A Lovely Town Called Sandwich (July/August 1998 | Volume: 49, Issue: 4)

A Lovely Town Called Sandwich

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Authors: The Editors

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 4

A tourist’s itinerary published by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce deals briskly with the Cape’s oldest town: “11:00 A.M. Arrive Sandwich, Visit Sandwich Glass Museum, Dexter Grist Mill, Shawme Pond. 1:00 P.M. Depart Sandwich.” This not-unreasonable agenda is more or less the way I first saw Sandwich, more than twenty years ago. Because it is the first major town you encounter after crossing the Sagamore Bridge, which spans the Cape Cod Canal, you tend to give it an hour or so and then head on up the Cape.

But even then, I remember thinking this wasn’t enough time, and over the years, Sandwich stayed fixed in my memory. With its shady lanes, peaceful town green, mirrorlike pond, and old Dexter gristmill (in operation from 1655 until 1881, later a tearoom, and now restored), the town seemed to turn its back on the normal concerns of a resort in summer. Then too, there was the glass museum.

That was really what brought me back to spend three days in Sandwich last July. Oddly, though, I hadn’t given a minute’s thought to treasures of American glass since my first visit; it was the museum itself, not the collecting of glass, that seemed so compelling. After all, it was glass, writes a local historian, “that changed the face of Sandwich and gave it an ... enduring place in the history of the industrial revolution in the United States.”

That happened in 1825. Nearly two hundred years earlier, in 1637, the town’s founders, known as the Ten Men from Saugus (in reference to the Saugus Plantation in the Massachusetts Bay Colony), settled on the marshy northern shores of Cape Cod. They were the Cape’s first white inhabitants, and the oldest of them, Thomas Tupper, had been born in England in 1578, during the time of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

 

The Ten Men named Sandwich after an Enelish town in Kent. They chose their site for its dense pine and oak forests, its marshes that produced plenty of salt hay for feeding and bedding their cattle, and its freshwater stream that they dammed to power a gristmill. Farming and the riches of the sea brought prosperity to Sandwich and the other towns that soon took hold on the Cape. By the late 1700s Sandwich also was gaining its first tourists, among them Daniel Webster, who regularly stayed at William Fessenden’s Tavern on Main Street. The place burned to the ground in 1971 but has been very elegantly rebuilt to its old style. It has been renamed the Dan’l Webster Inn, and it is where I stayed last July.

One wealthy Bostonian drawn there for relaxation was Deming Jarves, an agent for a Boston glass manufacturer, who in 1825 decided to build a glassworks on the creek at the edge of town. He picked the place for many of the same reasons as the founders had: Boston was only about a hundred miles