New England's First Big Dig

“Cape Cod Now An Island” read the headline in newspapers across the country in the spring of 1914--to which a lot of people, from Miles Standish to George Washington to countless schemers and dreamers, might have replied, “What took you so long?”

The idea of cutting a canal through the sandy isthmus had been around since the Pilgrims schlepped their goods south over miles of sandy hills and valleys to trade with the Narragansetts and the Dutch at an outpost called Aptuxcet on the shores of the Monument River near Buzzards Bay. They noticed how tantalizingly close the headwaters of that river came to the headwaters of Scusset Creek, which flowed the other direction into Cape Cod Bay. Separated by a little less than a mile and hills only 30 feet above low tide in Buzzards Bay, the gap was a water route just begging to be (in fact, it came within 18 inches of being breeched in an 1815 hurricane). Overland schlepping aside, the trip around the great bent arm of the Cape was easily among the most treacherous a ship could make; the shifting shoals, ripping tides, and fogbound coast claimed an estimated 3,000 ships between the mid-1600s and late 1800s.

The cries for action came early. In 1697, the Massachusetts General Court called for a committee to investigate the building of a cross-cape canal, for “it is thought by many to be very necessary for the preservation of men and estates, and very profitable and usefull to the publick.” No record has been found of that committee’s findings. In 1776, General Washington assigned an engineer to look into a canal for military and trade purposes. The resulting report was highly in favor of such a project and was promptly forwarded to the Continental Congress, where…nothing happened. And so it went, decade after decade, with studies, maps, tangles over ownership charters, political wrangling, and bankruptcies (as a few projects were actually begun, only to fold under the physical and financial enormities of the task). Harvard historian Henry C. Kittredge eventually wrote in Cape Cod: Its People and Their History, “If ever a strip of land was a parade-ground for surveyors first and a battle-ground for legislative vituperation afterwards, it was the route of the Cape Cod Canal.” Meanwhile, by the late 1880s, Cape shipwrecks were occurring at a rate of once every two weeks.

Though it is painful to relate, it was a New Yorker who finally stepped in to take control of the situation. August Belmont Jr. was born in 1853 and raised on Fifth Avenue, the son of a financier for the Rothschilds. A middling Harvard student, he was an avid member of the university track team and is credited with the invention of the spiked running shoe. Like his father, for whom Belmont Park is named, August loved racehorses; he was the original owner of Man o’ War, one of the greatest runners of all time. More than just a sporting man, he was behind the construction of New York’s first subway in 1904, built by his Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Soon thereafter, he turned his attention north, towards another large-scale transportation project.

His advisors assured him that a canal could be profitable, but for Belmont this was more than just a business proposition. His mother descended from the Perrys of Bourne, Massachusetts, long a maritime family. His grandfather was Commodore Matthew Perry, whose “black ships” had forced Japan to open itself to trade. The route planned for the canal went right past the Perry homestead. Providing a safe way for sailors would be a fitting tribute.

Pulling from his connections and resources, Belmont financed two companies—one to build the canal, the other to operate it. Neither task turned out to be easy. Digging began June 22, 1909, when, Belmont used a silver Tiffany shovel to remove the first clod of earth. Winter storms soon forced dredging vessels off the job to seek safe harbor. The renowned engineer William Barclay Parsons, who had worked with Belmont on the subway, underestimated the size and quantity of glacial boulders hidden beneath the planned route. Even two huge “dipper” dredges, purpose-built on site, couldn’t budge them, so divers were brought in to set dynamite charges to shatter the rocks, some of them weighing up to 100 tons. Over a span of five years, however, a fleet of 26 dredges, many working around the clock and calendar (to the annoyance of residents), reduced the primeval separation of Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay to a thin dike. Ceremonially mixing bottles of water from both sides, Belmont proclaimed, “May the meeting of these waters bring happiness and prosperity to our country and save some of the misery which the waters of the Cape have caused in the past.”

The canal—eight miles long, with stone jetties extending from both ends for a total of 13 miles—was about 100 feet wide and 25 feet deep. Three bridges, built simultaneously, combined to handle train, trolley, and highway traffic, either swinging or lifting out of the way of large passing ships. Yet, after an initial honeymoon, the canal began to attract griping from captains and sailors: it was too narrow; strong tidal currents made travel difficult; the tolls were too high. Many local pilots stuck with the devil they knew, spurning the waterway and traveling around the Cape as they always had. In its first four years of operation, there were 14 accidents, including a sinking that closed the canal for three long months as the ship was removed.

World War I came to domestic shores when, on July 21, 1918, a German submarine fired on the outer Cape town of Orleans and destroyed a passing tugboat and its barges. A day later, its military importance clear, President Wilson put the Cape Cod Canal under federal jurisdiction. After the war Belmont, who had once spurned any governmental involvement in its operation, ended up selling the canal to the United States for $11,500,000; the Army Corps of Engineers took over on March 31, 1928, with a Congressional mandate to run and improve it.  The Corps being the Corps, it hit the project hard, contracting with MIT to run a model testing the hydrologic effects of a straighter, wider route. It canvassed shipping companies about why they were avoiding the canal. One big problem: vessels had to wait, struggling in the strong current, for the bridges to open. In rapid course, employing hundreds of men during the Great Depression, came the two fixed highway bridges still in use today, each with 616 feet of clear span and maximum clearance 135 feet above high tide, as well as the lifting-span railroad bridge, which is kept in the open position except when briefly lowered for a train to pass. (Though it may not feel it to those creeping across it on a Friday afternoon, the Bourne Bridge even won an award for “The Most Beautiful Bridge Built during 1934.”)

Even more astounding, the Corps widened the canal to 480 feet and deepened it to 32 feet, installing a new navigational light system, and lining the edges with rip-rap stone to prevent erosion. Within a year of completion, the new canal was hosting three times the number of vessels and eight times the cargo than Belmont’s did in its final year.

Nowadays, that rip- rap edge is a good place from which to watch the parade of boats, both pleasure craft and commercial. It’s also a perch for fishermen like landscape contractor Roger Cook, who describes the canal as “a striper highway” where he regularly lands 40-pounders. “They run through chasing herring,” he says, “and now that herring are protected, there are more than ever before.” As August Belmont would probably agree, it’s nice to get away to the island for a little fishing.