The Dune Shacks of Provincetown
On the wild back shore of Provincetown Massachusetts writers, artists and families made summer homes in the early 1900’s. Commonly called the dune shacks, some were originally life saving huts but most were constructed in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The eighteen shacks that remain are part of the Cape Cod National Seashore and are designated as The Peaked Hill Bars Historic District. There is no running water and no electricity. There are kerosene lamps for lighting, wells a walk away for pumping water and propane stoves for cooking. Solitude abounds with the sound of the sea ever present.
Through these photographs I am trying to give a flavor of what it is like in this rugged backshore living in the dune shacks. I am forever searching for home and the backshore of Provincetown, with these shacks, gives life and peace and healing to those who appreciate its wonder. Inspiration and creativity flows. Literature and the arts flourished in this simple lifestyle, as did the families who have summered for generations here
Eugene O’Neill owned and lived for summers in an old coast guard station in the dunes. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a patron of the arts, held forth in the dunes with Jack Reed who is best remembered for his first-hand account of the October 1916 revolution “Ten Days that Shook the World.” Later on, Warren Beatty would play him in the movie “Reds” where the opening scenes were filmed on the Provincetown dunes.
The author Hazel Hawthorne owned a shack and came here “with the thoughtful intention of living directly and truthfully.” Harry Kemp the poet lived in what may have been a converted chicken coop and wrote numerous poems about the dunes. Other visitors to these windswept shores were e.e. Cummings. Jackson Pollack, Tennessee Williams, Walker Evans, Charles Demuth and Jack Kerouac who wrote part of “On the Road” here.
Marsden Hartley may have summed it up best in his autobiography “What a summer - in among those amazing dunes – shifting with the wind before one’s eyes – burying young pine trees to their tops – moving incessantly,… Whoever will forget those dunes – once having seen them – and the great rumbling, dramatic “outside” as it was called – the ocean itself, the long stretch of lovely sands, and nothing else..”
