Bas Relief Park
Signing the Compact, etched by a 2015 storm. [Courtesy of Det. Rich Alves]
[2010, Dunlap]
[2010, Dunlap]
[2008, Dunlap]
[2010, Dunlap]
Text last updated on 4 February 2024 | The centerpiece of Town Green is Signing the Compact, better known as the Bas Relief. The park and monument date from 1920, the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landfall. The 170-foot-wide park property, once occupied by houses, was taken by the state to create a vista of the Pilgrim Monument.
The bronze relief, 16 by 9 feet, was designed by Cyrus Dallin and cast by the Gorham Manufacturing Company. It had a haunting quality in the winter of 2015, when Det. Rich Alves of the Provincetown Police Department captured it in this photo. (Nota bene: It’s a color photo.)
As a notable historical footnote, Dallin was also the sculptor of Massasoit, otherwise known as Ousamequin, who led the Wampanoag sachemship at the time of the Pilgrims’ arrival. The original of the monumental bronze was erected in Plymouth in 1921.
Nearby are a memorial to five Mayflower passengers who died while the ship lay in the harbor, and a tablet with the compact’s text, in which some have seen early stirrings of American democracy.
(Years ago, other stirrings in the densely wooded park involved sexual escapades, some of whose participants ended up in jail — just across Bradford Street in Town Hall.)
The absence is conspicuous of a memorial acknowledging the presence on this land many centuries before the Pilgrims’ arrival of the Wampanoag people. An effort was begun in 2016, but dissolved three years later amid bad feelings. Town Manager Alex Morse told The Provincetown Independent in October 2022: “I believe there is still interest in doing something. It’s just a matter of identifying the time and resources to do it.”1
¶ Republished on 17 September 2023.
1 “Wampanoag Monument Plans Stalled but Not Forgotten,” by Paul Benson, The Provincetown Independent, 5 October 2022.
Town Green (106 Bradford Street) on the Town Map, showing property lines.