It is around 1.5 miles (2.4 km) long and around 1 mile (1.6 km) wide at its mouth at inner Casco Bay.

[1] It sits between Sunset Point, at the southern end of Yarmouth, and the eastern edge of Cumberland Foreside.

State Route 88 (formerly the Atlantic Highway) runs beside the cove (as Foreside Road south of the Yarmouth line and Lafayette Street beyond it).

In 1643, Englishman George Felt, who came to what was then North Yarmouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony, from Charlestown, Boston, eleven years earlier, purchased 300 acres (120 ha) in Broad Cove from Welshman John Phillips.

[2] Later in the 17th century, Walter Gendall's farm incorporated the western end of the cove, at Duck Cove.