John Hay Memorial
The life and work of conservationist and writer John Hay is to be honored with a sculpture on the site of the Museum he helped to create. Back in 1954, John was a leading member of the co-founders group that established what was then called the Cape Cod Junior Museum. To honor his legacy, we are commissioning a sculpture designed by Brewster artist Steve Kemp. Inspired by Hay’s classic book ‘The Run,’ it will show alewife swimming upstream and feature molds of tidal flats with a passage from his writing. The Museum will be holding a series of fundraising events through the year.
John Hay was introduced to Cape Cod by his friend, the poet and novelist Conrad Aitken, but he had always looked for adventure in the outdoors. As a child, he spent summers on his family’s estate in Sunapee NH, where he built a houseboat to explore the lake and camp under the stars. As an adult, he re-ignited that love of nature and outdoor space on his visits to Aitken’s home in Brewster. In 1946, John and his wife Kristi, moved there themselves.
Having built their own home “Dry Hill”, where the Hays could see the ocean from a mile away in a then deforested landscape, John’s daily strolls through the neighborhood developed into a deep love for his new environment. It became one he wanted to share, and encourage others to discover a world outside of what he called the “jabbering” of modern life. In 1954, he and a group of seven other parents founded The Cape Cod Junior Museum to “study the plant, animal, and marine life which abounds so profusely in this region.”
At first housed on the second floor of Brewster’s old town hall, in 1955 the Museum’s first physical location was a tent. Erected on marshland John had persuaded the town to buy, it was developed to encourage children and adults to understand the natural world that surrounds them. John was President, and one of the teachers, but also an avid student himself who often had questions of his own for the professors and experts who came to help the fledgling institution. Where that tent first stood, the modern-day Museum’s KidSummer buildings now stand.
“The Run” was released in 1959 and became a classic of nature writing. Written to explore the lives of alewives, it also describes the geography of the herring run in Brewster, and takes in animals like the muskrat John saw at Stony Brook. Unlike other naturalist writers of the time, Hay took a narrative, poetic approach to his work, using his own experiences to understand the lives of the creatures he was studying. He would go on to write seventeen more books, all written in his shack at Dry Hill. In 1965, he was honored with the John Burroughs Medal, America’s highest award for nature writing.
John Hay died on February 26, 2011, aged 95. He had retired from the position as Museum President in 1980 but continued to support it throughout his life. He was also an early president of the Brewster Conservation Commission, with achievements including the protection of the town’s salt marsh.