EASTHAM—More than 67 years ago, Dorcas Gill may’ve been eating breakfast before heading off to Orleans High School in the same kitchen she stood in last Thursday. Back then her surname was Daley, and her family bought the house after her sophomore year. It took them one year to fully restore the mid-eighteenth century house to what it was when Nathaniel Swift owned it roughly 200 years before them. On this morning, Dorcas waits at the kitchen table by two covered plates of cornbread for the arrival of Eastham Elementary School students, who are traditionally the first to tour her former home each season.
(From Route 6 in Eastham headed toward Provincetown, turn left at the Brackett Road traffic light onto Old County Road. The Swift Daley house compound is on Old County before Massasoit Road. Call for more information about days/hours open, (508) 240-1247.)
Dorcas recalls when her father, Raymond Daley, bought the house in 1939 for $2,300, and most people in town didn’t even know it was there. One night, the Daleys were at the bandstand behind the old Town Hall to see Dorcas play her trumpet with the Cape Cod Community Band, and Raymond asked Ralph Chase, a real estate agent, about any old houses for sale that he could buy and restore. Chase pointed him to a house that had been vacant for 15 years right next to his office, which was on Route 6 where the post office is now. The next day, Raymond, Dorcas and her brother walked through the overgrowth to find the house with its doors ajar. Despite being a “derelict of a house,” they were taken by its potential.
“We can fix this up so it can be a great old house,” Dorcas remembers her father saying.
Today, The Swift–Daley House receives roughly 250 visitors annually when its doors open between July and August, Dorcas says. Since her mother, Verena Daley, donated the house to the historical society in 1974, there have been three head curators, including Verena, Dorcas and now Maureen Leavenworth. For the fourth graders’ visit Thursday, Leavenworth presented the collection of period clothing kept in the upstairs portion of the house. Unlike most tour groups, the children are encouraged to feel the fabrics and even try on such accessories as an old beaver-pelt glove. Leavenworth points out the finer details of the various garments to show students how materials were used and reused to get the most out of them. As an example, she holds up her favorite piece in the collection: a child’s bonnet cleverly crafted from a man’s handkerchief, complete with removable battens for washing.
Outside in the back of the house where there used to be 13 acres of mostly asparagus fields, there is The Chester Ranlett Tool Museum and The A. Thomas Dill Beach Camp, both of which were also part of the students’ tour. Ranlett himself, who’s in his 80s, was on hand to show students his impeccable collection of tools that includes everything from a bow drill to an automated cranberry sorter. “Look high and look low. If it cranks, crank it gently,” he instructed each group as they entered the oil-scented museum. Eastham Historical Society President Kate Alpert mingled among the touring groups of students. She has a very personal connection to the beach camp, which was built by her uncle, Herman Dill. It used to sit on the dunes of Coast Guard Beach until the storm of 1978 decimated the area and changed it forever. As a child and teenager, Alpert fondly remembers staying at the fishing and hunting camp and waking up to the sounds of the crashing waves.
At the end of the tour, everyone gathered outside on the grass for cornbread and cranberry juice, surrounded by structural artifacts that, along with their contents, offer a glimpse into a way of life that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s hard to imagine which of the snacking students may someday host a historical tour in their own former home and retell stories of the way things used to be.
Jun 14th, 2007
