It’s hard to imagine what Wellfleet’s Fresh Brook — or Trout Brook, as it is labeled on some old maps — looked like a half millennium ago, when it was a deep, navigable, fish-filled stream.
What remains of the mile-and-a-half-long brook can be seen from the Cape Cod Rail Trail just south of the LeCount Hollow Road parking area: a small, nearly stagnant pond nestled in a pretty, uninhabited valley in the Cape Cod National Seashore. The only evidence of the hamlet that flourished there are the skeleton of a foot bridge and shallow indentations left by homesteads dating back more than three centuries.
Also lost to history are the native sea-going brook trout known as “salters.” These fish nourished both Indigenous people and early European settlers and later attracted Wellfleet’s first wave of tourists.
For decades, momentum has slowly built among people familiar with Fresh Brook to restore its flow and illuminate how this tiny river could play such a critical role in the history and biology of Outer Cape Cod.
Historians know a little about Fresh Brook as the site of one of the region’s earliest European settlements, a simple village that became a thriving town over the course of a century. They know even less about what was likely a seasonal life along the brook before colonization. Since 1962, an archaeological study of Fresh Brook Village has remained, untouched, at the top of the National Seashore’s list of priorities.
It’s pretty certain that the valley was first permanently inhabited sometime in the late 1600s. Evidence is limited to such tangential reports as descriptions in Boston newspapers of how survivors of the pirate ship Whydah’s 1717 grounding off what is now Marconi Beach found shelter in homes in Fresh Brook’s headwaters near the Old King’s Highway. A thorough archaeological study would likely unearth a trove of information and artifacts.
Fishermen look at what little remains of Fresh Brook and see in its bare trickle and still water the ghost of what was once a mighty creek. Though short in length, it was wide and deep enough to allow the valley’s original mackerel-fishing residents to sail and row their heavy smacks between their homes and Cape Cod Bay. This is what I see here most clearly: a stream that teemed with river herring, eels, stripers, and salters — the beautifully speckled sea-run brook trout, the only trout native to Massachusetts.
Salters provided sustenance to the valley’s residents for centuries, but as commercial mackerel fishing waned in the latter half of the 1870s, they offered another benefit: people here looking for new ways to earn a living found one in guiding wealthy sportsmen to Fresh Brook to hook these fat and feisty fish.
Given the small size of the brook, it’s easy to imagine the salters disappeared because of overfishing. But while Cape Cod’s mackerel, cod, and herring populations were diminishing, salters remained plentiful right into the 20th century. That’s when a series of manmade changes led to Fresh Brook’s diminishment and to the extirpation of its salter population.
While the demise of many of the Cape’s watersheds can be blamed on the 1873 arrival of the Old Colony Railroad, this was not the case with Fresh Brook. Its rail crossing was likely first built of trestles, later followed by an earthen embankment with a wide culvert that allowed salters to move upstream to their spawning grounds. The trestles ended navigation upriver from the bay but didn’t significantly affect the salter population. We know the fishing was still so good on Fresh Brook in 1906 that a wealthy investor bought a swath of the valley upstream of the railroad tracks to build a hunting and fishing lodge.
What did kill off Fresh Brook’s salters was a series of blunders by the state of Massachusetts in building the new Route 6, which opened in 1948, and then in constructing the Cape Cod Rail Trail through the watershed in 1953. During the highway’s construction, Fresh Brook’s water flow was constrained to a one-foot-wide pipe. The bike path involved the rebuilding of the railbed’s embankment, in the process replacing its wide culvert with a two-foot-diameter pipe.
The extraordinary resilience of the seagoing brook trout is evident in the fact that salters continued to be caught in the headwaters above the old railroad embankment even after these obstructions to the stream’s flow were built.
Ironically, the final blow came not at the hands of road and railway engineers but from an ill-advised change made by environmentalists who feared a free-flowing stream might result in saltwater intrusion into the freshwater headwaters. Nobody apparently considered the salters when the state agreed to add a small dam, or weir, just upstream of the new bike trail culvert.
Later hydrologic studies conducted by the Cape Cod National Seashore established that tidal water had infrequently reached above the embankment. The only real consequence of the weir was that it prevented native sea-run brook trout from reaching their ancestral spawning grounds.
Steve Hurley, the recently retired southeast regional director of the Mass. Div. of Fisheries and Wildlife, has seen impoundments like Fresh Brook’s come and go.
“There was a big push in the 1950s and ’60s for building small impoundments wherever they could,” he told me. The leading environmental concern of the day, he said, was creating more small ponds to counter lost waterfowl habitat. Ducks Unlimited, a large national nonprofit, led the postwar charge to address rapidly declining duck and goose populations.
Today, the movement to restore Fresh Brook is aided by a different national nonprofit, the Virginia-based Trout Unlimited, which has a Cape Cod chapter. The organization has contributed both cash and hands-on work to several successful salter restoration projects here, including at Red Brook and the Quashnet River in Falmouth and at Cape Cod’s most famous salter stream, the Mashpee River.
Bringing salters back to Fresh Brook could be a relatively simple mission, according to those who’ve studied the brook, including people from Trout Unlimited, Mass. Fisheries and Wildlife, and the directors of the no-longer-active Sea-Run Brook Trout Coalition. This past October, in a presentation to the Wellfleet Select Board, the National Seashore’s chief scientist, Geoff Sanders, and Seashore ecologist Tim Smith said the Park was getting very close to beginning the actual restoration process. “One of the reasons we’re pursuing this,” Sanders said, “is that from a construction perspective, the project is quite simple.”
Sanders explained that all necessary studies have been finished and that remaining permits, including approval under the National Historic Preservation Act and a final cost analysis, would be concluded in the coming year. On a Fresh Brook site survey in November, Sanders said he was confident the actual physical work to restore the brook’s two-way flow would take less than three days. At the select board meeting, he said the Seashore was working with state and federal wildlife agencies and with Trout Unlimited to secure financial support for post-restoration work and monitoring.
But as it happens, the simple act of cutting through a small, aging slab of concrete may not be as simple as it sounds. Now, with virtually all of Fresh Brook and its valley under federal control, the recent administration change in Washington leaves us wondering whether there will be a reversal in the Seashore’s longstanding commitment to the project.
This fisherman will be following the developments to come with interest and hope.
