Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in the years when Thoreau walked the peninsula— 1849, 1850 and 1855.
“The time must come when this coast (Cape Cod) will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of, — if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport, — I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in Cape Cod, first published in 1865, soon before railroads started to make The Cape a major summer-resort area.
At New Silver Beach, in Falmouth, on the western side of The Cape — probably not quite what Thoreau could have foreseen.
