Cape Cod was home to indigenous Americans for millennia before the arrival of European settlers in the early 17th century. This is due to increased focus on Native American history. The scope of his historical project has grown substantially - by about 10,000 years. Much has changed over Burke’s decades here.
Bill Burke ’84 says it was probably part of the support system for four 200-foot towers that helped transmit Guglielmo Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless message between Europe and America in 1903. It was found by a visitor near the Marconi Wireless Station Site in South Wellfleet. This well-preserved object is a deadeye, used in the rigging of traditional sailing ships. Today, more than 4 million people visit Cape Cod each year, often battling summer traffic that is the stuff of legend, to reach this beautiful nowhere. Standing atop an ocean bluff overlooking the sea 61 years later, one can hardly imagine doubting the project. The Cape Cod National Seashore began as an experiment - a gamble many residents were reluctant to take. The park was intended to stymie large scale development, which worried investors who envisioned booming beach towns like Atlantic City, N.J., and Ocean City, Md. Residents and merchants feared losing their property to eminent domain. Kennedy, whose family keeps its well-known compound in Hyannis to this day.Ī protected seashore on Cape Cod was a controversial idea. The national park was established in 1961, the year before he was born, under President John F. Recently, visitors to the beach recovered a British naval pistol from 1759 that the park now preserves.īurke has worked at Cape Cod National Seashore for more than half its history.
And if the tide brings items ashore or unearths artifacts buried in the sand, preservationists have only until the tide returns to safely relocate them before they are washed out to sea. The coastal weather exacts a toll on historic buildings and other sites. Preservation is a struggle against the environment. This windowless, subterranean space is nothing like the sunny seaside climate outdoors, but the cool, dark, and dry environment keeps delicate materials safe from the elements. In a backroom, primary source documents, including lighthouse keeper’s logs, whaling journals, and maps, fill boxes on shelves that wrap around the walls floor-to-ceiling. In a room under the visitor center, Burke handles artifacts and processes primary data, adding to and interpreting Cape Cod’s historical record each day. Thanks to his work, loose flotsam tells the stories of shipwrecks, scrimshaw (carved whale bone) the stories of the whalers who chiseled it, and dune shacks the stories of families who waited anxiously for sailors to return from sea over the Cape’s long maritime history. He oversees the process by which historical artifacts and data become historical narrative ready for consumption by visitors eager to learn the natural and human history of Cape Cod. If they’re lucky enough, they will encounter William “Bill” Burke ’84, cultural resources program manager for Cape Cod National Seashore - in other words, the park’s historian.īurke has worked for the National Park Service since college and at the national seashore since 1988. In the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau described it as “a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.” This quote greets visitors to the Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham, where guests can see artifacts dating back centuries. Cape Cod is “a grand place to be alone and undisturbed,” playwright Eugene O’Neill wrote in 1919. Driving along the two-lane highway to the Outer Cape, visitors can feel they’re headed nowhere. It’s a long way from the Bourne or Sagamore bridge to Cape Cod National Seashore, where 40 miles of federally protected beaches, woods, and ponds, covering 43,600 acres, run from Chatham in the south to Provincetown in the north.
0 kommentar(er)
