(2011)
“What I remember most about 11 Commercial Street,” Amy Whorf McGuiggan has written, “are the stunning Spanish bells, brought back from Cuba, that hung from wooden frames in the yard. They gave that beautiful corner of Provincetown a distinct look and feel. The Carpenters [Ralph and Constance] traded one of their bells for a magnificent Frederick Waugh seascape that graced their living room wall adjacent to a large window that looked out across Provincetown Harbor. Waugh had his bell installed in the belfry of St. Mary’s of the Harbor, the church that had been his devotional project in the last years of his life.”
In the 1930s, before developing Delft Haven and the far West End generally, Ralph Snow Carpenter (1884-1970) had been general manager of the Caribbean Sugar Company in the Cuban province of Camagüey and had “collected a number of historic bells when he lived there,” The Advocate noted in 1965, after a 300-pound bell was stolen from the heavy timber bell housing in Carpenter’s yard.
¶ Last updated on 14 March 2018.
For further reading online
Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell, Book 4, Page 167. Provincetown History Preservation Project, Dowd Collection, Page 1196.