Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum

In November 1620 the Mayflower, blown off course from its intended destination near the Hudson River, made its first landfall at the hook of Cape Cod and anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor. Before anyone went ashore, the men aboard signed the Mayflower Compact, binding themselves to make and obey just laws for the good of the colony, a document later generations came to see as a founding step toward government by the people.

The Pilgrims spent about five weeks around the tip of the Cape, taking on fresh water, exploring the dunes, and having their first tense encounters with the Nauset people of the Wampanoag Nation, who had lived on this land for thousands of years and whose descendants remain in the region today. Finding the sandy tip poor for settlement, the Pilgrims sailed on to Plymouth. Provincetown built the monument in the early 1900s to make sure its role as the real first landing was not forgotten.

The monument was raised between 1907 and 1910, its cornerstone laid by President Theodore Roosevelt and its completion marked by President William Howard Taft, a measure of how much national attention the project drew. Its designers looked to Italy for a model, choosing the Torre del Mangia, the slender brick campanile on the main square of Siena, and translating its lines into New England granite.

Inside, a series of ramps and stairways climbs to a viewing gallery near the top, and the interior walls are set with carved stones sent by towns and organizations from across the country, a kind of stone guestbook of early twentieth-century America. The climb is a workout, but the reward at the top is one of the great views on the East Coast, taking in the whole curling arm of Cape Cod.

The museum at the base tells the story of Provincetown beyond the Pilgrims, and it is a rich one. For centuries this was a hard-working fishing and whaling port, and in the 1800s waves of Portuguese fishermen, many from the Azores, settled here and shaped the town's food, festivals, and family names that endure to this day.

By the early twentieth century Provincetown had become one of the country's most important art colonies, drawing painters to its famous light and, at the Provincetown Players, launching the early career of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. That double identity, salt-worn fishing town and freewheeling arts haven, still defines the place, and the museum's collections of ships' gear, folk art, and paintings capture both sides.

From the top of the tower the whole tip of Cape Cod unrolls below: the harbor and its wharves, the dense grid of the town, the great rolling dunes of the Province Lands, and the Atlantic curving away on nearly every side. On the clearest days the mainland shows far across the bay. It is the kind of view that rearranges your sense of just how narrow and how remarkable this outer arm of land really is.

Summer is Provincetown at its most crowded and joyful, with the streets and beaches full and long light lingering over the water. Fall quiets the town and turns the dunes and marsh grasses gold. The monument and museum keep to a seasonal schedule and typically close for the coldest stretch of winter, so it is worth checking before you make the drive out to the end of the Cape.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.