Before the summer folks

Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in the years when Thoreau walked the peninsula— 1849, 1850 and 1855.

“The time must come when this coast (Cape Cod) will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of, — if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport, — I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in Cape Cod, first published in 1865, soon before railroads started to make The Cape a major summer-resort area.

At New Silver Beach, in Falmouth, on the western side of The Cape — probably not quite what Thoreau could have foreseen.