Reconstructing Ocean View Drive

Earlier this year I wrote a column on the mysterious origins of Ocean View Drive in Wellfleet, the road paralleling the ocean and connecting four town beaches, from LeCount’s Hollow (aka Maquire’s Landing) at the southern end to Newcomb Hollow at the northern end. The real mystery, for me, was why the date and circumstances of the construction of such a prominent and (relatively) new road was such a mystery.

Ignorant myself, I had consulted several longterm residents, the Historical Society and town hall and come up with no better than shrugs or vague and contradictory guesses.

The column elicited, as I had hoped, a number of responses, from which I’ve been able to piece together the following story–the reconstruction, as it were–of OVD.

OVD was built in sections from south to north, taking all of the 1950s and a bit of the ’60s. A 1950 article from the old Provincetown “Advocate” supplied by a reader refers to a “newly constructed Ocean View Drive,” enough of it to access 150 lots auctioned off by the selectmen at the LeCount’s Hollow end. (The town’s take of $30,000 to $35,000 according to selectman Charles Frazier “exceded all expectations.”)

So at least some of the southern section was completed by then, by 1950, perhaps by 1949, depending on your interpretation of “newly.”.

A local surveyor wrote that the section north of Long Pond Road was laid out in 1957, so presumably the road was finished to that point by then.

As for the Newcomb Hollow finish date, another reader stated authoritatively that “Ocean View Drive was completed during the summer of 1960.” He’s so certain because, a graduate of last class of Wellfleet High before regionalization, he returned from college after his freshman year to work on the crew that finished it.

He adds an interesting aside, “there was some pressure to finish that summer. . . . the fear of impending National Seashore restrictions added to the pressure. We raced each other [to level the truckloads of sand needed to strengthen the bankings.”

This clear recollection suggests that when I first visited Wellfleet in September of 1959 and slept on the beach at Cahoon’s Hollow, there may have been an OVD to the left when I emerged from the beach access road, but possibly not to the right (had I had any reason to notice that).

This account of the last stage of construction also gives a date to a story relayed by friends, from their neighbor near the eastern end of Long Pond Road. Seems that an ancestor went for his usual hike to the ocean and was so shocked to see OVD being built he had a heart attack.

What’s still missing, although most of my email informants were around at the time, is the full story of the circumstances surrounding the creation of this road. Who came up with the idea? Who stood to benefit? Some informants conjectured that Charlie Frazier, that selectman cited in the “Advocate” article, was behind it, since he was behind everything during those days; but the article says that it was Dr. Maguire (namesake of the landing) who “was a heavy buyer” of the auctioned lots.

Was there no public discussion in the paper or elsewhere of the pros and cons of this major feature of our town? Did it all happen without input from town meeting?

Having made headway solving one mystery by crowd-sourcing, how about such puzzles as, for instance, the bypassing of downtown by Route 6, one of the most crucial events in town history. How did that come about?

Or when, by what stages, and why, did we go from a mostly Republican town in the 1950s to the progressive, predominantly Democratic town we’ve been known as in recent decades?

We know that there was plenty of discussion in public hearings, most of it negative, of the proposal to turn/take two-thirds of our town into a National Park. But how, by what stages, did we go from hating the idea to not being able to imagine ourselves without that protection (from ourselves)?

 

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