Truro is a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States, comprising two villages: Truro and North Truro. Located slightly more than 100 miles (160 km) by road from Boston, it is a summer vacation community just south of the northern tip of Cape Cod, in an area known as the "Outer Cape". English colonists named it after Truro in Cornwall, United Kingdom.
The historic Wampanoag Native American people called the area Pamet or Payomet. Their language was part of the large Algonquianfamily. This name was adopted for the Pamet River and the harbor area around the town center known as the Pamet Roads. The population of Truro was 2,003 at the 2010 census.
Over half of the land area of the town is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, and administered by the U.S. National Park Service.
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According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 26.3 square miles (68 km2), of which, 21.0 square miles (54 km2) of it is land and 5.3 square miles (14 km2) of it (20.02%) is water. Truro is located just south and east of the "tip" of Cape Cod, and is bordered by Provincetown to the northwest, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and east, Wellfleet to the south, and Cape Cod Bayto the west. The town is thirty-eight miles by road to Barnstable, fifty miles from the Sagamore Bridge and 105 miles by road from Boston.
The topography generally slopes downward from the Atlantic to Cape Cod Bay, and from south to north. There are several small ponds throughout town, all of which combined are smaller than the Pilgrim Lake, just east of the Provincetown town line, and just south of the sand dunes which make up most of the northern tip of the Cape. Pamet Harbor, a small inlet, is in the southern half of the town on the Cape Cod Bay side, and leads to the Pamet River. Just south of the lighthouse is a Coast Guard radar station, equipped with a Doppler radar tower, close to the nearby Jenny Lind Tower.
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