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Overview
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Provincetown is blessed
with an excellent harbor, which Vikings reportedly used on fishing voyages
as early as the 15th century. Provincetown was the site of the first landing
of the Mayflower, and the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower compact in the
harbor to codify the administration of the colony they intended to establish.
Although rich fishing
grounds resulted in the seasonal leasing of fisheries with licenses granted
for bass, mackerel and cod fishing, the first permanent settlement was
built in 1700. Provincetown grew very slowly during the 18th century,
and its population fluctuated with the price of fish. Farming was of secondary
importance and aside from the fishing industry, there were some salt works
and one mill.
In the forty years
a after the American Revolution, the town's population almost tripled.
By the middle of the 19th century, Provincetown had developed as the prime
maritime, fishing and commercial center of the Cape. The Civil War, which
destroyed so much New England business, provided more markets for Provincetown's
fish. Portuguese sailors, picked up by American ships in the Azores and
Cape Verde Islands to fill out their crews, came to Provincetown to live.
Additional Portuguese immigrants moved to town in the 19th century to
work on the whaling boats and coastal fishing vessels. In 1875, there
were 25 coastwise and 36 ocean vessels operating in town, more than any
community in the state including Boston. Provincetown was a bustling place
with all of the ancillary maritime businesses operating, such as ship
chandlers, shipwrights, sail makers, caulkers, riggers and blacksmiths.
The picturesque setting
and salt air also began attracting artists and writers by the end of the
19th century. Poets, novelists, journalists, socialists, radicals and
dilettantes formed a colony, which in 1915 opened the Provincetown Players
in a converted fish house on the wharf. Among the writers whose works
were performed there was Eugene O'Neill. When the fishing industry faltered
from competition with cheaper Nova Scotia cod, and the Portland Gale of
1898 swept away half of the town's wharves, the resort population of the
town provided jobs to take the place of those lost. In the 1920s the artistic
and literary productions gained an international reputation. Abandoned
sites of maritime businesses became the new homes of the seasonal visitor,
and sail lofts, warehouses and barns became studios, galleries and shops.
Today, the wealth of preserved historic buildings combines with the lure
of the sea to support a huge tourist and summer home industry.
(Narrative in part
courtesy of the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.)
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