Cape Cod Museum Of Natural History: Looking Back On 70 Years

Listen and you touch on light

twisting through shallows;

you sense a speech within a time

eluding it, ripples on stone.

It has no answer. Music follows,

music falls, with its magicians.

With birds, we hear what we could be,

never what we say we are.

– John Hay, “Bird Song”

The late John Hay, one of the founders of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster and its president for a quarter century, spent a lifetime listening and touching on light, hearing what could be, never what the world said he was.

Hay’s words today on the 70th anniversary of the museum are as vital as they were when the museum was founded in 1954 — overlooking the placid Stony Brook Valley and surrounded by another 300 acres of conservation land, including historic Wing Island, site of one of the region’s earliest Paleoindian settlements, dating back 8,000 years ago to the final glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene period. Hay, one of America’s finest naturalists and nature writers, was son of noted archaeologist Clarence Hay and the grandson of John Hay, Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt and a private secretary to Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps more than anyone, Hay understood the joys of observing the natural world through the eyes of a child, the child in all of us. His words shape the museum today, resonating in so many ways to protect and preserve this fragile environment.

“Theirs (children) will be the eyes and the listening ears in the woods and on the shore of Cape Cod,” Hay wrote in the museum’s first statement of mission.

An early mentor of mine, Hay taught me that words have sounds; the mind, the spirit within, hears them. A good writer, he taught, is as much a composer as all else. Hay, the author of 18 books, a Harvard poet laureate, and recipient of the celebrated John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, once said, “Our museum ought to be in the business of helping people to work together in enhancing the land’s own rooted, rhythmic, constant alliances with the earth. There is no arbitrary division between the human and the non-human, or man versus nature. We are nothing without the life we are given to share.”

He advised, “To be within nature requires one to respect nature’s own values on which you can build and strengthen your own vision.”

Vision has driven the progression of the museum, says Bob Dwyer, president and executive director. “We have worked diligently to be true to John’s vision. His words light the path of our future and we will faithfully follow.”

Added Ray Hebert, chair of the museum’s board of trustees, “John, through his genius, connected people, nature, philosophy and discovery in elegant, spirit-driven ways. Our commitment is to keep walking in that vision.”

The Founding

The Cape Cod Museum of Natural History was founded 70 years ago by two mothers, a teacher, a potter, a doctor’s wife, and an author. They each contributed a small amount of money “to open the eyes of children to their relationship with the natural world around them.”

And so the Cape Cod Junior Museum was born, later to be called the Cape Cod Junior Museum of Natural History, and finally the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. Initially, no land, no building. No capital fund drive. No paid staff.

“Instead of starting with a building and filling it, we started with the out-of-doors — marshes, streams, land, ponds, and dunes around us,” said Hay years ago. “We felt it was essential that nature provide the foundation and inspiration for the museum.”

Later buildings were constructed and expanded with fund drives.

Over seven decades, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History has faithfully adhered to its mission — staying power from the vision of its founders. The initial building, the additions, the exhibits, trailblazing programs all followed in lockstep to the mission. Today, the museum arguably is one of New England’s finest natural history museums in its weight class. The museum aquarium was recently ranked as 10th "most beautiful" in the country by Aquarium Store Depot, a national website founded by aquarium expert Mark Valderrama. Aquarium Store Depot generated its top 10 list of "most beautiful" public aquariums in the nation by examining Trip advisor reviews. In all, 175 public aquariums with more than 100 reviews were assessed.

On another front, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, in an effort to build more of a Cape-wide presence, recently acquired The Thornton W. Burgess/Green Briar Nature Center in Sandwich by unanimous vote of both boards.

The Thornton W. Burgess Society, the Green Briar Nature Center and Jam Kitchen, founded in 1976, sits on two and a half acres off bucolic Route 6A, surrounded by 57 acres of town of Sandwich-owned land with springs, hills and walking trails. Thornton Burgess, a 20th century renowned naturalist, conservationist and author, helped lead the effort in this country to support the cause of conservation and preservation. For more than a half century, Burgess wrote and spoke about the mysteries and marvels of nature as a driving force in our lives and this nation. In all, Burgess, one of America’s most prolific authors, wrote more than 170 books and more than 15,000 newspaper columns, many of them with a focus on teaching young children through his celebrated characters Peter Rabbit and his friends Jimmy Skunk, Grandfather Frog, Johnny Chuck, Sammy Jay, Reddy Fox, Hooty Owl, and Old Mother West Wind and many others.

The union brings together two of our nation’s most accomplished and revered nature writers.

Wing Island

“It may be surprising to hear that in nature nothing is finally known,” said Hay — words that underscore the mysteries of Wing Island. As one looks through the panoramic glass windows in the museum’s Marshview Room, Hay’s words come to life. When the Pilgrims first stepped upon the shores of Cape Cod Bay in the cold, forbidding November 1620, they found not a New World but an old one — an ancient landscape that bore the traces of 10,000 years of human endeavor.

Wing Island, a 140-acre preserve of heavily wooded upland in West Brewster that rises from a salt marsh just north of the museum, is owned by the town of Brewster; the museum maintains a well-traveled one-mile trail that leads across the island past patches of highbush blueberry, chokeberry, sea lavender, beach plum, wild raspberries, whose long straight shoots were once used by native people to fashion spears and arrows. The island is named after Brewster’s first English settler John Wing, a disaffected Sandwich Quaker who purchased the land in 1656 from Edward Bangs of the Mayflower Company. According to one version of local history, Wing lived on the island with his family, but there is no clear proof of this.

But Wing Island does contain one of the earliest Paleoindian settlements in the country. Years ago, then museum archeologist, Harvard-educated Fred Dunford, through his diligent work, uncovered artifacts of human occupation dating back 8,000 years. Solving the mysteries of Wing Island is a story of discovery and the painstaking process of gathering and interpreting clues of the past to better understand the future. Today, as it was in years past, it is critical for all of us to view the world with the probing eyes of a child. Wing Island brings us back to that.

The Future

Titanic explorer Robert Ballard, a museum supporter, once told me, “We are born with an innate curiosity, with an incredible number of questions to ask. If we cease to ask questions, we lose our curiosity, or if the system is not responding to our curiosity, then a tragic thing happens: We stop asking.”

The mission today of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural history is to continue asking questions. In its 70 years, the museum has come full circle with the wisdom of John Hay, who inspires the museum’s future in his eloquent words.

Cape Cod, he has said, is an “essential and unique ecosystem expressing priceless earth values that will survive us. It is impossible to value it only in terms of money and the economy, which are always fickle and temporary in nature. What the Cape looks like depends on how it follows the ultimate and far more powerful forces of nature…To be within nature requires one to respect nature’s own vision of life.”

Greg O’Brien has been a trustee at the Cape Cod Museum for close to 25 years. A career journalist, he’s an author and script writer. He’s also co-author with Fred Dunford of “Secrets in the Sand, the Archaeology of Cape Cod.” John Hay wrote the forward.