_A Liberator of Slaves, Immortalized
by the Poet Whittier_
“The boys all want the town paper. It’s like getting a letter from
home, they write.”
Harry Albro, friendly and kind country editor, gives particular
attention to his servicemen’s mailing list. He served under MacArthur
in the last war, was gassed at Argonne and came back with six battle
stars. He has held the post of a State Guard commanding officer and has
had other Home Front duties. His homey weekly newspapers mean a lot to
people in war service now far removed from their beloved Cape Cod.
When the Revolutionary War clouds loomed, Ebenezer Weekes of Harwich
said to his son, “Eben you are the only one that can be spared; take
your gun and go; fight for religion and liberty!”
“HARRICH” IN ENGLAND, “HAR-WICH” HERE
“Harrich” is the way it is mouthed in the seaport town of Essex County,
England. The Harwich of Cape Cod is pronounced Har-wich. This Harwich
was founded in 1694 and it is said that one of her ardent townsmen,
Patrick Butler, walked all the way to Boston, a trek of 100 miles, to
obtain the incorporation.
In modern times Anthony Elmer Crowell of East Harwich achieved fame
as one of America’s great craftsmen. Mr. Crowell, remote from the
beaten path, admirably proved the better mousetrap adage. He carved and
painted images of birds so realistically that they came into demand
for museums and private collections and travelled even to Australia.
At first Mr. Crowell was a gunners’ guide, commissioned to fashion
some duck decoys that would be more convincing to Cape Cod ducks than
the wood-butcher jobs that other decoy-makers had sold the sportsmen.
Then the East Harwich genius branched into making robins, bluejays,
sanderlings and the many, many other species of the feathered tribes.
Word of his skill got around fast and he profited handsomely. His
quaint craft was put into Joseph C. Lincoln’s Cape Cod book, “Queer
Judson”. And, “It is not unlikely that a day may come when a ‘Crowell
bird’ will be as much sought as a genuine bit of Sandwich glass or a
slender piece of Sheraton furniture,” prophesies Arthur Wilson Tarbell
in “Cape Cod Ahoy!”
Religion was a strong point of Harwich’s early days. A variety of
fifteen denominations once functioned within the town’s borders and
at times emotions ran high. It is recorded, for example, that the
Rev. Edward Pell of Harwich left a request for his burial to be in
the North Precinct, or present-day Brewster, for, “if left among the
pines of the South Precinct (Harwich) he might be overlooked at the
resurrection, that the Lord would never think of looking in such an
un-Godly place for a righteous man.”