Museums and History

Three sites, one story, and between them the most distinctive history on the peninsula.

The Marconi Station site, South Wellfleet. Guglielmo Marconi chose the Outer Cape cliff for his first American transatlantic wireless station because it stood high and pointed east at nothing. Four wooden towers went up, an enormous aerial was strung between them, and on 18 January 1903 a formal exchange of greetings passed between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII with no cable involved. The station worked into the First World War era and was then dismantled. What survives, inside the National Seashore, is an overlook, interpretive panels, concrete remnants and a very large view: the cliff has eroded so far since 1903 that much of the original site is in the sea, which is its own lesson about this coast. No building, no admission. Go for the sand cliff and the scale of the Atlantic.

The French Cable Station Museum, Orleans. In 1891 a submarine telegraph cable was landed here, running direct to Brest in France, and for the better part of seventy years messages between America and Europe passed through a small building on a corner in Orleans. The station handled the news of Lindbergh's arrival in Paris in 1927, and in 1940 the news of the German advance on the French coast came through it. It closed in 1959 with the equipment left in place, which is why the museum is unusually good: the instruments are the real ones, in the room where they worked. Hours are seasonal and limited, so check before you drive.

Chatham Marconi Maritime Center. The former receiving station of the ship-to-shore wireless callsign that opened in 1914 and listened to vessels in the North Atlantic for most of the twentieth century, with the operations room and the antenna field interpreted on site.

The outer beach is one of the great shipwreck coasts of North America, and the reason is bathymetry rather than bad luck: shifting bars lie parallel to the shore, so a vessel driven in by an easterly grounds hundreds of yards out with heavy surf between it and safety.

The response was a chain of Life-Saving Service stations along the Atlantic shore, each with a crew who walked night patrols in winter and launched open surfboats into breaking water. The Old Harbor Life-Saving Station, built in 1897, was moved by barge to Race Point in 1977 to save it from erosion and is preserved there by the National Seashore, with breeches-buoy demonstrations in season. It is the best place on the Cape to understand that job.

The Pendleton rescue of February 1952 is the story everyone tells. A tanker broke in half outside Chatham in a winter gale, and a four-man crew took a thirty-six-foot wooden motor lifeboat over the Chatham bar and brought back thirty-two men in a hull rated for a fraction of that number. The lifeboat, CG36500, was recovered from dereliction, restored, and is preserved on the Cape.

The Cape Cod Canal is the engineering answer. Private construction began in 1909, it opened to traffic in 1914, and the federal government bought and widened it from 1928. The Army Corps of Engineers runs it still, with a free visitor centre at Sandwich and service roads on both banks. Watching a freighter pass a hundred feet from the path is a better history lesson than most exhibits manage.

The Whydah is the wreck that came back. A pirate ship under Samuel Bellamy went down off Wellfleet in April 1717, was found by Barry Clifford in 1984, and is described as the only fully authenticated pirate shipwreck ever recovered. Artefacts, including the bell that confirmed it, are in West Yarmouth.

If you have one museum afternoon on the Upper Cape, spend it in Sandwich, which was settled in 1637 and shares the title of the Cape's oldest town with Yarmouth.

The Sandwich Glass Museum tells a genuine industrial story rather than a decorative one. Deming Jarves founded the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company here in 1825, chose the site for the fuel and the shipping rather than for sand, and built a works that pioneered pressed glass and produced coloured tableware that collectors still chase by name. It employed a large share of the town until competition and a labour dispute closed it in 1888. The museum runs live glassblowing demonstrations, which is what makes it work for children as well as collectors.

Heritage Museums and Gardens, up the hill, is about a hundred acres of grounds built around a rhododendron collection developed on the estate, with a hybrid named for the man who bred them. It also holds an early twentieth-century carousel that visitors can ride and an American automobile collection housed in a round barn modelled on a Shaker design. In late May and early June the rhododendrons are the reason people drive out here from off-Cape.

The Dexter Grist Mill on Shawme Pond is described as the oldest mill on the Cape and still grinds corn in season. The Sandwich Boardwalk, a timber walkway of around 1,350 feet first built in 1875, crosses the marsh to the bay and has been rebuilt after storms more than once.

The whole cluster is within a few minutes of the canal and of the Sagamore Bridge, which makes it the single best stop for anyone arriving on the Cape in the afternoon with a room they cannot check into until four.

Hyannis Port is where the Kennedy family summered, and the association is a large part of why Hyannis gets the visitors it does. Set expectations correctly, though, because the thing people come looking for is not open.

The Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port is private property, occupied, and not a visitor attraction. Driving the residential streets looking for it is discouraged by the neighbourhood and it will not reward you.

The John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum on Main Street is the real answer, and it is better than a small-town presidential museum has any right to be. It is narrowly focused on the family's years on Cape Cod, roughly from the 1930s to 1963, using photographs, film and personal material rather than trying to retell a presidency. The theme is the water: sailing, the beach, the boat, the family on the sand. Seasonal hours; confirm before travelling.

The John F. Kennedy Memorial on Ocean Street, overlooking Lewis Bay, is a quiet outdoor memorial with a fountain and a pool, free and open, and it takes ten minutes.

Also in Hyannis: the Cape Cod Maritime Museum on the harbour, which builds and sails traditional wooden boats and is a good deal more hands-on than its size suggests, and the harbour walk itself, where the fishing fleet, the island ferries and the whale-watch boats all share one basin.

Two other literary and artistic stops worth folding in if you are on this side of the Cape. The Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port occupies the house the illustrator lived in, and it is idiosyncratic in exactly the way you would want. Highfield Hall in Falmouth is a restored nineteenth-century estate house with changing exhibitions and grounds you can walk for nothing.

The Wampanoag have lived on this peninsula and the islands for thousands of years, and the historical record visitors usually get here starts in 1620, which is a very late place to begin.

The Mashpee Wampanoag are a federally recognised nation with land on the Upper Cape, and Mashpee is their town. The Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Museum occupies a small colonial-era house on Route 130 and is run by the tribe; opening has been intermittent while the building has been worked on, so check the tribe's own information rather than a third-party listing. The Old Indian Meeting House, also in Mashpee, is one of the oldest church buildings on Cape Cod and has been restored by the tribe.

On the islands, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) holds the land around the clay cliffs at the western end of Martha's Vineyard, which is why the cliffs are protected and why taking the clay is prohibited rather than merely discouraged.

Elsewhere on the Cape, the deeper past is present without being labelled. Shell middens, kettle-pond sites and place names are everywhere: Mashpee, Cotuit, Monomoy, Nauset, Chequessett, Pamet and Wianno are Wampanoag words, not decorative ones. The National Seashore's interpretation at Salt Pond covers the pre-contact Cape and the archaeology of Nauset seriously, and is the easiest starting point for a visitor.

The plainest way to put it: the town histories on this page cover four hundred years. The people who named the water had been here for something like twelve thousand.

On a landform this young and this mobile, geology is not a separate subject from the town histories. It is the reason for them.

The Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, founded in 1954, is the place to have this explained properly. It sits on the bay with the John Wing Trail running out across salt marsh to the Brewster flats, so you can look at an exhibit about tidal ecology and then walk out into it twenty minutes later. It is strong on the glacial story, on the marsh, and on the shorebirds, and it is one of the better wet-afternoon options on the Lower Cape for children.

The Salt Pond Visitor Center at Eastham and the Province Lands Visitor Center at Provincetown are the National Seashore's own interpretive centres, both free with Seashore access, and both better than the word "visitor centre" suggests. Salt Pond covers the formation of the Cape, the Nauset archaeology and the lifesaving era; Province Lands is worth it for the observation deck alone.

Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, run by Massachusetts Audubon, has a nature centre and trails out to the tidal flats, and is the base for a long-running programme rescuing cold-stunned sea turtles from Cape Cod Bay each autumn, which is a genuinely Cape-specific piece of natural history: the hooked geography traps turtles that fail to leave before the water cools.

The connecting idea is worth stating. This peninsula is roughly fifteen to twenty thousand years old, made of material a glacier dumped and the sea has rearranged ever since. The outer cliff retreats by a few feet a year. Lighthouses have been moved back from the edge. Marconi's station fell into the ocean. Nothing here is permanent, and the museums that acknowledge that are the ones worth your afternoon.