Services We Offer In Sandwich, MA

Life in Sandwich, Massachusetts: the oldest town out here, and it still looks it

Settled in 1637, and it never got torn down

Sandwich was settled in 1637 and incorporated two years later, which makes it the first town anybody built on this arm of the coast. What is unusual is not the date — plenty of New England towns are that old on paper — but how much of it is still standing. Drive the road that is Route 6A on a map and the Old King's Highway to everybody who lives on it, and you pass three centuries of houses in a row: half-Capes with the door off to one side, full Capes with the door in the middle, and the occasional Federal with too many windows for a town this size.

The center of it all is a pond with a mill on it. Shawme Lake sits behind the village, the Dexter Grist Mill still turns beside it, and the Sandwich Glass Museum is a short walk away, telling the story of the works that made this a factory town for most of the nineteenth century. Up the road, Heritage Museums and Gardens spreads across a hundred acres of rhododendron and old cars. It is a lot of history for a town of this size, and none of it is behind a rope.

According to the Town of Sandwich, the town was settled in 1637 and incorporated in 1639, which makes it the oldest on this arm of the coast.

Four seasons, and the water decides all of them

The town has Cape Cod Bay along the north and the Cape Cod Canal cut down its western edge, and between them they set the weather. Spring arrives late and grudgingly; a March afternoon inland can be ten degrees warmer than the same afternoon on the marsh. Summer is humid rather than hot, the sea breeze does most of the cooling, and the fog rolls in over Town Neck often enough that people plan around it.

Autumn is the good one. It runs long here, well past when the rest of the state has given up, and the light over the salt marsh in October is the reason a lot of people who came for a summer never left. Winter is wet more often than it is white — the water keeps the hard freezes short — and the damp is the part that matters to a building.

Walk the 1,350-foot boardwalk out over the marsh to Town Neck Beach in any of the four and it is a different place each time. That is not a tourist-brochure line; it is just what a salt marsh does across a year.

A town of three parts

Sandwich is really three places sharing a name. There is the village, tight around the pond and the old street grid, where the houses are old and close together. There is East Sandwich along 6A, more spread out, farms and conservation land and the Green Briar Nature Center with the Briar Patch behind it — Thornton W. Burgess, who wrote all those rabbit stories, was born in this town, and East Sandwich has never entirely let go of it. And there is Forestdale, inland and up off Route 130, pine woods and kettle ponds and newer houses set back among the trees.

Then there is the part that is not any of those: nearly fifteen of the town's forty-four square miles are inside the Massachusetts Military Reservation, so a third of Sandwich by area is woods, runway and fence line. People here are used to a town that is bigger on the map than it feels on the ground.

The three go with three ZIP codes — 02563 for the village, 02537 for East Sandwich and 02644 for Forestdale — which is the quickest way to tell somebody which part of town you actually mean.

Where we fit in

EcoGeek is family owned and operated, and we are a local outfit rather than one driving down for the afternoon and heading back over the bridge at four. Knowing what a house here is built like and what the damp does to it is most of the job, and that is not something you pick up from a route sheet.

Everything we use is family and pet friendly. That is not a slogan somebody bolted on; it is the reason the company has the name it has.

Why it feels like home

A mill on a pond, a boardwalk over a marsh, three hundred years of houses along one road, and a canal at the end of it. Sandwich is old enough to be set in its ways and lived-in enough not to be a museum. It is a good town to work in, and we are glad to be here.