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Nantucket, Far Away and Long Ago by Joseph Warren Phinney and his Granddaughter Diana Taylor Brown THESE ARE EXCERPTS from the autobiographical reminiscences of Nantucket which my grandfather, Joseph Warren Phinney, dictated to my Grandmother a year or so before he died. My Grandfather was born on Nantucket Island in 1845 and died at the end of 1934 in West Medford, Massachusetts. I'm adding here a few more dictated anecdotes which were not included in the printed manuscript. Orphaned before he was four years old, he moved to Sandwich, Massachusetts, with his grandmother and grandfather at the age of seven or eight. The Cape Cod Advocate was a newspaper published in Sandwich in 1860 by Matthew Pinkham and Benjamin Bowman. Bowman, the printer, enlisted in the army in 1861, and Joseph Warren Phinney got his job at $3.00 a week. Thus began the work that he was to follow the rest of his life. Although brought up in the Quaker faith, he twice enlisted in the Union Army. Once he was returned because of his age, but the second time he was old enough to become a corporal with Co. A, 5th Regiment Infantry. After the war he went on with journalism and the printing business, living in both the middle west and New England. Later on my Grandfather became a well known authority on type foundings, and became manager of the American Type Foundry. I remember, as a child, sitting on his lap, as he sang sea chanties to me or told stories of the Civil War — how he once saw Abraham Lincoln who visited his regiment stationed outside of Washington. My grand father did not inherit the love of the sea from his forebears who were often whalers and captains in the China trade, or from his own father, a captain who lost his life in the burning of his ship on Lake Erie. My Grandfather recalled to his family that an uncle of his had a fleet of whalers and was very wealthy. When he was ten years old, this uncle tried to get him to "ship before the mast". When he wouldn't go, the un cle had no further use for him.
