Editor:

Thank you for your recent excellent piece about racism in the Nauset School system. 

When, many years ago, I brought racist incidents my daughter was experiencing to the attention of the administration at her elementary school in Brewster, I was greeted with a wave of dismissal and a head shake. “No, we don’t have any racism here,” a smiling principal said to me. There was no offer of support or help, nor any interest in looking further into the matter. 

My daughter, a Korean adoptee, was called a “chink,” and had students pulling up on their eyes telling her, “now I look like you,” while laughing. This began in kindergarten. This was in the 1990s, and I’m so sad to read that things have not improved. 

When she was young we didn’t have terms like “micro-aggressions” and chalked up statements like “I bet she’s really good at math” or “where are you from, like, really from?” and an amazing one, “do you need to feed her special food?” like she was an exotic pet, to people just being ignorant and insensitive. But it was very hurtful and at times insulting. I’m heartbroken that students, and I’m sure adults as well, in our community are experiencing this. 

I wanted to speak up because I wanted to corroborate that yes, racism does indeed happen here, and to add the context of this not being anything new. We experienced it over 30 years ago. We need to do better. It’s beyond time. 

Candace Hammond
Orleans

Editor:

The operators of the Chatham Food Pantry would like to thank and recognize those organizations who contributed to success in 2024.

The Bernstein Philanthropic Impact Fund, Buffy's Ice Cream, Chatham Bars Inn Tennis Club, Chatham Community Garden, Chatham First Congregational Church, Chatham Garden Club, Chatham Girl Scouts, Chatham Men's Club, Chatham Police Department, Chatham Porch and Polo Society, Chatham Post Office, Chatham Village Market, Chatham Women's Club, Holy Redeemer Church, Judy and Bernard Cornwell, J. W. Dubis & Sons, Lower Cape Outreach Council, Monomoy Yacht Club, Professional Education Organization, Rotary Club of Chatham, Peter T. Schock Electric, South Chatham Library, St. Christopher's Outreach, and the VFW Ladies Auxiliary.

Peter and Linda Hughes
Chatham Food Pantry

Editor:

In the Jan. 16 article "Traffic Study Cites Failed Intersections,” a mistake, unintended I’m sure, could mislead readers to believe that the 79 families who will live at the end of Main Street Extension will have more than one way to enter and leave the shelter. 

Not true: There is no access from Headwaters Drive in the Pleasant Lake area. Shelter residents will have only one access: Main Street Extension, with poor lines of sight and no sidewalks, a narrow road that winds through mixed industrial and residential zones into the failed intersection at Depot Street.

In 1999, the Cape Cod Commission ruled against further development at that same site, then known as the Eagle Pond Assisted Living Facility. A major reason for the denial was that the single access on Main Street Extension was considered inadequate and unsafe. No improvements have been made to that road since then. And yet somehow, miraculously, that road has now been ruled safe for the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic to be generated by the family shelter. 

Paula Myles
North Harwich

Editor:

One way to erase history is for one to race to the HDHC, tell them that the building before them cannot be saved, that it is even too dangerous for one to enter and assess its condition. Such is what we listened to last night from Davenport Company. Sadly, the HDHC continues to participate in the erasure of old structures in Harwich. By the HDHC's admission, its sphere of influence and responsibility is limited to the town's historic district. Outside that district it cannot be relied on to accomplish much. It makes excuses for itself and ends up carrying the water for those who would choose to tear down the town's significant old structures. The HDHC has allowed itself to become a pawn, to be just another hoop on the way to erasurehood. Just as Harwich has always supported clearcutting to create subdivisions, the town apparently supports clearcutting to erase its architecture as well. Over time that is how it goes. Last night's faint by Davenport would suggest that Harwich prefers a fake Rolex rather than burnish the real thing. It is time for the HDHC, as presently constituted, to stop posing as an effective preservation body. It is essentially a window dressing outfit.

We need an HDHC that will stand up to its moniker. We need a preservation mission, not a demolition mission. The HDHC should cease making builders, developers and themselves feel good about how the HDHC manages the regulatory process. They have done a poor job of it. Hopefully the board feels very awkward playing their part in this Baptist Church play and will then do something about changing their future role. We do not need a board satisfied with making excuses, satisfied with its part as a tool in the erasure of history.

Matt Sutphin
Harwich 

Editor:

A perfect storm of traffic is coming to North Harwich by way of two (possibly three) new housing developments in addition to an inevitable commercial enterprise on Route 124 near the highway ramps, all within two miles of each other. Anybody who lives in town and uses these roads should be alarmed at what is about to happen.

The select board hired VHB to study the pre-existing road problems before vehicles from the 60 units at 456 Queen Anne Rd., the 79 units at the transitional housing facility and the unfathomable 248 possible units from the proposed Pine Oaks IV on Queen Anne Road, take to the roads around the Queen Anne/Main Street/Route 124 area of North Harwich. Clustering all of this density within a two-mile span would create a de facto housing alley out of Queen Anne Road, a road that cuts through an industrial zone where drivers can, and do, accelerate to dangerously fast speeds.

According to VHB’s study, “Existing traffic volumes along the roadways in the study area carry 7,000 vehicles on an average day, with the highest peak hour traffic volumes along Pleasant Lake Avenue between Route 6 and Queen Anne Road.” If built as proposed, Pine Oaks IV alone would add an additional 450 cars making 2,224 trips per weekday to roads where drivers speed 80 percent of the time, according to Pine Oak Villages’ own traffic study.

The presentation of the traffic study to the select board focused on injuries and fatalities at the intersections of North Harwich with their D and F ratings. This is important information for the town. But many question the study’s data regarding the speed limit and serious accidents on Queen Anne Road. The VHB report erroneously listed the speed limit on Queen Anne as 30 miles per hour. In reality, the speed limit increases to 40 mph around the area where Pine Oaks proposes its entrance. At the presentation, select board member Donald Howell questioned the vehicle speed data in VHB’s document, stating that vehicles travel Queen Anne Road at much higher rates than cited in the study. Anybody who regularly travels these roads knows this to be true.

North Harwich residents also question why a stronger point wasn’t made about the injuries and fatalities that have occurred on Queen Anne Road.

When vehicles are speeding on Queen Anne, they are often big trucks like 10-wheelers, dump trucks, etc. There is a big difference between getting hit by a car and getting hit by a commercial truck traveling at 40 mph. Another important question that bears asking is what is the rate of speeding after 8 p.m.? People use Queen Anne as a high speed cut-through.

At full capacity, the Pine Oaks IV project would bring about 800 to 1,000 people to a small area of Harwich, a town with a year-round population of 13,600 people. With 800 to 1,000 more people, there are bound to be children and adults walking and/or riding bikes to the nearby conservation lands and the closest commercial hubs of Dennisport and Patriot Square. This would require travel through dangerous intersections and along the incredibly narrow and treacherous section of Main Street to Depot Road which crosses over the Herring River and which in no way allows for four feet of clearance. There is no pedestrian or bicycle infrastructure on these roads, and there has been no plan proposed by the Pine Oaks group to improve these traffic and infrastructure problems.

The housing developments are all inevitable at this point. Let’s hope the Massachusetts Office of Housing and Liveable Communities sees that Pine Oaks IV would make North Harwich more dangerous and less liveable than it already is.

Sherri Stockdale
North Harwich

Editor:

At the May 2025 town meeting, the Chatham Historical Society will seek community preservation funds to restore Alice Stallknecht’s murals, painted in the 1930s and ‘40s and hung in the Atwood Museum in 1977. 

I visited the Atwood a few years ago and was struck by the murals’ homogeneity. The three murals — titled “Christ Preaching to the Multitude," “The Circle Supper” and “Every Man to His Trade” — reflect a time in the life of Chatham that no longer exists. Chatham is now more diverse and welcoming, and sex discrimination in work has been reduced, if not eliminated.

With the proposed money for this 2025 restoration coming from community preservation funds, which every Chatham taxpayer, including racial and ethnic minorities, men and women, contribute to, perhaps the time has arrived to pay not only for the restoration of this historic moment in Chatham history, but also to create and hang a plaque beside them, stating something like, “These murals by Alice Stallknecht, completed in the 1940s, reflect a historic slice of time in Chatham’s history. Chatham today has grown to become a welcoming town of diversity and inclusion of many races, religions and national origins.”

I suspect that such a plaque, in addition to clarifying Chatham’s current commitment to equality, will do wonders to increase paid membership at, and visitors to, the Atwood Museum.

Roz Diamond
Eastham