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An Island in Time:
Wellfleet's Bound Brook Island An Island in Time is a personal rendering and micro-history of a beautiful and secluded place in the Cape Cod National Seashore. Arriving with my family in the early 1990s, I grew to love Bound Brook Island in Wellfleet and wanted to understand and share its geological creation, its native people, its settlers. I hiked its hills and ravines, its forgotten roads, taking the landscape into my muscles and bones. Then, exploring this one square mile through time, I encountered sea captains, entrepreneurs, a midwife, uncovered tragic family stories and close connections. I wanted to plumb the island's mysteries: Why was Bound Brook Island no longer an island? How did it get its name? And why did its thriving community of 150 inhabitants in 1850 dwindle to none fifty years later? Antique maps and photographs as well as my own maps, photographs and poems, inform this book that also contains original research about the island’s inhabitants. An Island in Time ends in the twenty-first century, with its summer people, its artists and intellectuals and its future in a warming world. forthcoming from the Rose Press in Spring 2022 Opposite: Memory Map of Bound Brook Island in 1860 by Dr. Nehemiah Somes Hopkins, 1924. Courtesy Wellfleet Historical Society & Museum, gift of Al Kraft |
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