Marconi-RCA Wireless Receiving Station

Built in 1914 on a gently sloping hillside above Ryder's Cove in Chathamport, this wireless receiving station is a campus of low red brick and shingled buildings arranged in a broad V. It includes a Main Operations Building, a Powerhouse, a Garage, a two-story Bachelors' Quarters/Hotel, six bungalow-style houses and three 100-foot steel antenna towers added in 1921. The J. G. White Construction Company built it for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America to handle transatlantic messages, as the successor to Marconi's South Wellfleet station. After the Radio Corporation of America took over Marconi's assets in 1919, the station became RCA's first to handle only marine traffic, linking ships at sea with shore customers. In 1921 it received the first commercial marine vacuum tube transmitting apparatus. Because the other early installations no longer survive, it is described as a rare example of its type. The buildings remain largely as constructed, with only minor losses.