomas Ryder Whorf Jr, who lived between 1815 and 1887, built the famous 400-foot-long Whorf’s Wharf (apparently no one thought anything of the odd...

Provincetown History Snippet: What Are The Mudheads?

July 19, 2019

History

In the late 19th century, summer art colonies were becoming increasingly popular. Charles Hawthorne selected Provincetown as the site for his summer school, and he taught his students to do plein-air paintings—paintings out of doors. A model would sit on a...

Provincetown History Snippet: Useless and Ridiculous

July 12, 2019

History

During the Civil War, two defensive batteries were built on Long Point to protect Provincetown’s valuable harbor from a possible Confederate blockade. The batteries were essential: Provincetown had strategic importance for the war and both the fishing fleet...

Provincetown History Snippet: Church, Museum…. Library?

July 5, 2019

History

The building that is now the Provincetown Public Library started out in 1860 as the Center Methodist Episcopal Church, and was already famous: with a 900-person capacity, it was the United States’ largest Methodist church! The church was abandoned and then...

Provincetown History Snippet: Who is Stanley Kunitz?

June 28, 2019

History

Kunitz attended Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. degree in 1926 and an M.A. in 1927. While working as an editor, he contributed poems to magazines, eventually compiling them in his first book, Intellectual Things. He served in the army during...

Provincetown History Snippet: A Long-Lost Poem

June 21, 2019

History

Marie Louise Hersey was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1894 and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1916. In Modern Verse (1921), author Anita Forbes writes, “In few towns along the New England coast is the contrast between the old America and the...

Provincetown History Snippet: Who Are The Provincetown Players?

June 14, 2019

History

There’s community theatre… and then there’s community theatre. Only the Provincetown Players could boast producing one Nobel prize and five Pulitzer prizes, though as Mary Heaton Vorse said, “No group of people ever had less sense of...