Born in 1914, Mrs. Crane talks about her ancestors coming to Situate and moving down to Barnstable in 1639. Her father was born on the Cape.  His family grew up at a house in Barnstable called Packet Mail.  His grandfather built the house in 1829 and was the master of a sloop that delivered the mail from Barnstable to Boston.  Her father went to elementary school at the Pond Village School across from the Lamb and Lion Inn.  He went to High School in Sandwich via train each day.  He went to school with Thornton Burgess and later went on the college and law school.  He would bring his family down to the Cape in the summer and on holidays.  Mrs. Crane said that her house is reputed to be haunted by a black cat and tells a story of how the house became haunted.  She talks fondly of living in a section of the village called Pond Village near a body of water called at various times Hinckley pond, Great pond or Coggins pond.  Her residence at 2730 Main Street is located near the Packet Mail house and Pond Village.  She recalls stories of neighbors that lived in the Pond Village area.  She also remembers the start of the Barnstable Yacht Club and sailing in a German iron boat called the Rainbow.  She recalls the early 1920s and going with her mother and her friends to tea houses like the Sign of the Motor Car or the Old Mill in Sandwich.   Her mother would also go antique shopping and take her along on those shopping trips.   She remembers riding in a green Ford Roadster with her cousins to Hyannis and watching people walk in Hyannis.  She remembers her mother ordering items from the Fisk store in West Barnstable and seeing the items delivered in the afternoon.  She also remembers as a girl seeing the butcher and vegetable man selling their produce house to house. 

Notes: The Tales of Cape Cod Oral History Collection is housed at the William Brewster Nickerson Archives in the Wilkens Library at Cape Cod Community College in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. For more information about the collection, please contact the Nickerson Archives, http://www.nickersonarchives.org/.