page_title: Long Point (Cape Cod)
section_title: Challenges
hierarchical_section_title: Long Point (Cape Cod) / Challenges
caption_attribution_description: Town of Provincetown, before and after the railroad. Most notably, there were no roads in/out of town until the US government artificially sealed off the Eastern Harbor. This was done so as to prevent storm washout from breaching the northernmost part of that harbor; a breach would have made Provincetown an island permanently, and would have destroyed the valuable harbor. This later provided the foundation for the railroad to finally come to Provincetown in 1873, and for a formal road in 1877. Top (1835) map extracted from "A Map Of The Extremity Of Cape Cod Including the Townships of Provincetown &amp; Truro: A Chart Of Their Sea Coast And Of Cape Cod Harbour, State of Massachusetts", by the U.S. Topographical Engineers (later were rolled into the US Army Corps of Engineers. Grolltech: Colorized and reoriented with north to top of page. Bottom (1887) map extracted from "Massachusetts, Provincetown Sheet", by the US Geological Survey. See individual file pages for more details about the original works.
context_page_description: Long Point is a peninsula located in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the extreme tip of Cape Cod, as it curls back in on itself to create Provincetown Harbor. The Long Point Light was built on this point in 1827. The lighthouse once shared this peninsula with a settlement of fishermen that came to be known as Long Point, Massachusetts. This Provincetown village grew and thrived from 1818 until the late 1850s. When the settlers decided to leave Long Point, they took most of their houses with them – about 30 structures in all – by floating them across the harbor.
  During the American Civil War, the military established a defensive coastal artillery post and garrison at this location. The Long Point Battery came to be known as "Fort Useless" and "Fort Ridiculous" among the local residents.
  Today, Long Point is a ghost village – nothing remains, except for the lighthouse and an earthen mound, the last remnant from the earlier military post.
context_section_description: Production of salt did not retain its lucrative luster for long, however, for downward price pressures had hit that industry from several angles. For one, the completion of the Erie Canal in 1830 meant a sharp increase in competition from companies that were mining massive salt deposits in Syracuse, New York.  Local competition had increased as well – by 1837, Provincetown had 78 saltworks, and the selling price had fallen from a high of eight dollars per bushel at the turn of the nineteenth century, down to only one dollar. Around that same time, demand for salt-cured fish began to decline, yielding to a growing consumer preference for ice harvesting and storage.  John Atwood Jr., the son of Long Point's founder, boasted that "In 1848 I brought the first mackerel ever received on ice to Boston. It was August. I took them in the sloop smack American Eagle."  He later pioneered the use of a jib topsail to shorten his time-to-market, so as to meet the growing appetite for fresh-caught fish.
   
  Living on Long Point presented its own share of challenges as well. The geography of Provincetown as a whole made for an isolating existence throughout most of its history, as the town was essentially cut off, not just from the mainland, but in many ways, even from neighboring towns on Cape Cod.  The town was surrounded by water in every direction:
  Atlantic Ocean, to the north
  Massachusetts Bay to the northwest
  Cape Cod Bay to the west and southwest
  Provincetown Harbor to the south and southeast
  East Harbor and a salt marsh to the east
  Until late in the 19th century, there was not a single road leading in or out of Provincetown – the only way to travel by land to the rest of Cape Cod was to first head north, traversing a series of tall, rolling sand dunes, and to then follow the thin strip of beach along the northern shore line, known as the "backshore".  A wooden bridge was erected over the East Harbor in 1854, only to be destroyed by a winter storm and ice two years later.  Although the bridge was replaced the following year, a traveler using it still had to traverse several miles over a sand route, which, together with the backshore route, would occasionally be washed out by storms.  Prior to the railroad's arrival in 1873, Provincetown was like an island, in that it relied almost entirely upon the sea for its communication, travel, and commerce needs.  All of this was doubly true of Long Point, being isolated from its own nearest neighbor, the rest of the town of Provincetown.  To reach the closest edge of town from Long Point by land, one had to make a difficult trek across a 3-mile (4.8 km) beach route past Wood End to Herring Cove, and then another mile (1.6 km) over continuously shifting sand dunes.  To complicate matters, portions of that route were underwater twice each day with the high tide.
  Although salt was plentiful, there was no source of fresh water on Long Point.  Plank cisterns were built throughout the village to collect and store rain water for daily use.  During periods of drought, barrels of water had to be filled up in Provincetown, and then transported over to the point.
  Beyond the challenges imposed by the occasional drought, however, the residents of Long Point came to recognize the potential for a much greater natural force – one that threatened to impact them with little advance warning.  While Long Point provides a natural barrier to protect Provincetown and its harbor from many storm hazards, the point bears the brunt of such a storm when it does so:
  This sickle of sand which encloses one of the finest harbors on the North Atlantic was so narrow that encroaching storms played havoc with it and threatened at one time to sweep the narrow point away.  It was too valuable a harbor to be destroyed and the government took it over.
  — Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and the town: a Provincetown chronicle (1942)
caption: The East Harbor isolated Provincetown from other towns (top), until the railroad arrived in 1873[12][20]
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