Fort Hill Rural Historic District
| Fort Hill Rural Historic District | |||
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| National Register of Historic Places | |||
| Historic District | |||
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| location | Eastham , Massachusetts , United States | ||
| Coordinates | 41 ° 49 '10 " N , 69 ° 57' 56" W | ||
| surface | approx. 100 acres (40.5 ha ) | ||
| Architectural style | Second Empire , Greek Revival , Georgian | ||
| NRHP number | 00001656 | ||
| Data | |||
| The NRHP added | April 5, 2001 | ||
| Declared as HD | April 5, 2001 | ||
As Fort Hill Rural Historic District , a good 40 hectares large area east of US Highway 6 in Eastham in the state of Massachusetts of the United States designated the year 2001 as a Historic District in the National Register of Historic Places has been entered. It consists mainly of fields, forests and salt marshes and essentially comprises the properties of two former farms. Due to its geographic location at the easternmost point of Cape Cod , the area is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore .
division
The name Fort Hill probably goes back to a law of the Plymouth Colony Court from 1653, in which, due to a renewed sea war between the British and the Dutch, all cities of the colony were asked to build appropriate defenses, especially since the tensions between New England and Nieuw Amsterdam increased steadily through trade relations with the Indians. Fort Hill would have been a convenient location for artillery , but it was never actually fortified.
In addition to extensive open spaces, the Historic District also includes three historic houses with outbuildings. The district is bounded in the east by the Nauset Marsh, in the south by the Town Cove and Town Creek. In the north the area borders on the Hemenway Road, in the west the border of the Cape Cod National Seashore forms the boundary of the Fort Hill Rural Historic District.
building
In the south-west of the area are the three buildings, each of which has been recognized as contributing property - that is, as contributing to its historical significance. This area is also known as the Fort Hill Road Area . While Captain Edward Penniman House is owned by the National Park Service (NPS), the other two houses are privately owned.
Captain Edward Penniman House
Built in 1868, Edward Penniman House is on the south side of Fort Hill Road and is open to the public seasonally. It is two and a half stories high, has a mansard roof and was built entirely of wood in the Second Empire style. There is an octagonal dome with windows on the roof. It is one of the best-preserved buildings of this style on all of Cape Cod.
A special feature is the integrated water supply at the time of construction, which was the first of its kind in Eastham. Two sinks in the kitchen and a bathroom on the upper floor are supplied by two cisterns which are located in the attic or below the floor level in the northeast corner of the house. The house is largely unchanged in its original condition. The house has a barn to the southeast , which was built in the same architectural style.
Sylvanus Knowles House
The privately owned Sylvanus Knowles House is north of Fort Hill Road directly across from Edward Penniman House and was built entirely of wood in the Greek Revival style around 1864 . The two-story house has a gable roof and an L-shaped floor plan.
Seth Knowles House
Seth Knowles House, at the eastern end of the residential area, was built around 1790 in the style of Georgian architecture . It is also made of wood, is two and a half stories high and has a gable roof with a crossed gable in the middle.
Open spaces
In the eastern half of the Historic District, open spaces formerly used for agricultural purposes with "classic, collapsed Ice Age topography " determine the landscape. The wavy hills structured by stone walls are characteristic.
The close proximity to Nauset Beach protected the area from the erosion that is otherwise very widespread on Cape Cod , so that the coastline there has changed little over the past hundred years. Only the vegetation, which has increased since the end of agriculture, has reduced the extent of the open spaces.
With its height of more than 12 m, the eponymous Fort Hill offers a good panoramic view of the area. In the south it borders on Town Creek and Town Cove, on the opposite bank of which there are modern residential developments. To the east is the Nauset Marsh marshland , which merges into the Atlantic Ocean . On its north side there is still a former coast guard station . To the northwest and west are the maple swamp and the three houses on Fort Hill Road.
Maple swamp
The northwest third of the Historic District consists of a red maple swamp. There, directly adjacent to the Nauset Marsh, is Skiff Hill , which is just as high as Fort Hill . Located at the highest point of the Skiff Hill Indian Rock , a 20-ton granite - boulder , which the Indians for sharpening used their existing bone and stone tools or weapons.
Archaeological importance
There are a total of 14 prehistoric and historical sites on the Fort Hill Rural Historic District, including the Nauset Archeological District, registered as a National Historic Landmark in 1991 . The sites come from a period from the Archaic Period to the contact with the first Europeans. Several thousand artifacts could be documented.
Historical meaning
The Fort Hill Rural Historic District represents the state of organized agriculture on Cape Cod between 1750 and 1900. While community-managed land - in the form of a common land - dominated until the mid-18th century , a social and economic began at this time Conversion to family businesses. Real estate was increasingly viewed as a calculated, individual investment where innovation resulted in greater profits. Large families who jointly farmed neighboring parcels were characteristic of this period.
Until 1644
The area around Fort Hill was used by the indigenous people long before the arrival of the Europeans. When the French explorer Samuel de Champlain reached Nauset Harbor in 1605, he described the natural harbor as being surrounded by many small houses, each with enough land to support the residents with agriculture.
Established in the 1990s, the Nauset Archeological District includes six historic sites, the location of which roughly corresponds to the locations of the dwellings and fields that Champlain had described. There is much to suggest that the Indians lived there permanently; Above all, the environment offered a diverse food supply and access to a wide variety of habitats such as mud flats , salt marshes , freshwater wetlands and forest areas, so that subsistence farming was made possible.
1644 to 1672
After realizing that they had not chosen the best location, some 20 years after Plymouth was founded , the Pilgrim Fathers began exploring other places for possible relocation of the city. They were familiar with the area around what is now Eastham from their original exploration, but after two new fact-finding missions they came to the conclusion that there were insufficient resources available to support the people of Plymouth, so that full relocation was no longer an option. In 1644 49 colonists left the city of Plymouth under the leadership of Thomas Prence and settled in Nauset. In 1646 the town of Nauset was founded and in 1651 it was renamed Eastham. Their livelihood and economic basis was almost exclusively agriculture.
1672 to 1716
Samuel Treat was the first white settler to live permanently on Fort Hill. His father was the governor of the Connecticut Colony and co-founder of Newark, New Jersey . Treat graduated from Harvard College and ministered to Eastham for nearly 45 years, full-time for the first time in history. Since the city did not have enough money, they paid him with land on Fort Hill and other areas of the city, among other things.
After purchasing more land in the 1710s, Treat owned much of the Fort Hill land, all of which are now within the boundaries of the Historic District. Based on the records, it can be assumed that Treat also operated subsistence farming.
1742 to 1800
After Treat's death in 1717, ownership of his home passed to Willard Knowles in 1742, who owned what is now Fort Hill Rural Historic District when he died in 1786. He ran a farm there with arable farming (corn, rye and wheat) and cattle breeding (cattle, pigs and sheep). After his death, the land was divided between his sons, Seth and William. From this point on, both had their own businesses in the immediate vicinity; since the late 19th century, the southern house has been known as Seth Knowles House (named after the grandson of Seth Knowles of the same name) and the northern one as Sylvanus Knowles House (named after William's grandson).
19th century
Both farms were run by a total of five generations of the two Knowles families. They constantly adapted to the changing market and environmental conditions and were able to achieve modest prosperity through their successful work; the southern farm was once one of the three most valuable properties in the city. Accordingly, most of the structural changes to the residential buildings also take place during this period.
The Knowles mainly grew grain, potatoes and fruit and also extracted peat on a small scale . Cows provided milk for making cheese and butter; With the completion of the rail link to Eastham, this area was expanded, as the market for fresh milk was much larger from then on. Seth and Sylvanus Knowles were the first residents of Eastham to use the train service to Provincetown several times a day to sell their milk there. In addition to agriculture, both families worked in salt production from seawater until the 1850s . Specialties such as cranberries and asparagus were only grown on a very small scale and were of no economic importance, however, towards the end of the 19th century, families increasingly focused on poultry farming .
20th century
After the deaths of Seth (1905) and Sylvanus (1911), the operations were briefly continued on a smaller scale. In 1936 the southern farm was sold to Charles A. Gunn and in 1943 Dorothy Lucile Kattwinkel acquired the northern farm. Gunn resumed farming and switched it entirely to milk production with more than 20 cows. Through an agreement with the Kattwinkels, he was able to grow clover and alfalfa on the southern farm , while his cows grazed on the northern pastures.
In the 20th century the importance of traditional agriculture on Cape Cod declined and tourism increased at the same rate. The areas on the outer edge benefited from the connection to the railroad and the expansion of US Highway 6 , so that Charles Gunn's son wanted to divide up the farm and build country houses. The father, however, was against it and instead sold the property to married couples James H. and Frances Leach.
James Leach initially had a few horses that he rented out to tourists, but in 1960 he sold the former farm to a development company that divided the property into 33 parcels and offered them for sale. Ten lots had already been sold and initial earthworks commenced when Cape Cod National Seashore was established in 1961 and halted work.
1961 until today
Although the area around Fort Hill was not originally part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, the reserve was expanded to include it after an on-site visit. However, it was not until 1965 that the National Park Service acquired all of the required land. The NPS set up hiking trails and parking lots and took over the maintenance of the landscape.
See also
literature
- Simeon L. Deyo: History of Barnstable County, Massachusetts: 1620-1637-1686-1890 . Blake, New York 1890, OCLC 5539906 .
- Richard D. Holmes, Carolyn D. Hertz, Mitchell T. Mulholland: Historic cultural land use study of lower Cape Cod: a study of the historical archeology and history of the Cape Cod National Seashore and the surrounding region . University of Mass. Archaeological Services, Amherst, MA 1999, OCLC 191122425 .
- Sarah Korjeff, Betsy Friedberg: National Register of Historic Places Inventory - Nomination Form. (PDF) United States Department of the Interior , National Park Service , November 2000, accessed February 9, 2017 .
- Francis P. McManamon, Patricia E. Rubertone, S. Terry Childs: Chapters in the archeology of Cape Cod. III - The Historic period and historic period archeology (= Cultural resources management study . Volume 13 ). Division of Cultural Resources, North Atlantic Regional Office, National Park Service, US Dept. of the Interior, Boston 1985, OCLC 14589883 .
- EG Perry: A trip around Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, south shore, and historical Plymouth . 3. Edition. Self-published, Boston 1898, OCLC 874077754 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 22.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 5.
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 6.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 7.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 8.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 9.
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 12.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 13.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 14.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 16.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 18.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 20.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 21.
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 23.
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 24.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 26.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 27.
- ↑ cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 29 f.
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 30.
- ↑ a b cf. Korjeff / Friedberg, p. 31.