Where amazing things go
The National Seashore's repository of eclectic relics
On a windswept, remote Truro dune sits a low-slung, nondescript cement block building surrounded by chain link fencing topped with barbed wire — no identifying sign, no indication of use or purpose.
What once were windows are sealed with yet more cement block, walls painted a neutral beige. A garage door is the only suggestion that large objects could come and go.
“It used to be the telephone exchange station for the Air Force,” says Cape Cod National Seashore Historian Bill Burke, conjuring back to when this chunk of the Seashore was a military base, part of the nation’s perimeter warning system against feared Ruskie attack.
Burke has a key so we went inside, where the modern use became clear:
This is a repository, storage created in 1996 for relics that represent a broad swath of Cape Cod history. It holds artifacts the National Seashore has chosen to take and protect, only a small portion of what is offered year after year, a hodgepodge as old as 3500 years, as recent as this lifetime.
On the floor by the entrance is a piece of shipwreck awaiting analysis, an unusual introduction because by and large the Seashore does not collect old timber off the beaches.
“We have a recipe book,” said Burke, detailing their federally-defined focus; Coast Guard lifesaving, cranberry history, Marconi, Native American artifacts, whaling captain mementos (especially of the Penniman family, whose handsome home is a popular landmark at Fort Hill in Eastham). The Seashore adds about a dozen items a year, mainly donated.
Rows of multi-story cardboard boxes are filled with remnants and artifacts. Along the walls are the likes of antique furniture, a Narwahl whale tusk, a Nauset Marsh duck boat from the late 1800s.
A rocking chair plunked on a shelf belonged to the wife of Captain Edward Penniman. She accompanied him on whaling voyages for perhaps four years at a time, and had the rocker’s curved runners flattened so she could sit more stably as the boat provided rocking.
Whalers liked to hunt polar bears for meat and sport — hey, there’s one:
A cabinet holds a profound collection of Native American blades, points and tools from what is called the Coburn site in Orleans. These were fashioned around 3500 years ago, removed from what archeologists believe was a crematorium. Burke says there are pending conversations about returning these artifacts to the Wampanoag Tribe, where by all rights they belong.
Inside many of the boxes are 80,000 shards and chunks from a 1970 archeological dig at Smith Tavern on Great Island in Wellfleet, where people hung out in the 1700s. That sounds like a huge amount, but they’re mostly little chips of bowls, bottles, clay pipes, window (and drinking) glass, plaster, “not sexy stuff,” smiled Burke.
Then again, as Seashore Archeologist Dan Zoto showed, sometimes these pieces fit together, and when they do the result could be an evocative bowl.
“See how the inside is glazed but the outside isn’t?” asked Zoto, beginning his second day on the job, a Barnstable High School grad who went to UMass Amherst, masters work at UConn, now back home at what seems like his dream job. “They glazed the inside to keep liquid from seeping through, but glazing the outside would have just been a waste of money.”
Because the building is cement block, without a lot of traffic, it keeps cool in summer but needs winter heat. “Curators like it to be around 50 percent humidity, under 75 degrees,” said Burke, “and what they really hate are wild temperature swings. So we’re in pretty good shape.”
Safekeeping is the goal, which can become the opposite of accessibility. That is a tension every curator faces; there is poignancy seeing these objects, evocative and intimate, sequestered and clumped together in a dormant anonymous space, in boxes and under sheets, in cabinets and lining walls.
Burke would like more public interaction, welcoming the idea of creating an exhibit at the Wellfleet Historical Society to highlight the most interesting finds from Smith Tavern, or sending the Coburn collection back to Wampanoag hands.
There was one whimsical relic I didn’t get a chance to see or touch because it was in a secure box and the key was elsewhere. That’s a regret because this one has special local import:
The pen John F. Kennedy put to paper, sitting in the White House in 1961, when he signed legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore.
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Love the local lore and store! Thx
Who knew! Very interesting article Seth. Thank you for this glimpse of the unknown treasure chest at ccns. And Bill is great.