Brewster’s Twentieth Century: A Retrospect with Author Jim Coogan

Digging Into the Past, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History’s archaeology and history series presents Brewster’s Twentieth Century: A Retrospect with   Brewster native and author Jim Coogan, Thursday, November 9, 2017 at 1pm.

 Jim will take a look-back at a Cape Cod town during a century of transition.  From a small community dominated by a handful of long-established families, Brewster saw little change during the first decades of the 1900s. Through the traditional days of subsistence farming and fishing, and into the hard years of the Depression, the town’s population gradually declined as young people left to find better opportunities off-Cape.  After World War II veterans returned home to a place that was much the same as they had left it. However, by the 1960s, the population began to grow as people from nearby metropolitan areas moved to Brewster to raise families and to take advantage of the construction jobs that would dominate Cape Cod in the last quarter of the century.  Somewhat reluctantly, Brewster accepted the new reality of social, political, and economic change as it tried to hold on to its history while at the same time adapting to modern times. As the twenty-first century dawned, the town had become transformed to a modern suburban community with a solid year-round economy and a population that was ten times larger than it had been in 1900.

Brewster native Jim Coogan was a high school teacher at Dennis –Yarmouth Regional High School for 27 years. Upon retirement, he went into partnership with Dennis author Jack Sheedy and formed Harvest Home Books. Together they have co-written 11 books about Cape Cod. Jim’s latest book, Sears Point: A Cape Cod Novel, is a study of Brewster in the twentieth century as the town moved from the kind of place that inspired the novels of Brewster author Joseph C. Lincoln, to the up-to-date suburban community that it is today.  Jim lives and writes in Sandwich and will be signing his books at the presentation

 Free with Museum Admission

For more information please call the Museum at 508-896-3867 ext. 133.