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White picket fences, English-style hedges and ancient stone walls grace the`properties on which many antique homes in Yarmouth rest. Architects influenced by the Greek Revival, classic Colonial, French Second Empire, and Gothic Victorian styles, among many designs in vogue through the decades. Yarmouth's varied, rich architecture is a testament to the fortitude and vision of the families who lived here since this mid-Cape town was founded by English settlers 357 years ago.
The first residents of Yarmouth, the Indians, called their home Mattacheese, or `planting lands'. Yarmouth-of English origins-was the name settled upon by settlers when Mattacheese was incorporated in 1639 as a frontier town of the Plymouth Bay Colony. Relations between the Native Americans and the European settlers, by existing accounts, were fairly harmonious and meetings between Indians and the English began long before Yarmouth's incorporation.
In June, 1621, a handful of men from Plymouth came ashore at Cape Cod Bay in search of a lost, rambunctious boy named John Billington. A group of Indians met the search party and the Plymouth men were invited to meet the local chief, or sachem, Iyannough, and `partake of food and drink'. The Billington boy was later located at Nauset with the aid of the Indians.
Several Wamponoag tribes peacefully coexisted in Mattacheese: the
Pawkunnaw- kuts lived near Bass River in South Yarmouth and South Dennis. Lands just south of Chase Garken Creek near Dennis was home to the Hockanom and the Nobscusset Indians settled in north Dennis.
Two European men actually resided for a short time in Yarmouth prior to the establishment of a permanent colony here in 1639. A Lynn-based minister, Stephen Bachiler tried but failed to settle a small community at Mattacheese in the winter of 1637-38. And Stephen Hopkins of the Mayflower was granted leave from Plymouth to winter his cattle in Mattacheese in 1638.
The Plymouth Court then awarded land grants to three men in early 1639. Within a year of the arrival of John Crowe, Thomas Howes and Anthony Thacher, no less than 25 families settled in newly incorporated Yarmouth and many of these families' descendants still live in Yarmouth.
In Pilgrim settlements the `gathering' of a church was coeval with the founding of a town, and the Reverend Marmaduke Matthews - a controversial, opinionated man - served as the first minister of the meetinghouse, which later evolved into the Congregational Church. A modest structure with a thatched roof and unplastered walls was constructed for Sunday worship. |
