Atwood-Higgins House

The Atwood-Higgins House is an early Cape-style home and farmstead on Bound Brook Island, in a remote corner of Wellfleet. It’s a rewarding detour if you like New England architecture and places with a layered story. The main house has been maintained, while the later farm buildings have seen less preservation, so expect an evolving historic site rather than a uniformly restored museum.

The house is visited through seasonal tours, generally offered from late spring into early fall. Check the current schedule and reservation requirements before driving out; the precise 2026 details weren’t clear. Bound Brook is reached on narrow, winding local roads, a poor fit for oversized vehicles.

The oldest part dates to about 1730. It began as a half-Cape and grew into a full Cape by the end of the eighteenth century, with a central doorway and chimney. That chimney served four fireplaces and two beehive ovens, a lot of work packed into the center of a modest house.

The house had been abandoned since 1873 when George Higgins inherited it in 1920. Over the next four decades, he restored the old house and created a nostalgic Colonial Revival homestead. He began summering here in 1932 and donated the property to the seashore in 1961.

His farmstead grew to include a 1924 barn, a 1929 guesthouse, a screened summer house on a knoll above Herring River, and a country store and post office inspired by a Vermont general store. Higgins’s additions are part of the story too: they show how a deteriorating Cape house became a family retreat.

Bound Brook was once separated from the mainland; sand and marsh deposits eventually connected it to the Cape. Nearby kames—mounds of glacial debris—formed as the ice retreated roughly 18,000 years ago. The setting also gave earlier residents access to both land resources and water routes through Herring River.