EASTHAM——
Local Boy Makes Good On
First Bombing of Tokio
Eastham, Cape Cod, has a real claim to present-day fame. This unexciting, though historic little settlement, near the outer end of the sickle, is the home of Master Sgt. Edwin W. Horton, Jr., member of the Doolittle party on the first bombing of Tokio in World War II.
On his return to this country, Horton, at the first opportunity, hastened back to little Eastham for a quiet visit. And brought his bride to introduce to the home folks.
Eastham is small but historically she is important. The original name was Nauset. Here the Pilgrims, exploring after their arrival on the Mayflower, had their first encounter with the Indians. The forefathers focused particular attention on the fertile soil, Thomas Prence, Governor of Plymouth Colony, describing it as the “richest soyle, for ye most part a blackish & deep mould, much like that wher groweth ye best Tobacco in Virginia.” Today Eastham is still outstanding as a farming place, noted especially for her asparagus production.
Provincetown for beauty,
Wellfleet for pride,
If it wasn’t for milk cans
Eastham ’d’ a died.
Thus the sing-song went when, later, the lush Nauset dairy herds provided milk for a good part of the Cape. And Eastham, truly farming-minded, would fling back these better known lines:
The Cape Cod girls they have no combs,
They comb their hair with codfish bones;
The Cape Cod Boys they have no sleds,
They slide downhill on codfish heads.
PILGRIM’S TREE STILL BLOSSOMS
Life still springs from at least one of the plantings of those far distant days of the forefathers. Thomas Prence, who first set foot on the Cape in 1621, subsequently built a house for himself and his bride near Fort Hill. He planted a little pear tree there; it had been brought over from England.
Each Spring a pear tree blossoms on this site. Thoreau, in the book on his Cape Cod travels, refers to the planting by Thomas Prence and states the tree had been blown down a few months previous to his visit to the scene. A modern historian, however, records that Thomas Prence’s pear tree is still bearing, a sapling having been planted after the old tree had been swept down in a gale. Thoreau quotes the following tribute by a Cape Codder, a Mr. Herman Doane:
“That exiled band long since have passed away,
And still, old Tree! Thou standest in the place
Where Prence’s hand did plant thee in his day,—
An undersigned memorial of his race.”
THE LAST WORKING WINDMILL
The lone workable windmill on Cape Cod is located in Eastham. Before Pearl Harbor there would be a ceaseless trek of Summer visitors to the Seth Knowles’ windmill and Miller John Fulcher would demonstrate its ancient workings with true professional eclat. He’d set her sails, swing her into the wind, give the lift wheel a deft spin, and, in jig time, Miller John would turn out a bushel of ground corn before the eyes of the intrigued city folk. Those who seemed to know asserted that Miller John had the “miller’s thumb”. Dipping his thumb into the trough, he would decide just when the corn was properly ground.
The story of the old windmill is vague. Some say it gave service originally in Plymouth and then was “flaked” across the Bay to be re-erected in Eastham. The date 1793 is nailed inside, but this still leaves unanswered the point as to when and where its story begins.
There’s a tablet near a stretch of Eastham beach that memorializes the “First Encounter.” The event is described in William Bradford’s narrative:
“But, presently, all on ye sudain, they heard a great & strange crie, which they knew to be the same voyces they heard in ye night, though they varied their notes, & one of their company being abroad came runing in & cried, ‘Men, Indeans, Indeans’; and withall, their arrowes came flying amongst them. Their men rane with all speed to recover their armes, as by ye good providence of God they did.... The crie of ye Indeans was dreadfull, espetially when they saw ther men rune out of ye randevoue towourds ye shallop, to recover their armes, the Indeans wheeling aboute upon them. But some runing out with coats of malle on, & cutlesses in their hands, they soon got their armes & let flye amongst them, and quickly stopped their violence.”
Bradford’s narrative reveals, also, why the redskins were in a war-making mood.
Six years previous “one Hunt, a mr. of a ship” had visited this scene. Hunt had seized 24 of the Nauset Indians and taken them to Spain in slave chains and, it is elsewhere related, he “sold these silly savages for rials of eight.”
What changes are wrought by the years! Where slavery was introduced in the early 17th century, a native son now is ranked with America’s great heroes in a global war for freedom.