In September 1927, author and naturalist Henry Beston came to this shore and built a two-room cottage with a fireplace on the dunes about a mile and a half away. There he lived a solitary year in the company of the ocean, with the Coast Guardsmen on the hill as his nearest neighbors. As the seasons unfolded, he recorded his encounters with the waves, the winds, and the wild creatures of the beach and dunes, and the resulting book, “The Outermost House,” became a classic chronicle of the rhythms of nature on the outer Cape. The small cottage stood at the end of Nauset Spit on one of the easternmost reaches of land in the United States, giving rise to its title. In 1964 it was named a National Literary Landmark, and storm tides washed the house away in 1978.