It's a mystery that could prove how the Pilgrims set the boundaries for the first Cape Cod towns.
ORLEANS — It's a mystery that could prove how the Pilgrims set the boundaries for the first Cape Cod towns.
Called "The Cornerstones Project," the effort has already paid dividends for a Chatham man and a group of Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School students, who this spring discovered a boulder etched with a giant "X" in Orleans Town Cove. The rock may have been placed there by Pilgrims as a marker for the southernmost boundary of the town of Eastham.
"It just seems so top secret," said Joey Benedict, 13, of Dennis, who chose the Cornerstones seminar last spring.
The project, started by Michael Farber and Lighthouse teachers Paul Niles and Daniella Garran, works off a theory developed in 1985 by retired architect and amateur historian H. Morse Payne. As the descendent of the first settlers of the town of Yarmouth, Payne has an avid interest in early Cape Cod history and has researched much of his genealogy.
Payne learned that English Pilgrims arriving in the New World in the early 17th century discovered something interesting when they first sailed around Cape Cod. By the time they navigated around the outside and into Cape Cod Bay, the needle on their compass had spun all the way around and they realized the peninsula represented a surveyor's dream. It was a natural compass rose.
The Pilgrim elders later used the unique geographic makeup to set the original cornerstones for the first four Cape Cod towns, Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth and what was then known as Nauset, surmised Payne.
Using a combination of sophisticated surveying techniques, the Pilgrim elders found the center of the compass rose in Cape Cod Bay and radiated the first town boundaries in a pie shape off that center point, Payne's theory postulates.
Payne, who is now 86 and lives in Bedford, found the center point he believes the Pilgrims used by drawing a north-south line from Wood End in Provincetown to Quivet Creek in Dennis, and an east-west line from Truro to Indian Cliff in Manomet.
"I was frightened to death of it," because of what it could reveal about history, Payne told a group of about 100 people gathered to hear about the project at the First Congregational Church of Wellfleet last month. "It was almost overwhelming and was the most moving experience of my life."
Payne, and now Farber, believe the Pilgrims may have marked the center spot in the bay with an underwater marker, probably a huge boulder more than 100 feet down. It has become somewhat of a Holy Grail for them, since its existence would go a long way toward proving the theory. Others agree.
"This is the first Plymouth Rock," best-selling author of the historical novel, "Cape Cod," William Martin, told the Wellfleet gathering. "That's what I see when I look at this, whether you ever find the (marker) or not."
Farber has become passionate about Payne's theory. He moved back to Cape Cod from West Virginia recently to oversee the renovation of the family homestead in Brewster, but that project has taken a backseat to solving once and for all the mystery of how the Pilgrims established the original boundaries of Cape towns.
The pursuit has also caught the imagination of the Lighthouse School students and teachers. Eleven students took the seminar last spring, and Niles and Garran will offer it again in the fall.
"The best piece of evidence is to find the center point in Cape Cod Bay. The next best is to find the land stones" that the Pilgrims placed to mark boundaries, said Niles, a science teacher and associate director at the school.
In June, the group of seventh- and eighth-graders found what may be one such stone. They located a huge boulder with a mysterious "X" carved in it, that the Pilgrims may have used to mark the southernmost boundary of Eastham. (See story, at right).
Early settlers often placed rocks on land to identify offshore boundary markers, Farber said.
To survey the original town boundaries, Payne theorized that the Pilgrim Elders in the 1630s positioned a ship along the magnetic north line on the center point in Cape Cod Bay.
"Everything in the Pilgrim world is based on magnetic north line," Farber said.
Magnetic north works off the molten iron in the earth's core and orients compasses to the north. It differs slightly from true north, which is determined by the North Star and is around which the earth rotates. Magnetic north changes over the years, as the molten material in the earth shifts.
Payne's theory continues that while the ship was stationed in the Bay at night, a horseman carrying a lantern rode along the shoreline. Someone with a compass on the ship watched the rider and when he reached the point on the compass that delineated the boundary they wanted, a cannon was likely shot from the ship. The rider would then stop and drive a stake in the beach. The stick would later have been replaced by a large boulder.
"It would only have taken one or two days to survey the Cape," said Farber, who discovered Payne's theory in a book compiled 20 years ago for the Barnstable County tricentennial, "Three Centuries of the Cape Cod County, Barnstable, Massachusetts 1685-1985."
About five years after establishing the boundaries for the first four towns, the Pilgrim Elders divided the Lower Cape towns, Farber said.
The narrow arm-like configuration of the Lower Cape did not lend itself to the English method of surveying, which set up boundaries by using a pie configuration radiating off a central point.
So, for that area, the settlers appear to have used a Roman method of surveying, which delineates by using 90-degree angles off the original magnetic north line, Farber said. The Elders further divided Eastham, using the same Roman method, into seven sections for seven of the Pilgrim families, he said.
Farber knows that finding an underwater marker near the center point in the bay would solidify Payne's theory. But, shifting sands and the presence of fishing draggers over the years would probably have covered or moved the rock, he said.
But finding the rock, "is entirely parenthetical to your project," Dr. Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering told Farber in a recent e-mail.
"The theoretical point in space is a very cool, though intangible, archaeological/historical artifact. To my mind, you have already established its existence," he said.
Farber is concentrating his immediate efforts on shoreside boulders that dot Cape Cod Bay. A cluster of 12 such rocks sit off private property in Truro, he said. "There are very few boulders in the Lower Cape. Why are there 12 off Truro?" he said last week.
Farber is working with the property owners to get permission to study the rocks to see if they may point to a landward boundary.
Why the Pilgrims divided up Cape Cod when they did is understandable, he said.
"(Establishing the Cape Cod towns) was the first effort by Pilgrims to apply English survey methods to the New World," Farber told the group in Wellfleet last month. "Whoever controls the survey, controls the political discussion."
Since there already exists so much documentation of early Massachusetts history, Clarke University professor Paul Burke believes there must be a paper record of the Pilgrims surveying of Cape Cod.
At the talk in Wellfleet, he urged Farber and the Lighthouse students to pursue their research with an eye toward publishing a scholarly paper on it. "There's an awful lot of work to be done," he said.