Matt Clark

A contingent of anti-submarine boats was stationed at the Provincetown Naval Base for the duration of the First World War—to the very vocal distress of townspeople, who complained that the submarine activity was interfering with the weir fishing going on in...

On May 15, 1602, English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold dropped anchor in a broad harbor he called “Shoal Hope,” meaning “shallow harbor”; we call it Provincetown. (Ironically, it’s one of the world’s deepest natural harbors; what did Gosnold know?)...

Charles W. Hawthorne was the son of a Maine sea captain who arrived in Provincetown in 1899 after studying painting in New York; he was attracted to the light. Living here was cheaper than New York: fishermen’s wives and widows were renting rooms and sheds...

Provincetown’s fishing fleet has traditionally gone after tuna, cod, haddock, and striped bass, but for many years it’s mackerel—a migratory fish arriving off the Cape in summer—that was one of the area’s primary catches.   The mackerel...

He had lived alone for years in one of the dune shacks on Provincetown’s back shore, but poet Harry Kemp spent his last days in a cottage on Howland Street built by his friend Sunny Tasha especially for him. He died on August 8, 1960, of a cerebral...

Between Lancy’s Wharf and the engine house of the Colonial Cold Storage plant is a three-story building that once housed the Old Reliable Fish House restaurant and pier, now a forlornly abandoned near-ruin. The structure was a prominent pier from the...

The first Catholics in Provincetown were Irish, and had come here to work in fish-related industries such as salt works and flake yards. There were only 70 of them in 1851, but with the influx of Portuguese families, by 1887 there were 1,730 Catholics in...