Many people know that the Pilgrims stopped here at the curved tip of Cape Cod before proceeding to Plymouth. Historical records suggest that an earlier visitor, Thorvald, brother of Viking Leif Erikson, came ashore here in AD 1004 to repair the keel of his boat and consequently named the area Kjalarness, or Cape of the Keel. In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold came to Provincetown and named the area Cape Cod after the abundant codfish he found in the local waters.
Incorporated as a town in 1727, Provincetown was for many decades a bustling seaport, with fishing and whaling as its major industries. In the late 19th century, groups of Portuguese fishermen and whalers began to settle here, lending their expertise and culture to an already cosmopolitan town. Fishing is still an important source of income for many Provincetown locals, but today the town ranks among the world's leading whale-watching—rather than whale-hunting—outposts.
Artists began to arrive in the late 1890s to take advantage of the unusual Cape Cod light; in fact, Provincetown is the nation's oldest continuous art colony. By 1916, with five art schools flourishing here, painters' easels were nearly as common as shells on the beach. This bohemian community, along with the availability of inexpensive summer lodgings, attracted young rebels, as well as writers like John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World) and Mary Heaton Vorse (Footnote to Folly), who in 1915 began the Cape's first significant theater group, the Provincetown Players. The young, then unknown Eugene O'Neill joined them in 1916, when his Bound East for Cardiff premiered in a tiny wharf-side East End fish house.
America's original gay resort, Provincetown today is as appealing to artists as it is to gay and lesbian—as well as straight—tourists. The awareness brought by the AIDS crisis and, more recently, Massachusetts's legalization of same-sex marriage, has turned the town into the most visibly gay vacation community in America.
