Sometimes a detour takes you exactly where you want to be.
Those of you who travel the north side of Cape Cod know that Route 6A has been closed in Dennis for several months, and a detour sends drivers either north through Sesuit Neck or south to Scargo Hill Road.
One day on the south detour, I noticed the sign for Scargo Tower. The 30-foot tower is a folly built in 1900 by Frank Tobey for the guests at his Nobscussett House hotel, then on 125-acres overlooking Cape Cod Bay. I hadn’t been up the tower in close to 50 years. The last time I even stopped there was just before the pandemic – investigating whether it might be a good outing for young grandkids. But it was under renovation and not open for climbing.
The tower commands the view over 60-acre Scargo Lake and the bay beyond. The current stone tower, with its metal spiral staircase, is actually the third built on the site. The first was built in 1874 of wood and was funded by donations as an observatory, according to the Dennis Historical Commission. There was a telescope and an ice cream stand. That tower was blown down by a storm in 1876 but was rebuilt.
Tobey bought it in 1890. But when the second tower burned during a wildfire 10 years later, he rebuilt it out of Cape Cod stone. His heirs donated it to the town in 1929, not long before the hotel closed. By 2019 it was showing its age and the town closed it for renovations, reopening it in 2021.
It sits in a parking lot about the size of a tennis court, at 160 feet above sea level, one of the highest points on the Cape. (The highest honor goes to Pine Hill in Bourne at 306 feet, but it’s on restricted land at Joint Base Cape Cod.)
I had thought about taking the grandchildren to Scargo Tower because kids like climbing things – in fact, unlike adults, they care more about the climb than the view. And the tower is just spooky and weird enough to fuel imaginations. These days it could be a model for a landscape in a video game.
I stopped by on a sunny day in late winter. There were no leaves on the trees, so after climbing the 38 stairs, I had a clear view of the ice melt around Scargo Lake below. And I could see through the trees to Cape Cod Bay, stretching east from the wee tip of Provincetown to the western curve of Plymouth. It was as if I were standing in the cup of a giant hand. It’s one of those places on the Cape that gives you a sense of the bay’s protective geography, as well as its fragility and connection to the wilder Atlantic.
There aren’t a lot of places on the Cape where you get that wide sweep of a view. The Pilgrim Monument or Race Point. A few hidden spots along the north side, like the Eddy trail in Brewster. Highland Light in Truro, where you see the length of the Cape’s outer arm. And once I got to climb to the top of the 100-foot steeple at First Church in Sandwich.
The church sits on a hill overlooking Sandwich Village and randomly was once on the cover of an Elvis gospel album. I followed a member of the building and grounds committee up a winding labyrinth of stairs and wooden ladders to get to the tip top. I was confident because when you look at the steeple from the ground, there’s clearly a balustrade around the accessible part of the tower.
But when we popped out the trapdoor, I was horrified to see that the flooring was actually on top of the banister. There were no actual railings around the platform, which was only about 8 feet in diameter. But swallowing my fear, I stepped up and was rewarded by a view that seemed to extend to Quebec, both magnificent and humbling.
I don’t know how long Scargo Tower would hold the grandkids’ attention, maybe 15 minutes. They might like it’s possibly named after indigenous folklore about the area, including that the lake was formed by Princess Scargo’s tears of heartbreak. They might think it a little bit creepy and a little bit cool, and by now they might be old enough to appreciate the view. It’s a bit of a hidden spot, and they like those. Besides, there’s ice cream less than a mile away – and that’s always a good detour.
