History of Woods Hole
The earliest known historical records for Woods Hole, Massachusetts, concern purchase of land from the Wampanoag Indian Job Notantico by fourteen settlers on December 30, 1679. Small-scale farming, some fishing, and, later, saltworks were the first industries. By 1790, the village boasted ten houses and a population of seventy-four. Sixty years later, there were thirty-four houses and two hundred people. Whaling ships (peaking at nine) worked out of Woods Hole from 1828 to 1864, and the Pacific Guano Company produced fertilizer (based on local fish and bird droppings collected on islands in the Pacific Ocean) from 1863 to 1889 at its factory on the peninsula then known as "Long Neck," now Penzance Point. Four years before Pacific Guano ceased operations, Spencer Baird's location of a pernament fisheries laboratory in Woods Hole initiated the scientific bent of the delightful community.
Woods Hole: The Early Years
From NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Marine Service
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