The Barley Neck had its beginnings in 1848, when Isaac and Mary Doane purchased the property from Hannah Sparrow. Isaac Doane was one of four owners of the Cove Salt Works.
In 1868, Captain Joseph Taylor, a 47-year-old Orleans native, who had attended Rock Harbor Academy and Andover purchased the property. He was a pure Cape Codder, descended from the Taylor-Hopkins-Doane-Higgins families. Seecomb and Taylor commissioned the building of the clipper ship, the Red Jacket, which in 1854 set a transatlantic record that would stand for twenty years, sailing from New York to Liverpool in 13 days, one hour and 25 minutes. It remains the record for a clipper ship.
At the packet landing on the other side of Barley Neck Road, stood a gristmill, called the Old East Mill which Taylor operated until 1893. (The mill, which can be seen today at the Heritage Plantation in Sandwich, had been used originally to grind salt, and had been built of leftover timbers when the Congregational Meeting House [now the Federated Church] rebuilt their porch in 1797. In 1819 it was moved to the hill over looking Meeting House Pond to be near the grain producing areas of Barley Neck and Pochet. Produce was shipped by packet ship to Connecticut and New York.)
Taylor’s son Mark Crosby Taylor, a Boston piece goods salesman, joined the Sands & Wood Company in 1890 as a partner, forming Sands, Taylor, Wood and in that year founded the King Arthur brand of flour.
Taylor died in 1901. In 1906 his heirs, Josephine, Mark, and Joseph, sold the property and 33 acres to Frances Gundry, a suffragette and published author. Her husband Joseph Gundry Sr. was the nation’s youngest bank president, of the Lake Shore Banking and Trust Company of Cleveland. When Mrs. Gundry viewed the property and witnessed the workmen digging for clams in Meetinghouse Pond she decided to name the property The Quahog.
Frances Gundry’s sons, Joseph and John, both served in World War I after receiving their degrees from Harvard. Frances died in 1933 leaving the property to her heirs, John, Joseph, and Alice. Alice married into a royal English family, becoming Lady Alice Clifford. The Campbell’s purchased the windmill property from the Gundrys in 1957 and developed the marina now known as Nauset Marine East. The Gundry children sold the Barley Neck property to Arthur and Dorina Nicoli in 1958.
The Nicolis operated their property as the Packet Landing Inn, adding a connected motel in 1965, and serving pizza in the bar. In the early seventies the Nicolis began leasing the Victorian structure to restaurateurs, which included Bob Gill, who operated it as The Pequod Inn and Rick Edwards who originated The Barley Neck Inn. In the seventies, the Nicolis added a second motel, The Seabreeze, to the east. In 1994 Joe and Kathi Lewis bought the west two acres at the bankruptcy auction, that further split the property, and reopened the The Barley Neck Inn & Lodge. The Seabreeze has been redeveloped in 2004 as a nine unit condominium neighborhood known as Windswept Village. The former Packet Landing Motel or Barley Neck Lodge is being redeveloped as the Phase I first six units of Barley Neck Village.