16 



JL 



100 YEARS EXPLORING LIFE, 1888-1988 



Old Main as it looked in 

 1892, set amidst the 

 moraine which forms this 

 part of Cape Cod. 

 MBL Archives. 



The thick woods, protected by a series of agreements against wanton 

 development in Woods Hole, provide a lovely place to take an evening's 

 stroll — or to wish one could when the land is barricaded off as private. Yet 

 as Henry David Thoreau had pointed out with regret in his book Cape Cod, 

 by the mid-nineteenth century the Cape had few forests any more. The 

 sheep had eaten what people had not burned or cut (and the gypsy moths 

 came along a few years later to carry out the last stages of deforestation). 

 Thanks to the Boston merchant Joseph Fay, who sought to attract other 

 summer residents to the area, the forests returned to Woods Hole. Fay 

 planted an impressive twenty thousand mixed pine, larch, spruce, and birch 

 seedlings to bring back the trees. Within fifty years, the forest around Woods 

 Hole had reached a second growth or oak stage, and in the twentietli century 

 the mature forests have returned, even though the population wishing to use 

 and enjoy tliem has also expanded. 



Today, as from the beginning, the MBL researcher typically first arrives 

 in Woods Hole along with the ferry visitors in the summer. The streets are 

 filled with "ice cream people," dressed in shorts or batliing suits and 

 wandering casually about the streets slurping drippy cones; and "lobster 

 people," whose bright red skin shows that they have spent a little too long in 

 the sun on Miirtha's Vineyard and who want one last lobster dinner before 

 heading home; and children, impatient to board tlie feriy because tliere 

 seems to be little for visitors to do in Woods Hole; and dogs, black dogs. 



No helpful signs indicate which way to turn. If one has aiTived by bus, 

 the best bet is to walk away from all the people gathered around the ferry 



