Past Exhibits

Inspired by art collector and summer resident Marcella Garber Polisar Katz, this new exhibit highlights the museum’s collection of paintings, prints and other works on paper by women artists of Woods Hole. The 24 featured artists include Maria Denny Fay (1820-1890), Peggy Clark Kelley (1915-1996), Mary Mavor (1925-2005) and Joan Kanwisher (1924-2019). The exhibit also includes a color illustration by Julie Child from her recent donation of more than 500 works to the museum.

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.