Baker Biddle Property: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Cape Cod National Seashore

Killion, Jeffrey; Miller, Jill

The Baker-Biddle Property is part of Cape Cod National Seashore, located at 610-612 Bound Brook Island Road in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The site is located 0.25 miles east of Cape Cod Bay, and like other residential properties in the area, is surrounded by successional woodlands and forested wetlands. These lands and waterways were open and navigable in late eighteenth century when David Baker, Jr. established a farm on the island and built the wood-frame Baker House with his son David III in the 1820s. The Cape Cod style home served as the focus of the Baker farm, which included a gristmill, saltworks, pastures, and gardens. Changes in land use and transfers of land ultimately decreased the farm to its current 10-acre parcel. Although now ringed by woodlands, the Baker House is the core of the property and reflects modifications made by owners Jack Hall and Francis and Katherine Biddle in the mid-1900s. Today a collection of small wood-frame studios and cottages stand near the Baker House, arranged around a broad lawn in the late 1930s and 1940s during Hall’s residency. Extensive gardens to the north and south of the house and tree plantings in the lawn date to the Biddles, who resided seasonally at the property in the 1950s and 1960s. The site remained in the Biddle family until it was acquired by the National Park Service in 2011. The Baker-Biddle Property is significant under two criteria of the National Register of Historic Places: Criterion A in the areas of Social History and Entertainment/Recreation, and Criterion B in the areas of Entertainment/Recreation, Law, Literature, and Politics/Government. Under Criterion A, the property is locally significant for its association with multiple generations of the Baker family who settled on Bound Brook Island, including Lorenzo Dow Baker, founder of the United Fruit Company and now Chiquita Brands International. It is also locally significant for its association with the Cape’s transition to a tourism economy focused on leisure and the beauty of the natural landscape, and namely Francis and Katherine Biddle who owned the property as a seasonal retreat and frequently hosted gatherings of world-class poets and literary critics. Under Criterion B, the property was the home of several notable figures: it is locally significant for Francis Biddle, Attorney General for President Franklin Roosevelt and Lead Judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials; and locally significant for Katherine Biddle, an acclaimed poet and writer. The period of significance for the landscape at the Baker-Biddle Property is 1820-2011. The period begins in the 1820s when David Baker Jr. and his son David III constructed the Baker House. The time period includes the end of Baker family ownership of the property in 1935; an expansion of the house and relocation of additional buildings to the site by Jack Hall in 1937-1949; and modifications to the house and other buildings and installation of gardens and landscaping by Francis and Katherine Biddle in 1949-1968; the death of Francis in 1968 and Katherine in 1977; and the years when use and care of the property transitioned to the Biddles’ son Edmund Randolph. The period ends in 2011 when the property was transferred to the NPS.

Baker Biddle Property: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Cape Cod National Seashore

Series