The early settlements on Cape Cod all came about under the aegis of the parent colony in Plymouth. Several times in Pilgrim chronicles we read how Captain Myles Standish was sent to Sandwich, Barnstable and Yarmouth on tours of inspection and to supervise the division of lands purchased for little or nothing by the newcomers from the remnants of an Indian population decimated years before by disease.

Direct Pilgrim influence on the religious life, the administration and the courts of the Cape settlements continued from the earliest beginnings at Sandwich in 1637, with steadily diminishing strength, until the election of Thomas Prence of Eastham as Governor of Plymouth Colony in 1657. Meanwhile the parent settlement itself was coming under the domination of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its Puritan hierarchs. The Plymouth connection finally lapsed, for all practical purposes, in 1685, when Plymouth Colony was divided up into Plymouth, Barnstable and Bristol Counties.

First Cape settlement was in 1637, when a band of Puritan families from Saugus and Lynn on the North Shore got permission from the Pilgrim Fathers to migrate to the precincts of the Plymouth Colony, of which the Cape was a part. Some Pilgrim families from Duxbury and Plymouth came along with these first settlers to carve out homesteads in the Sandwich area.

Next towns to be settled were Yarmouth and Barnstable, in 1639, an earlier attempt to populate the Mattacheesett section of what is now Barnstable having failed.

Yarmouth was a direct offshoot of Pilgrim Plymouth, and prominent among its settlers was Giles Hopkins, son of Stephen Hopkins, who came over with his father on the Mayflower.

Barnstable, at its inception, was dominated by the personality of the Rev. John Lothrop, a very strongminded man of dissident Pilgrim persuasion who, together with fifty of his parishioners, had once served two years in jail in England for religious schism. For a time the spirit of controversy continued in the new Cape Colony, fanned by the radical views of Marmaduke Matthews, a firebrand Welshman. But by the time Captain Myles Standish and two companions came down from Plymouth in 1643 to divide up the salt hay marshes, cleared farmlands and woods of Barnstable into legally recorded homesteads, the colony had settled down and become absorbed with more workaday matters.

Last of the very early Cape Cod towns to be settled was Eastham in 1644, by a party led by the Rev. John Mayo, bearer of another of the names later to become famous on the Cape in its great mercantilist period.

Falmouth, in 1686, fissioned off quite directly from Plymouth, and was incorporated in 1686, originally under the name of Succonesset. Harwich officially came into being in 1694, as an offshoot from Barnstable, and very much later, in 1803, gave rise to Brewster. Dennis, meanwhile, had fissioned from Yarmouth in 1794. But by this time Pilgrim origins and influence were but the dimmest of memories.

Also influential on the early Cape, after the middle 1650’s, were the Quakers, at first persecuted, but eventually accepted as a manifestly superior kind of people. They, too, quickly merged during the following century into the Cape Cod way of life, and became indistinguishable from families of Pilgrim or Puritan origin.