Every American who was alive and listened to popular music in the 1950’s heard Patti Page sing “Old Cape Cod.” I knew where Cape Cod was (its flexed arm is a defining feature of the east coast of the United States), and it sounded lovely and kind of mysterious to me. I didn’t know that my ancestors not only lived on Cape Cod but were among the founders of its oldest towns.
Barnstable County currently encompasses all of Cape Cod, from Provincetown at the “hand,” southward through Chatham at the “elbow,” and then westward to Sandwich (shoulder) and Bourne (armpit) at the point where the cape meets the mainland of Massachusetts (the shoulder and armpit designations are my own, so far as I can tell, although I can’t imagine that I’m the first person who has ever thought of them). Although Plymouth, the site of the first Pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts in 1620, is not in Barnstable County, three towns that were established in 1637-1639 – Barnstable, Sandwich, and Yarmouth – share the designation as the oldest incorporated towns in Massachusetts.
As I began my exploration of Barnstable County, I realized I had to address the superficiality of my own knowledge of the early settlement of Massachusetts. I knew about the two colonies that made up Massachusetts – Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay – but I hadn’t thought much about the geographical and historical distinctions between them. This map helped me:
The evolution of the borders of Barnstable is also important, as evidenced by these two maps:
This is important knowledge, because researching Barnstable County probably means researching the New Plymouth Colony and the towns it encompassed for several decades before turning to records related specifically to Barnstable County. Information about my Barnstable ancestors who were living in the town of Sandwich, for example, may be found in the records of the town of Sandwich or the New Plymouth Colony as well as in the county of Barnstable.
I have dozens of ancestors who have connections to Barnstable in the 17th century, mostly in the towns of Sandwich and Yarmouth. All of them are through my father’s lineages – specifically, the Arnold family line. Before I talk about them, however, I need to set them in their historical context.
A (Very) Little History
The stories about the Mayflower and the hundreds of subsequent ships that brought passengers to New England in the 1620s and 1630s were well known to residents in Barnstable County in the 1640s. Many of them were immigrants themselves; those who were not immigrants were the children of immigrants. The stories of life in Europe (in England for the Puritans, in England and Holland for most of the Pilgrims) would have been the threads that held these little communities together. And by little, I mean little; none of these towns had more than 500 residents during the 1640s.
The early years of Plymouth were characterized by repeated efforts to figure out how to interact with the Native Americans who were living there at the time of settlement. Observers described the Indians as both savage and hospitable; violence battled with diplomacy as the preferred way to navigate these tumultuous interactions. As the inhabitants of the Plymouth Colony moved out from their original location, their encounters with greater numbers of natives set up a recurring cycle that was not to end until the Indians were either eliminated or pushed away from the areas settled by the English at the end of the 17th century.
The early years were also characterized by the constant struggle to grow, trap, shoot, dig up, or catch adequate food to feed the colony's inhabitants. The colony was almost wiped out during the first winter after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, as almost half of the settlers died that first winter. Although subsequent years were better than those first few months, famine was never far away.
The death of King James I in England in 1625 set the stage for further immigration into Massachusetts. His successor, Charles I, was pro-Catholic and anti-reformer, and when he dissolved Parliament in 1629, in an effort to neutralize his opponents, many Puritans began to make plans to leave the country. Between 1629 and 1640 (when Charles I called Parliament into session again), an estimated 80,000 Puritans left England, with roughly a similar number going to Ireland, the West Indies, Holland, and New England. After 1640, emigration to New England reduced sharply, but the population of Massachusetts continued to grow, from approximately 9,000 in 1640 to 55,000 in 1700.
Everything I have read about Barnstable County in the 17th century identifies it as a farming and fishing community; in those early days, almost everyone in the county made their living either off the land or from the sea. Those who did not pursue these two avenues made their living from the people who did farm or fish – by being lumbermen or blacksmiths or tailors or tavern keepers or clergy.
Sandwich was founded in 1637 by approximately 60 families from the Plymouth Colony, including my paternal 11th great-grandfather Edmond Freeman and my paternal 10th great-grandfather Thomas Dexter. Many of them came from the town of Saugus (north of Boston, where the town of Lynn is located today). The town was incorporated in 1639.
Sandwich gained the reputation of being a town generally more tolerant of religious diversity than the rest of Plymouth Colony. In the 1650s, Sandwich became the home of the first Quaker community in Massachusetts after a group of Quakers who had been expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony settled there.
The travails associated with King Philip’s War in New England in 1675-76 largely bypassed Sandwich, due in part to the efforts of another of my ancestors, (in this case a collateral ancestor, my 9th great-uncle Richard Bourne) who became known as the “Praying Indians Pastor” for his missionary work among the Mashpee Indians. The town of Mashpee in Barnstable County was originally founded as an Indian reservation. Even today, 6.3% of the Mashpee population identifies as Native American, compared to .3% Native American in the neighboring town of Sandwich.
Town of Yarmouth:
Yarmouth was incorporated at the same time as Sandwich – 1639. Originally named Mattacheese, the town was renamed Yarmouth in 1640. It was originally settled by 28 families who moved there from other towns in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yarmouth had the advantage of straddling Cape Cod, with open water access both to the north and the south. Because it could take advantage of both fertile farmland and good access to fishing and waterfowl, the residents did not suffer the kind of food insecurity sometimes faced by other parts of the county.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about Yarmouth in the 17th century:
“In 1642 and 1645, Yarmouth furnished soldiers for the Plymouth Colony's expeditions against the Narragansett. In 1648, the Plymouth Colony's legislature, the General Court, appointed Myles Standish to adjudicate land disputes among the Yarmouth settlers. Yarmouth soldiers served the Plymouth Colony in King Philip's War: fifteen Yarmouth men participated in the Great Swamp Fight without casualties, but the town did lose five men at Rehoboth. Yarmouth troops also saw service in the early years of King William's War. In the early eighteenth century, some of the Yarmouth veterans of King Philip's War were granted lands to settle in Gorham, Maine.”
My Ancestors in Barnstable County
As the following pedigree charts illustrate, I have a lot of ancestors who lived in Barnstable County during the 17th century. My direct ancestors had moved away from Barnstable by the early years in the 18th century, relocating both to other parts of Massachusetts and to other colonies.
Hi, Karen! This article is especially interesting to me because we frequently visited friends living in beautiful Barnstable on our way to Nantucket. They, like my husband and I, loved talking about the history of the area. Please know I am thinking about you every day and imagine you might be in the crowd of mourners participating in the events surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s death. I look forward to hearing your stories when you return home. Ann
Counterintuitively, the Upper Cape refers to the area including Falmouth, Bourne, Sandwich and Mashpee. Barnstable, Yarmouth and Dennis are considered Mid-Cape. Brewster, Harwich, Chatham and Orleans comprise the Lower Cape area and the Outer Cape includes the towns of Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro and Provincetown.