16 Water Street
Sandwich, MA 02563
Phone: 508-888-1173
“Post tot naufracia portus. (After so many shipwrecks, a haven.)”
— MOTTO OF THE TOWN OF SANDWICH
The English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold gave Cape Cod its name in 1602, referring to its “great store of codfish.” The Mayflower’s pilgrims set foot on Cape Cod at Provincetown before making their permanent settlement in Plymouth.
Sandwich is the oldest European settlement on the Cape. It was founded in 1637 and named for Sandwich, England, and it has nothing to do with the sandwich one eats. A century after this town was founded, the Earl of Sandwich popularized the food item. In the 1800s the town became well-known for its pressed glass, an industry which continues to this day.
Hoxie House dates to about 1675. It is one of the oldest houses on Cape Cod and one of the oldest in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was built for the Reverend John Smith, who lived here with his wife and their thirteen children. In the mid-nineteenth century it was bought by Abraham Hoxie, a whaling captain. The town acquired Hoxie House in the 1950s, restored it, and maintains it as a museum.
This is a wood-frame saltbox house, typical of early New England dwellings, which have a long pitched roof that slopes to the back. Such dwellings resemble a lidded wooden box in which salt would have been stored. It is thought that the saltbox house was created when a lean-to was added to the back of a Cape Cod–style house. It is also thought the diminutive lean-to, a single-story addition, may have been selected so as to save on property taxes, but this is conjecture.
Hoxie House has furniture and artifacts dating to the seventeenth century. The house is set in one of the picturesque neighborhoods on Cape Cod.