Book excerpt: Chatham is a historic Cape Cod town with coastline on Nantucket Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. The first European settler, William Nickerson, recognized its beauty and knew that farming and fishing would provide sustenance for future settlers. Chatham has many stories to tell-tales of boating and fishing, railroads and hotels, churches and theaters, shipwrecks and rescues, and wireless communication and war efforts. With vivid photographs, Chatham brings the town to life from the early 1800s to the 1960s. In these pages, see Chatham's lighthouse, which has warned of treacherous sandbars off the coast and has witnessed hundreds of shipwrecks since 1808, and the Mack Monument, which memorializes one valiant rescue. Visit the South Chatham Village Hall, which has rocked with laughter at Silver Circle entertainments; the Fourth of July parades; the 1912 and 1962 festivities celebrating Chatham's incorporation; and the weekly summer band concerts. Learn how technology changed Chatham from the arrival of the railroad and the building of the Marconi Wireless Station to the construction of the Chatham Naval Air Station, with its blimps and seaplanes protecting the East Coast from German submarines during World War I.