News & Stories

By Jeffrey D. Crocker Wartime often produces great stories of courage and heroism. This is not one of them. The year was 1864, the third year of the American Civil War. The previous year, Congress had passed — and President Abraham Lincoln had signed — the unpopular Enrollment Act, requiring men between the ages of 20 and 45 to register for military service. Thomas F. Crocker of West Barnstable became notorious for his wild attempts to evade the draft during these events. A

Salt-making on Cape Cod, including in Barnstable village, has a very long history. Historian Amos Otis reports in his Genealogical Notes of Barnstable families that: A salt work was erected in Barnstable very early, on the point of land on the west of the entrance of Rendezvous Creek, still known as Saltern point. Otis clarifies that the word “saltern”: Means a salt work, a building in which salt is made by boiling or solar evaporation. It is lost to time who owned t

It is almost impossible today to contemplate life without refrigeration. However, almost within living memory that was a reality. Before refrigeration, Cape Codders harvested ice from ponds and stored it in icehouses and then ice boxes in their houses. One such pond was Hinckley’s Pond in Barnstable Village. There was an icehouse at the edge of that pond, along 6A, from which the local iceman would make deliveries when requested by local households and businesses. M

On Cape Cod we are surrounded by endless stretches of old stone walls that mark property lines, fields, and thoroughfares. Those stones are a legacy from the glaciers that retreated North many thousands of years ago. As the ice melted, stones from small pebbles to massive boulders were left scattered across the land. They were a useful annoyance for the early settlers, who used them to build the foundations of their new houses, and to mark the limits of their land: Gustavu

The landscape of Cape Cod was created in large part by the glaciers of many thousands of years ago. Some of the small ponds that were left behind evolved into cranberry bogs. Native Americans harvested wild cranberries and used them for food, medicine and as a fabric dye. European settlers then cultivated local cranberries, but commercial cranberry farming did not start in earnest until the early-mid 1800s. Cranberries grow from April to November. Cranberry farming was

By Jeffrey D. Crocker Miss Experience Crocker was an accomplished and independent woman of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. She never married. She was the granddaughter of Deacon William and Alice Crocker, the first Barnstable Crockers, who arrived with Reverend John Lothrop in 1639 when the Town of Barnstable was established. Experience and her brother Nathaniel lived in their grandfather William’s house, a large two-story frame dwelling located at what is now 2