A New Yorker on Cape Cod in 1841

Abstract

fHARLES A. LOOMIS, son of a wealthy landowner in Ontario County, New York, was graduated from Union College in 1837, and after three years' study of the law was admitted to the New York bar in 1840.1 Ill health, however, prevented him from pursuing a legal career. After an unsuccessful attempt to carry on a practice in Columbus, Ohio, he settled on some land of his father's in Michigan and tried to farm it. In 1847, just as continued illness was defeating this experiment, he was elected to the Michigan legislature as a Free-Soil Democrat. After the Civil War he presumably inherited a sizable estate from his father, and lived abroad most of the time until his death, about 1898. In the spring of 1841, as an expedient for recuperating his health, he visited Cape Cod and spent several months on a fishing vessel for the benefit of outdoor life in the salt air. The following letter was written to his father, Chester Loomis, a former Democratic state senator in New York, 1836-1838. Discounting the young man's political bias and his misinformation regarding the old courting practice of bundling, he presents an interesting observer's comment upon economic and social life on Cape Cod in the mid-nineteenth century.