Research Library Update

In 2022, the NHA’s digitization team completed work on nearly 60 manuscript collections, all of which are now available to researchers online. The year started off with digitizing the Ships Papers Collection (1,521 items), with the rest of the year spent digitizing collections as small as a single item to collections of family correspondence numbering thousands of pages.

This year, the focus is on two collections: account books and student reports from the Preservation Institute Nantucket program. The account book collection consists of nearly 500 volumes recording the business dealings of hundreds of island individuals and firms. Many of these volumes are from Nantucket ships and preserve crew lists, payments records, and lists of supplies, whale oil, and transactions in foreign ports. Other volumes relate to the island’s lighthouses, shops, wharfs, government offices, the railroad, and land transactions. Documenting 300 years of business activity, the collection ranges from Mary Coffin Starbuck’s seventeenth-century account book to Bill Sevren’s 1980s receipt books.

The University of Florida’s Preservation Institute Nantucket (PIN) has operated as a center for education in historic research and architectural preservation on Nantucket since 1972. It is one of the nation’s oldest, continually operating field schools for historic preservation. The program prepares the next generation of heritage specialists as part of applied research and learning that helps document, conserve and manage the island’s historical, architectural and cultural resources. The NHA Research Library is one of three repositories to receive the research outputs of the program and is working in partnership with PIN to make this research available online.

Also in 2023, the NHA is launching a pilot digitization project at the collections storage center. Due to the wide variety of artifacts in the collection, digitization of three-dimensional materials requires a different approach than the one taken at the Research Library for digitizing materials such as manuscripts, books, and photographs. The pilot will allow staff to establish workflows and metrics that can guide the project long term.

In the first quarter, the pilot project team has reviewed nearly 1,000 artifacts, including paintings, trunks, ship models, South Seas materials, natural history specimens, and architectural mementos, ensuring that each is cataloged and photographed. Upcoming artifacts include jewelry and a subset of the furniture collection.

Digitization of the NHA’s collections is made possible thanks to a visionary gift from Connie and Tom Cigarran. The NHA Board of Trustees has matched their gift, allowing staff to increase digitization capacity this year.

The second and third acquisitions are both letter books—compilations of outgoing business correspondence from island merchants. The first is from the whale-oil and candle maker James Barker (1759–1832) and contains letters to his extensive network of business associates in Boston, New York, and elsewhere from 1794 to 1803, including letters to his younger half-brother Jacob Barker (1779–1871), who was later a leading figure in antebellum American finance. The NHA holds a great many individual business documents from the late eighteenth century but very few complete letter books from this time. The book promises to open a window on the daily operations of one of the island’s less-understood whale-oil concerns.

The NHA has recently added three important manuscripts to its research collections. The first is a logbook from the ship Henry Astor. The Henry Astor was built as a merchant ship in New York in 1820. It made two whaling voyages to the Pacific from Hudson, New York, under Captain Charles Rawson between 1831 and 1839 before undertaking two more from Nantucket between 1840 and 1848 under captains Seth Pinkham and Thomas M. Coffin. The ship then carried the members of the Henry Astor Mining Company and the Sherburne Mining Company from Nantucket to the California gold fields in 1849. It was subsequently sold to Panamanian owners. The current logbook documents the 1831–35 voyage from Hudson and was written by first mate Reuben F. Starbuck of Nantucket. This voyage was particularly successful, harvesting 2,200 barrels of sperm oil; the log contains many drawings of whales and whale tails, indicating successful and failed hunts. By coincidence, the NHA already holds a scrimshaw whale tooth bearing a portrait of the Henry Astor that was engraved by the very same Reuben Starbuck during this voyage. The logbook is a gift of Peggy Coyle; an ancestor of hers purchased the book for $1.00 on a summer visit to Nantucket in 1889.

Henry Astor Ship Log. MS220 Log 424. Gift of Peggy Coyle in 2022 (Acc. RL2022.31).

The second letter book is from Christopher Mitchell & Company, the island firm that operated the famous Nantucket whalers Globe, Lima, Peruvian, Phebe, and Christopher Mitchell. The book starts in 1835 and runs to 1843, and its letters relate to the details of shipping, whaling, and oil refining. The construction progress of a new whaleship, the Walter Scott, is traced in letters to Gideon Barstow & Son in Mattapoisett. Other letters reveal disputes about leaky whaleships in the Pacific, purchases of canvas and hemp for sail- and ropemaking, and shipments of refined oil in Nantucket’s coasting fleet to merchants in New York and elsewhere. The book is a gift of Deborah Culbertson.

The NHA, like many museums and archives, collects oral histories to preserve living traditions and record community history from the people who lived it. Hearing people’s stories in their own voices reminds us that history is made in the present, and not all history can be collected through artifacts alone.

The NHA is custodian for several hundred oral-history recordings, in both audio-only and video formats, and regularly initiates new recording projects to answer new questions and address specific research goals. In this update, we hear from two NHA Research Fellows about their recent experiences working on Nantucket oral-history initiatives.