Welcome to the Jeremiah Smith House

Located directly on Town Cove in Orleans, the Jeremiah Smith House is the perfect place for your quintessential Cape Cod get-away.

The Jeremiah Smith House is the perfect convergence of classic old-Cape Cod architecture and charm with modern comforts and amenities. The sprawling home is nestled on a wooded, private, waterfront lot replete with beach grass and the smell of salt air. A kidney-shaped pool sits perched on a knoll, taking advantage of spectacular water views. And the huge rear deck provides a look at Town Cove that is second to none.

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Jeremiah Smith House Ammenities

• Spectacular panoramic water views of Town Cove in Orleans
• 4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths
• Sleeps 10-12
• Kidney-shaped pool
• Cable television
• Two fireplaces
• Sunroom with water views
• Laundry
• Close to Orleans and Eastham restaurants and shopping

Jeremiah Smith

As populations grew on Cape Cod in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, south side sailors found the distance around the tip of Provincetown to the bay side ports to be both lengthy and dangerous, particularly in the area of the shoals of Peaked Hill Bars off Truro. The solution was to deepen the natural cut, which became Jeremiah's Gutter.

In the spring of 1717, the channel was opened across the land of Jeremiah Smith, connecting Boat Meadow Creek on the bay to Town Cove. From this protected harbor, boats could reach the Atlantic through Nauset Harbor. Never very wide and subject to the problems of low tides and bayside sand bars, the channel nevertheless accommodated small boats of up to twenty tons and cut the time of shipping around the Lower Cape by as much as a full day.

In the same year that it was opened, the canal played a role in the wreck of the pirate ship Whidah when His Majesty's agent, Captain Cyprian Southack, used it to take a survey party to the wreck site. After arriving by boat from Boston, Southack obtained a whaleboat in Provincetown and proceeded down the bay and through Jeremiah's Gutter to the Atlantic side where the Whidah went aground on the Wellfleet shore in an early spring storm. Although his trip through the canal was smooth enough, his mission of preserving the treasure from the site for the crown was not so successful because he found that enterprising residents already made off with most of the valuables.

When the south precinct of Eastham was established as the town of Orleans in 1797, the Smith family land and Jeremiah's Gutter became the northern boundary of the new town. In 1804 the canal was improved and widened.

Jeremiah's Gutter was important during the War of 1812 when British warships Newcastle and Spenser blockaded Cape Cod Bay. The larger British vessels were unable to sail close in to the shore because of the shoals. Local sailors used smaller shallow draft whaleboats to move cargo through the narrow canal from the bay to the Atlantic. Use of the canal prevented seizure of valuable supplies that were badly needed while the war was in progress.

The nineteenth century saw a gradual decline in the use of Jeremiah's Gutter. There was some post-war interest in widening the small canal and around 1820 a company called the Eastham and Orleans Canal Proprietors was actually formed "for purpose of opening, and keeping open a canal from Norset Cove {sic} to Boat Meadow Creek." The proposal planned to charge a ten cent a ton toll for vessels passing through the waterway, with additional charges for certain kinds of cargo. But nothing was ever done and after three years the charter for the company lapsed. Certainly part of the problem was that a larger canal in the Orleans area would still not have eliminated the navigation problems of the Monomoy Shoals off Chatham and the dangerous Peaked Hill Bars. The use of larger vessels and the problems of wide tidal flats in Cape Cod Bay also made such a passage in the Orleans-Eastham area impractical.

Today, there is little evidence of Cape Cod's first canal. Those who frequent the shopping complex near the Eastham rotary at Route 6 are usually unaware that they are walking on the site of Jeremiah's Gutter. Canal Road in Orleans is the only visible remembrance that the small waterway ever existed.

*from the cape cod companion.

Harry Hunt & Associates

The Jeremiah Smith House is a Harry Hunt and Associates property. We are pleased to offer the finest vacation rentals on Cape Cod.