The Distinguished Dozen

By Robert Thomson

The biggest names in town didn't even live here.

People strolling around the village can spot tributes to Sandwich’s founders, early settlers, military veterans and war dead on wooden tablets and metal plaques. But the lettering tends to be tiny. Not so with our most prominent list of historic figures.

Etched big and deep on the façade of a Main Street building are the names of 12 people who never called Sandwich home. Most never set foot on this continent. Yet for more than a century, their names have hidden in plain sight atop the brick mass of the Sandwich Public Library.

The facade of the Sandwich Public Library features two panels displaying the names of a dozen prominent men from the history of art, science, philosophy and literature, with no explanation of how or why they were chosen.

On the left of the library facade, visitors see:

SHAKSPEARE

MILTON - PLATO

DARWIN - SCOTT

LONGFELLOW

On the right:

EMERSON POE

MICHAEL-ANGELo

VELASQUEZ

BACH - DANTE

Just like that. No explanation.

We don’t even get the commonly used full names of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Darwin, Sir Walter Scott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Diego Velazquez and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The central panel on the facade does report that the structure is named the Weston Memorial Building after William and Sophia Weston, whose bequests financed its construction for a public library in 1909.

As to why the 12 flanking names were plucked from the great catalog of Western Civilization, the answer may be lost to the ages. Meaning I can’t find it. Despite the help of Town Archivist Jen Ratliff and Town Clerk Taylor White, I've uncovered no official record or newspaper account that reveals how the Distinguished Dozen were chosen.

The general idea is plainer. The display of revered names from the history of art and science was a thing in that energetic era of library construction. The exterior of the Boston Public Library completed in 1895 under the supervision of architect Charles McKim is famously decorated with 537 names.

Sandwich sliced its honor roll by 525. But didn't that make the underlying task more difficult? Who culled several millennia of thought and creativity to spotlight a dozen heroes?

The librarian? That would have been Annie A. Rogers, who took the job in 1897 at the starting salary of $50 a year. But would Miss Rogers have chosen to memorialize a dozen guys? I like to think that if she did the picking, a library visitor would be looking at a list that included New England’s ALCOTT, DICKINSON and STOWE. How about 18th century poet Phillis Wheatley or Cape Cod’s own Mercy Otis Warren?

Instead, we've got a boys club of seven writers, a scientist, a sculptor/painter, a painter, a composer and a philosopher. Apparently, you had to be dead to qualify. No chance a late-life escapade by a writer or artist would embarrass the Sandwich library.

Still, POE gets my attention. Edgar Allan’s last name is associated with the dark, the lurid and the macabre. And that was just his personal life.

And if the designers did have any concerns about controversy, why DARWIN? The Weston building opened for patrons in 1911. The theory of evolution wasn't exactly settled science among Americans. A safer choice for the same six letters: NEWTON. And it adds gravity.

POE might have squeezed in because his name was three letters long and rounded out the line with EMERSON. Such is the fickleness of fame.

But if space was a concern, somebody must have really, really wanted MICHAEL-ANGELo up there. The great Italian pushes the boundaries with 13 letters plus the hyphen. It's the only name that scrunched in a lower-case letter.

The weird thing is that the space problem would have been eased by using the widely accepted spelling of “MICHELANGELO.”

Talk about spelling. Over coffee in Beth’s Bakery recently, I showed a cellphone picture of the façade to my companions. Fellow Library Trustee Mark Wiklund frowned and muttered, “Shakespeare.” I stared at the picture. He had spotted what I missed. Did the emperor of English Literature suffer a cut to become “SHAKSPEARE” so he could fit atop our library? Et tu, Sandwich?

On the other side of the façade, the Spanish painter Velazquez apparently exceeded his quota of Zs and became VELASQUEZ.

To all my questions, the unadorned list replies “If you know, you know.” Still, it vexes me that the early 20th century town leaders left us so few clues about the design of one of our most significant public buildings.

Architect Joseph Everett Chandler, 1863 – 1945

Refusing to concede, our archivist did some internet detecting and hit upon a significant piece of the puzzle. A state database of historic properties revealed the name of the Weston Memorial Building’s architect: Joseph Everett Chandler.

Born in Plymouth, Chandler graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1889.

During his college years, he worked at the office of McKim, Mead & White, around the time Charles McKim was designing the Boston library building. The Boston façade has all 12 of our names. Shakespeare did not suffer the loss of an E in Boston, but other spellings are consistent, including MICHAEL-ANGELO and VELASQUEZ. EMERSON and POE appear on the same panel in Boston, as they do in Sandwich.

The McKim Building looks a lot like the Sainte-Geneviève Library, which opened in Paris in 1851. The exterior boasts 810 engraved names.

The extensive lists, placed below windows, mesh well with the styles of the Paris and Boston buildings. Perhaps Chandler thought the wrap-around effect would not be as pleasing on the vastly smaller and differently styled Colonial Revival building he designed for Sandwich.

Or maybe he didn't have the money for more than two panels. Town records suggest the leaders of the Sandwich project remained cost-conscious despite the Westons’ generous bequests. Anyway, we got 12 names on two panels from the architect who once worked for McKim.

It's unlikely that 21st century designers would follow their example and decorate a new library with names etched in stone. The moderns would have learned lessons about changing tastes.

Ivanhoe by SCOTT was an intercontinental hit in the 19th century. By the time Sir Walter’s name was affixed to the Sandwich façade, his popularity among adult readers was sliding. In 1914, the library board voted to “donate the old set of Scott’s works to the High School.”

In 2025, a Sandwich library patron searching the Fiction shelves can spot one lonely copy of Ivanhoe – the Penguin Classic edition published a quarter century ago. It does not appear well-thumbed.

If modern librarians wanted to promote compelling figures from the literary world – names that would draw in patrons – exterior displays would require the flexibility of the flavor lists outside Shipwreck and Twin Acres.

But don't fiddle with the façade. It links our Main Street building to a special time in the history of the world’s public libraries. And the names aren't so much a list of individuals as a collective message from one generation to the next: Welcome to the future but remember the past.

Robert Thomson is a member of the Friends of the Sandwich Town Archives