Ask How Someone Gets From Yarmouth to Dennis and the Mid Cape Splits in Two

One house west of where Union Street meets Route 6A in Yarmouth Port, a stone carries four characters and a year: B 4 1729. Four miles to Barnstable village, according to the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth.

A few minutes south, Route 28 has nothing carved in 1729. It has a bridge from 1935, a mini golf course whose season ends Sunday, and a building that used to have sea lions in it.

Ask somebody how they get from Yarmouth to Dennis. The road they name tells you which Mid Cape they carry around.

The milestone has company. Just east of Parnassus Book Service, almost across from the Yarmouth Port post office, a second stone reads G T T / BOSTON / 76 MILES / 1880. The historical society says it was never a stagecoach mile marker or a town line, and presumes George T. Thacher set it.

The road those stones sit on goes back further than either. The Cape Cod Commission traces the Old King's Highway to a Native American trail that became the main east-west road on the Cape's north side. It runs 34 miles from Bourne to the Orleans line, through seven towns and eight National Register Historic Districts. The state named it a Scenic Byway in 1992, and in 2021 the U.S. Department of Transportation made it a National Scenic Byway. The land along it north of Route 6 sits in the Old King's Highway Regional Historic District, created by a 1973 state law, which the Dennis Historical Society calls the largest historic district in the country, stretching from Sandwich to Orleans.

Even that name had to be fought for. In 1920, the historical society writes, the General Court named the road "The King's Highway." Markers went up along it, and some Cape Codders objected because they thought the name was unpatriotic.

You're a 6A person if your Mid Cape includes:

You're a 28 person if your Mid Cape includes:

If 6A is the postcard, 28 can look like the road the Cape got stuck with. Its paper trail says it was built on purpose.

Until 1933, there was no way through South Yarmouth but Old Main Street. "Prior to that, all traffic went down Old Main Street as no other road existed," the historical society writes. In 1933 the town got a Route 28 bypass connected to Bridge Street, and the crossroads people now call Four Corners was, until then, Three Corners.

Route 28 was already a long road by then. When the New England states numbered their highways in 1922, the society notes, it ran from Sagamore all the way to Manchester, N.H.

Then there's the crossing. The Bass River Bridge that carries 28 from South Yarmouth to West Dennis dates from 1935, MassDOT says, and is the fourth bridge at that spot. MassDOT also says it's reaching the end of its useful life and has to be replaced. For now, it's a working piece of the 1930s you can still drive across.

So 28 has its own history, just a newer one: a bypass in 1933, a bridge in 1935, a replacement on the way. And 6A wasn't preserved in amber either. It got its name, and its markers, from the legislature in 1920, over some residents' objections.

This weekend, while Pirate's Cove is still open (weather permitting), try it. Start at the 1729 stone in Yarmouth Port, one house west of Union Street. Take 6A east past Hallet's to the Cape Playhouse in Dennis. Then drop south to 28 and come back west over the 1935 Bass River Bridge, past the mini golf, to 674 Route 28.

Bring whoever in your house always takes the other road, and let them call the turns on their half. Then tell us which road you'd take home, and the one place on it that proves your case.

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