Tradition of Moving Houses
The tradition of moving houses is one that can be traced back throughout the Cape’s architectural history, as it is not uncommon to discover that many older homes have been repositioned, relocated or even deconstructed and reconstructed in another location. As Gerard Smith, a Wellfleetian and docent at the Highland Lighthouse remarked of his own home:
I live in a house that was obviously taken apart at some point, to some extent and then reassembled at another location. It was in the era when they were moving things out of the Boundbrook area in Wellfleet and relocating them.
Many of these older moves followed a more customary approach as defined by Wolfe, since they lacked the means and technology for more technically sophisticated moves. In an era before cranes, rollers, hydraulic jacks, or any of the other pieces of equipment that have made contemporary moves possible, the process of taking a home apart and reconstructing it was much more common. Smith speaks of these customary approaches and the frequency of homes in Wellfleet that had been moved as a result of erosion:
There certainly were developed here on the Cape more sort of home grown moving systems, some involved taking houses apart but others involved using logs to roll houses and clearly many of the houses at least in Wellfleet were moved from areas that had either eroded away in the case of Billingsgate Island [where] they were floated across and in the case of another area where a harbor got completely silted up and there was no real activity there, they were moved off by water as well.
The phenomenon of moving houses has not always been necessitated since many traditional Cape Cod houses were not built right on the water but were typically built down in a hollow or on a high point, a safe distance back from the coastline. The more contemporary desire to have ocean front realty has trumped the traditional sensibility of building a home a safe enough distance away that erosion or damage from strong storms is not a concern. Bill Fitts explains this transition:
At the turn of the century and up to the early part of the twentieth century, there weren’t many people who thought of building on the waterside of the front street, Commercial Street because of the storms. So they would build their houses on the landside. The sea captains would build their homes high up on a hill away from the storms… As the tourists came in then, [the Cape] became a little more popular with the outside world. People wanted to build on the water.
This desire for ocean front realty brings us to the present, where houses frequently have to be moved to a safer location because they have been constructed in vulnerable areas. The desire to build a house too close to the coastline can be problematic since there are many houses that have been built in areas that are eroding at a rate greater than the average. On the top of these eroding bluffs houses can be found precariously perched, which is counter to the traditional sensibility that dictated houses be built in more stable areas. Realistically, the burgeoning population on the Cape and highly prized ocean front realty results in these lots that have valuable panoramic views of the ocean to become the most sought after sites to build, despite their eventual impermanence.
