Featured Stories & Articles from Cape Cod Travel Magazine: A History of Houses: Cape Cod homes go far beyond the classic cape
In the mid-17th century, Cape Cod’s earliest settlers built basic, one-and-a-half story cottages with central chimneys and steep gable roofs. The weathered grey-shingled houses had low ceilings designed to resist the relentless force of sea winds. Seaweed stuffed between layers of paper served as insulation and mortar made of burned clam and oyster shells was used to fill chinks around window sills. The modest houses became synonymous with the region, and in the 19th century the architecture was coined a design unto its own—the “Cape Cod” style. By the 1930s, the Cape Cod had become the most popular house design in America.
While countless houses in the area emulate those earliest dwellings, the residential architecture of Cape Cod encompasses an extensive range of styles. Traveling along the peninsula’s main thoroughfares and winding back roads you’ll discover that Cape Cod has a rich architectural heritage: an array of homes that tells the story of an extraordinary community that has experienced significant changes over time.
While Cape Cod originated as a desolate farming enclave, by the late 18th century its harbors were bustling ports. Sea captains were hugely prosperous and as testaments to their wealth, they constructed stately homes furnished with items collected on their world travels. In Yarmouth Port, the Greek Revival Captain Bangs Hallet House was built in 1840 for a sea captain in the China trade. Now open to the public, the house provides a portrait of the era with pieces of pewter, porcelain, and nautical equipment. Parts of the structure date back to 1740, including the kitchen’s brick beehive oven.
Also open for tours is Eastham’s palatial Captain Edward Penniman House. The yellow and red French Second Empire home is notable for its cupola and whale-jawbone entrance gate. Inside, you’ll find Penniman’s artifact collections and written accounts of his whaling voyages. Another former sea captain’s residence of architectural interest is Yarmouth Port’s Colonial House, now an inn and restaurant. The two-story Federal was constructed in the 1730s and renovated in the 1860s to include a third-story with a mansard roof and Doric portico.
By the mid-19th century, Methodists were holding camp meetings during the summer in Yarmouth, Craigville, and Oak Bluffs. Tents were set up for retreats dedicated to prayer, reclamation, and conversion. “Family” tents were used by those who attended the meetings annually and camp-goers eventually replaced them with Carpenter Gothic wooden cottages. The tiny cottages with steeply pitched roofs and gables, were Victorian folk confections that exhibited gingerbread ornamentation, bright colors, and elaborate scroll work. More than 300 of these fanciful cottages remain within the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Grounds in Oak Bluffs, where the Cottage Museum features exhibits that show how the cottages have been furnished over the past 100 years.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the Cape Cod Railroad introduced a new age for the region. Trains departed daily from Boston to towns throughout the Cape, from Falmouth to Provincetown. Affluent city dwellers, lured by the summer’s ocean breezes flocked to the area. Bostonians and New Yorkers built Shingle-Style manses and opulent Victorians as seasonal retreats. In 1890, President Grover Cleveland converted an oceanfront fishing lodge into his 20-room “summer White House” in Bourne.
While Cleveland’s former home no longer exists, a few structures from this golden-era survive including Falmouth’s Highfield Hall, a lavish Queen-Anne stick style country manor. It was built in 1878 for the Beebes, a prosperous manufacturing family, on the town’s highest hill. The 20,000 square-foot structure, now open to the public, was narrowly rescued from demolition and has recently been restored to its original glory. A restoration effort is presently underway in Brewster, at the former home of liquor merchant Albert Crosby. Open sporadically for tours, the 35-room Crosby Mansion, built in 1888 around the four-room cape-style home Crosby was born in, originally featured a 60-foot tower, 13 fireplaces with imported tile, a French inspired salon, and marble bathrooms.
A sharp contrast to such luxurious residences are the primitive shacks interspersed among the dunes on the Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown. The first dune shacks were built in the 1800s by the Life Saving Service to house shipwrecked seamen. Lifesaving services eventually relocated, and in the 1920s the shacks were discovered by artists and writers who sought inspiration and seclusion in the dunes. Among the shacks' notable inhabitants were e.e. cummings, Jackson Pollock, Eugene O'Neill, and Jack Kerouac. The Seashore owns most of the dune shacks, though a few are managed by nonprofit groups. About 18 shacks still exist; they have no electricity, no running water, and no toilets, yet they are still used by artists and writers for short stays.
In the years following World War II, integration with the outdoors, informality, and creativity were the hallmarks of experimental designs on the Outer Cape by prominent architects of Modernism including Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff, Paul Krueger, and Nathaniel Saltonstall. The small structures—humble in budget and materials—they created in Wellfleet and Truro managed to fuse rustic simplicity with the high style of international Modernism—all with the lightest touch on the land. In recent years, efforts have been made by the Cape Cod Modern House Trust to catalog and preserve the Modernist cottages, some of which are eligible as National Historic Landmarks.
Houses built throughout the Cape in recent decades represent a diversity of styles. Some architects look to the past for inspiration, borrowing details and forms from the designs of other eras. Others seek to push the limits with more contemporary elements. The result is a unique architectural atmosphere that is symbolic of Cape Cod itself: a region that embraces its historic origins while looking forward, progressing at its own pace.
Captain Bangs Hallet House: 11 Strawberry Ln., Yarmouth Port; 508-362-3021,
Captain Edward Penniman House: Fort Hill Rd., Eastham; 508-255-3421
Colonial House: 277 Main St., Yarmouth Port; 508-362-4348,
Cottage Museum: 80 Trinity Park, Oak Bluffs; 508-693-0525
Highfield Hall: 56 Highfield Hall, Falmouth; 508-495-1878
Crosby Mansion: Crosby Ln., Brewster; 508-240-2338
