Historic Sites in Barnstable County

History of Barnstable County

Barnstable County is Cape Cod, the hooked peninsula that runs from the Cape Cod Canal out to Provincetown. It was incorporated in 1685 on the homeland of the Wampanoag, and its story starts before Plymouth: in November 1620 the Mayflower anchored in Provincetown Harbor, where the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact. The Pilgrim Monument, finished in 1910, marks that first landfall.

For the next three centuries the Cape lived by the sea. You can still see it in the sea captains' houses of Brewster and Yarmouth Port, in lighthouses like Highland Light in Truro (the current tower dates to 1857), and at Wellfleet, where Guglielmo Marconi's station sent a transatlantic wireless message in 1903. Much of the Outer Cape has been protected as Cape Cod National Seashore since 1961.