Introduction

In the beginning, Billingsgate was a collection of several villages on the lower Cape between Eastham and Provincetown.  Small settlements with a meeting house, a burial ground and often a school, grew up where fishing and farming were possible: on Bound Brook Island, near Gull Pond, around Duck Creek, and in South Wellfleet.  In 1763 inhabitants in these scattered European enclaves petitioned for independence from Eastham and incorporated themselves as the Town of Wellfleet.

In the two and half centuries since, local historians have recorded much about their Town.  Among the liveliest of these memoirs are Wellfleet, A Pictorial History, by Judy Stetson, first published in 1963 by the Wellfleet Historical Society and reissued in 2004 with additional chapters by Seth Rolbein; Wellfleet Remembered by Ruth Rickmers, 1993; and also Wellfleet Echoes, 1973 and More Wellfleet Echoes, 1978, by Earle Rich.

We on the Historical Commission hope this Guide, with annotated maps, will help our visitors and our neighbors locate surviving Monuments and Memorials that mark significant sites in our town that is still, to quote Thoreau's Cape Cod,  "east of America."