Provincetown, Massachusetts
A Short History of Provincetown
The first written plan of self-government in America was signed in the harbor here in 1620, the town was incorporated in 1727, and a fishing port built by Portuguese families later became one of the country’s oldest art colonies. Provincetown has been telling the rest of the nation how to govern itself since before there was a nation.
1620, and the First Written Government
Before the Mayflower’s passengers ever reached Plymouth, they anchored in Provincetown Harbor, and in November 1620 they signed the Mayflower Compact in the water you can still see from Commercial Street. The Compact was the first written framework of self-government in what became the United States: a promise among the signers to make and obey just and equal laws for the general good. It was not a grand constitution. It was a group of people agreeing that they would govern themselves by rules they wrote together, which is the same idea that Town Meeting runs on four centuries later.
A Fishing Town With Portuguese Roots
Provincetown was incorporated as a town on June 14, 1727, after more than a century as a harbor where ships sheltered at the tip of the Cape. After the American Revolution it grew fast as a fishing and whaling port, and the crews who worked the boats included many Portuguese sailors, a great number of them from the Azores, who settled here and whose families shaped the town’s food, its festivals and its life on the water. The working waterfront that gave the town its living is still there, and the town still marks its Portuguese heritage every summer.
The Art Colony
In 1898 the painter Charles Webster Hawthorne opened the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, said to be the first outdoor school for figure painting in the country, and artists and writers followed the light out to the end of the Cape. The Provincetown Art Association and Museum was founded in 1914 and marked its centennial in 2014. In the years around the First World War the Provincetown Players staged early work by Eugene O’Neill, and the town has been a center of American art and theater ever since. That colony is not a museum piece: the Fine Arts Work Center still gives fellowships to emerging writers and artists here every year.
The Pilgrim Monument
The town’s tallest landmark remembers the harbor’s first winter. President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Pilgrim Monument on August 20, 1907, and President William Howard Taft dedicated the finished tower on August 5, 1910. At 252 feet 7 inches it is the tallest all-granite structure in the United States, modeled on a bell tower in Siena, Italy, and from the top you can see the whole curl of the Cape. It stands over the Provincetown Museum, which keeps the town’s own history beside the story of the Compact signed below it.
1990: The Town’s Charter
Here is the piece of Provincetown history that most directly affects you. In 1990 the town’s voters adopted a revised Home Rule Charter that set up the Select Board and Town Manager form the town runs on today. It kept Town Meeting as the legislature, where every registered voter can vote the budget and the bylaws, and it put the daily work of the town in the hands of a professional Town Manager appointed by, and accountable to, the elected Select Board.
The trade was deliberate: one professional administrator to run the departments, and an elected board and an open Town Meeting to hold the power. Whether the balance is right is a real question, and it is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted.
The History the Town Keeps Itself
The Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum together hold much of the town’s art and its record. They are not passive collections. Groups like these apply to the town’s own Community Preservation Committee for money to restore what they hold, and Town Meeting votes those applications one at a time, which means the preservation of Provincetown’s history is itself decided in the room where every registered voter can stand up.
Sources: Town of Provincetown official website (provincetown-ma.gov); Wikipedia, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Pilgrim Monument; Town of Provincetown Home Rule Charter (1990); U.S. Census Bureau.