Historic Nantucket Spring/Summer 2014

P.O. BOX 1016, NANTUCKET, MA 02554-1016

NHA.ORG

PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT NANTUCKET, MA AND ADDITIONAL ENTRY OFFICES

Nantucket

SPRING/ SUMMER

2014

HISTORIC

VOLUME 64, NO. 1

A PUBLICATION OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

The Properties OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Over the past century, the NHA’s collection of historic properties has grown to fourteen buildings and four sites that are essential to the narrative of four centuries of local history. Our mission “to tell the inspiring stories of Nantucket through our collections, programs, and properties” relies on investing in our built heritage and continuing a plan of restoration, renovation, and maintenance. Through the continued generosity of its supporters, the NHA is working to build its endowment to ensure the perpetual care and protection of these icons of Nantucket history.

NANTUCKET

Nantucket

SPRING/SUMMER

2014

HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

HISTORIC

VOLUME 64, NO. 1

A PUBLICATION OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Janet L. Sherlund, PRESIDENT Kenneth L. Beaugrand, VICE PRESIDENT Jason A. Tilroe, VICE PRESIDENT William J. Boardman, TREASURER William R. Congdon, CLERK

Josette Blackmore Maureen F. Bousa Anne Marie Bratton William R. Camp Jr. FRIENDS OF THE NHA REPRESENTATIVE

Calvin R. Carver Jr.

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Windows on the Past

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Thomas Macy House Refinement comes to Main Street

WILLIAM J . TRAMPOSCH

Constance Cigarran W. Michael Cozort

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Franci N. Crane Ana Ericksen

The Properties of the Nantucket Historical Association

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NHA Properties Map

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Rethinking, reusing, restoring

Nancy A. Geschke Whitney A. Gifford Georgia P. Gosnell TRUSTEE EMERITA

Kathryn L. Ketelsen FRIENDS OF THE NHA REPRESENTATIVE

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NHA Properties Listing

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Oldest House On the edge of the English settlement

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Victoria McManus

Grinding the Island’s corn

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Phoebe B. Tudor

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Ex Officio William J. Tramposch

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» Bartholomew Gosnold Center, 1993 NHA-Properties-Gosnold-1

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» Storage area at the Gosnold Center, photograph by Tony Dumitru, 2013

Greater Light The artistic life

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Whaling Museum Campus Telling the stories

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1800 House The sheriff’s fine home

Fire Hose Cart House Last of the neighborhood fire houses

Macy Christian House The Town evolves

L. Dennis Shapiro

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Old Mill

Laura C. Reynolds Kennedy P. Richardson

Hadwen House The pinnacle of opulence

William E. Little Jr. Mary D. Malavase

Quaker Meeting House and Fair Street Museum

Research Library

The challenge of finding

That year the Bartholomew Gosnold Center was built on Bartlett Road. The attics, basements, closets, and

appropriate storage for a growing

other less-than-optimal NHA storage sites were emptied and contents moved to climate-controlled storage that allowed for

Archiving history

collection of artifacts was

Bartholomew Gosnold Center

temporarily allayed in 1993,

inventory, organization, and ready access for everything from teacups to tall clocks, portraits, furniture, business signs,

C3

Old Gaol

A place for everything

scrimshaw, textiles, and much more. So much more, in fact, that an annex was built in 1999 to house large items like catboats and hand-pumper fire engines. The

A snug lockup

GOSNELL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

collections at the Gosnold Center are the foundation for exhibitions and study; records and ON THE COVER: ROW 1: Whaling Museum, PC-WhalingMuseum-1; Fair Street Museum, P9326; Quaker Meeting House, F2890

photographs of archived items can be examined in

ROW 2: Greater Light, GL114; Old Gaol, PC-OV-OldGaol-1

the research databases on the NHA’s website.

Betsy Tyler EDITOR

A woodworking shop and curatorial-staff

ROW 3: Hadwen House, PC-HadwenHouse; George Christian, A65-25; Oldest House, PC-OldestHouse ROW 4: Quaker Meeting House and NHA Research Library, P7515; Old Mill, PC-30;

Elizabeth Oldham

Thomas Macy House, 89.142.16

COPY EDITOR

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

Eileen Powers/Javatime Design

©2014 by the Nantucket Historical Association

DESIGN AND ART DIRECTION

Historic Nantucket (ISSN 0439-2248) is published by the Nantucket Historical Association, 15 Broad Street, Nantucket, Massachusetts. Periodical postage paid at Nantucket, MA, and additional entry offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Historic Nantucket, P.O. Box 1016, Nantucket, MA 02554 –1016; (508) 228–1894; fax: (508) 228–5618, info@nha.org For information visit www.nha.org

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» Pocket watch owned

by Peter B. Hussey (1799–1866), made by Edmunds, London and Birmingham, circa 1818–19.

Gift of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association 1987.159.1

offices are also located at the site, which features a large receiving area and two floors of storage space that houses artifacts of all sizes and shapes, each one a tangible reminder of our history.

»FROM

THE GOSNELL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Windows on our past WILLIAM J. TRAMPOSCH

N

estled among the nearly eight hundred preCivil War buildings of Nantucket are the iconic properties of the Nantucket Historical Association.

Founded in 1894, the NHA has since been the chief caretaker of the island’s heritage, its stories, and its collections, including our properties. Beginning with the purchase of the Quaker Meeting House in 1894, the association has been most fortunate to have acquired, mostly as gifts, a significant collection of iconic buildings and important sites since then. We have cared for the properties as best we can, and as any property owner can appreciate, it is no easy task. We deal constantly with what poet Robert Frost described as “the slow, smokeless burning of decay” in every one of the sites. Our core properties are our key interest; they help weave a narrative of the island’s remarkable heritage. This publication tells our island’s story in a way that portrays our properties as key characters in our history.

I find that the houses inhabit the island in a way. They’re living presences, and they’re presences that go way back.

So when I am walking the streets, I really have a profound sense of people having been here before. The cobblestones, the shingles, they all have a texture that seems to evoke something that’s been around for a long time. . . . I’ve always had a sense that it’s almost an imaginary landscape that is real.

—Nat Philbrick

The Oldest House, on Sunset Hill, recalls a time when European settlement was but decades old on the island, then already inhabited by several thousand Wampanoags; our mill, the oldest working mill in America, returns us to an age when wind provided the energy for both the island and its fleet of whaleships that traversed the globe; the Hadwen House recalls the high-water mark of whaling when this “elbow of sand” was the whaling capital of the

» Greater Light windows, photograph by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

world; and Greater Light, tucked into a quiet lane, provides a doorway into an understanding of Nantucket’s reawakening as an art colony and resort. Significant sites in our portfolio include the Research Library and Quaker Meeting House on Fair Street; the Old Gaol off Vestal Street; the Fire Hose Cart House on Gardner Street, to name a few. This issue of Historic Nantucket explores them all. We hope you will, too!

Today, the NHA is one of America’s oldest historical associations; and well it should be, given the history here in our cobbled streets, our sandy lanes, and our rustic houses.

We hope you enjoy your visits to the properties of the Nantucket Historical Association and, if they touch your lives in the way they way they have ours, please appreciate the constant need they have for care by supporting our cause!

Fair winds,

WILLIAM J. TRAMPOSCH GOSNELL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

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The Properties OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Each historic property belonging to the NHA, whether originally a dwelling, a commercial or industrial building, or a structure with a unique purpose—like the Old Mill, the Fire Hose Cart House, and the Old Gaol— has human stories associated with its origin and use. All of these buildings play a significant role in the continuum of Nantucket history, and many of them are surrounded by myth and mystery. Although they are recognizable icons of our past, we sometimes forget that they were full of life and activity, that they suffered periods of prosperity and neglect, and that it was sometimes a struggle to acquire and preserve them.

With this issue of Historic Nantucket, we are presenting an anthology of “house histories” for our sites. Restoring them one by one, and finding new ways to fill them with life, has been a twenty-first-century focus. Acquisition and preservation naturally lead to research, exhibition, education, and public programs, with the extended campus of the NHA as the setting for a dynamic interpretation of our storied past. Beginning with the Oldest House, join us on a journey through the evolution of the town and enjoy the view from each property as we travel through time.

BETSY TYLER, EDITOR OBED MACY RESEARCH CHAIR

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Map illustration

by Mary Emery Lacoursiere

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1800 House

10 Old Gaol

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Bartholomew Gosnold Center

11 Old Mill

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Eleanor Ham Pony Field

12 Oldest House

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Fire Hose Cart House

13 Quaker Meeting House

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Folger-Franklin Memorial Bench and Boulder

14 Research Library

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Greater Light

15 Thomas Macy House

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Hadwen House

16 Thomas Macy Warehouse

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Macy-Christian House

17 Tristram Coffin Homestead Site Marker

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Mill Hill

18 Whaling Museum Campus

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CONSTRUCTION DATE

ACQUISITION DATE

21ST-CENTURY RESTORATION

CIRCA 1801

DONATED 1951

2005

1993; ANNEX 1999

BUILT BY NHA

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OPEN LAND

DONATED 1979

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1886

DONATED 1960

2012

SITE DATE CIRCA 1665

DONATED 1962

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CIRCA 1790; REMODELED 1929–30

DONATED 1970

2011

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1845

DONATED 1963

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CIRCA 1745

DONATED 1971

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OPEN LAND

PURCHASED 1897

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PROPERTY & ADDRESS

1800 House 4 MILL STREET

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Bartholomew Gosnold Center 89 BARTLETT ROAD

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Eleanor Ham Pony Field 10 MILL STREET

Fire Hose Cart House 8 GARDNER STREET

Folger-Franklin Memorial Bench and Boulder 3 WANNACOMET ROAD

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Greater Light 8 HOWARD STREET

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Hadwen House 96 MAIN STREET

Macy-Christian House 12 LIBERTY STREET

Mill Hill 39 YORK STREET

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CONSTRUCTION DATE

ACQUISITION DATE

21ST-CENTURY RESTORATION

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1805

DONATED 1946

2014

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1746

PURCHASED 1897

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1686

PURCHASED 1923

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1838

PURCHASED 1894

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1904

BUILT BY NHA

2001

CIRCA 1800; REMODELED 1832

DONATED 1987

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1846

DONATED 1984

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SITE DATE CIRCA 1660

DONATED 1981

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HADWEN & BARNEY OIL AND CANDLE FACTORY, 1847

PURCHASED 1929

PROPERTY & ADDRESS

Old Gaol 15R VESTAL STREET

Old Mill 50 PROSPECT STREET

Oldest House 16 SUNSET HILL

Quaker Meeting House 7 FAIR STREET

Research Library 7 FAIR STREET

Thomas Macy House 99 MAIN STREET

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Thomas Macy Warehouse 12 STRAIGHT WHARF

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Tristram Coffin Homestead Site Marker 7 CAPAUM POND ROAD

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Whaling Museum Campus 13–15 BROAD STREET

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2005 PETER FOULGER MUSEUM, 1971

BUILT BY NHA

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Âť Jethro Coffin House, 1686, Nantucket, Mass., postcard by H. Marshall Gardiner, ca. 1920s PC-Oldesthouse-19

Âť West Elevation of Chimney Showing Fireplace in West Parlor and West Chamber Over Parlor, Jethro Coffin House, delineated by Alfred F. Shurrocks, 1927 Courtesy of Historic New England

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Gardner Coffin looked out the window of her house on Sunset

Hill at the eastern

edge of the English territory called Sherburne in 1695,

her vista was wide open.

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From her hilltop, she cast her glance toward the Great Harbor where her father operated his cod-fishing business. No wharves were yet built and no town existed; she saw marshland, swamp, and a few buildings, but no churches, no banks, no cobbled streets. Most of the English families still lived in the settlement farther west, where the original Proprietors had selected their house lots. To get there, Mary would travel down the cart path that became West Chester Street, to a crooked lane that connected the road along the north-shore cliff with the road that ran between two of the large freshwater ponds that were essential to the settlers. Houses were scattered from the North Shore at Capaum to the head of Hummock Pond and along its western arm, forming a rural community of independent families united by intermarriage and common interests.

» Mary Gardner Coffin, oil on canvas attributed to the Pollard Limner, ca. 1720. Gift of Eunice Coffin (Gardner) Brooks, 1924.3.1

» Town of Sherburne, Nantucket, by Ardis Mayhew, n.d.

MS1000-1-1-10

The ranks of the English settlers had grown to several hundred men, women, and children in the thirty-five years of their island venture, but the primary inhabitants of Nantucket were Indians, and they outnumbered the English population by three or four to one. Relations between the two groups were relatively peaceful, but the inevitable cultural misunderstandings occurred. Mary had had her own encounter with an Indian intruder just a few years earlier, and although the story has several versions, the essence of it is that an Indian who had been enjoying a bottle of rum made himself comfortable in an upstairs room of her house when she was out. He made a threatening appearance sometime after she returned, and she fled with her baby to her closest neighbor.

Mary lived on Sunset Hill for about twenty years.

Although the date of construction of the house is not known exactly, tradition tells us that it was built as a wedding present for the couple in 1686, when sixteen-year-old Mary married twenty-three-yearold Jethro Coffin. Ten years earlier, Mary’s father, John Gardner, had been a leader of the Half-Share Revolt of island tradesmen against the full-share Proprietors, led by Jethro’s grandfather, Tristram Coffin. The two men had very different ideas about the governance of the island and the proportional allotment of common lands. In the end, Gardner’s faction won, but the relationship between Gardner and Coffin was never amicable. The marriage of Mary and Jethro united the families, and the house—built on Gardner land with Coffin lumber—is a lasting reminder of family harmony and pioneer fortitude in the seventeenth century.

Like the view from the house, the dwelling itself had a different appearance in the seventeenth century. It was a fine house for its time, two stories in height on the south-facing front façade and the same height on the north side. Massive fireplaces were the dominant features of the two rooms on each floor: the parlor on the west side and the “great room,” with a recessed oven for cooking, on the east, and the two bedchambers above. Physical evidence indicates that the center-chimney dwelling originally featured twin front gables that allowed light into the second-floor rooms, and from that height on the hill the Coffins and their

» Mary Gardner Coffin Fleeing Indian, collotype on paper by Janet Ball, 1986. Gift of Janet Ball McGlinn, 1988.71.2

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Oldest House

» Perspective Sketch of Jethro Coffin House (1686), Sunset Hill Lane, Restored to Original Form and Restored First-Floor Plan, by Clay Lancaster, in The Architecture of Historic Nantucket, 1972

children could see for miles.

Jethro, like most of the early landowners on the island, had his hand in a variety of business ventures, including sheep-raising, blacksmithing, shore whaling, and his father Peter’s sawmill and lumber enterprises in the Merrimack Valley.

Mary had the care of a growing family—they would eventually have six children who lived to adulthood—and the never-ending domestic chores of cooking and preserving food; spinning and weaving; knitting, sewing, mending; nursing the sick; tending her kitchen garden; and the grueling day-long process of washing clothes and linens. As a woman of fairly comfortable means, she may have had domestic help, but it was still a labor-filled life. Mary and Jethro sold their Nantucket dwelling to Nathaniel Paddack in 1708 and moved to Mendon, Massachusetts, when Jethro inherited property there, but Mary would later move back to the island and live with her son Josiah in his house on Cliff Road when Jethro died in 1726.

» Jethro Coffin House, photograph by Charles H. Shute & Sons, ca. 1860s P6422

Four Generations of Paddacks Although the Oldest House is closely associated with Mary and Jethro Coffin, four generations of the Paddack family lived there. Many of them were mariners, reflecting Nantucket’s change from an agricultural to a maritime community in the eighteenth century, but the first of the Paddack owners, Nathaniel, was a weaver by trade and an occasional shore-whaler by circumstance. He came to the island from Cape Cod with his brother, Ichabod, who had been hired by the town in 1690 to teach the practical skills of whaling. Nathaniel married Ann Bunker and they produced a family of seven daughters and three sons on Sunset Hill.

Later, to accommodate his sons’ families, Nathaniel built another house close by on his acre-and-a-half plot; Daniel occupied the west side of the new dwelling and Paul the east.

Both men were mariners, and as whaling moved offshore, the dreaded phrase “lost at sea” began to appear in local genealogies. Daniel was one of the early whalers who earned

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that descriptor, in 1746; his brother Barnabas has no record at all, but apparently did not marry. Surviving son Paul, a whaling captain, inherited the Jethro Coffin house and moved with his family back to his childhood home when Nathaniel died in 1756. It may have been around this time, or perhaps earlier, that the house was transformed and enlarged from a two-story English-style house to a lean-to. The kitchen was moved to an addition at the back of the house where a fireplace with a much larger oven was built into the chimney. The change in appearance of the house was dramatic; the roofline was completely altered and now featured the familiar “cat-slide” north roof, the old casement windows of the seventeenth century were replaced with sash windows, and the house began its transformation into the one we recognize today.

» The Family Tree, Nantucket, watercolor by Robert Perrin, 1986 1987.224.1

The two houses on Sunset Hill made their own small neighborhood. Paul Paddack rented the two halves of the newer house to various tenants who shared the pump and well and the road between the houses, but he eventually sold the newer house. He and his wife, Anna Coffin, had six children who could walk from their perch on the hill down to the shops and houses and wharves of the small town that was rapidly growing. Perhaps the most remarkable difference between Mary Coffin’s window on the world in 1695 and Anna Paddack’s view fifty years later was the fact that the population of the island’s whites and Indians had now reversed numbers: by the mid-eighteenth century there were three thousand white inhabitants and fewer than four hundred Indians. The Oldest House was no longer an outpost of the English settlement, it was conveniently located near the center of activity. The Paddacks had a stellar view of the movement in the harbor and surrounding waters during the Revolutionary War and, like the rest of

» Jethro Coffin House, photograph by H. S. Wyer, ca. 1870s P4260

» Detail from Second-Floor Plan, Jethro Coffin House, Alfred F. Shurrocks, Del., 1927 Courtesy of Historic New England

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Oldest House the islanders, they suffered the hardships imposed by that conflict. Paul and Anna lived until the end of the century (Paul died in 1799, Anna in 1802) when their youngest son, Nathaniel, a mariner, assumed responsibility for the household. He had married Deborah Pinkham in 1782, just after the war, and by the end of the century they had five children; for a hundred years the homestead had been lively with the activities of large families. Another generation of Paddacks grew up on Sunset Hill—Lucretia, Hepsabeth, Jonathan, Peggy, and George. In 1839, when youngest son, George, was forty-two, with a wife and three children, his father sold the old house to him for $250. He immediately sold it out of the family to a cooper named George Turner for $300, ending a hundred and thirty-one years of Paddack ownership.

Turner had skills with a hammer and went to work; his daughter, Harriet, recalled in 1928 that her mother had told her the house was “very much out of repair.” Although the 1830s and ’40s were an era of refinement on Main Street, when cobbles and sidewalk flagging were laid and the grand Greek Revival-style houses were built and older houses remodeled by those reaping the profits of the whaling industry, not everyone enjoyed the new prosperity. The Turner family on Sunset Hill was fortunate to have a solidly built house in a choice location, even if it was showing its age, and they were well situated away from the raging fire of July 13, 1846, that consumed the downtown, but life for a cooper with eight children during the era of Nantucket’s decline was difficult. By 1865, the island had lost more than four thousand residents, and by 1867 the Oldest House was empty. George and Mary Turner found another place to live, and the ancient nuptial dwelling of Jethro and Mary Coffin was used as a hay barn and an object of historical curiosity for summer visitors on a rantum scoot.

Coffin Family Reunion The Coffins were the most prolific of the first families of Nantucket, and in 1881 they had their first reunion on the island where so many had been born. Harriet B. Turner Worron, who grew up in the house on Sunset Hill, wrote a saga of the Coffin family published the same year— “Trustrum” and His Grandchildren—and the interest in the Coffin legacy on Nantucket reached something of a fever pitch. Five hundred reunion attendees gathered and reminisced and set about to memorialize their ancestry. They erected a monument to the first male settlers at the Founders Burial Ground overlooking Maxcy’s Pond; they spawned an interest in genealogy that led to Louis Coffin’s extensive clan history, The Coffin Family, and two off-island Coffins purchased the Jethro Coffin house from the Turner family for $300. Repairs were made and the house was opened up in 1886 for its 200th birthday, then settled down for a long sleep until 1897, when it was opened in the summers as a house museum. Still owned by Tristram Coffin of Poughkeepsie (who had purchased his cousin’s half share), the house attracted a constant stream of curious visitors eager to peer into a relic of the early history of the island.

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» Oldest House, drawing by unknown artist, ca. 1930s 1997.136.1

» June at the Oldest House, photograph by Kathrina Marques, 2007 OH-June2007-2

OTHER NHA PROPERTIES OF THE

First Settlement The NHA purchased Jethro and Mary’s dwelling from Tristram Coffin in 1923. Winthrop Coffin of Boston—another off-island descendant of the original Tristram—stepped up to fund restoration of the house on the condition that it proceed under the supervision of William Sumner Appleton, then secretary of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities [SPNEA, now Historic New England]. Appleton, and his architect of choice, Alfred F. Shurrocks, began the work in 1927. The old Paddack house next door had been razed the previous year, once again opening up the site where the derelict old dwelling sat awaiting some serious attention. It was Shurrocks who determined that the house originally had twin front gables, but it was decided at the time to restore the structure to its familiar lean-to form—one that evolved in the mid-eighteenth century—and to replace the later double-hung sash windows with diamond-paned casements more suitable for a seventeenthcentury dwelling.

The Jethro Coffin house was designated a National Historic Landmark by the Secretary of the Interior in 1968. In 1986, for its 300th birthday celebration, historian Helen Winslow Chase researched and wrote the Jethro Coffin House Chronology, 1686–1986, the basis for much of this overview. A celebration of the tercentenary of the dwelling was held, but just a year later, on October 1, 1987, lightning struck the house, toppling the chimney, destroying half of the roof, and melting the electrical wiring, causing damage that required two years (and about a million dollars) to painstakingly mend and restore. The stalwart old structure was so solidly built that once restored it has continued to hold firm on Sunset Hill, where it tells the story of the early English settlement of Nantucket in the seventeenth century, the first chapter in the NHA’s built history of the island.

Tristram Coffin Homestead Site Marker 7 CAPAUM POND ROAD | SITE DATE CA. 1660 The 1881 Coffin Reunion that engendered interest in the homestead of Jethro and Mary Coffin led to a search for the house site of Jethro’s grandfather, Tristram Coffin (1609–81), one of the original proprietors and the progenitor of the Coffin family in America. His house once stood south of Cappamet (Capaum) Harbor, now a pond closed in from the sea by a storm in the early eighteenth century. Coffin had an early dwelling, probably built about 1661 “under the hill” and a “new dwelling” on the hill, built before 1678. Most of the houses of the first settlers were dismantled and moved in the early eighteenth century to the town that was growing up around the Great Harbor, or portions of the old dwellings were used in the construction of new ones.

Folger-Franklin Memorial Boulder and Bench 3 WANNACOMET ROAD | SITE DATE CA. 1665 Peter Folger (1617–89), a halfshare man invited to the island to serve as interpreter to the Indians, was granted a house lot in “Rogers Field” in 1663. A wooden bench carved with the names of his wife, Mary Morrils, and their eight children commemorates the site of the Folger house. A brass plaque on a large boulder elaborates on Peter Folger’s contributions to Nantucket, noting that his youngest child, Abiah (1667–1752), the only one of his children born on Nantucket, married Josiah Franklin of Boston and was the mother of Benjamin Franklin (1706–90).

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Abigail Swain trudged up the path to the Popsquatchet Hills, balancing daughter Hannah on her hip.

The new mill stood above her, the white sails on its vanes whipping in the southwest breeze and turning the shaft that set the interior gears in motion to activate the granite mill-wheels. Her husband, Eliakim, and his partner, John Way, supervised the grinding of sack after sack of corn, producing the yellow meal used in every island kitchen.

Operating a mill was a new venture for Eliakim, who owned shares of two sloops, a wharf, a try-house, and a fish house.

Now he had a land-bound venture, one tied to the agricultural roots of the island. Swain and Way were the first owners of the Old Mill. Tradition tells us that a man named Nathan Wilbur built the mill in 1746, but there are more unanswered questions about this property of the Nantucket Historical Association than any other.

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» View of the Town of Nantucket, oil on canvas by Thomas Birch, 1811–15. Gift of Robert Waggaman in memory of Floyd Pierpoint and Jean Mackenzie Waggaman, 74.21.1

» View of the Old Mill from South Mill Street, watercolor by unknown artist, ca. 1910s. Gift of Robert Waggaman, 70.21.2

» Old Mill Interior, oil on canvas by Wendell Macy, 1894

09.34.1

» Cross-section Showing the Mechanism of a Windmill, from Diderot’s “Encyclopedia,” Paris, 1762, in Old-Time New England, January 1931

We wish Abigail could have described the mill in detail for us, because we don’t know what it looked like in the mid-eighteenth century—whether it was a post mill or a smock mill when Thomas Birch painted the earliest view of the town, as seen from Shimmo, about sixty years later. The mills he depicts are post mills, an ancient design that allows the entire structure to be rotated to face the wind; they look a little like popsicles, the structure elevated on a post visible at the base. Smock mills are differently constructed—octagonal, situated on the ground on a broad base and tapering to the top where a rotating cap sits.

Vanes are attached by a shaft to the cap and only that part of the mill is turned toward the breeze. If a post mill had been built on Nantucket in 1746, it was removed after Birch recorded the scene with his paintbrush circa 1811, and if this scenario is accurate, the smock mill we recognize today as the Old Mill would be a nineteenth-century construction. However, there is no record of the mill being removed or rebuilt, so it is questionable whether Birch painted his scene with some freedom of expression, basing his depiction on mills he had seen elsewhere. Architectural historian Clay Lancaster wrote in Nantucket in the Nineteenth Century, 1979, that the mills on the hill were inaccurately represented by Birch, but later, after further research, he was inclined to believe that they were post mills, and revised his earlier statements.

» Detail from Map of the Island of Nantucket, by Dr. James Tupper, in J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, London edition, 1782 MS1000-1-5-2

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» Illustration from “Cape Cod, Nantucket, and the Vineyard,” by Charles Nordhoff in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1875 Harpers-1875-63

Some accounts of the Old Mill relate that it was framed with “oaken

» Husking at Rosewood Farm, stereograph by Josiah Freeman, ca. 1870s P6566

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beams washed ashore from shipwrecks”; others declare that the lumber came from oak trees growing just across the street in what is now known as Dead Horse Valley. Whatever the true history of the mill may be, the 1746 date of construction is based on numbers inscribed on the stone doorstep, the one piece of evidence that appears irrefutable.

Surviving early windmills on Cape Cod are, like the Old Mill, smock mills, built to withstand strong winds in exposed locations. Millwrights were as specialized as shipbuilders, with advanced carpentry and engineering skills.

Nathan Wilbur, called both a mariner and a hired millwright in histories of the Old Mill, may be a figment of popular imagination. One storyline suggests that he was paid in advance for constructing a mill on Nantucket, but was robbed and murdered when he took the money to the mainland to purchase materials.

Another suggests that he was a mariner who had seen Dutch windmills and was inspired to replicate one, and that story is later embellished with the addition of the “fact” that he used tools he brought to the island from England and was taunted by islanders who ridiculed him and failed to embrace his project. The

Old Mill character of mariner millwright Nathan Wilbur seems to have been developed in the late nineteenth century as a folktale, each telling adding a little more color to the myth of the origin of one of our favorite landmarks.

The Old Mill is a grist mill, used to grind corn. That there were four windmills on the Popsquatchet Hills and another on New Lane demonstrates the size and value of the island’s corn crop (which may have been supplemented by imported corn) and tells us something about the diet of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nantucketers, who depended on Johnny Cake, Hasty Pudding, hominy, Indian Pudding, cornbread, and cornmeal mush as tasty staples to round out a meal of mutton or chowder. Three other mills (with unsubstantiated dates of construction) were near the Old Mill—the Barnabus Bunker Mill, built by Richard Macy in 1723 and blown up with gunpowder in 1836; the Spider Mill, built in 1759 and taken down around 1840; and the Red Mill, built in 1770 and taken down in 1859. Farther away, on New Lane just south of the New North Cemetery, stood the Round Top Mill of 1802, removed in 1873. During both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 the vanes on the mills on the Popsquatchet Hills were turned in one direction or another to warn Nantucketers at sea of British privateers maneuvering nearby. A popular legend has it that during the Revolutionary War a cannon ball was shot from a man-o’-war, passing through the mill and landing within a foot of the miller.

» The Old Mill, Nantucket, carte de visite of painting by Benjamin G. Tobey, ca. 1860s P4197

»

LEFT: Old Mill, watercolor on paper attributed to Hugh Tallant, ca. 1885 57.11.2

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Old Mill

Mill Hill •

39 YORK STREET •

When the NHA offered the highest bid for the Old Mill in 1897, it also acquired a oneand-a-half-acre lot on the hillside below the mill. Part meadow and part wooded, the little green space is a quiet vantage point for viewing the mill above and the town below.

» The Old Miller, photographic portrait of John Francis Sylvia, ca. 1880s F1758

The mill may have been an investment for Eliakim Swain and John Way, who then hired a miller to run the operation. When Swain died, he left one-third part of the mill to his youngest son, Timothy, and one twelfthpart to his eldest son, Charles; likewise, John Way left his one-third part of the mill to his wife, Abigail, and after her death to his sons, John and Seth.

The remaining three-twelfths were owned by other parties. In 1829, heirs of the original owners sold the mill to Jared Gardner (1775–1842) for forty dollars. Jared was a carpenter and, according to his son Jared M. Gardner, a millwright. Gardner’s forty-dollar offer was based on his estimate of the value of the mill as firewood. In an article about the mill in the Inquirer and Mirror in 1878, Jared’s son recalled that “the condition of the mill at that time was deplorable; everything movable had been taken away, even to one vane and the lower shingles.” Once Gardner examined the solid oak-frame construction of the building, he decided to repair it and put it back in working order, and Jared M., who was then eleven years old, borrowed his father’s chisel and deepened the grooves in the date inscribed on the doorstone—1746. If the original mill was indeed a post mill, it may have been Gardner who refashioned it as a smock mill sometime around 1830. One would think that such a radical remodeling of the iconic whirligig would merit comment in the local newspaper, but no reports of construction on Mill Hill are printed; the only notice about the mill appears in 1834, when Gardner placed an advertisement in the Inquirer offering “the Eastern Grain Mill” for sale. Apparently, he had no takers. When he died in 1842, his heirs divided his estate and daughter Elizabeth G. Macy and son George C. Gardner 2nd each received one half of the “Charles Swain Mill, so called.”

Azorean Millers During the remainder of its working life in the nineteenth century, the Old Mill was in the hands of Portuguese mariners-turned-millers from Nantucket’s burgeoning community of immigrants from the Azores. The New Guinea neighborhood below the mill was home to George Enos, a mariner from Flores who in 1854 purchased the mill from Gardner’s heirs for $150. In 1865, he sold “said Mill, which has been used for Milling purposes from time immemorial” to John Murray, another Azorean mariner, from the island of Graciosa, for $850. The increase in the value of the mill during the period of Nantucket’s severe economic depression at the end of the Civil War is telling: out of necessity the island had rediscovered agriculture when whaling ended, and as the last mill in operation the Old Mill may have gained value; perhaps Enos made expensive repairs to the structure, too.

Murray must have recognized the importance of the mill, selling the property

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Historic Nantucket

a year later to Francis Sylvia, a mariner from Fayal, for $1,200.

Sylvia was the miller when Nantucket blossomed as a tourist destination, a time when visitors and locals began to tell stories about the island that mixed history and nostalgia with a heavy dose of creative invention. Tourists could wander among the fishermen’s cottages in ’Sconset, visit the philosophical old hermit in Quidnet, eat their fill of chowder, marvel at the Atheneum’s museum of curiosities from around the world, and pay homage to the scenic windmill at the edge of town. And Francis Sylvia saw where the real profit of owning a mill might lie. In 1881, he advertised: “Stereoscopic Views of the Old Mill have been issued by the subscriber, and are on sale at the mill and at his residence on Back Street. A copyright for the view has been obtained according to law, and all persons are hereby cautioned against infringing upon the same, a fine of $100 attaching to such offence.” Later, he added some Azorean items to his mill gift shop and invited his summer friends to buy souvenirs: “All Aboard. I would like to see all my friends at the Old Mill. Having arrived from Fayal with a good supply of Hats, Baskets, Feathers, Flowers, etc. would be pleased to show them if you do not buy.” Sylvia became the subject of paintings, and his photograph was taken wearing a straw hat that may have come from his home island. He owned the Old Mill for thirty years, from 1866 until he died in 1896.

When the Old Mill appeared on the auction block in August 1897, the nascent Nantucket Historical Association, founded just three years earlier, was eager to acquire the landmark structure. With a generous donation from NHA supporter Caroline L. French, a successful bid of $885 secured the mill and, according to the New York Herald (the only paper reporting the auction!), “the crowd burst into cheers.” The last mill on Nantucket—the survivor of two wars, countless storms, and periods of neglect—was saved.

After some minor repairs over the years—and major overhauls in 1930, 1936, and 1983—the mill is capable of grinding corn just as it did two hundred and fifty years ago. Believed to be the oldest American windmill in continuous operation, the Old Mill was designated an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1992.

On summer days when conditions are perfect, several strong backs are put to the task of moving the wheel attached to the long tail-pole that turns the cap of the mill, along with the vanes, into the wind—new vanes, cross-arms, and tail-pole wheel were made in 2008. Sails are attached, they begin to fill, the vanes twirl, and traffic on Prospect Street slows; cars pull over, people stop and get out, take pictures, and marvel at the historic mill performing its humble task.

» Third-Floor Plan Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Old Mill, 1936 Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

» Wheel and tail-pole, Old Mill, photograph

by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

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» Looking west on Liberty Street, The Halliday Historic Photograph Co., ca. 1890s P8790

In the mid-eighteenth century, the town of Nantucket was slowly evolving as neighborhoods were established near the

» Kitchen fireplace in lean-to addition, photograph by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

Houses and shops were built in the vicinity of the wharves that were the launching sites for whaling voyages to Newfoundland and Davis Strait and trading voyages to Philadelphia and Charleston. The Wesco Acre Lots, laid out in 1678, extended from the wetlands of Federal Street west to Gardner Street, with Liberty Street the southern bound. The island community, descended from the first English settlers and augmented by the

Great Harbor.

families of tradesmen and mariners, had grown to almost one thousand when land was set off in 1723 to Thomas Macy, a grandson of one of the original settlers of the same name, in an area called the Clay Pits—between Walnut Lane on the east and Winter Street on the west.

Thomas probably built more than one house in the area, but only one survives, a dwelling on the corner of Walnut and Liberty Streets that he deeded to his youngest son, Nathaniel (1717–83), in 1745. According to the deed of sale, Nathaniel was already living in the house, which may have been unofficially given to him when he married Abigail Pinkham (1722–1810) in 1741, or built by him sometime in the early 1740s, or, as some sources suggest, moved from the older settlement west of town and situated facing the street, rather than facing due south, a more common orientation in the early

» Macy-Christian House, photograph

eighteenth century. Liberty Street was a lively neighborhood when Thomas

by Rick Morcom, 1985 NHA-Properties-MacyChristian-4

and Abigail set up housekeeping in their modest one-and-a-half story house.

Next door to them on the corner of Winter Street (house no longer standing),

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Historic Nantucket

» George Christian, unknown photographer, ca. 1920s. A65-25

» West Elevation, Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Nathaniel Macy House, 1969 Courtesy of Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Walter Folger and his wife, Elizabeth, were beginning their large

Abishai, the youngest child of Nathaniel and Abigail,

family of exceptional children, and Abigail’s uncle, Barnabas

purchased half of the house from his mother in 1808—the

Pinkham, lived just down the street at what is now 5 Liberty.

northwest room (front right parlor), the chamber above it, and

Other early houses were scattered throughout the Wesco Acre

rights to the kitchen. He was a mariner, married to Phebe Worth,

Lots along with barns and workshops, adding noise and activity

with three children. He died the next year, followed by his mother

and the aroma of animals and nearby oil refineries.

in 1810; and his sons sold the house in 1827 after their mother

Physical evidence reveals that the much-altered house

died. Three generations of Macys had lived in the house, much

originally had a central chimney with one room on each side, plus

the same way as many of their neighbors resided in family houses

a couple of small rooms on the second level. As his family rapidly

that were passed down time and again, with family furniture and

grew, Nathaniel enlarged the house, adding the lean-to kitchen

heirlooms intact, whaling logbooks in the attic and hundred-year-

that extended across the south side and elevating the front façade

old china in the cupboard.

to a full two stories, creating the profile that exists today. Abigail

The Macy house changed hands a number of times in the

was occupied with a household that would eventually include ten

nineteenth century, remaining a residence for almost a hundred

children and Nathaniel was busy on a number of fronts as a

years after the Macy family sold it, but in 1925 it became the

merchant, or trader. His estate inventory dated 1787 reveals that

property of the Monnahanit Girls Club, and in 1929 of St. Paul’s

he owned parts of two wharves and a ropewalk, several houses,

Church for use as a parish house. In 1934, George P. Christian, an

seventy-six sheep commons and seven cow commons, and his

Episcopal minister from New York City, and his wife, Ruth,

livestock included twenty-nine sheep and lambs, two horses, and

purchased the property for their summer residence and began a

two cows. What’s most interesting, however, is the record of the

long process of restoration and renovation. Careful to retain the

furnishings of his homestead. For a man of property and a

eighteenth-century character of the parlor and keeping room on

household that at one time included twelve people, the furnishings

the first floor and the two front bedrooms upstairs, the Christians

seem meager, but most of the Macy children were grown and gone.

embraced the history of the house and filled it with antiques they

Tables and chairs (one round chair, six black chairs), two beds, a

collected throughout New England, creating a romantic

pair of drawers (dresser) and a looking glass were the main pieces

interpretation of New England colonial life.

of furniture, along with two beds, six blankets, a calico quilt, five

Ruth Christian bequeathed the Macy-Christian House and

pillow cases, andirons and other fireplace tools, kitchen

furnishings to the NHA in 1971. For many years it was open

equipment—tea kettles, six pewter plates, twelve teaspoons, pots,

seasonally as a house museum, with a portion of the dwelling

basins, trammels, a coffee pot and a spice mortar—and a small

providing rooms for NHA staff and interns. Currently, the house is

assortment of tools. No rugs, books, or paintings are listed in the

being fully restored for use as the NHA executive director’s

sparsely furnished house that was dominated by the huge walk-in

residence, an appropriate fit for the Liberty Street homestead in

fireplace with two ovens in the long, cozy kitchen and keeping

the town’s oldest neighborhood.

room on the south side of the house.

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Eunice Baxter Lawrence (1770–1859) opened the door of 4 Mill Street to a freshly painted, handsome new home.

Her three boys—Reuben, twelve;

Lawrence (1768–1827), High Sheriff for

Charles, nine; William, six—and their little

the County of Nantucket, for $2,000, a

sister, Eliza, just four years old, dashed through

price indicating that the house had

the parlors and keeping room (kitchen, dining,

features that made it somewhat above

and family room) and set off to explore the

average in value. The two-and-a-half-story

second-floor bedchambers, then carefully

house is symmetrical, with a center chimney

descended the steep winder stairs to scoot out

and a central doorway and it has

the back door to the sheltered south side of the

embellishments suitable to a substantial house

TOP LEFT: 1800 House, photograph by John McCalley, ca. 1970s

house. Occasional cart traffic clattered its way

of the era, such as paneled walls around the

ph7-72

toward the mills on the Popsquatchet Hills

fireplaces, wainscoting in the parlors, and

nearby, and the random mooing of cows and

interior wooden shutters. Unlike the

the smell of backyard oil refineries filled the

seventeenth-century Jethro Coffin house and

rear view, photograph by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

neighborhood.

the eighteenth-century Macy-Christian house,

F1798

Local housewright Richard L. Coleman had

TOP RIGHT: 1800 House

» Sampler stitched by Love half-story addition on the south side became

soon after built the house known as the 1800

the new kitchen sometime during the

House. In 1807, he sold it to Jeremiah

Lawrence family’s ownership of the property.

Historic Nantucket

»

it had four rooms on each floor. A one-and-a-

purchased land on Mill Street in 1801 and

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»

Calder, 1800 2006.27.3

» James Bunker at the fish flake

1800 House

(drying rack) and Rebecca Bunker at the pump, 1800 House, 1893 F1798

Lawrence held the office of sheriff until 1822, but all the while he

the 1800 House to the NHA. Mrs. Melhado wanted both to

was in business with a fellow “hatter,” with a shop on Old North

preserve the hundred-and-fifty-year-old house and to protect her

Wharf. Later in his career, he was a merchant advertising a

own extensive estate from drastic changes in the historic

“handsome assortment of Fancy Goods”—silk gloves, Kerseymere

neighborhood in the days before the Historic Districts Commission

shawls, figured muslins, and English ginghams—for sale in

had oversight of new construction and alterations to buildings.

exchange for cash or spermaceti candles.

And, at the time, it was a perfect fit for the NHA, which did not

Although on the outskirts of the commercial area of town, the

yet own the Hadwen House, and, according to an article in the

Lawrences were a short walk from the Court House then on Main

Inquirer and Mirror , had “for years been desirous of having a

Street near the present-day Civil War Monument and the Old Gaol

resident property of the period of the whaling prosperity, namely

not far distant on Vestal Street, where the sheriff escorted those

from about 1800 to 1850, which could be furnished appropriately.”

awaiting trial or recently convicted. Lawrence enjoyed his new

It was the era of house museums, and the NHA was happy to

house on Mill Street for twenty years, and his wife continued to live

increase its property portfolio, adding to the Quaker Meeting

there until 1856, when she sold the property to Love Calder for

House, Oldest House, Old Mill, Old Gaol, and Whaling Museum.

$700. The beginning of the end of Nantucket’s whaling-era

The house underwent a major restoration beginning in 2003,

prosperity was already felt and the value of the fifty-year-old house

and reopened as a center for Early American arts and crafts

was less than half of what it had been when new in 1807.

instruction in 2005, celebrating the rich legacy of Nantucket

Love Calder (1785–1870) was a single woman, but she may

decorative arts and artisans—like Love Calder, who stitched an

have shared her house with relatives: an 1865 census indicates that

intricate sampler in 1800, and later hung it in the parlor of the

she was head of a household that included her cousin, William

house that is now a productive classroom.

Calder, and other relatives; it was not unusual for extended family to share a dwelling on Nantucket. The NHA was fortunate to acquire a sampler stitched by Love in 1800, a testament to the kind of needlework taught on the island in Quaker schools.

Calder sold her Mill Street house to James Monroe Bunker (1818–1902) in 1865 for $300. Bunker had sailed on the Nantucket ship Aurora to California in 1849 to explore

Eleanor Ham Pony Field •

10 MILL STREET •

opportunities in the land of gold, but returned to the island. He was a carpenter by trade in an era when there was little new construction and few who could afford to make improvements or repairs on their homes. Bunker may have added the large barn that appears on the property in an 1887 map. He and his wife, Rebecca, were fixtures of Mill Street for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

In 1903, the Bunker house was sold to Leonora James, wife of Everett. The couple had a twelve-year-old daughter, Marion.

Everett died in 1914, but Leonora stayed at 4 Mill for almost fifty years, and Marion did, too, along with her husband, David W. Cahoon, and their daughter, Katherine. In 1950, Louise Melhado,

Eleanor Ham’s family’s summer home was at 8 Mill Street near a small lot of land where Eleanor kept her harness-racing pony. When she died in 1979, she left the little pony field to the NHA for the purpose of “enhancing and preserving the beauty of Mill Street.” Now one of the town’s few remaining publicly accessible green spots, the pony field recalls a time when livestock pastures and small farms were an integral part of the neighborhood’s landscape.

owner of Moors End—the large brick-walled property at 19 Pleasant Street—purchased 4 Mill Street and the next year gave

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21

William H. Chadwick

Dimly lit by natural light filtered through two ironbarred windows in the north and south walls, it featured a fireplace, built-in

was escorted up the exterior stairs to the second floor of the Old Gaol, where he had a first look at his new residence—the west cell.

bunks, and a privy. Despite the austerity of his lodging, Chadwick was relieved that his sentence could be served on Nantucket and not in Boston, where his trial for embezzlement had been held. At least here his family was nearby, and his wife and parents would make the room comfortable for him, supplying a rug for the floor, a bookshelf for his library, a table for writing and for making lightship baskets, and a rocking chair.

In 1885, Chadwick was convicted of embezzling ten thousand dollars from the Pacific National Bank, money that presumably purchased some of the materials for a grand construction project at Squam Head: a three-story

»

ABOVE LEFT: Local dignitaries

and representatives from the Massachusetts Commission on Prisons, at the Old Gaol, 1893 P7150

»

ABOVE RIGHT:

The Old Gaol, photograph by Jeff Allen, 2011 OldGaol-1

house with a large cupola, a massive stable, a barn, and other outbuildings that came to be known as “Chadwick’s Folly.” The purpose of the compound was never divulged, but it was thought to be designed for use as a summer hotel, or gentlemen’s club, or perhaps a gambling casino, and that » Chadwick’s Folly in Squam, ca. 1890s

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Historic Nantucket

P15942

Old Gaol off-island backers funded most of the development.

Chadwick’s conviction halted the project and the property was sold at auction.

In 1885, Chadwick was the sole resident of the Old Gaol, a four-cell stronghold used primarily as a lockup for those awaiting trial on criminal charges. Next door was, a “House of Correction,” or workhouse, where debtors, habitual drunkards, juveniles, and less serious malefactors could ply their trades while serving their sentences. As a felon, Chadwick was incarcerated in the more secure facility, although he, like many of the inmates over the years, had considerable freedom. Chadwick was a model prisoner, and after serving three years in his “penthouse cell” had his sentence commuted

by President Cleveland in 1888.

Bank robberies and embezzlement were, surprisingly, not uncommon on Nantucket. In

» Old Gaol and House of Correction, postcard by Louis Dormond, ca. 1950s PC-OV-oldgaol-1

1846, Barker Burnell Jr. was escorted to the second-floor west cell to await trial for

» Detail from Map of the

Mechanics Bank. His term of residence in the

Town of Nantucket in the State of Massachusetts,

by William Coffin, 1833

embezzler’s suite was considerably shorter than

MS1000-3-4-5

embezzlement from the Manufacturers and

Chadwick’s, as Burnell was found not guilty. » Old Gaol window grate, The stress of the trial and the public humiliation were too much for him, however,

photograph by Eileen Powers, 2007

and he and his family moved to Chile.

Men accused of robbing the Nantucket Bank in 1795 had escaped from a jail on High Street, an incident that prompted the town to build the more secure facility. Local housewrights John and Perez Jenkins were contracted to construct a new jail on Vestal Street, near the courthouse then situated at the juncture of Main and Milk Streets. Two stories high, with two cells on each floor, fashioned from heavy oak logs bolted and reinforced with iron, with barred windows and doors two planks thick, the new jail was essentially an iron cage within a log cabin. It was a testament to local concern about keeping criminals securely locked away.

In 1805, the jail was not in a closely built neighborhood as it is today. The keeper’s house was nearby on Vestal Street, or Prison Lane as it was known; to the west open land extended to Quaker Road, or Grave Street. Information about inmates of the jail appears in Nantucket County Court records beginning in 1806, when Paul Worron was taken to jail for failure to pay damages ($26.30) to Jeremiah Mode for breaking his finger during an

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» The Old Gaol and House of Correction, photograph by Harry Platt, ca. 1880s P4165

» Lower west cell, photograph

by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

altercation. The length of

four prisoners: two thieves (one a Frenchman, the other a

Worron’s sentence is not

fourteen-year-old boy); one debtor; and a “youth of eighteen”

known. Petty crimes,

whose crime is not recorded. The inspectors found the jail

including thievery, were

odoriferous, remarking: “Room No. 1 has a permanent vault

the most prevalent offenses on Nantucket, in about equal numbers

(privy), the unpleasant effects of which were apparent on first

to imprisonment for debt. In 1822, John Evans and James Murphy

entering the Prison, before the door of the room was opened.

were committed “to gaol in this town charged with stealing a

Rooms Nos. 2, 3, and 4, filthy from the same cause. In other

Pocket Book from Mr. Samuel Dow, while at an auction on Friday.

respects, not much cause of complaint in regard to cleanliness.”

On examination before Josiah Hussey, Esq. Murphy stated that

In 1855, the “House of Correction,” formerly a part of the

Evans took the Pocket Book from the owner’s Pocket and handed

Quaise Asylum/Town Farm in Polpis, was moved next to the jail

it to him, and that they went immediately to their lodgings and

on Vestal Street, and Sheriff Uriah Gardner was paid $50 a year as

divided the money, amounting to 40 dollars.” A later report states

overseer at the Gaol and the House of Correction. The seven

that Evans and Murphy had a copy of a biography of infamous

additional rooms were available for debtors and other offenders.

English highwayman Michael Martin in their possession, proof of

Unfortunately, in the mid-nineteenth century, as the whaling

the “pernicious effects of such publications as the lives of Martin,

industry collapsed, plenty of Nantucketers ran into financial

Samuel Greene, and others who have ended their existence upon

difficulty and were unable to pay their mortgages and promissory

the Gallows.” The duo of thieves managed to escape from the jail

notes. By the 1870s, the population of the island had dwindled to

and sail away from the island; although spotted by a passing sloop,

a third of what it had been in the 1840s, and there was little crime.

they were not apprehended.

In fact, the jail was empty from 1870 to 1876. When the

The Board of Managers of the Prison Discipline Society (Boston) inspected the Nantucket facility in October 1833, noting

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Historic Nantucket

Legislative Prison Committee visited Nantucket in 1883, it recommended abolishing both the jail and the house of correction,

Old Gaol

» Details of First-Floor Vestibule, and Elevations, Historic American Buildings Survey drawings of the Old Gaol, 1935 Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

» Old Gaol exterior door, photograph by Eileen Powers, 2007

but enough islanders signed a petition to preserve the increasingly

lower east cell was purportedly used to store confiscated liquor and

archaic lockup, and the town continued to use it without making

homemade stills and accoutrements. The last prisoner hit the

any significant alterations to the original structure. The

keeper over the head and escaped in 1933, and the building sat

Massachusetts Board of Prison Commissioners reported in 1902:

empty for more than a decade, until the Town of Nantucket

The buildings here remain as a curiosity in prison architecture.

There was one prisoner in custody at the close of the year, the same as last year. During the year the keeper reports that there was one prisoner for one day; one for three days, held to be transported to a prison on the mainland; and one held for fourteen days, awaiting trial. As far as the chair is concerned, there is very little criminal business on Nantucket.

deeded the jail and the adjacent House of Correction to the Nantucket Historical Association in 1946. The NHA noted in its Annual Report for 1946 that the buildings were falling into disrepair, “. . . and it would have been a matter of only a few years before they would become ruins.” Restoration and repair were begun, and the Old Gaol opened

Saved again, and again

for public viewing in the summer of 1949.

Twelve years later, the Commission made the same

The House of Correction was not part of the

recommendation as the 1883 Legislative Prison Committee, to

exhibit, and was razed in 1954.

discontinue the use of the jail as a penal institution: “It is unfit and

Far off the beaten path behind a hawthorn

unsuited in every way for the confinement of human beings. . . .

tree in a fenced yard, the Old Gaol is a stark

The authorities should see to it that both the jail and the house of

reminder of the less celebratory side of

correction are promptly disposed of in such manner that they can

Nantucket life in the nineteenth century. The

never again be used for confining purposes, for they are entirely

sturdy building served the community for more than a hundred

unsuited in every way to that purpose.” And once again, the town

years, and remains a stronghold after a hundred more. Restored in

ignored the recommendations. Occasionally, a malefactor spent a

the spring of 2014 with community, state, and national grant

night or two in one of the cells. During Prohibition (1920–33) the

funding, this unique structure may well last another century or two.

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Eunice Coffin Macy

Eunice had inherited the eighteenth-century Valentine Swain house on upper Main Street from her father, Zenas, in 1828. It was in a

(1788–1843) was pleased to move from her husband Thomas’s rather modest home on Summer Street to a greatly expanded and beautified house at 99 Main Street.

prime location at the “Court End” of town, directly across from a large Quaker Meeting House at the corner of Main and Pleasant, and near the Court House on the corner of Milk Street, but it was no more stylish than their house on Summer Street. By 1832, she and Thomas were remodeling, creating an elegant house that almost replicated her sister Lydia Coffin Crosby’s house at 90 Main. It would establish the Macys as one of the leading families of the neighborhood, joining all of Eunice’s siblings who had built new homes or, like Thomas and Eunice, remodeled old ones in the early 1830s: Henry and Charles G. Coffin at 75 and 78 Main Street; Henry Swift (Mary Coffin’s widower) at 91 Main Street; Matthew Crosby (Lydia Coffin’s widower) at 90 Main Street; and Matthew and Lydia’s daughter, Ann Crosby, at 86 Main Street. The Coffins claimed Main Street a decade before Joseph Starbuck’s

» Costume study at the Thomas Macy house, photograph by H. Marshall Gardiner, ca. 1920s P1966

children moved into the Three Bricks and the Two Greeks.

Nantucket was thriving economically, and the Quaker influence being much less pervasive than it had been in the previous century, islanders were

» Thomas Macy house, photograph

by Jeff Allen, 2012 99Main-1

more open to influences from abroad. Local architecture of the 1830s and 1840s reflects cosmopolitan tastes, translated and interpreted by local builders.

Eunice and Thomas, along with teenage sons Isaac and Phillip, and little Mary Macy born in 1828, moved into the new house in 1833. With his business

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Historic Nantucket

Thomas Macy House

partner, brother Peter Macy, Thomas owned a candle factory, a cooper shop, and a large warehouse on Straight Wharf as well as shares in a number of whaling vessels. An active man of means and a town leader, Thomas Macy also found time, in his later years anyway, to enjoy his home and family. In a letter written to his daughter Mary in January 1857 (she and husband Valentine Hussey were living in New York)Thomas describes time spent during a harbor freeze-up.

It is a comfort however to be able to say that we are all well and bright, lacking nothing – I have a plenty of tobacco and Mother has cider enough for mince pies, and what more can we ask?

Later in the same letter he mentions the low temperature of eleven degrees below zero on January 24, and the condition of his greenhouse, an addition to his property that is no longer standing: “Our Green House is buried up

» Main Street, from Philip Macy’s, photograph by C. H. Shute & Son, ca. 1860s P8768

with snow and Charles has succeeded in keeping the plants free from frost.” It is easy

» South Elevation,

day, while someone else scrambled to keep

Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Thomas Macy House, 1987

the fires lit in the greenhouse stove.

Courtesy of Library of

to imagine the distinguished gentleman smoking his pipe and writing on a wintry

Mary Macy Hussey inherited the house

Congress Prints and Photographs Division

at 99 Main from her father in 1864; she lived with her husband, Valentine, in Factoryville on Staten Island, New York, so did not occupy the house, and in fact sold it to her stepbrothers Isaac and Philip in 1871. Philip and his wife, Susan, lived there for thirty years, and after them, their daughter Mary Eliza Macy became a fixture of

» The Macy Dining Room, Nantucket, colored print of watercolor by Edgar W. Jenney, ca. 1930s.

Gift of Miss Mary Turlay Robinson. 74.37.2

upper Main Street for another thirty years. By the end of her life she appears to have become a walking anachronism: As the years went on leaving her in an ever-increasing loneliness, gradually, in spite of herself and her distaste for notoriety, she became a conspicuous figure in the social life of the town, for although gently tolerant towards changing conditions, she was never in the least modernized.

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» Second-Floor

Mary Eliza bequeathed her family home with all its furnishings and contents to Ella H. Still of Passaic, New Jersey, the youngest child of her aunt Mary Macy Hussey, wife of Valentine. Mary Eliza Macy was eighty-six years old when she died in 1931; her cousin, Ella H. Still, was twenty years her junior, with two married daughters, Mrs. Francis Biggs and Mrs. Lester Troast. One wonders about the condition of the house after Mary Eliza’s long tenure; her resistance to modernization probably ensured that the house was not much changed on the interior from its original appearance, with perhaps the addition of modern plumbing and

Chamber of Macy House, watercolor and graphite on paper by Edgar W. Jenney, ca. 1930s 89.142.16

» East Elevation, Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Thomas Macy House, 1987 Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and

heating. Unfortunately, there is only one interior photograph of the house prior to 1930.

Photographs Division

Exterior photographs, as well as Sanborn Insurance Company maps, show that the exterior of the house remained unchanged except for a few minor alterations.

Ella’s daughters, Mrs. Biggs and Mrs. Troast, inherited the house, which they sold two years later to Flora K. Todd of Easton, Maryland. The Todds had been summer residents of Nantucket for several years previous to their purchase of the property; their tenure at the house was brief. A notice of the purchase of the Macy house in 1945 states: Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Todd, who have been summer residents of Nantucket for several years, have purchased the Thomas Macy House on Main Street. Known to artists and architects as the house with “the beautiful doorway,” this typical Nantucket dwelling of the early 1800s has been sketched and photographed more than any other island house, with the possible exception of the Oldest House on Sunset Hill. . . . Mr. and Mrs. Todd are deeply interested in Nantucket and are happy to be the new owners of this fine old island dwelling.

The Todds sold 99 Main to Jacqueline Garda Stephens Harris (1892–1979) two years later.

Jacqueline had first visited Nantucket with her husband, Julian, in 1925. In the early 1930s, the Harrises built a summer home on the north shore of Nantucket at Dionis, perched on the bluff in what was then a remote area of the island. Later in her life, after she had been a widow for many years, Jacqueline purchased 99 Main Street, which would be her home until she died there in 1979 at the age of eighty-seven. In 1965, she welcomed the Historic American Buildings Survey to 99 Main. The report on alterations and additions to the house mentions nothing after Thomas Macy’s major alteration in the 1830s, so any changes made subsequently were either considered minor or occurred after 1965.

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Historic Nantucket

» Jacqueline Stevens Harris, photograph

by Louis Davidson, ca. 1950s P430a

Thomas Macy House

» Sallie Gail Harris Tupancy, oil on canvas by unknown artist, 1937 95.319.1

» Oswald A. Tupancy, oil on canvas by Elmer Wesley Greene, 1956 95.320.1

Jacqueline’s daughter, Sallie Gail Harris Tupancy, and husband, Oswald (“Tup”), inherited the Thomas Macy house and made it

Thomas Macy Warehouse •

12 STRAIGHT WHARF | 1846 •

their home, with the understanding that it was Jacqueline’s wish that the property eventually be donated to the Nantucket Historical Whale-oil merchants needed warehouses to store Association. Oswald observed that the absence of an endowment for not only casks of oil but all manner of items and the NHA’s Hadwen House was the reason that maintenance and equipment, including ships’ supplies and general repairs were not always timely, and he had no intention of subjecting merchandise. Thomas Macy (of 99 Main Street) 99 Main Street to the same fate. He set up the Tupancy-Harris built his warehouse on Straight Wharf after the Foundation of 1986, which provides funds for the permanent Great Fire of 1846 burned the wharves and maintenance of the Thomas Macy house. All costs associated with commercial heart of town. Heeding the cautionary the house—from major repairs to insurance, landscaping, and tale of that conflagration, Macy chose to build this cleaning—are provided by the foundation. fine example of Greek Revival industrial architecture In 1987, the NHA became the owner of the Macy house. After of brick. After the decline of whaling, Joseph B. repairs and improvements to house and grounds, a plan for the use of Macy ran a number of businesses, including a ship the house was formulated. A staff apartment was created in the chandlery, from the warehouse and in the early second-floor ell and the first-floor kitchen was expanded to make it twentieth century, a carpenter’s shop was located suitable for catering large gatherings. The Thomas Macy House there. The Nantucket Foundation purchased the became the NHA’s site for gracious entertaining and building in 1944 and the Artists Association of accommodation; visiting scholars and lecturers are provided with Nantucket operated the Kenneth Taylor Galleries in lodging there, and the small apartment has provided housing for the space. Forty years later, the NHA acquired the various staff members over the years. Thanks to the foresight of building from the Nantucket Foundation. In a prime Jacqueline Harris and her daughter and son-in-law, the house that was location on Straight Wharf, the warehouse is fashioned into its Federal-style grandeur by sophisticated Quaker currently rented for commercial use, the income businessman Thomas Macy has been preserved—in a streetscape of providing funds for continuing maintenance. equally stately homes—by an organization dedicated to the study and appreciation of Nantucket’s unique history.

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In 1838, John Boadle

The two-story hip-roof building was simple but functional, with a central door on the east side facing Fair Street, two

opened the door to the new Friends Academy on Fair Street, pleased to have such a handsome purpose-built structure as his

windows at the second floor level, and a chimney in the middle of the roof near the east end of the building; from the front side it looked like a child’s drawing of a house. Plenty of windows on the north and south sides allowed light into the long schoolrooms: on the first floor were the desks of the older scholars, while upstairs the primary students were instructed by Boadle’s assistant. An Englishman by birth, Boadle had

schoolhouse.

been recommended for the job on Nantucket by Philadelphia Friends, and he arrived on Nantucket ready for the challenge. John, as he had his students call him, settled in—becoming one of the most beloved teachers in the history of island schools—and made the Fair Street schoolhouse his scholastic kingdom for almost twenty years.

Next to the schoolhouse stood a large meeting house built to serve the orthodox Quakers in 1833 after one of the early schisms in the

» A few Nantucket Friends, 1887 Gift of David Austin, F6175

» John Boadle (ca. 1805–78), carte de visite

by G. W. Pach, New York, ca. 1860s P1005

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Historic Nantucket

» Quaker Meeting House and Research Library, photograph by Eileen Powers, 2007

Quaker Meeting House & Fair Street Museum

» Friends Meeting House, Nantucket, photograph by H. S. Wyer, ca. 1880s GPN4313

Society of Friends. Records show that James Weeks built the meeting house, and he may have built the schoolhouse five

» Quaker Meeting House and Fair Street Museum, photograph by John McCalley, ca. 1950s P7515

the faithful left on the island.

In 1894, the meeting house was available for purchase. Many in the

years later. The Fair Street meeting house was larger than the

community were unaware of the history of the building, prompting

Main Street meeting house, which later became a straw-hat

Henry S. Wyer to write a letter to the editor of the Inquirer and

factory and permutated through several other adaptations before

Mirror and lay out the facts, summing up with the statement,

settling as the core of the Dreamland Theatre. By the 1860s, the

“Thus it is evident that the building was identified with the

number of Quakers on island had diminished, rendering the large

Friends for about 54 years, and is to all intents a landmark and a

Fair Street structure of questionable usefulness; it was dismantled

relic of them which should be preserved to futurity.” The

and shipped to Dennisport on Cape Cod, where it was

Nantucket Historical Association had recently been organized in

reassembled and used as a school until it burned down in 1930.

May 1894, and members were actively searching for a “suitable

John Boadle married Hanna Heaton of Plattekill, New York, in

place in which to store and exhibit the donations and loans of

the Quaker Meeting House in 1854. Soon after, he left Nantucket

antique and historical articles, which already began to come in.”

to teach in New Bedford, and his able assistant, Hepsibeth Hussey,

Their June 25 meeting was held in the Friends Meeting House on

continued the school, but in a new location at the corner of

Fair Street and new president, Dr. J. Sidney Mitchell,

Charter and Fair Streets. The schoolhouse at 7 Fair Street, a better

recommended buying the building in which the meeting was held,

size for a small population of island Friends, was reconfigured as a

“. . . as an old and valuable landmark which would serve

meeting house in 1865. Two thirds of the second floor was

temporarily as the headquarters of the society, and the Council was

removed, leaving a balcony at the east end; simple bench pews

authorized to purchase the same at once.” And so the Quaker

saved from the old 1833 meeting house were added to the first

Meeting House, formerly John Boadle’s schoolhouse, became the

floor; and a raised platform with bench seating at the west end of

first building owned by the NHA, a place for meetings and for

the room accommodated the elders. For almost three decades, the

storing the donations that rapidly accumulated.

old schoolhouse-turned-meeting house served as the site of quiet Quaker contemplation, but eventually there was only a handful of

Just three years after its inception, the association recognized the need for safe storage of the treasures in its care. Mary E.

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Quaker Meeting House & Fair Street Museum

Starbuck, recording secretary of the NHA, wrote in her 1897 report: “More than anything, we need a fireproof

» East Elevation,

purposes, and when we have such an

Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Quaker Meeting House, 1969

addition many valuable relics will come

Courtesy of Library of

building. We have land enough at the rear of the Meeting-house for a brick extension of sufficient size for our

back to the island. They have already

Congress Prints and Photographs Division

been promised and for many reasons it seems expedient to claim them as soon as possible.”

In 1897, the association made a pivotal decision. Rather than buying and “fitting up” a whaleship, an idea that was briefly considered but deemed too expensive, it was voted that the fund accumulating for that purpose be converted to a fund for “the most pressing need of the Association—the erection of a fire-proof building.” Instead of brick, concrete was chosen as the building material by architect George W. Watson of Boston. Concrete was not a new material, in fact it was used in ancient Rome for constructing aqueducts, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, but after the fall of the Roman Empire the art of making concrete was lost until rediscovered in the eighteenth century; it was used widely in Europe, particularly in France in the nineteenth century. The first American landmark building using reinforced concrete, the William E. Ward House, or Ward’s

» Quaker Meeting House as NHA headquarters, 1894–1904 P3414

Castle, was constructed in Port Chester, New York, in the 1870s; a concrete street was created in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1891;

» First Floor Plan, Historic American

Harvard Stadium was made of concrete in 1903, and the first

Buildings Survey drawing of the Quaker Meeting House, 1969

concrete skyscraper was being built in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1904.

Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints

News of that achievement came to Nantucket, and persuaded

and Photographs Division

Henry S. Wyer, vice-president of the NHA, to use the relatively inexpensive aggregate material for the proposed fireproof building. In 1904, one of the country’s early concrete buildings took shape behind the Quaker Meeting House. Frank Lloyd Wright would follow suit in 1905, with his famous Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois.

The collection of artifacts and documents that had been growing for ten years was moved from the Quaker Meeting House to the new fireproof building, a task that “engrossed the whole

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Historic Nantucket

time and efforts of our working officials during the past year, and a most strenuous year’s work for Curator and assistants . . .” wrote curator Susan E. Brock in 1905. She was happy to report that the most satisfactory part of the whole project was the restoration of the old meeting house to its former condition, as it appeared when the association purchased it in 1894, adding, “We hope to be able to preserve it forever, in its Quaker simplicity, as a type of the places of worship of our ancestors.”

The NHA has done just that, and the Quaker Meeting House looks today very much the way it did in 1864. The attached fireproof building was for years known as the Fair Street Museum, the primary exhibition space of the association, with collections arranged in a “cabinet of curiosities” style on both floors of the building.

» NHA collections in the Quaker Meeting House, photograph by Henry S. Wyer, before 1904 P9326

The Fair Street Museum was the heart of the NHA, overflowing with everything from arrowheads to manuscripts, along with larger items like furniture and hose carts. The addition of the Whaling Museum (1930) and the Peter Foulger Museum (1971) to the NHA campus allowed for

» North Elevation, Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Quaker Meeting House, 1969

the gradual emptying of the building and opened it up for special

Courtesy of Library of Congress

exhibitions, particularly art, but it was a property that needed rethinking

Prints and Photographs Division

to better suit the mission of the association. And that’s what happened at the end of the twentieth century, when plans to make it a state-of-the-art research library were formulated.

Now, for more than a decade, the little 1904 concrete building has been the site for the active study, preservation, and promulgation of the island’s rich history.

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William Hadwen stood at

His stature as a businessman and philanthropist was already known to most of the community, and this Greek-

the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets and watched the men frame his new house, the edifice that would announce to the town that he was a wealthy man with

cosmopolitan tastes.

revival-style mansion would provide him and his wife, Eunice Starbuck, with grand accommodations for entertaining the island elite. And it would complement the three houses built across the street by Eunice’s father, Joseph, for her three younger brothers.

William and Eunice had been sharing the house at 100 Main Street with Nathaniel and Eliza Barney since 1829, when the two men bought the house together. Theirs was a partnership not only in real estate, but in business, and they were cousins married to Starbuck sisters. Eliza,

» Hadwen House, 2007, photograph

by Eileen Powers

» Hadwen House, 1928

the younger of the sisters, married Nathaniel Barney in

F4453

1820. At their wedding, Eunice met Nathaniel’s cousin, William

» Section D-D, Historic American Buildings Survey

Hadwen, a young silversmith

drawing of the Hadwen House, 1978 Courtesy of

from Newport, Rhode Island.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Two years later, William and

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Historic Nantucket

Hadwen House Eunice married, and although William established a jewelry and silver business on Nantucket, he soon realized that the real gold of Nantucket was whale oil. He and Barney pooled their resources and bought the house at 100 Main, which included a candle factory on the property, and they established the firm Hadwen & Barney, whale-oil merchants. Nantucket’s whaling industry was at its peak of prosperity in the 1820s and ’30s, and the men amassed small fortunes.

Now, in 1845, William and Eunice Hadwen were building two houses—their own just two

» Eunice Starbuck Hadwen, foil on panel, unknown artist, ca. 1830s.

Gift of Mrs. Eunice S. Barney Swain, 1915.23.1

doors away from their housemates, and an equally impressive companion house at 94 Main where various family members, including

» William Hadwen, oil on canvas by William Willard, ca. 1850 1905.38.1

Nathaniel and Eliza, would live.

With their colonnaded porticoes, the houses look like Greek temples. Enclosed by a common fence and sharing a rear garden, the pair made a family compound like no other, as impressive—if not more so—as the Three Bricks across the street, which were part of the family, too. What led William Hadwen to build such opulent houses in a style that was dramatically different from the ubiquitous shingled Quaker houses and the sedate Georgian bricks of the neighborhood can only be surmised. His personal taste—formed in Newport—was obviously incompatible with the local aesthetic, and Eunice, if she had so desired, was not successful in talking him out of his architectural experiment. Local tradition tells us that Hadwen hired selftaught Nantucket architect Frederick Brown Coleman to design and oversee the building of the houses. Other buildings attributed to Coleman include the First Baptist Church (1840); the portico of the Methodist Church (1840), and the Nantucket Atheneum (1847).

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Hadwen House The Hadwen House is situated on elevated ground atop a high foundation, both for the imposing visual effect, and to allow for a basement-level kitchen and informal dining room. Instead of the massive central chimney of earlier island architecture, four endchimneys provide fireplaces in the four rooms on each of the upper two floors. A double parlor separated by sliding doors is on the west side of the first floor along Pleasant Street, directly above the kitchen and informal dining room below. On the east side of the central hallway with its elegant stairway is a formal parlor that originally extended the full length of the house but was later reduced to allow for a first-floor kitchen.

» Rear view of 96 and

Four bedchambers are on the

94 Main Street, ca.

1890s F252

second floor. For all its massive appearance from the street, the

» Northwest Elevation,

house is not particularly

Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of the Hadwen House, 1978

commodious by today’s standards, but well-attended entertainments were held there in the nineteenth

Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and

century. On December 23, 1847,

Photographs Division

Susan Gardner of Nantucket wrote, “Last evening I was at the sewing circle at Mr. Hadwen’s new house. We had a very pleasant time and they have a very beautiful house. There were about one hundred persons there to tea and about double that number in the evening.”

William and Eunice had no children, but Eunice took several young women under her wing, offering a very personal “finishing” school. She wrote to her niece, Dorcas Hadwen Lee, in 1845 that she felt amply repaid for all she had done for one of those young ladies “if she would in any degree compare with two very superior women whose characters I had had some hand in forming and whose society I have had a great deal of enjoyment from.”

William had his protégés, too: young boys named for him— William Hadwen Starbuck; William Hadwen Lee; Hadwen

» Costumed women and children on Hadwen House steps, hand-tinted photograph by H. Marshall Gardiner, ca. 1920s 64.28.4

Draper; Hadwen Swain; and William Hadwen Barney, his greatnephew, son of Joseph, who grew up at 100 Main Street with parents Nathaniel and Eliza. Joseph was the only son of Hadwen’s partner and cousin, and he inherited his uncle’s house at 96 Main when Eunice died two years after her husband, in 1864.

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Historic Nantucket

Joseph Barney owned the Hadwen House from 1864 to 1905. He was married to Malinda Swain, and they had four children. Like the Hadwens, the Barneys entertained. An extant seating chart from a gathering in 1874 depicts an outsized oval table with forty seats designated, plus seven side tables seating two to five people each, and a sofa seating four—all in one long room on the east side of the house. Imagine the women in their full skirts, the mirrors and chandeliers reflecting the gaslight, trifles and syllabubs served all round. A newspaper report of the event—a reception in honor of Miss Mary F. Eastman, a supporter of woman suffrage who had just lectured at the Atheneum— described the setting: The spacious parlors were grand reception rooms for a polite company. . . . Sparkling with light, every corner was a charming niche where delighted visitors waited for their chances for an introduction to the gifted woman thus publicly honored. . . . To the sound of a tripping march on the piano by Miss Susie Starbuck, at the cordial invitation of Mr. Barney, all entered the supper room. The long tables stretched away—I had almost said into viewless space— covered with linen that rivaled the snow-wreaths in purity.

Massive silver urns, breathing with the riches of flavored contents; viands, cakes in frost, meats, tempting delicacies, assorted with exquisite taste; to speak of the tables flanked with crystal dishes literally quivering with things palatable; and over all, blazing chandeliers, whose beams flecked silver and glass.

» Dining Room of the Hadwen-Satler House, watercolor and graphite on paper, by Edgar W. Jenney, ca. 1930s 98.1028.1

» The Hadwen House, handtinted photograph

by H. Marshall Gardiner, ca. 1920s 64.28.6

Satler Additions In 1923, heirs of Joseph and Malinda Barney sold their grandparents’ house to Charles E. Satler of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Satler and his wife, Maria, were summer residents of Nantucket, along with their daughter, Jean, and son, Karl. They expanded the house with a two-story addition across the southwest side of the building, creating a breakfast room on the first floor behind the double parlor, an expanded bedroom on the second floor, plus a laundry room in the basement. The grand house was the Satler

» Southeast Elevation, Historic American Buildings

summer home for more than forty years. Jean Satler

Survey drawing of the Hadwen House, 1978

Williams, who was comfortably ensconced in her own

Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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Hadwen & Barney Oil and Candle Factory • 13 BROAD STREET

|

1847 •

As the largest whale-oil manufacturing firm on the island, Hadwen & Barney owned several oil and candle factories over the years, beginning with the one behind their shared house at 100 Main Street. In 1848, they purchased the oil and candle factory building on Broad Street at the head of New North Wharf (now Steamboat Wharf) built by Richard Mitchell & Sons in 1847, a year after the Great Fire swept through the area. The new Greek Revivalstyle industrial building (similar to the Thomas Macy

» 96 Main Street, ca. 1890s

GPN2095

Warehouse on Straight Wharf) was originally part of a complex of buildings devoted to oil processing and candle manufacturing. The only remaining spermaceti lever press in the world is in the building.

After the whaling industry failed, the building was used as a warehouse, and much later, as an antiques shop. In 1929, it was purchased by the Nantucket Historical Association and debuted as the original Whaling Museum in 1930, a select site for the display of a whaleboat, whalecraft, and other relics of the industry. The candle factory building was connected to the 1971 Peter Foulger Museum in 2005 as part of the new, expanded Whaling Museum that now presents the candle factory as an industrial site featuring the massive lever press and as the core of expanded exhibition spaces.

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Historic Nantucket

house across the street in the West Brick (97 Main), inherited the Greek-revival mansion in 1962, when her mother died. The next year she made a charitable gift of the property, and furnishings, to the Nantucket Historical Association as a memorial to the Satler family.

Beginning in 1964, the Hadwen House was opened to the public as a house museum, furnished as the Satlers left it. A major refurbishing took place in the 1990s, restoring the interior to a closer approximation of its mid-nineteenth-century appearance, with wallpaper, floor coverings, and furnishings appropriate for the home of a wealthy couple who weren’t averse to being stylish. The prominently situated iconic house reminds us of the privileged lives of Nantucket’s whale-oil magnates during the height of prosperity in the whaling era, when the prospect for continued success was still rosy and no one could imagine life on the island without whaling as the driving force at the center of it all.

Calamitous fire

In fact, concerned Nantucketers purchased their first fire

was a constant threat in a

engines were purchased, as well as ladders, leather buckets, hoses, and hose carts.

engine for eighteen pounds sterling in 1750. Over the next century, additional Regardless of careful preparation and best intentions, including a town ordinance

town of closely built

prohibiting smoking in the street, fires happened. In 1836, a blaze broke out on

wooden houses

lower Main Street at the Washington House, an inn and dwelling, and spread to several other buildings in the vicinity before it was extinguished by fire companies

near refineries and warehouses full of

oil.

pumping water from a cistern installed in 1833 in the lower Main Street square. Two years later, Joseph James’s ropewalk, situated between Union and Washington Streets, caught fire. The neighborhood included numerous oil and candle factories and oil-storage sheds,

» The Hose Cart House, 1963

P4408

» View of the Fire in Main Street,

all highly combustible, resulting in an area burnt “as bare as the beach.” More than a hundred people lost

Nantucket, May 10, 1836, colored lithograph by E. F. Starbuck, 1836.

businesses and homes.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Sandsbury,

1838, after the disastrous ropewalk fire. Twenty firewards

The Nantucket Fire Department was established in

1896.128.1

were elected and they in turn appointed men to manage » Charles G. Coffin’s fire bucket, painted leather. Gift of Alden Roys, 89.123.1

the engines and other equipment that was in readiness in small fire houses throughout the town. Despite the new

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Fire Hose Cart House

organization, the worst conflagration in the town’s history—the Great Fire—broke out on the night of July 13, 1846, in Geary’s Hat Shop on Main Street. With the aid of a fresh sea breeze, the fire quickly jumped from building to building, spreading west to Centre Street and north all the way past Broad Street to Ash and Sea Streets. One third of the island’s buildings were destroyed, eight hundred islanders were left homeless, and all along the waterfront the fire, violently fueled by burning whale oil and tar, leveled wharves, counting houses, ropewalks, sail lofts, warehouses, and cooper shops. Afterwards, only a few brick sentinels remained, among them the Rotch warehouse (Pacific Club), Pacific Bank, and Jared Coffin House.

A continued dread of fire led to the creation of more cisterns

» Map of That Section of the Town of Nantucket, Which Was Destroyed by Fire on the Night of 13th July, 1846, drawn

by S. H. Jenks Jr., 1846 MS1000-4-3-11

and more fire companies. Hand-pump engines were eventually replaced by steam engines in 1896, and finally, in 1923, the town purchased a motorized fire engine. Hydrants were introduced in

plans to buy two vehicles and suggested “to reimburse the town

1882 by the Wannacomet Water Company.

for the cost of these two cars, I would recommend the sale of the

The Fire Hose Cart House at the corner of Gardner and

building and land on Gardner Street which is no longer needed

Howard Streets is the last of the neighborhood fire houses on

by the Fire Department for any purpose.” The property was then

Nantucket, situated in a densely populated part of town that was

auctioned to satisfy the more pressing needs of the department

remote from hydrants but not far from the cistern located at the

and purchased by neighbor Frank Bartlett. His daughter, Edith

corner of Main and Bloom Streets. Built in 1886 to house Engine

M. Bartlett, gave the building to the NHA in 1960.

No. 6 (“Cataract”) and hose cart No. 8, the little Greek Revival-

For many years the little fire house on Gardner Street has

style building cost the town $412.62 to construct. The Cataract

exhibited artifacts of firefighting on Nantucket. In 2012, the site

was retired around the time the NHA opened the fireproof

was completely restored and newly interpreted to provide visitors

building on Fair Street in 1904, and was exhibited there as an

with a greater understanding of how fires have shaped the history

example of early firefighting equipment. Thereafter, hose carts

of the town and how the town has worked to prevent and

were stored in the Gardner Street building, specifically hose carts

contain them. The Cataract, for which the fire house was

no. 7 and no. 10, as specified on the quarterboard that once hung

constructed, was recently restored and is on display.

above the double doors. By 1931, the hose cart house and the firefighting equipment it stored were obsolete. The fire chief had

» Pumper with hose cart attached, ca. 1910s P13138

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Historic Nantucket

The house now known as Greater Light was formerly grocer William Holland’s barn and dates back to the late eighteenth century, when it was owned by Richard Macy, son of Zaccheus.

It was spotted by two artistic Quaker sisters from Philadelphia, Gertrude and Hanna Monaghan, in the summer of 1929, when they followed a herd of cows up Main Street and out of curiosity continued their pursuit down what was then called Bull Lane, but is now a part of Howard Street. The cows disappeared into a massive barn, the sisters followed, and their moment of inspiration occurred. They were immediately enthralled with the old barn, situated just a block away from the formal houses that lined Main and Gardner Streets, but ancient and rural in character. Grocer William Holland sold the barn to Gertrude and Hanna, who

»

»

ABOVE LEFT: Great room, ca. 1930s.

enthusiastically began planning

Gift of James E. Bullock P20201

their transformation of the

ABOVE RIGHT: Greater Light restored,

photograph by Jeff Allen, 2012 GreaterLight-14

livestock habitat into a summer home and art studio unlike anything else on the island.

» Gertrude, Hanna, and parents, ca. 1930s.

Collectors of cast-off

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. James Bullock P16953

architectural elements— including iron gates, gilded

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Greater Light columns, odd windows, and bits and pieces of trim and embellishment—the Monaghan sisters were scavengers with pocketbooks, partially funded by their indulgent parents, James and Anna Monaghan, who were joint owners of the barn property with their daughters. Gertrude, the elder sister, fortytwo years old in 1929, was an artist who had studied in Philadelphia and abroad. She was well established as a muralist in Philadelphia where she had applied her talents to the walls of several large department stores and private homes. Her artistic sister Hanna, ten years younger, was an actress and author as well. The family was well-to-do, talented, well educated, and somewhat nontraditional for its time and place. Gertrude and Hanna Monaghan chose to devote their lives to art, as an expression of their faith. They were Quakers, but of a decidedly different mold from the earlier Quaker population of Nantucket.

Rather than rejecting art, they embraced it. Gertrude attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and won several awards, including a European Travel Fellowship. At home, she and Hanna created a studio that was their first building project: they first made a drawing of a room above their kitchen, then created a scale model, hired a carpenter, and supervised the project. The result was a cross between a workshop and a chapel, and set the stage for their Nantucket barn project.

And what a project it was! Back in Philadelphia, over the winter, the sisters made a carefully planned cardboard model of their vision for the barn. It included the perfect location for a pair of twelvefoot-high wrought-iron gates that Hanna had purchased the previous spring, on a whim. The massive gates had been reposing in a junkyard near the city, their origin unknown; when Hanna left a deposit for them, her plan for their use was another

Âť Transverse Section, Preservation Institute: Nantucket, 1996, Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of Greater Light Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Âť Gertrude Monaghan, ca. 1910s.

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. James Bullock P21297

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unknown, but they were a work of art, and she recognized their intrinsic value. As it turned out, the height from the edge of the barn roof to the garden on the east side was exactly twelve feet, the sort of fortuitous circumstance that seemed to flow naturally during the course of the renovation.

Pieces fit. Stained-glass windows were wished for; they were found. Wrought-iron balconies were desirable; the sisters drove by a building in Philadelphia that was being demolished and spied just the ones they envisioned, ripe for the picking. Each of these elements was replicated in tiny pieces of cardboard and added to the model, which began to take final shape.

Eclectic Harmony One of the most remarkable features of the house, the fireplace in the great room, was designed by the sisters to have a circular raised hearth with an opening seven feet high. The antithesis of the traditional Nantucket fireplace, it was conical and stuccoed, with gold pillars supporting the mantel. The door to the balcony over the patio—where there had formerly been a pigpen— was made of four church windows fitted together in redpainted frames, and the north wall was almost entirely taken up by a gigantic nine-paned studio window, also fashioned from individual church windows. All of these features, as well as an interior balcony that would allow access from a thirdfloor bedroom to the original hayloft door, were thoughtfully » Fireplace in great room, ca. 1930s. considered, drawn to scale, and cut and pasted onto the

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. James Bullock P20100

model, which Hanna put in a hatbox and transported to Nantucket. The reaction of Magloire (Mack) Paradis, their

» Greater Light garden, ca. 1930s.

island carpenter, to this whimsical, dainty rendition of their

Gift of James E. Bullock P20097

future summer home was recorded by Hanna in her memoir: “Well,” he said dryly, “I would suggest that you tear the barn down and I can build you something new and much nicer.

» Fixed Gate at Patio, Preservation Institute: Nantucket, 1996, Historic American Buildings Survey drawing of Greater Light Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

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Greater Light “And,” he added, “it will be cheaper, too.”

True to their inner vision and trusting in their plan, the sisters persevered. Every element of every room in the house was designed by them, with carefully selected handcrafted pieces—from door latches to windows and iron balconies—fitted in. It was a labor of love, soon to be furnished and decorated with the same astute aesthetic. What the sisters created was an intensely personal environment made up of widely disparate parts that came together with harmony in the three-dimensional collage that was their home.

As the renovation of the barn neared completion, the sisters turned their attention to the garden, which required imagination and faith, qualities they had in abundance.

Hanna recounts their contemplation of the old farmyard:

» Detail from Greater Light Patio,

As we sat in our patio and surveyed its surroundings, I said, “A patio must have a garden, a green grassy room under the sky.” The grilles seemed rather ludicrous as we looked beyond them into the pile of ashes. A more hopeless sight could not be imagined. “We know nothing about planning or planting a garden,” I said to Gertrude as we surveyed the dump around us.

watercolor by M. Pitcher, ca. 1930s 87.28.1

Although it is now hard to imagine Greater Light without the garden that is an integral part of their outdoor room, it was

» Hanna’s bedroom, photograph

by Terry Pommett, 1986 P9809

another huge project for the sisters, and one they approached with their usual faith in serendipity. They had heard of a lady gardener who lived on Main Street, someone locally renowned for her talent in garden design and her knowledge of flowers. The woman appeared on their doorstep, fortuitously of course, and offered to advise them, first suggesting that they use the large stones from the cellar, now in the rubble pile around the ash pit, to build a garden wall, and then to plant irises and other blooms in the chinks of the rocks. Although the town was still full of gossip and some displeasure about what was considered by some a bizarre alteration of the barn, their landscape consultant, excited by the project, continued to help:

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Our “garden old lady” on Main Street was true blue through it all. She would come hurrying down the street, knowing of the eyes watching behind closed blinds in the houses as she passed.

On she came, her basket over her arm with peony roots and iris tubers to plant. She would scuttle by the curtained windows as though snipers were after her, and arrive quite out of breath.

The sisters added a tall board fence along Howard Street to keep the “peepers” at bay, but that only made

» Hanna Monaghan, oil on board by Helen Cordelia Gilbert, 1960

their activities more interesting to the curious, who

1998.1013.1

acted as though aliens had landed in the town’s backyard. Undeterred, they added trees, a millstone topped with an alabaster column surrounded by baby

» Parlor window, photograph by Beverly Hall, 2012 GL1016

boxwoods, and a tiny pool and fountain.

Art, needlework, research, conversation, and relaxation on the patio were the order of a summer day on Nantucket for Gertrude, Hanna, and their family and friends at Greater Light, while their greyhound Angel Gabriel, and later his successor, Star of Bethlehem, snoozed in the garden. The sisters’ vision of a summer home and studio was inspired. From a simple but solidly built eighteenth-century barn of beautiful proportions, they created a magical space. Their personal aesthetic blended imagination and whimsy with a passionate appreciation of unique hand-crafted works of utilitarian art— woven, carved, forged, or painted— that coalesced in an environment that is a monument to their spirit.

Hanna Monaghan, the last surviving sister, bequeathed Greater Light and its contents to the NHA in 1972. The hidden » Restored great room, photograph gem of a property was open to the public for a number of years,

by Jeff Allen, 2012 GreaterLight13

but as the aging building became structurally unsound, the doors were closed. In 2009, a new vision for the house as a center for small gatherings and lifelong learning in the arts spurred a

» Kingfisher tile in garden fountain, photograph by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

complete restoration of house and garden. Reopened in 2011, Greater Light embodies the creativity and spirit of the summer art colony that flourished on Nantucket in the 1920s.

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The Whaling Museum— our treasure chest

Here, the story of this “ant-hill in the sea”— Herman Melville’s apt description of the island in the midnineteenth century—is revealed. In 2005, the doors opened to a unified, expanded Broad Street edifice that extends from the Peter Foulger building to the Candle Factory and museum shop, with a charming façade paying homage to Nantucket’s architectural legacy joining the two. Inside, an artifact-embellished island timeline leads to Gosnell Hall where a sperm-whale skeleton dives from the ceiling over a whaleboat, a startling scene evoking the grim industry pursued by generations of Nantucket mariners.

Whaling captains gaze from their portraits on the facing wall as well-versed interpreters tell the story of the whale hunt to captivated audiences, bringing to life the era of Nantucket’s maritime fame and fortune, when Nantucket ships were in every ocean and brought back to the island the oil that was processed in factories just like Hadwen & Barney’s and exported to light the

» Newly expanded Whaling Museum, 2005 » Hadwen & Barney Candle Factory, east side, ca. 1880s, F3256

streets of London and Paris.Winding stairs and multilevel walkways lead to permanent scrimshaw and decorative-arts galleries and to spaces with changing exhibits about life on the island through the centuries. Atop it all is Tucker’s Roofwalk, where a panoramic view of the harbor and town varies with the

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Whaling Museum Campus

» Gosnell Hall, photograph by Caroline Sollmann, 2011

» Captain George A. Grant, 1934 P16714

season and the weather. The Whaling Museum is a celebration of

exhibit the treasures of an

Nantucket, from prehistory to the present.

earlier age was always at a

mn

premium. Thanks to a bequest from Admiral

The Nantucket Historical Association has grown from an idea William Mayhew Folger, a generated by a handful of forward- (and backward-) thinking folks descendant of early settler in 1894 to a campus of sites that includes historic buildings, a Peter Foulger, the museum research library, collections-storage facility, retail shop, and the named for his ancestor flagship site—the 2005 Whaling Museum. In 1930, the NHA opened in 1971 on the premiered the original Whaling Museum in the Hadwen & corner of Broad and Barney oil and candle factory at the head of Steamboat Wharf.

North Water Streets with Featuring a collection of whaling tools, ship models, scrimshaw, new exhibit halls, library paintings, and other artifacts collected in the early twentieth space, office space, and, as always, more collections storage. century by whaling enthusiast Edward F. Sanderson, the museum The Research Library and artifact collections were housed in was in a building not only designed for the industry, but with its their own dedicated buildings in 2001 and 1993, respectively, first “custodian,” or interpreter, being George Grant, a retired freeing up the Broad Street compound for reinvention and whaleman whose father, Charles Grant, was one of Nantucket’s expansion in the twenty-first century. Included in the footprint of most successful whaling captains. Sanderson’s collections filled the the new building is the Museum Shop, conceptualized, created, hall named for him on the second floor, and the library collection and managed by NHA Council member Grace Grossman in found a home on the first floor, near exhibits of scrimshaw and 1982–84, and continuing to offer a carefully selected mixture of tradesmen’s shops that were added in the late 1950s. A two-story merchandise relating to Nantucket’s present and past. With the “Whale Room” was appended to the west side of the oil and Whaling Museum project completed to accolades and candle factory in 1970 to house the skeleton of a finback whale dramatically increased visitation, attention is now focused on the that had stranded on the island in 1967. care and interpretation of the other properties in the NHA The collections of the NHA continued to expand in the collection, and one by one, with the support of donors and local, twentieth century. While the Whaling Museum featured the state, and national grants, the lineup of iconic buildings is being industry that made Nantucket an internationally recognized name preserved and opened up to new uses and enhanced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Fair Street interpretations.

Museum showcased artifacts that told the story of island life in all We encourage you to look at our sites again, with an eye to the its variety, and the NHA’s house museums interpreted domestic past, and the future. life during successive historical eras. But space to preserve and

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In 1894, a thoughtful group of Nantucketers suggested “. . . that a society should be formed at once for the purpose of collecting books, manuscripts, and articles of any sort, to illustrate the history of our Island. . . .” The resulting collection of primary-source documents that record the history of Nantucket is housed in the NHA Research Library at 7 Fair Street— once the Fair Street Museum, but retrofitted, restored, and enlarged in 2001.

An archival vault beneath the Quaker Meeting House provides climate-controlled storage for irreplaceable original documents— logbooks, account books, family papers, journals, business records, photographs—that are made easily accessible to researchers when they visit, or through online records. The intimate Whitney Gallery at the entrance to the library features changing exhibitions of Nantucket art and history. Light-filled reading

» Research Library construction, 2001 Construction-2001-1

rooms are a haven for historians, students, journalists, filmmakers, homeowners searching for information about their Nantucket

» Interior of the Research Library, photograph by Jeff Allen, 2001 T435

houses, genealogists filling in the branches of their family trees, and anyone with a question about local history. Our island stories begin here, as we continually reexamine and reinterpret our past.

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» Whitney Gallery, photograph

by Eileen Powers, 2013

NANTUCKET

Nantucket

SPRING/SUMMER

2014

HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

HISTORIC

VOLUME 64, NO. 1

A PUBLICATION OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Janet L. Sherlund, PRESIDENT Kenneth L. Beaugrand, VICE PRESIDENT Jason A. Tilroe, VICE PRESIDENT William J. Boardman, TREASURER William R. Congdon, CLERK

Josette Blackmore Maureen F. Bousa Anne Marie Bratton William R. Camp Jr. FRIENDS OF THE NHA REPRESENTATIVE

Calvin R. Carver Jr.

1

Windows on the Past

26

Thomas Macy House Refinement comes to Main Street

WILLIAM J . TRAMPOSCH

Constance Cigarran W. Michael Cozort

2

Franci N. Crane Ana Ericksen

The Properties of the Nantucket Historical Association

30

NHA Properties Map

34

Rethinking, reusing, restoring

Nancy A. Geschke Whitney A. Gifford Georgia P. Gosnell TRUSTEE EMERITA

Kathryn L. Ketelsen FRIENDS OF THE NHA REPRESENTATIVE

3 4

NHA Properties Listing

6

Oldest House On the edge of the English settlement

12

Victoria McManus

Grinding the Island’s corn

18

Phoebe B. Tudor

20

Ex Officio William J. Tramposch

22

» Bartholomew Gosnold Center, 1993 NHA-Properties-Gosnold-1

41

» Storage area at the Gosnold Center, photograph by Tony Dumitru, 2013

Greater Light The artistic life

46

Whaling Museum Campus Telling the stories

48

1800 House The sheriff’s fine home

Fire Hose Cart House Last of the neighborhood fire houses

Macy Christian House The Town evolves

L. Dennis Shapiro

39

Old Mill

Laura C. Reynolds Kennedy P. Richardson

Hadwen House The pinnacle of opulence

William E. Little Jr. Mary D. Malavase

Quaker Meeting House and Fair Street Museum

Research Library

The challenge of finding

That year the Bartholomew Gosnold Center was built on Bartlett Road. The attics, basements, closets, and

appropriate storage for a growing

other less-than-optimal NHA storage sites were emptied and contents moved to climate-controlled storage that allowed for

Archiving history

collection of artifacts was

Bartholomew Gosnold Center

temporarily allayed in 1993,

inventory, organization, and ready access for everything from teacups to tall clocks, portraits, furniture, business signs,

C3

Old Gaol

A place for everything

scrimshaw, textiles, and much more. So much more, in fact, that an annex was built in 1999 to house large items like catboats and hand-pumper fire engines. The

A snug lockup

GOSNELL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

collections at the Gosnold Center are the foundation for exhibitions and study; records and ON THE COVER: ROW 1: Whaling Museum, PC-WhalingMuseum-1; Fair Street Museum, P9326; Quaker Meeting House, F2890

photographs of archived items can be examined in

ROW 2: Greater Light, GL114; Old Gaol, PC-OV-OldGaol-1

the research databases on the NHA’s website.

Betsy Tyler EDITOR

A woodworking shop and curatorial-staff

ROW 3: Hadwen House, PC-HadwenHouse; George Christian, A65-25; Oldest House, PC-OldestHouse ROW 4: Quaker Meeting House and NHA Research Library, P7515; Old Mill, PC-30;

Elizabeth Oldham

Thomas Macy House, 89.142.16

COPY EDITOR

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

Eileen Powers/Javatime Design

©2014 by the Nantucket Historical Association

DESIGN AND ART DIRECTION

Historic Nantucket (ISSN 0439-2248) is published by the Nantucket Historical Association, 15 Broad Street, Nantucket, Massachusetts. Periodical postage paid at Nantucket, MA, and additional entry offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Historic Nantucket, P.O. Box 1016, Nantucket, MA 02554 –1016; (508) 228–1894; fax: (508) 228–5618, info@nha.org For information visit www.nha.org

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» Pocket watch owned

by Peter B. Hussey (1799–1866), made by Edmunds, London and Birmingham, circa 1818–19.

Gift of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association 1987.159.1

offices are also located at the site, which features a large receiving area and two floors of storage space that houses artifacts of all sizes and shapes, each one a tangible reminder of our history.

P.O. BOX 1016, NANTUCKET, MA 02554-1016

NHA.ORG

PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT NANTUCKET, MA AND ADDITIONAL ENTRY OFFICES

Nantucket

SPRING/ SUMMER

2014

HISTORIC

VOLUME 64, NO. 1

A PUBLICATION OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

The Properties OF THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Over the past century, the NHA’s collection of historic properties has grown to fourteen buildings and four sites that are essential to the narrative of four centuries of local history. Our mission “to tell the inspiring stories of Nantucket through our collections, programs, and properties” relies on investing in our built heritage and continuing a plan of restoration, renovation, and maintenance. Through the continued generosity of its supporters, the NHA is working to build its endowment to ensure the perpetual care and protection of these icons of Nantucket history.