70 Main Street

The front of the Captain's House is white clapboard, two stories and five bays wide, with a brick chimney at each end of the roof and a hooded door at the center; the long shingled wing behind it carries the guest rooms to a third floor. It is the main inn of The Copper Swan, a year-round hotel on Main Street in the center of Wellfleet, and it looks over the bay marsh.

The ground floor holds a sitting room with a brick fireplace and wide plank floors, a breakfast room that becomes a cocktail lounge in the evening, a screened porch and a covered deck. Eighteen guest rooms and sixteen and a half baths run over three levels, two pairs of the rooms connecting. The listing counts five and a half renovated baths, a newer roof and added insulation among the recent work, and the newly subdivided parcel of 1.24 acres has parking for sixteen cars.

The listing says sea captains who harbored their ships in Duck Creek lived here. The 1989 National Register nomination for the Wellfleet Center Historic District gives the background: as the small outer harbors on Cape Cod Bay silted up from the 1830s, Wellfleet's fishing and shipping gathered at the village on Duck Creek, where wharves went up and a shipyard launched seven schooners between 1848 and 1853, and the town reached its peak population, 2,411, in 1850.

The Cape Cod Central Railroad reached Wellfleet in 1870, and its dike across the mouth of the creek sealed off the upper harbor, which the nomination says became a backwater of salt marsh and tidal flats.

Before it was The Copper Swan the inn traded as the Wagner at Duck Creek and, earlier, the Inn at Duck Creeke. The same nomination counts the Duck Creek Inn inside the district, one of two inn complexes there made of historic houses and outbuildings converted for inn use by the middle of the twentieth century. Its data sheet heads that group with the Holbrook-Hayes House, a Federal house of about 1810, beside the Duck Creek Tavern and a stable; the Crexi record gives 1850 for the Captain's House.

The Carriage House next door and the restaurant and event space beside it are offered separately.