Whitehead Brothers Company sand pits
Loading area where sand from the Whitehead property was dumped into rail cars. Route 6 is in the middle foreground. [Posted by Salvador R. Vasques / Facebook / My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 9 April 2018]
The roadway and parking lot at the entrance to the sand pits is all that’s left of the Whitehead operation. That, and the sand. [2019, Dunlap]
Matt Connolly shared a photo of the Whitehead works captioned “Some of our family taking a tour with the operators there.” [Posted by Matt Connolly / Facebook / My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 10 June 2023]
This aerial view puts the Whitehead pits, right rear, into town context. Three cottage colonies in the foreground are, from left, Beach Point Village, Mayflower Cottages (set back from Commercial), and Bayberry Bend. [Posted by Joel Grozier / Facebook / My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 10 June 2023]
[2019, Dunlap]
This marker is presumably on the Provincetown town line. [2019, Dunlap]
Art’s Dune Tours vans use the sand pits as a point of embarkation. The Mount Gilboa Tank is in the distance. [2019, Dunlap]
View from the dune peaks over East Harbor and beyond. [2019, Dunlap]
[2019, Dunlap]
[2019, Dunlap]
[2019, Dunlap]
[2019, Dunlap]
[2019, Dunlap]
Text last updated on 22 January 2024 | As coal was to Newcastle, so was sand to Cape Cod — a seemingly inexhaustible commodity that would always be in demand elsewhere. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the chief excavator and exporter of sand from Provincetown was the Whitehead Brothers Company of New Jersey, which was founded in 1841 and is still in existence as Whibco.
A spur of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad was constructed specially to serve the sand pits, the local historian Joel Grozier said.1 Thousands of tons of Cape Cod sand were shipped off annually to industrial users. “A lot of that sand went southbound to New Jersey to machining factories,” Peter Robert Cook recalled.2 A lot of sand also went northward, to the Martin Marietta Corporation cement plant in Thomastown, Me., for use in bagged concrete, Linda Noons-Rose remembered.3 The Navy was a big customer, as the sand was useful for filtration.4 Residents also recalled the sand going to the Corning Glass Works in Corning, N.Y. While it was too coarse to be used in glass-making, Geoffrey Kane said, it may have been used for polishing or sandblasting.5
“The railroad cars were loaded by two dump trucks that were loaded by a mechanical shovel,” Don Wien wrote on Facebook. “I believe three men ran the operation. … The trucks traveled up a ramp, turned right or left, depending which side was being loaded, and backed up to the end of a ramp and dumped into the railroad cars.”6
What remains today is asphalt: a roadway and parking lot in a racetrack configuration. Everything else is gone but the sand itself.
The property didn’t begin its modern life as an industrial operation. Instead, it was envisioned in 1915 by Harley F. Williamson (1870-1941) of Springfield as the north half of a sprawling subdivision called East Harbor Beach. Around 200 building lots were plotted along the harborfront and at the western shore of East Harbor, separated by the tracks of the New Haven Line.
It’s unclear just how capable Williamson was of pulling off such an ambitious scheme. He seems to have owned a few properties in Springfield, but was managing a house furnishing store in the 1920s when he gave his title as treasurer of “Williamson & Lawson Sand Company.” That was the entity in 1924 that sold the East Harbor property to Whitehead Brothers.7
Francis W. Stark (1911-1996), who lived at 217 Bradford Street in 1950, was the local agent of Whitehead Brothers and foreman at the Mayflower Heights site. Chester O. Smith of 11A Conwell Street had been the foreman until his death in 1942.
Whitehead Brothers bought itself a good deal of good will in the 1950s by donating its clean sand to the Nickerson Street Playground (now the Chelsea Earnest Memorial Playground) at 1 Bradford Street and the Howland Street Playground (now the Mildred Greensfelder Playground) at 211½B Bradford Street. Upon the delivery of 200 tons of sand to the Nickerson Street Playground in 1952, A. Y. Gregory, the president of Whitehead, wrote a letter saying: “Our company has been in the sand business for 111 years and more than once we have been told by a customer that as a boy he played in sand furnished by the company.”8 (Evidently, Whitehead had no women customers in 1952.)
Mildred (Wood) Greensfelder (1904-1999) was the leading civic advocate of better and cleaner playgrounds — literally cleaner, since the Howland Street Playground was constructed where there had been a coal bin. Children often came home from the playground covered with coal dust. Clean beach sand was therefore a blessing, and Greensfelder was not above saying so publicly: “Since the loading of trucks to bring the sand from the pits involves the outlay of considerable amount of effort and time by the Whitehead Company’s busy agent, Francis Stark, this gift of sand is one which the townspeople should very much appreciate.”9
Good will was needed by Whitehead because even in the 1950s — which we tend to think of as an ecologically benighted age — there was growing alarm in town that the removal of thousands of tons of sands annually from Mayflower Heights had the makings of an environmental disaster. With the diminution of the dunes, it was feared, the Atlantic Ocean would be able to break through into East Harbor (also known as Pilgrim Lake), thus cutting Provincetown off from the rest of the Cape.
“The place where sand is being taken out by many railroad carloads every month has been called the ‘wrist’ of the Cape,” the Advocate said in a December 1954 editorial, presumably written by Paul G. Lambert (1894-1964), the publisher and managing editor. “The company taking the sand is carving it out of one of these high dunes … and when the cut-through is finally accomplished there will be a tunnel through which the winds will be able to move more sand than could be carted away in many days.”10
Selectman Frank Dears Henderson (1901-1964) was far more outspoken. In 1956, he sponsored an article in the Town Warrant that would have a) required a permit from the Board of Selectmen for the “removal of sand from the limits of the Town of Provincetown” and b) automatically denied such a permit “if the applicant is engaged in the business of giving, selling, or trading sand.”11 Whitehead Brothers wasn’t named, but it was obviously the target of the proposed legislation.
“This matter concerns the destruction of our dunes by greed for the almighty dollar, aided by the destructive forces of Nature when thrown off by man,” Henderson wrote in what amounted to a Page 1 Op-Ed piece to which the sympathetic Advocate gave a liberal amount of space. “Future generations will be faced with a water breach at the east extremities of our town when the bay and sea finally meet, as a consequence of man’s greed for that almighty dollar.”12
Whitehead’s chief public advocate seems to have been Ralph Snow Carpenter (1884-1970), best known today as the developer of the lovely Delft Haven cottage colony in the West End and as an outspoken bigot who railed against the presence of homosexuals in Provincetown. Carpenter ridiculed the notion that the excavation at Mayflower Heights posed any immediate — or even remote — danger. “Whitehead Brothers have been taking sand from this pit for 30 years,” he wrote in 1954.13 “They are progressing at the rate of eight feet a year. Understanding that the distance to the back shore, toward which they are digging, is 8,000 feet, it would take 1,000 years to reach the water.”
Henderson was unpersuaded. “This gentleman failed to consider the destructive and constructive forces of nature, but assumed that everything out in the dune area is static,” he answered. Nonetheless, Carpenter’s side prevailed. Henderson’s motion was defeated at Town Meeting.
The two adversaries tangled heatedly soon again, at a Special Town Meeting in July. This time, the issue was Whitehead’s proposed gift of $5,000 to the Town Infirmary at 26 Alden Street. Henderson said he could not approve the gift with a good conscience because he had been told to keep his mouth shut about his objections to the sand removal operations. “If you think this isn’t hush money to get your good will, then vote to approve it,” he told voters. Carpenter called him a liar. Both men were then denied the privilege of the floor. The measure passed, 64 to 2.14
But there was no denying that the tide of popular opinion was slowly turning against Whitehead Brothers, fueled in part by a desire to take over the New Haven Line’s right-of-way and turn it into a street (as finally happened with the mapping of Harry Kemp Way). John C. Van Arsdale Sr. (1919-1997), remembered today as the father of aviation in Provincetown, outlined the town’s grievances in 1959 in his capacity as a member of the Planning Board and director of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.
“The railroad to Provincetown is practically useless and has been for many years. … One of the greatest problems of the present existence of the railroad in Provincetown is the fact that it contributes to the defacement of the beautiful Provincetown dunes at the entrance to town by providing Whitehead Brothers with a ready means by which to haul out large quantities of sand from their sand pits. While there have been several moves to stop this deplorable situation and maybe it will take a national park to accomplish this, we feel that the termination of railroad service may help to prevent the further defacement of nature in our area.”15
Whitehead Brothers was undeterred by the removal of the rail spur, however. Through Francis Stark, the company contracted with John Noons of Truro to truck the sand to Eastham, where it could be transferred to rail cars for shipment.16
Just as Van Arsdale had predicted eight years earlier, it was the coming of the Cape Cod National Seashore that finally put an end to the Whitehead Brothers operation. Using its power of condemnation, the National Park Service moved to acquire the 72-acre sand pits in 1966. In September 1967, the board of directors at Whitehead accepted a settlement of $85,000 for the property. The company retained the right to remove up to 60,000 tons of sand annually until the end of 1975.17
With the cessation of industrial operations, the Whitehead Brothers sand pits became a fantastic playground in their own right. “What a treat it was as a child to climb to the top of those dunes and slide down on a bit of cardboard, like a magic carpet ride,” Suzanne Plover-Lanza recalled on Facebook. “Although always shifting, we assumed they would always be there. If only we had known we were hastening their demise.”18
“Back then we used to play that we were out in the Sahara,” Diana Lombardi wrote. “We wore my father’s pith helmet from World War II and we had my brother’s old Boy Scout canteen.”19
You would think children could easily lose their bearings in this Sahara, full of deep shadows and valleys. But the wise Joseph Andrews (1920-2019) assured young Donna and her friend Vicky, one of Joe’s daughters, that they could not get lost. “If we didn’t know which way to go home,” Lombardi recalled his counsel, “just climb to the top of the tallest dune and look for the monument.”20
¶ Published on 22 January 2024.
In memoriam
• Ralph Snow Carpenter (1884-1970)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 191417699.
• Mildred (Wood) Greensfelder (1904-1999)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 219278410.
• Frank Dears Henderson (1901-1964)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 105089362.
• Francis W. Stark (1911-1996)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 73392007.
1 Caption in My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 10 June 2023.
2 Comment to Provincetown Diaspora, 31 January 2022.
3 Comment to My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 10 June 2023.
4 “Dune Sand Will Be Trucked off Cape; Opposition to Removal Is Recalled,” Provincetown Advocate, 22 September 1960, Page 1.
5 Comment to My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 9 April 2018.
6 Comment to My Provincetown Memorabilia Collection, 10 June 2023.
7 Williamson & Lawson Sand Company to Whitehead Brothers Company, 19 November 1924, Book 410, Page 140, Barnstable County Registry of Deeds.
8 “Gift of Sands Saves Playgrounds $300,” Provincetown Advocate, 17 July 1952, Page 1.
9 “New Sand Covers East Playground,” Provincetown Advocate, 14 August 1952, Page 1.
10 “Find Out Now,” Provincetown Advocate, 9 December 1954, Page 6.
11 Annual Report for the Town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, for the Year Ending December 31, 1956, Pages 123-124.
12 “Selectman Henderson Urges Action to Prevent Sand Shipments at Once,” Provincetown Advocate, 1 March 1956, Pages 1.
13 “In Our Mail,” Provincetown Advocate, 9 December 1954, Page 2.
14 “$5,000 Gift Starts Battle at Meeting,” Provincetown Advocate, 19 July 1956, Page 8.
15 “Strong Objections Raised to Action by Norman Cook on Closing Rail Line,” Provincetown Advocate, 24 December 1959, Page 1.
16 “Dune Sand Will Be Trucked off Cape; Opposition to Removal Is Recalled,” Provincetown Advocate, 22 September 1960, Page 1.
17 Whitehead Brothers Company to United States of America, 22 December 1967, Book 1387, Page 772, Barnstable County Registry of Deeds.
18 Comment to My Grandfathers Provincetown, 14 June 2021.
19 Comment to My Grandfathers Provincetown, 14 June 2021.
20 Comment to My Grandfathers Provincetown, 14 June 2021.