In Sandwich, there has long been a theory to explain why the town managed to easily escape harm during the War of 1812.
A silly mistake. By the British.
Now, as beach erosion is revealing some artifacts from that era, a spotlight is again put on the damage nature is doing to the town’s coast, which may be more of a threat than the British ever were.
First, to 1812.
An English frigate, the Commodore Harty, with 74 guns on board, was traveling up and down the coast, offering communities the option to pay up or be fired upon.
But when the ship passed the coast of Sandwich, the legend goes, its crew saw the brickyard that stood on Town Neck, mistook it for a fort, and steered clear.
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“They thought, ‘Aha, this must be a fort. It’s not safe to attack them.’ But the ‘soldiers’ they saw from their ship were brickyard workers,” said Carolyn Crowell, 88, a member of the local historical commission who had devoted considerable time to finding the exact location of the brickyard.
The basis for this bit of 1812 lore comes from a letter to the editor published in the Cape Cod Standard Times 125 years after the fact by George Burbank, a respected local historian. But it has garnered renewed interest in recent years as erosion on Town Neck has revealed bits of brick that Crowell believes to be from that brickyard.
“As more and more bricks are being exposed, the history is coming out,” said Debra Levesque, whose Freeman Avenue home sits on the site where the bricks have been discovered.
For Levesque and others along the coast, it is also exposing some dire details of their present situation. She said the bricks were first discovered after the February 2013 nor’easter, known as Nemo.
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It was interesting to find out that they were historically significant, Levesque said, but she had more pressing matters, like keeping her house from falling in the ocean.
She moved her house back 30 feet, and received permission to renourish the beach. When another nor’easter hit a few weeks ago, she said the sand she had brought in disappeared, exposing more of the bricks.
Levesque, like many in town, blames the erosion on a jetty protecting the Cape Cod Canal, just north of the beach. They say the jetty is preventing the ocean from naturally replenishing the sand on Town Neck.
According to the Cape Cod Times, town officials are planning a $2 million project to use dredging from the canal to replenish the beach and also hopes to take sand that is piling up on the Scusset Beach side of the canal.
“When this piece of history came up, it illuminated many other things,” said Jonathan Shaw, a past chairman of the Sandwich Historical Commission. “There’s no question it saved the town from an attack by having the British be so dim as to think the kiln was a fort.”
Now, he said, those bricks are telling the story of the consequences of the jetty.
“The erosion is going to result in a number of houses tumbling into the ocean, the whole dune structure will be eroded, the marsh will be flooded, and the historic district will be flooded.”
Unlike in 1812, there is much to be saved in Sandwich now. Back then, according to Barbara Gill, the town archivist, there really wasn’t much. It was, she said, a tiny fishing and farming community.
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“They probably didn’t figure that we had any money,” Gill said.
“The Industrial Revolution really didn’t hit Sandwich until 1825, when they built the great glass factory here,” she said, referring to the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, which was world-renowned in its time.
The town has long known where the brickyard was located in general, thanks to an 1857 map, but local historians say it is nice to pinpoint its exact location.
But, according to Crowell, who would regularly go out in a canoe looking for that evidence, it’s notable that solving that riddle further exposed a larger problem that has yet to be solved.
Billy Baker can be reached at billybaker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @billy_baker.