Make A New Town Out Of The Mainland Bourne Villages?

Today, we are going to assume that one side of the "Where Cape Cod ends" argument is correct, and that side is the "Cape Cod ends at the Canal" opinion. 

We're choosing this side because we're very interested in the follow-up questions to ending Cape Cod at the Canal. If you choose the Canal as the cutoff point, you have to reclassify several villages from two Cape towns.

Almost all of Sandwich is east of the Canal, which is the Rubicon for this argument. Scusset Beach, however, is "on the mainland," but still part of Sandwich. Bourne has a greater chunk of town on the mainland, with Buzzards Bay, Bournedale and Sagamore Beach representing hard north of the Canal.

Chopping these villages off of Cape Cod completely to make a new town is a fun idea for a columnist. They would make for a very small town. I don't think Scusset has any people at all. Buzzards Bay, with 3800 people, is Bourne's most populous village. Sagamore Beach isn't far behind with 3300. Bournedale is the smallest. I have no idea how many people live there, a Bourne selectman told me about 1500. I'd throw 8500 down as a winter population guess for the region.

If you made a town out of that, she would be more populous than Chatham, Halifax or Mattapoisett. She would be slightly less pop than Harwich, Acushnet or Hanson. She would be as large as six Truros, three Plymptons or one-point-five Berkleys. Her closest match, population wise, might be Hull, Brewster or Freetown. 

Buzzards Bay and Sagamore Beach may come close to doubling in population in the summer, which would make the imaginary town more akin to a (wintertime) Duxbury, Mashpee or Westport. 

If you dropped this faux town in the western half of the state, it would be the second largest town in Franklin County, the seventh largest town in Hampshire County and the third largest town in Berkshire County.

Physically, this town- which the state was kind enough to draw into this map- would have a land area and shape very similar to New Bedford, Raynham, Rockland or Seekonk.

With frontage on both Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay, the town would almost certainly merit a Bay moniker, maybe Bayville or something. If a town in Massachusetts was going to be named after Tom Brady, this could be it. The Sagamore part would resent naming the town Buzzards Bay, the BBays would resent naming it after Sagamore, and both would opt out of Bournedale. "Gridlock" would be a good town name from June through September.

Of course, the Where Does Cape Cod End question is more theoretical than practical. The true question arising from that question is "If the Cape ends at the Canal, what would you classify Buzzards Bay, Bournedale, Sagamore Beach and Scusset Beach as?" 

The question gets harder once you eliminate "secession" as an option, as forming a new town would answer that question with one answer, while we are instead looking at 3-4 answers if we just go by "spiritually" or "culturally." 

If these villages aren't Cape Cod, they are either the South Coast or the South Shore. "Irish Riviera" also comes into play.

Let's go village by village, sawing off everything beyond this sign...

Buzzards Bay 

Bee Bay, standing alone, has about the population of the North Plymouth part of Plymouth. It is, by population, larger than Plympton, Provincetown and Wellfleet. It also has 500 less people than Brockton High School has students.

She has a land area slightly larger than Chelsea and slightly smaller than Everett.

If removed from the Cape, Buzzards Bay touches both Wareham and Plymouth. She does not touch Cape Cod Bay. Buzzards Bay is a shareholder in the "Route 25 Ruined Our Economy" company with East Wareham. 

That sort of makes the call for Buzzards BAY (locals, especially younger ones, heavily emphasize the Bay part of Buzzards Bay when speaking aloud, and the effect is eerily similar to when a football player is introduced and says he is from THE Ohio State University... amazingly, this is only done for Buzzards Bay village, and is not done for the similarly named body of water). She is a stretch to include in the South Shore, a problem shared by every landlocked town in Plymouth County.

At the end of the day, Buzzards Bay would be the eastern border of the South Coast.

Sagamore Beach

Saggy B is slightly more populous than Provincetown and has about half the population of West Bridgewater.

Added bonus: they have more Cape Cod Bay coastline than Yarmouth, and about the same amount of bay coast as Weymouth (population 53,000).

Culturally reassigning this village is easy. It becomes the southern terminus of the South Shore. You merely need to peep at the map for a half second to see that.

The tough part? According to what I could uncover for demographics, Sagamore Beach just misses the 30% Mick Mendoza Line for inclusion in the Irish Riviera. I think I saw 29% listed as the village's Irish population. As a Bourne resident of Boston-Irish descent, I am doing what I can to rectify this situation, but I am only one man and maybe we ain't that younnnnng anymore.

Bournedale

No, it is not Wampanoag for "Shortcut." She is how you get from Route 3 to Wareham, and how you get from Route 3 to Buzzards Bay if traffic is bad.

Bournedale gets no respect at all, even in Bourne, which also gets no respect at all. Bournedale has a two sentence Wikipedia entry, very similar to Earth's "mostly harmless" designation in THHGTTG. The article had no population figure, and digging on the Internet yielded nothing. I asked a Bourne selectman, who said, "I think 1500." That's also what I came up with after adding up the villages and subtracting them from the town's population.

I have no idea where they put them, and assume that the apartments near Route 3- which have a sort of Irish Battleship triple decker motif- might account for 500-750 of that.

Landlocked, she is difficult to clarify in the South Shore/South Coast manner that we lopped BBay and Snagawhore off the Cape with. She is a tough sell for either region. This problem goes away with a new town, although the question merely transfers to the town at that point.

If the town secedes, Bournedale should be renamed. If the town is named "Belichick," the village could be named "Brady."

She might get swallowed up by Buzzards Bay in a Molotov Pact-style partition deal with Sagamore Beach. Speaking of which...

Scusset Beach

Sandwich gets mighty fat on traffic coming and going through Bourne all summer. This is our payback. 

We aren't asking much. They've been screwing up our lives for generations. All we ask in return is a nice beach. They're not even really using  the f*cking thing.

In the scenario I'm envisioning, we annex Scusset Beach from Sandwich. It would then be absorbed into Sagamore Beach. Sagamore Beach would then ignore any entreaties made by Buzzards BAY against Bournedale.

If Bourne has to fight Sandwich for it, Sandwich is a wealthier town, but Bourne has a military base. They're about the same size.

It is prescient in this scenario to note that Russia and Germany were at war with each other about two years after the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact that partitioned Poland was sealed. Any secession scenario- especially with a dual partition- involves the chance of us ending up with two very small, Plympton-sized towns.

Plympton-by-the-sea.