594 
The RURAL NEW-YORKER 
April 5, 1924 
Hope Farm Notes 
I had what you might call a lively ex¬ 
perience last week. On Wednesday the 
great hearing on the school bill was given 
at Albany, and it was a strenuous per¬ 
formance. It was a great meeting, of 
far-reaching importance, and I might 
write a study of it. Perhaps it is better 
to let the discussion drop now and see if 
we cannot get both sides together for a 
fair compromise. On Saturday of that 
same week I went down to Cape Cod to 
attend a Farm Bureau meeting at llyan- 
nis. It was an excellent meeting—held 
at the normal school. These Cape Cod 
folks take life seriously and honestly. On 
(he blackboard of the first room I entered 
this welcome was written in large letters: 
This room is dedicated 
to 
The Public Service, 
That all who enter here 
May live 
A more abundant life. 
And public service on Cape Cod does' 
not mean some monopoly of transporta¬ 
tion or other utilities, but it really means 
actual historic service for the people. I 
read that notice and then stood at the 
sun-lit window looking off across Hyannis 
Bay to the blue Atlantic in the distance, 
and it all brought to mind the remark of 
one of my little boys when, some years 
ago, we spent a month on Cape Cod. This 
boy was a little bewildered. The thought 
of the blue water stretching for thousands 
of miles aw r ay to Europe, the thunder of 
the waves as they smashed against the 
great rock, the bright sun and the star¬ 
lit nights, the humming wind, the salt air, 
and the dream hanging over it all, some¬ 
how got into his little soul. And one 
night we had a great fire on the beach. 
After studying it awhile the boy turned 
to me and said : 
“Are we in Americat" 
IIow do you suppose I answered him? 
The next day I took him to one of those 
old churchyards which dot the Cape. 
Often they are surrounded by a tumbling 
stone wall. The headstones often lean, 
and there are many neglected graves. But 
as the boy and I stood at the gate and 
looked in it seemed to us that more than 
half of those graves had a little flag, 
faded and worn, snapping in the breeze, 
at the foot of the mound. And each one 
marked the last resting place of a Cape 
Cod soldier; no one can tell how many 
more are buried far away. And the boy 
got the answer without a word from me. 
“Arc we in AmericaV' Well, you can 
hardly get any closer to the soul of the 
nation. I took a copy of Whittier from a 
shelf and was not surprised on opening it 
at random to find myself reading “Massa¬ 
chusetts to Virginia” : 
“And sandy Barnstable stood up — wet 
with the salt sea’s spray, 
And Bristol sent her answering shout 
down Narragansett Bay. 
“For us and for our children, the vow 
which we have given 
For freedom and humanity is registered 
in heaven.” 
***** 
•Somehow, that is the way I have al¬ 
ways regarded Cape Cod and its people. 
The very shape of the Cape indicates a 
fighting race. Look at the map and see 
how Cape Cod is like the right arm of a 
boxer, stretched out to defend Massachu¬ 
setts Bay. Up north Cape Ann stretches 
out like a left arm ready to strike. Your 
well-trained fighter knows that he must 
use his best arm for defensive work, and 
Cape Cod has shoulder, elbow, forearm, 
wrist and hand stretched out in the most 
approved style. For centuries that long 
arm has protected Plymouth and Boston, 
and all they have stood for in American 
history. America? Here you have the 
very grit of it. I imagine there is no spot 
of equal size in this country so. curiously 
misunderstood in its soil and its people 
as Cape Cod. I had a Western man tell 
me once that Cape Cod is the finest place 
in the world to go away from! He 
thought he had covered it all. It is not 
likelv that any historian can ever justly 
tell ‘how much the West owes to tape 
Cod and Southeast Massachusetts gener¬ 
ally. The strong, clear-eyed, fearless men 
and women who carried the sands of the 
sea in their shoes and in their character 
over the mountains to the West helped 
depopulate Cape Cod. but they mixed with 
the cement of their determination and put 
the foundation of Western society on solid 
concrete. The V est today owes more to 
the doughnuts and fishballs and clam 
chowder which were eaten on Cape Cod 
a century ago thaxx to all the natural 
wealth that ever came out of her forests 
and soil. And yet the average American 
really knows more about Cuba or the 
Sandwich Islands than he does about 
Cape Cod! He seems to picture the usual 
Cape Codder as a long, lean, wiry man, 
evaporated to a husk by the salt wind, 
much like a salted fish! People seem to 
think that the average Cape Cod man 
goes about trying to trade jack-knives, 
and when he comes in sight the only safe 
thing to do is to put one hand on your 
watch and the other on your poeketbook 
and run! 
***** 
That seems to be popular belief, and 
there could not be anything wider of the 
mark. The normal college was crowded 
with as fine a class of country people as 
ever came together. The lean, dried peo¬ 
ple were not there. Most of them were 
plump and well rounded out, and there 
were as many fat people as you would 
find in any audience. As is the case on 
any island or large cape, after a number 
of generations the people naturally de¬ 
velop into a certain type of shape, and 
the old conception of the loose-jointed, 
slab-sided Cape Codder of romance must 
be modified. I should think Cape Cod 
would be a great place to go for a wife, 
but if they are wise the Cape people will 
keep their girls at home. They seemed 
to me like a happy, contented, and well- 
fed people, with something of sentiment 
and mystery about them, as would nat¬ 
urally be expected in one who through 
every waking hour must hear the murmur 
or roar of'the ocean. Would you not ex¬ 
pect that one who could never escape from 
the roar of the ocean would show a dif¬ 
ferent psychology from one who passed 
his life in the stillness of the forest? I 
think it may safely be said that the psy¬ 
chology and food of the people who live 
in a certain section determine their char¬ 
acter and power. E. P. Armitage, in 
“Diet and Race,” tells of superior tribes 
of native Africans who drink sea water 
every day as a tonic, while others, back 
in the interior, buy it as a precious medi¬ 
cine. The Cape Codders have taken their 
ocean medicine for some generations — 
blown into them by the wind—and it has 
made them a strong race. I had a plate 
of clam chowder which was literally a joy 
forever. I never dreamed before that the 
plebeian clam could ever produce such 
aristocratic food. I have read in Brad¬ 
ford's history how, early in the history 
of Plymouth, a band of Dutchmen came 
from New York to spy out the land. 
Bradford does not seem quite sure what 
they came for. but I imagine they came to 
get some of that clam chowder. It was 
worth the journey ! Why, I should think 
that a woman in one of these weather¬ 
beaten old farmhouses making such a dish 
as that would feel like a poet writing 
some masterpiece! 
***** 
If the average citizen sizes up the Cape 
Cod people wrong he usually makes a 
great mistake in estimating the soil and 
farm possibilities. The usual estimate is 
a sandbank blowing and shifting about 
with every wind—a cold, raw, wintry 
place, with no chance for what you would 
call good farming. As I traveled down 
from Middleboro out into the Cape, the 
opening landscape was a constant sur¬ 
prise to me. At Middleboro the ground 
was solid with snow. It was several 
inches deep in most of the fields, packed 
down hard, with good-sized drifts along 
the walls. The ground was full of frost, 
with hardly thaw enough to make mud. 
As we went on I noticed that the snow 
had disappeared. When w r e were fairly 
on the Cape there was no snow to be 
found—not even along the walls. There 
seemed to be no frost left in the soil, and 
when we got off the train we certainly 
found some mud—though we are told that 
you cannot make mud by any combina¬ 
tion of sand and water. It seemed to me 
that the Cape was two weeks ahead of 
the mainland in its season. All along 
through the shoulder of the Cape you find 
patches of pine trees, some of them quite 
large enough for lumber. The pine seems 
to grow well in this soil. A man under 
middle age ought to get returns from for¬ 
estry during his lifetime. There were 
many little ponds and brooks, usually 
found in some low place or hollow, look¬ 
ing not unlike the little lakes one finds in 
Florida. Here and there at corners of 
these little ponds, in along the shores of 
brooks, were patches of blood red which 
at first sight were hard to understand. 
Coming close to one of these red patches 
you saw that it was made up of waste 
cranberries. Apparently the picking had 
not been clean, and the Fall and Winter 
floods had washed the berries from the 
vines and floated them into groups or 
patches. It was startling to a stranger 
until one came to know what caused the 
red color. There were comparatively few 
stones such as one sees in many parts of 
New England, yet here and there were 
stone walls, separating fields, and .an oc¬ 
casional great granite ledge pushing its 
ugly head out of the ground as if to say : 
“l T ou cannot keep me down. I am the 
spirit of New England. I have come to 
watch these sandy lands like a policeman, 
to keep them from blowing away.” 
Well, as one journeys through this sec¬ 
tion, one can see how, in olden times, be¬ 
fore we knew the true value of warm, 
light soils, a boy might have considered 
Cape Cod a good place to go away from. 
Now let us see if one can make good on 
the proposition that it is a good place to 
go back to. h. w. c. 
(To be continued) 
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