The Fish Market Closed in 1966. Mrs. Baxter's Fryer Didn't.

Pleasant Street in Hyannis doesn't end so much as run out of land. You've probably idled next to it in the ferry line. Go past the Steamship Authority lot and the trucks waiting for the boat, and the road stops at a gray-shingled building with white trim, standing on pilings over the inner harbor.

A sign asks boaters to hail on channel 71. People tie up at the dock and walk straight in for lunch, and on weekends, Cape Cod LIFE noted, they wait for a slip. Inside there are handmade boat-chart tables and captain's chairs, and nobody takes a reservation.

It all looks like it was built to be a restaurant. It wasn't. For decades this was a place where fish got packed, sold and shipped, and nobody sat down.

So who decided the fish wharf should start cooking?

The Baxters were here long before lunch was. The family's own history starts with Benjamin D. Baxter, a sea captain. In 1919 Benjamin D. Baxter Jr. bought the land at the end of Pleasant Street and used it to pack fish. In the 1930s Warren Baxter opened a fish market in the building that houses the Boathouse today. After the war the family split the work. Warren kept the market. Benjamin handled the boats, offloading catch and selling fuel.

The fish came up the dock, went into the market and went home in paper. That was the business.

Then, in 1957, as the family tells it, "Warren's wife installed a Fryolator in a dock shed and began selling fish and chips."

That sentence is close to the whole record. None of the published histories give her first name. Cape Cod LIFE calls her "Warren's wife," and the same writer, in a companion piece, calls her Sam Baxter's grandmother. No account says whether the fryer was her idea, what a plate cost, or how long it took for a line to form. What's left is an object and a location: one fryer, in a shed, on the dock where the fish came in.

For about ten years the market was the business and the fryer was the side dish.

Then grocery chains took over selling fish, and Cape Cod LIFE reports that the Baxter fish market closed in 1966. That's the moment most family businesses end. The main thing stops paying, and the doors close.

This one had a fryer.

On July 4, 1967, the family opened Baxter's Boathouse in the old market building. The fish stopped leaving the wharf raw and started leaving it fried. The boats, the dock and the family all stayed. What changed was what happened to the catch in its last ten feet.

The new bar didn't overthink it. "The only alcohol served was Budweiser on tap. And vodka with cranberries," Cape Cod LIFE wrote in 2019.

The Kennedys became regulars anyway, according to the family, and the magazine says Ted Kennedy came for the fried clams. A two-drink bar on a fish dock, and a U.S. senator ordering clams.

When the Boathouse turned 50 in 2017, general manager Samantha Mulcahy told CapeCod.com, "People tell us they had their first date here. We've had engagements here." If you grew up anywhere between Barnstable and Dennis, there's a fair chance someone in your family has a Baxter's story, and it probably involves fried fish and a view of the harbor.

It's the same kind of place as the old Jack's in Yarmouth Port, where nobody was coming to take your order. It runs on its own rules because it grew out of somebody working with what was in front of them. At Baxter's, what was in front of them was fish.

Sam and Ben Baxter run it now. Cape Cod LIFE counted them as the fifth generation, sons of Warren Baxter Jr., known as Barney. In early 2025 they put the wharf on the market and asked the Town of Barnstable to take the first look.

"I would love to have the town steward the property," Sam Baxter told the Cape Cod Times that February.

The listing covers three parcels, a little over half an acre, including the 6,358-square-foot restaurant, the docks and the parking lot. Town officials say the structures date mostly to the 1940s. On March 20, 2025, the Town Council voted $160,000 to send divers and engineers under the pilings, bulkheads and buildings before anyone talked price.

At that hearing Sam Baxter said what the sale was and wasn't about. "I know the town is not going to get into the restaurant business," he said. "It's about the land, the riparian rights, the waterfront, and the continuation of the harbor." Councilors talked about a public fish pier like Chatham's, where the town says the primary use is supporting the commercial fishing industry. The listing agent, Chuck Carey, pointed out that fish is where the property started in 1919, and that such a use "would be coming full circle."

Since then the wharf has moved behind closed doors. The Council has listed 0, 167 and 177 Pleasant Street for executive-session talks on "purchase, exchange, lease or value" several times, including April 30. We found no public price or completed deal in the records checked through Sept. 22.

Meanwhile the fryer keeps running. "We're going to keep it going as long as we can," Sam Baxter said in 2025. "It's not like we're going out of business." The restaurant opened again this spring, it's open Thursday through Sunday now that summer's over, and it plans to open on Columbus Day.

Go down on a weekend and watch the dock for a while. Boats still swing in off the harbor. People climb out hungry and walk up the same few yards of dock the catch once came up.

If the town ends up with the wharf, the talk is about bringing fish back to that dock, landed and sold the way it was before there was anything to fry it in.

Nobody wrote down her first name. The town is now deciding what happens to the wharf her fryer kept going.

Baxter's Boathouse & Fish N' Chips | 177 Pleasant St, Hyannis
Open Thursday–Sunday from 11 a.m.; the website says it will also be open Columbus Day, Monday, Oct. 12.
No reservations · (508) 775-7040 · baxterscapecod.com
Tip: boaters can hail on channel 71 and tie up first-come, first-served. Expect a wait for the dock on weekends.