There's a Castle in the Truro Woods and It Came From Boston

NORTH TRURO · A TOWER WITH NO PATH

A granite tower from Boston stands in the North Truro scrub with no path to it, a famous legend attached and a 1981 federal file.

4 min read · A Celebrate Lower Cape spotlight

If you've played Highland Links, or walked the road toward Payomet, you've probably seen it without meaning to. A granite tower stands out of the scrub oak, crenellated at the top like a rook lifted off a chessboard, somewhere between Highland Light and the old North Truro Air Force Station.

No road reaches it. There's no real footpath either. Nothing on it says what it is.

Robert Finch, writing for CAI, found the image everyone else has been reaching for:

A file the Park Service forgot it had

Seventy feet is the figure most people use. Bill Burke, the Seashore's cultural resource manager, told Provincetown Magazine in 2019 that the original ran about 90 feet, and what stands in Truro is about 55, because it was never rebuilt in full.

He said something else, too. "We've never formally evaluated it. It's never been documented or studied. It's not on the National Register of Historic Places."

The National Park Service's own records say otherwise. The Cape Cod National Seashore's Historic Structure Inventory, prepared in March 1981, has an entry for the Jenny Lind Tower, with its location, condition, provenance, the 1927 move and a recommendation about the National Register. The Seashore's Historic Resource Study discusses it as well.

So the tower has two records. One is a file. The other is the man whose job includes knowing about it, telling a reporter it had never been documented.

A railroad lawyer with a hundred acres

It came from Causeway Street in Boston, from the Fitchburg Railroad depot, built in the 1840s. Its second-floor hall was among the largest in the city, according to Richard F. Whalen's history of Truro, excerpted in the Provincetown Banner.

When the depot came down in 1927, Henry M. Aldrich, a Boston lawyer connected to the railroad, bought one of its towers. He had it taken apart and rebuilt on about a hundred acres he'd bought from a local man named Mort Small, according to the New England Historical Society and Whalen's account. Small said it took five men more than two months. Aldrich put five cottages around it. They're long gone.

He left no reasoning on record for what the tower was for. The only documented use anyone has turned up: in 1932, the Aldrich family climbed it to watch a solar eclipse.

A thousand people, then someone broke the windows

Jenny Lind was the most famous singer alive when P.T. Barnum brought her to America in 1850. On Oct. 12 of that year she sang in the hall above the Fitchburg depot.

There really was a riot. Doors were set to open at 8 p.m. By 6:30, about a thousand people had the depot surrounded, the New England Historical Society recounts. At 7:50 the crowd burst through and up the stairs. Coats tore, gowns were ruined, women fainted. The hall was bad for sound and worse for sightlines, and the heat got so bad people smashed the windows for air.

Charles Rosenberg was in the building, and later wrote a book about the tour. "One half of her voice had been frightened out of her," he wrote.

"There are those who like to believe"

Here is the story Truro tells. Lind climbed one of the depot's towers and sang out over the mob until it went quiet, and Aldrich, who adored her, saved that tower for that reason.

No account from the night says she sang from a tower. Rosenberg, who was there, doesn't mention it. And Aldrich was born in 1867, seventeen years after the concert.

The historian Edward Rowe Snow put the legend into print in 1946, in A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod, hedged as "there are those who like to believe." Aldrich's son later told him that Jenny Lind's performance had nothing to do with why his father moved the tower, according to Whalen's account in the Provincetown Banner.

Burke's reading is the plain one, and probably the true one: Aldrich saved it as a tribute to his family's railroad and to a handsome building on its way to rubble.

A pro shop built out of a shipwreck

The Truro Historical Society's 2024 Highlands walk with Dan Haslam started on the porch of the Highland House and took in the lighthouse, the golf course, the tower, a world-record glider flight and a golf pro shop built from a shipwreck. That's the company the tower keeps out here. Nobody on that list is ordinary.

The view is the honest way to see it. The tower sits inside the Cape Cod National Seashore, the Seashore has never posted a trail to it, and the scrub is as thick as Finch said.

KEEP READING

More of the Outer Cape that moved, sold or got misremembered

The tower isn't the only structure out here with a strange trip behind it and a story that drifted.