Bourne, Massachusetts
A Short History of Bourne
From a Pilgrim trading counter built in 1627, to the western half of Sandwich petitioning its way out of Sandwich, to a canal that cut the Cape loose from the mainland and put all three of its bridges in one town.
Aptucxet, 1627
For thousands of years before any English settler arrived, this ground was the summer fishing and hunting country of the people now known as the Herring Pond Tribe of the Wampanoag Nation. In 1627 Governor William Bradford put up a trading post at Aptucxet, on the portage between the two rivers that separated Cape Cod from the rest of the mainland. Goods moved through it in both directions, between the English, the Native people of Narragansett Bay and the Dutch of New Netherland, and the trade did well enough to help Plymouth Colony pay off its debt. The town today calls it the nation’s first store. A replica stands on the original foundation. The neck it was built to exploit is the same neck the canal was later cut through, which is a useful thing to notice: the geography that made Bourne worth trading in is the geography that made it worth digging.
West Sandwich
Ezra Perry settled here in 1640, and for the next 244 years this was not a town at all. It was the western end of Sandwich, and people called it West Sandwich. A herring mill opened in 1695. The Bournedale Iron Works started up in 1821, the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company in 1825, and the Keith and Ryder wagon company in 1826. The railroad arrived in 1847 and industry followed the tracks. By then the western villages had their own mills, their own harbors and their own reasons to want their own town meeting.
1884: A Town by Petition
In 1884 the western half of Sandwich petitioned the Commonwealth for separation, and it was granted. Bourne is the last town ever incorporated in Barnstable County, which makes it the youngest town on Cape Cod. It is named for Jonathan Bourne Sr., born here in 1811, who left at seventeen for New Bedford, built a whaling business, served in the state legislature and helped push the separation through. His ancestor the Rev. Richard Bourne was the first Christian preacher to the local Wampanoag. In 1897 Jonathan Bourne’s daughter Emily Howland Bourne built a memorial to her father at 30 Keene Street. That building is the Jonathan Bourne Historical Center today, and it holds the town archives and houses the Historical Commission.
The Summer White House
From 1893 to 1896 the President of the United States spent his summers in Bourne. Grover Cleveland kept an estate in Bourne Village called Gray Gables, and for four years it was the Summer White House. The village still carries the name. The house is gone, lost to a fire, and the neighborhood that grew up around it is one of the nine villages the town counts today, alongside Bournedale, Buzzards Bay, Monument Beach, Pocasset, Cataumet, Sagamore, Sagamore Beach and Bourne Village itself.
The Canal
Cutting a channel across the neck was an old idea here. Myles Standish looked at the low ground between the two rivers in 1623, and in 1697 the General Court of Massachusetts considered the first formal proposal and took no action. Construction on a working canal finally began on June 22, 1909, under August Belmont Jr.’s Boston, Cape Cod and New York Canal Company, to designs by the engineer William Barclay Parsons. It opened to traffic on a limited basis in July 1914 as a privately owned toll waterway and was finished in 1916. In 1928 the federal government bought it for $11.4 million and made it free to use. Between 1935 and 1940 it was widened to 480 feet and deepened to 32 feet. Today the canal runs about 7.4 miles from Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains it, and there is still no toll. All three crossings, the Bourne Bridge, the Sagamore Bridge and the railroad bridge, stand inside Bourne, which is why the town calls itself the first town on the Cape. The Massachusetts Maritime Academy sits on the Buzzards Bay shore near the canal’s southern mouth, and Joint Base Cape Cod, formerly Otis, sits partly inside the town’s borders.
The Landfill That Pays the Town
The town’s most unusual institution is younger than any of that. Bourne began landfilling off MacArthur Boulevard in the late 1960s, and in the early 1980s, when other Cape towns signed on to ship their trash to the SEMASS waste-to-energy facility in Rochester, Bourne decided to keep its own operation and build it out. That required a department of its own. In 1998 the town petitioned the state legislature, and in 1999 the Governor signed the act creating the Department of Integrated Solid Waste Management. Since January 2001 a host community fee has moved money from the landfill’s enterprise fund into the town’s General Fund on every ton the facility accepts, and the town’s own account of the department puts the total contribution, in cash and avoided costs, at well over $20 million. The department still has to come to Town Meeting for permission to spend its own money, which is the part worth remembering the next time someone tells you Town Meeting does not decide anything.
Sources: Town of Bourne, About Bourne and ISWM Overview (bourne-ma.gov); Town of Bourne Local Comprehensive Plan, A Brief History of Bourne; Bourne Historical Society, Historic Center (bournehistoricalsociety.org); William J. Reid, The Military Value of the Cape Cod Canal, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, August 1965; J. North Conway, The Cape Cod Canal (2008); The Independent, Opening the Cape Cod Canal, July 1914; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New England District; U.S. Census Bureau.