Atwood-Higgins Historic District

The Atwood-Higgins Historic District possesses significance under National Register Criteria A, C, and D at the local level. The period of significance begins in 1730, the approximate construction date of the first building on the property, and ends in 1961, when ownership of the property was transferred to the National Park Service. The original homestead portion of the Atwood-Higgins Historic District possesses significance at the local level under Criteria A and C in the areas of Exploration/Settlement and Architecture. Under Criterion A, the Atwood-Higgins House has important associations with the Colonial Period development of the Town of Wellfleet. Initially part of Eastham, Wellfleet's first European settlement occurred in the mid- to late seventeenth century and was focused around the hamlet of Billingsgate. The town of Wellfleet was set off from Eastham in 1763. Constructed about 1730, the Atwood-Higgins House is one of the oldest and best preserved Colonial Period dwellings in the town. For more than 150 years, the occupants of the house were ancestors of the Nauset settlers who were associated with the maritime industry and used the property in a manner consistent with typical local cultural patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Atwood-Higgins Historic District possesses additional significance under Criterion A in the area of Tourism. The early-twentieth-century transition in use of the Atwood-Higgins property from a year-round residence to a seasonal recreational retreat exemplifies regional trends in tourism and the historic restructuring of the local economy. The Atwood-Higgins Historic District, including the house, outbuildings, landscape, and ancillary features comprise George K. Higgins's personal version of an ideal, historic Cape Cod homestead, which was acquired and improved in an effort to create a specific experience of place for leisure purposes. By the onset of the twentieth century, the negative effects of urbanization and mass-production resulted in a decreased quality of life for many Americans, in which interpersonal relationships, natural human connections to the land, and the formation of personal identity through historical associations with people or places were drastically diminished. Paired with the increased mobility enabled by the automobile, these factors fueled a new scenic and heritage tourism market. Tourists, typically from middle and upper class families, sought naturally scenic, rural destinations that fulfilled a nostalgic desire to experience simpler times, unique places, and to reconnect with their historic origins. Cape Cod was quickly identified as a destination that possessed all of these assets and the region was popularized by the substantial amount of travel writing and advertisements published during the 1920s and 1930s. These documents placed additional emphasis on the local history through detailed nostalgic descriptions of quaint historic landscapes or objects, historical contexts, folklore, and instructions on how to experience the feeling of local places.

This enhanced fascination with both national and personal heritage inspired many vacationers to visit their ancestral communities, often renting or purchasing historic houses there to use for summer recreation. George Higgins annually left his home in Brookline, outside Boston, to vacation on his Colonial family homestead in a rural area of Cape Cod every summer. His development of the property into a highly individualized, ideal Colonial complex, personalized with physical expressions of childhood memories that contributed to his personal identity, represents the twentieth-century recreational trend of experiencing an intact or re-created historic place. While the assemblage of re-created buildings and aesthetic improvement of the landscape around a period Cape Cod Cottage is not consistent with trends in the growing professional preservation movement of the time, his use of the estate as a summer resort and an indulgence of historical interests provides insight into the popular culture of the early twentieth century. Advocates and scholars involved in the preservation movement during this period supported a more scientific methodology for restoration and maintenance of historic buildings, based on research, documentation, and physical evidence of historic characteristics. The acceptance of this methodology by supporters of the emerging preservation movement followed debates regarding the retention of material and design integrity during restoration projects. Higgins valued the historic characteristics of the Atwood-Higgins house and property, but based his improvements on nostalgic family memories, and personalized interpretations of history and aesthetics.

Under Criterion C, the Atwood-Higgins House is significant as one of the earliest and best-preserved local examples of an early-eighteenth-century Cape Cod Cottage, constructed with typical Plymouth Colony building techniques. The house is a remnant of the gradual expansion of the original Nauset Grant settlement in Eastham, which did not extend north into Wellfleet until the late seventeenth century. Historic additions to the house are characteristic of the building type and relate to the continuous use of the property as a year-round residence. Higgins's subsequent efforts to restore and preserve the house ensured its survival, making it one of the few Colonial Period Cape Cod Cottages remaining in the region, where the national building type evolved. The house retains a high degree of architectural and structural integrity.

Under Criterion D, the Atwood-Higgins Historic District possesses local level significance in the area of post-contact period archeology. Archeological excavations conducted on the property to date have yielded valuable corroborative information about the specific construction chronology of the house, ca. 1730, and also have yielded information about previously undocumented building and repair campaigns both inside and outside of the house. Furthermore, the identification of an intact topsoil stratum containing eighteenth-century domestic debris and cultural features suggests the potential for additional intact soils on the property containing similar deposits. These deposits, in turn, have the potential to address questions of local and regional importance including the early settlement of the island, early agriculture on the Outer Cape, and the establishment and modification of transportation networks.

The Atwood-Higgins Historic District retains a high degree of historical integrity. All of the buildings and features remain in their original locations and the natural, secluded, rural setting of the property has been preserved. The buildings retain their historic designs, and the majority of the structure and materials remain in the contributing buildings. Material or structural alterations to the contributing buildings were generally associated with necessary maintenance or repairs. The main house also includes historical alterations associated with its period of use. The Atwood-Higgins Historic District embodies the feeling of a rural Cape Cod retreat that includes an early-eighteenth-century homestead as expressed by the main house.