History of Yarmouth, MA

In the early years of the Republic, Yarmouth shared with the rest of New England a strong support for the Federalist Party. The economy of Yarmouth was centered on maritime industries, and the townspeople were consequently opposed to the Jefferson Administration's Embargo Act of 1807 and Non-Intercourse Act of 1809.

On July 8, 1812, the Yarmouth town meeting voted to protest the recent Congressional declaration of war with Great Britain. Along with much of the rest of coastal New England, Yarmouth was subject to blockade by the Royal Navy beginning in 1814. Although the people of Yarmouth, including its militiamen, remained intensely opposed to the War of 1812, local militia forces did participate in attempts to counter the blockade.

Early economic endeavors

Yarmouth began as a farming community in which the people of the town raised pigs, cattle, and sheep. Due to livestock pasturage, firewood collection, shipbuilding, and the construction of the Old Colony Railroad, the old-growth forests of the Wampanoag era had disappeared from Yarmouth by the end of the nineteenth century, not to be replaced with stands of incipient second-growth forest until agriculture declined in the town during the twentieth century.

Although agriculture was a prominent part of Yarmouth life, the town's location led its people to make much of their living from the ocean. For centuries, many Yarmouth men worked as whalers. In the early nineteenth century, merchantmen skippered by Yarmouth captains participated in the China Trade between New England and the Cantonese trading center of Whampoa. Captain Ebenezer Sears of Yarmouth was the first American skipper to take a merchant vessel around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1854, Captain Asa Eldridge of Yarmouth skippered the clipper