Twenty-Six Million Dollars and a Hundred Years

My wife Lisa has a particular way of looking at Route 6A in Brewster. When we drive past 3057 Main Street — that long run of old camp buildings tucked between the road and the bay — she doesn’t see a closed property. She sees summer.

Lisa was a counselor at Cape Cod Sea Camps in the 1970s. She knows where the dining hall sat, where the boats were kept, what the beach looked like at low tide when the flats ran out toward the horizon. For her, that land was never “open space.” It was a place she belonged to before it belonged to the town.

So when people ask me whether the Sea Camps property is “open now,” I understand the hope behind the question. The honest answer is more interesting than a simple yes. Brewster did something rare: it bought the land. What it’s still working out — carefully, and in public — is how a town turns ownership into access.

A camp with a hundred-year story

The camp’s history is the part most longtime Cape families already half-know. By most accounts it began in 1922, when Worcester Academy teacher Robert Delahanty — “Captain Del” — and a colleague started a boys’ camp, Camp Monomoy. A few years later the operation moved north to Brewster, onto the bay, and boys were soon sailing on Cape Cod Bay each summer.

A neighboring estate became Camp Wono for girls, and for decades the two camps ran side by side through the Brewster woods. By the 1970s they had merged into the coed Cape Cod Sea Camps — a residential and day camp that, at its height, drew well over a thousand children a summer and counselors from around the country and the world. Lisa was one of them.

When the gates closed

COVID ended it. In late 2020 the family that ran the camp announced it would not reopen — the pandemic had taken the 2020 season and made the next one impossible to plan. For the thousands of people in the camp’s database, the news came the way most things came that year: a letter. No final summer, no goodbye.

And then the land — a rare bay-to-pond landscape, with hundreds of feet of beach on one parcel and Long Pond frontage on the other — was for sale. For Brewster, the stakes were obvious. The wrong buyer could have meant condominiums on the bay or a private compound walling the town off from one of its best stretches of shoreline.

Brewster steps up

What happened next is the part worth remembering. Residents approved a $26 million purchase — $20 million for the roughly 55-acre bay parcel at 3057 Main Street, and $6 million for the roughly 66-acre pond parcel at 500 W. H. Besse Cartway — at a Special Town Meeting in September 2021 and a Special Election that October. The town named the bay shoreline First Light Beach in May 2022. (The Town of Brewster’s Sea Camps project page lays out the acquisition and the planning timeline.)

It was one of the largest land acquisitions in Brewster’s history — and the camp family facilitated a sale to the town rather than holding out for the highest private bid. The land Captain Del bought in the 1920s would stay in the community’s hands. Then came the hard part: deciding what to do with it.

What the town has planned

This is where precision matters, because plans and access are not the same thing. At Annual Town Meeting on May 11, 2024, voters approved final comprehensive plans for both parcels, developed with the town’s design team led by landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand. Some pieces already exist: the community pool on the bay property opened to residents back in the summer of 2023. Others — a built-out public beach, gardens, a playground, courts, and a community center, with several existing camp buildings eyed for town and seasonal staff housing — are the direction the approved plan points toward, not a description of what’s finished today.

The pond side has been guided toward conservation through a long public-engagement process: advisory committees, resident forums, surveys, and design support from the town’s planning team. As of this writing, the most recent 2026 conservation steps — a permanent conservation restriction and any related state legislation — are still being finalized in the town record. If you’re citing them in conversation, confirm them against the meeting minutes before treating them as settled.

For the people who were there

When Lisa and I drive past now, she still sees summer. But she also sees something newer: the fact that this stretch of Brewster won’t be walled off or sold to a developer. That’s the real win, and it’s permanent in a way a single beach day isn’t.

The town couldn’t save the camp. It saved the land. The next chapter — what gets built, what stays wild, who can use what, and when — depends less on nostalgia than on the unglamorous work of planning, permitting, and clear public rules. That work is still underway, and it’s worth following.

If you’ve been meaning to see it, do — just check the current access rules first, so the only surprise waiting for you is how far the flats really go.

— Arthur Radtke
Founder, Celebrate Media | Realtor, eXp Realty on the Lower Cape