April Fool's Contest, 2017 - Souvenirs That Got PTown History Wrong

This souvenir plate likely sold quite well in the early 1900s,
but it got a bit of Provincetown's history wrong.

Many and various sorts of Provincetown souvenirs have been produced over the years, and many of these items depict our colorful history in one way or another, but a number of them have gotten several little bits of our history wrong.
This lovely plate, likely produced around the 1920s, shows several vignettes of well-known Provincetown sights of the day, such as the Pilgrim Monument, the steamship Dorothy Bradford arriving from Boston, and the building thought by many to be the  oldest remaining house in Provincetown. It's found at 72 Commercial Street.
In about 1746 the house was built by ship's carpenter Seth Nickerson, mainly using timbers and planks he had recovered from shipwrecks over the years. The beehive-shaped brick oven at the rear of the main fireplace dates this house before 1750. More "oldest house" claims are argued for other buildings, but this one was promoted as such, and was opened to the public by its resident owners somewhere in the early 1900s.
This souvenir plate was manufactured by W. Adams & Sons, Tunstall, England, and imported for F. H. Dearborn, who owned a shop near the center of town, selling souvenirs, newspapers and periodicals at 277 Commercial Street. The points of interest depicted on the plate seem to be from photos of well-known Provincetown landmarks, including the "Oldest House."

This image is definitely not the home known as the oldest house in Provincetown.

But look closer…
What's wrong with this picture?
A photo erroneously labeled as the oldest house was used in several postcards over a period of years, and also made its way onto this souvenir plate.

"Details" have been painted into the original black-and-white photograph
of this house, long ago mistakenly labeled as PTown's oldest house.

Here are two versions of this photo, each made into a popular postcard, with a number of artistic embellishments, such as the slightly-too-perfect clouds added in the photo to the left. The flower garden was also painted in.

In this incarnation, the artist "improved" the photo by trimming the trees and
shrubs a little, refurbishing the roof, and giving the house a red brick chimney.

This edition featured an embossed version of the photo, again enhanced by an artist, and pressed into the card leaving the image slightly raised. It made a lovely postcard, but the description was still wrong.
Several things in this photo tell us that this is not the West End building known as the oldest remaining house in town. Whoever can name the most clues to this mistaken identity will win a great Provincetown prize. Just point out as many discrepancies as you can find between this house and 72 Commercial Street.
Click on any photo above to enlarge it for more detail, and list every reason you can spot why this can't be the oldest house. E-mail your list to theyearrounder@gmail.com, or text your answers to 424•237•8696 (that's 424•23P•TOWN, if that's easier to remember, to leave your answers by voice mail, but by entering that way you'll lose a minute-and-a-half of your life listening to my message about my fabulous guided tour of Provincetown before you can leave your answers.)
You can also enter by good old US mail. Send entries to TheYearRounder (all one word,) at P O Box 1632, Provincetown, MA 02657.
Entries must be in my hand, or cell phone, or e-mail, by 12' O'clock Noon on April 28th, 2017. In case of a tie for greatest number of reasons why this photo is not Provincetown's "Oldest House," or for any other dispute, a panel of three level-headed citizens, as determined by ME, will resolve the issue by coin toss, random selection, prettiest handwriting, sexiest telephone voice, or any other senseless criteria they may choose, and by entering, we all agree that their ruling is infallible and FINAL.
And, as usual, I reserve the right to award an extra prize or two for no reason whatsoever, to one or more entries chosen at random from all entries received by the deadline. So, you don't even have to be right to win a prize, but you do have to enter.
Good luck, and happy April Fool's Day to one and all. And for a good giggle, click this link to see my all time favorite April Fools prank, perpetrated a few years back by the BBC.

Can Anyone Identify this PTown Location?

Can you identify this spot? Help me if you can.

Does Anyone recognize this spot, or know the name "The Bars" as the title of this postcard reads? Printed a bit faintly in the upper right corner of the card is "c. 710 The Bars, Provincetown, Mass." I've never seen, nor even heard of this place, which certainly doesn't mean that it didn't exist, but I find it curious. For one thing, there aren't a lot of tree-covered hillsides around town, as seen toward the back of this view.
In my vast collection of photo and postcard images of Provincetown and its history, there are a number that were incorrectly labeled by the publisher, and I'm wondering if this is another of those. That doesn't seem very likely, though, since the publisher was the Advocate, the venerable Provincetown publisher that put out the weekly town paper of the same name, and also ran what may have been the largest postcard operation on Cape Cod, publishing their own cards.

Now Waydowntown, the old Advocate Building is still quite charming.

There was another building, attached at the back of 265 Commercial Street, where the newspaper was printed, but most of the postcards of that era were printed in Germany, owing to the superior quality of prints achieved by the skillful Germans and their very advanced presses. The early Advocate postcards were no exception.
Boston architect T. M. Sargent designed the storefront with rather oversized windows to show off the cards, newspapers and souvenirs offered to a tourist trade that was already beginning its steady growth by 1911, when this shop was built in the center of town, right across the street from Town Hall. The windows above, made up of a couple of hundred tiny panes, create one of my favorite architectural details on Commercial Street. The decorative woodwork above and below the windows also helps to make this building one of the most charming in town.
For a time the postcard business even seems to have spilled into the next building to the east through a "hyphen," a small addition built between two structures to join them. As it turns out, there are quite a few hyphenated buildings in Provincetown.
At any rate, there's a bit of the history of The Advocate Building, as it was known. Now, back to my question… Does anyone know a spot in Provincetown called the Bars? If so, please leave a comment here, or e-mail theyearrounder@wildglobe.com, or call me at 42423PTOWN. This one has me stumped.

The Journey of the Mayflower Pilgrims is Commemorated in this 1920 50-Cent Piece

Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford
appears on the 1920 Pilgrim Tercentenary half dollar.

 In May of 1920 the U. S. Congress authorized the minting of a coin that would commemorate the 300^th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims on what would eventually be known as American soil. Boston sculptor Cyrus E. Dallin, known for his Appeal to the Great Spirit, a statue of a Native American on horseback which can be seen at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, was engaged to design the coin. In fact, the design of this fifty-cent piece may have been rushed a bit since the anniversary year was already half over when the notion (and then the motion) to create this new coin was approved. That may explain a few errors in the design, such as the shape of the Mayflower, on the back of the coin, along with the type of sails and their placement on the masts, making this ship look a bit more like the Santa Maria, the ship that carried Columbus to the Bahamas (not to American shores) in 1492.

This coin celebrates the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower
Pilgrims' journey to religious freedom in the New World.

The front side of the coin portrays William Bradford, the leader of the Pilgrims, who would become the governor of the Plymouth Colony and serve in that position, on-and-off, for close to 30 years. In designing the coin, Dallin invented the image of Bradford, as no known drawing of his actual likeness exists. He gave Bradford the sort of features and clothing often seen in paintings by Dutch Masters of the 1600s. Actually, most of the Pilgrims typically dressed a bit less formally rather than in the staid styles and dark colors in which they have most often been depicted over the years.

Historians will argue as to whether the book Bradford holds is a Bible or his own book, Of Plymouth Plantation, in which he details a good bit of the history of Plymouth and its people, as well as conditions and events that led 102 souls to leave their homes in England and Holland for an uncertain life in the New World. This book is where we find a great deal of our knowledge today of the journey, the lives and the struggles of the Pilgrims.

In 1920 there were 152,112 of these commemorative coins minted. Today they typically sell for about $60 to $90, depending on their condition. Half-dollar coins have been churned out nearly every year since the first U.S. Mint was built in 1792, in Philadelphia, which was the nation's capitol at the time. Should we begin lobbying Congress for a 2020 quatercentenary coin acknowledging Provincetown as the Pilgrims' first landing place? 

PTown Beachcombers Find Little Treasures

Low tide can expose all kinds of treasures along the shoreline of Provincetown, which runs about 20 miles along the edges of Provincetown Harbor, Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. There are two low tides and two high tides in a period of approximately 25 hours. So if low tide occurs at, say, 4 PM today, tomorrow afternoon it would be just before 5PM. A tide chart will come in handy to help you choose the time for your walk along our shores. Anywhere along the beaches of Provincetown you can find seashells, pebbles, and on the edge of the harbor, sometimes bits of pottery from some of the earlier days when there were ceramics workshops in town, along with countless other little treasures.
Shells of clams, mussels, scallops and oysters, picked clean by the seagulls and other scavengers, are found in many spots. Very large clam shells are sometimes found on Race Point Beach, along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, along with occasional lobster buoys, pieces of driftwood and other, larger gifts from the sea which sometimes wash onto the shore with the waves and tides. On rare occasions, and on calmer beaches like the shoreline of the bay or the harbor, you might find something valuable, like old coins, jewelry or other items dropped on the beach in years gone by. Bits of sea glass, the shards of broken bottles worn smooth over many years of washing in and out with the tides, are becoming quite scarce, but still turn up once in a while. And sometimes just a simple little rock with a nice design, worn small and smooth by washing up and down the beach for a couple of hundred years, is just the right keepsake to remember a special day exploring the beaches of Provincetown.