Osterville Historical Museum
H. Manley Crosby, who was born in 1872, was an innovator from a family of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, boatbuilders that is still active in wooden-boat construction. When he was in his mid-20s, Manley set up shop in Brooklyn, New York, to be close to a hotbed of catboat racing.
Of the seven unique villages that make up the town of Barnstable on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, there is one that enjoys, if such a thing is possible, an over-abundance of geographic blessings. In addition to 5 miles of Nantucket Sound coastline, Osterville abuts or encompasses seven ponds, a river, and four bays. The most important bays relating to this story are North Bay and West Bay, for it is on the passage connecting these two enticing bodies of water, fringed with trees, marsh grass, and sand, that the Crosby boat shops once flourished.
It is a pleasant exercise, now, to imagine Osterville as it was during the latter decades of the 19th century. The village was then home to perhaps 400 residents, but it was also attractive to increasing numbers of summer visitors who arrived by train at the West Barnstable station and then took an hourlong stagecoach ride to their destination. Osterville was, and remains, a genteel place of tree-shaded streets and, especially in the years before the automobile, it offered a full measure of peace and quiet. At night, nothing detracted from the darkness and starlight except for the oil lamps of neatly kept homes and inns. Summer visitors relaxed and socialized, went bathing, or visited the reading room in the shingle-roofed library that, in 1882, had a collection of 1,209 books.