For a small fee during the summer months, anyone can have access to this pristine beach, it’s blue Atlantic, it’s long sands, and it’s commanding high bluffs. Some three to four million people visit the National Seashore every year. And there was a danger of development taking off and turning the place into more, more densely populated coastal areas.īut at this point in the mid 1950s, there was still a 40-mile or so unbroken stretch of outer beach that, for the National Park Service, was enticing because it offered a lot of public recreation to people within a day’s drive of this area.ĭave Fraser: In 1955, a first term Senator from Massachusetts sponsored a bill that would largely serve as the framework for the seashore legislation.That senator would become President, and in 1961 signed the bill into law, creating the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Land was still available and still inexpensive. But in coming here, they changed the very thing they were seeking.īill Burke, Cape Cod National Seashore: Cape Cod was at a crossroads in the 1950s, for sure. People wanted what the Cape offered: its rural character and its unfettered access to the sea. Fishing built towns like Truro and Provincetown in the mid 19th century.īy 1920, Cape Cod boasted just under 27,000 residents. And he said that the writing has to have rhythms just like the waves.ĭave Fraser: The water has always been the Cape’s calling card. He talked about the rhythms of the waves, how they came in in threes. I was told by one of his friends that nature and writing were synonymous with him. He said he had a rather amateurish enthusiasm for windows, “I had ten.” So, he had a house built, out on what is now Coast Guard Beach. And the more he was out there, the more he fell in love with the place. Cummings, Jack Kerouac, Mary Oliver, and perhaps most importantly, Henry Beston, whose 1928 book, The Outermost House, chronicled the outer beaches, dunes, wetlands and harbors, and awoke Cape Codders to a landscape that needed protection.ĭon Wilding: He was out there in the middle of this beautiful natural setting that he had always - it had always appealed to him, but he never got to experience it. Literary giants like Eugene O’Neill, e.e. ‘Cause Every time you go to the beach it’s a rediscoveryĬape Cod Resident: When people go out to the Dunes or to Race Point or Herring Cove and you watch a sunset or a sunrise, you’ve never seen anything like it.ĭave Fraser: Spending time on the Outer beach can induce a feeling of enchantment that led visitors, especially writers and artists, to feel themselves re-imagined while they were there. Guest # 1: I had no idea, you know, living in Chatham here as a kid, that there was this sort of wider Cape Cod.īill Burke, Cape Cod National Seashore: The waves are always shaping, reshaping, building up, taking away. Producer Dave Fraser explores the rich history of this area, and how it invited visitors to experience a different kind of seaside - unpolished and undeveloped.ĭave Fraser: ‘A grand place to be alone and undisturbed’ is how playwright Eugene O’Neill described the outer beaches of Cape Cod, a 40 mile stretch along the outside of the hooked elbow that shelters Cape Cod Bay.ĭon Wilding, Cape Cod Historian: This was a - probably one of the most treacherous areas along the East Coast because of the way Cape Cod sticks out. While it has drawn vacationers and artists to its shores for a long time, for many years this part of the Massachusetts coast was unprotected. Zydalis Bauer, Connecting Point: If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Cape Cod every summer, it’s difficult to imagine a time when it was simply a home for settlers and fishermen.

This story originally aired on August 6, 2021. Producer Dave Fraser explores the rich history of this area, and how it invited visitors to experience a different kind of seaside: unpolished and undeveloped. The new park set aside what would become more than 43,000 acres from the elbow of Chatham to the tip of Provincetown.

Kennedy formally signed into law the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore. That changed on August 7, 1961, when native son and then-President John F. If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Cape Cod every summer, it’s difficult to imagine a time when it was simply a home for settlers and fishermen.

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