Cape Cod: Exploring a Sense of Place
East Harwich is one of seven villages within the Town of Harwich. It is a “census designated place,” an amorphous term that simply means that there is no separate municipal government here, but enough people live in this area to lump us together for counting every ten years.
Unlike the villages of Harwichport and Harwich Center, an identifiable village center is not easy to find in East Harwich. What forms the center of commercial activity today is the busy intersection of two well-trafficked highways. A firehouse (built 1976) and a giant cell tower disguised as a flagpole are on one corner. The post office, built in 1990, is just a short distance down the road. When these two buildings were constructed, they were in the “middle of nowhere.” For this center of commerce is not a revitalized Main Street; it is development from the mid 1980s and '90s, the convergence of shopping centers. The new buildings all set well back from the road, surrounded by expanses of macadam. There are two banks, a home improvement store, a restaurant, an enormous supermarket, chain drug store, medical office, liquor store, gas station, a clothing store, several take-out food places, and two Dunkin Donuts stores—one at each end of this bit of consumer heaven.
There are sidewalks along the two intersecting roads, and a button the pedestrian can push to get across the four-lane intersection, but pedestrians are rare in this space clearly conceived for motorists. There are no ghosts of the past here either, no repurposed former general store, no derelict farmhouse clinging to its corner of the landscape. There is nothing to tell what, if anything, occupied this intersection fifty years ago.
To discover old East Harwich, we must look elsewhere.
Old East Harwich
If the intersection of Routes 39 and 137 was not the center of East Harwich in the past, where was the village? The road names give a clue. Follow Route 137 a mile or so south toward Chatham and you come to an intersection with Church Street and Queen Anne Road, two of the oldest roads in this part of the Cape. They connect Orleans, Chatham and Brewster. Here on the slight hill above the inter-section, the Methodist church was built in 1811 and a graveyard was started behind it. This was the only Methodist church on the Cape at the time, and people came here to worship not just from the surrounding neighborhood, but from as far away as Eastham and West Harwich. Because of this church, East Harwich had closer ties with the villages of Orleans, Brewster, and Chatham than did any other part of town.
Like an ancient tribe living near its sacred shrine and the graves of its ancestors, a settlement grew up along the roads radiating from the church. Homes, stores, schools, and taverns appeared along Queen Anne Road and Church Street,
If you lived in East Harwich in 1910, especially if you were a member of the Methodist Church (shown by the red dot), this was the center of your world.
An "old-timer" I met in the new post office in East Harwich told me about how things had changed since he was a boy living in the area. "This used to be all woods," he said, gesturing to the street outside. "Then when the highway was built, and all the development came, everything shifted over this way." As Yi-Fu Tuan reminds us, humans are adaptable. As one "center of the world" is destroyed, another is built next to it or somewhere else altogether, to become the new center. A center moves as people's needs change.
"Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world. . . . The stars are perceived to move around one's abode; home is the focal point of a cosmic structure." [1]
eastward to Pleasant Bay and northward toward the Brewster line. By 1860 East Harwich could be described as “a considerable settlement.” In 1901, Sears Lowell Moore ran a dry goods and hardware store at 212 Church Street, replacing a store run by E. Ellis in 1880. The post office occupied several locations over the years. The 1910 map shows it at 196 Church Street. Later it was on Muddy Cove Road (now Bay Road). On the Chatham side of Queen Anne Road across from the church, the Corner Store, was once a general store. Today it is a cafe selling paninis and burritos.
The post office was located in this house on Church Street in 1910.
Mary Chase Gould, who will celebrate her ninetieth birthday this summer, grew up in East Harwich and has lived in this part of town all her life except for two years when her husband was in the Coast Guard. She remembers the area along Church Street before the new side roads were built. "The only house along this stretch of road when I was a girl was that old Cape in the field," she said.
The village then was a small, quiet community. "Our 'big adventure' when I was a girl, was walking down to the post office to get the mail! We'd meet our friends there to play. A man up the road had cows. We'd walk there to get our milk from him."
The oldest house still standing along Church Street, a "three quarter Cape," built about 1800.
She remembers East Harwich as a community where people looked after one another. If someone had trouble, as when her family's house was destroyed in a fire, the neighbors stepped in. Families donated clothing and took in a child until the family found another home. If a neighbor witnessed a child misbehaving, the parent would hear about it. "Just as the saying goes," she told me. " 'It takes a village.' You just don't have that today."
Changes in transportation helped change life in East Harwich. The advent of the automobile made travel to other parts of the Cape easier, and brought many tourists to the Cape. The new concept of retirement led to a building boom and by the early 1970s, many new houses were built on former woods or farmland along Routes 39 and 137, necessitating the new firehouse, built in 1976. The mini-malls were built in the 1990s, and the shift was complete. The Methodist church is still in its same spot, and some of the old residences remain along both roads, but the local commercial center has shifted west and north. For larger purchases, the Mid Cape Highway provides easy access to the malls and the big box stores in Hyannis.