Ten Things You Might Not Know About Harwich

by  Alan Pollock

            HARWICH — Last month, we published a story about the 10 Things You Might Not Know About Chatham.  So it's only fair that we do the same for Harwich, which has plenty of amazing stories of its own.  So here they are, in no particular order, starting with an easy one: 

            1.  Baffling Boundaries.  In 1803, half of the town of Harwich was literally wiped off the map.  It wasn't done by a hurricane, but by a different kind of tempest.  Before that time, the town stretched from Cape Cod Bay south to Nantucket Sound, and residents of the North Parish had little in common with their relatively poorer cousins on the south side of town.  Most of Harwich's prime assets were along what is now Route 6A, including a large tax base of sea captains, a number of key industries, and the the town's Meeting House. 

            So in 1803, the commonwealth's General Court approved a proposal to split the town in two, naming the North Parish “Brewster.”

            The change also ceded much of Harwich's shorefront on Pleasant Bay.  Portions of what is now South Orleans, including the area of Quanset, Portanimicut and Namequoit roads, were all once part of the town of Harwich, and were lost during the 1803 split.  To further complicate matters, much of what is currently West Harwich, including most of the Herring River and Allen Harbor, were once part of Yarmouth. 

            It's no wonder that state law eventually decreed that the selectmen of every town should periodically perambulate the borders of their town with the selectmen of the neighboring town, just to ensure the town lines didn't shift.  Technically, they're still required to do so. 

            2.  Number, Please.  Have you ever dialed a telephone number for South Chatham, and noticed that it has a 430 exchange, like Harwich?  There's a story behind it.

            Despite the longstanding rivalry between Harwich and its neighbor to the east, there was actually a phone line  that ran between the two towns long before phone service became ubiquitous.  In around 1895, a farmer's telephone line was privately constructed and operated between Harwich and South Chatham, local historian Larry Larned wrote.

            “Six residences, including Arthur L. Cahoon on Bank Street and two grocery stores owned by W. T. Cahoon and Wilbur Crowell, were connected to the line.  Dr. Handy, a well-known Harwich physician, owned the switchboard located at the Exchange Building.  This privately owned line was later sold to Southern Massachusetts Telephone Company and became Line 41, a party line serving well-known people in South Chatham and the Cockle Cove Inn on Cockle Cove Road.”

            The party line became part of the first public telephone exchange, established in 1903 in what is now the children's section of the Brooks Free Library in Harwich Center.  Eventually, the telephone numbers in Harwich were given the prefix of HA (for “Harwich”) and when dial service was established in 1962, HA became “43.”  The first dial exchange in Harwich was 430, but there weren't enough telephone customers in town to properly fill out the available numbers, so customers in South Chatham were added to the exchange.  Eventually, the 430 exchange was filled up, and the 432 exchange was created. 

            3.  The Napster.  The tech-savvy among us will recognize Napster as a popular website for purchasing music, but fewer people know that it has its roots in Harwich.

            Shawn Fanning graduated from Harwich High School in 1998, and went to work with his uncle at an Internet company in Hull.  Naming it after his hair style, Fanning created Napster, a program that simplified peer-to-peer file sharing, allowing Web users to upload their favorite music files and share them with people around the world.  The idea became a global sensation just months after it was launched in 1999.  And a few months later, Napster was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, which claimed copyright infringement for the millions of songs which could now be downloaded for free.

            A lengthy legal battle ensued, and in 2001, a judge ordered the file sharing site shut down.  The company emerged from bankruptcy as a legitimate pay-to-download music service.  Fanning went on to create several other high-tech companies, one of which recently sold for a reported $15 million. 

            4.  Racing Around The Mere.  It's hard to imagine a horse track in Harwich, and it's particularly hard to imagine that they raced around Wychmere Harbor.  First, a bit about the harbor itself.

            Known as Salt Pond, Oyster Pond and by various other names, the harbor was at first a 20-foot deep pond connected to Nantucket Sound by a narrow, shallow cut across the outside beach.  To dress up the area for summer visitors, the pond was renamed The Mere, and it was exactly a half-mile around its perimeter.    In the spring of 1880, several entrepreneurs formed the “Water Park Driving Association” and drafted up plans for horse track that would circle the pond.

            That winter, the track was graded and the cut to the outside beach was filled in, and by springtime, the trotting park was open.  At its height, more than 2,000 people would attend the horse races, and on the Fourth of July the races would be accompanied by fireworks and a huge clambake.  But the horse track was short-lived; it ceased operation around 1885, and a couple of years later the cut was reopened and deepened, transforming the pond to Wychmere Harbor.

            5.  Sanborn And Chase.  One of the town's leading citizens, Caleb Chase of West Harwich, made his fortune in the coffee trade, eventually creating the Chase & Sanborn Coffee Co.  With his wealth, Chase built a mansion on Beacon Street in Brookline, where he spent the winters, but he continued to summer in Harwich, where he was well known as a distinguished citizen and leading philanthropist.

            Chase purchased the Exchange Building (see “Roller Derby,” below) and presented it as a gift to the town in 1903.  He also provided the seed money for the fund that bears his name, which still provides assistance to needy families in Harwich.  His portrait hangs in the Brooks Academy Museum, operated by the Harwich Historical Society.

            In 1992, historical society volunteer Bev Thacher noticed that Chase's portrait didn't match the tiny portrait on the coffee can, but it did match the little drawing of Sanborn.  Chase was misidentified on his own coffee can, his likeness switched with that of his business partner.  Thacher wrote letters describing the mistake to the Nestle Beverage Company, which then owned the brand, and the portraits were finally reversed. 

            6.  Roller derby.  In 1855, the tallest building on Cape Cod was erected in Harwich, the Cape Cod Exchange.  It was a marvel of engineering, but it only lasted 21 years before it was razed by fire.  But in that time, the building had become such a fixture of the community that local businessman Chester Snow built a new one, even grander than the first Exchange.

            Dedicated in 1885, the four-story building included a 1,000-seat auditorium with a large stage, balcony and box seats; two large stores on the ground floor, and an opulent grand hallway.  Above the auditorium on the third floor was, of all things, a roller skating rink.  

            The rink was octagonal in shape, finished with a two-inch plank floor covered with two-inch-wide tongue-and-groove flooring of rock maple.  Above the rink was a 20-foot gallery and two promenades that were 61 feet long, surrounding a 13-square-foot musicians' box.  The Exchange Roller Skating Rink opened on April 17, 1885, and admission was 10 cents (15 cents more for skate checks).  On opening night, the rink comfortably accommodated 175 skaters , with 150 spectators watching the scene from above.  The music came from the 24-piece Harwich Cornet Band, and fruit and other refreshments were provided by Mr. R. H. Small of South Harwich, according to the account in the Harwich Independent. 

7.  First cranberry farm.  It's well known that the first person to cultivate cranberries was Capt. Henry Hall of Dennis.  Hall figured out, among other things, that if cranberry vines are periodically covered with sand, their growth and productivity is stimulated.  The year was 1816, and the Hall family still operates cranberry bogs in the region.

            But Harwich, which is better associated with cranberry growing than its neighbor to the west, had a distinction of its own.  In 1844, after Hall and others had figured out techniques for sanding the bogs in the winter when they've iced over, and flooding the bogs to control pests, Alvin Cahoon of Harwich undertook the first commercial cultivation of early black cranberries.  Three years later, he was joined by Cyrus Cahoon who started a small commercial bog nearby.

            The Cahoons operated bogs near Pleasant Lake, and before long, commercial cranberry bogs were springing up all over town, helping to reverse the economic decline the town had been enduring.  Within years, it became known that cranberries could be used to ward off scurvy among sailors, and the market grew; by 1854, there were 197 acres of cranberry bogs operating on Cape Cod.  Schools were dismissed for a few weeks each year so the children could help with the cranberry harvest.

8.  Legal Tender.  Come property tax time, people sometimes feel like all their money's going to town hall.  In Harwich, there's some precedent for this.

            The building that is now the front portion of Harwich Town Hall was built in 1912 to house the town's two banking establishments: the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank (which had been in business for more than a half century at the time) and the Harwich National Bank.  The unused front door of the current building had a double entrance: Cape Cod Five depositors went to the left, and Harwich National customers were on the right.  It should be noted that in Harwich Port, the same configuration was used for the two banks' branches.  The Cape Cod Five remains on the left, and the descendent of Harwich National, TD Banknorth, is on the opposite side of the driveway.

            The National Currency Act of 1863 authorized national banks to issue their own money, and until federal reserve notes were issued in 1914, the First National Bank of Harwich issued its own legal tender currency, signed both by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and by the Harwich bank president.

            9.  Talkies In The Port  The town now has a modern movie theater in East Harwich, but the real Modern theater was in Harwich Port. 

            Some residents can still remember flocking to the old movie house on rainy summer days to take in films like “Gunga Din,” “Son of Frankenstein,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Ice Follies of 1939,” “Stanley & Livingstone” and “Each Dawn I Die.”  At one time, the theater had one show each night, with five different features in a week.  The shows were at 7:30 p.m., with matinees at 2:30.

            Longtime Dennisport summer resident Sonja Sexton remembered that the Modern was the only movie theater nearby, particularly when wartime gas rationing made trips to Hyannis out of the question.  Located roughly where Bonatt's Bakery is now, the movie house was “not in the least modern” in the 1940s, Sexton quipped.

            10.  Branded for his Beliefs.  In a quiet corner of the Brooks Academy Museum grounds stands a memorial to Jonathan Walker, “the man with the branded hand,” who suffered imprisonment and torture for his abolitionist beliefs.

            Walker grew up on Cape Cod and established a name for himself as a merchant captain; a man of faith, Walker abhorred the practice of slavery.  In 1844, aboard his own ship leaving Mobile, Ala., Walker encountered seven slaves who sought to escape to the Bahamas, and he agreed to give them passage.  Two weeks later, his boat was seized and he was arrested. 

            A federal court in Pensacola ordered Walker imprisoned.  Roused by the story, Harwich residents raised funds for Walker's legal defense and passed a town meeting resolution decrying his imprisonment.  An abolitionist committee in Boston dispatched a well known lawyer to Pensacola, but before the lawyer could arrive, Walker was tried and convicted.  He was sentenced to one hour in the pillory and seven years in prison, a year for each slave he tried to liberate.  The court further ordered Walker's right hand to be branded with the letters “SS” for slave stealer.   

            Once free, Walker became an active writer and lecturer in the abolitionist movement; his story was heralded by Frederick Douglas and John Greenleaf Whittier.

9/10/09