2. Baxter Drew House

Tour the Villages
West Yarmouth

Baxter Drew House

If houses could talk, this one could have told us much about the history of West Yarmouth having provided shelter to local families for more than three and a quarter centuries. The families who lived here -- the Baxters, Drews, and Syrjalas -- have each written a chapter in West Yarmouth's history in their own way. Said to have been built around 1652, the house was first lived in by Baxters who operated the Baxter Gristmill nearby. Not only were the Baxters millers, but also farmers, seamen, and captains. In the mid-19th century the house, already old, was purchased by Theodore Drew, a farmer and shellfisherman. Drew raised a large family of boys who built homes and businesses surrounding the old homestead. In the photograph above, the greenhouses of son George Drew are visible to the right of the house. By the 1930s, the Syrjala family came to live in the house. The Syrjalas, who had immigrated from Finland, worked for the Makepeace Company which then owned many of the cranberry bogs in West Yarmouth. Several dozen Finnish families were recruited around 1900 to work in the West Yarmouth cranberry bogs, the Syrjala's among them. Raymond Syrjala, a manager for the Makepeace Company, was the last to live in the house. Sadly, in the late 1980s the house was torn down to make room for a miniture golf course and the oldest house in West Yarmouth was lost forever.