Watergate, Explained in a One-Room Schoolhouse

On the third Thursday of August, a man named Jack Clarke is going to stand up in a schoolhouse on Cape Cod and give a talk called "Watergate: The Eastham Connection."

Sit with that. A 1972 break-in at a Washington office building, brought down to a one-room school on Schoolhouse Road, with a local thread apparently strong enough to hang an hour on. Nobody in Eastham seems to regard this as unusual programming. It is slotted between a talk on the town windmill and a panel about lighthouses, as though it obviously belongs there.

Which, in this building, it does.

The Room Got Bigger Last Year

The schoolhouse has been growing and shrinking for a century and a half, and last year it grew back.

It started as one room in 1869. By 1909 it had three school wings. In 1906 the town consolidated three separate schoolhouses onto that single site, and this is the one that came through. It taught Eastham children until around 1936, when the last pupils moved to a newer building.

Then the wings came off, and for decades what stood there was less than what had stood there.

The first wing was rebuilt in 2007. In 2025 the Eastham Historical Society finished the second — an 800-square-foot ell running perpendicular to the original building, reconstructing a wing that was still part of the footprint in 1937. There was a ribbon cutting on June 18. The building is now back to the three-wing shape it held in the early twentieth century.

It sits at the intersection with Nauset Road, directly across from the National Seashore visitor center, which is to say it sits in the path of a very large number of people who are on their way to look at something else.

Each Wing Got a Job

The three wings are not three versions of the same room.

The Vintage Schoolroom is the hands-on one, built around the original schoolmaster's desk and furnished the way the room actually looked. Children are invited to sit at the desks, handle the books, put on period clothes and play school. Historic world maps line the walls — the world as it was explained to Eastham kids.

The Eastham History Wing carries the long arc: the town's first people, the Mayflower settlers, the maritime heritage, the war veterans. It also holds a permanent exhibit on Henry Beston and The Outermost House, marking that book's influence on the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The Seashore visitor center is across the street. The exhibit explaining part of why it exists is in here.

The Community Connections and Genealogy wing is the new one, and it is the strangest and most local of the three: transportation, mail service, camp meetings, volunteer firemen. A Map Wall showing how the town changed shape. A hands-on shelf of artifacts pulled from the archives. A genealogy and research corner for people trying to find themselves in it.

Marca Daley is the curator.

Thursday Nights Get Odd

On selected Thursday evenings through the season, at seven o'clock, somebody stands up in that building and talks.

July 30 was Don Wilding on The Outermost House — Beston's year in a two-room shack on the Nauset dunes, a book a fair number of people on this side of the Cape treat as scripture. August 6 is Ron Petersen on "Two Shipwrecks: Revolution on the Cape." August 13 is the Eastham Windmill, subtitled "Dedicated to Our Millers," which tells you something about the room: this is a place where the millers get a dedication.

Then Clarke and Watergate on August 20.

On August 27, Susan Abott, Kate Smails and Joe Lebherz take on "Lighthouses: Family, Politics, and Preservation" — three names on one title, which is either a panel or an argument.

September 10 brings John Dennis Anderson, who does not talk about Henry Beston but appears as him. The season opened with a man explaining Beston's book and later has a man being Beston, with a permanent Beston exhibit standing in the next wing the whole time. Parker Mumford closes things out on September 17 with Thoreau, who walked this coast first and wrote it down.

The Jawbone

The talks are half of it.

The permanent collection is what a small town keeps when it decides to keep things. Shipwreck material. Old paper currency. Farming and household implements. Material from the Life Saving Service, from the era when men went out into the surf after wrecked ships from stations up and down this shore.

And a thirteen-foot jawbone from a sixty-five-foot finback whale — not a thing you expect in a schoolhouse, and exactly the sort of object a town ends up with when it lives where this town lives.

The archives are in the same building. Genealogical and historical material, donated and catalogued and held in climate control. It is the least visible thing the society does and probably the most consequential. Somebody's grandmother's letters are in there. Somebody's deed is in there.

The Eastham Historical Society was founded in 1963 by residents who wanted, in their own words, to preserve Eastham's past for Eastham's future. Sixty-three years on, they keep the schoolhouse, the 1741 Swift-Daley House out on Route 6, the Ranlett Tool Museum, and Dill Beach Camp.

Admission to the museum is free; donations are asked for the upkeep. Summer hours run Wednesday through Saturday, eleven to two, through August.

Which leaves the harder part: standing up on a Thursday night in August, in a room where children learned to read until 1936, and holding a couple dozen people who could be at the beach.