Images courtesy of Historic New England
Provincetown’s History Told Through Artifacts
by Steve Desroches
Historic homes are veritable time capsules. Repairs and renovations can reveal stories of past inhabitants, cultural practices, and design and construction elements popular years ago. Such was the case in 1937 when Dorothy and Clifford Waterhouse bought the Captain Jimmy Fish House in Centerville, a village in the Cape Cod town of Barnstable.
Built around 1799, the couple found while renovating their new home had seven layers of wallpaper dating all the way back to the house’s initial construction. So began a passionate hobby for Dorothy who traveled New England to collect scraps and remnants of old wallpaper, much of which was produced by hand in Europe and Asia before the age of mass production.
The fragments seen here were collected by Waterhouse at the Captain Snow House at 90 Bradford Street. Built in 1776 by Captain Eben Snow, it’s had many incarnations, going from the Snows to David Fairbanks, a founder of Seamen’s Savings Bank, in 1826 and then back to the Snow family through 1953. In the 1970s it hosted a museum, featuring folk art from the collection of Stan Sorrentino, the infamous owner of the Crown & Anchor. It operated as an inn for 30 years until being turned into a private residence in 2015.
Waterhouse likely collected these samples, which date from somewhere between 1865 to 1880, in the 1940s about which time her hobby turned into big business. Artist Binnie Wilson was traveling New England on behalf of the Chicago-based Warner Wallpaper company looking for historic designs she could reproduce. As Waterhouse was well known throughout the region, she and Wilson quickly met and formed a partnership, publishing a book of wallpaper called The Waterhouse Collection in 1950. It included a reprint of the scrap found in the Captain Snow House they called “Provincetown Geometric,” which the company manufactured for the next 20 years. Both the original portions as well as the reproductions made later are in the collection of Historic New England, a Haverhill-based historical organization that includes an enormous archive of home décor and design. Much of Waterhouse’s vast collection is in the Centerville Historical Museum, an institution she helped found in 1952.
