"Cranberry County" is a sweeping term that we use to cover the South Shore, the South Coast, Cape Cod and the Islands. It's a relatively homogeneous area.
While great differences exist from town-to-town (and even from one section of a town to another), they are a degree of Great where the differences might not be so apparent if you aren't from the region.
While people from Duxbury may think of people from Marshfield as a lower species of talking ape, we all look alike to someone from Angola.
However, the differences are often extraordinary when examined by a local.
Some of the differences are socioeconomic, some are racial, some are urban/suburban, some are ageist (not sure if that's a word, but it is now) and some are so subtle that I'm not sure what they are and I am only writing about them because I am aware that some locals feel that differences exist.
We'll see what's up with these differences... this week, in Cranberry County Magazine!
Plymouth and the Pinehills
Plymouth is a huge town. It is the largest municipality in Massachusetts. It has more land area than Boston and Worcester combined, with Everett, Charlestown and Somerville thrown in.
A working understanding of Population Density can explain the population differences between Boston and Plymouth, and that means a lot here. Much of Plymouth is rural or even undeveloped.
It's not as bad Now as it was Then. Much of Southern Plymouth was forest until recently. There were parts of the forest that had higher Wampanoag population totals than White Guy totals. Population booms in towns just north of Plymouth in the 1970s showed that maybe the limits of "tolerable commute from Boston" had not been reached yet. Many developers noticed this.
Soon enough, you had some massive building projects going on down there in the hinterlands. The 12.4 kilometer land area of the Pinehills neighborhood is about the same size as Arlington, Massachusetts (population: 44,000). The Ponds Of Plymouth neighborhood is large enough that it redrew a Congressional district. Both of these areas were literally carved out of the forest.
The Pinehills have 3000 homes, many of which are Luxury homes. They pay $9.5 million in taxes, making them the second largest taxpayer in town after the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant ($9.7 million in 2011, the Pinehills may have passed them).... and the PNPP ain't in town for the long term, Jack. The Pinehills are the proverbial 9.5 million pound gorilla, and that influence will skyrocket soon enough.
The arrival of these heavyweights forever changed the landscape of Southern Plymouth. Formerly a ponds-driven resort community dotted with cottages and cabins (a Boston Globe article said that the Pinehills area was "only good for hunting" before development), the formerly uninhabited areas- consisting of sort of Cedarville, sort of West Wind Shores Shores, sort of Manomet, and really none of the above- bleed over into the Irish Riviera-influenced coastline.
The long-term, pre-Pinehills residents of the area seem pretty cool about the arrival of the luxury housing. The Pinehills are generally self-sufficient, and were dropped down where they aren't in anyone's way. Most recognize that people paying $10 million a year in taxes are worth whatever problems may arise with traffic, population density and water concerns.
The one form of resentment that I saw (and I went trolling for Pinehills hatred on several area-themed Facebook pages) involved the belief that the Pinehills live in their own little world. It is very self-contained, having their own shops, gas stations and even a fire station. Pinehills people have very little reason to mix in among the rabble, and everybody knows it. "It's like a town unto itself" was a prevailing sentiment.
It does make you wonder when the Pinehills people and the Ponds Of Plymouth people will realize that they are carrying a large % of the town's tax burden on their shoulders, and maybe strike out on their own? Annex Cedarville's White Cliffs neighborhood for beach access, swallow up some pond neighborhoods for future gentrification... and then secede. They could probably apply for admission to Cape Cod, if they keep the Median Household Income high enough.
Google Map that ish and tell me that I'm not on to something. Sounds like a good future article.
Duxbury and the Irish Riviera
Duxbury is a tony town of 15,000 souls, and the folks from other local towns call it "Deluxebury."
While the wealth is not ostentatious (if you drive through town expecting to find Versailles on every block, you'll be disappointed), everybody on the South Shore knows what's up. It even drifts out to the Cape. Radio talk-show host Ed Lambert from WXTK, who works in Hyannis and lives further out on the Cape, always says "Deluxebury" when referring to the Plymouth County town.
So, in posh Deluxebury, what's up with that sandy cottage village on the ocean side of the Powder Point Bridge? Why, it's none other than Duxbury's little slice of the Irish Riviera!
The Irish Riviera is a strip of often seasonal coastal housing built more along cottage standards than as a place where you might think about hanging a chandelier. It is a distinct cultural entity which runs mostly unchanged down the Massachusetts coast from Quincy to the edge of Cape Cod.
Access to Boston via Route 3 in the 1950s and especially the Boston Busing Crisis of the 1970s doubled the population of most South Shore towns. This made the Irish Riviera more of a year-round thing.While Duxbury Beach is mostly uninhabited, what inhabitants there are stand firmly in the camp of the Irish Riviera. Heavily blue collar, overwhelmingly Catholic, generally seasonal and very, very Irish (my friends growing up there included Kerrigans, Branns, McDaniels, Deehans, McLaughlins, Duffys and several spellings of "Reed") the residents differ noticeably from the Pilgrim descendants roaming through Duxbury Proper.
I grew up on Duxbury Beach, and most of my classmates instantly recognized me as a non-native Duxburian. Many of them to this day think that I grew up in Marshfield, either literally or culturally.
The neighborhood is slowly being gentrified, as wealthier people buy up cottages and jam as much lumber as they can into the footprint of the original cottage. Property values soar, and the blue collar Irish Riviera crowd will be squeezed out of the neighborhood by whatever they call Yuppies these days. Many of my old neighbors (I migrated to the Cape a dozen years ago) tell me that it isn't the same neighborhood these days.
For now, however, the Irish Riviera still runs through Duxbury.
Note that Mosquito Village very nearly took the Duxbury section of this article, but I went for my old neighborhood as a sort of professional courtesy.
Brockton and the South Shore
Duxbury Beach is the story of an Irish-American, Boston-to-suburbia exodus. Brockton is an older tale, and it involves putting shoes on people.
Brockton was originally a part of Duxbury, but you wouldn't guess that now. They are completely unalike. It's a lot like the old George Carlin "baseball is pastoral, football is technological" routine. Duxbury is suburban, almost rural. Brockton is urban. Duxbury is very white. Brockton is very black. Duxbury has a small population over a large land area, while Brockton jams a lot of people into a small space. Duxbury is wealthy, Brockton is poor. Duxbury kids are pampered, Brockton kids are among the toughest in the world.
Duxbury is basically like every other town in Plymouth County.... Brockton, uhm, isn't.
How did that come to be?
Brockton's position on the Salisbury Plain River allowed it to operate mills, and these mills expanded steadily throughout the early Industrial era. While the Carvers and Marshfields of the area were primarily farming communities with sparse peopling, Brockton's burgeoning industries (by the time of the Civil War, they were America's leading manufacturer of shoes) produced a high-density, urban entity.
The differences soon became apparent. Wareham is a good-sized Plymouth County town, home to 22,000 people in 2010. Brockton had that reached that population in 1875. By 2010, Brockton (93,000 peope or so) made up about 20% of Plymouth County's nearly half million residents... jammed into 2% of the land area.
As you may have guessed, very few of those people are white millionaires who prefer to live in a triple-decker with two Dominican families. The median income in Brockton is about $21K, well below the Plymouth County's $35K. 14% of Brockton residents are below the poverty line, as opposed to 4-6% in Plymouth County... which, I hate to add, includes the Brockton numbers as 20% of the total.
Brockton kids are as tough as it gets. Two of Brockton's residents have ruled very competitive and prestigious boxing weight classes in the last 50 years or so, no mean feat for a city that is just 1 of the 25,375 cities, towns and incorporated places in the US. If your town's "notable residents" has "Marvin Hagler" listed, and he isn't the immediate undisputed answer for the "toughest guy who ever walked these streets" argument... you live in a pretty tough town, my friend.
This is funny, because if you went to Central Casting and asked for a typical Plymouth County resident, you'd probably get some butter-soft Cohasset trust fund WASP.
Brockton provides almost all of Plymouth County's street credibility, sporting a robust 43.1 black majority. Plymouth County's 7-8% blackness is almost entirely based in Brockton. Duxbury, holding down the other side of the see-saw, is .6% black. Duxbury does rank above Brockton in "drive-by shootings of a prominent rapper."
The Wedge and Hyannis Port
Following the Rich Man, Poor Man theme, let's carve up a region where the Kennedy Compound and a very busy Salvation Army center are 5000 feet apart.
"The Wedge" is a part of Hyannis that has a higher poverty/crime rate than her surrounding neighborhoods. It is the area south of Route 28 around where the Cape Cod Mall is. It forms a sort of Triangle, which draws unfortunate comparisons to the ones in Bermuda and Bridgewater.
It's not Roxbury. You could put on a shirt made of money and walk through the toughest part of the Wedge yelling threats at midnight, and your chances of survival would be a healthy 46%. It would be about .46% if you did it in certain parts of Dorchester, and it would only get that high because a good portion of Americans believe that the gods speak through the mentally ill.
The Wedge (aka "Captain's Quarters) is not as bad as this article makes it out to be, an article where the author urges Zero Tolerance/Shock And Awe tactics on a neighborhood about the size of a mall, but you have to view things in their proper context.
Not that far down the road, you have a Summer White House, perhaps the most well-known one ever. It's where Jackie O and JFK got in the yacht and had those "How many butlers and maids should we hire this summer" conversations that you and I don't have.
I doubt that, when Jackie O was deciding which one of her hats to wear, she ever said "Oh dear, I'd better not go with blue, it could be mistaken for Crip affiliation five blocks over. Someone might blow my husband's head off."
Note that we almost went with Onset Waterfront/Shangri-La for a Wareham tangent, but the article is getting lengthy. Both towns battle over the "Brockton-by-the-sea" nickname, with "Sea Lowell" and "she's like a baby Lynn" also in the mix in SE Massachusetts conversations about the 'Ham. I personally know a guy in Wareham who has performed more murders in his travels than the entire town of Duxbury has suffered for as far back as my admittedly-shoddy memory goes.
Chatham and Harwich
Here's one of those comparisons that makes no sense to an out-of-towner. I live on Cape Cod, too... albeit the Upper Cape. I consider this to be close to a family-style dispute that anyone with a brain stays out of. So, into the dispute we go...
The differences between these two towns are piddling, if that's the right word. Chatham has a $45K median income, while Harwich is at 41K. That's like, uhm, $80 a week or so, no? Chatham and Harwich are 95-96% white. They are both tourist-dependent, like a junkie and the smack. If you say something stupid at a tavern about fishing or driving a boat or lobstering in either town, there will be no shortage of people willing to correct you.
I list them here because I recall there being some acrimony when they regionalized the schools and created Monomoy High School. I voted for Charwich (which would have given restaurants in both towns the opportunity to create a hyper-local sandwich), but I'm not a resident.
I think that the beef was over how to fund the high school. Harwich is just about twice as large as Chatham, and the financial split may have been less than fair originally.
There may also be questions about the rate of development and the changing face of the Outer Cape. In 1960, Chatham had 3273 residents, and Harwich had 3747 residents. Harwich then almost tripled their population by 1990, while Chatham barely doubled theirs. I should add that these differences vanish quickly when Chatham's summer population skyrockets to 30K and Harwich moves past 40K. Then, they just all hate summer people.
There is an element of two twins fighting over which one is prettier here, but I think that I may have overestimated the acrimony that exists between the two towns. If I missed some point of contention, hit me up in the comments.
Gurnet/Saquish and the Post-Industrial Era
Whatever problems Brockton may have, somebody at least was decent enough to run a power line through town. You don't need an off-road vehicle to get around. A really big wave doesn't cut it off from the rest of the word.
Residents of Gurnet Point and Saquish Head have those problems. The cool part? They like it that way.
Way out on the end of Duxbury Beach (it's actually Plymouth, but that would only confuse you if you were looking for it on a map), there are two tiny villages.
They have no electricity out there, and survive on firewood, propane, solar and wind energy. It is as Cottage as any beach gets around here, or pretty much anywhere.
Many who see it up close think that it may just be the greatest place ever, myself included. If you take away the Jeeps, it's basically 1850 until you look in the cottages and see laptops, portable radios and newspapers writing about a black US President, space shuttles and so forth.
They're aware of the modern world, so it's not like that M. Night Shyamalan (?) village movie out there. It'd never work... not enough trees. They could see modern stuff, including a nuclear reactor, just across the bay in Plymouth proper. You could maybe pull it off with a bunch of fog machines, but a good wind might spoil the ruse.
Simply put... the high school is known as Dennis-Yarmouth, and the baseball team in the Cape League is known as Yarmouth-Dennis. D-Y is in effect for more months of the year, but Y-D is in effect when the population is at the highest point.
Everything balances, and everyone goes home happy.
Speaking of which, I'm out of towns. Let me know who we forgot!
Thanks to Heidi Woodmansee Sullivan, Kerri Yankovicth-Smith (Marine Mom!), Scott Rodrigues and the Duxbury Beach Resident's Association for help with the pics.
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