Search Results for: History Snippets

On September 16, 1620, a ship called the Mayflower left from Plymouth, England, to voyage to America—the New World.   Everyone on the Mayflower was looking for something. Some wanted a fresh start, an economic opportunity; others sought religious freedom. While they were not united in their religious convictions, the passengers became colloquially known as...

During the mid-to-late 1800s, towns in Massachusetts started building municipal halls complete with auditoriums as a way to end the practice of meeting in churches (to officially separate “church and state”) and Provincetown Town Hall was built with a large auditorium used for town meetings and a plethora of other activities, including roller skating, basketball...

In one of the saddest chapters of Provincetown history, six remaining survivors inside a sunken U. S. Navy submarine tapped out a message to divers working to free them: “Is there any hope?” There wasn’t. The submarine, the S-4, had just completed a measured mile exercise off Wood End on December 17, 1927 when it...

He loved birds. He also loved bronze, and the combination made for exceptional art created by William F. Boogar, Jr., a noted sculptor who studied in Provincetown with Charles Hawthorne and settled here permanently in 1933. He worked in the lost-wax method in his Provincetown foundry, creating graceful sculptures of gulls, sandpipers, and whales. His...

When they came ashore at what would become Provincetown, Mayflower passengers first encountered a native tribe called the Nauset. Part of the Algonquin, the Nauset lived on Cape Cod from Bass River east. They were non-nomadic and peaceable; there were no conflicts with Europeans until white explorers captured and enslaved native peoples. (In 1614 shortly...

This week we’re bringing you a different history snippet: Norman Mailer’s own words about the town, taken from Tough Guys Don’t Dance: The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the...

Helltown was a settlement south of Hatches Harbor, with 33 buildings, a fleet of 30 dories, and a working population of about 125 fishermen. When Mary Heaton Vorse asked a captain why it was called Helltown, he answered, “because of the helling that went on there.” The name could also have been due to the...

If you’re looking at the Provincetown Public Library, then you’re looking back in time! It started life as the Center Methodist Episcopal Church and was impressive for its time, with a 162-foot tower housing a bronze bell. The spire was damaged during the Portland Gale. In 1958 the building was sold to Walter P. Chrysler,...

The British man-of-war Somerset III terrorized the Cape area for some years up to and during the American Revolution, and was often anchored in Provincetown Harbor, where “boats frequently landed, and the officers helped themselves to water, provisions, and anything else that they wanted” (The Wreck of the Somerset, E.A. Grozier). It ran aground on...

Last year, the wreck of the pirate ship Whydah gave up part of her captain: a leg bone found in concretion is widely believed by archaeologists to belong to “Black Sam” Bellamy, New England’s most famous pirate, who became wealthy not because of greed but through anger at the exploitative English system. Bellamy knew this firsthand....