The Cape Cod Canal, a Shortcut Cut Through Sand
Near Plymouth, Massachusetts
To reach Cape Cod by car, you cross the Cape Cod Canal, a man-made channel roughly seven miles long that slices clean through the base of the Cape and turns everything east of it into an island. For centuries, ships bound between Boston and New York had to sail the long way, around the outer arm of the Cape past Provincetown, through some of the most dangerous water on the eastern seaboard. In the two decades before the canal opened, many ships were wrecked on that route and many lives were lost.
The dream of a shortcut was ancient, but it took a rich man to build it. The financier August Belmont Junior funded the work, and his chief engineer was William Barclay Parsons, the same man who had engineered New York City's first subway. The canal opened on the twenty-ninth of July, nineteen fourteen, as a private toll waterway.
It proved too narrow and too tricky, so in nineteen twenty-eight the United States Army Corps of Engineers bought it and made it free to all. The Corps then widened and deepened it through the nineteen thirties, turning it into one of the widest sea-level canals in the world, with no locks at all. Three crossings span it today, the Bourne Bridge, the Sagamore Bridge, and a tall railroad lift bridge.
Every trip to the Cape now begins with that crossing.
