Outermost house of Henry Beston. Come with us over the sand dune cliff to search for Henry Beston's lost Outermost House in the most recent episode: The Fo'Castle E35.
"Sleep gone and past recapture, I drew on my clothes and went to the beach. In the luminous east, two great stars aslant were rising clear of the exhalations of darkness gathered at the rim of night and ocean-Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, the shoulders of Orion. Autumn had come, and the Giant stood again at the horizon of day and the ebbing year, his belt still hidden in the bank of cloud, his feet in the deeps of space and the far surges of the sea." From The Outermost House.
Quincy native Henry Beston joined the French Amy in 1915 and served as an ambulance driver. Like Ernest Hemingway, he wrote about his experience, also like Hemingway he became a journalist for a time, covering the war. He knew cape cod from studying coast guard stations along the cape for a magazine. The recently formed Coast Guard provided, and still provides, a critical service in the area. The ocean around Cape Cod is one of the most dangerous places in the world to sail.
Looking for solace, Beston we went to the beaches of Estham, the furthest point out, as far as he could be from the world, as close to the sea as he could be. He spent a year looking for what he called the Devine Mystery of Nature where a man could cease being a man and become part of something else. He would study and record the sights and sounds of nature. The book he created is cited as the impetus for the preservation of Cape Cod’s natural resources. Beston’s book changed the way people thought about nature, not just something to be feared but also something to be respected and managed.
About ten years after the house was built a storm nearly destroyed it, so it was moved back. 10 years after that, the dune it sat on started to collapse so they moved it again, this time behind the dune. But the sea takes what it wants to. In February of 1978 the Fo’castle was pulled into the ocean by one of the most powerful and destructive storms in the history of Massachusetts, our famous blizzard, a single storm that left 27 inches of snow, shut down the state for a week and killed over 100 people. Not only was the house lost, but the very ground it stood on is now under water.
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Coast Guard Beach
The Outermost House Historical Marker
Henry Beston
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