Dennis, Massachusetts
A Short History of Dennis
A town that made salt out of seawater, built clipper ships in a creek, and voted itself into existence in 1793.
Nobscussett, Sesuit and Quivet
People have lived on Cape Cod for at least nine thousand years, and the Wampanoag were here long before any English boat arrived. The names they used are still on the map in Dennis. The northern sections of what is now the town were called Nobscussett, Sesuit and Quivet, and there was a village at Nobscussett Point. When you drive past a road sign carrying one of those names, you are reading a word that is older than the town, older than the Commonwealth, and older than the country.
The East Precinct
English colonists of the New Plymouth Colony settled here in 1639, but not as Dennis. All of this land was part of the town of Yarmouth, and the eastern end of it became known as the East Precinct. For more than a century the people who lived here paid Yarmouth’s taxes and voted at Yarmouth’s town meeting, while running their own parish. That parish is where the town’s name comes from: the Reverend Josiah Dennis, the minister who served it.
1793
Dennis separated from Yarmouth in 1793 and has been a town in its own right ever since. That is the date on the town seal, and it is worth sitting with, because the border between Dennis and Yarmouth was not drawn by a governor or a court. It exists because residents decided it should, in the same form of meeting that still votes your budget every May. The two towns kept working together anyway. They share a school district today.
Salt Out of Seawater
Dennis had little farmable land, so it went to sea instead. In the 1700s Captain John Sears built salt works off what is now Saltworks Road in East Dennis, evaporating seawater in shallow vats to get the salt that preserved a fishing fleet’s catch. The idea spread across the Cape and Dennis led the region in making it. The industry lasted more than a century and closed in 1888, when salt mines opened in New York and made evaporating the ocean uneconomic. The road name is what is left.
The Shiverick Shipyard
In the 1800s Asa Shiverick and his three sons built schooners, brigs and clipper ships at Sesuit Harbor in East Dennis, on a creek that runs into Cape Cod Bay. Two of the clippers weighed more than a thousand tons apiece, and one of them, the Wild Hunter, sailed as far as China. The yard closed in the 1860s. Residents put up a plaque to it in 1924, and Shiverick Road and Wild Hunter Road still carry the names. It is an unusual thing for a town this size to have done, and it is the reason Dennis raised sea captains the way inland towns raised farmers.
Scargo Tower and the Summer Town
Scargo Hill is the highest ground in the mid-Cape, a moraine left behind by the glacier, and the lake below it is a kettle pond. A stone tower went up on the hill in 1902 to commemorate Thomas Tobey, who settled in Dennis in 1678, and the Tobey family gave it to the town in 1929, which is why anyone can climb it today. By then the town was becoming a summer place: hotels and cottage colonies, then motels along Route 28, then the year-round residential pattern the town has now. In 1927 the Cape Playhouse opened in Dennis Village, and the Dennis Historical Society records it as the oldest summer theater in the United States. It is still putting on plays.
Sources: Eugene Green, William Sachse and Brian McCauley, The Names of Cape Cod (Arcadia Press, 2006); Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (1905); the Dennis Historical Society; the Town of Dennis; U.S. Census Bureau.