Hot and cold, Sandwich beckons

December 07, 2003|Jane Roy Brown, Globe Correspondent

SANDWICH -- Many are the Bostonians who rejoice in the pleasures of the Outer Cape in winter: deserted beaches and empty highways. But chances are they own vacation homes, because down on the skinny end of Cape Cod, restaurants, bars, and inns are as apt to be shuttered as the changing rooms at Herring Cove Beach.

For a Cape getaway that mingles summertime conveniences with the joys of an unpopulated beach, Sandwich is the place. Thoreau, who traveled to the Cape several times between 1849 and 1855, viewed this long-settled community with a misanthropic squint. ''Ours was but half a Sandwich at most, and that must have fallen on the buttered side some time," he sniffed. ''I only saw that it was a closely-built town for a small one, with glass-works to improve its sand, and narrow streets in which we turned round and round till we could not tell which way we were going, and the rain came in, first on this side, and then on that, and I saw that they in the houses were more comfortable than we in the coach."

But Thoreau lived long before travelers had to contend with Cape traffic, and from that perspective alone, Sandwich is endearingly located just two exits from the Sagamore Bridge. By today's standards, this is an almost painless journey: usually no more than an hour and a quarter at this time of year. It also has the same quaintly shingled houses that towns farther east possess, except that here, more people tend to live in their homes year round.

True, workaday retail options -- doughnut shops, supermarkets, hardware stores -- outnumber tourista-ville boutiques; but even visitors sometimes need a can of soup, a roll of duct tape, or a coffee to go. And who wouldn't mind being able to see a big new movie while spending a weekend out of town, without standing in line?

Those who have driven through on Route 6A en route to someplace else may think they have seen the whole shebang, but Sandwich's historical and scenic center lies hidden on Main Street/Route 130, just a few blocks south of 6A. This is not only the oldest town on the Cape (founded 1639), but one of the oldest in the country, and that lengthy past is quietly on display in the central district. Residents line up to fill jugs with spring water near the site of the 18th-century Dexter Grist Mill at the head of Shawme Pond at Main and Grove Streets, in the shadow of the impressively pillared Town Hall, built in the 1830s. Though 19th-century architecture dominates, several houses in this little nexus date to the 1700s, as does the evocative Old Burying Ground on Grove Street.