In 1908, The Herring River Dike Was Wellfleet’s First Salvo in its War Against the Salt Water Mosquito

The oyster reefs were shrinking and the fish were mostly gone. As Wellfleet began steering its economic course towards the nascent tourism industry, one pesky marsh-inhabiting beast stood in its way

By David Wright

A large crowd of Wellfleet residents gathered for the formal start of the Herring River Dike construction on August 7, 1908. Note far right the young boy Lorenzo Dow Baker 2nd, Capt. Lorenzo Dow Baker’s grandson, who was delegated to represent the Baker family at the ceremony. He is holding a shovel preparing to turn the first spadeful of sand. His grandfather, one of the most ardent supporters of the dike construction project, had died six weeks earlier. (Photo courtesy of the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum)

As the long-awaited Herring River Restoration Project reaches the end of its preliminary phase, it might be good to look back 119 years ago when work began on the Herring River Dike, a project then called the Marshland Reclamation Project. What were their reasons, in 1908, for doing all the things we are now undoing at great effort and vastly greater expense? Ironically, some of those reasons are the same.

To begin, we should understand that we will not now be returning the Herring River to its original, pristine state. The healthy marshland we hope to recreate was itself a result of silting brought about by heedless deforestation. The early colonists’ need for wood - for constructing buildings and ships, for making salt for food preservation, and for home heating and cooking - was great enough to rapidly denude the once dense Outer Cape forests.  By the 1880s, more than 1,000 acres of saltmarsh had formed in the Herring River system due to soil run-off and resultant grass growth. 

Southwesterly-looking view of the dike during early phase of the dike construction in 1909. (Photo courtesy of the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum)

The natural flushing of this area had already been impeded by ditching done for fabricating the railroad bed in 1869, and by construction of the Atkins Pole Dike at the mouth of the Herring River, the brainchild of a group of 20 men intent on creating more upland for cattle grazing, and farming. Draining the lowland behind today’s Briar Lane, this initial dike eliminated the skating parties once held in the former marshland between today’s Benson, Young and Downs’ Insurance and Paine’s Garage, now L&R Auto.

But the Atkins Pole Dike was only a precursor to the more dramatic land alteration yet to come: the creation of the Herring River Dike in 1908. Chaired by Capt. L.D. Baker, the country’s first banana importer and Wellfleet’s entrepreneur extraordinaire, a committee of five was appointed to look into the diking of the river: fellow committee members included N.H. Payne, livery owner M.D. Holbrook, T.A. Newcomb, F.W. Snow, and Capt. Baker’s son, L.D. Baker, Jr. And it wasn’t only those with vested interests who supported the diking project: it was most of the town.  Mariners and shellfishermen had questions, including the effect the dike might have on the oyster’s food supply. They were answered satisfactorily by a pair of scientists, Drs. Mead and Field, who cited recent successful examples from land reclamation projects in the Carolinas. The fact was that most of the Town’s income, even then, was coming from the tourist trade. Wellfleet was essentially “fished out”, but had plenty of real estate to sell, rent or build upon. Nearly everyone in town had a stake. Now it was down to convincing the State to support the project the Town wanted. When the committee came to Town Meeting with their proposal to borrow $10,000.00 toward the construction of the dike (the Town’s portion of the bill, and half the total cost) the vote was 182 - yea; 17- nay. And the big reason for all this considerable work and, by the norms of the day, incredible cost was the tiny, near-weightless mosquito. 

How big a menace were the mosquitoes to Wellfleet? Clarice Daniels, writing in The Cape Cod Standard Times, wrote of a Wellfleet where horses went out into the marsh for salt hay sprayed with insecticide and wearing wide-brimmed straw hats with holes for the ears, from which hung a long veil. Quoting Bill Ryder of Commercial Street, she adds, “The driver had to be well covered from head to foot, and, like the horse, wear a wide-brimmed straw hat with a long veil. All the men in town had them, and most of the horses.”

It wasn’t merely for the comfort of the horses and townspeople that the mosquito had to be eliminated. With the end of big fin fishing catches in 1900, tourism was seen as the economic future of Wellfleet. Capt. Baker’s brainchild, The Chequesset Inn, was built on the former Mercantile Wharf, mostly unused by then due to the decline in mackerel fishing. People from “away” could come by train to enjoy nature’s bounty, sometimes by eating it. Bird shooting lodges were big business in the early 1900s. Here, from a journal by an unnamed sportsman from Kingston, MA, are some notes on the vexing flying pests, too small to shoot at, encountered in Wellfleet.

This is a postcard view of the new dike, taken just after its completion in 1911. Photo is taken from the Chequesset Neck side of the Herring River looking west. The dike’s small sluiceway can be seen near the eastern side of the river. (Photo courtesy of the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum)

August 10, 1907: Bought mosquito netting and put it over the damaged windows.

August 11, 1907: Went to the Methodist Church. Church very pretty inside. Good singing. Swarm of mosquitoes at the door, and quite a lot got in.

August 12,1907:  Went up to see about the (bird shooting) stand, but the mosquitoes so thick I gave up.

And here is the start of a long poem written by Martha Baker, Capt. Baker’s daughter, read at a meeting in connection with the building of the dike. It was found in a trunk at Belvernon, the Baker family’s summer house, by the Agger family, and donated to the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum.

The Burial of the Mosquito
No melancholy dirge we beat,
No mournful requiem repeat.
We dig the grave, thou cruel pest,
And joyfully lay thee to rest,

Long we’ve felt thy baneful sting,
Long have heard thee gleeful sing.
With sweet revenge thy shroud we bring,
And on thy corpse the sand we fling.

No more wilt thou our homes infest,
Nor steal from our rightful rest.
Thou vicious robber, fare thee well.
Bliss to sound thy funeral knell.

Thou’st robbed our town of its good name -   
well deserves extended fame,
No cooler breeze could tourist ask,
More sunny shores on which to bask.

A photo of the schooner Lucie, taken in mid-construction of the dike. The Lucie made several trips to Wellfleet carrying stone. The photo is taken from the Cape Cod Bay side of the Herring River Basin looking to the northeast. Even as construction continued the Herring River channel remained deep enough to accommodate a large schooner. Note, too, the vast area of marsh that grew around the Herring River shore due to silting caused by the deforestation of Cape Cod in the previous century. (Photo courtesy of the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum)

When I was dusting one of Capt. Baker’s fumigators in the Historical Society Museum, I was reminded how the tropical experience of mosquitoes must have colored local thinking. After many years of trading in the West Indies Capt. Baker settled with his family in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Several other Wellfleet families relocated there, as well, to assist Capt. Baker in his banana business. More than those families back on Cape Cod, they understood the seriousness of mosquito-borne disease. Near-fatal bouts of malaria had convinced them that mosquitos were more than mere annoyance, and not to be trifled with.

When construction began on the Herring River Dike on August 7,1908, a group of local dignitaries stood at the site as witness to the occasion: Selectmen Nehemiah H. Paine, Martin D. Holbrook and Thomas A. Newcomb. Capt. Baker was not there. He had died, not of a mosquito bite, but of heart failure on June 21 in Boston’s Parker House at age 68. Nor was his son, who had been so influential on steering committees. It was Capt. Baker’s grandson, Lorenzo Dow Baker 2nd, who represented the family. “I had to make a speech,” recalls Mr. Baker, "and it was the first speech I ever made. Then I had to get a little dirt on the shovel.” Thus, the work began.

The saga of the Herring River Dike and Wellfleet’s effort to vanquish its seemingly immortal mosquitos, however, did not end when the dike was finished in 1911. The story continues…

David Wright is Curator at the Wellfleet Historical Society Museum and the author of “The Famous Beds of Wellfleet -  A Shellfishing History.”

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