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The Significance of Public Schools in Ante-bellum Nantucket BY ELINOR MONDALE GERSMAN
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NANTUCKET settlers clustered together in a central town and made the best of their sandy island, thirty miles off the southern coast of Cape Cod, through farming and sheep herding. Later, butchering beached whales led to pur suit of them at sea, and by 1770 Nantucket had a fleet of 125 ships averaging ninety-three tons each, with an annual produc tion worth $358,200.' During the Revolution and the War of 1,812, Nantucket's exposed position resulted in great suffering and an accompanying loss of wealth and population, but the most serious obstacle to economic development was the sand bar blocking the mouth of the harbor and preventing entry of large, loaded ships. As early as 1803 the islanders began petitioning Congress for various kinds of aid in dealing with the bar, and eventually they constructed a "camel," a steam-operated device, to lift ships over the bar. This worked successfully during the 1840s, but it proved too expensive.2 In the face of adversity Nantucketers left the island in droves throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to form whaling colonies abroad or to join friends and relatives in American cities and on the frontier. Despite this outward mi gration, Nantucket flourished; the years between 1820 and 1850 are remembered as a "Golden Age" of cultural and financial growth. From 5,617 in 1800 the population grew to 9,012 in 1840 after which it began to lose ground and was reduced to 4,123 in 1870. In the census years of 1810 and 1820 Nantucket was the third largest city in Massachusetts, but thereafter the urban population of the state grew more rapidly than did the island's, presaging its eventual loss of position among the major cities. The dominance of the Society of Friends and the Presbyter ian church in eighteenth-century Nantucket was lost as the number of sects multiplied and secular interests soared in the nineteenth century.3 After several false starts a permanent newspaper was established in 1821, and islanders developed such a taste for news that in 1836 a successful "Commercial Reading Room" was opened. A number of library associations eventually combined into one main library in the mid-1830s, the Nantucket Philosophical Institute became popular for its scien tific and literary talks, a Lyceum was encouraged, and an Educa tion Society formed in addition to a variety of fraternal and social voluntary associations. Temperance, abolition, and other reform causes all had their adherents. A general interest in
