wellfleet harbour six years ago. So many great memories of upper cape.
"The Upper Cape is actually the area that you encounter first and is in fact the most southern part of the Cape. Confused? So was I.
Bourne, Sandwich, Sagamore, Falmouth, Mashpee, Cotuit, Osterville, Centerville and
Marstons Mills are considered to be part of the Upper Cape."
"
"Upper" and "Lower"[edit]
The terms "Upper Cape" and "Lower Cape", and references to traveling "up Cape" or "down Cape" have long been a source of confusion for the uninitiated Cape Cod visitor, who, mistakenly associating "up" with "north", might get turned around by passages such as these from 1920:
- "The look of things is more ocean-like if one goes down the Cape to Provincetown."[15]
- "Almost every street in Chatham is solidly paved, and the old corner town of the Cape is the natural goal of the traveler coming up the Cape from Provincetown..."[16]
There are many theories to explain the apparent paradox. One is that the terms derive from early nautical navigation. When one traveled to the east, one went down the longitudinal scale (toward zero at
Greenwich, England). Additionally, prevailing fair weather winds (generally out of the southwest) have been used as the basis for directional descriptions by European settlers and their descendants in eastern North America. That is, one would be traveling "down [wind]" to the east with a westerly wind at one's back. To this day, on nearby Martha's Vineyard, "Up Island" is the western section and "Down Island" is to the east.
The arrival of the railroad during the nineteenth century reinforced the "up/down" concept, as train schedules between Boston and Cape Cod always showed Boston at the top – the timetable for trains headed onto the Cape would be read from the top down, and those of returning trains would be read from the bottom up. Provincetown, therefore, despite being the Cape's northernmost town, was the furthest "down" that one could travel. (The Cape's unique shape brought a new paradox along with the automobile and highway system: when driving "down Cape" on
US Route 6 "eastbound", the final 30 miles from Orleans to Provincetown takes one in nearly every direction
except east.)
The best known colloquial explanation, however, is that the shape of the peninsula as it appears on maps and charts resembles that of a human arm. In that analogy, the southern portion of the Cape represents the
"upper arm", Chatham the elbow, and the north–south portion is the
"lower arm", or forearm. Going further, some say Provincetown is the curled hand, or fist, with
Race Point and
Wood End at its knuckles, and
Long Point at the fingertips.
In the late twentieth century, as the Cape began drawing more vacationers and artists on retreat, the nautical nomenclature and potential confusion over directions have gradually been giving way to the simpler "Outer Cape", although the older terms are still used by some local residents."
