As I’ve noted before, the Turk’s Head Inn was long considered Rockport’s finest resort. It stood at the location of the present-day Cape Hedge Inn, at the intersection of South Street and Thatcher Road in the area of town known as Land’s End. The inn commanded a sweeping view of Loblolly Cove and Thacher Island, with its twin lighthouses.

The inn closed around 1965. In January 1968, with planning already underway to tear down the old inn and build a new one, fire destroyed the inn’s center section. The next year, the center section and the south wing were razed. In 1970, another fire destroyed the remaining north wing. The remains were razed and replaced by a new Turk’s Head Motor Inn, which later became the Cape Hedge Inn.

This postcard offers a unique colorized view of the inn. The card is not dated, but the picture offers a couple of clues as to the date. One is the car. It appears to be either a slightly newer model than or one of the same cars shown in a 1906 postcard of the inn. We also know that this picture is from 1906 or later, because the portion of the inn seen on the right was constructed late in 1905 after a fire destroyed the original structure. You can see how it originally looked in this postcard. These hints lead me to believe that the view is from no later than 1910.

The card was published by Edwin C. McIntire of Gloucester and printed by the Curt Teich postcard company in Chicago under the brand C.T. Photochrom. Many Teich-printed cards bore numbers that reveal when they were printed. This one has such a number, indicated it was printed in 1914. That further reinforces the conclusion that the image is from 1910 or earlier.