Decorative drawing: a small American settlement seen from a low hill. Not a photograph of this place.

Orleans, Massachusetts

33 topographic sheets cover this place, the earliest surveyed in 1887 and the latest in 1993. It stands in Orleans town. It lies in ZIP code area 02653. It stands on Mill Hill. The Survey maps it on the Orleans quadrangle. 1,767 people lived here at the 2020 count. It stands 59 feet above sea level.

Orleans within Barnstable County

Population over time

2 figures

Orleans grew from 1,621 to 1,767 between 2010 and 2020. These are the recorded population figures Wikidata holds for this place, reached through the Geographic Names Information System number this page is keyed on rather than by name, so they belong to this place and not to another of the same name. Most are census counts, but not all are: an early figure may be a founding or settlement estimate. The change column is computed, and is left blank where more than 20 years separate a figure from the one before it, because a gap that long is not a change between two counts.

Year	People	Change
2010	1,621
2020	1,767	+146 (+9%)

Then and now

1887 to 1993

The same ground, surveyed 106 years apart. Drag the handle to wipe between them. Both sheets are United States Geological Survey originals; neither has been altered.

Topographic sheet of Orleans, surveyed 1993

Topographic sheet of Orleans, surveyed 1887

Topographic sheets covering this place

33 sheets

Matched by testing this settlement's coordinate against the published boundary of every sheet in the United States Geological Survey's historical collection. Each opens the scanned sheet at the Survey.

In the county-history sources

30 words on this township

The county-history sources names this settlement in its chapter on Orleans Town. These are the passages that mention it, exactly as the scans read.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Orleans Town - it names this place 1 more 1 time.

Fires near this place

74 since 1993

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 74 fires within 5 miles of Orleans between 1993 and 2020, burning about 42 acres in total. 9 started naturally. 3 were recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	28
Equipment and vehicle use	15
Debris and open burning	10
Natural	9
Recreation and ceremony	6
Arson/incendiarism	3
Smoking	2
Fireworks	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
3 September 2018	Natural	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
28 September 2015	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	1946
24 September 2020	Debris and open burning	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
22 September 2020	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
22 September 2020	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
5 August 2015	Equipment and vehicle use	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	1520
3 August 2018	Debris and open burning	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
3 August 2015	Equipment and vehicle use	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	1025

Settlements close enough to share some of these fires:

Every fire recorded in Barnstable County

Specimens collected near this place

12 of 3,239 shown

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. Museums hold 3,239 specimens collected within 10 miles of Orleans between 1819 and 1975: 1,696 Animalia, 1,186 Plantae, 169 Fungi, 68 Bacteria, 65 Chromista, 55 Unrecorded. 12 distinct Species records are shown. Collected by A. B. Seymour, A. R. Hodgdon, A. R. Alan Hodgdon Hodgdon and others. Each is a physical object with a catalogue number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be concluded from a species being absent.

Species	Year	Collected by	Where, as recorded
Laminaria caperata Bachelot de la Pylaie, 1824	1819	Collector unknown
Carya tomentosa (Lam.) Nutt.	1840	Collector unspecified
Stenotomus chrysops (Linnaeus, 1766)	1860	William Bemis	Cape Cod Bay, Wellfleet Harbor
Alosa mediocris (Mitchill, 1814)	1871	MCZ team	Brewster, Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Bittiolum alternatum (Say, 1822)	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Buccinum undatum Linnaeus, 1758	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Gastropoda	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Helix Linnaeus, 1758	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Hydrobia minuta (Totten, 1834)	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Lacuna vincta (Montagu, 1803)	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Littorina littorea (Linnaeus, 1758)	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod
Littorina rudis (Maton, 1797)	1872	Smith, S. I.; Harger, O., U.S. Fish Commission	Cape Cod

All 3,239 specimens within 10 miles, at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Storms near this place

13 since 1994

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Orleans in 13 storm reports between 1994 and 2019: 6 thunderstorm wind, 4 hail, 3 lightning. The reports record 1 death. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
July 2009	Lightning	Orleans	1 killed	A 41 year old man was out digging for quahogs (clams) on the tidal flats of Little Pleasant Bay, a quarter mile east of Sipsons Island when he was struck by lightning and killed.
August 2008	Thunderstorm Wind	Orleans	$5,000	Trees and wires were downed by thunderstorm winds.
November 2005	Lightning	Orleans	$5,000	no account filed
November 2005	Lightning	Orleans	$5,000	no account filed
July 2019	Thunderstorm Wind	South Orleans	$3,000	Amateur radio operators reported trees down on Route 28 Southbound. Wires were down on Main Street. A tree was down on wires on Blue Heron Way. A large tree was down on Quanset Road. Wires were down on Karen Lane.
August 2018	Thunderstorm Wind	Orleans	$1,000	At 9:09 AM EST, thunderstorm winds toppled a tree on O'Connor Road in Orleans, near the Transfer Station.
April 2008	Hail	Orleans	-	Penny sized hail fell near Rock Harbor.
July 2007	Thunderstorm Wind	Orleans	-	Large tree limbs down.
July 2007	Hail	Orleans	-	Penny size hail.
July 2007	Hail	Orleans	-	Penny size hail.
May 1994	Hail	Orleans	-	Dime-size hail was reported.
July 1996	Thunderstorm Wind	Orleans	-	no account filed
July 1996	Thunderstorm Wind	Orleans	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Barnstable County

Nearest settlements

The eight closest, with where each one stands in the county. Distances are straight-line, computed from the Geographic Names Information System coordinates.

Place	Distance	Sheets
Rock Harbor	0.9 miles	33
East Orleans	1.1 miles	33
Namskaket	1.4 miles	33
Tonset	2.0 miles	33
Weeset	2.1 miles	33
First Encounter Beach	2.4 miles	33
Nauset Heights	2.7 miles	33
South Orleans	2.7 miles	33

Elsewhere

Matched on this settlement's Geographic Names Information System number rather than its name, so it cannot be a different place of the same name in another state.

Wikipedia article on Orleans	An encyclopaedic summary. Its text is share-alike, so it is linked here rather than copied.
Wikidata item Q7103248	The structured record the population and elevation above come from. Public domain (CC0).

Provenance

This settlement is recorded in the Geographic Names Information System as feature 616894. The sheet list is computed by point-in-boundary test against the United States Geological Survey's historical topographic inventory. Both are works of the United States government and carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.

Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.

Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.

Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.