An Island in Time is a personal rendering and a micro-history of a beautiful and secluded place in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Arriving with her family in the early 1990s to spend summers in one of the island’s four original antique houses, Sharon Dunn grew to love Bound Brook Island in northwest Wellfleet. She wanted to understand and share its geological creation thousands of years ago, its native Punonakanits, its settlers, and the maritime community and individuals that once flourished there.

She hiked its hills and ravines, finding abandoned roads and cellar holes where houses once stood. Exploring this one square mile through time, she encountered sea captains, entrepreneurs, a midwife. She tells the stories of Lorenzo Dow Baker, the “banana king,” of schooner builder Capt. Reuben Rich, of the Methodist revival meetings that drew devotees from Boston, of the Black American family that lived on the island in 1850—and much more.

She explores: Why is Bound Brook Island no longer an island? How did it get its name? Why did this thriving maritime community of 150 inhabitants in the 1850s dwindle to none fifty years later?  ​

Antique maps and photographs as well as her own maps, photographs and poems, inform this book that includes original research in town records, county  deeds, and newspapers including the abolitionist Liberator.  An Island in Time ends in the twenty-first century, with its summer people, its artists and intellectuals and its future in a warming world.

Meet Dunn and hear the story behind the story of An Island in Time at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 13 in Snow Library’s Craine Room.