Truro, Massachusetts
A Short History of Truro
A fishing town at the outer edge of Cape Cod that grew out of Eastham, took its name from Cornwall, kept the Wampanoag name of its river, and put most of its own land under federal protection.
1709, and the Town That Grew Out of Eastham
Truro did not begin as a town. English colonists settled here in the 1690s as the northernmost part of Eastham, far out on the narrow arm of the Cape, and by the turn of the century the settlement had grown large enough to run its own affairs. It was officially separated and incorporated as the Town of Truro in 1709. The colonists named it after Truro in Cornwall, England, but the older name is still on the map: the Wampanoag people called this place Pamet, or Payomet, and that name stayed on the Pamet River and Pamet Harbor at the center of town.
Corn Hill, and the First Winter
Truro carries one of the earliest stories of European arrival in New England. In November 1620, before the Mayflower’s passengers settled at Plymouth, an exploring party came ashore here and found a buried cache of Native corn on a rise above Cape Cod Bay. Historians still argue about exactly what happened, but the place has been called Corn Hill ever since. It is a reminder that the land the colonists built on was already lived on and farmed.
Fishing, Whaling, and the Sea That Gave and Took
For its first two centuries Truro lived off the water. Fishing, whaling and shipbuilding were the town’s early industries, and the harbor was busy enough to support them. Then the tides and the shifting sands of the Lower Cape silted the harbor, and those trades moved to deeper ports. What the sea left behind was the coast itself. Truro is the site of Highland Light, also called Cape Cod Light, the earliest lighthouse on Cape Cod. The first tower went up in 1797, the present one in 1857, and in 1996 the whole granite structure was moved back from an eroding cliff to save it from the sea that built the town.
1961: A Town That Became a National Seashore
Here is the piece of Truro’s history that most shapes the town today. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy signed the act creating the Cape Cod National Seashore, and more than half of Truro’s land area is inside it, administered by the National Park Service. That single decision set much of the town’s shoreline, dunes and woods off limits to development for good. It is why a town this small still looks the way it does, and it is why so much of what happens at Truro Town Meeting is about the small amount of land that can be built on, including the year round housing the town voted for beside its own school.
1992: The Town Wrote Itself a Charter
Truro governs itself under a Home Rule Charter that the town adopted at the Annual Town Meeting of April 22, 1992. The charter puts an elected five-member Select Board and an appointed professional Town Manager over an open Town Meeting, and it spells out who appoints whom: the Select Board hires the Town Manager, and the Town Manager appoints the town’s department heads. Whether that structure still fits the town is the kind of question Town Meeting can reopen, because a charter can be amended the same way it was adopted, in the room where every registered voter can stand up.
Sources: Wikipedia, Truro, Massachusetts; Town of Truro Home Rule Charter (adopted April 22, 1992), truro-ma.gov; U.S. National Park Service, Cape Cod National Seashore.