KG around the cape summer 2021 - Flipbook - Page 46
A ROUND CA PE COD
To travel along the stately Old King’s Highway (Route 6A) is to retreat to another
era. Shade trees overhang one particularly serene and curving section of 6A in
Yarmouth Port, where you can drive past more than fifty homes once owned by
Sea Captains. The Historical Society of Old Yarmouth has awarded each captain’s
former abode a distinctive oval, black and gold schooner plaque. While many of
these historically significant homes are privately owned, you can visit The Captain
Bangs Hallet House museum, located just off 6A on Strawberry Lane, to get an
inside look at a nineteenth-century home of a successful, world-navigating mariner.
Also on the grounds of the museum is a magnificent weeping beech tree that is
more than a century old.
Arts
The award-winning Cultural Center of Cape Cod on Old Main Street opened in 2007 in a
renovated old bank building to serve the entire Cape community and visitors to the area with
instruction and exhibition in the visual, literary, and performing arts. Also in town is the Yarmouth
Art Guild, which provides education, enrichment experiences, and showcase opportunities for its
more than 125 community artist members.
Culture
The Edward Gorey House Museum on Yarmouth Port’s common celebrates the life and work
of the American author and illustrator, with the nearby Yarmouth New Church, a historic former
church, serving as a vibrant center for public benefit and use. The Whydah Pirate Museum
on Route 28 is home to thousands of relics from the Whydah, a ship seized by pirates and
shipwrecked off Cape Cod in 1717. Since 1978, the Yarmouth Seaside Festival has been creating
community spirit each October with live music, a craft fair, kayak and canoe races, children’s
events, and a spectacular firework display on Seagull Beach.
Education
Yarmouth is part of the Dennis-Yarmouth school district and has two of its own elementary
schools: Station Avenue in South Yarmouth and Marguerite E. Small in West Yarmouth. Yarmouth
students in grades four and five attend Nathaniel H. Wixon Innovative School in Dennis, while
sixth and seventh graders from both towns go to Mattacheese Middle School in Yarmouth. Also
located in Yarmouth is the high school for both Yarmouth and Dennis: Dennis-Yarmouth Regional
High School on Station Avenue, which is the location for the Werner Schmidt Observatory run
by the Cape Cod Astronomical Society. Yarmouth teens may also elect to attend the public
vocational and technical school in Harwich, Cape Cod Regional Technical High School. Yarmouth
is home to Cape Cod’s only Pre-K through grade eight Catholic School, St Pius X School, located
on Wood Road.
History
Long before 1639, when a land grant to English settlers John Crow, Thomas Howes, and Anthony
Thacher transformed “the lands of Mattacheeset” into Yarmouth, generations of Native people
lived here. The whole area was known as “Mattacheese,” which meant “old lands by the borders
of water.” It was home to different tribes of the collective Wampanoag nation, including the
Pawkunnawkuts, who occupied both sides of the southern section of Bass River, the Hokanums,
who resided in the northeast section of town, and the Cummaquids who lived in the western
part. Today, a traditional Wampanoag structure, known as a Turtle Wetu, has been designed and
constructed by a member of the Wampanoag nation on the grounds of the Historical Society of
Old Yarmouth.
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