Historic Nantucket, Spring 2002, Vol. 51 No. 2

NANTUCKET H

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SPRING 2002

VOLUME 51, NO. 2

4 Foreword

by Frank D. Milligan

5 Black–White Relations on Nantucket from 1773 to 1863

by Robert Johnson Jr.

10 Portuguese Islanders and the Old Mill

by Helen Seager

15 Dorcas Honorable: The Life and Heritage of an Oft-Married Woman

by Frances Ruley Karttunen

19 Diversity Comes to Nantucket

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by Frances Ruley Karttunen

Book Section Tuckernuck Island: A Pictorial Review of the Island Reviewed by Elizabeth Oldham

22 NHA News

On the cover: John Francis Sylvia, aka “The Old Miller” Other Islanders is the title of Frances Ruley Karttunen’s research paper, which can be read at www.nha.org.

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THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION BOARD OF TRUSTEES Arie L. Kopelman President

Peter W. Nash

Barbara E. Hajim

Alice F. Emerson

Bruce D. Miller

Patricia M. Bridier

First Vice President

Second Vice President

Third Vice President

Treasurer

Clerk

Alfred Sanford Isabel C. Stewart John M. Sweeney Richard F. Tucker Marcia Welch David H. Wood Robert A. Young

Mary F. Espy Thomas C. Gosnell Julius Jensen III L. Dennis Kozlowski Jane T. Lamb Carolyn B. MacKenzie Albert L. Manning Jr. Arthur I. Reade Jr.

Sarah Baker Rebecca M. Bartlett Laurie Champion Nancy A. Chase Prudence S. Crozier John H. Davis Joseph S. DiMartino

Frank D. Milligan Executive Director

RESEARCH FELLOWS Dr. Elizabeth Little

Pauline Maier

Nathaniel Philbrick

Patty Jo S. Rice

Renny A. Stackpole

FRIENDS OF THE NHA Pat & Thomas Anathan Mariann & Mortimer Appley Heidi & Max Berry Christy & William Camp Jr. Laurie & Robert Champion Dottie & Earle Craig Prudence & William M. Crozier Robyn & John Davis Sandra & Nelson Doubleday Nancee & John Erickson Marjorie & Charles Fortgang Nancy & Charles Geschke Susan & Herbert Goodall III

Georgia & Thomas Gosnell Silvia Gosnell Barbara & Robert Griffin Barbara & Edmund Hajim George S. Heyer Jr. Barbara & Harvey Jones Kathryn & James Ketelsen Sara Jo & Arthur Kobacker Coco & Arie Kopelman Sharon & Frank Lorenzo Carolyn & Ian MacKenzie Phyllis & William Macomber

Miriam & Seymour Mandell Ronay & Richard Menschel Aileen & Scott Newquist Charron & Flint Ranney Gleaves & Thomas Rhodes Ellen & Kenneth Roman Marion & Robert Rosenthal Ellen & David Ross III Linda & Harvey Saligman Charlotte Smith Genevieve & Richard Tucker Marilyn Whitney Yuriko & Bracebridge Young Jr.

ADVISORY BOARD Patricia Loring William B. Macomber Paul Madden Robert F. Mooney Jane C. Richmond Nancy J. Sevrens Scott M. Stearns Jr. Mary-Elizabeth Young

Nina Hellman Elizabeth Husted Elizabeth Jacobsen Francis D. Lethbridge Reginald Levine Katherine S. Lodge Sharon Lorenzo

Walter Beinecke Jr. Joan Brecker Patricia Butler Helen Winslow Chase Michael deLeo Lyndon Dupuis Martha Groetzinger Dorrit D. P. Gutterson

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Thomas B. Congdon Jr. Robert F. Mooney Elizabeth Oldham

Susan F. Beegel Mary H. Beman Margaret Moore Booker Richard L. Brecker

Nathaniel Philbrick Sally Seidman James Sulzer David H. Wood

Cecil Barron Jensen

Helen Winslow Chase

Elizabeth Oldham

Claire O’Keeffe

EDITOR

HISTORIAN

COPY EDITOR

ART DIRECTOR

Historic Nantucket welcomes articles on any aspect of Nantucket history. Original research, first-hand accounts, reminiscences of island experiences, historic logs, letters, and photographs are examples of materials of interest to our readers.

Copyright © 2002 by Nantucket Historical Association Historic Nantucket (ISSN 0439-2248) is published quarterly by the Nantucket Historical Association, 15 Broad Street, Nantucket, MA 02554.

Second-class postage paid at South Yarmouth, MA and additional entry offices.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Historic Nantucket Box 1016 • Nantucket, MA 02554-1016 • (508) 228-1894; fax: (508) 228-5618 • nhainfo@nha.org For information about our historic sites: www.nha.org

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Museum Center architects Cornelius J. “Randy” Reid and Bernie Cywinski with chair of the Museum Center design committee Alfie Sanford, NHA chief curator Niles Parker, and exhibiton planner Scott Rabiet of Amaze Design.

RUE, THE STREETS ARE QUIETER AND ONE NEEDS

to be less strategic in timing the grocery shopping, but be assured even in winter and early spring there is never a dull moment around the Nantucket Historical Association! In fact, it seems that our staff and volunteers are running as flat out over this “quiet time” as they are during the rest of the year.

Within days after the Festival of Trees and Wreaths was over and the trees were carefully stored away, the staff and volunteers began formulating new ideas for next year’s special events. Planning and designing exhibitions and new children’s programs have also kept us occupied during the early months of winter. In our Gosnold Support Center on Bartlett Road, curatorial staff installed a new collectionsmanagement program and began the complex and timeconsuming work of integrating the artifact data with the archival material housed in the NHA’s library. This project involves the essential task of inserting data for the approximately 40,000 artifacts that need to be thoroughly inventoried. Soon, the curatorial staff will be able for the first time to organize future exhibitions with the essential data for each artifact or manuscript only a mouse-click away. This is top-priority work that is essential if the NHA is to reach its goal of acquiring full museum accreditation by the American Association of Museums by 2005.

This winter we also conducted a number of key staff recruitments. New to our staff are Kathrina Pearl in the Grounds and Maintenance Department and Georgen

Gilliam as our new curator of library and archives. Justin Pariseau returns this summer as the senior interpreter. The search continues for a coordinator of education and family programs, but that has not precluded our offering a full range of winter programs in the Whaling Museum and the Research Library, the latter in conjunction with an exhibition on wildflowers in the library’s Whitney Gallery that features the watercolors of M. J. Levy Dickson.

Winter is also the time when a good portion of the year’s repair work to our historic buildings is typically undertaken. In this regard a new heating system was installed and a number of rooms repaired and repainted in Hadwen House, our Main Street Greek Revival mansion.

Similar work was undertaken in the Macy-Christian House on Liberty Street.Working drawings were also completed for masonry repairs to the Macy Warehouse on Straight Wharf, the Old Gaol hearth and chimney, and structural repairs to the Quaker Meeting House.

These “quiet” winter months have also kept staff and volunteer leadership busy working with architects Bohlin Cywinski and Jackson and our exhibition planners Amaze Design, furthering design plans for our fabulous new Museum Center. This splendid new cultural center will finally provide the island with a year-round facility in which the NHA will offer programs and showcase NHA collections that have had to be kept locked away in storage for lack of proper museum display space. The NHA’s new museum will be a “hub” of activities, and we are all very proud of the new vision that it represents and thankful for your support in helping us achieve the vision. There is no question that Nantucket will be a better place to live and raise children because of this new facility.

Oh yes, winter on Nantucket: such a quiet time.

— Frank D. Milligan

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Black-White Relations on Nantucket from 1773 to 1863 CIVIL WAR, NO ISSUE MORE sharply divided Americans than the issue of race. Yet on Nantucket, blacks and a substantial number of whites nurtured a working relationship that recognized both racial differences and shared human characteristics. While the vast majority of American blacks in 1773 languished under the pains and deprivations of slavery, many in Nantucket could pursue a livelihood and plan their futures as free people.

Nantucket, of course, was not spared the experience of slavery. The earliest evidence of it on the island appeared in the records of the monthly meeting of the Society of Friends on June 26, 1716. By 1733 Elihu Coleman’s tract against slavery had been published. In it he wrote, “Now I can truly say that this practice of making slaves of men appears to be so great an evil to me, that for all the riches and glory of this world, I would not be guilty of so great a sin as this seems to be.” Even during racial crises such as that involving school integration, when polarization between blacks and whites increased, this opposition to slavery continued on Nantucket.

Primarily as a result of Quaker influence, race relations on the island during and after the American Revolution were more harmonious than elsewhere in the nation. Even though racial antipathy continued to undermine black–white relations, the Quaker presence and the long tradition of abolitionist activities had an ameliorating effect.

Blacks had been a part of Nantucket’s population since the early eighteenth century. The first Nantucket census in which blacks were officially counted occurred in 1764. Out of a population of 3,570 individuals, fifty “Negroes” and one hundred forty-eight “Indians” were counted. By the 1820 census the number of “coloreds” had increased to 274. Ten years later the names of Arthur Cooper, Samuel Harris, Absalom Boston, and

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Stephen Pompey appeared as heads of households in the census. These men and their families played leading roles in the development of cooperative race relations on the island and established an African Meeting House, one of the first black institutions in the nation.

Prince Boston, the uncle of Absalom, was born into slavery on Nantucket in 1750, son of Boston and Maria, who were slaves of William Swain, a prominent Nantucket merchant. In 1773 Prince Boston made history by obtaining his freedom from the Swain family through a lengthy court battle. William Swain had freed Prince’s parents in 1760, with the stipulation that each of their children serve the Swain family until age twenty-eight, which for Prince would have been 1778.

Through litigation, Prince was able to obtain his freedom five years earlier. This result was consistent with a developing legal principle in Massachusetts and England that allowed blacks access to courts to litigate issues of freedom.

Free blacks on Nantucket engaged in business.

Prince Boston’s nephew Absalom, a free-born native of Nantucket, became a whaling captain.

Grandson of Boston and Maria, Absalom was born to their son Seneca Boston and his Native American wife Thankful (Micah) Boston. Like his younger brother Prince, Seneca had been born into slavery, but he had obtained his freedom upon reaching the age of twenty-eight in 1772.

Absalom Boston continued his family’s tradition of agitation and hard work. In 1820, two years before becoming captain of his own ship, he obtained a license to operate a “public inn.”

But his voyage to the Atlantic whaling grounds as captain of the ship

by Robert Johnson Jr.

Absalom Boston

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Arthur Cooper Industry with its all-black crew was sig-

nificant, not because of the modest amount of oil brought back, but because he represented a continuing historical tradition of black seamanship in the whaling industry. Black seamen were subject to being kidnaped and murdered on the high seas. Although the Atlantic slave trade had become unlawful in 1808, an illegal trade continued, which placed all black seamen in jeopardy.

After retiring from the sea, Absalom Boston became a leader in the community known as “Newtown” and “New Guinea.” In the mid 1820s he was a founding trustee of the African Baptist Society, which assembled in the newly constructed Meeting House on the corner of Pleasant and York Streets. By 1830 he had also opened a store. In 1845 he brought suit against the town to get his daughter Phebe Ann Boston admitted to the Nantucket public high school.

Absalom Boston was widowed twice. His first wife was Mary Spywood; his second was Phebe G. Spriggins; and his last wife was Hannah Cook, who outlived him, as did children of his second and third marriages.

No confrontation over black freedom on Nantucket raised more important issues than that involving Arthur Cooper, who had been born a slave in Alexandria, Virginia in 1789. He managed to leave the farm of his owner, marry a free black woman named Mary, and eventually make his way with his young family to Nantucket in 1820.

In 1822 the Quaker community came to the assistance of the Cooper family when Camillus Griffith, a bounty hunter, arrived to take Cooper, his wife, and his children into slavery. While Griffith may have had a valid legal claim against Arthur Cooper, it is unlikely that he had the right to apprehend Mary and the Cooper children.

A crowd of blacks and Quakers pledged that they would not let the family be removed. William Mitchell, father of Maria Mitchell, organized a citizens’ response.

While he explained to Griffith that he had no authority to apprehend the Coopers, another townsperson slipped the family out the back door. When the matter was brought before him, Magistrate Alfred Folger ruled that the family could not be removed from Nantucket,

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and Griffith left the island emptyhanded. Griffith continued trying to gain possession of the Coopers through litigation on the mainland, but he was unsuccessful. The Coopers continued to live in peace on Nantucket. After the death of Arthur Cooper’s first wife, he married Lucinda Gordon, who had also escaped from slavery. The Cooper children continued to reside on the island.

Another black person who lived in Nantucket, interacted with its Quaker residents, and went on to an extraordinary career was Mary Ellen Pleasant. Born into slavery in Georgia, she was brought to Nantucket where she lived and worked for the Hussey-Gardner family. The Gardners taught her to read, and she learned to keep accounts and deal with the public in their store. Eventually members of the Gardner family assisted her in moving to San Francisco in 1852. There her business acumen made her a millionaire, and she used her riches to assist fugitive slaves and to support antislavery causes.

Between 1773 and 1840 there was no unanimity of white opinion on the race question. While strong opposition to slavery existed among Quakers, there was less agreement on issues of social equality. This abolitionist fervor emanated from both the black and Quaker communities. In 1839 a group of Quakers formed the Nantucket County Anti-Slavery Society as an auxiliary to the Massachusetts State Anti-Slavery Society.

However, disagreement centered around two issues: whether white churches should be more active in opposition to slavery and whether black and white children should go to school together. This vacillation in commitment to black freedom was epitomized in the local antislavery conventions and the Eunice Ross controversy.

Through the efforts of twenty-five-year-old Anna Gardner, a series of antislavery conventions was held on the island. Frederick Douglass, who later became the country’s leading black abolitionist, spoke at one that met in the Nantucket Atheneum in 1841. This speech before a primarily white audience marked the beginning of his career as an abolitionist speaker. Those who supported and encouraged him to speak in Nantucket were mostly Quakers and included the Gardner family who had hidden Arthur Cooper and his family in 1822 S P R I N G

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and the Barney family, leaders in the Nantucket abolitionist movement.

A year after Douglass’s initial speech, another convention was held in the Atheneum. Among those present were William Lloyd Garrison and Stephen Symonds Foster. The second antislavery convention was met with mob violence; cobblestones and eggs were thrown after Foster’s speech, in which he attacked Christian churches for complicity with slavery. His speech was later published under the title “Brotherhood of Thieves.” Foster’s position was that northern churches, including those in Nantucket, that did not actively oppose slavery were guilty by association.

While Nantucketers might deplore the violent opposition to Foster’s speech, they were resistant to mounting pressure to integrate the island’s public schools. To many it seemed self-evident that blacks should attend separate schools just as they lived in the separate community of New Guinea. A controversy arose, therefore, over whether black children should be integrated into the white schools. Despite deep division of opinion, several prominent whites supported integrated education. Ironically, the question of whether Eunice Ross, a black pupil of Anna Gardner, should be admitted to the high school raged during the height of the antislavery movement on the island.

In 1789 Massachusetts had required all towns to establish public schools. Nantucket eventually complied with the law in 1827, establishing new schools and providing a subsidy to New Guinea’s already existing African School. The Eunice Ross controversy began in 1840 and was not resolved until 1847, when the island’s schools were integrated.

This result did not come without a struggle led by both blacks and whites. When school committee member Edward Gardner moved in 1840 that “coloured children” be allowed to attend any of the public schools, his motion failed to pass. The ensuing controversy stirred both communities and divided the white community.

Blacks assumed leadership in this struggle by issuing resolutions, boycotting classes, and petitioning the state legislature. Edward J. Pompey prepared their initial petition, which was signed by over a hundred and four H I S T O R I C

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blacks. By this time Pompey was already actively engaged in antislavery activities, having been the Nantucket agent for William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator since 1831. In 1834 Pompey had become secretary of the Nantucket Anti-Slavery Society. The petition from the New Guinea community and additional petitions from the white community led to the passage of House Bill 45, guaranteeing all Massachusetts children access to education. A year later the schools were integrated, and the school in the African Meeting House passed out of existence.

The Meeting House had, however, played an important role in the early nineteenth century. Built by the black community to serve as a church and a school, it served a multiplicity of purposes. Although the land was acquired for a school, the building was consecrated as a place of worship before it was completed in 1825.

From its inception white teachers, including Quaker Anna Gardner, taught there, carrying forward a Nantucket legacy of cooperation between blacks and whites. Eunice Ross, who died in the same year as Frederick Douglass, not only changed Nantucket’s school system but helped to create substantive rights for all children in the Commonwealth of Massaachusetts.

After the closing of the African school, the building on the corner of York and Pleasant Streets continued to play a role in the life of Nantucket’s black community.

Christina Porte, daughter of Ezekiel Pompey and Lydia Corrington, outside her home at 5 Atlantic Avenue, shortly before she died in 1895 at the age of 75.

She married William Porte Sr., who was born in Calcutta, India.

Next door, 3 Atlantic Avenue is a house reputed to have belonged to Absalom Boston, subsequently owned

by Sampson Pompey, a Civil War veteran (in photograph on p. 9).

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In 1848 James Crawford became pastor of the Pleasant Street Baptist Church, which met in the building. Born into slavery in Virginia, the Rev. Crawford had escaped by going to sea and leaving his ship in Providence, Rhode Island. In Nantucket, where he worked as a hairdresser — he operated in both the black and white communities — preaching regularly in the Summer Street Baptist Church as well as at the town asylum for the indigent.

From the beginning, Rev. Crawford’s black church received support from white denominations. The white pastor of the Summer Street Church called on Crawford’s black congregation to become affiliated with the national Baptist denomination at an ecclesiastical council convened in 1848. In April of that year, Crawford baptized thirty original members of his church. Ten years later the Summer Street Church was filled to capacity to hear Rev. Crawford preach and raise money to purchase the freedom of his sisterin-law Diana and his niece Cordelia from slavery in North Carolina.

Rev. Crawford married three times. His first wife was the sister of the famous abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet. His second wife, Diana, was his first wife’s sister, whom he had purchased from slavery.

Diana died an untimely death in 1860. Eight years later he married Rebecca Elaw, daughter of the black Methodist woman preacher Zilpha Elaw, who spent the last years of her life conducting missionary work in London.

Born to a slave mother and her white master, Rev. Crawford was described by white Nantucketer Arthur C. Brock as having “wonderful brown hair, and the merriest blue eyes and dimples, and that large, humorous, lovely mouth that spoke evil of no man.” He served as pastor to the colored people of the island for forty years until his death in 1888.

Eighteen hundred and sixty was another crisis year in island race relations. A black woman, Patience Cooper, was arrested Reverend for the murder of Phebe Fuller, James Crawford an elderly white woman. The

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brutality of the crime shocked the island. Patience was convicted of manslaughter solely upon a declaration Mrs. Fuller allegedly made to Captain Nathaniel Fitzgerald before she lapsed into a coma and died.

Immediately after the assault Mrs. Fuller had told authorities that her assailant was an unknown white man.

Due to efforts of local attorneys, the initial murder indictment against Patience Cooper was dismissed.

Subsequently she was reindicted for manslaughter and went to trial in 1863. The most incriminating evidence against her was the testimony of Captain Fitzgerald, who told the jury what he said Mrs. Fuller had told him. Despite efforts to exclude this testimony as hearsay, the judge allowed it to be heard by the jury. It is interesting to note that seventeen years earlier Captain Fitzgerald had actively opposed efforts to integrate Nantucket public schools, thus raising questions about his potential bias in the Fuller case. Did he have a motive to lie about his alleged conversation with the victim? Why was his testimony given more weight than the victim’s initial statement that a white man had assaulted her?

Convicted of manslaughter, Patience Cooper was sentenced to ten years in the Nantucket House of Correction. In 1873 she was transferred to the Bristol County House of Correction. Upon release, she returned to Nantucket and lived out the rest of her life as a resident of the town asylum for the indigent.

As in the case of Arthur Cooper, it was the intervention of white Nantucketers — in this case Attorney Edward M. Gardner — that shielded Patience Cooper. Otherwise she might have faced a capital conviction of murder and a possible death penalty. The question of whether she was unjustly convicted of manslaughter remains an open question.

The issues concerning integration that Nantucketers grappled with between 1773 and 1863 were precursors to similar national issues that raged from Reconstruction to the mid-twentieth century. After blacks acquired political freedom, S P R I N G

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would whites allow them to interact on social levels?

Would blacks be encouraged to pursue their livelihoods free of overt discrimination? Would whites, who controlled the legal process, vigorously defend blacks before the courts?

In Nantucket between 1773 and 1863 there existed a model of black/white cooperation premised upon a fundamental belief that slavery was morally wrong.

While a majority of whites were willing to accede political equality to blacks, a considerable number of individuals could not accept social equality as an acceptable public policy. Yet by 1863, the year that Patience Cooper began her prison term, Nantucket had faced and resolved these important public policy issues, in large measure because of black political activism and Quaker morality. The nation might have been spared tremendous financial and human losses if it had embraced this racial paradigm, which grew out of the struggles of Nantucketers between 1773 and 1863.

Robert Johnson Jr. is chair and associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has coordinated the James Bradford Ames Fellowship program since its inception. The program, established by Adele Ames in memory of her husband, funds research into the history of blacks and Cape Verdeans on Nantucket Island.

A gathering of Civil War veterans by the side entrance of 33 Main Street: (front row, l to r) Benj. B. Burdick, Chas. M. Crocker, Chas. Hyde, John R. Raymond, Geo. A. Barker, Peter Hoy, Frederick H. Barney, Sampson D. Pompey, Franklin B. Murphey; (middle row, l to r) Edw. H. Wing, Josiah F. Murphey, James H. Wood, James H. Barrett, Alfred F. Ray, Josiah A. Young, Benj. A. Coffin, Edw. C. Bennett, Hiram W. Reed, Henry F. Fisher; (rear, l to r) G. Howard Winslow, Wm. A. Barrett, Geo. Dolby, Horace Spencer; (at extreme l) Geo. Fisher; (at extreme r) Valentine Small.

Photograph by John Johnston, 1909

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Portuguese Islanders and the Old Mill by Helen Seager

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HE CENTENNIAL OF THE NANTUCKET

Historical Association (1994), followed by the sesquicentennial of the Great Fire (1996) have sharpened interest in the events and trends of the second half of the nineteenth century.

That period saw the decline of nearly everything that had previously defined Nantucket economy and culture, including whaling, the Religious Society of Friends, prosperity, and population. The 1850 census showed a population figure of 8,770; in 1900, only about 3,000 people still called the island their home.

The population decline can be explained in large measure by shrinking opportunities on the island with the demise of whaling and whaling-dependent industries and the burgeoning opportunities elsewhere, epitomized by the California gold rush. As whaling ships and other assets were sold at a low price or abandoned by established island capitalists, people whose entrepreneurial opportunities had been limited were able to set themselves up in businesses. Other events and trends of the period are chronicled serially in today’s “Looking Backward” columns of the Inquirer and Mirror.

One of the major events of the early years of the NHA was the acquisition of the Old Mill in 1897, through purchase at auction. How did this auction come about? Who were the owners of the mill before it was auctioned? How and why did they acquire it? And why did they sell it? This article attempts to answer these questions by looking at the last three private owners.

At the time of the Great Fire, the mill was still referred to in deeds as the “Charles Swain Mill,” reflecting the fact that Swains had owned it from 1750 until 1828, when, it is said, Jared Gardner bought it from the Swain heirs for firewood. Instead of burning it up, however, Gardner applied his skills as a wheelwright to restore the mill to good enough condition to grind corn again. Gardner died of consumption without a will in 1842; his death record calls him a carpenter by occupation. His heirs partitioned the property in such a way N A N T U C K E T

that his daughter Elizabeth Gardner Macy and husband Peter and George C. Gardner II received the mill and land around it. The probate court accepted an appraisal of $639 for the mill, which probably meant that it was in working order. No receipts from operating the mill were reported to the court during the probate period following Jared Gardner’s death. The heirs of Jared Gardner didn’t sell the mill until 1854. These and other records do not show whether the mill was operated during the dozen years that it was in the hands of Gardner’s heirs. Although the sale, to George Enas, took place in October of 1854, it is not recorded in the Registry of Deeds until April 1865, and the record of the properly dated sale is found in the books for 1865 instead of 1854.

George Enas (sometimes recorded as Enos) paid $150 for the property, less than one fourth of the amount of the probate appraisal. The purchase at a bargain price illustrates the business opportunities on the island for new arrivals. He was the first of three private owners of the Old Mill. These owners had one thing in common: all were Portuguese islanders. Enas, owner from 1854 until 1864, had been born in 1815 on the tiny island of Flores, the most western island in the Azores, part of the Kingdom of Portugal. The Azores, sometimes referred to as the “Western Islands” in Nantucket records, are located well out in the Atlantic due west of Lisbon, in about the same latitude as Nantucket. As the crow flies, Flores is the nearest island of the Azores to Nantucket.

Enas was in Nantucket by 1850, when he was reported in the census as a “mariner” with a modest $350 in assets. He had married widowed Sally Maria Stockman, whose mother was Hepsabeth Coffin; he was Sally’s third husband, and they had no children. By no means the first Azorean to arrive in Nantucket, he was, by Nantucket standards, a relative newcomer. As established Nantucket entrepreneurial families gave up their holdings to pursue opportunities elsewhere, S P R I N G

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Enas and others were able to participate actively in the modest business opportunities that remained. In the late 1850s, Enas invested in island real estate other than the mill, acquiring six parcels during 1856–58 alone while selling only two. The 1860 census showed his holdings to include $700 in real estate and $1,200 in personal property.

Enas died of consumption in January 1866, at the age of 50. His death record names his occupation as miller; his will left everything to his wife. When she died in 1873, her will left everything in a charitable trust for “deserving poor,” especially the elderly. Although she probably inherited also from her parents, George Enas’s legacy constituted at least part of the assets of the Sally Maria Enas Trust. Her trust lasted until 1993, when its principal and income were distributed to the Relief Association of Nantucket, itself established the year after Sally Maria died. In recent decades, her trust contributed to, among other things, fuel assistance for the elderly, and continues to do so through the Relief Association. Thus, it can be said with truth that the effect of the life of the first of the Azorean mill owners

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is still felt nearly 130 years later.

In April 1865, the year before he died, Enas had sold the mill for $825 to Captain John Murray, a native of Graciosa, another island in the Azores. The sale included “sixteen picks, two jacks and falls, one crowbar, one handspike, one capstan, and the measures and fixtures.

Also the goodwill of the trade, the said Enas hereby agreeing not to carry on the business of milling on Nantucket.” Captain Murray was still engaged in whale fishing out of Nantucket, as part owner and captain of the Abby Bradford. The clause that prohibited Enas from engaging in milling indicates that Murray wanted to operate the mill without competition. Since he sold the mill for $1,200 after owning it for only twenty months, one wonders whether he really intended to operate it. He did add to the value of the mill property in 1865 when he purchased, for $10, land “a little to the Eastward of the Eastern Wind Mill” (the Old Mill was the easternmost of several windmills on Mill Hill) from another mariner. On the other hand, Murray realized a handsome profit in a short time, so his motive may have been strictly capitalistic.

With the help of summer resident Caroline French, the NHA acquired the Old Mill at this auction on Main Street in 1897.

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H. S. Wyer photographs of the Old Mill, ca. 1890s.

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Enas had written his will in 1842, naming Sally Maria as executor, but returned in 1863 “for providential reasons to again declare the foregoing to be my last will and testament.” Would “providential reasons” include intimations of his own mortality? Perhaps illness had already made it difficult for Enas to continue his occupation as miller, and the captain helped him out by taking the mill off his hands.

Two major events took place in Captain Murray’s life after he sold the mill in December 1866. In 1869 he captained a five-month whaling voyage to the Azores and stopped at Graciosa to pick up his son, John Murray Jr. Their relationship was a source of great satisfaction to the captain. In his later years, Captain Murray described him as “my dear son, John Murray, Jr. who has been the business partner and advisor of my middle life and the joy and comfort of my declining years, and through whose constant care and watchfulness I have acquired what little property I now possess, and who, though begotten by me out of wedlock, I here before God and these witnesses declare to be my natural son.”

Father and son together operated a store on Orange Street for decades, and both were highly respected in the Portuguese and wider island community. Then, in 1871, Captain Murray married Nantucketer Harriet Appleton in the Congregational Church. She was twenty-eight-years old and younger than her husband by twenty-one years. In 1880, father, son, and daughter-inlaw Anna, also from Graciosa, all were living on Orange Street. Harriet may have been living at that time in another house that the captain had purchased for her, perhaps the house with a “sitting room, parlor, and three bedrooms” on Warren Street that was part of her N A N T U C K E T

estate when she died in 1903. Records from other dates show all four in the house on Orange Street.

Captain Murray died in 1899, two years after the NHA acquired the mill at auction. His will named “my young friend” Lauriston Bunker as executor. John Murray Jr.’s name appears in several legal documents with power of attorney or as guardian or trustee in various matters, another indication of the high regard in which the community held him. His obituary in 1920 points out his important contribution to the construction of Alfonso Hall (now Rev. Joseph M. Griffin Hall) between Cherry Street and Williams Street and to the establishment of the Portuguese United Brethren on Nantucket.

John Francis Silva (whose name Nantucketers changed to Sylvia) probably arrived on Nantucket from the Azores after 1860. He is listed in the census records for the first time in 1870, as a mariner, age 50, married to Frances Silva, age 56, also from the Azores. Having bought the Old Mill in late 1865 for $1,200, Silva operated it with the assistance of an apparently rather colorful widower from Ireland, Peter Hoy (he is in the photograph on p. 9), who lived near the mill with his six children.

Silva increased the value of the mill while he was owner. He acquired land adjacent to the site and made a deal for land with the Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Land that enabled him to build a new road connecting the terminus of South Mill Street to Upper York Street (known later as West York Street).

The surveying in 1885 for this and other deals provided valuable groundwork for the auction by which the NHA would acquire the site.

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These Wendell Macy paintings are supposedly of John Francis Sylvia (1819–1896) at work in the Old Mill.

Note the date carved into the beam in the painting on the right.

In the fall of 1877, the vanes of the mill were heavily damaged during a gale. Two letters to the editor of the Inquirer and Mirror describe the challenges faced by Silva after the storm. The first, entitled “Spare the Old Mill” is at the NHA but without a date. It describes the writer’s fear that “Mr. Sylvia . . . has decided to tear down” the mill because the business at the mill would “not warrant his repairing the damages.” The writer passes on suggestions he had heard from island friends “whereby the mill could be made a source of profit” as a tourist attraction, including “an observatory in its top [that] would bring in many dimes” and “a small restaurant on one of its upper floors. . . . [Let] a few windows be put in the dining room, and a hungry crowd would enjoy. . . sitting [at]. . . table among the cobwebs and dusty beams.” The writer also urged that some island organization rally to save the mill.

The second letter, dated October 14, 1877, from a Nantucket native living in Providence, recalled boyhood days (possibly around 1860) watching the miller do his work. The writer, who had clearly seen the first letter, acknowledged, “In a business point of view, it is possible that it has outlived its usefulness.” Even so, the writer went on “it ought to be permitted to remain . . . as a relic and landmark sacred to every true Nantucketer.” He closed by echoing the first letter: “Save the old mill.” An editor’s note following the second letter reported to readers that “Mr. Sylvia has this week had it repaired, and will continue to use it for grinding corn.”

A printed card in the NHA’s manuscript collection bearing John Sylvia’s name (and containing some misinformation) gives a brief history of the construction and H I S T O R I C

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early ownership of the mill. The card was presumably prepared for public distribution to attract visitors.

Silva’s photograph, now in the archives of the NHA, appeared in island publications a number of times after he died.

Silva died in April 1896. Frances, his wife, had predeceased him. Silva’s will, signed in May 1889, left his estate to his brother Louis Francesco Cardozo and nephew Alexandre Marques, with John Murray Jr. as executor. Both heirs lived in Fayal, the major whaling island in the Azores, and in their absence were represented in the settlement of the will by John Murray Jr. The executor’s probate report on estate assets and income showed $100 in revenue for the estate from “two years of fees at the mill,” but it doesn’t say whether the fees derived from grinding corn, greeting tourists, or both. Probate also records an appraisal of the mill and “about two acres east of the old mill” at $700.

Silva’s heirs took steps, again through John Murray Jr., to sell at auction the mill and John Silva’s house on Spring Street, advertising the sale in the Inquirer and Mirror in July 1897. According to the minutes of its 1898 annual meeting, the NHA and others had already been raising funds for the possible purchase of the mill; they had raised $750 by the time of the auction. When that amount was insufficient to cover their $885 auction bid, summer resident Caroline French “generously gave the $135 necessary to make up the full amount.”

A plaque in the mill suggests that Miss French purchased the building outright and donated it to the NHA. That is not consistent with the minutes.

By choosing not to tear down the Old Mill, John Silva cemented its place in the island’s heritage. The S P R I N G

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Old Farmer — Nantucket (John Francis Sylvia) as painted by Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown in 1883.

The painting was a gift from the Friends of the NHA in 1992.

Old Mill—still operating—is beloved and has become the popular landmark that the writer of the second letter to the newspaper editor believed it should be. As suggested in 1877, an organization did rally and save the Old Mill.

Growing up in the Azores, the men who came to own the mill would have been well acquainted with the use of wind power for a variety of purposes. The mechanics of windmill operation were not a mystery to them. But in Nantucket, Portuguese mill owners of the nineteenth century did not strike it rich. They did, however, find economic opportunity despite (some might argue, ironically, because of) declining times, and they contributed to the island’s historical, economic, civic, and charitable life in ways that still have significance for the twenty-first century.

Helen Seager, a Nantucket resident and life member of the NHA, is a retired community organizer who spent the 1990s as convener of the Friends of the African Meeting House on Nantucket. She also developed the island’s Black Heritage Trail.

Sources: NHA Research Library: “Business and Resident Directory, 1897”; Eliza Starbuck Barney Genealogical Record; Vertical (blue) files.

Nantucket Registry of Deeds: Book of Plans; Grantee/Grantor Indexes; Proprietors Book of Records.

Probate Court: Folder and Record Book Town Clerk: Marriage and Death Records U. S. Census: Nantucket Populations

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Dorcas Honorable: The Life and Heritage of an Oft-Married Woman

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ORCAS HONORABLE, WHO

today is generally recognized as Nantucket’s “Last Indian,” died early in 1855. She had outlived by a few months Abram Quary, who died in late 1854.

Both had been born in the 1770s, at the time of the American Revolution, a decade after the “Indian sickness” killed 222 of Nantucket’s 358 Wampanoags.

Quary, however, better fit the nineteenth-century image of “the Last Indian” because of the striking painting of him that hangs in the Nantucket Atheneum and because in old age he lived the life of a hermit and supported himself by making baskets and steaming quahogs for excursionists. Dorcas, on the other hand, kept out of the public eye, worked as a domestic, and was a member of the Baptist church.

The life of Dorcas’s mother, Sarah, however, was romanticized just as Abram Quary’s has been. She died in 1821 and was survived not only by her daughter Dorcas and by Quary, but also by Abigail Jethro, whom the nineteenth-century Nantucket historian Obed Macy considered the island’s “last Indian.”

Nonetheless, Sarah was also characterized as the last of her people. As stated in a fictionalized version of her life published in the Inquirer just a dozen years after her death, “old Sarah Tashemy, the last of the Indian race on the island of Nantucket” was “the daughter of a famous chief whose kindness to the Whites was proverH I S T O R I C

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bial—without whose generous influence they would never have succeeded in forming their settlement within her father’s territories.”

Having lost her family and her suitor in the 1763–64 epidemic, according to this story, she lived a solitary, shunned life, and then at death, “She spoke in a language which was recognized as that of her departed nation, although no one present understood its purport.”

In 1834 Joseph C. Hart published a historical novel about Nantucket entitled Miriam Coffin, or the Whale-Fisherman. In it he fictionalized the life of Keziah Coffin, and as a subplot he also fictionalized and romanticized the life of Sarah Tashama. In the novel, Benjamin Tashama’s daughter is not orphaned by the epidemic but, despite the protection of her father, she is seduced by a white off-islander named Dr. Julius Imbert. Before the end of the 1800s, island readers had confused the content of Hart’s novel with Nantucket history.

Also at the end of the 1800s, Eliza Mitchell produced a manuscript Book of Reminiscences in which she pasted Dorcas’s photograph and wrote down her own version of the lives of Dorcas and her mother. This particular reminiscence turns out to be a mixture of Mitchell’s personal memories and pieces of both the 1833 and 1834 published stories.

She was daughter of Sarah Tashma. Sarah was the last Indian female and a daughter of the famous Preacher

by Frances Ruley Karttunen

Dorcas Honorable

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and Teacher who lived before my time. Sarah was called Matta in Miriam Coffin, or the Whale Fishery.

Imbert probably the father of Daucas. Sarah was a true Indian but was never known to smile after her visit from Imbert. I remember her well as she worked for my mother when I was very young. Been dead about 70 years or more. Daucus lived many years in the family of Capt’ John Cartwright. 6 feet tall, a noble woman of her Tribe, always kept aloof from bad company, lived to be over eighty.

Abram Quary

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What emerges from historical documentation of the lives of Dorcas Honorable and her forebears is less romantic but at least as humanly rich as the several products of nineteenth-century imagination.

Dorcas’s mother was Sarah Tashama Esop, daughter of Benjamin Tashama who was, indeed, both a preacher and a teacher. Prior to the epidemic, he kept a school for Wampanoag children. There he taught them to read and write their own language, which has been known over the years as “Massachusett” or “Natick,” using the teaching material developed for the purpose more than a century earlier by John Eliot, New England’s “Apostle to the Indians.” In the 1770s, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, writing of Nantucket, observed that Eliot’s 1666 Bible, catechism, and “many other useful books” translated

by Eliot “are still very common on this island and are daily made use of by those Indians who are taught to read.”

By the time Crèvecoeur wrote this, however, the epidemic had carried off more than half the speakers of Massachusett. Benjamin Tashama’s wife, Sarah Paine Tashama, had died. He and their teenaged daughter Sarah had survived, but at least thirty children can be identified from the list of epidemic victims.

Benjamin Tashama’s days as a schoolmaster had come to an end. When he died in 1770, the probate inventory of his estate showed that he had fifteen chairs, chairs that Wampanoag schoolchildren had not sat in for the past sixteen years. In 1917 the boulder that had marked the site of his house and school near Bean Hill on the Milestone Road was moved to the grounds of the Nantucket Historical Association’s Fair Street Museum and is now at the entrance to the NHA Research Library.

There probably was no Imbert. Sarah Tashama N A N T U C K E T

Esop appears in one of the Nantucket deed books in 1778, when she sells the house that once belonged to her grandfather, John Tashama, another epidemic victim. As an adult Sarah married a man named Isaac Esop. The first mention of her daughter gives her name as Dorcas Esop.

Isaac Esop, like Sarah, was an epidemic survivor.

The marriage of Isaac and Sarah is recorded in 1772, but her name is recorded as Sarah Titus rather than as Sarah Tashama. This may be a typographical error in the Vital Records of the Town of Nantucket or a confusion on the part of the original writer, since both the Tashama family and the Titus family were well known on Nantucket at the time. Or possibly Sarah Tashama, in her mid-twenties, had already made an earlier marriage to a surviving Titus. Adding to the confusion are the recorded marriage intentions of a woman named Sarah Titus and a man named Samuel Causam just the year before, in 1771.

Eliza Mitchell’s ascription of Dorcas’s paternity to an evil Imbert who destroyed for all time her mother Sarah’s happiness is derived from two sources. Imbert comes from the pages of Hart’s novel, and the loss of joy in life comes from the 1833 story, in which the deadly epidemic is the precipitating factor: “She had never been seen to smile from that hour.”

Sarah may have grown destitute and lonely in her old age, but in the prime of her life she had a husband and a daughter, and she had the control of family property. In the 1800 census she appears, apparently widowed, as head of a household in Nantucket’s African community of New Guinea. In 1804 Jenny Fenix, a black woman from a troubled family, was sentenced to a whipping for breaking into Sarah Tashama’s house.

The inventory of stolen goods includes pewter ware, pots, rice and flour, yard goods, and a hat. Clearly Sarah was not destitute as of the date of the burglary. Her dwelling appears labeled “Tashama’s house” on a map of the town made in 1821, the year of her death.

There has been a pervasive romantic tendency to perceive all aboriginal people who are not distinctly young as “ancient,” but there is no doubt that unlike most of Nantucket’s Wampanoags both Sarah and her daughter Dorcas lived into old age. Without Sarah’s birth date, we cannot be exact about her life span. Eliza Mitchell says Sarah was seventy-five years old when she died and Dorcas was past eighty. Another source gives Dorcas’s birth date as April 27, 1776, and her death S P R I N G

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Detail of a town map dated 1821 shows four original mills and Benjamin Tashama’s

date as January 12, 1855, indicating that she died a bit short of her seventy-ninth birthday.

Dorcas Esop’s first recorded marriage is to Isaac Freeman, in 1792 when she was sixteen. After a while Dorcas probably returned home to her mother, since the 1800 census shows Sarah as head of a household of two.

An abbreviated first marriage did not sour Dorcas on the institution. Subsequent records of marriage intentions pair Dorcas Freeman with Bill Williams in 1801, Dorcas Williams with Henry Mooers in 1808, Dorcas Mooers with John Sip in 1817, and Dorcas Mooers (not Sip) with Thomas Honorable in 1820.

Six years prior to when they filed their marriage intentions, John Sip, the one husband whose name Dorcas did not assume in the course of her marital history, appears in Nantucket court records as the victim of a vicious assault. On March 4 of that year, Abiah Golden, Joseph Capee, William Pompey, and Stephen Williams, “Black men, mariners,” went on a rampage in New Guinea. They set upon Daniel Gardner, the head of a family there, and “did strike with a stone in the breast and did wound and bruise him the said Daniel so that he raised a great quantity of blood and other injuries and wounds to him. . . .” They also broke the windows of his house and unhinged his door. The same day this gang of four attacked John Sip, ropemaker, and broke his collarbone.

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The 1817 marriage intention of John Sip and Dorcas Mooers is the last record of him that has come to light so far. Sip does not appear in the 1810 or 1820 census, and there is no death record for him in Nantucket.

By the time of her union with Thomas Honorable, Dorcas was in her forties. Nonetheless, they had a daughter Emmeline, who married a man named Castro, continuing the Tashama line to future generations. The 1830 census shows Thomas and Dorcas Honorable, in their fifties, living in New Guinea. Twenty years later, the census shows a widowed Dorcas living in the household of Thaddeus Coffin and his family. Once again, Eliza Mitchell’s memory strayed. It was octogenarian Phillis Painter, an African Nantucketer, who lived with Captain John Cartwright’s family.

The 1850 census is the last to record Dorcas Honorable as a resident of Nantucket. Just five years of life remained to her before her Baptist church congregation laid her to rest.

If Dorcas Honorable and Abram Quary were the last native American people on Nantucket, then something more significant than recognized “Indian blood” finally passed from the island in the winter of 1854–55.

They were the last two who spoke the Massachusett language. Their community, which would have kept their language alive, had collapsed ninety years earlier, when no children returned to Benjamin Tashama’s school in

house located just to the lower right of the mills.

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Benjamin Tashama’s doorstone was moved to the NHA’s Fair Street Museum in 1917.

Today, it remains as the doorstone to the Research Library.

the fall of 1764.

The fifteen chairs were put away. The school books perhaps migrated a couple of miles eastward.

Crèvecoeur wrote of his visit to a family living in Siasconset, “I found very few books among these people, who have very little time for reading; the Bible and a few school tracts, both in the Nattic and English languages, constituted their most numerous libraries.”

Jeffrey Summons was a black man who, like Benjamin Tashama, lived the latter years of his life in New Guinea and made a contribution to education within his community. In 1825 he sold land on the corner of Pleasant and York Streets to the Trustees of the School Fund for the Coloured People for a token $10.50, on condition that they build a schoolhouse there and that “a school be kept in it forever.” When Summons died in 1832, his estate included precisely fifteen chairs. A few years later the estate inventory of yet another New Guinea resident, Philip Tyler, included twenty-four chairs. It is tempting to imagine the chairs from Benjamin Tashama’s school leading a life of their own, moving from house to house in the neighborhood, stored against the time when they might be needed again for the education of Nantucket’s nonwhite children. In fact, there is no evidence that these chairs were the same.

Eighteen hundred and fifty was the first year in which it was asked whether individuals enumerated in the federal census could read and write. Saddened though he would have been at the extinction of his native language, reading teacher Benjamin Tashama would have been gratified that his granddaughter Dorcas was not illiterate. He and Jeffrey Summons might also have taken satisfaction had they foreseen that before the end of Dorcas’s life, the children of New Guinea would have gained admittance to all Nantucket’s public schools

of Texas in 2000. This article is adapted from research on “Nantucket’s First Peoples of Color: Wampanoags and African Nantucketers.” The work has been supported by a grant from the Nantucket Arts Council and a James Bradford Ames fellowship for 2000–2001. “It is gratifying that each time I enter the new NHA library, I tread on Benjamin Tashama’s doorstone,” she said.

Sources Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. 1986. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Albert E. Stone, ed. New York: Penguin Books. [Letters from an American Farmer originally published in 1782, drafted in 1770s] Eliot, John, transl. 1663. The Holy Bible.

Containing the Old Testament and the New. Translated into the Indian Language and ordered to be Printed by the Commissioners of the United Colonies in New England. Cambridge, Mass.: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson.

Eliot, John. 1669. The Indian Primer; or The way of training up our Indian Youth in the good knowledge of God, in the knowledge of the Scriptures and in an ability to Reade. Cambridge, Mass.: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson.

Hart, Joseph C. Miriam Coffin, or The WhaleFisherman. Nantucket: Mill Hill Press. 1995.

[Originally published 1834] Little, Elizabeth A, 1980. “Probate Records of Nantucket Indians.” Nantucket Algonquian Studies, No. 2.

—. 1990b. “The Nantucket Indian Sickness.” In Papers of the Twenty-first Algonquian Conference. William Cowan, ed. Ottawa: Carleton University. Pp. 181–96.

Mitchell, Eliza. 1894–96. Book of Reminiscences.

Nantucket Historical Association MS. Collection 23.

Vital Records of Nantucket, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society. Five Volumes, 1928.

Material from Probate, Deed, and Court record books of the County of Nantucket.

Frances Ruley Karttunen graduated from Nantucket High School in 1960 and has published books about linguistics and ethnohistory. She retired from the University

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Diversity Comes to Nantucket The following is an abstract from The Other Islanders, a considerable and fascinating research project by Frances Ruley Karttunen. It is the first document available in the NHA’s new eText Center located on our website – www.nha.org. In the future we hope to host similar research projects and articles online for researchers, students, teachers, and readers of Historic Nantucket.

2000 FEDERAL CENSUS REVEALED what we already knew, that the population of Nantucket at the opening of the twentyfirst century is ethnically and racially diverse.

But we may have been less aware that Nantucket’s ethnic diversity began when English settlers first set foot on the island. Nantucket was not uninhabited when they came, and alongside the settlers’ descendants there have always lived descendants of other peoples.

In the 1940s and 50s, when I was growing up, the wintertime population of Nantucket was about 3,500 people. Nearly as many people lived on Nantucket three hundred years earlier. They were ancestors of the Wampanoag people who lived and still live on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. Before the arrival of English settlers in 1659, the Nantucket Wampanoags had been visited by Christian missionaries; for the next half century they had their own churches and their own courts. They farmed and fished, spun and wove wool, worked as carpenters, and went whaling. Teacher Benjamin Tashama kept a school for the children, where they learned to read and write from primers and the Bible translated into their own language.

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HE YEAR

They continued to outnumber the English settlers for more than fifty years. Then their numbers began to fall, and in the winter of 1763–64 an epidemic struck.

The “Indian sickness” killed two thirds of the Wampanoags living in their village of Miacomet, and the victims were laid to rest in a burying ground off what is now Surfside Road. After that there were no children left to attend Benjamin Tashama’s school.

Some of the survivors moved to Mashpee on Cape Cod and some of them married into the AfricanAmerican community at Five Corners. Benjamin Tashama moved there with his daughter Sarah. Sarah’s daughter, Dorcas Honorable, along with Abram Quary were said to be Nantucket’s last Indians, even though Wampanoags have lived on Nantucket since, including Sankaty Lighthouse keeper Charles Vanderhoop from Martha’s Vineyard.

The African Americans living around Mill Hill were descendants of slaves brought to Nantucket in the 1700s. Pressured by the local Quakers, English families gradually freed their slaves who began to form a village at Five Corners called New Guinea. In 1825 the people of New Guinea built and opened their own school, two years ahead of the Town of Nantucket’s public schools.

When Nantucket High School opened in 1838 and the people of New Guinea learned that their children would not be permitted to attend, they staged a successful campaign for school integration.

During the 1800s New Guinea was home to fugi-

by Frances Ruley Karttunen

Diversity’s many faces: Ruth West Coombs (1891–1964). Members of the Coombs family, descendants of Wampanoag preacher Hiacoomes, moved to Nantucket from Mashpee. Photograph by Louis S. Davidson.

Ning Der and his parents came from Canton, China, to join his grandfather, who operated the Canton Hand Laundry on Straight Wharf for many years. The 17-yearold Academy Hill student is shown here in 1939 with his model of the Unitarian Church (which is still displayed in the church today).

John Gebo cuts a dashing figure in this detail from a group photo of World War I servicemen. Charles Grant lived on Coon Street and was Nantucket’s fish warden from 1937 to 1946. Grant, whose father was Jamaican, is shown at the tiller in 1938.

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tive slaves from the mainland and to men from the Cape Verdean archipelago who came to Nantucket on whaleships. In the AT NO.4 MAIN STREET 1820s and 1830s seamen from the Carry out Hawaiian islands, from Tahiti, and even Monday, Thursday and Saturday from New Zealand resided in New FRIED CHICKEN Guinea. During those days men also came And CHOP SUEY to Nantucket from the Azores; here they dec10–3mos found wives and raised families.

When Nantucket’s whaling industry collapsed in the 1850s, the population collapsed too. White families and African-American families alike left for the mainland, many of them heading for the gold rush in California. No more Cape Verdeans or Pacific Islanders came to Nantucket, but Azoreans continued to come and bring families with them.

In 1851, a hundred and fifty refugees from the potato famine in Ireland were shipwrecked off Tuckernuck. Some found jobs and vacant housing on Nantucket and stayed for a while before moving on. With the development of commercial cranberry growing, Cape Verdeans started arriving again, this time with their families.

Once whaling was over, fishing took on new importance, and the fishermen were Portuguese, Scandinavian, Dutch, and even Latvian. Chinese laundrymen and Armenian merchants found niches for their businesses in downtown Advertisements from Nantucket. Brothers from Greece Nantucket’s papers opened a cafe, children of Russian and Polish Jews indicate a multi-cultural opened another, and a Dutch family operated a florist shop. French, Scottish, and Irish Canadians came from influence in the island the Maritime Provinces, soon outnumbering the businesss community. remaining potato-famine Irish.

Ad at top appeared in Toward the end of the twentieth century Irish workthe December 10, 1938, ers returned to Nantucket, and then came Jamaican workers. Thai families and Eastern Europeans live issue of the here. A Spanish-speaking population from Central Inquirer and Mirror, America has taken root. and the bottom one Diversity is nothing new on this island. Nantucket was in the has been a cosmopolitan community for over three and a half centuries. Only now we are coming to recognize, August 29, 1889, issue. accommodate, appreciate, and celebrate our diversity.

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GLEANINGS Periodically we find something in the NHA collections that we just have to share. Look for more “Gleanings” from the NHA’s archives and artifact collections in future issues of Historic Nantucket.

Nantucket, Mass Sept. 14, 1910 William S. Oliver / Lynn, Mass.

Dear Sir: Benjamin Albertson was over to my house the other day and I asked him if their [sic] was no way of keeping Mr. Butler Folger’s hens & chickens out of the Friends burial ground.

My grandfather and grandmother is buried there — Thomas and Lydia Macy. Butler Folger told Mr. Albertson they was only eating up the grasshoppers. The ground is in bad shape from the hens.

Can’t you stop it?

Hoping to hear from you, Yours respectfully, Charles H. Macy 153 Main Street P.S. You needn’t bring my name in but I am not afraid to back it up.

— Found in the NHA vertical files by Elizabeth Oldham, Research Associate

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Historic Nantucket Book Section Tuckernuck Island: A Pictorial Review of the Island with Facts and Misinformation for the Uninformed

by Edward Wayman Coffin Paper, $25.00 Review by Elizabeth Oldham This other Eden, demi-paradise, This happy breed . . . this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea.

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NGLAND ?

THINK AGAIN — THIS IS Tuckernuck. Sixteen years in the making, this book by old Tristram’s grandson-tothe-tenth-degree gives us an insider’s view of a place known to most of us only in the view from Madaket—remote, faintly mysterious, inaccessible unless we’re lucky enough to have a friend there who will ask us over.

Who could know about the rich full life that was led by the few hardy souls who lived there year-round throughout the nineteenth century? In 1880, according to the official census, thirty-eight people—nine families—still called Tuckernuck home: farmers, fishermen, one “retired carpenter,” one sailor (a Coffin), and nine women “keeping house,” plus their children. As early as 1829 there was a primary school on Tuckernuck, taught by a series of bright young Nantucket women who boarded with one or another of the families and were paid as much as $60 per term.

The Dunhams reigned on Tuckernuck; they “built more houses, raised more children, and, being very industrious, eventually owned most of the land.”

Dunhams married Smiths and Coffins and Brookses, sold and resold their properties, and in 1871 leased some land to a prosperous Boston surgeon who was an avid gunner, drawn by the vast numbers of migrating plover that fattened up on Tuckernuck on their way south. The good doctor was considered to be the island’s first summer person—“a wealthy dandy who required assistance in spending his money.”

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Canny, intrepid, inventive—the men and women of Tuckernuck made do with what the sea and soil could produce, taking in boarders to help things along. They built houses, moved houses, demolished houses; sailed their little boats; planted their gardens; fished and gunned and went clamming. They manned the humane station at Muskeget, saving the lives of countless wrecked mariners. And thank heavens they took lots of pictures—reproduced here in profusion for our delectation.

Edward Wayman Coffin is devoted to his Tuckernuck friends and family. His affection for them illuminates his book—even as he says of his Aunt Thelma “she was flawed by her inability to communicate in a non-hostile manner. . . . Whenever I made a visit with Thelma, I always departed with a feeling that I was on parole.”

Tuckernuck has changed some but not as much as you’d think, given what’s happened to the mother island; and the inheritors have taken firm stands on how things are to be done over there.

Thank you, Mr. Coffin. We’ll be forever grateful for your quirky wit and generosity of spirit in sharing your Tuckernuck life with us.

The challenges of transporting materials to Tuckernuck: (top) Charles Glidden in 1940 atop Byron Coffin’s model A Ford.

Photo courtesy of Mary Coffin Pease; (bottom) Dory trimaran with Arthur P. Dunham’s new horse “Fan,” ca. 1905.

Photo courtesy of June Coffin Dammin.

Elizabeth Oldham is research associate in the Nantucket Historical Association’s Research Library. She is also a freelance copy editor and writer.

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Educational Explorations The Nantucket Historical Association has begun a series of educational explorations to off-island museums and sites. The purpose of these trips is to offer interesting diversions in the off-season. The first of these explorations was an overnight trip held in February, when fifteen people traveled to Salem, Massachusetts. There they were enriched by the expertise of museum curators and docents at the Peabody Essex Museum and three historic houses evocative of three centuries of Salem heritage and architecture.

From Salem the group proceeded to Norman Hurst’s gallery of ethnographic art in Cambridge. Norman is very familiar with the NHA’s collection of early South Seas materials, and he spoke about the early seamen and whalemen who traveled the globe and brought back marvelous artifacts from the places they visited.

For a change of pace, there was an enlightening visit to the WGBH Public Broadcasting TV and radio studios before heading back to Nantucket.

All who participated in this outing were enthusiastic beyond expectation and eagerly await further adventures. The Northeast offers an endless array of destinations from which to choose, and a schedule of forthcoming expeditions is being planned for next year. In the meantime, a one-day visit to the Cahoon Museum of Art, the Sandwich Glass Museum, and Heritage Plantation on Cape Cod is set for June 5.

Space is limited to thirty participants. For further information and to make reservations, call the NHA office.

—Nina Hellman, volunteer coordinator

Exhibition News A wide variety of exhibitions is planned through 2002, starting with a lovely ode to spring in the Whitney Gallery at the NHA Research Library on Fair Street from February through early June. In conjunction with a series of gardening lectures, the NHA is hosting a botanical art exhibition. Central to the show are the exquisite botanical illustrations by local artist M. J. Levy Dickson. “Her illustrations are beautiful representations of the island’s flora and the NHA is grateful for the opportunity to display them,” said chief curator Niles Parker. Also on display are hand-blown glass flowers by Nantucket artist Meg Morris, an eighteenth-century garden journal, and samples from the Maria Mitchell Association’s herbarium. The exhibition is open 10–4, Monday–Friday at the NHA Research Library.

In May, the NHA will open an exhibition featuring the Nantucket Railroad. In addition to displaying artifacts from the collection relating to train travel on the island between 1881 and 1918, the exhibition will include souvenirs and memorabilia loaned by the

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Nantucket community. “It is astonishing to see the wide variety of railroad objects held in private collections,” said Parker. On display will be everything from actual pieces of the rail to tickets and photographs. “It is sure to captivate visitors of all ages,” he said.

Also on display this summer will be an exhibition of needlework by Nantucket resident Susan Boardman in the Whitney Gallery starting on June 21. With meticulous detail, Susan has stitched the stories of nine Nantucket women — past and present. Among the women are Anna Gardner, Lucretia Mott, and Maria Mitchell from the nineteenth century, with Edith Andrews, Grace Grossman, NHA trustee Nancy Chase, and our very own Elizabeth Oldham as the featured women of contemporary Nantucket.

Later in the summer, the curators are planning an exhibition of Nantucket silver. Opening in July in the Hadwen House, the display will include silver objects from the NHA’s collection and a survey of the island’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century silversmiths. Silver is, appropriately, the theme of the twenty-fifth annual Antiques Show.

Opening in the Whitney Gallery October 5–December 8 is Jag! Cape Verdean Heritage on Nantucket. Historic and contemporary photographs documenting the lives and history of Nantucket’s Cape Verdean community will be central to the exhibition.

Programming will include speakers and special events for young and old. Look for more information in the summer issue of Historic Nantucket.

Wine Festival All NHA members are invited to attend the Nantucket Wine Festival’s Charity Gala on Thursday, May 16, at 6 P.M. at the White Elephant. The evening will include an opportunity to sample wines and foods from twenty tables, each hosted by a winemaker or vineyard representative. Top restaurateurs from the island and region will provide the cuisine to match the wines. Members may also want to attend the Charity Auction on Friday, May 17, at 9 P.M. at the White Elephant. Reservations for either or both events may by made by calling the NHA at (508) 228-1894, ext. 0, or by clicking on the Sixth Annual Wine Festival’s website, www.nantucketwinefestival.com. A complete list of auction items will also be available at the website. Net proceeds from both events will support the NHA’s education programs and access to the association’s museums, particularly in the winter and shoulder seasons.

Museum Shop on Line Photographic reproductions from the NHA’s considerable image archive sold well last year in the Museum Shop and the Museum Shop on Straight Wharf. Now S P R I N G

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the photographs are available for purchase on the NHA website, www.nha.org. Twenty photographs have been selected from the archive and are sold in various sizes, framed or unframed. The nineteenth-century photographs depict scenes from catboats under sail in the harbor to downtown streetscapes to Brant Point and Sankaty lighthouses and much more. Browse the website for ideas — just click the Museum Shop icon on the NHA’s home page to see the images. Look for more shopping ideas on the web in the future.

Join On-Line Members may now join or renew their memberships on-line. Please look for the “Join Now” icon on the NHA home page.

Staff News Kathrina Pearl joined the NHA in January to assist in the maintenance department. With experience in gardening and landscaping, Kathrina offers invaluable help in caring for the NHA’s properties. She, along with Scott Waldie and manager Ed Boynton, provides the necessary day-to-day property maintenance including cleaning and gardening.

For the last seven years, Pearl had been selfemployed as a greenhouse grower and had previously worked at a farm and for a land-design company on Nantucket. Born in Ireland, Pearl has a degree in horticulture from University College Dublin. She moved to Nantucket in 1985. “Right from the start, I was struck by the friendliness of the island community,” said Pearl. “Now seventeen years later, I feel the same way.” She enjoys Nantucket’s changing seasons and walking on the moors in the winter.

Georgen Gilliam began as the curator of library and archives in March and will be responsible for a full range of duties associated with overseeing management of the library and archives as well as developing plans to improve digital access to the collections.

Before joining the NHA, Gilliam was the special collections access coordinator and web specialist at Utah State University’s Merrill Library, where she catalogued materials and designed and maintained the special collections website. Previously, Gilliam was a project assistant at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

There she created a database of digital images and bibliographic records for periodicals of African Europeans. In addition, Gilliam worked for the La Crosse County Historical Society as a graphic artist and curatorial assistant. Gilliam has her M.L.S. degree and a master’s in communications from the University of Kentucky and an advanced studies specialty certificate from the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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Gilliam moved to Nantucket from Utah with her two cats, Molasses and Oatmeal. She is enthusiastic about her move and looks forward to getting to know the island community. “I think it’s a good fit,” she said of her new life on Nantucket. Her hobbies include birding and web design.

Save the Dates Activities of the twenty-fifth August Antiques Show begin on Monday, July 29, with a lecture in the Methodist Church by Leigh and Leslie Keno, back by popular demand. Their lecture for 2002 is titled “Real or Fake? Authenticating American Furniture.” By sharing their experiences, the antiques connoisseurs will comment on the fun and pitfalls of collecting antiques. The Antiques Show Preview Party is scheduled for Thursday, August 1, and the show runs August 2–4 at the Nantucket High School. Also scheduled is a Collectors Tour on Friday, August 2, at 8:30 A.M. when antiques experts will guide interested collectors through the show. The chair for the silver anniversary show is Margaret G. Benedict, assisted by a capable and energetic committee. Call (508) 228-1894, ext. 0, to volunteer or for ticket information.

The NHA is pleased to announce that The Whittier Trust Company will be the title sponsor for the twenty-fifth August Antiques Show.

Another Library Resource Historian Helen Winslow Chase and her family have donated her entire personal library to the NHA. Duplicates of titles already in the Research Library on Fair Street have been used to create a circulating reference library housed in the administrative offices on Broad Street. Interpretive and administrative staff will have the benefit of this valuable resource and the NHA is grateful to the Chase family for their contribution.

New staff members: Georgen Gilliam (l) and Kathrina Pearl

Community Network for Children All through the winter months, the Whaling Museum has been buzzing with the activity of small children, thanks to a new venture with the Community Network for Children (CNC). Designed to educate and involve families by exposing them to the island’s many resources, the CNC has organized a series of Saturday morning programs in the Whaling Museum. Each Saturday, interpretation specialist Jean Allen has introduced the families to Nantucket history by way of craft making and story telling. It has been highly successful and the NHA appreciates the efforts of the CNC to coordinate and sponsor the programming.

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