Hidden Cape Cod: Fascinating, Little-Known Facts About Every Cape Town

There are 15 towns on Cape Cod and each one has its own story. Some of them are well known – some not so much. Here are 15 fascinating facts – one for each town on the Cape – that might make you see this sandbar a little bit differently:

Provincetown’s Floating Houses

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Long Point, the thin peninsula jutting out of Provincetown and curling slightly back toward Truro, was a thriving fishing village during the early 1800s. But in the 1850s, families decided to pack up and move back to the mainland portion of town – and took their houses with them. The structures were floated on casks over a mile of water. Some accounts say that some of the wives were so unperturbed by the action that they kept cleaning and organizing while their homes were afloat. Historians cannot quite agree on what prompted the move, but by the time of the Civil War, only two houses remained on Long Point, above.

Comments

  1. When I was a kid in Hyannis, helping work at a gas station behind my house, a guy pulled up to the pump and wanted some gas. He handed me a “can of OIL” that he said needed to go in the gas tank, before the gas. I NEVER heard of such a thing!. I opened the can, poured the oil in then put the amount of gas he told me to. I asked AL (the proprietor) what that was about. He told me it was a Foreign car, called a SAAB, and it used oil with the gas.

    • I owned one of those old Saabs with the 3 cylinder 2 stroke engine. Got great milage but not a lot of power and always started on cold Cape Cod mornings. Mine was a little blue station wagon and I had to replace the transaxle (transmission) 3 times. I gor pretty good at changing it out in a few hours. The little engine was so small I was able to just pull it out of the engine bay and set it on the floor. The body pan finally rusted out.

  2. What about Marstons Mills !

  3. Stuart Wood says

    WHERE IS YARMOUTH?!?!

  4. EC Whittemore says

    Judging from the dates of the comments, this feature first was published ca 2016 — you’ve had 7 YEARS to add a unique fact about YARMOUTH! Get with your own program!



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