10/16/2026
Recently I got to tour the Winslow Crocker house in Yarmouth Port, a Historic New England property. Unlike simpler Cape Cod homes, built in 1780 it has surprisingly rich, detailed wood paneling in every room. In 1936, avid antique collector and preservationist Mary Thacher had the house dismantled beam by beam and moved six miles down Old King’s Highway to its present site next to her ancestral home. This was the time when the Sagamore and Bourne bridges opened. Thacher remodeled the interior—rebuilding fireplaces, modifying windows, and utilizing stripped woodwork—to create a colonial backdrop with a 20th-century aesthetic.