Past Exhibits

Our Gallery 2 exhibit highlights pioneering oceanographers and the instruments they invented to study the Gulf Stream and global ocean currents. The exhibit tells the story of Benjamin Franklin’s early ...

This 2021 exhibit explores the archaeology associated with the earliest indigenous settlements on Cape Cod. With the Public Archaeology Laboratory in Pawtucket, RI, the museum has developed a display on Native American archaeological sites, ranging from approximately 12,000 to 450 years ago, along with artifacts and images to tell us more about the culture of the earliest inhabitants of our region well before the Mayflower landing in 1620.

“Honoring Jewel Plummer Cobb” exhibit tells the story of the change in name of Agassiz Road to Jewel Cobb Road.  Woods Hole residents initiated a community wide campaign upon learning that the prominent scientist, Louis Agassiz, credited with inspiring the start of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), was a white supremacist who used his science in support of his racist theories.  Seventeen illustrated panels give a step-by-step narrative of the way the name change came about.

This 2018 exhibit, Man and Mollusk: A History of Shellfishing on Cape Cod, showed the many kinds of shellfish found in our waters and the vintage tools that were used to gather them, as well as the use of quahog shells by the Wampanoag Indians to present-day oyster farming by local fishermen. Thanks to Tom Chilton and Bob Grosch for curating this exhibit.

Discover how Cape Cod fishermen travelled close to shore and far from land before the days of electronic devices. The exhibit features reproductions and an original of large, century-old maritime charts from the archives of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A list of exhibits at our Museum over the years. The first exhibit of the Woods Hole Historical Museum was held in 1974 in Endeavor House on School Street. The following year, in 1975, an exhibit was held at Fisher House on Church Street.

Electric home refrigerators didn't begin to replace home ice boxes until the 1920s and to keep things in those ice boxes cold, one needed ice. Here in the northeast, much of that ice was cut from ponds that froze over in the winter. The ice was cut and then stacked in ice houses to be used throughout the year. During summer of 2015 one of the exhibits at the Woods Hole Historical Museum told the story of the ice and the ice houses that were found around the shores of many of the ponds in Falmouth. Much of what was on display in that exhibit is now online and can be viewed by clicking here.