Museum accessions.(Chatham Historical Society and its Atwood House Museum)

Vacationers in Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, this summer will find the Chatham Historical Society and its Atwood House Museum well worth a visit. The museum comprises the old Atwood House, which remains much as it was when it was built in 1752 and enlarged in 1833, and additional galleries for the historical society's strong collection of paintings, decorative arts, and other objects, all evocatively presented to recall the history of this seafaring town.

One of the most recent additions is a rare treasure indeed--a painting of a local sea captain's house executed in China in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It descended in the family and is accompanied by the sketch from which it was made, as well as by many fascinating family documents that shed light on their lives and the history of their house, which still stands, overlooking Pleasant Bay in what is today North Chatham.

The house was built in the late eighteenth century by Myrick and Esther Nickerson, who enlarged and updated it in the stately Federal style in the early nineteenth century. Their daughter Elizabeth inherited it on their deaths, and after her husband, David Kent, was lost at sea in 1816 it descended to the Kents' son Myrick Nickerson Kent. He and his wife adopted little Lizzie Payne, orphaned when her parents, brother, and grandparents were all lost during a voyage from Manila to San Francisco; shortly after their marriage in January 1878, Lizzie and her husband, Joseph Atkins, acquired the house from her adoptive parents.

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