The Folly on Beach Point

A row of identical cottages on a Cape Cod sandbar was supposed to fail. Ninety years on, it is the last of its kind — and the land beneath it is worth more than the dream that built it.

Drive north on Route 6A toward Provincetown and the row arrives all at once. Twenty-odd white cottages, green-trimmed and nearly identical, set down on the bay side of Beach Point like a single word written over and over. Same pitch of roof, same small porch, same flower name on a sign beside each door. From a moving car it reads less like a place to stay than like a rhythm — cottage, gap, cottage, gap — with Provincetown floating on the water behind it.

This is Days' Cottages, and generations of drivers have recognized the white-and-green procession without ever learning its name. It is one of the Outer Cape's most photographed survivors of a vacation form that once lined this shoreline and is now quietly disappearing: the cottage colony.

What the Crash Built

The story begins with a bad year. Joseph A. Days ran a Provincetown building firm, F.A. Days and Sons, and he had already set his sights on the barren spit at Beach Point — land nobody else wanted, going cheap. Then, in October 1929, the stock market crashed, and the paying work that kept his crew busy dried up. The obvious move was to shelve the idea. Days did the opposite. He would put his idle men to work raising small cottages and rent them to the tourists just beginning to reach the Cape by automobile. Around town, people were sure he had lost his mind. They called it Days' Folly.

Work started on the first cottages in the fall of 1930, and by July 1931 the operation opened for its first season with nine ready for guests. Days kept building. Four more went up to the south in 1932, and nine more rose to the north over 1932 and 1933 — twenty-two purpose-built cottages in all, the row you see from the road. A twenty-third rental, a former gas station of the same size across Route 6A, was folded in later and given a flower name to match. Each of the twenty-two was cedar-clad, with two small bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace, and an open porch facing the bay. Joseph's wife, Amelia, named every cottage for a flower and hung a sign at each door to prove it.

That was the folly: a run of identical little boxes on a sandbar, christened for daisies and roses, betting that people would drive a long way to sit on a porch and watch the light move across the water.

They did, and the bet was not even unusual. Through the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, cheap cars and freshly paved roads turned the Outer Cape into a place ordinary families could actually reach, and colonies like this one — a cluster of small seasonal cottages sharing a parcel and a few plain amenities — sprang up across Truro, Wellfleet, and Eastham. They were the motels before motels: a bed, a bureau, a bath, a two-burner cooktop, a cross breeze off the water. No one expected them to last a century. That so many did is the accident worth paying attention to.

An Endangered Cape Species

What kept Days' standing was part stubbornness, part seawall. A wall first went up in the mid-1940s to hold the bay back; when the blizzard of 1978 tore it out, the family built it again, deeper and reinforced. Over the decades the porches were glassed in, furnaces installed, the shingles painted white, and in 1981 someone added vinyl siding and plastic shutters — the well-meaning updates that keep a building upright while slowly erasing what it was. The colony is a condominium now, the cottages individually owned, most still renting to the public through the summer. Since 2020, thirteen of them have been stripped back to white cedar shingle and green trim, the vinyl undone, the row restored to the way it read from the road in 1935.

That restoration is the exception. Across the Outer Cape, the cottage colony has become what preservationists now call an endangered Cape species. The logic is simple and unsentimental: a colony sits on land that, subdivided or cleared, is worth far more as a single modern house than as a dozen tiny boxes rented by the week. Hemmed in by newer subdivisions, the old cottages get mistaken for garden sheds. In Truro, at the late-1950s Hi-Land View colony on Coast Guard Road, an owner's plans called for five of the six cottages to be demolished for a large new residence, with the sixth kept on as a pool house.

Worth Less Than the Land

Even the towns trying to save these places keep losing them. Truro has a demolition-delay bylaw — a one-year pause for buildings with a distinctive architectural style or a genuine tie to history. It is a speed bump, not a wall. In October 2024, a contractor hired to restore an 84-year-old cottage for the town's state-grant-funded employee-housing project tore it down instead, over a weekend and without authorization. The irony cut both ways: that cottage was the one the town meant to save, while its historical commission had, days earlier, judged the site's remaining cottages "pretty ordinary" and cleared them for demolition. Saved or condemned, they were coming down all the same.

Eastham has tried the other direction. In 2022 the town amended its zoning to open a path for qualifying cottage-colony units to convert to year-round use, on the theory that the surest way to keep a small old building standing is to let someone live in it in February. It is a quieter kind of preservation — not a museum piece but a roof over a head, in a town where a roof over a head has become the hardest thing to find.

That is the friction beneath the nostalgia. Many surviving colonies face steady redevelopment pressure for a plain reason: the ground is worth more than the buildings on it. The market that made Days' Folly a good bet is the same market now eyeing the sand it sits on.

Which is what makes the row at Beach Point worth slowing down for while it is still a row. Stop at the seawall and the thing you notice is not any single cottage but the repetition — the same shape twenty-two times, a whole vanished idea of a modest Cape vacation preserved by accident and thirteen coats of fresh paint. The screen doors still slap. The flower signs are back up. Provincetown still sits across the bay, exactly where it sat when the town was certain Joseph Days had lost his mind.

The folly outlasted the men who mocked it. Whether it outlasts the market is the part no one on Beach Point can promise.