Harwich, Massachusetts
A Short History of Harwich
A town that shrank twice, invented an industry in a swamp, and then in 2010 voted to give away its own school district.
1694, and a Town That Kept Getting Smaller
Harwich incorporated in 1694 and took its name from the English port of Harwich. The town on the map today is a good deal smaller than the one that was chartered, because Harwich gave land away twice by vote. In 1772 the southeastern section became part of Eastham. In 1803 the north and south parishes separated, and the north parish became the town of Brewster while the south parish stayed Harwich. Both of those borders exist because residents in a meeting hall decided they should, in the same form of meeting that still votes your budget.
Seven Villages and the Oldest Road
Harwich is one town with seven village names inside it: Harwich Center, North Harwich, East Harwich, South Harwich, West Harwich, Harwich Port and Pleasant Lake. North Harwich and Harwich Port were settled first, and Harwich Center has been the civic center for most of the town’s history, which is why Town Hall, the library and Brooks Academy all sit within a few hundred yards of each other. Queen Anne Road, also called Old Monomoy Road, is reportedly the oldest road in town, laid out somewhere between 1620 and 1675 along a route Native people had already been walking. Non-natives first settled here around 1665, on ground long inhabited by the people the record calls the Sawkatuketts and the Potonumecots.
The Cranberry Started Here
In 1846 Captain Alvin Cahoon is credited with raising the first cranberry crop grown for commercial sale anywhere, from a bog near Pleasant Lake. Cultivated bogs spread across Harwich between 1855 and 1865 and became the town’s signature industry, and the state’s own heritage landscape survey names Harwich as the place that produced that first commercial crop. More than 200 acres of bog remain inside the town today, which is why so much of Harwich’s open space argument is really an argument about agriculture.
Brooks Academy, and What a Town Will Pay For
Sidney Brooks was born in Harwich in 1813 and decided the town needed a school of its own. The cornerstone of his Pine Grove Seminary was laid on August 3, 1844, and the school taught English, French, Latin and Greek alongside piano and drawing. The building still stands on Parallel Street and now houses the Harwich Historical Society, whose collection includes the largest cranberry culture exhibit on Cape Cod. A town that built a private academy in 1844 and turned it into a museum is a town that has been arguing about what education is worth for a very long time.
The Railroad, and the Summer Town
The Cape Cod railroad reached Harwich from Dennis in 1865, and the depot west of Harwich Center made that village the commercial hub as well as the civic one. The Chatham Branch Railroad came through in 1887, running east from Harwich Depot into Chatham. Fishing and salt had carried the town’s economy before that; corn, rye, wheat, apples and pears came off its farms; the railroad brought boots, overalls and slippers, and then it brought visitors. By the early twentieth century tourism was the growth industry, concentrated in Harwich Port along Nantucket Sound, and Harwich has been a working town and a summer town at the same time ever since.
2010: The Vote to Share a School District
The biggest civic decision in living memory was made by voters, not by a board. In 2010 Harwich and Chatham agreed to merge their school districts into one regional district, and the regionalization agreement was signed on January 19, 2011. Four years later the result was a building: Monomoy Regional High School at 75 Oak Street in Harwich, which Chatham students attend too. Both towns give up something in an arrangement like that, and both towns pay for it, which is why the regional agreement gets revisited. It was amended again on May 25, 2022. Every one of those steps went through a public vote.
And a Change of Name, in 2023
Harwich was run by a Board of Selectmen for more than three centuries. In 2023 a town vote changed the board’s name to the Select Board, and Chairman to Chair. It is a small edit to the bylaws and a fair illustration of how this town works: the words on the door changed because enough residents stood up in a hall and said so.
Sources: Massachusetts Heritage Landscape Inventory Program, Harwich Reconnaissance Report (Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Cape Cod Commission), published by the Town of Harwich; Harwich Historical Society (Cranberry Culture; Brooks Academy); Monomoy Regional School District, Regional Agreement records; Town of Harwich Select Board; U.S. Census Bureau.