Duck Creek and the scenic Uncle Tim’s Bridge are bordered by Commercial Street in Wellfleet Village. Duck Creek has been the dumping grounds of discarded objects for more than 200 years. The trash of yesterday is the material culture of today. Material culture is defined as the study of objects or artifacts for the purpose of gaining insights into the social life and the cultural history of a given place. The term also is applied to the artifacts themselves, as they represent direct physical evidence of the life of a community in earlier times. Today’s presentation is about the study of the history of Wellfleet Village from the early 1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, as reflected in the objects that were in use during those years. Wellfleet Village developed into the center of commercial and residential life in town by the 1830s. Its primary industries shifted over time from agriculture and whaling to fishing and shellfishing, to general provisioning of a changing population, and by the later 1800s to a newly developing tourism industry.

Stephen Broker has been recovering the artifacts of Wellfleet’s past from the tidal waters of Duck Creek for the past fifty years. A Flickr photo-sharing site has been developed to show the full range of artifacts recovered from the mud. It is found at the following address.

Zoom Link to register for this event: DUCK CREEK