There was gold in that....
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
My favorite dead New England business is the Pacific Guano Company., which had a big factory (exactly where you now get the ferries to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket) in the Woods Hole section of Falmouth. There it processed bird, er, waste from Pacific islands into high-grade fertilizer by mixing it with menhaden and other fish. It stank, but made some local fortunes in its 1859-1889 life. (Some of my ancestors, descendants of Cape Cod Quakers, were investors.)
A shortage of guano and the arrival of new, man-made chemical fertilizers ended the company’s short life and the Yankee owners moved on to other trades, such as building big summer places for the new rich from Boston.
New Englanders have usually known when to move on from aging industries, such as textiles and shoes, to advancing ones, such as electronics, computer software, pharmaceuticals, investment firms (e.g., Fidelity) and even oyster aquaculture.
My Cape Cod -- from rural to suburban
The Bourne Bridge, over the Cape Cod Canal, with the Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge in the distance.
From Robert Whitcombs's "Digital Diary','' in GoLocal24com
We went down to the Cape the other day to stay with a cousin in a house on a harbor on Buzzards Bay. I thought of how much the Cape had changed since my boyhood, in the ‘50s. Then, much of it was truly rural, with small farms and many cranberry bogs. There were no superhighways. Approaching from Boston’s southeastern suburbs, you’d go down Route 3A, which would become increasingly rustic as you headed south, with farm stands and general stores. The closer we got to the Cape Cod Canal, the more the air smelled like pine, as we entered a state forest.
Then the excitement of crossing the Sagamore Bridge onto an island/peninsula then devoid of big box stores, malls and gated retirement communities and on to my paternal grandparents’ gray-shingled house in the village of West Falmouth, the land of which some of my Quaker ancestors had bought from the Indians in the 1600’s. Then, if there were still time, to the beach, where the water was much cleaner and warmer than in Massachusetts Bay, and where the private bathhouse would get destroyed from time to time in hurricanes, to whichBuzzards Bay is particularly vulnerable.
After that, getting some ice cream from the village’s one and only general store. Then maybe a trip to Woods Hole the next day to see the aquarium of the world-famous Oceanographic Institution there. Woods Hole was where some of my ancestors built boats and partnered in the Pacific Guano Co., where bird excrement from Pacific Islands was processed with fish meal to make what was considered in the 19th Century the best fertilizer. Nowadays, it’s hard to think of Woods Hole as a factory town. Rather, it’s now in effect a college town.
As for West Falmouth, while it’s still almost as pretty as it was 60 years, it’s a ghost town to me since virtually everyone I knew there has died or otherwise gone elsewhere.
Or we occasionally approached the Cape from the west, on Route 6, with its strips of clam shacks, cheap motels and kitschy tourist-oriented gift stores. Ugly, but delightful to young children. Now, of course, you miss the local and often tacky texture on the boring big divided highways. And these highways draw in so much out-of-region traffic that the traffic jams on the two road bridges (there’s also the beautiful railroad bridge) mean driving to the Cape can take considerably longer now than in the ‘50s.
Because of that and because too much of this glacial moraine now looks like exurbia or suburbia, we don’t makemany visits anymore to Olde Cape Cod. Still, the air down there still has a certain luminosity.