Historic Nantucket, Fall 2002, Vol. 51, No. 4

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

Peter W. Nash

Barbara E. Hajim

Alice F. Emerson

Bruce D. Miller

Patricia M. Bridier

First Vice President

Second Vice President

Third Vice President

Treasurer

Clerk

Alfred Sanford III Isabel C. Stewart Lawrence L. Stentzel John M. Sweeney E. Geoffrey Verney Marcia Welch Robert A. Young

Julius Jensen III L. Dennis Kozlowski Jane T. Lamb Carolyn B. MacKenzie Arthur I. Reade Jr. Melanie Sabelhaus Harvey Saligman

Rebecca M. Bartlett C. Marshall Beale Robert H. Brust Nancy A. Chase John H. Davis Joseph S. DiMartino Mary F. Espy

Frank D. Milligan Executive Director

RESEARCH FELLOWS Dr. Elizabeth Little

Pauline Maier

Nathaniel Philbrick

Patty Jo S. Rice

Renny A. Stackpole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary H. Beman Margaret Moore Booker Richard L. Brecker

Sally Seidman James Sulzer David H. Wood

Cecil Barron Jensen

Helen Winslow Chase

Elizabeth Oldham

Claire O’Keeffe

EDITOR

HISTORIAN

COPY EDITOR

ART DIRECTOR

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

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

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

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

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Foreword

A Paper Trail:

by Frank D. Milligan

Piecing Together the Life of Phebe Hanaford

by Lisa M. Tetrault

10 “No Harvest of Oil”: Nantucket’s Agricultural Fairs, 1856–90

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by Aimee E. Newell

Living in the China Closet

by Frances Ruley Karttunen

18 Historic Nantucket Book Section Reviews by Garth Grimmer and Peter Sorensen

20 NHA News

On the cover: This image of a Nantucket harvest is reproduced from a glass-plate image in the NHA Reseaarch Library, c. 1890.

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throughout the world, the NHA is dusting off its glass cases and undertaking a period of change. No longer merely the guardians of items from Nantucket’s past, the NHA is assuming a new role. As a museum director from Great Britain put it, we all need to move “from twilight to spotlight.”

Unquestionably, the purpose of museums has expanded in recent years in response to the changes in our environment—and no more so than here on Nantucket. In 1904 a museum was defined as “a collection of the monuments of antiquity, or other objects interesting to the scholar and the man of science, arranged and displayed in accordance with scientific method.”

Yesterday’s museums often sought to create an environment of awe and intimidation. If you have any doubt about that just examine the architecture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museums in this country and in Europe. They were built as intimidating monuments dominated by huge exterior and interior staircases, magnificent columns and arches, and aweinspiring foyers. These museums represented power, scholastic learning, and the genius of the artist.

Today a museum is defined as a “notfor-profit-making institution . . . in the service of society, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits for purposes of study, education, and enjoyment.”

(International Council of Museums, 1987) Today’s museums and historical associations are expected to meet certain social

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needs by creating engaging learning environments through exhibitions and interpretation. While we don’t nourish bodies as hospitals do, or stomachs as grocery stores do, we do strive to nourish minds.

This transition, however, has not occurred without vigorous debate within museum boardrooms and in public forums. A 1984 American Association of Museums document stated: The absence of consensus about learning in museums stems from a paradox of significant proportions, a tension of values that is inherent in the very mission of museums. Stated quite simply, the concerns of preservation and the demands of public access are contradictions lived out in every situation.

In many ways, this past summer’s public debate over the future of vacant NHA land on Mill Hill typifies the tension over the central purpose of the museum in today’s society. Regardless of his or her opinions, nobody should be alarmed when the topic elicits a sometimes heated debate. That only means people care.

While opinions differ within any organization regarding funding priorities, I have yet to meet anyone who wants this organization to become locked in an antiquarian mindset, or to proceed from this point forward without regard to sound financial planning.

To that end, the NHA’s current capital campaign is based upon a commitment to both preservation and public access and education by: •

Converting the Fair Street Museum building into a user-friendly, state-of-the-art library and repository that houses our outstanding archival collections.

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Transforming some of the NHA’s most significant historical properties into fully restored entertaining centers of learning, staffed and open to the public on a daily basis for most of the year.

Nantucketers will explore key historical themes, including the role that “ideas” played in shaping Nantucket history in the Quaker Meeting House; comparative lifestyles in Hadwen House, the Oldest House (and to a lesser degree in the F A L L

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Macy-Christian House and the Old Gaol); and Nantucket’s nonwhaling economic past at the Old Mill and the Oldest House.

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Restoring the Whaling Museum to its original appearance as a whale oil and candle manufactory that will bring alive Nantucket’s once worlddominant whaling story.

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Building new galleries adjacent to the Whaling Museum to bring the NHA’s artifacts out of the storeroom and into the classroom, and to display the “at sea” whaling story by featuring the skeleton of the forty-seven-foot sperm whale that washed ashore on Nantucket a few years ago.

These galleries will give the NHA what it has never had: display conditions that meet the museum standards required for accreditation by the American Association of Museums, a pre-

requisite for other museums to loan us artifacts and exhibitions.

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Creating adequate administrative space to ensure that the NHA continues as a “main street” presence in the historic district on a year-round basis, a goal that is good for both the NHA and Nantucket.

I firmly believe that every person who cares about the NHA wants the organization to succeed in the course of action that balances our role as a collecting institution (including historic properties, which are, after all, only large artifacts) with our role as a socially relevant learning institution that makes a difference in people’s lives.

— Frank D. Milligan

A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE: September 11, 2002 Visitors also saw a small disobservance organized play of historic fire-fighting by the American Assoequipment in the Peter Foulger ciation of Museums and the Museum at 15 Broad Street.

Institute of Museum and “The visitors truly appreciatLibrary Services, the Nantucket ed being invited into the museHistorical Association offered ums and historic houses free free admission to all of its histhat day,” said programs and toric sites and Walking Tour on education coordinator Kirstin September 11, 2002. We are Gamble. “We felt privileged to pleased to announce that 787 be able to do something for the people visited our sites or The Hadwen House. Photo by interpreter Lauren Noble. community on the anniversary joined tours that day. of 9/11.”

“It was an extremely satisfying and busy day at all of our “All across the country museums were open free on properties including the Whaling Museum, where close to September 11. It was deeply gratifying to play our part in 300 people stopped in for a visit,” said chief curator Niles the day of remembrance and see the thoughtful response Parker. “The people walking through the door were almost from the Nantucket community,” said Niles. too many to count at times.”

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A Paper Trail: Piecing Together the Life of Phebe Hanaford by Lisa M. Tetrault

Rev. Phebe Hanaford’s Church of the Holy Spirit (Second Universalist) in New Haven, Conn.,

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century, Phebe Hanaford was asked to help officiate at the funeral services for two leading women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century: the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the woman-suffrage organizer Susan B. Anthony.

The two friends, who had shared a life of labor, died within four years of each other, and Hanaford knew them both well. One of the nation’s first female ministers, an author, feminist, and Nantucket native, Hanaford was intimately involved in the early women’s rights campaign for nearly the entire span of the seventy-five-year movement. The invitation in her old age to preside at the funerals of arguably the most famous women of the nineteenth century testified to Hanaford’s own prominence. Yet, for complicated reasons, this extraordinary woman is almost forgotten today.

To recover Hanaford’s remarkable life story requires evidence. In short, those wanting to know about her need a paper trail, clues from which to reconstruct events. Luckily, in Hanaford’s case, a paper trail is preserved in the vaults of the Nantucket Historical Association’s Research Library at 7 Fair Street.

Carefully stored in six archival boxes, some of Hanaford’s letters, scrapbooks, sermons, and memorabilia survive, offering a window into her amazing life. These sources are invaluable, in part, because they are exceedingly rare. For many women like Hanaford no personal documents survive, and their life stories are sadly, almost irretrievably, lost. The bulk of extant material on the nineteenth-century women’s rights moveN A N T U C K E T

ment comes mainly from women who had nationally prominent profiles—women like Stanton and Anthony.

And although those two women certainly deserve a prominent place in history, they did not—indeed, could not—create and sustain a mass movement on their own.

Yet reading history books and watching documentaries, one is often led to think that they did. This raises thorny questions about the relationship between sources and memory. Does the fact that more abundant and more readily available records exist for nationally prominent women mean that they occupy an over-privileged position in our collective memory? And are they, as a result, overshadowing women like Hanaford to an unreasonable degree? Although she is relatively unknown today, Hanaford, along with many other women, played key roles in creating and developing a powerful women’s rights movement. To write a fully rendered and usable past, then, requires including those important but now forgotten women in our stories. Thankfully, not all of their histories are lost. With valuable collections such as the NHA’s Hanaford papers, some histories can be recovered.

Phebe Ann (Coffin) Hanaford was born in Siasconset on Nantucket Island on May 6, 1829. She was the only child of the merchant and shipowner George W. Coffin and his wife Phebe Ann (Barnard) Coffin. Both were Quakers and direct descendants of the island’s first white settlers, Tristram Coffin and Peter Folger. Phebe Ann (Barnard) Coffin died shortly after her daughter was born, and George Coffin subsequently married Emeline (Barnard) Cartwright (widow of Joseph Cartwright Jr.), with whom he had seven more children. Reared on Nantucket with her elder stepbrother and her younger half brothers and sisters, little Phebe had both public and private schooling. She studied an advanced, classical curriculum (including Latin and higher mathematics) under an Episcopalian minister, the Reverend Ethan Allen of Trinity Church.

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preach in Friends meetings. Phebe’s free spirit and bent for reform showed at an early age. She reportedly often mounted a box in the barn and played preacher with the neighborhood children assembled as her congregation, and she frequently climbed up Brant Point lighthouse where she declaimed Byron and Shakespeare, both considered too worldly for an austere Quaker home. When only eight, she signed a temperance pledge, and at thirteen she was writing for the press. At age sixteen, Phebe took a job teaching school in Siasconset.

Four years later, at age twenty, she married Dr. Joseph Hanaford, a native of Newton, Massachusetts, and a homeopathic physician, medical writer, and teacher.

Ten years her senior, Joseph Hanaford had been working in Nantucket, where the two lived on and off during the early years of their marriage. Eventually, Phebe moved off the island in 1857, settling with her husband first in Beverly, Massachusetts, and later, in 1864, in Reading. The couple had only two children, Howard and Florence.

During the 1850s and 1860s, Phebe raised her children, turned to writing, and gave her first sermons.

Over those years, she wrote many of her books, of which there would be fourteen in all. The first, Lucretia the Quakeress (1853), was an antislavery tract inspired by her Nantucket cousin, the famous abolitionist and Quaker Lucretia (Coffin) Mott. Hanaford’s Life of Abraham Lincoln (1865) was the first biography of the president published after his assassination, and it sold an impressive 20,000 copies. She also published a volume of poetry entitled From Shore to Shore (1870).

From 1866 to 1868, she edited two periodicals, including a monthly Universalist magazine. Hanaford had left the Quaker faith to join her husband in the Baptist church (which did not ordain women), but after the death of a younger brother and sister and a careful reading of the Bible, she turned to Universalism. While visiting Nantucket in 1865, Phebe gave her first sermon at the age of thirty-six. Acceding somewhat trepidatiously to her father’s request, she preached two sermons in the little schoolhouse in Siasconset where she had once been a teacher. A year later she was surprised H I S T O R I C

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and honored when asked to substitute in South Canton, New York, for the Rev. Olympia Brown (the first ordained Universalist woman minister). “I dared not refuse to go,” she recounted, “it seemed to be the Lord’s call. [So] I went.”

With Brown’s encouragement, Hanaford soon entered the Universalist ministry. Recalling her ordination at Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1868, Hanaford claimed to be the first woman ordained in New England. A year after her ordination, she accepted a pastorate in Waltham, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Phebe had separated from her husband, who remained in Reading until his death in 1907. She began supporting herself, accepting a position with the First Universalist Church of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1870, at an annual salary of $2,000. That same year, she served as chaplain for the Connecticut Legislature, the first woman ever to do so. Although she launched a highly successful career at a time when few women were permitted in the ministry, she was sometimes plagued by controversy. Shortly after she was ordained, for example, a newspaper reported that at the marriage ceremonies she performed, men were forced to take their wives’ names. This was, of course, false, but it revealed the discomfort many felt about a woman entering the prestigious, male-dominated profession.

When she began to preach her first sermons, Hanaford also became active in the nascent women’s rights movement. During the Civil War (1861–65) women had suspended the annual women’s rights conventions that had begun a decade earlier. When the war ended, a group of abolitionist and feminist reformers came together in 1866 and formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), of which Hanaford was a member. The organization’s aim was to secure black and female suffrage as equal and inextricable demands.

When the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was proposed, members of the AERA split at their May 1869 meeting over whether to support the amendment, which prohibited discrimination in voting on the basis of race, but not gender. In other words, it would enfranchise freed black men, but no women. Although the majority of the organization’s members, including

Rev. Phebe Hanaford, c. 1868 P14374

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Hanaford, supported the proposed amendment, it was unacceptable to others, particularly Stanton and Anthony, who after a vitriolic exchange with the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, left the meeting and broke with the organization. The two women met with others opposed to the amendment later that evening and created their own independent society, the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869), appointing Stanton president and restricting membership to women.

Other leaders of the feminist–abolitionist coalition gathered that fall to create a rival organization, the American Woman Suffrage Organization (1869). Founders of the latter organization included such luminaries as Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Phebe Hanaford. Many women, including Hanaford, viewed the split as unfortunate, and she remained on good terms with both organizations, helping to accomplish the eventual unification of the two groups in 1890.

Hanaford left her pastorate in New Haven in 1874 and accepted a position with the Universalist Church of the Good Shepherd in Jersey City, New Jersey, where the congregation subsequently was at odds, ostensibly

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over her women’s rights activities. After her first three-year term, Hanaford was up for reappointment. Although she had doubled membership during her first term, some reputedly renounced her activism around the so-called “woman’s question” and asked her to resign. She refused, and the congregation divided in 1877, when a majority of voting members failed to reappoint her. Hanaford formed a second Universalist society and dissenters followed, attending her sermons in a public hall where she preached for the next several years.

Hanaford’s letters and papers, however, offer a somewhat different explanation for the split. After separating from her husband (whom she never officially divorced), Hanaford had begun living with a woman named Ellen Miles. Newspaper clippings preserved in Hanaford’s scrapbook reported that the disgruntlement among congregation members was, in fact, over Hanaford’s liaison with Miles, whom the papers called the “minister’s wife.” Hanaford, it seems, was not simply asked to cease her women’s rights activities, but more specifically, to “dismiss” Miss Miles. The split in the Jersey City congregation, then, actually appears to have been over Hanaford’s intimate personal life. While we cannot know for certain the exact nature of Hanaford and Miles’s relationship, their letters testify to a deep and abiding affection. The two remained lifelong companions, separated after forty-four years together only by Miles’s death in 1914.

Although the conventional story about the split in Hanaford’s congregation is, it seems, misleading, it is true that throughout the nineteenth century Hanaford remained ardently dedicated to women’s advancement, a goal she furthered through agitation and through example. She spoke at numerous national, state, and local woman suffrage conventions. Indeed, she played a role in nearly every major suffrage campaign in New England during the nineteenth century. In her own view, if more women had been allowed to vote in church affairs she would have easily won reappointment in her Jersey City pastorate. She served as vice president of the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1874, and she was one of the women ministers invited to conduct services at the 1888 International Council of Women. When her dissident New Jersey congregation applied for formal recognition and was rejected by the General Universalist Convention in 1878, Hanaford had no settled pulpit, F A L L

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basement and will yet surface, joining the papers already preserved and offering the possibility of an even fuller reconstruction of her amazing life.

After Miles’s death in 1914, Hanaford left New York City and moved to Rochester, New York, to live with her granddaughter, Dionis Coffin (Warner) Santee, with whom she passed her final years, never losing interest in public affairs and retaining her faculties to the end. Unlike many pioneers in the woman suffrage movement, Hanaford lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which enfranchised most women; a majority of Southern black women, however, would not be able to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She often remarked that she would like to live to be a hundred years old, but her wish was cut short by eight years. On June 2, 1921, at the age of ninety-two, she passed away peacefully and was buried several days later in Orleans, New York.

Opposite page: Five generations of the Hanaford family, clockwise from top left: Phebe with her son, Howard Alcott Hanaford, c.1851/2. In Henrietta, N.Y., in 1914 with greatgranddaughter Helen Mae Feasel Maxfield. Maria Mitchell Hanaford Feasel, Phebe’s granddaughter, Howard’s daughter, and Helen’s mother.

Helen’s daughters visited Nantucket for the first

Lisa M. Tetrault was the NHA’s 2001 E. Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney Fellow. She is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is completing a dissertation tentatively titled “The Making and Remaking of the American Woman Suffrage Movement, 1865–1895.”

Her work pays particular attention to how the politics of memory and historical preservation have shaped our understanding of the campaign.

time in 1998, clockwise from top left: Diane Dobbertin, Audrey Johnson, Lynn Domras, and Hazel Knickerbocker.

Inset: Audrey, born September 6, 1932, as a baby. Below: Phebe, who lived to 92, shown

Sources:

here at 89.

Phebe Hanaford Collection, MS 38, Nantucket Historical Association.

Phebe Hanaford, “Twenty Years in the Pulpit,” Woman’s Journal, 27 December 1890.

Helen Cartwright McCleary, “Phebe Ann (Coffin) Hanaford: The 100th Anniversary of her Birth,” Nantucket Historical Association Proceedings XXXV (1929).

“Phebe Hanaford,” in Notable American Women, Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

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and for years she conducted lecturing and preaching tours across New England and the Middle Atlantic and Western states. She spoke on a wide variety of reform topics to audiences as small as thirty and as large as several thousand. Hanaford reportedly had a clear, rich voice that rang out “like a silver bell,” allowing her to project easily into the far corners of lecture halls in an era before electronic amplification. Surely her childhood orations from the top of Brant Point lighthouse helped her cultivate that impressive skill.

In 1884, she returned to New Haven as pastor of the Second Church. She then retired from the pulpit in 1891 and moved with Miles to New York City. There she was involved with a number of women’s groups.

She presided over the New Century Study Circle and the Society for Political Study (1896–98). She served as a vice president of Sorosis, a women’s literary club, and she served for five years as president of the Women’s Press Club (1901–06). She was also active during her lifetime in many temperance clubs, working to abolish the sale and consumption of alcohol. In her later years, she recalled her activism with pride, and she also recalled fondly offering a prayer at her son’s ordination (he became a Congregationalist minister) and performing the ceremony at her daughter’s wedding.

Although the Hanaford papers form a rich source that offers invaluable insight into Hanaford’s illustrious life, there are questions that her papers cannot answer— aspects of her life that remain obscure. Many of her beautiful sermons are preserved, for example, but for unknown reasons her political speeches are not, making it relatively easy to reconstruct her religious philosophy but exceedingly difficult to reconstruct her feminist philosophy. Because her preaching and women’s rights activism overlapped, however, her sermons offer some clues, as do newspaper accounts of her speeches, which she pasted into her scrapbooks. These, along with broadside advertisements for her public lectures, also allow us to reconstruct to a degree her busy itinerary.

But because many of her letters were lost or destroyed over the years, we cannot know how she felt about those public appearances. Did she experience nervousness, confidence, elation, frustration? How did she deal with the trials and exhaustion of nightly lectures and extensive travel? What were her proudest and most discouraging moments? Answers to those questions may never be known. Perhaps a stash of Hanaford letters and writings exists somewhere in someone’s attic or

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“No Harvest of Oil”: Nantucket’s Agricultural Fairs, 1856–90 by Aimee E. Newell

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1880, EASTMAN JOHNSON UNVEILED HIS NEW masterpiece. The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket depicts a romanticized rural scene, with approximately fifty men and women picking cranberries in a fictionalized Nantucket location.

Viewed in tandem with his painting Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, Johnson presents an idealized view of island agriculture. One art critic stated that Johnson was “representing the lasses and laddies of that seafaring isle stealing a few delightful hours from maritime and domestic pursuits to cull the scarlet berries from the moist meadow-lands.”

In fact, when Johnson and his family first came to Nantucket for a summer visit in 1870, few signs of the island’s prosperous “maritime pursuits” remained. The last whaleship to depart Nantucket’s harbor, the Oak, left in 1869, signaling the demise of the whaling industry, for which the island was known around the world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Nantucket’s population, which numbered almost 10,000 in 1840, had declined to just over 4,000 people at the time of Johnson’s first visit.

Islanders who stayed behind must have felt the desertion keenly. Suddenly, neighbors, friends, and relations were gone, transforming the most important whaling port in the world into a veritable ghost town. As the economic decline began, the islanders who stayed tried to muster some control over the turn their lives were taking. A group of island residents gathered in April 1856 at the Nantucket Atheneum Library and established the Nantucket Agricultural Society. Chartered by the state, the society was formed “for the encouragement of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, in the County of Nantucket, by premiums and other means.”

During the first few years of its existence, the society devoted itself to “disprov[ing] the oft-repeated assertion that [Nantucket] is a barren sand heap,” to providing education for island farmers, and to fostering bonds of community so that a new source of economic

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prosperity and island pride could be found. At the first fair in 1856, high school principal A. B. Whipple explained the importance of those goals, “The great benefit . . . of these fairs, is not all in improved stock, and improved fruits, but in improved minds, improved tastes, improved sensibilities to whatever is beautiful; thereby improving our life and augmenting our happiness.” Through annual fairs, meetings, lectures, and publication of the society’s annual Transactions, the members of the Nantucket Agricultural Society attempted to regain control over their lives by fostering social connections and working together to make it through this dark period of the island’s history.

The island’s decline began in the 1840s when the harbor proved too shallow to accommodate the increasing size of whaleships. In 1846, a fire roared through the downtown district, wiping out businesses, homes, and even ships at the wharves. As Nantucket struggled to rebuild, whaleships bypassed the island port for the deeper harbor of New Bedford, which also had access to mainland railroads. In 1849, the discovery of gold in California proved too strong a magnet for hundreds of unemployed islanders, as they left Nantucket, often on ships previously used as whalers, to try their luck out west. And, in the 1850s, the refining of kerosene, which was easily extracted from the earth, provided a cheaper substitute for whale oil.

In response to those pressures on islanders and their economy, the members of the Agricultural Society attempted to persuade their neighbors to remain on Nantucket and plow the soil. Most of all, by fostering a sense of pride and confidence in themselves and their neighbors, society officers and members hoped to change the direction of Nantucket’s decline. Thus, the society’s first president, Edward W. Gardner, wrote in his 1859 report: Our great staple, oil, is sliding away from us at a very rapid pace . . . I am led to believe that we have but the alternative to embark in agriculture or the mechanic F A L L

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Gardner and the other founders of the society did not have to look far for inspiration. The original group of European settlers, who arrived on Nantucket in 1659 from the Merrimack Valley and from whom several society members were descended, expected to farm the land, much as they had on the mainland. However, the island’s sandy soil was easily depleted and “would not rate above a middling quality,” so the original settlers quickly turned their attention to raising livestock. By 1704, several years before the first sperm whale was captured by a Nantucketer, the New England surveyor of customs listed Nantucket as one of the chief sheep-raising districts in the colonies.

With almost 15,000 sheep inhabiting the island by the late eighteenth century, shearing them in the spring was an enormous task, so islanders made it an annual celebration. The three-day “Shearing Festival,” described as a “prolonged picnic,” allowed Nantucketers to accomplish a practical task while enjoying one another’s company complete with food, drink, and entertainment.

Almost immediately upon the establishment of the Nantucket Agricultural Society, the local newspaper drew comparisons between the old shearing festivals and the new agricultural fairs. As one editor explained, “In our boyhood days ‘shearing week’ was set apart as the festive period of the year . . . now the welcome Agricultural Fair annually brings the enjoyments of the olden time.” The local press covered the establishment of the society in April 1856, hailing it as a positive move toward Nantucket’s economic recovery and brushing aside old arguments about the poor quality of the island’s soil: “In the past, while our capital has been floating in all waters, and our attention directed into foreign channels, we have almost forgotten and neglected our home resources. Our soil has been cultivated only to a very limited extent, and ordinarily in a very superficial manner.”

The initial step for the fledgling organization was to raise the $1,000 of capital stock required by the State Board of Agriculture in order to receive its support, including $200 annually for premiums, as the prizes H I S T O R I C

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were called. Donations from the society’s officers comprised most of this amount, but membership dues also helped. According to the bylaws, “any person, by paying into the Treasury two dollars (or if a female one dollar), and signing the rules adopted by the Society, shall be considered a member.” To provide added incentive for membership, the society permitted premiums to be disbursed only to those who were members. By August 1856, the capital stock had reached $1,000, and the date of October 28 was set for the Nantucket Agricultural Society’s first Cattle Show and Fair.

Despite the appeal of the lofty ideals propounded by the founders of the society and the enthusiastic support of the island newspapers, it appears that not all of Nantucket’s residents were in favor of the idea. The society’s published Transactions, describing the first fair, trumpet its success despite “ . . . the little faith which most of our citizens had in our being able to make any display worth the undertaking.”

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arts, or embark for a less congenial home than the one which we now enjoy on our native island. Farmers, manufacturers and merchants, does it not arouse you to adopt some decided course of action, or will you wait for the better times that will never come, unless you improve the resources which you have within yourselves.

In the end, the first fair proved so popular that it was held open for two additional days. In an empty lot in town about sixty animals were shown. Displays of vegetables, fruits, “fancy articles,” and “manufactured articles” were spread out inside the Atheneum, in the center of town on India Street. Entertainment was provided each evening in the form of singing and speeches.

The local glee club sang several original songs and the recently formed Nantucket Brass Band performed, riding in a whaleboat mounted on wheels “through all

Sheep shearing c. 1880s.

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Ticket to the 1888 Nantucket Agricultural Society Fair.

Race track at the Fairgrounds c. 1915.

“Oliver C. Backus House” c. 1885 by James Walter Folger (1851–1918)

[the] principal streets . . . serenad[ing] a number of . . . citizens.”

As had been the tradition with the island’s Shearing Festival, businesses and schools were closed, leading one young Nantucketer to remark in her diary, “Quite pleasant. No school on account of the ‘Fair.’ Went to the Fair in the afternoon and evening.”

Just three years after organizing its first agricultural fair, the society purchased a tract of land outside of town, which by the time of that year’s fair was “in complete order for the reception and exhibition of cattle . . . the requisite buildings have been erected, and an excellent track has been prepared.” Yet, despite the establishment of a physical presence on the island, the society continued to struggle with its public image. As one Nantucket resident wrote to her sister: Next week comes the annual Agricultural Fair when everybody will be alive for a short time and a few half starved cows and oxen will be exhibited upon the new grounds recently purchased and fitted for the occasion.

I suppose the grounds are really very handsome and if we could look forward to a host of visitors at that time there would be some encouragement for such an undertaking but everything comes from our own pockets—as one lady said, she sent a cake to a Fair and then went and bought it to help them along.

As the letter suggests, the struggle to resuscitate the island’s economy created strong opinions, with supporters of the Agricultural Society extolling farming and raising livestock as a way to improve island life, without intervention from the mainland, while also preserving island autonomy and pride.

However, as the letter also demonstrates, another group of Nantucketers was discovering that tourism might be the answer to the island’s economic problems.

Before the society reached its fifth anniversary, its organizers would realize they needed to attract off-island visitors to make the annual fairs successful. As early as

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1859, special trips by steamboats “brought a large number of excursionists from the continent— more visitors from abroad than at a previous exhibition, many more,” according to the island newspaper.

The Agricultural Society’s officers quickly capitalized on Nantucket’s new popularity, pushing the fair earlier in the season and encouraging off-islanders to compete in the equine categories. However, at least one islander found the crowds a liability, confiding to her diary in 1864, “Etta and I . . . wended our way to Mrs. Cash’s, where we spent the afternoon very pleasantly, being greatly impressed with watching the many carriages and pedestrians wending their way to the Cattle Ground.” The next day the same diarist was persuaded by her friends to attend the Fair, but the three ladies went to the Atheneum Hall “at an early hour, so that we had an opportunity of viewing objects of interest, without interruption by the collecting assembly.”

Holding the fair at the end of September rather than in mid-October made it more convenient for offislanders to attend, but it compromised the rationale for holding an agricultural fair: it was before the island’s harvest season. The newspaper glossed over this, reporting, “Owing to the fact that the exhibition was held this year at an earlier day than in former years, the show of Isabella grapes was not so large as usual; still a few lots were well ripened.” More important, the newspaper continued, “the fact of the change of time of holding the Exhibition was not generally known abroad,” and few visitors from the mainland attended the fair that year.

Although in the early 1860s the society adapted some of the arrangements for the fair to encourage attendance by seasonal visitors—such as coordinating extra steamboat runs—its goal of educating island farmers about agricultural innovations, encouraging them to remain on the island and achieve self-sufficienF A L L

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cy, remained paramount. In 1860 and 1861, special appeals were made to island farmers to participate: “Farmers often grudge the trouble of driving their herds and single animals from any considerable distance. . . . But let them consider that whatever adds to the interest of the occasion, contributes to the prosperity of our island.”

Despite island farmers’ ambivalence to the society, the social aspects of the annual agricultural fair cannot be underestimated. On a small island, which had seen almost half of its population depart for mainland destinations, occasions to gather together and share common memories and experiences were few and far between. As the newspaper explained, “We need something of the kind to break the monotony of our dull yearly round; something to which we may look forward, and upon which we may look back.” On fair days during the first few years, stores and schools closed and “businesses generally suspended. . . . The whole population was astir, and at noon it was one of the impossibilities to obtain a horse. . . . For the time, trouble was banished and a gleam of pure sunshine apparently filled every heart.” One islander remembered years later: “Once a year there was a Fair in the Atheneum Hall.

For what object or by whom arranged I can’t recall, but it was a ‘social event’ and . . . we were always on hand with the other children and the whole day was a wonderful occasion for me.”

By 1890, the island had become an active summer haven for artists, due to the abundance of its subject matter and its pleasant climate. Categories for art, needlework, and “mechanical arts,” like woodcarving and printing, were part of the society’s premium list from the beginning of the society. The most renowned American artist to work on Nantucket, Eastman Johnson, did not enter his work in the fairs. However, given the inspiration that island agricultural pursuits H I S T O R I C

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provided for him, it seems likely that he attended the fairs when he was in residence. A number of local artists did enter their work, Wendall Macy and James Walter Folger being especially successful in winning premiums.

Folger was a native Nantucketer.

Trained as a woodcarver in Boston, he dabbled in many media, eventually favoring oil and watercolor paintings and painted woodcarvings. Macy was born in New Bedford to parents who had left their native Nantucket in the 1840s for the better economic climate of the mainland port. Macy lived in New Bedford until returning to Nantucket in the mid-1870s, when his name appears almost immediately in the records of the Agricultural Society, winning premiums and serving on the fair’s organizing committee.

According to an 1877 newspaper account, “Wendall Macy had a variety of paintings from his studio, some of which possessed great merit, and all of which were really beautiful. His painting of taking kelp from the seashore, was true to life.” In contrast to Macy’s polished canvases showcasing the island’s natural beauty and to Johnson’s romanticized vision of Nantucket agriculture, Folger’s naïve canvases depict a realistic view of island farming. His paintings show island farms as they were, slightly ramshackle buildings bounded by asymmetrical fences in an uncompromising landscape. As more and more island residents catered to the tourist trade, those charming farms would fall further into decay.

In 1876, the Agricultural Society again changed the date of the annual fair, moving it up to the first week of September. However, many island farmers, listed as premium winners and judges in multiple categories for years, simply could not afford to be away from their farms at that crucial time. Diaries kept by farmers who faithfully recorded their attendance at the fairs of the 1860s and the 1870s show only spotty attendance at fair days in the 1880s. Ironically, the society was alienating the very people it was formed to help. Or, perhaps, the society so successfully accomplished its goals that the farmers were more interested in raising good crops and profitable livestock than in participating in the fair.

Although some island farmers and residents may have been unhappy with the change in dates, the local newspaper continued its positive support, reporting, “This change has its advantages and disadvantages, but F A L L

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is thought . . . to be, on the whole a change for the better. The show of produce may suffer somewhat in consequence, as contributors can hardly be expected to pluck their later vegetables and fruits for exhibition before they are fully ripened. But as a time for a grand social gathering and reunion the earlier date may be looked upon as more favorable to success.” Indeed, the society’s published Transactions for 1876 record the fair’s success, stating, “[I]t was evident that the change of the time of holding the Fair, from the last week in September to the first week, was a decided improvement in every way, as the attendance was much larger.

There is every reason to hope that a successful future is in store for the Society.”

On the contrary, the change of date to early September would be the beginning of the end for the Agricultural Society and its annual fairs. By the late 1870s, tourism was proving a much more satisfactory solution to the island’s economic problems than was agriculture. Nantucket’s lack of a viable industry during the middle decades of the nineteenth century preserved a quaint atmosphere, which appealed to urban Americans who watched the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century indelibly mark their once familiar landscapes. A visit to Nantucket was an antidote to the effects of the industrial revolution that were then becoming commonplace throughout the northeastern United States. Attending an agricultural fair fit with what the “strangers” came to bucolic Nantucket to experience.

Even the island newspaper, always a chief supporter of the promise of island agricultural pursuits, conceded in 1879: “It is true the early date is against us as regards the display of fruit and vegetables. . . . But these advantages were thought to be more than offset by the opportunity afforded us to secure a much larger attendance of visitors.” By 1882, one island guidebook lamented: It is greatly to be regretted that the interest once taken in the [Agricultural] society has from some cause greatly diminished of late years . . . . [I]t is probable that one of the chief causes of lack of interest is, that the annual fairs are held too early in the season . . . of late years the annual fair . . . has been held immediately after the close of a long and exciting summer season; and before the townspeople generally have had time to think of a fair, it is upon them.

In other words, Nantucket would never become “the garden of the world,” but instead became “a healthful and pleasant summer resort.”

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By the end of the nineteenth century, Nantucket had firmly established itself as a summer retreat for wealthy New Englanders and talented artists. Unfortunately, that did not bode well for island agriculture. Although one guidebook bragged that “well nigh every vegetable that is raised elsewhere in New England has been produced on the island within recent years, the quality and flavor being generally of the best,” the author went on to bemoan the scarcity of laborers as the “most serious obstacle” to Nantucket farming, recounting that “one sad result of the development of a summer resort has been to attract many young men, who formerly devoted themselves to cultivating the soil, to the easier task of driving carriages.” The Agricultural Society continued to sponsor annual fairs until 1934 but, as the newspaper noted, “. . . like all country fairs, that at Nantucket does not prove an attraction to the present generation that it did in years gone by.”

Despite the fact that the Nantucket Agricultural Society would eventually cease to exist, it served an important function during a difficult period of the island’s history. By encouraging agriculture and raising livestock as viable economic pursuits, the society offered hope that Nantucket could regain its position in the American market. Although those hopes would founder, with tourism placing the island back on the map, the society did achieve its secondary purpose— fostering a sense of pride among Nantucketers by awarding premiums for artistic and practical talents and by celebrating “the spirit that makes our Island so free.”

Aimee E. Newell is curator of textiles and fine arts at Old Sturbridge Village and a free-lance writer. She was formerly the curator of collections at the Nantucket Historical Association. She has published in Piecework Magazine, The Catalogue of Antiques and Fine Art, Nantucket Magazine, Times of the Islands Magazine, Home and Garden Nantucket, and the Dublin Seminars for New England Folklife Proceedings.

Sources Consulted: This paper draws extensively from the manuscript collections at the NHA Research Library, especially the Nantucket Agricultural Society collection, and microfilm copies of the nineteenth-century island newspapers. Additional material comes from letters and diaries written by Nantucketers and artifacts related to the island’s agricultural fairs in the NHA collection.

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Living in the China Closet Following publication of the China Closet photograph on the front cover of the summer 2002 issue of Historic Nantucket, we received a number of queries about the cottage. Following is an excerpt from The Other Islanders, Part III, and should help to answer some of the questions.

The China Closet was one of the Underhill Cottages in Siasconset.

1830 IN Wolcott, New York of “Quaker stock.” At age sixteen he lost the fingers of his left hand in an accident. Professionally limited by his disability, he learned to take shorthand and became a court stenographer. He also developed into a prolific writer. During the Civil War, while employed as a correspondent for The New York Times, he was taken prisoner by the Confederates, tried as a spy, and imprisoned for some time. After his release, he returned to New York and was instrumental in the professionalization of court stenography in his home state.

Becoming prosperous, he first invested in a vineyard in Chatauqua County, which he sold in order to go into resort development in ’Sconset, where he put $20,000 into buying property and building new cottages carefully modeled on the old ’Sconset cottages.

An energetic promoter of seaside vacations in the village, he was credited by the Inquirer and Mirror with the extension of the Nantucket Railroad track from Surfside to ’Sconset.

Edward Underhill’s connection to Nantucket through his own Quaker heritage had been reinforced through his marriage to Evelyn Stoddard.

She and both her parents had been born in Hudson, New York, where

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DWARD UNDERHILL WAS BORN IN

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Nantucketers had migrated during whaling days. Two of the streets along which the Underhill Cottages were built are Evelyn Street, named for his wife, and Lily Street, named for his daughter Lily Doubleday. (The third street in the development is Pochick Street.)

The NHA has a copy of a published poem by Edward Underhill called “The Summer Skaters.”

Among his other productions are a long series of architectural and historical studies of ’Sconset architecture titled “Some Old Houses on ’Sconset Bank.” In 1912 Roland B. Hussey published Underhill’s essays almost verbatim in a pamphlet titled “The Evolution of ’Sconset.” The pamphlet was reprinted by the Inquirer and Mirror Press in 1954 as Hussey’s work, but in 1961 architectural historian Henry Chandlee Forman printed Underhill’s originals under Underhill’s name.

Underhill indulged his late-nineteenth-century humor in jocular promotional material for his cottages, “Cap’n Shubael Paddack’s Advice to His Son as He Is About to Launch on the Ocean of Marriage,” and a fabricated will of Obed Gardner, a fictional old Nantucketer.

The China Closet was the Underhills’ personal summer home. World travelers, the couple acquired a vast collection of chinaware, mostly English. In the summer of 1895, Forman’s grandmother visited the China Closet, where Mr. Underhill showed her and her companions “his beautiful collection of old china . . . many rare and curious pieces” with which they had furnished their cottage.

There were plates, teapots, and bowls on every surface, horizontal and vertical, even on the ceiling.

When Edward Underhill died in New York in 1898, he left the cottages, all thirty-six of them, jointly to Evelyn and Lily with the stipulation that they not be sold. The income from S

by Frances Ruley Karttunen

The China Closet, the summer home of Edward and Evelyn Underhill.

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(opposite page, courtesy of the Museum of AfroAmerican History, Boston) and a young woman believed to be Florence Clay (shown at right in a sailboat with Alexander Starbuck).

As Mrs. Underhill and Mrs. Higginbotham, they shared the later decades of their lives, first in the China Closet and later in Mizpah Cottage on York Street.

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their summer rental was intended to support his widow and daughter for the rest of their lives. When one of the women died, the other would become full owner.

Lily Doubleday disappears from the records. Perhaps she died young offisland. In any case, Evelyn Underhill carried on with the cottage rentals for another three decades after her husband’s death. Around 1920 she met Florence Clay Higginbotham, a young African-American woman living and working in ’Sconset. When Mrs. Underhill’s white housekeeper died, she hired Florence Higginbotham to take over management of the cottages.

Florence Clay had been born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1894. Leaving home in her mid-teens, she got a job with White House Coffee in Boston and then accompanied some friends to Nantucket to do summer domestic work in ’Sconset. When her friends returned to Boston in the fall, she remained on the island. In 1917 she married Robert D. Higginbotham, who was also employed in ’Sconset. Mrs. Elizabeth Watts and Mrs. Alice Morton of ’Sconset were their witnesses.

Florence Higginbotham’s young husband, four years her junior, soon joined the U.S. Navy as a cabin steward. After sending a series of postcards to “my Dear Wife” from his ship as it cruised to Rio de Janeiro in the winter of 1918–19, he dropped out of her life. When she filed divorce papers in 1924, she gave his place of residence as San Francisco and dated his desertion of their marriage to the summer of 1919.

In 1921 Florence gave birth to her only child, William Caroll Higginbotham, whom she and her friends called “Bunny.” Three months after William’s birth, Mrs. Underhill had mother and child come to live with her in the China Closet. Other white ’Sconset families provided housing for their African-American employees in Codfish Park, but as Florence Higginbotham wrote to William in 1969, “They [the Underhills] never owned any property down bank, that is why she wanted me to come and live with her.”

For the rest of the 1920s the two women and the boy lived together in ’Sconset in the summers. As N A N T U C K E T

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Before their friendship began: Evelyn Stoddard

William grew, they moved from the China Closet to another of the cottages, the Double Decker, to get him away from all the breakable china. At the end of each summer season they would close the cottages, take the boat to Woods Hole, and drive to Mrs. Underhill’s mainland home in Waltham, Massachusetts, where William began school.

But as Mrs. Underhill approached her eightieth birthday, her fortunes spiraled downward. Losses followed losses as her husband’s uninsured rare-book collection was destroyed in a warehouse fire and the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out other Underhill investments. The women decided to stay on in Nantucket in the winters, and William transferred from his Waltham school to the ’Sconset school, which he attended in 1930 and 1931 before transferring to the new Cyrus Peirce School in town.

The move to town was a reversal of the roles of Mrs. Underhill and Mrs. Higginbotham. When Florence Higginbotham had been a young single mother, Evelyn Underhill had taken her and William into the China Closet. Now Mrs. Higginbotham took the elderly Mrs. Underhill into her home. In 1920, she had invested in a house at 27 York Street, buying it from Edward and Elizabeth Whelden for $200 to use as a rental property.

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One of her tenants, Harold W. Folger, described as “one of the last of the dory fishermen of this vicinity,” died in bed in the house.

Adding a front porch and a sunroom to the house, Mrs. Higginbotham moved Mrs. Underhill, her family photos, and her china collection to York Street. For the remaining years of her life, Mrs. Underhill lived under the care of her former housekeeper. When she received guests, Mrs. Higginbotham withdrew to the back of the house. At other times the woman sat together smoking cigarettes, reciting poetry to each other, listening to the radio, doing jigsaw puzzles, and working on scrapbooks. Some of the scrapbooks were of celebrities and the world of high fashion. Mrs. Higginbotham kept an article about African-American history. In the 1890s Edward Underhill had also kept a scrapbook. It concludes with his own obituary, pasted in by his wife, and is now item 68 in NHA Collection 64.

William made new friends on York Street and sought his mother’s permission to join the Catholic church, to which his friends belonged. Mrs. Higginbotham and Mrs. Underhill were not churchgoers but encouraged William to follow his own inclinations.

Bit by bit, through the Depression years, Evelyn Underhill and Florence Higginbotham sold furniture H I S T O R I C

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and pieces of the china collection to support their household, including a Spode platter for thirty-five cents and a Wedgwood teapot for forty-five cents.

Despite their straitened circumstances, Mrs. Higginbotham made another investment. In June 1933 she bought the land adjacent to her York Street house, land on which stood the long-closed African Meeting House. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she rented the Meeting House to Nantucket businesses to use as storage space, and at one time as an artist’s studio.

The Underhill Cottages had ceased to support Mrs. Underhill long before her death. In a document executed before Reginald T. Fitz-Randolph in August 1932, Mrs. Underhill sold to Mrs. Higginbotham “all the personal property, including household furniture and personal effects, now situated in the building numbered 27 York Street in said Nantucket.” Two weeks later she signed another document, witnessed by two of her close friends from ’Sconset, stating that “I have given Florence Higginbotham my watch and rings for her faithful services to me for the many years she has been with me.”

On April 17, 1935, Evelyn Underhill died at the age of 84 years, eight months. Some of her china collection remained in storage at 27 York Street until 2001, when William Higginbotham sold the house to the Museum of Afro-American History.

Ethnohistorian Frances Ruley Karttunen is the author of The Other Islanders, a three-part history of the nonEnglish population of Nantucket. Part I: “Nantucket’s First Peoples of Color” and Part II: “From Other Ocean Islands” are now viewable on-line at the NHA web site.

This story of the friendship between Mrs. Higginbotham and Mrs. Underhill is excerpted from the forthcoming Part III: “Nantucket and the World’s People.”

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Historic Nantucket Book Section Reviews by Garth Grimmer and Peter Sorensen

Wood, Wind and Water: A Story of the Opera House Cup Race on Nantucket Photographs by Anne T. Converse Text by Carolyn M. Ford

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N EVERY THIRD SUNDAY OF AUGUST IN

Nantucket a crowd gathers at the Brant Point Lighthouse beach to watch about seventy sailboats leave the harbor and make their way into Nantucket sound. These vessels vary in type and size but they have two things in common: they are exquisitely beautiful and they are wooden. Parading to and fro in front of the spectators is a fleet of small colorful boats.

They are the Nantucket Rainbow Fleet, and they celebrate and highlight the fact that this event,“The Opera House Cup Race,” is uniquely Nantucket.

It all began thirty years ago when a group of sailors was gathered at a bar (as sailors are wont to do) discussing sailing and related topics. When the lack of races specifically for classic wooden boats was brought up, Gwen Gaillard, the owner of the Opera House Restaurant, offered to provide a trophy (an old silver wine bucket) if the sailors could organize a race. Fifteen

boats showed up at the starting line and participated in what turned out to be the first single-hulled classic wooden-boat race on the East Coast. Now, thirty years later, several other classic wooden-boat regattas have evolved but none has the prestige of the original.

However, as boats like the Endeavour, the British J boat that almost beat Vanderbilt’s Rainbow in 1934 for the America’s Cup, or Intrepid, the twelve-meter triple defender of the cup, sail past, most spectators are unaware of their place in maritime history. Nor do many people know the story of how some of the boats were rescued from certain destruction. For them, Wood, Wind and Water is a must read.

The book provides a brief history of Nantucket and the Opera House Cup Race and then moves to a cryptic background of several of the boats that have raced in the past. The choice of boats included is arbitrary but the coverage introduces the owner and how he acquired the boat and what he did to restore it or rescue it. Readers are introduced to the various classes of boats from J boats to twelve-meters, Herreshoffdesigned or -built boats, and modern boats manufactured with the latest construction techniques.

Although this book is short on text, the photographs more than make up for it. They are beautiful and are the closest thing to actually being in the race.

Scenes of action at the start of the race are included just as are foggy, windless, drifting days. Unfortunately, however, the photographs only cover the period between 1989 and 2000.

This book is not a definitive history of the Opera House Cup, and the authors acknowledge that.

Rather it is their interpretation of the race from the time they began to experience it, but they have vividly captured their excitement and enjoyment of the Opera House Cup. When he is not giving walking tours or grinding corn at the Old Mill, NHA interpreter Garth Grimmer can often be found hoisting sails, reading the wind, and navigating the fastest way around marks in Nantucket Harbor on race day.

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Demon of the Waters

By Gregory Gibson Mutiny on the Globe

By Thomas Farel Heffernan

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OLLOWING A PARTICULARLY HEINOUS MOMENT in a story clocking many such, author Gregory Gibson describes an inelegant body disposal at sea: “. . . but the line fouled in the rigging, and the corpse dragged along in the wake of the ship like a guilty conscience.” In the same way, the 1824 mutiny aboard the Nantucket whaleship Globe has been ignominiously towed in the flow of American maritime history.

The tale has resurfaced on a regular basis. With the commercial success of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, it seems apparent that the public’s appetite for sea-disaster books continually craves a good yarn, especially if it’s true and especially if it’s well told. The Globe saga is such a yarn.

But two books—both well told—in the same year?

Considering that the events of the mutiny are well known to genre followers and that there is a finite supply of first-person documentation, what is a reader to do? The general reader will find either book worthwhile and well written, though seemingly padded (with each pushing 300 pages). However, both are “must reads” for those with even a little sea water coursing through their veins.

Samuel Comstock is a mischievous Nantucket youth who ships early to sea and grows to despise the whaling trade and authority figures. He dreams of commandeering a vessel, of killing off officers and crew, and of becoming a Yankee king of some South Seas empire.

Timing, innate manipulative powers, and, perhaps, weak Globe captaining present Comstock his opportunity. But the man who was able enough to turn a crew, to kill officers, to steer the ship to Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to author a charter amongst surviving crew, to ingratiate himself to atoll natives was ultimately unable to live out his dream. Samuel Comstock died at the hands of his own followers.

Heffernan fleshes out his telling Mutiny on the Globe with extensive information on life amongst the indigenous islanders, drawing information from the likes of Francis X. Hezel and Hiram Bingham. Many H I S T O R I C

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pages, too, are devoted to the rescue by the U.S. schooner Dolphin of two crew members who survived twenty-two months in virtual island arrest. Heffernan said recently that Comstock failed to fulfill his dream after becoming “lost in his own fantasies.”

Also asked why the lead mutineer did not ultimately succeed, given his charm and capacity for evil doing, Gibson, author of Demon of the Waters, said Comstock became a victim of his own hypomania at a key moment. Gibson gives fascinating insights into the world of antique book and manuscript wheeling and dealing that led to the uncovering of a journal by a seventeen-year-old midshipman, Augustus Strong, who penned an account of the Dolphin’s activities and its rescue mission.

Both authors in speaking of Comstock freely employed terms such as “sociopath” and “psychopath.”

The people and events forming the Globe story stirred and haunted nineteenth-century imaginations just as surely as they do today and will tomorrow.

Peter Sorensen is a museum interpreter living in Old Mystic, Connecticut. His writings have appeared in Sea History magazine and Viet Nam War Generation Journal.

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Silver Anniversary Antiques Show

Clockwise from top left: Marilyn Whitney with Bob and Laurie Champion in the Hadwen House garden.

August Antiques Show chair Maggie Benedict with Jay Bauer of Trianon/Seaman Schepps.

The Whittier Group, this year’s title sponsor: Grace Russak, Nancy Casey, Mike Casey, Stephen Smith, and James A. Jeffs.

Auction chair Melanie Sabelhaus with auctioneer extraordinaire Rafael Osona.

Leanne and John Kendrick.

Benefactors and Founders Dinner committee: Marcie Watts, Lynn Steinfurth, and Nan Geschke.

2002 honorary chair Dorothy Slover.

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The Twenty-Fifth Annual August Antiques Show was recognized as its silver anniversary. The silver theme provided a setting for the NHA to have an exhibition of silver from its collection at Hadwen House and a small display at the Antiques Show.

Nantucket silversmiths made some of these pieces, some commemorated special occasions on the island, and some were on loan from private collections. As Antiques Show chair, I would like to thank the talented and energetic group of women on my committee, as well as the fine staff of professionals in the NHA offices.

These people helped to make the show a true celebration and a financial success.

First, I would like to thank our honorary chair Dorothy Slover. Her twelve years of service to the NHA and her dedication to the development of the Antiques Show made this event worth celebrating. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the Founders, Benefactors, Patrons, and Sponsors for their generous support. These groups form a special partnership with our corporate and business partners, who through their grants underwrote the cost of the twenty-fifth August Antiques Show. This year we welcomed a new title sponsor, The Whittier Trust Company, an investment and financial-management firm. They, along with Trianon/Seaman Schepps, provided the money to support the cost of producing the Antiques Show.

The final report will be included in the Annual Report, but preliminary figures indicate that net revenue will be ten percent higher than in 2001.

Approximatly $550,000 will help the NHA bring the history of the island to life through educational programs and preservation of artifacts.

The week began with the traditional lecture sponsored by the Friends of the NHA. Carolyn MacKenzie, president, along with Heidi and Max Berry, invited Leslie and Leigh Keno to return to the island to speak about identifying antiques as real or fake. A reception N A N T U C K E T

followed, hosted by Laurie and Bob Champion, at the Hadwen House.

Midweek, Mia and Bob Matthews hosted a luncheon at their home to acknowledge the corporate and business sponsors. Many thanks to Marybeth Keene, underwriting chair, for her hard work in recruiting those sponsors.

The NHA is indebted to the Antiques Council for managing the show for the past twelve years. This year we welcomed Adelson Galleries, Inc., and Stephen and Carol Huber for the first time. Victor Weinblatt and his associate John Suval arranged for temporary air conditioning, which was greatly appreciated.

Nancee Erickson and Barbara Halsted provided breakfast pastries, coffee, and newspapers for the dealers during the show.

Preparations for the Preview included decorating the foyer, hall, and gym at the Nantucket High School.

Leanne Kendrick, chair of the decorating committee, brought the silver anniversary to life with an artistic scheme that included pictures of silver pieces from the NHA’s collection. Barbara Vanderbilt and her team of creative women cut stencils, painted draped fabric, and arranged flowers, transforming the gray walls into a festive hall. Pam Waller, Nan Lampe, and Rhonda Cassity made the final arrangements for the Preview party; and The Whittier Trust Company provided the gift bags.

The Collectors Booth again proved to be a special feature of the show, offering modestly priced items.

Vicki Livingstone and Josette Blackmore and their committee gathered inventory for the booth from many of the Antiques Show committee members and other long-term supporters. Clement Durkes and Anne Obrecht also gathered some extraordinary raffle items from Nantucket businesses for which we are most appreciative. The Collectors Booth and the Raffle always contribute a significant portion of the show’s revenue.

The show opened to the public on Friday, August 2, immediately following the Collectors Breakfast and tour. Nantucketer David Wood, a life-long collector, F A L L

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spoke of his passion for collecting. Then David and chief curator Niles Parker led tours of the show and spoke about the antiques that were of particular interest.

Mia Matthews and Vanessa Diserio helped the children make Sailors’ Valentines while their parents attended the show.

For the first time, visitors were invited to bring in one or two items to receive a verbal appraisal from members of the Antiques Council. Over forty-five items were appraised on the first day of the show.

Other committees worked hard to help coordinate this event. Olivia Thornton ensured that there were always enough volunteers to help greet visitors, to sell tickets for the raffle, and to staff the Collectors Booth.

Pat Anathan organized volunteers to complete the mailing of invitations and to send response cards.

Chris Hart helped to maximize the publicity for the show and Phyllis Freilich and Linda Saligman found materials for the gift bags and organized volunteers to assemble them.

The twenty-fifth anniversary celebration was concluded on Saturday evening with a cocktail party hosted by Marilyn Whitney at her home, Moors End. On a warm summer evening several hundred supporters gathered in her magnificent garden to celebrate the Antiques Show’s silver anniversary. The highlight came when Melanie Sabelhaus, auction chair, introduced Rafael Osona to present the items “What Money Can’t Buy” for auction. The bidding was fast, and the auction set a new record. Then, in an effort to maximize the moment, Rafael auctioned commitments to the NHA Endowment Fund.

The cocktail party was followed by a fabulous evening of dining and dancing to the music of Ecliff and the Swing Dogs under the tent at the Eleanor Ham Pony Field, which is close to Marilyn Whitney’s home. The three-hundred benefactors and founders were dinner guests of Trianon/Seaman Schepps. Many thanks to the remarkable efforts of Lynne Steinfurth, Nan Geschke, and Marcie Watts who coordinated this fabulous evening.

I would like to extend my gratitude for the endless support and hard work of all my committee members and the wonderful staff at the Nantucket Historical Association who made this twenty-fifth Antiques Show a great success.

—Margaret G. Benedict, Antiques Show Chair, 2002 H I S T O R I C

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Annual Meeting The NHA held its 108th Annual Meeting on Friday, July 12, in the garden of Hadwen House. The speaker was Malcolm A. Rogers, the Ann and Graham Gund Director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and his topic was “Museums at the Crossroads: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

By highlighting elements of recent change at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in the museum industry in general, Rogers helped to put in context the efforts of the NHA to move forward with plans for the future. In addition, president Arie L. Kopelman and executive director Frank Milligan spoke, reflecting on the past year and thanking retiring board members.

They also reviewed recent decisions by the board and its vision for the NHA. The nominating committee placed the following names in nomination for the class of 2006: C. Marshall Beale, Robert H. Brust, Arie L. Kopelman, Bruce D. Miller, Melanie Sabelhaus, Lawrence L. Stentzel, and E. Geoffrey Verney. Elected to one-year terms were Carolyn B. MacKenzie, president of the Friends of the NHA, and Harvey Saligman, president elect, Friends of the NHA. The NHA also recognized trustees who were completing their terms: Sarah J. Baker, Laurie S. Champion, Prudence S. Crozier, Albert L. Manning Jr., Richard F. Tucker, and David Wood.

In conjunction with the Annual Meeting, a new exhibition, Nantucket Silver, a display of eighteenthand nineteenth-century silver, was unveiled in the Hadwen House. A spread of sweets and cool drinks was organized by Carolyn MacKenzie and her team of volunteers including Kaaren Hale, Pat Anathan, Penn Curran, Ellen Ross, Terese Payne, Barbara Hajim, Polly Espy, and Brad Henke.

NHA president Arie L. Kopelman talking to members at the 108th Annual Meeting on July 12.

Guest speaker Malcolm A. Rogers.

Web News Over the last six months, the staff has been steadily working on the NHA website, www.nha.org. Visitors will now find an on-line exhibition of the popular Embroidered Narratives: Nine Nantucket Women; expanded library pages, including frequently asked research questions; a posting of recent new releases; and an attractive display of black-and-white reproduction photographs for sale at the Museum Shop on Straight Wharf. The E-print center on the website has F A L L

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Susan Boardman’s beautiful needlework (as featured in this summer’s Embroidered Narratives exhibition) has been reproduced as notecards.

Shown here is the piece celebrating Susan Veeder.

The four contemporary Nantucket women immortalized by Boardman—the NHA’s own Libby Oldham, birder extraordinaire Edith Andrews, native scrimshander and NHA trustee Nancy A. Chase, and devoted citizen Grace Grossman— pose with the artist and their individual pieces.

Photograph by Kate Hutchison.

This Cabral family wedding portrait is one of the photographs and artifacts in Jag! Cape Verdean Heritage on Nantucket, which opens October 5 in the Whitney Gallery at the NHA Research Library.

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also expanded. Included are past articles from Historic Nantucket and in October the second installment of Frances Ruley Karttunen’s research project The Other Islanders. Please visit the site and let us know if you have comments or feedback by contacting us at: nhainfo@nha.org.

Friends of the NHA The Friends gathered in mid-August at the home of Dusty and Gleaves Rhodes for their annual meeting and dinner. The new president, Harvey Saligman, was elected and welcomed by outgoing president Carolyn Mackenzie. The Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association was founded in 1986 to seek significant acquisitions for the collections of the NHA. With their support, the NHA has been able to acquire a variety of art and artifacts—nearly seventy objects thus far—that the organization otherwise would not have been able to secure.

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Members Forum More than eighty NHA members gathered around the Old Mill for a Members Forum on August 21. The forum provided an initial opportunity for members to share their thoughts and visions for the NHA’s 1.25 acres of land adjacent to the Old Mill. Members of the board of trustees; Frank Milligan, executive director; and Niles Parker, chief curator, heard and responded to a broad range of members’ comments, concerns, and questions. Among the topics discussed were: the NHA’s intention to retain the land and raise an additional $3 million for the endowment to support historic properties; the Interpretive Plan and future use of NHA properties; preserving and displaying the NHA collection; the need and planning for the new museum; and the purposes and achievements of The Campaign for the NHA. Members are encouraged to continue the dialogue and can expect to see regular communications in issues of Historic Nantucket and The Gam. N A N T U C K E T

Notecards Susan Boardman’s beautiful embroideries—displayed at this summer’s exhibition in the Whitney Gallery at the NHA Research Library—have been reproduced as images on notecards, along with the text panels describing the significance of the piece and the process of producing them.

Susan Boardman underwrote the production and printing of the cards, which are on sale at the NHA Research Library, 7 Fair Street, and at the Museum Shop, 11 Broad Street.

Profits from the sales of the cards go to the NHA’s endowment for the restoration and maintenance of historic properties. Call the Museum Shop at (508) 2285718 to order a box. The price per box, including tax, is $21; $19 for members, plus postage.

Exhibition News Jag! Cape Verdean Heritage on Nantucket An exhibition documenting the lives and history of Nantucket’s Cape Verdean community will be on display in the Research Library’s Whitney Gallery starting October 5, 2002. Organized by Frances Karttunen and Theran Singleton as well as curatorial assistant Ben Simons and curator of library and archives Georgen Gilliam, the exhibition will feature historic and contemporary photographs and a selection of objects and documents. The Cape Verde archipelago of ten islands lies 240 miles off the coast of West Africa. The islands were uninhabited until discovered by the Portuguese in 1462, and the Cape Verdean culture developed from Africans and Portuguese and other Europeans who traveled there.

Nantucket and other New England whaling ports became the destination of many Cape Verdeans, who, faced with drought and starvation, signed on to work on the whaling ships in the early 1800s. In fact, Joseph Sylvia, the first Cape Verdean to become a United States citizen, was sworn in on Nantucket.

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The NHA Iron Man Relay team inched closer to glory this June when teammates Steve Langer, Niles Parker, Chris Hart, Frank Milligan, Tim Wallace, and Paul Jensen placed tenth in the highly competitive event sponsored by Nantucket Nectars.

Delighted to have the Old Mill working again, miller Betsy Pardi helped to

New Gifts to the Collection The Nantucket Railroad exhibition has elicited numerous gifts to the collection. Among the objects presented to the NHA are sections of the rail, spikes, photographs, and maps all related to the railroad, which operated on the island from 1881 to 1917. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the collection and the exhibition. A complete list of donations will be included in the Annual Report.

Readers Survey Thank you to everyone who filled out one of the Readers Surveys in the last issue of Historic Nantucket.

It was rewarding to discover all of the blue cards in the mail. If you haven’t answered the survey, there is still time. A tabulation of the responses will begin this fall.

Look for a summary in our winter 2003 issue.

Destination Providence The NHA’s group of explorers is planning an excursion to Providence on Wednesday, October 23. The trip will include a visit to the Culinary Museum and Archives at Johnson and Wales University in the morning. After a special luncheon there will be guided tours at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House, plus a walking tour of historic Benefit Street.

Members are encouraged to join the tour for a fascinating day with chief curator Niles Parker. For information about this and future trips, please call associate director/director of development Jean Grimmer at (508) 228-1894, ext. 111, or Niles Parker at (508) 2281894, ext. 120.

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train a crew of young interpreters, including Lauren Nobel (seen in middle jump-starting the mill). Photographs by Linda Steelman.

The Heritage Society PLANNING TODAY FOR THE NHA’S TOMORROW The Nantucket Historical Association invites you to join forward-looking donors who have included the Association in their wills.

Your gift will help build financial stability to continue the NHA’s mission for future generations.

For more information, please call Jean Grimmer at (508) 228-1894, ext. 111 GPN2862

Photographs and documents will be scanned into the NHA’s digital photo database and a digital exhibit link will be found at the NHA’s web site, www.nha.org. Related programming will include a concert and storytelling event featuring renowned Cape Verdean performer Len Cabral, on Saturday, November 2, and a lecture by Frances Ruley Karttunen on Friday, November 1.

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ut it’s never too late to sign on for another year with the

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