Eastham, Massachusetts
A Short History of Eastham
A town first known as Nauset, home to the oldest windmill on Cape Cod, wrapped in a national park, and, well into this century, the last town on the Cape to build a public water system, by a vote of its own Town Meeting.
Nauset, and the Town That Grew Out of It
Long before it was Eastham, this land was home to the Nauset, a Wampanoag people who farmed, fished and lived along the marshes and beaches here. In December 1620 a party from the Mayflower, exploring the Cape before the ship went on to Plymouth, met the Nauset at the Cape Cod Bay beach the town still calls First Encounter Beach. Colonists from Plymouth settled the area in 1644 and it was incorporated as the Town of Eastham in 1651. Eastham was once far larger than it is today: its original lands became Wellfleet and Orleans and reached into what are now Truro and Chatham, so a good deal of the Outer Cape can trace its town line back to this one.
Farms, Fish, Salt and the Windmill on the Green
For its first two centuries Eastham lived on farming, fishing and salt making, drawing salt from the sea in evaporating works along the shore. Summer visitors began arriving around 1830, and when the railroad reached town in 1870 it let Eastham ship its crops, asparagus and cranberries among them, off Cape to market. The one landmark that ties all of that together still stands on the Town Green beside Route 6: the Eastham Windmill, built in 1680 and the oldest windmill on Cape Cod, moved to its present spot in 1808, where it still grinds corn on occasion.
The Lights and the National Seashore
Eastham’s outer shore is one of the most dangerous stretches of coast in New England, and in 1836 the town’s residents petitioned Congress for lights to guide ships past it. The three towers that went up became known as the Three Sisters, because from the sea they looked like women in white dresses with black hats. More than a century later, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the law creating the Cape Cod National Seashore along the outer Cape, and Eastham found itself one of the towns inside it. The Seashore’s main visitor center, at Salt Pond, sits in Eastham and looks out over Nauset Marsh, and the National Park Service now cares for the Three Sisters within it.
The Water Vote
Here is the piece of Eastham history that most directly shows how the town governs itself. Well into this century, Eastham was the only town on Cape Cod with no public water system, and every house drew from its own private well. When contamination from the old town landfill reached that well water, the decision about what to do was not made by a mayor or a manager. It was made in a room. At Town Meeting in 2014 the voters chose to build a municipal water system, and a year later they came back and voted to extend town water across the whole town, paying for it on their own tax bills. It is one of the largest things Eastham has ever undertaken, and every yes came from a resident standing up in a hall.
That is the kind of decision an open Town Meeting exists to make, and it is the kind of decision a sixteen-year-old will be voting on before long. A town that can vote itself a water system can vote itself almost anything, which is exactly why it is worth knowing how the room works.
Sources: Town of Eastham, History of Eastham (eastham-ma.gov/467); Cape Cod National Seashore, National Park Service (nps.gov/caco); Eastham Windmill and Three Sisters Lighthouses, National Park Service; U.S. Census Bureau. Water-system history from the town’s own record of the 2014 and 2015 Town Meeting votes.