Yarmouth’s first European settler, Stephen Hopkins, came to our town in 1638 because of the salt marshes. He wanted to winter his cattle here because salt marsh hay was ideal feed. The Plymouth fathers allowed him to build a house in Yarmouth but told him he couldn’t stay here permanently.
Marshes were valued as property. Property lines were cut in the marsh by removing the top layer of peat. These straight ditches are still evident. Throughout the 19th century, property that was sold made sure the deed included marsh, and the marsh size was indicated by the number of tons of hay it produced each year.
Early farmers cut marsh hay for their animals and used it for many other things, such as helping to store ice during warmer weather and stuffing mattresses. The Sandwich Glass Company shipped their glass protected by salt marsh hay. Old hay and seaweed packed around foundations kept houses less drafty in winter. Cows fed salt marsh hay often produced salty milk, something old timers vividly remembered. They said you could tell immediately when a farmer switched the feed later in the winter when the regular hay ran out.
Cutting the hay using scythes was done late in the season, usually in September after other hay had been cut. It was stored on staddles. A staddle is a series of wooden pilings in the marsh that allowed hay to be piled above high water. Early in the 19th century, there were more than 1200 staddles in the Barnstable marsh.
Harvesting salt marsh hay in the Great Marshes, West Barnstable
Hay barges were used to collect hay and brought it to staddles or to shore. The barges could be rowed, poled or sailed. Horses gathering hay wore bog boots (wide wooden shoes attached to their hooves) like snowshoes.
Hay was usually removed from staddles in January, after the marshes had frozen. 1880 was a warm winter and farmers complained they couldn’t get their horses onto the marshes until near the end of the winter. Leaving hay on staddles during winter storms meant some were destroyed. Thirty staddles were lost in West Barnstable in a January 1886 storm. Many staddles were lost during the 1898 “Portland” storm and most weren’t rebuilt.
Locals, especially the poorer ones, burned marsh peat for fuel after wood became scarce. Peat could extend down 20 feet deep in places. They cut the peat with a shovel, just like in Ireland. It was stacked and air-dried.
Even the Massachusetts National Guard liked the marshes. In 1922, the Guard used Sandwich marshes for artillery practice, preventing farmers from accessing their land.
Soldiers boarding the train in West Barnstable after training on Sandy Neck and in the marsh.
In the 1930s, mosquito control cut drainage ditches in the marsh, to drain puddles and low spots that remained at low tide. These allowed minnows and other fish to reach and eat the mosquito larvae. Boundary ditches and mosquito control ditches are easy to tell apart. Mosquito control ditches stop when they reach a stream, whereas lot lines continue through. You can easily see this looking from the Bass Hole boardwalk.
Straight ditches cut into the marsh at Bass Hole.
Mosquito control took place as the Cape turned toward a tourist economy. The dreaded greenhead, a type of horse fly, was another tourist chaser who inhabited the marshes. During June, July and into August, these nasty females (yes, only the females bite) chased people from the beaches.
Local lore says that the very high tides caused by the full moon late in July mark the end of the greenhead season by drowning the larvae. The environmentally safe blue box traps are the real solution. A single box can trap over 30,000 flies in a season and the state puts out more than 900 traps on Cape Cod. The flies, attracted to the color, fly up underneath, enter the trap, and cannot find their way out. The mosquito control ditches actually helped the greenheads because they kept water levels down. Control by using DDT had a disastrous impact on the environment.
The mosquito and boundary ditches are one of the causes of the decline of our salt marshes. When cordgrass started to disappear, at first scientists were mystified as to the cause. Drought, climate change, and other items were blamed, but our native purple crab was eventually identified as a major culprit. To quote scientists, “the mosquito ditches … facilitated corridors to low marsh cordgrasses. As striped bass and blue crabs were being overfished, purple crabs experienced a fourfold increase in population. Suddenly these corridors to the cordgrasses became superhighways for hungry purple crabs to burrow while eating too much eelgrass, exposing the peat and turning it to mud so the marsh grasses can’t regenerate. More than 80% of the Cape’s marshes are retreating.
An unlikely hero is coming to the marshes’ rescue. A highly invasive non-native European green crab that perhaps came here on vessels from Europe, finds that purple crabs are “delicious.” Some scientists now say “Our results show, that despite previous evidence of negative impacts on native species, the European green crab is well suited to accelerate the recovery of heavily degraded salt marsh ecosystems in New England.” Is there a down side? Probably, but the marshes may return to a healthier state than they have been.
Even in the last 50 years some Yarmouth developers have tried to remove marshes. The Hyannis Park Civic Association has helped prevent two such projects from happening. A proposal in 1963 attempted to dredge out an 80 foot lagoon on the eastern side of Hyannis Park and fill three acres of marsh with the sand, allowing 15 more house lots. It wasn’t allowed. In 1993, an ambitious plan called Discovery Harbor was proposed, dredging out much of the marsh as well as the cranberry bog and making a large marina along Bayview Street. The plan included berths for cruise ships, a Coast Guard Station, and a large marina. This was to be on land owned by Cape Cod Hospital. It failed as well.
So, when you complain that the Yarmouth selectmen gave Dennis all the good beaches when the two towns split in 1793, remember - at that time there were no tourists, people didn’t want to live near the beach, and the salt marsh hay was far more valuable than sand. For more than 100 years, Yarmouth thought that it got the best deal!
Excerpted from an article by Duncan Oliver.