National Park Service- Race Point Ranger Station

About forestry service, 2339, Hanover, MA, US, Massachusetts

Provincetown () is a town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. A small coastal resort town with a year-round population of 3,664 as of the 2020 United States census, Provincetown has a summer population as high as 60,000. It contains the census-designated place of the same name. Often called "P-town" or "Ptown", the locale is known as a vacation destination for its beaches, harbor, artists, and tourist industry, particularly for LGBTQ people. == History == At the time of European encounter, the area was long settled by the historic Nauset tribe, who had a settlement known as "Meeshawn". They spoke Massachusett, a Southern New England Algonquian language dialect that they shared in common with their closely related neighbors, the Wampanoag. On May 15, 1602, having made landfall from the west and believing it to be an island, Bartholomew Gosnold initially named this area "Shoal Hope". Later that day, after catching a "great store of codfish", he chose instead to name this outermost tip of land "Cape Cod". Notably, that name referred specifically to the area of modern-day Provincetown; not until much later was that that name reused to designate the entire region now known as Cape Cod. The Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod on November 9, 1620.