Long Point settlement
Detail of a model of the Long Point settlement at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum. [2008, Dunlap]
A “floater” enamel plaque by Claude and Hank Jensen, showing a house floating across the harbor on a scow. Note the Long Point Light in the distance. These distinctive plaques mark homes that were originally constructed on the point. [2008, Dunlap]
Long Point Province Town and Location of Inhabitants in About 1857 is the map from which the Provincetown Encyclopedia takes its building location numbers. Note that the map shows the point upside down. [Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell 10:59 / Dowd Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4602]
The T-bone shape of the Lobster Plain is still apparent from the air. [2010, Dunlap]
Above: As the map shows, the Long Point settlement largely clustered around the T-bone-shaped Lobster Plain, which was then a body of water. Below: The sandy outline of the Lobster Plain can be discerned from this 3,000-foot view. It also resemble a whale fluke. [Google Earth]
The model at the Provincetown Museum. [2008, Dunlap]
Text last updated on 26 December 2023 | Long Point is perhaps best known as the site of a fishing village of that name in the first half of the 19th century. (This was not known as Helltown, despite what you might hear. The Helltown settlement — later and much smaller than Long Point — was situated at Herring Cove-Hatches Harbor.)
“Floaters,” the Long Point houses that were transported whole to the mainland aboard scows, are marked by Claude and Hank Jensen’s lovely blue-and-white plaques. They’re about the only vestiges of a community that once lived as close to the fishery as anyone could get without being in a school.
The fisherman John Atwood put up the first building at Long Point in 1818, according to Herman Jennings, followed by Prince Freeman and Eldridge Smith. Mackerel, shad, and bass were plentiful off shore, and could be hauled in by the barrelful with sweep seines. There was ample room at the point for salt evaporation works, an industry led by Eldridge Nickerson.
In 1822, Long Point recorded its first birth: Prince Freeman (another one). Smith’s son, Ed Walter, was born in 1851. By 1846, there were enough families to warrant a proper school, which doubled as the church. A post office was built, as was a bake house. John Atwood Jr. constructed a wharf and conducted a general store.
More than 50 buildings, including windmills for the salt works, were scattered around the Lobster Plain, whose T-shaped outline can still be discerned from the air. The population reached 200.
Universalism attracted its earliest adherents on the cape tip after Prince Freeman’s sisters, Elizabeth and Sylvia, rescued a copy of John Murray’s autobiography from the sea. They read his writings and then spread the good word themselves.
The celebrated naturalist Louis Agassiz arrived in 1852 to call on Nathaniel E. Atwood, a skilled ichthyologist.
But the fishing grounds were already being exhausted. The settlement was abandoned rapidly. Only two homes and the school house remained by the mid-1860s. Almost the entire hamlet was floated across the harbor.
John Atwood Jr.’s house landed at 6 Winthrop, Prince Freeman’s at 49 Commercial, Eldridge Smith’s at 301 Bradford, Nathaniel Atwood’s at 5 Nickerson. The bake house wound up at 18 Commercial, the post office at 256 Bradford and the school house at 329 Commercial (where it served as Arnold’s radio shop until it burned down in 1949).
The last known surviving inhabitant, Capt. Ed Walter Smith, died in 1960.
Provincetown Encyclopedia notes nearly 30 dwellings with respect to their approximate location in the Long Point settlement. The “Location No.” in the title block of each article corresponds to the key number of a hand-drawn map, Long Point Province Town and a Location of Inhabitants in About 1857, which can be found in the Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell (Book 10, Page 59) and in The Provincetown Book, by Nancy W. Paine Smith (Page 35). Neither source credits the map nor describes its provenance. Its reliability should be taken with a grain of salt. Or sand. The upland locations of the Long Point houses were compiled by the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum; again, without attribution.
Many popular assertions about the Long Point diaspora are questionable. Although there is a small cluster of genuine “floaters” around Point Street, the eminent town historian Irma Ruckstuhl cautions that there may not be too many more than that. She noted that the Jensens would typically oblige whomever asked for one of their enamel “floater” plaques. They certainly didn’t demand proof that the building to which the plaque would be affixed had been transported across the harbor on a scow. It’s my impression that more homes claim a Long Point provenance than could possibly have occupied that narrow spit.
And it should go without saying that the “floaters” in their current condition would scarcely be recognized by their original inhabitants, who would have known them as spartan and far more modest one-story dwellings. It’s also worth saying that a lot of what surrounds Long Point history is best described as “lore,” since trustworthy contemporary records are hard to come by.
But that seems fitting for a transitory, ephemeral place that was as much of the sea as of the land.
¶ Republished on 26 December 2023.