SUMMER 2020 VOLUME 70, NO. 1
SPECIAL ISSUE: CELEBRATING THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PASSAGE OF THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT
The Nantucket Historical Association presents
nantucket by design July 30 – August 1, 2020 Join us for an unforgettable VIRTUAL experience, including engaging panels, a design luncheon, an online antiques show, house tours, intimate Zoom dinner parties, and a virtual dance party you won’t forget!
Alessandra Branca
Steele Marcoux
Meg Braff
Young Huh
Richard Keith Langham
presenting sponsor NANTUCKET REAL ESTATE • MORTGAGE • INSURANCE
Kelly Williams, Nantucket by Design Chair 2020
Purchase tickets and learn more at NHA.org Follow us @NantucketbyDesign #NANTUCKETBYDESIGN
Ellen Fisher
Schedule of Virtual Events Virtual Design Luncheon Thursday, July 30
Virtual House Tours Friday, July 31
Join friends for lunch via Zoom and enjoy a live presentation with keynote speaker Alessandra Branca. Our vivacious and talented keynote speaker is a worldrenowned designer who will discuss how she creates “Sanctuary” in her designs. Alessandra’s interiors are anchored by classical details, rich colors, patterns, and textures, paired with antique and custom furnishings, modern and European art, and distinctive accessories. Alessandra has launched her own line, called Casa Branca, which captures the elements of her amazing style. Her talk is followed by live Q&A via Zoom.
Featuring designers Susan Zises Green, Gary McBournie, and Andrew Kotchen. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
Chaired by Stacey Bewkes Sponsored by Centre Pointe
The Nantucket Summer Antiques Show Virtual Preview Party Thursday, July 30 The NHA is pleased to partner with The Nantucket Summer Antiques Show through an online platform. All ticket purchasers will get the exclusive first look at the collections of 32 dealers. Enjoy an opening talk with renowned interior designer Alex Papachristidis, who will discuss how to incorporate antiques into modern interiors. Managed by The Antiques Council. Chaired by Maureen and Edward Bousa Honorary Chair, Kathleen Hay
Virtual Design Panel Friday, July 31 Join friends via Zoom as Steele Marcoux, editor-in-chief of Veranda magazine, moderates an engaging discussion with designers Meg Braff, Young Huh, and Richard Keith Langham. The designers will discuss how they create a sanctuary for clients, how to create work with historic interiors, and share engaging stories about their careers in interior design. The panel will be followed by live Q&A via Zoom. Chair Emerita Susan Zises Green
Virtual All-Star Designer Private Dinners Friday, July 31 Diamond, platinum, and gold leadership ticket holders are invited to join a virtual dinner party featuring one of our distinguished design luminaries as a special guest. Small groups will join together via Zoom for this unique opportunity to meet and dine with a leader in the field. Chaired by Gary McBournie and William Richards Sponsored by Magellan Jets
Saturday Seminar: Nantucket Design = Local Foundations + Global Infusions Saturday, August 1 This special seminar will be held via Zoom and will explore the history of design on Nantucket in the 20th century with Ellen Fisher, the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the New York School of Interior Design. Participants will learn how interior design has evolved throughout the years on Nantucket and engage in a live Q&A. Sponsored by New York School of Interior Design
Virtual Night at the Museum Dance Party Saturday, August 1 Join friends from all over the world at this exciting virtual dance party. Join famous DJ Mad Marg as she will take us back to the late 1970s with a disco bash to remember. During this Zoom dance party, you can observe or join on-screen to show off your best disco moves and flash your disco style! Get your mod and glitter out of storage and be prepared to do the Hustle! Chaired by Marla Sanford and Elizabeth Georgantas Honoring Phoebe and Bobby Tudor Sponsored by The Vault
New York School of Interior Design Student Project: On display at the Whaling Museum starting Thursday, July 30. Learn more about this student project and this year’s students at NHA.org! Wednesday, July 15, 6-7pm. FREE
Providing a Safe Environment for Our Members Staff is ready to “lower its whaleboats and get underway” and welcome you back into the Whaling Museum starting on July 11th and 12th with a Members’ Only weekend. We have implemented robust precautionary measures to make your indoor experience both exceptional and safe. These include sanitation stations throughout the museum, X3 times a day cleaning regiment, installation of MERV13 filters in our HVAC system, and increases in the flow of fresh air into the building. To learn more about safety measures and protocols, go to NHA.org. NEW THIS YEAR: Schedule the time of your visit so you will not have to wait in line. It is easy. Go to NHA.org and pick a time slot. We are limiting the number of people in the museum to <10% of maximum occupancy at any one time, plus we have extended museum hours from 8:00am – 6:00pm. Our highly regarded 1:1 interpreter presentations are on hold, but a new self-guided audio tour has been created and is available for free using personal devices. As a visual guide, a Yellow “Cobblestone” Road—à la The Wizard of Oz—is installed through the museum. Thanks to William Raveis Real Estate for sponsoring this initiative. New exhibitions abound, and a brand new Discovery Center designed for family exploration will definitely make you want to tap your heels three times and say “there is no place like the NHA.” Underscoring all the above is the firm belief that cultural institutions like the NHA can be places of healing during a time of crisis. We are fortunate to have large open indoor spaces, and the concept of “seeing not touching” is widely understood when visiting a museum. Providing a sanctuary is important this year, particularly as other indoor entertainment options are limited. We chose the Yellow Cobblestone Road metaphor for a reason—this year we want to do our part to strengthen the heart, mind, and spirit of the community. The Research Library continues to provide remote research services, and will offer in-person service to
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researchers by the month of August. The NHA’s 1800 House educational programs continue too, though many of these classes have moved online. Private instruction is available, so consider a private lesson for your family and friends. On private events, consider renting out the new Discovery Center or have a small gathering on the Roof Deck or in one of our historic properties. We will be delighted to accommodate. Though we must restrict access into our historic properties, we encourage you to enjoy the peace and tranquility found in the beautiful gardens of Hadwen House and Greater Light or in the open spaces by the Old Mill and Oldest House. Public outdoor programs, many at the historic properties, will ramp up once permitting allows. These will include creative uses of the normally fallow grounds, with performances and presentations. Finally, and most importantly, we thank you for your membership support. As we look at our revenue streams this year, every category is down except for Membership. This is a great testament to your collective belief in the importance of this organization. Congratulations go to you for your stalwart and steadfast commitment. Sincerely,
James Russell Gosnell Executive Director
SUMMER 2020 | VOLUME 70, NO. 1
Table of Contents: Extraordinary Women of Nantucket | pg. 12 Nantucket Women: How The Quaker Women’s Meeting Established The Foundation For The National Women’s Rights Movement | pg. 16 By Jeffrey Kovach, Ph.D. The Real Women of Petticoat Row | pg. 24 By Michael Harrison Biographies of the Women of Petticoat Row | pg. 32 A Disturber of Tradition: Anna Gardner | pg. 36 By Barbara White The Power of Voice: Reflections of Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) | pg. 44 By Jamie Stiehm An Island Seen: The Artists Association of Nantucket and The Women Who Built It | pg. 48 By Anne Knutsen, Ph.D., and Daniel Elias The Yellow Cobblestone Road
Board of Trustees 2019–20 Kelly Williams, President Victoria McManus, Vice President David Worth, Vice President William J. Boardman, Treasurer & Friends of the NHA President Sarah Alger, Clerk Nancy Abbey Patricia Anathan Susan Blount Anne Marie Bratton Chip Carver Olivia Charney
Wylie Collins Amanda Cross Annabelle Fowlkes Cam Gammill Graham Goldsmith Wendy Hudson Carl Jelleme Carla McDonald Franci Neely, Friends of the NHA Vice President Britt Newhouse Kennedy Richardson Marla Sanford
Cover: A Nantucket First! Welcome to Accaylia Sterling, Greta Pasys, Shelby Rondon, and Magdalena Gonzalez, the first Nantucket students to visit the new Discovery Center, June 26, 2020.
Janet Sherlund, Trustee Emerita Carter Stewart Melinda Sullivan Jason Tilroe Phoebe Tudor Finn Wentworth Alisa Wood Ex Officio James Russell, Gosnell Executive Director HISTORIC NANTUCKET (ISSN 0439-2248) is published by the Nantucket Historical Association, 15 Broad Street, Nantucket, Massachusetts. Periodical postage paid at Nantucket, MA, and additional entry offices. For information visit nha.org. ©2019 by the Nantucket Historical Association.
Editor: Ashley Santos, Associate Director of Marketing Designer: Amanda Quintin Design
all photos by nha staff unless otherwise noted.
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A LETTER FROM THE OUTGOING NHA BOARD PRESIDENT
Kelly Williams “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; …any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” These words from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions written in 1623, have always seemed to be particularly applicable to those who reside on islands like Nantucket. Nantucketers have seemed to understand innately that it is not in their best interest to disregard their fellow humans, because on an island 30 miles out to sea, you need everyone in order to succeed. At a time when our country is wracked with grief over the global pandemic and deep-seated racial inequality, I believe it is important to reflect upon Donne’s words, and believe that residents of our Island can model how not to be an island in humanity. As the stewards of our Island’s history, the Nantucket Historical Association can point to many examples of how collaboration and interconnectedness have led to great results for our community. Three years is a very short period of time for an organization with a 126-year history, and yet, it is amazing to reflect on all that the NHA has accomplished in this brief time. When I took on the role of president of the board of the NHA in July of 2017 from my extraordinary predecessor, Janet Sherlund, I shared with our then newly hired executive director, James Russell, my view that, over the years, the NHA had nailed the “Nantucket” and the “Historical” in our name and that our next period should be distinguished by a focus upon the “Association.” It is my opinion that non-profits only succeed through collaboration, and, thus, we set forth on a mission to strengthen our associations with other institutions on the island, among our collections and properties, and with our communities, locally and nationally. I believe it is this spirit of collaboration which is at the core of all that the NHA has accomplished over the past three years. One of our first acts was to purchase 4 Whalers Lane, a property located directly adjacent to the Whaling Museum. We believe this forward-thinking action by the board has positioned the Museum very well for the future, as we look to provide more public-facing space to our visitors and focus on telling Nantucket’s story in the broadest sense. Nantucket has been at the forefront of so many important historic movements that have affected our Island and
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our nation, from independence, to whaling and commerce, abolition, suffrage, desegregation, ecology and environmental protection, entrepreneurship, and arts and letters, to name just a few. To acknowledge this legacy, the NHA committed to open more of its properties to the public and installed new exhibits to tell those stories, such as Rights and Race at Hadwen House. In a prophetic turn, Nantucket emerged from its economic downturn in the late nineteenth century by embracing the arts and becoming a resort destination, known for the salutary effects of its light and air. To honor this chapter, the NHA installed a new fine arts wing at the Whaling Museum dedicated to highlighting Nantucket’s influence on American art, where we featured an exhibit drawn from the collections of the NHA and its many supporters, including a newly acquired masterpiece by William Trost Richards, gifted to the museum by the Friends of the NHA. In addition, in the McCausland Gallery, we mounted a blockbuster exhibit of American Realism amassed by noted Nantucket collector Sara Roby and now owned by the Smithsonian. During this brief time, the staff and board have accomplished so much, including a comprehensive strategic plan and digitization of our collection. James and the team have completely re-imagined the Museum, bringing collections out from storage and updating and
Top left: Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Sara Roby Collection on display in the McCausland Gallery, summer 2019. Top right: NHA lead exhibit at the 2019 Winter Show in New York City. Bottom left: Ribbon cutting of the new fine arts wing, Williams Forsyth Gallery in June 2019. From left to right: Kelly Williams, Andrew Forsyth, Janet Sherlund, William Boardman, Victoria McManus, and Jay Wilson. Bottom middle: Property purchased by the NHA at 4 Whalers Lane, located directly behind the Whaling Museum. Bottom right: Thomas Macy Warehouse
increasing the number of exhibits. The team has also developed an entirely new Discovery Center to engage our young visitors and established a new gift shop. We have invested in and secured some of our most historic properties, like the Thomas Macy Warehouse and Hadwen House. On the programming and collections side, we have established a series of symposia on scholarly topics, started the popular “We All Speak Moby-Dick” annual event, issued six publications, and acquired a number of extraordinary items, many with the help and guidance of the stalwart Friends of the NHA. We opened the Museum to island residents for free during the winter months. We have made Nantucket by Design into a nationally recognized event that adds much to the community and to the NHA’s bottom line, and we were all very proud that the NHA was selected as the lead exhibitor for the 2019 Winter Show in New York, to much acclaim. We have decorated and opened our historic properties for Christmas Stroll, to the delight of visitors, and we now host the Flower Power Party at the Museum during Nantucket’s iconic Daffodil Weekend. Any one
of the things listed would have been a laudable accomplishment during the past three years, but the fact that James and the team have completed them all at such a high level of commitment and quality speaks volumes about how special the NHA is. Institutions like the Nantucket Historical Association are so critical to stewarding the precious objects and stories which help to tell the story of America. My colleagues on the board of trustees take this responsibility to our community and our country very seriously. I am awed by their ceaseless dedication, creativity, and generosity. Serving as the president of the board of the NHA, and working with the multi-talented team of trustees, staff, and supporters, has been one of the great honors of my life. What a blessing it has been to give back to this special Island that has given me so much.
Kelly Williams, President
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Outgoing & Incoming Trustees OUTGOING TRUSTEES
INCOMING TRUSTEES
Anne Marie Bratton served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2020. During her tenure, she was Chair of the Communications & Marketing Committee, and was a member of the Development Committee. Mrs. Bratton was Vice Chair of the August Antiques Show in 2011 and Chair in 2012. She has also participated on the Nantucket by Design Committee. She is a member of the Friends of the NHA. Mrs. Bratton has generously supported the NHA through annual giving, campaigns, membership, and events.
Lucinda Ballard was born and raised in Maryland, and has spent most of her adult life in New York City. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and later earned an MS ed. in Museum Leadership from Bank Street Graduate School. After a brief career in the theatre, Lucinda worked as a producer-director-writer of documentary and “special purpose” films at several companies, including Ogilvy and Mather Advertising, where she was Vice President and Senior Producer. Lucinda has spent many years as an impassioned gallery instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she served as Chairman of the Volunteer Organization and continues to serve on its Executive Committee. She is a board member of East Side House Settlement, a social services agency in New York’s South Bronx and co-chair of The Winter Show, its main fundraiser. Lucinda has been coming to Nantucket her entire life and is currently Vice Commodore of the Nantucket Yacht Club. She is also a member of the NHA’s Collections & Exhibitions Committee. Lucinda loves gardening, sailing, the theatre, and losing herself in museums.
Kennedy Richardson served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2020. During his tenure, he was Vice President from 2014 to 2016. He was also a member of the Executive Committee, Collections & Exhibitions Committee, and Campaign Steering Committee. He chaired the Investment Committee and put new policies and procedures in place. He has generously supported the NHA through annual giving, campaigns, membership, and events. Phoebe Tudor served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2012 to 2020. During her tenure, she was a member of the Development Committee, Committee on Trustees & Governance, and Housing & Properties Committee. Mrs. Tudor served as Chair of Nantucket By Design in 2018 and 2019. She has graciously hosted donor events for the NHA in Texas and New York, and has generously supported the NHA through annual giving, campaigns, membership, and events.
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John L. Flannery is a seasonal resident and has been coming to the island for over 30 years. He is currently an Advisory Director at Charlesbank Capital Partners. Prior, Flannery held leadership roles inside GE for nearly 30 years, heading GE Healthcare, GE India and other business units before becoming GE’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. With a B.A. from Fairfield University and an M.B.A. from Wharton School of Business, John serves on the Finance Committee. His interests include history, reading, golf, and music.
Ashley Gosnell is from New York City, where she works at the Synergos Institute on the annual David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award. Prior to moving to NYC, she spent time in Connecticut as the Director of Development for a high-school student exchange program, ASSIST, and overseas in Beijing, China, as the Director of Secondary Placement for Due West Education. She is a Class Agent for St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, the Recruitment Committee Chair for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation Young Associates, and a member of the New York Junior League. Ashley also is a member of the NHA’s Education & Interpretation Committee. She holds a Masters in Education from Stanford University and a B.A. from Vanderbilt University. Judith Ivey is a two-time winner of the Tony Award, two-time winner of the Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel award, Emmy nominated, and an Obie Award winner. Judith has appeared in over 40 films, starred in four television series (Designing Women), and guest-starred in many more (White Collar, Nurse Jackie, Bloodline). Judith has also directed over 30 productions for the stage around the country. She received an honorary Doctorate from her alma mater, Illinois State University, was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, received the Texas State Medal of Arts for Theatre, and was honored by Women in Film. She is on the board of the Cherry Lane Theatre and the Houston Cinema Arts Society. Judith is married to Tim Braine, and they have spent summers in ’Sconset for 25 years. Judy loves animals and gardening.
Valerie Paley is a seasonal Nantucket resident who lives in ’Sconset. The senior vice president and chief historian at the NewYork Historical Society in New York City, she also serves as founding director of its Center for Women’s History, the first such center in the United States within the walls of a major museum. A graduate Photo by Wendy Mills of Vassar College, Paley holds an MA in American Studies and a PhD in History from Columbia University, where she teaches an undergraduate seminar in museums and public culture at the Columbia Center for American Studies. Her work at New-York Historical currently encompasses a critical range of curatorial, scholarly, and administrative responsibilities, which include the development of a new joint MA Program in Museum Studies with the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Professional Studies, which launched in fall 2019. Valerie serves on the board of Humanities New York, was an elected member of the Council (governing board) of the American Historical Association, and served on the board of the National Council on Public History. She also is a member of the NHA Nantucket Women’s Initiative Committee.
PICK UP A COMPLIMENTARY COPY AT THE WHALING MUSEUM The Life and Times of Oswald Anthony Tupancy: Golfer, Investor, Benefactor By Paul R. Judy
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Ability to Adapt and Adjust A LETTER FROM INCOMING BOARD PRESIDENT CHIP CARVER
I am excited. I am excited to step into the role of president of the Nantucket Historical Association and follow the path of Kelly Williams.
NBD has gone from the Nantucket Antiques Show, to Nantucket by Design, to Nantucket by Design in conjunction with the Nantucket Summer Antiques Show. The NHA has continued to adjust NBD and will be hosting a series of virtual events this summer. Each step along the way has allowed us to progress. It is this type of adapting and adjusting that excites me.
I also write this note with sadness for all the suffering that has and continues to occur because of the pandemic and racial strife. I wish each one of you good health and happiness. To be successful as an entity you must do two things. First, you must survive and be able to open your doors to carry out your mission. Second, you must adapt and adjust so that you will be even better after a crisis has occurred. And Nantucket and the Nantucket Historical Association are both adept at adapting and adjusting. If you know anything about the history of Nantucket, you know that the island is a leader in successfully adapting and adjusting. Prime examples are the rise and fall of the whaling industry, the early and leading embrace of the suffrage movement, and the creation of the summer destination the island is today. In each phase, the people of this island have adjusted to become leaders in what they are focused on. That is exciting. The NHA has a history of adapting and adjusting, similar to ACK. If we reflect on our major fundraiser, what is now called Nantucket by Design (NBD), we can see the adaptability the NHA is capable of. Under the guidance of many people, especially Janet Sherlund, Maureen Bousa, Phoebe Tudor, and Kelly Williams,
FRIENDS OF THE NHA VIRTUAL LECTURE, WITH GUEST SPEAKER SYLVIA YOUNT Wednesday, July 15, 6–7 pm. FREE
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With this crisis, what will the next chapter for ACK look like? I am not sure. What will the NHA’s role be? Again, I am not sure, but this is why I am excited. This is why I eagerly anticipate the future. Having watched the NHA during this crisis, I am impressed by the manner in which Executive Director James Russell, his staff, President Kelly Williams, and the board have put us in a position to open our doors as soon as we can and focus on our mission. Now we are in the process of determining the long-term implications of this crisis and how we must refine and improve the way in which we deliver on our mission. I look forward to providing any assistance I can to the staff of the NHA, its board members, and the overall membership. I am confident the NHA will continue to adapt and adjust, emerging even stronger over the next few years.
Chip Carver, Incoming Board President
Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator-in-Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will reflect on the global museum’s local founding in 1870, with a special focus on progressive women artists and tastemakers at the center of the late-19th-century New York art world. A virtual lecture via Zoom, RSVP to lexi@nha.org. A link will be shared prior to the lecture.
1894 Founders Society Through this society, the Board of Trustees recognizes the cumulative giving by individuals who assist with the NHA’s annual operating needs. 1894 Founders Society members contribute toward the annual fund, membership, and fundraising events, as well as to exhibitions and collections, scholarship and educational programs, plus other mission-driven initiatives. This generous support is greatly appreciated and welcomed by the community.
$50,000 and above President’s Circle Ritchie Battle Connie & Tom Cigarran Kelly Williams & Andrew Forsyth Barbara E. Jones† Bonnie & Peter McCausland Kim & Finn Wentworth $25,000 to $49,999 Anne Delaney & Chip Carver Kaaren & Charles Hale Richard Lowry Franci Neely Diane & Britt Newhouse Laura & Bob Reynolds Tracy & Joe Roby Harriet & Warren Stephens Melinda & Paul Sullivan Jason Tilroe Phoebe & Bobby Tudor Susan Zises Green $10,000 to $24,999 Nancy & Doug Abbey Patricia & Thomas Anathan Anonymous Gale Arnold Mary Randolph Ballinger Susan Blount & Rick Bard Carol & Harold Baxter Pamela & Max Berry Susan & Bill Boardman Maureen & Edward Bousa Anne Marie & Doug Bratton Christina Brown Julie Jensen Bryan & Robert Bryan Paula & Robert Butler
Laurie & Bob Champion Jennifer & Wylie Collins Amanda Cross Jennifer & Robert Diamond Deborah & Bruce Duncan Annabelle & Gregory Fowlkes Nancy & Chuck Geschke Barbara & Graham Goldsmith Susanne & Zenas Hutcheson Ann & Charles Johnson Jean Doyen de Montaillou & Michael Kovner Helen & Will Little Carolyn & Ian MacKenzie Miriam Mandell Victoria McManus & John McDermott Carla & Jack McDonald Ella Prichard Susan & Ken Richardson Margaret & John Ruttenberg Bonnie Sacerdote Marla & Terry Sanford Denise & Andrew Saul Janet & Rick Sherlund Kathleen & Bob Stansky Merrielou & Edward Symes Ann & Peter Taylor Sigrid & Ladd Thorne Louise Turner $5,000 to $9,999 Susan Akers Lauren & Clifford Asness Liz & Ben Barnes Patricia Nilles & Hunter Boll Richard Bressler Marianna & Chris Brewster Donald Burns
Christy & Bill Camp Marvin Davidson Mary Davidson Alex DeAngelo John DeCiccio Elizabeth Miller & James Dinan Jennifer & Stephen Dolente Ana & Michael Ericksen Cynthia & Michael Fowler Karyn Frist Michael Gerstein Andrea & Theodore Giletti Barbara & Ed Hajim Margaret & Gregory Hedberg Barbara & Amos Hostetter Wendy Hubbell Carl Jelleme Diane Pitt & Mitch Karlin Jill & Stephen Karp Diane & Art Kelly Linda & George Kelly Adrienne & S. D. Kirby Anne & Todd Knutson Paula & Bruce Lilly Sharon & Frank Lorenzo Ronay & Richard Menschel Ann & Craig Muhlhauser Sarah & Jeff Newton Nancy & John Nichols Carter & Chris Norton Caroline & Jeff Paduch Shira & Bradford Paul Liz & Jeff Peek Candy & Williams Raveis Maria & George Roach Sharon & Francis Robinson Robin & Mark Rubenstein Linda Saligman
Joe Santo Susan & L. Dennis Shapiro Deirdre & Joseph Smialowski Garrett Thornburg Liz & Geoff Verney Suzy & John Welch Stephanie & Jay Wilson Alisa & Alastair Wood Leslie Forbes & David Worth $3,000 to $4,999 Janet & Sam Bailey David Berry Laure & Bill Buck Prudy & Bill Crozier Janie & Jerry Dauterive Rhonda Eleish Cynthia & John Everets Page & Arthur Gosnell Suzy & Richard Grote Amy & Brett Harsch Wendy & Randy Hudson Ann & John Johnson Coco & Arie Kopelman Diana & Jeff Owen Nancy Romankiewicz Ellen & David Ross Sandra Holland & Alfie Sanford Mary Farland & J. Donald Shockey Georgia Snell Carol & Stephen Spinelli Karen & Edward Watkins
2019 Fiscal Year † deceased
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The Road from Abolition to Suffrage WILLIAMS FORSYTH GALLERY | OPENING AUGUST 4, 2020 This exhibition presents inspiring stories of individuals who moved Nantucket and the nation towards a more just and expansive distribution of freedom and political power. The story arc extends from the 1717 denouncement of slavery by the island’s Friends community, through to 1920 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted voting rights to women. Special factors, including the adoption of the Quaker religion, embrace of a whaling-based economy, and geographic remoteness, created the conditions on Nantucket for civil and political engagement. Like the rest of colonial New England, in the eighteenth century full political rights were only accorded to English landowners. Others—indigenous people, those of African origin or descent, landless workers and women of all heritages—were relegated to various levels of second-class dependency.
As anti-slavery sentiment grew, a number of black and white Nantucketers advocated actively for abolition and, in some cases, integration. Nearly three decades before the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and established citizenship as well as voting rights for all men, politically progressive Nantucketers had already begun to focus on securing those rights for women. This exhibition will focus on those principled individuals who advocated for equal rights and thus allowed political freedoms to take hold and flourish.
Florence E. Clay Higginbotham (1893-1972). P19179.
Portrait of Absalom Boston, ca.1835. Unknown Prior-Hamblin School artist Oil on Board Gift of Sampson D. Pompey, 1906.56.1
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Above left: Captain Paul Cuffee engraving, 1812 From a drawing by Dr. John Pele of Bristol, England On loan from Carl Cruz Left: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave With select text from page 117 Above: “Equal Suffrage” booth in the shape of the Old Mill, ca. 1910, P6610
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Extraordinary Women of Nantucket
MARY COFFIN STARBUCK (1645–1717) Quaker | Community Leader | Businesswoman Known as “The Great Mary of Nantucket,” Mary Coffin Starbuck was a woman of power and influence. A charismatic personality, Starbuck converted to the Quaker faith at fifty-six and brought much of the island’s white population with her. Meetings were initially held in her home, and she became the first recognized minister on the island. Starbuck also ran the family’s trading post, the island’s commercial center at the time. As she could read and write when her husband was illiterate, she kept the store’s account book, now held in the NHA’s collection. The volume illustrates the vital nature of her business to both the white and indigenous populations of the island, including accounts for as many as 200 Wampanoag customers.
KEZIA FOLGER COFFIN (1723–1798) Loyalist | Businesswoman Keziah Coffin, wife of a whaling captain, ran a lucrative international trading business before and during the American Revolution that made her and her husband the island’s wealthiest residents. Not content to rest in this position, it seems Kezia considered it her duty to supply the island with necessary foods and goods during the Revolution. Nantucket’s economy depended on British trade, and in 1779 she was suspected of smuggling, allegedly importing fresh flour through British connections. This was hardly treason; historians have noted that if no one had “moved more rapidly than the law,” there would have been much suffering on the island. The General Court in Boston understood this, despite the heated partisanship, and refused to convict her.
KEZIA COFFIN FANNING (1759–1820) Diarist Fanning is notable for the diaries she kept from age 16 until her death. Living during a period of dramatic change for both Nantucket and the American republic, Fanning keenly observed and documented many of the family’s activities, from her mother’s devotion to supplying the island with food during the war for independence, to her sons’ travails during the golden years of the whale-fishery. Her diaries were noted for their importance almost immediately, and eagerly sought by family and national historians alike. Passing through so many hands – they were an invaluable source for Alexander Starbuck’s History of Nantucket – the diary was eventually lost. But a few original pages remain, narrating the Nantucket bank robbery of 1795.
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EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN Any great change must expect opposition because it shakes the very foundation of privilege.” — Lucretia Coffin Mott
LUCRETIA COFFIN MOTT (1793–1880) Quaker Preacher | Abolitionist | Women’s Rights Leader Lucretia Mott was mentor to women’s activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, co-organizing the first women’s rights convention in the U.S. at Seneca Falls in 1848. She also contributed to the Declaration of Sentiments, the conference manifesto asserting women’s equality in politics, family, education, jobs, religion, and morals. “Resolved, therefore, that, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities and same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause by every righteous means; . . . and this being a self-evident truth growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature . . .”
ELIZA STARBUCK BARNEY (1802–1889) Abolitionist | Suffragist | Historian Well known as an “agitator” for temperance, equal rights, and women’s suffrage, she attended the first women’s suffrage convention in Massachusetts in 1851 and was among the first women to vote on Nantucket (for school committee) in 1880. Her later years focused on her “life’s work,” a genealogical record of 40,000 islanders dating back to the original English settlers. The seven volumes now rest in the NHA Research Library and are the cornerstone of all Nantucket genealogical research. She ended her days living at the Hadwen House with her son Joseph Barney, nephew of William Hadwen.
MARIA MITCHELL (1818–1889) Astronomer | Professor | Women’s Rights Activist | Librarian Maria Mitchell was a trailblazer. In 1847, she became the second woman to discover a comet and, the following year, was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As the Nantucket Atheneum’s head librarian, she was one of the first women in the world to lead a public library. Concurrently, she was the first professional woman employed by the U.S. government, hired in 1846 by the Coast Survey and in 1849 by the American Nautical Almanac Office. In 1865, as a professor of astronomy, she was the first person appointed to the faculty at Vassar College. She championed women in the sciences and advocated for women’s rights, co-founding the Association for the Advancement of Women in 1873 and remaining active in its work until 1888. To learn more, be sure to visit the Maria Mitchell Association.
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LYDIA FOLGER FOWLER, M.D. (1822–1879) Physician | Professor | Lecturer | Writer | Activist In 1850, Lydia Folger Fowler was the first American-born woman to receive a medical degree. In 1851, she became the first woman professor of medicine at a U.S. college. She specialized in the health of women and children and wrote and lectured on hygiene, nutrition, physiology, and phrenology. In later years, she served the poor and needy of the slums where she eventually contracted blood poisoning which led to her death at fifty-six. She championed opening the medical profession to women, became active in the temperance and women’s rights movements, and attended the Seneca Falls women’s right conference. Later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton dedicated The History of Woman Suffrage (1881) to her, among other pioneers of the suffrage movement.
EUNICE ROSS (1824–1895) Student | Education Advocate Communities across America in the 1840s saw the bitter divisions of slavery, and racial prejudice dominated public debate. On Nantucket in 1840, Eunice Ross, a seventeen-year-old student of Anna Gardner at the African School, by vote of a town meeting, was denied admission to the Nantucket High School because of her race. Five years of hot debate followed the ban, bringing to light ugly prejudices and deeply ingrained fears within the community. Finally, in 1845, frustrated by the delays of the Nantucket School Committee, Edward J. Pompey and 104 other black citizens, including members of the Ross family, submitted a petition to the Massachusetts State House requesting that admission to public schools be extended to all children. Ross submitted her own poignant petition, pictured here. Ross was twenty-four when the school system finally integrated, but she made history as an advocate for equal education.
REVEREND PHEBE COFFIN HANAFORD (1829–1921) Minister | Author | Women’s Rights Activist “I was the first woman ordained in Massachusetts. The first woman in the world to open a legislative session composed of men only . . . The first woman, I suppose, to respond to a toast at a Masonic Supper. The first woman to perform the ceremony of marriage for my own daughter . . . “That I have been successful as a preacher is largely owing to the fact of my Quaker birth, and my early education on the Island of Nantucket, where women preach and men are useful on washing days, and neither feel themselves out of place.” —Phebe Coffin Hannaford
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EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN MARGARET SWAIN GETCHELL (1841–1880) Retail Executive Credited with many of the store’s marketing innovations, in 1866, she was promoted to superintendent at Macy’s Department Store in New York City, making her one of the first women to hold an executive position in American retail, managing the store’s routine operations and nearly 200 employees. “Be everywhere, do everything, and never forget to astonish the customer.” —Margaret Getchell
ANNE RING (1865–1953) Tuckernuck Teacher | NHA Member | Select ”Woman” In 1926, Nantucketers elected educator Anne Ring to the Board of Selectmen, the first woman so elected not only in Nantucket but in the whole Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Legend has it that the selectmen had to remove their spitoon from the selectmen’s room! Since then eight more women have been elected to what is now the Select Board, and currently, for the first time, women members are in the majority.
CLARA PARKER (1877–1970) Atheneum Head Librarian | “New Voter” Following the ratification of the 19th amendment in August 1920, Clara Parker and her stepmother Harriet Parker registered to vote in the national elections. They were listed together in the Inquirer and Mirror as two of sixty-nine Nantucket women registered as “New Voters.” Clara Parker was head librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum for fifty years, serving three generations of Nantucket readers. Upon her retirement, she was named Librarian Emerita.
FLORENCE E. CLAY HIGGINBOTHAM (1893–1972) Business Woman | Property Manager | Cook Born in Virginia, Florence Clay made Nantucket her home. After formally training at the Boston Cooking School, she arrived on island in 1911 to work as summer staff in ‘Sconset. In 1920, she was hired to manage the Underhill Cottages in the village, where she lived with owner Evelyn Underhill, and purchased the historic Seneca Boston home, in the New Guinea neighborhood closer to town, which she used for rental income. After the stock market crash of 1929, Higginbotham moved to the Boston house permanently, with her former employer Underhill in tow. In 1933, she purchased the adjoining historic African Meetinghouse, which she also rented out for storage and, once, as a studio. Higginbotham lived at the Boston house until her death in 1972. Her son, Wilhelm, retained ownership of the house, until it was sold to the Museum of African American History (MAAH) in 1989. The MAAH has recently completed an award-winning restoration of both properties, ensuring her legacy.
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Nantucket Women HOW THE QUAKER WOMEN’S MEETING ESTABLISHED THE FOUNDATION FOR THE NATIONAL WOMEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT By Jeffrey Kovach, Ph.D.
The abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century. The Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights in 1848. The women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What do these have in common? The abolitionist movement of the early nineteenth century. The Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights in 1848. The women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What do these have in common? You would be correct if you answered that each profoundly changed the face of the United States. You would also be correct if you said that Nantucket women led each of these movements. How did a small island twenty-seven miles off the Massachusetts mainland play such a vital role in shaping the United States today? The answer to this question began at the dawn of the eighteenth century, even before the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, first established a monthly meeting on Nantucket. John Richardson, a Quaker traveling minister who preached on the island in the first two years of the eighteenth century, believed that the spiritual center on the island could be found within Mary Coffin Starbuck, whom he named “Great Mary.” Richardson believed her conversion would lead to Quakerism taking hold on the island. He would be proven correct. By 1704, Mary Coffin Starbuck was a devout Quaker. By 1708, the island received permission from the New England Yearly Meeting, based in Newport, Rhode Island, to establish a monthly meeting for Nantucket Friends. For most of the first decade of the meeting until her death in 1717, Starbuck kept careful watch on the faith of the island, opposing the establishment of an ordained minister or the preaching of another denomination. The first meetings were even held in her home before a meeting house was built to host services.
Mary Coffin Starbuck may have been Quaker Nantucket’s first mother, but her leadership would carry on with other strong Quaker women after her death. A new generation of women would ascend to positions of leadership within the meeting. The families of these women read as a Who’s Who of early Nantucketers, as Starbucks and Swains, Coffins and Colemans, Folgers, Macys, and Gardners were all represented in the early leadership of the women’s meeting. What was the role of the women’s meeting? After its establishment in 1708, the women’s meeting collected money for the benefit of widows on the island and for the construction of a new meeting house. This fundraising was independent of the men’s meeting. For some ventures, the collections of the women’s and men’s meetings would be pooled together, such as for the building of a new meeting house, the first of which was constructed in 1711. The women’s meeting, however, handled all charitable efforts for women without coordination with the men’s meeting. In 1761, for example, the meeting first set aside “four Dollars to Eunice Guinn She being in need of Help.” The women’s meeting also collected money to pay for the care of the meeting house, as it would when it paid Mary Gardner for her sweeping of the meeting house floor. The financial autonomy of the women’s meeting gave Quaker women on Nantucket an independence few religious groups afforded their female followers. The women’s meeting had established itself as the moral compass for eighteenth-century Nantucket. It also established the authority of the meeting over its membership.
Left: Excerpt from Mary Starbuck’s business ledger. MS10 AB475.
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NANTUCKET WOMEN
Nowhere was the moral authority for the women’s meeting greater than when it came to regulating marriage. Friends established a specific procedure for marriage within the meeting, and the women’s meeting was central to ensuring strict adherence to that procedure. The very same Eunice Guinn who the women’s meeting aided during her time of need in 1761 would be disowned (a less severe form of excommunication) five years later for exogamy—in other words, marrying a non-Quaker. The conventional process for a Quaker marriage began when a couple would present themselves to both the women’s and men’s meetings to declare their intentions. The women’s meeting would appoint a committee that would be charged with ensuring the prospective bride’s “clearness,” which meant she was not married at that time, as the men’s meeting did the same for the prospective groom. The women’s meeting would also ensure the bride-to-be had the permission of her parents, if still alive, to marry, regardless of her age, as the men’s meeting would for the groom. Once these questions were answered, the couple would for a second time declare their intentions to both the women’s and men’s meetings. At that time, the meeting as a whole would either bless or refuse the couple’s intentions. Most often, couples that had encountered concerns would address those questions with the meeting before reappearing to declare their intentions a second time. There were instances when the meeting would offer its blessing, but not unanimously. In an insular community like Nantucket, especially in a meeting that disowned members for marrying outside of Friends, the spousal pool was shallow. This led to some marriages being between partners who were deemed to be too close in relation for the meeting. For example, in 1721, Abigail Folger and Daniel Folger, her first cousin once removed, sought the blessing of the meeting for their marriage. They would receive the blessing of the meeting, but the meeting records showed that some Friends were concerned with their “being ney of kin.” The meeting would note that this approval was “not in full unity of friends.”
Women who did not go through the full Quaker process were disowned. In most cases, women who did not follow the proscribed Quaker marriage process did so because they were “marrying outside of Friends,” as had been the case with Eunice Guinn. On Nantucket, even though Quakerism would be the dominant religion of much of the eighteenth century, the arrival of new denominations would increase the chances of marrying outside of Friends. Conversely, a woman who was not a Friend but wished to marry a Quaker man would have to go through the process of becoming a Friend before being permitted to marry into the meeting. When a Quaker couple had received the blessing of the meeting, a wedding would be held with members of both the men’s and women’s meetings. If either the bride or groom came from another Quaker meeting, it was customary that members from that meeting would be in attendance to witness the proceedings. After the wedding was completed, both the men and women in attendance would bear witness to the wedding, signing the marriage certificate. The wedding itself would not end the women’s meeting’s oversight role, however. When questions emerged within a marriage, the women’s meeting would have a role in regulating the conduct of the wife. With newlyweds, such questions could arise when a wife gave birth to a child too soon after marriage. The process for declaring intentions to the meeting at two monthly meetings, along with the investigatory process, receiving the blessing of the meeting, and marrying before the meeting could take months. For those couples that had either decided to marry out of necessity or did not wait for the process to be finalized before consummation, the proof was undeniable. The women’s meeting would seek a public acknowledgment of the offense for the meeting’s records. When this was received, the offense was often forgiven. Disownment was reserved for when the offenders did not submit to the will of the meeting by making a public admission of guilt.
Right: Marriage certificate for Reuben Folger and Dinah Hussey, 1743. MS51 Folder 8.
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“For some Nantucket families, the husband’s role as head of the household was merely ceremonial, while the wife truly wielded the financial power.”
Other offenses, including bigamy, would occasionally arise. Tabitha Trott, daughter of one of the earliest and most esteemed female Friends on Nantucket, Anna Trott, was disowned by the meeting after her first husband, John Frost, a schoolteacher, left home to become a privateer. Believing herself abandoned or her husband lost at sea, she remarried Joseph Brown. When John Frost reappeared, Trott was disowned by the meeting for bigamy, and her mother’s esteem in the meeting was lost. The women’s meeting had become the guardians of the Quaker family unit and morality on the island. Its members had the authority to aid the poor, investigate young couples seeking to marry, call for the disownment of members for offenses, and govern the daily lives of its substantial membership throughout the eighteenth century. Female Friends held this power on Nantucket for two specific reasons. The first reason was that Quakerism was far more gender egalitarian than many other Protestant denominations in New England and throughout other parts of the colonies. From its inception, female Friends were empowered by the outspokenness of Margaret Fell, the wife of founder George Fox. The second reason was that the whaling empire that would take hold on Nantucket by the middle of the eighteenth century would cause much of the island’s male population to be away at sea far more often, and for far longer periods of time, than in many other communities. Quaker women were ever-present on the island, practicing a faith that allowed for greater female participation and empowerment than most of its contemporaries. As both whaling and Quakerism became more prominent on Nantucket during the eighteenth century, female Friends took on a more visible presence in the
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island’s public affairs. Whaling wives’ duties as deputy husbands afforded them a status few other women at the time had. While denied official political power to either vote or hold public office, Nantucket women served a vital role to the island’s social and cultural life. Women kept detailed account books, transacted business, and even traveled to the mainland in the service of the family’s economy. Even Great Mary kept a detailed account book of her own at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As whaling voyages increased in length by the last two decades of the eighteenth century, these account books were vital to women serving as deputy husbands or engaging in business on the island. Judith Macy, for example, kept her own account book from 1783 to 1805, a daybook that contained the personal finances for her dry goods and spinning businesses. Most whalers’ wives had the financial support to handle the affairs of the household by being granted either partial payment of their husbands’ wages, or by receiving credit on the guarantee of those wages. As women assumed greater roles in handling the personal family finances, coinciding with the extension in the length of voyages, this was essential to the family being able to support itself for long periods of time. For ships’ captains, the family often had sufficient wealth to provide for those needs and for that of the community. This gave captains’ wives greater flexibility at transacting business and expanding on the family’s wealth while husbands were at sea. When a husband would return from sea, he would once again assume control over the family’s purse strings, at least by appearances. The wife would often be praised for her work as a deputy husband running the family’s
NANTUCKET WOMEN
business in his absence. Publicly, he would resume his place as head of the household. Since many whalers would only remain home a few months at a time between voyages, it would not be long before the wife would once more control the family’s business. This raises the question of whether it is better to be in actual control of the family’s economy but appear to play a helpmate’s role, or if it was preferable to hold the formal position of being the head of the household. For some Nantucket families, the husband’s role as head of the household was merely ceremonial, while the wife truly wielded the financial power. For girls and young women raised on Nantucket in the eighteenth century, the answer to that question came in the influence older women had over them in their formative years. These young females would come of age on an island, and in a Quaker meeting, that perhaps more
There may be no greater example of how this combination of strong female Quaker leadership and economic independence could influence young women than in the case of Lucretia Mott. Born Lucretia Coffin, daughter of Anna Folger Coffin and Thomas Coffin, Lucretia would spend only her first eleven years on Nantucket before her family moved to the mainland. During those eleven years, Lucretia would witness her mother running the family’s economy while her father was at sea. She also would be raised in a family with strong Quaker roots on Nantucket. The experience of growing up on an island with such powerful examples of strong, independent, religiously devout women would shape her entire life. More than a half century later, Mott would reference the lasting impression made by her mother and other Nantucket women in a series of correspondences with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She would carry
“My conviction led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth for authority, not on authority for truth.”
than anywhere else in the English-speaking world was populated by strong, independent women. The major institutions that were a part of their everyday lives, their house of worship and the business being conducted in the shops, had a tremendous number of female role models. The first generation of younger Quaker women could look to Mary Coffin Starbuck as their inspiration. Her legacy would be passed on to a new generation of Quaker women who became the new leadership of the women’s meeting. Mary Starbuck Folger, granddaughter of Mary Coffin Starbuck, would rise to importance within the women’s meeting, serving on investigative committees and wielding influence over Nantucket’s female Friends. Successive generations of Quaker women on the island would similarly become the new leadership of the meeting.
the inspiration of her mother and the other Nantucket women with her to Philadelphia and to Seneca Falls. This influence was also present in her younger sister, Martha Coffin Wright, who was born after the family had relocated from Nantucket, but nevertheless was still influenced heavily by her mother and older sister. Wright would join her sister as an advocate for women’s rights and abolition in the early nineteenth century. Both attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, with Lucretia Mott offering her own oration at the convention, no doubt influencing future champions of the women’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Eliza Starbuck Barney, circa 1865. F6742.
Rev. Phebe Hanaford, circa 1865. P14374.
Other female descendants of the eighteenth century Quaker meeting on Nantucket would become involved in activist movements of the nineteenth century. Anna Gardner would become an outspoken advocate of the abolitionist movement after, at age six, she witnessed her parents, Oliver Gardner and Hannah Macy Gardner, helping hide an escaped slave from Virginia, Arthur Cooper, his pregnant wife Mary, and the couple’s children. She even witnessed her father and his brother Thomas disguise Cooper in a coat and Quaker hat to avoid detection. These events of her youth would lead her to fight for the racial integration of Nantucket’s public schools in the 1840s, as well as during the same peri od helping to organize Nantucket’s anti-slavery conventions. The 1841 convention at the Atheneum, of which she helped organize, launched the public speaking career of Frederick Douglass.
Eliza Starbuck Barney, born in 1802 into a wealthy whaling oil family and raised in the Quaker meeting, was an early advocate for women’s suffrage. Her family roots included both the Starbuck and Gardner lines. Her early advocacy for women’s suffrage was quite public, as she attended an 1851 convention dedicated to the issue, the first in Massachusetts. She was an influential member of the Nantucket Women’s Suffrage League and the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, two organizations dedicated to this issue. She would see the island adopt the right for women to vote for school committee, and she would cast a ballot in that first election. Beyond her advocacy for women’s suffrage, her legacy also lives on today in the Barney Genealogical Record, a thorough documentation of the genealogy of the island she first penned that is housed by the Nantucket Historical Association.
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NANTUCKET WOMEN
would lead her to pen the tract Lucretia, the Quakeress, inspired by her cousin, but deviating from Lucretia Mott’s life story to become a cautionary tale against slavery. In this story, the title character, a devout abolitionist, rejects the courtship of a wealthy slave owner. Only when the slave owner repents, freeing his slaves and paying them as agricultural labor does Lucretia agree to marry him, with the couple and their gainfully employed laborers living happily ever after on his plantation. In addition to her writings, Hanaford would also serve as vice president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, an organization founded in 1873 to promote greater female engagement in intellectual and public endeavors. Among the organization’s founders was Maria Mitchell, esteemed astronomer, educator, and activist. Mitchell was yet another woman who was raised in the Quaker meeting on Nantucket.
Maria Mitchell, circa 1870. GPN4358.
Another Coffin and cousin to Lucretia Coffin Mott and Martha Coffin Wright, Phebe Hanaford, would continue this legacy of female advocacy. Born in 1829 and despite her Quaker roots, she would marry a Baptist and later become ordained as a Unitarian minister. Her activism
For the Nantucket Quaker meeting to have influenced so many women who would shape the nation is no coincidence. From the abolitionist movement of the early nineteen century to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the women’s suffrage movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nantucket women have been leading the charge for social activism. These movements succeeded in their missions of expanding women’s rights, including the right to vote, and ending slavery in the United States. The visible leadership roles women played in the Quaker meeting of the eighteenth century would combine with the business acumen of whalers’ wives conducting the family’s financial interests in the absence of their husbands to forge generations of empowered women from the island.
It probably should come as little surprise, then, that women would carry the inspirations of Nantucket to the rest of the United States and the world. Nantucket’s greatness can be traced back to one of the founders of the Quaker meeting. — Mary Coffin Starbuck
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Women in front of Mary H. Nye’s Dry and Fancy Goods store, Centre Street, 1890. None of these women, supposed to be Petticoat Row shopkeepers and clerks, have been positively identified. The trio at left may be Priscilla Manter and her daughters Clara and Emily. Photograph by Henry Platt. P1662.
Over time, the strong women of Nantucket have become embodied in the mythos of “Petticoat Row,” a street where women-owned and women-run businesses dominated the retail landscape.
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The Real Women of Petticoat Row
By Michael R. Harrison, Obed Macy Research Chair Crèvecoeur, in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, famously noted how the maritime economy of Nantucket engendered independence and self-reliance among the island’s women. The island’s whaling voyages often being “very long, [the whalemen’s] wives in their absence are necessarily obligated to transact business, to settle accounts, and in short, to rule and provide for their families.” This history of women’s empowerment in the family economy is well documented. Its extension into the island’s commercial economy has long been taken for granted, based largely, it seems, on the anecdotal evidence of a few well-known female merchants, such as Mary Starbuck (1645–1717) and, particularly, Kezia Coffin (1723–1798), whom Crèvecoeur describes entering the mercantile trade while her husband was making whaling cruises. Over time, the strong women of Nantucket have become embodied in the mythos of “Petticoat Row,” a street where women-owned and women-run businesses dominated the retail landscape. As an article in the Inquirer and Mirror put it in 1976, “Petticoat Row has been the nickname of Centre Street from Main Street north towards Broad Street since the 18th Century, so called because the shop keepers were mostly ladies, usually the wives or widows of the men who were away for years at a time with the whale fishery.”1 This ennobling Petticoat Row story turns out to be only partially true. The women-run retail district on Centre Street was an entirely post–Civil War institution, which developed in the 1860s and lasted into the 1930s. It comprised between two and twelve businesses at a time and involved about thirty female proprietors in all. During the island’s whaling period, which began in the 1690s and started to close in the late 1850s, women were deeply involved in Nantucket’s economy but ran just a small minority of the island’s commercial enterprises, few of them on Centre Street. Even with large numbers of island men travelling the globe by the beginning of
the nineteenth century, there was no shortage of men at home. While whaling created conditions that led some island women to enter the commercial sphere, it was actually the economic and population disruptions that followed the collapse of whaling that brought Nantucket women into the paid workforce in significant numbers. The earliest printed reference to Centre Street being called Petticoat Row comes from 1903, when the Inquirer and Mirror newspaper reported on a state labor inspector visiting “what is locally termed ‘Petticoat Row,’ where the employers are largely women.”2 No earlier print or manuscript references to the nickname have
The Centre Street Block, built 1846–47. Historic American Buildings Survey drawing (HABS MA-908) by Gary Joseph Coates, 1967
been found. A 1907 visit to the street by a reporter for the Boston Sunday Herald noted how “The fair storekeepers are not aware that they are doing anything out of the ordinary. They have been pursuing their business methods for thirty years, in a quiet unobtrusive way, and they have no idea that they belong to that new-fangled class known as ‘business women.’”3 This reference to “30 years” is telling, for it reveals an awareness among the shopkeepers of the age of their “Row.” Far from comprising the whole of Centre Street between Main and Broad streets, the businesses visited by the reporter in 1907 were generally confined to the
2 “The Labor Law,” Inquirer and Mirror, May 16, 1903, 1. 1 “Petticoat Row Celebrates Its Own Bicentennial,” Inquirer and Mirror, July 22, 1976, 21.
3 “‘Petticoat Row,’ Nantucket, is Known in Song and Story,” Boston Sunday Herald, Apr. 21, 1907, 17.
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Left: View looking north on Centre Street with several people walking in street, ca. 1860s. sg10047. Above: Interior of Mary H. Nye’s store on Centre Street, 1880s. Photograph by Henry S. Wyer. P3425
east side of Centre Street in the block between Main Street and Pearl (now India) Street, plus a few shops on the west side directly opposite. All the buildings here were built after the Great Fire of 1846. The heart of the block was the Greek Revival building on the east side known variously as the Centre Street Block, the Odd Fellows Building, or Sherburne Hall. This building was built in 1846–47, immediately following the fire, for whaling captains George Harris (1797–1869) and Benjamin Franklin Riddell (1804–1862). It originally contained six ground-floor storefronts, plus second-floor offices and a purpose-built fraternal hall for the Nantucket lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.4 The first merchants to open stores in the Centre Street Block were all men: A. M. Macy, books; Brown & Street, boots and shoes; Heman Crocker, groceries; John P. Swain, groceries. George R. Pierce & Co. opened “the Ladies’ Exchange,” retailing dresses and fancy goods, at no. 1 Centre Street Block in 1849. Later long-term tenants included Charles H. Jaggar, apothecary (operated 1856–ca. 1865) and William H. Bennett, boots and shoes (ca. 1870–89). It is likely these stores hired female clerks or assistants, but none have been identified. The owners’ wives often worked in the shops, too, as suggested by the experience of the Hooper family, who sold sweets from no. 4 Centre Street Block from 1850 4 F. Blair Reeves, “Nantucket Lodge No. 66, Independent Order of Odd Fellows,” HABS No. Mass-908, Historic American Buildings Survey, 1971.
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to 1908. Linus A. Hooper (1822–1885) opened a confectionary there in 1850, adding ice cream the next year. He married Mary Jane Coffin (1826–1893) in 1853. After fifteen years of being advertised under his name, the store began to appear as Mrs. L. A. Hooper’s in 1865— the earliest any woman has been identified as a proprietor in the Centre Street Block. When she died in 1893, the business passed to their son, George W. Hooper (1856–1931). He ran it with the assistance of his wife, Harriett “Nellie” Hooper (1845–1905), who is reported to have been a familiar figure at the store’s counters. The earliest female proprietors who have been identified on Centre Street after the Great Fire are Delia M. Folger (1820–1899) and Sophia Ray (b. 1808). Delia, whose husband abandoned her for the California Gold Rush, bought a house at the northeast corner of Centre and Chestnut streets in 1859 and moved her dryand fancy-goods store there. Sophia and her husband George ran a confectionery and stationery business (with circulating library), first from a location on Centre opposite the Congregational Church, then, from 1860, from a location at the corner of Pearl and Centre. They later moved into the Centre Street Block. Other women who opened stores between 1867 and 1869 around the intersection of Centre and Pearl include Lucy Mitchell, millinery; Eliza Ann Chase, fancy goods; Mary
THE REAL WOMEN
A. Hussey, successor to Lucy Mitchell; Mary F. Coleman, dry goods; and Sally Ann Coleman, millinery. By 1875, twelve women ran businesses in this block, and only two male-run businesses remained. The stores specialized in women’s and children’s clothing, hats, fancy goods, notions, shoes and boots, stationery, souvenirs, confections, and ice cream. The block generally maintained between eight and twelve women-run stores until about 1915, when antique and curio shops began to take over the block. As late as 1919 there were still five women-run stores on the block, and three remained in business into the late 1930s. A number of the businesses were exceptionally long lived. Emeline Coffin was in business on Centre Street for at least twenty-six years; Phebe Clisby, twenty-nine years. The store of Charlotte Riddell, later run by her daughter, Mary H. Nye, lasted about thirty-two years. Hannah G. Sheffield took over the fancy-goods store of the late Eliza A. Chase in 1880 and retired in 1915. The storefront at 7 Centre Street was in the continuous proprietorship of women for more than eighty years, beginning about 1874, when Mary P. Swain opened a fancy-goods store there, and lasting until 1954, when Cora Stevens relocated her stationery business into a storefront on Main Street. A majority of the female proprietors of Centre Street were single women or widows. Of thirty-two proprietors operating between 1859 and 1940, fifteen never married or were single when they ran their stores, five opened businesses after being widowed or abandoned, and one supported an unemployed husband before being widowed. Of the ten proprietors who were married, four worked with their husbands, and two were the wives of mariners. Centre Street grew into a nexus of women-owned stores in the 1860s and 1870s, but it was not the only street in town in which women ran stores. Roland B. Hussey, in a reminiscence of island businesses in operation in the half century between 1863 and 1913, remembered twenty-one female proprietors on Centre Street and sixteen elsewhere in town.5 5 Roland B. Hussey, “Shops I Knew,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 1, 1913, 1–2.
Mary H. Nye, 1885. GPN3511
What of women-run businesses on Nantucket before the advent of Petticoat Row? Certainly the island had well-known enterprising women. Kezia Coffin, already mentioned, ran a substantial mercantile trading business before and during the Revolution and is reputed to have profiteered from smuggled goods during the wartime embargo. According to family memory, Anna (Folger) Coffin (1771–1844), mother to the anti-slavery and women’s rights lion Lucretia Mott, sold “East India goods” from a front room in her Fair Street house to support her family when her husband was thought lost on an 1800–02 whaling voyage. Betsey (Swain) Cary (1778–1862), widowed at thirty-four when her China trading husband, James, died at Canton, is best known for operating the Washington House hotel on Main Street from about 1816 to 1831 and later a store and public house in ’Sconset. The widow Elizabeth (Coffin) Chase (1777–1844) sustained heavy financial
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losses when the dry-goods and variety store adjoining her home on Winter Street was damaged by fire in January 1834. In whaling-era Nantucket, women worked most commonly in the home or on the island’s farms. This labor was unpaid but essential to the prosperity and survival of the community. Like their sisters on the mainland, Nantucket women managed family affairs and fortunes when spouses were absent and during what one historian calls the “complex financial transactions involved in widowhood.” They were active leaders in Quakerism but were customarily excluded from elected office, the law, and most professions. Some owned shares in whaling vessels. Like other women in America, island women supplemented their household incomes by exchanging handwork or the products of their kitchens and gardens for money or goods, and many assisted without pay in their spouses’ commercial enterprises. When women participated in the paid labor market, it was generally as weavers, seamstresses, dressmakers, teachers, boarding house operators, tavern keepers, shop clerks, and shopkeepers—occupations that extended the family economy into the public sphere. Shopkeeping was an accepted and common occupation for women in Colonial and Early Republican America; more than 300 women retailers have been identified in Philadelphia and New York, for example, between 1740 and 1775. The factories that grew to employ thousands of working-class women elsewhere in New England hardly touched Nantucket, with the exception of the Atlantic Straw Works and its more than 200 female operatives, who made hats and bonnets on Main Street between 1853 and 1866.6
Above: David H. Strother’s depiction of 82-year-old Betsey Cary in her ’Sconset store, selling dry goods, salt fish, and whiskey. From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1860, p. 747 Below: Eunice Whippey, formerly Eunice Elkins, 1860s. CDV1519
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The exact number of female business proprietors on island is difficult to assess during the whaling period due to fragmentary sources, but it appears to have been quite modest. Newspaper advertisements provide a partial view into the island’s commercial landscape during the final decades of island whaling, particularly for retail businesses that needed to announce the arrival of new, perishable, or fashionable stock. A periodic 6 Patricia Cleary, “‘She Will Be in the Shop’: Women’s Sphere of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia and New York,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 119:3 (July 1995), 182–83.
THE REAL WOMEN Centre Street: Avis Pinkham, cake and pastry Main Street: Eliza Riddell, dry goods; Abby Betts, variety Mill Street: Hannah Fosdick, grocer; Mrs. Lawrence, dry goods Pleasant Street: Mrs. Gardner, grocer Winter Street: Elizabeth Chase, boots and shoes Fair Street: Sarah Swain, baker; Ann Castle, dry goods Federal Street: Lydia Hosier, dry goods; Nancy Hussey, variety; Mrs. Thompson, ice cream and confectionery; Mrs. Coffin, hotelier (Mansion House)7 A third source, very late in the whaling period, is the business directory included on Henry F. Walling’s 1858 map of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. It names only a doctor, a photographer, and Jaggar’s apothecary on Centre Street.
Jedida (Swain) Lawrence (1777–1861). As a young widow, she opened a dry-goods store on Mill Street to support her seven children. Gift of Mary G. Bachman, PH22-34
survey of island newspapers between 1816 and 1845 identified ads for about 215 separate business establishments or endeavors, all owned by men except for those of these eight women: Susan Ellkins, boarding house on Main Street, 1821; Betsey Cary, boarding house on Main Street, 1825; Polly Burnell, cloth sales, 1821, and seashells on Ray’s Court, 1840; Mrs. Gale, apothecary, 1830; Eunice H. Elkins, millinery, 1833; Lydia A. Swain, straw bonnets on School Street, 1835; Thankful Davis, leather, 1835; Mrs. L. Butler, boarding house in Edgartown, 1835. While this source very likely underrepresents women’s businesses, it is suggestive that the proportion is so small—only 3.7 percent of the sample. Of the businesses in this sample whose locations are named, only nine were on Centre Street, all run by men. Another source for identifying women-owned stores is an 1882 list, compiled by former Nantucket residents living in Boston, of every business they could recall predating the Great Fire of 1846. Published in the Inquirer and Mirror, the list contains some 300 businesses, thirteen (4.3 percent) with female proprietors:
Examining the biographies of the female shopkeepers listed in these sources suggests women were most likely to open stores if widowed or unmarried. Polly (Giles) Burnell (1777–1854) lost her husband of three years at sea in 1798, leaving her alone to support their young children and, eventually, her aged mother. Sometime before 1816 she began retailing cloth, continuing until at least 1825 when her politician and banker son was well of age. From about 1831 until her death in 1854, she sold Pacific and Indian Ocean seashells, gathered by her whaling friends and relations, from her house on Ray’s Court. Her sister-in-law, Susan (Burnell) Ellkins (1781–1861), also a widow, ran a boarding house. Jedida (Swain) Lawrence (1777–1861) was pregnant with triplets when she lost her husband and a daughter at sea in 1809. With seven total surviving children, she eventually opened a dry-goods store on Mill Street. Lydia (Austin) Hosier (1788–1866) was also pregnant, with her fifth child, when her husband of nine years died in 1818. She, too, turned to dry-goods retailing, opening a store in the ground floor of her Federal Street home. Eunice H. Elkins (1789–1872) lived off island with her merchant-captain husband, but, when he died in 1823, she returned to her native Nantucket and turned to dressmaking and millinery to feed herself and her 7 “Before the Fire,” Inquirer and Mirror, Apr. 13, 1889, 3.
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The widow Lydia (Austin) Hosier (1788–1866), who ran a dry-goods store out of her Federal Street house in the 1830s and 1840s. GPN3330
Henry Pinkham worked as a recruiting agent in Boston, supplying off-island seamen for Nantucket’s whaleships. He was the father of Avis S. Pinkham. Ad from the Nantucket Inquirer, April 14, 1827
surviving daughter. Ads for her Broad Street business disappear from the local newspapers after her 1836 marriage to William Whippey, a retired whaling captain. Finally, Avis S. Pinkham (1820–1864) supported herself and her widowed mother with a cake and pastry business from their house on Centre Street, apparently stopping when the Great Fire destroyed the house. She switched to teaching and never married.
rarely signed on more than once or twice. Islanders consistently recruited half or more of their crews from off island between the end of the War of 1812 and the 1860s. While island mariners frequently opened shoreside businesses after retiring from the sea, there were never so many island men away whaling that shoreside jobs could only be filled by the island’s women.
It is a myth that women took a large role in the island’s retail commerce during the whaling period because the men who might otherwise have run stores were away at sea. As island whaling became more pelagic and its voyages longer in the eighteenth century, the men who worked the island’s whaling vessels at any given time became generally a separate group from the men who worked the island’s factories, shops, stores, and countinghouses. Nantucketers, in fact, had difficulty finding enough men to man their ships, not because there were insufficient island men to fill the berths, but because whaling was terrible work. Foremast hands
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For example, the U.S. Census says that in 1840, near the height of island whaling, Nantucket had 9,012 residents. Fifty-three percent were men and 47 percent women. The employed population was accounted to be 2,497 persons, including 1,615 “employed in navigation,” 526 in manufactures and trades, 118 in agriculture, and 11 in learned professions. The island’s 33 “retail dry goods, grocery, and other stores” employed 227 persons. Those employed equaled 27.7 percent of the total population or 52.2 percent of the male population. Looked at another way, those employed equaled 69.0 percent of the working-age male population between the ages 10 to 60. Even if all men “employed
THE REAL WOMEN
restaurant at Surfside is kept by a woman—and it is needless to say well kept—and women hold many positions normally held by men.”9
Jacob (right) and Prapione Abajian (left) in Abajian’s Oriental Bazaar on Centre Street. GPN444
in navigation”—one-third of the male population, the same seafaring percentage as Barnstable County at this time—had been away at once, there were still enough able-bodied men on island to fill the available jobs.8 This changed in later decades, causing Nantucket women’s non-domestic labor participation to increase as island whaling decreased. The collapse of the whaling economy led to a steep decline in population, as single men and young families moved away in search of jobs. Women started to outnumber men, and the population skewed older. In 1830, about 3.3 percent of the island’s 7,202 residents were age 70 and above. By 1870, the population had dropped to 4,123, yet 11.9 percent were 70 and above. By 1880, the island was 56 percent women and 44 percent men, a proportion of about five women for every four men. No wonder outsiders felt that “The stores are largely owned and conducted by women.” A news item repeated in many mainland newspapers in 1881 told how three of the island’s six pulpits were filled by women one Sunday (Rev. Louise S. Baker at the Congregational Church, Rev. Phoebe A. Hanaford at the Unitarian, and Rev. R. Ellis of New Bedford at the Colored Baptist Church). “This is the normal condition of affairs in a community of women like this, where the females outnumber the males in the proportion of sixteen to one [sic]. The flagman at the railroad crossing is a woman. The
When Hannah G. Sheffield died in September 1923, she was memorialized on Nantucket as the last of the oldtime women merchants of Petticoat Row.10 The number of women’s stores on the Row had dropped by half in 1915 and 1916, as hats, stationery, and fancy goods gave way to antiques, curios, rugs, and jewelry. The seeds of this transformation were planted in 1884, when Jacob Abajian (1860–1937) opened a rug and curio shop in the Odd Fellows Building. His store remained in business for over fifty years, selling china, jewelry, baskets, art, furniture, clocks, and antiques targeted at the owners of summer homes. Prapione Abajian, Jacob’s wife, worked at the store and managed the couple’s variety business, opened at 15 Centre Street in 1912. The eventual opening of other immigrant-owned souvenir, rug, and antiques businesses near Abajian’s Oriental Bazaar, all catering to the summer market, led the Inquirer and Mirror to complain in 1912 that “Centre Street might well be called ‘Fakirs’ Row’ nowadays . . . with its numerous oriental shops and auction rooms.”11 In 1923, Helen Cartwright McCleary published a celebratory poem about the female merchants of Petticoat Row. It concluded, Then here’s to Nantucket women, In the days of auld lang syne! Here’s to their independence And their qualities so fine! Here’s to the wit and humor Of many a kindly dame! Here’s to their industry and thrift, Their honesty, their fame!12 9 “Forty Years Ago,” Inquirer and Mirror, Feb. 10, 1872, 2; “Census,” Inquirer and Mirror, Nov. 20, 1880, 2; Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 9, 1871, 2; “Lovely Woman Ahead,” Buffalo Evening News, Aug. 30, 1881, 11. 10 “Passing of Petticoat Row,” Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 29, 1923, 4. 11 “Seen and Heard,” Inquirer and Mirror, Aug. 10, 1912.
8 Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitant and Statistics of the United States . . . from the Returns of the Sixth Census (Washington: Thomas Allen, 1841).
12 Helen Cartwright McCleary, “The Passing of Petticoat Row,” Inquirer and Mirror, Oct. 6, 1923, 3.
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Biographies of the Women of
Petticoat Row
This list describes the women known to have operated retail businesses on Centre Street in Nantucket between 1860 and 1954, the period when Petticoat Row existed. It does not include all female business owners on Nantucket during this time. PRAPIONE (MOURADKHANIAN) ABAJIAN (1872–1953) immigrated to the United States from Armenia in 1897. In 1908, she married Jacob Abajian (1860–1937), a naturalized citizen also originally from Armenia. Since 1884, Jacob had run the Oriental Bazaar at 19 Centre Street, selling rugs, curios, and other items targeted to the summer-home and tourist market. Prapione assisted Jacob in running the Oriental Bazaar, and in 1912 they opened the New York Variety Store at 15 Centre Street (one of a number of island businesses to carry this name over time). Although Prapione is consistently listed in the census as having no profession, she is named in numerous business directories as the proprietor of the variety store, which lasted until about 1936. The Oriental Bazaar closed in the 1940s. The Abajians also owned a store in New Bedford. When on island, they lived above 19 Centre Street.1 ELINORE CABOT (1875–1923?) wife of Walter Channing Cabot, the owner of Shimmo Valley Farm, is reported to have run the store at 9 Centre Street until 1915 or 1916. BETSEY CHASE, a widow, is reported to have run a millinery store on the east side of Centre Street, adjacent to the store of Eliza Ann Chase, in the 1860s. ELIZA ANN (TUCK) CHASE (1809–1880) ran a fancy-goods store at 24 Centre Street from 1868 to 1879. The 1870 census reveals that Eliza was by this time the breadwinner for an extended household that included her unemployed husband, William H. Chase (1808–1878), a former shoe finisher; a widowed sister; a widower brother; and a niece. Two mariner nephews also contributed to the household. 1 “Here and There,” Inquirer and Mirror, July 13, 1912, 4; “The Personnel of the Business Establishments of Nantucket,” Inquirer and Mirror, July 10, 1915, 1; “Death of Jacob Abajian,” Inquirer and Mirror, November 13, 1937, 4; “Prapione Abajian,” Inquirer and Mirror, May 16, 1953, 2.
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MARY E. (SWAIN) CHINERY (1841–1915) is listed under her married name, Mrs. John Chinery, as a dressmaker on Centre Street in an 1875 Nantucket business directory. Her husband (d. 1896) was a sailor. LYDIA ANN CLISBY (1837–1926) was described in 1923 as the “last of the old-time ‘Petticoat Row’ merchants.” While long a familiar face on Centre Street, she never owned her own store but worked for many years for Charlotte Riddell and her daughter, Mary H. Nye.2 PHEBE E. CLISBY (1845–1908) was the daughter of John W. and Ann (Swain) Clisby; he died in California during the Gold Rush. Phebe was a teacher in the Nantucket public schools. In 1879 or 1880, she took over the fancy-goods store of Mary P. Swain at 7 Centre Street, expanding it to sell books, stationery, artist’s materials, souvenirs, and novelties. She operated it until her death in 1908. She never married. 3 EMELINE COFFIN (1840–1909) started a millinery business in 1868 at age 28, working out of the Davis house on Orange Street. She moved in rapid succession to the McCleave store on the north side of lower Main Street, then to a shop on the south side of Main Street across from the Pacific National Bank, before finally settling into a store on Centre Street at the corner of Pearl (India) sometime before 1880. Her sister, Kezia C. Coffin (1842–1912), also worked in this store. Emeline sold her Centre Street business to Ella F. Sylvia in 1906. She never married.4
2 “An Interesting Family Group,” Inquirer and Mirror, Nov. 29, 1913, 2. 3 “Miss Clisby Dead,” Inquirer and Mirror, Feb. 15, 1908, 4. 4 “Sold Out,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 31, 1906, 4.
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE WOMEN
ELLEN H. COFFIN (1857–1938) opened a millinery store at 21 Centre Street in late October 1885. In 1892, she married Lincoln Burgess (1862–1931), a partner in R. E. Burgess & Sons, proprietors of the Central Markets on Main Street and Broadway, ’Sconset.5 MARY F. COLEMAN (1829–1894) learned the drygoods trade as a clerk in the store of Bovey & Coffin. She opened her own dry-goods store on Centre Street in 1869 and ran it until a few weeks before her death in 1894. She never married.6 SALLY ANN COLEMAN (1822–1899) opened a millinery store on Centre Street before 1869, adding boots and shoes in 1873. She retired from business about 1884. She never married. Her unmarried niece, Mary Crosby Wyer (1838–1913), also worked in the store. DELIA M. FOLGER (1820–1915) taught school, engaged in dressmaking, sold dry and fancy goods, and made hair art and paintings on glass and seashells for sale to tourists. Her first store was in her house on Liberty Street. She moved to a house at the northeast corner of Chestnut and Centre streets in 1859. She appears to have left Nantucket about 1868. Her husband, carpenter Thomas M. Folger (1817–1869), sailed to the Gold Rush in 1849 and may never have returned. He fell from the deck of a sloop and drowned in California in 1869.7 EMMA FRASER (1862–1945) purchased the Centre Street millinery store of Nellie M. Keane in 1916, soon moving into 9 Centre Street. She sold the business in 1922 to Carrie J. Long. She never married.8 5 “New Millinery,” Inquirer and Mirror, Oct. 24, 1885, 2. 6 “New Store! New Goods!” Inquirer and Mirror, June 19, 1869, 3; “Obituary. Coleman,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 10, 1894, 1. 7 “Delia M. Folger,” Inquirer and Mirror, Feb. 9, 1929, 2; “Query Brings Reminiscences from ‘A Nantucket Girl’,” Inquirer and Mirror, Feb. 23, 1929, 2. 8 “Personal,” Inquirer and Mirror, Jan. 22, 1916, 2; “Seen and Heard,” Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 2, 1922, 2.
ELIZABETH “LIZZIE” M. (BENNETT) GIFFORD (1861–1920). Her father, William H. Bennett (1813–1889), was a sailor early in life but took up cobbling, opening a boot and shoe store in the Centre Street Block before 1870. When Bennett died, Lizzie’s husband, George W. Gifford (1859–1894), took over the store. When Gifford himself died in 1894 at age 35, Lizzie took over the store, running it until at least 1907. until at least 1907. “Left a widow when quite young, with four daughters to bring up, Mrs. Gifford has handled the business successfully and made a good living for her family.”9 MARY JANE (COFFIN) HOOPER (1826–1893) married her second husband, Linus A. Hooper (1822–1885), in 1853 and joined in the operation of his ice cream saloon and confectionary on Centre Street. They also ran the Ocean House hotel on Broad Street beginning in 1860. From 1865, the Centre Street shop was advertised with her as proprietor. Their son George W. Hooper (1856–1931) opened his own ice cream business in 1886, with a store on Broad Street. In 1892, he began selling his ice cream out of his mother’s Centre Street store. When she died the next year, the store became his, and he was assisted in running it by his wife, Harriett “Nellie” M. (Cooper) Hooper (1845–1905). The store operated until about 1908, when Jacob Abajian rented the space to expand the Oriental Bazaar.10 MARY ABBY (GARDNER) HUSSEY (1839–1908) married Robert C. Hussey (1835–1867) in 1861. He was away on a whaling voyage from 1862–65 (one of the final 20 such voyages to sail from the island), then died of consumption in early 1867. “Left with limited resources, she engaged in the millinery trade, having a store in the basement of the present residence of 9 “‘Petticoat Row,’ Nantucket, is Known in Song and Story,” Boston Sunday Herald, Apr. 21, 1907, 17. 10 “Here and There,” Inquirer and Mirror, February 1, 1908, 4..
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Charles N. Long, Orange Street.” She was on Centre Street before 1869, in which year she took over the retail space of Lucy Mitchell. “[U]pon the death of the late Mary F. Coleman, [Mary A. Hussey] took up the dry goods business of the latter in connection with millinery. . . . [S]he was highly esteemed, not only by her fellow citizens, but by many of the summer residents who had become patrons at her store.”11 NELLIE M. KEANE (1866–1941) operated a millinery store on Centre Street from 1896 to 1916. She sold her business to Emma Fraser in 1916. She never married.12 CARRIE JAMES LONG (1866–1940) was a school teacher on Nantucket. She purchased the Centre Street millinery store of Emma Fraser in 1922 and expanded its offerings to women’s and children’s furnishings. She retired in 1937 and her storefront at 9 Centre Street was taken over by Cora Stevens, whose novelty and stationery store was adjoining. She never married.13 MRS. C. LUCE is listed as a dressmaker on Centre Street in an 1875 Nantucket business directory. PRISCILLA (HILBURN) MANTER (1825–1878) married Nathan H. Manter (1818–1897) in 1843. He became famous as the longtime captain of the steamer Island Home. Her Centre Street store operated between about 1865 and 1875, initially in partnership with a Mrs. Bunker. Daughter Clara Manter (b. 1852) assisted in the store, possibly also daughter Emily (1845–1905). LUCY MITCHELL ran a store on Centre Street at the corner with Pearl (India) Street from about 1867 to 1869, when Mary A. Hussey took over the store.14 This woman may have been Lucy H. Mitchell (1842–1871), the daughter of wheelwright Thomas
S. Mitchell (1814–1892) and Lydia (Coffin) Mitchell (1818–1854), who is listed as a dressmaker in the 1865 Massachusetts state census. She never married. SUSAN PADDACK (1807–1882) moved her store from Orange Street to the house on Centre Street “formerly occupied by Dr. C. F. Robinson” in 1862.15 By early 1868, she was operating out of the store “formerly occupied by Mrs. Delia M. Folger.” Mary P. Swain worked in her store in 1870. She closed or sold the business in 1871. She never married. SOPHIA A. (ELKINS) RAY (b. 1808) assisted her husband, Captain George C. Ray (1801–1877), in opening a confectionery, stationery, and toy store on Centre Street opposite the Congregational Church around 1857. In 1860, Sophia, who had been a teacher until about 1856, advertised that she was combining her thread store (location uncertain) with the confectionery at the corner of Pearl and Centre streets. George and Sophia later moved their business into George R. Folger’s former location in the Centre Street Block.16 CHARLOTTE C. (CHASE) RIDDELL (1806–1885) opened a shop on Centre Street in or before 1869. Her daughter, Mary Harris (Riddell) Nye (1840–1906), worked there alongside her sister Sarah (1849–1873), then took over the store when her mother retired, operating it until 1901. Charlotte’s husband, Mary and Sarah’s father, was Captain Timothy W. Riddell (1806– 1882), a whaler and merchant captain who opened an auction and commission business on island in 1857. As a young woman, Mary Riddell made hats for the Atlantic Straw Works, doing piece work from home. In 1864, she married whaling captain Joseph P. Nye (1814–1894) of Fairhaven; he was 50 and a widower, and she was 24. HANNAH G. SHEFFIELD (1845–1923). In 1880, she took over the fancy-goods store of the late Eliza A. Chase, on the west side of Centre Street. She was in business at this location until 1915, her shop marked the entire time by a modest sign reading “Buttons and Trimmings.” She eventually bought the building, in which she also lived, renting out the extra storefronts “at a good profit.” She never married.17
11 “Obituary,” Inquirer and Mirror, June 13, 1908, 3; “Bark R. L. Barstow,” Nantucket Inquirer, May 7, 1862, 2; “Removal,” Inquirer and Mirror, Apr. 17, 1869, 3. 12 “Personal,” Inquirer and Mirror, Jan. 22, 1916, 2.
15 “Removal,” Nantucket Weekly Mirror, May 24, 1862, 3.
13 “Seen and Heard,” Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 2, 1922, 2; “Here and There,” Inquirer and Mirror, Oct. 9, 1937, 4.
16 “Removal,” Nantucket Weekly Mirror, Aug. 25, 1860, 3.
14 “Removal,” Inquirer and Mirror, Apr. 17, 1869, 3.
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17 “‘Petticoat Row,’ Nantucket, is Known in Song and Story,” Boston Sunday Herald, Apr. 21, 1907, 17.
BIOGRAPHIES OF THE WOMEN
MARY P. SWAIN (1829–1887) was the daughter of whaling captain Jonathan Swain II and Margaret (Swain) Swain. She went into business with Susan Paddock selling fancy goods in 1870, then set up by herself on Main Street in 1871. She had moved her store to Centre Street by 1874, but sold the business to Phebe Clisby in 1879 or 1880. She never married. CORA STEVENS (1888–1967) grew up on Nantucket, working summers as a girl in the ’Sconset store of E. A. Lawrence, then later in the Lawrence store at Main and Orange streets. In July 1915, she opened the Sunshine Shop, a variety store at 4 Federal Street. She purchased Ann Amelia Westgate’s variety business at 7 Centre Street in 1924. In 1937, she expanded into 9 Centre Street (the former store of Carrie Long) and began selling sporting goods. In 1941, this portion of the business became the Pot and Kettle Shop. In 1954, she purchased the store facing Main Street at the corner of Centre, adjacent to her existing gift shop. During renovations, she left in place a side door opening onto Centre Street. “You see,” she told a reporter, “I had that door left there leading to Centre Street because I could still say I was in business on ‘Petticoat Row.’” She sold the business in 1960 to Chester and Mary Baker of Boston, who renamed it Mary Baker’s. She never married.18 EDITH RAY SYLVIA (1879–1954) rented 13 Centre Street from 1905 to 1916 for her stationery and smallwares store. Prior to this, she was for many years bookkeeper at the Central Market on Main Street, and she closed her business in order to become bookkeeper and treasurer of the Nantucket Union Store. She never married.19 ELIZABETH C. (RAY) SYLVIA (1849–1929), the mother of Edith R. Sylvia and widow of grocer and former 18 “Events Occurring on Nantucket the Past Year,” Inquirer and Mirror, Jan. 8, 1916, 3; “Here and There,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 22, 1924, 4; “Miss Cora Stevens Confirms Sale of her Stationery Store,” Inquirer and Mirror, Dec. 9, 1960, 1, 6; “Miss Cora Stevens,” Inquirer and Mirror, Dec. 21, 1867, 1, 6B.
whaler Antoine Sylvia Jr. (1834–1906), sold wall paper from her house at 33 Centre Street starting in 1910. Although not strictly speaking on Petticoat Row, she was remembered by others as being located there. ELLA F. SYLVIA (1853–1932) lived much of her life off island and worked as a nurse in New York City. She purchased Emeline Coffin’s millinery business in 1906. Retiring about 1915, she then ran a small shop out of her Pleasant Street home. She never married.20 ANN AMELIA (HOLMES) WESTGATE (1867–1931) worked for five years after high school as a compositor for the Inquirer and Mirror, then, after her 1890 marriage to jeweler and watchmaker James W. Westgate (1865– 1916), as one of the first telephone switchboard operators on island. In 1908, she took over Phebe Clisby’s stationery and novelty store at 7 Centre Street, operating it until 1924, when she sold the business to Cora Stevens. After that, she worked at the Steiger Dudgeon store on Main Street.21 20 “Sold Out,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 31, 1906, 4; “A Tribute,” Inquirer and Mirror, July 16, 1932, 5. 21 “Death of Mrs. A. A. Westgate,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 14, 1931, 1.
PETTICOAT ROW’S YOUNGEST ENTREPRENEUR
Charlie started her lemonade stand in 2017 to support the Oldest House. Daughter of Amanda and James Boening, owner of James Robinson, she has been raising money for the NHA for the past four years. This year, she has raised over $500…so far. Way to go, Charlie!
19 “Personal,” Inquirer and Mirror, Apr. 8, 1905, 4; “Accepted a New Position,” Inquirer and Mirror, Mar. 11, 1916, 1; “Edith R. Sylvia,” Inquirer and Mirror, Feb. 20, 1954, 4.
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A Disturber of Tradition Anna Gardner By Barbara Ann White
Nantucket-born Anna Gardner lived in a time of crisis and polarization. Courageous and outspoken, she was part of a political minority throughout her life. She put her principles over her own comfort and safety. She resigned from a job to protest racial segregation, and refused to flee when white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan, threatened her. In a time when women’s roles were rigid, Anna chose independence, committed to embodying women’s full potential. Born less than thirty years after the ratification of the Constitution, it was not certain that the United States would survive its divisions. An idealist and a realist, Anna saw hope in the principles of the Constitution, but was realistic in the knowledge that those principles would take decades to be fulfilled. In 1822, when she was only six years old, her parents hid the family of Arthur Cooper from bounty hunters in their home on Vestal Street. Her parents’ bravery made a deep impression. In her memoir Harvest Gleanings, written almost sixty years later, she vividly recalled the depth of the Coopers’ fear. One of the foundational experiences of her life, it was instrumental in her commitment to abolition and to equal rights. Oliver C. Gardner and Hannah Macy Gardner ensured that their gifted daughter received an above average education. She attended three schools led by progressive educators, all abolitionists who also believed girls and boys should receive equal educations. A future teacher, Anna applied the lessons she took from these educational reformers. As a teenager, Anna taught at the one-room African School at Five Corners, founded by the black community a full year before Nantucket established its public schools. In 1840, when the town denied Anna’s star pupil, Eunice Ross, admission to the high school, Anna resigned, refusing to be part of a system of segregation.
Above: Portrait of Arthur Cooper. 1899.0131.001. Left: Studio portrait of Anna Gardner in the 1870s or 1880s. She wearing the locket given to her by her students at the African School. GPN1319.
Below: 1880 photo of the African Meeting House on the corner of Pleasant and York Streets. F3970.
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The earliest known photograph of Frederick Douglass, taken circa 1841-1846. Douglass was in his mid-twenties when he and Anna Gardner began their long friendship. Onondaga Historical Association.
Isabella Gibbons when she was a teacher at the Jefferson School. One of the first teachers trained by Anna Gardner, she taught at the school for years after Anna left and when the school was absorbed by the Charlottesville Public Schools. New England Freedman’s Aid Society Records in the Rare Books Collection of the Boston Public Library.
Anna was already the secretary of the integrated Nantucket Anti-Slavery Society. The chapter was tireless in its fight against slavery, the return of fugitives to the South, and racial discrimination in the North. The group submitted dozens of petitions to the state and federal legislatures, organized rallies, and invited radical abolitionists to the island at yearly conventions during the 1840s. Political activism offended the island’s Quaker community. While Quakers were early to denounce slavery, mainstream Quakers increasingly opposed public political participation. In 1839, Anna was disowned, as were
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other outspoken abolitionists on the island. She became a lifelong Unitarian. Their optimistic belief in the possibility of progress aligned with her beliefs. It was at an Anti-Slavery convention on Nantucket in 1841 that Anna met twenty-three-year-old Frederick Douglass. Douglass’s gripping description of his life while enslaved brought him to the attention of the prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who hired him on the spot, launching Douglass’s illustrious career. Anna and Frederick Douglass became lifelong friends and correspondents. The two met on several occasions both on Nantucket and at his home in Washington, D.C. Douglass’s influence on her was profound, and her influence on him is evidenced by her weeks-long stay at his home in 1888, one of only a handful of guests invited to stay overnight.
ANNA GARDNER
During the Civil War, black people crossed the battle lines by the thousands as territory was liberated by the Union army. Education, long denied to them by law, made their demand for schools an early priority. Anna put herself in harm’s way to teach the freed people. She took military transport to North Carolina in early 1863, two years before the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Anna was not typical of educators who went South. For one, at age forty-six, she was sixteen years older than the average teacher. Unlike most, she had prior experience teaching black students, harboring no doubts about their educational potential. Most significantly, Anna’s tenure was far longer than average, teaching in the South for a dozen years, while the typical teacher endured the hardships for just two years. Her first assignment was in New Bern, N.C., a city of under 6,000 people in 1860. Its population had swelled with the addition of over 30,000 Union soldiers and thousands of black refugees. Superintendent of the Poor Vincent Colyer recognized the demand for freedmen’s education and established night schools taught by volunteer soldiers. But, the numbers were overwhelming, and a call went out for Northern teachers. Philanthropic organizations met the call, including the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society (NEFAS), the secular society that supported Anna during her years in the South. Life was not easy. At first, Anna lived in New Bern, but as the numbers of refugees grew, camps were created on its outskirts, the largest called James City. Anna moved to James City to be close to her pupils. While there, the camp came under enemy fire, and the occupants fled to town. She also experienced several small pox epidemics, the worst in 1864. For several months, an average of fifty freedmen died each week. Teachers, including Anna, had to suspend classes to minister to the sick and dying. Quick to realize that the long-term demand for teachers could not be filled by Northern teachers, Anna increasingly focused her efforts on creating “normal” classes designed to educate black teachers. Her second, and most successful assignment, was in Charlottesville, Va. Anna was selected in 1866 by the Freedmen’s Bureau to create a school from the ground
up. She seized the opportunity to create a normal school class. Her first student, Isabella Gibbons, had somehow learned to read while enslaved. Simultaneously studying at night with Anna, Isabella was immediately put to work teaching during the day. Despite intense opposition from former Confederates, Anna created a four-room school, consistently staffed by two black teachers and two Northern white teachers during her tenure from 1866 to 1871. The Jefferson School became one of the most successful normal schools in the South. Some of its graduates taught into the next century, keeping a small flame of education alive during the years of oppression that followed Reconstruction. As she had in New Bern, Anna lived amongst the freedmen. She moved into the Union’s military barracks on a compound where impoverished freedmen had taken refuge. She credited her acceptance as a white teacher to “cast[ing] her lot” with them. The school, opened within days of her arrival, was in a dilapidated building on the compound. Living in the South as a white Northern teacher required courage. When the army announced it was leaving Charlottesville, Anna was alarmed. The school had barely opened its doors, and without military protection, she feared for its survival. Philena Carkin, a white teacher who joined her in 1866, wrote in her journal that the whites “threaten to burn us out.” Anna traveled to Washington, D.C., in a failed attempt to persuade the military to rescind its decision. Even though the school was vulnerable and defenseless, it remained open, although Anna admitted to Philena that she was “terrified.” She had reason to be terrified and the school became the target of attacks during her years there. When the original school building was returned to its former owners, a second Jefferson School was built in 1870, in large part due to Anna’s persistence. The new school was near the train tracks connecting Charlottesville with the University of Virginia, and on more than one occasion, the students pelted the school with stones. Three of the four teachers lived in the schoolhouse: Anna, Philena, and the family of Paul Lewis, the second freedmen to become a teacher at the school. White gangs sometimes banged on the doors at night to intim-
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ANNA GARDNER
Congress, presided over by Anna’s childhood friend and neighbor Maria Mitchell and addressed by Nantucket-born Lucretia Coffin Mott. Anna’s speech emphasized that the ballot was a remedy to the “low legal state” of women. She urged women to “throw off the shackles which have been so insidiously forged about them,” and optimistically predicted a future when boundaries between men and women would be regarded as “simply absurd.” It was not until 1879 that Massachusetts allowed women to vote, narrowly restricting it to elections for members of school committees. In February 1880, Anna and twelve other women became the first Nantucket women to cast votes. Suffrage, however, was not Anna’s only cause during her retirement. She continued to advocate for public education, warning that neglecting it would “prove fatal to our experiment of a Free Government.” She also fought racial injustice. In 1899, at age eighty-nine, Anna, crippled and in ill health, attended a conference in Boston “to protest against the barbarism of lynching.” Portrait of Anna Gardner, 1886. Wendell Macy (1845-1913). Oil on canvas. Gift of Harvey Jones in honor of the Friends of the NHA.
idate them. One night the Ku Klux Klan left a picture of a coffin at their doorstep. Philena wrote that the whites had failed to consider “that had we been timid and easily frightened,” the teachers would not have been there in the first place. After leaving Charlottesville, Anna taught in the South for a few more years, but by the 1870s, support for Reconstruction had declined precipitously. Philanthropies struggled for donations and could no longer support the schools. New state constitutions had provisions for public education and, ostensibly, had taken on the task. Anna returned to the island in 1875, age sixty-nine. Civil rights continued to dominate her life with women’s suffrage her main focus. Within months of her homecoming, Anna delivered a speech about suffrage at the Fourth Women’s Congress in Philadelphia. Nantucket was disproportionately represented at the Women’s
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Anna did not live to see her ideals realized, and, in fact, saw the promises of Reconstruction broken. These broken promises continue. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery but left a loophole that even now forces convicts into involuntary labor. The Fourteenth Amendment with its promise of equal protection under the law has never been fully enforced. And, obstacles and violence continue to suppress voting in black communities, despite the Fifteenth Amendment. Anna also saw the demise of her dream of integrated public schools. The infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1898 legitimized “separate but equal schools” a few years before she died. Anna must have fought despair, but it is not reflected in her writing. She expressed hope for a better future, writing, “circumstances sometimes produce retrogression for a season—but in the long run they will each and all fall in the march of progress.” She believed, as she had when she was a teenager, that the United States would someday live up to the ideals of the Constitution. She trusted that future generations would embrace and enforce those ideals.
Bits and Bytes FROM THE RESEARCH LIBRARY AND THE MARKETING DEPARTMENT By Amelia Holmes, Associate Director, Research Library The Research Library (RL) staff has ramped up digital dissemination of its assets over the past 3 months. An exciting initiative to push out content-rich material began in earnest in March with its “spring semester” of NHA University. Each Tuesday, NHA U brings together new and existing historical research alongside the association’s collections to highlight Nantucket’s national and global connections. Past “lessons” have taken readers to Europe, the Pacific, and around the U.S. These communications reach nearly 20,000 subscribers. A popular outlet for sharing stories is through our social media channels. Daily, staff shares a story from #onthisdayinhistory, with a historical photo or artifact from the collection. With 11,000 followers and growing, we love seeing the response from all who love Nantucket history. The RL ramped up its focus on research with new articles by staff, island researchers, and scholars. These are posted weekly on the History Topics section of the NHA’s website. With nearly 10,000 readers so far this year, History Topics articles cover the spectrum of Nantucket history from Native peoples to contemporary events. 2020 marks two hundred years since the ill-fated Essex disaster, which later influenced Herman Melville’s great American classic, Moby-Dick. To mark the anniversary, staff developed an exhibit that is on display in the Whaling Museum’s Mezzanine Gallery and as a digital exhibit on the NHA’s website. Digitization of our collection is moving full steam ahead. The Ships’ Logs and Journals Collection is the focus, with 190 logbooks (45% of the collection) scanned to date. In addition, staff continues to digitize the historical photograph collection, adding to the 30,000 photographs already searchable
online. Staff is undertaking a long-term map digitization project, in partnership with the Boston Public Library. In January, the RL launched a new project to transcribe its whaling logbooks and journals. Using the crowdsourcing platform From the Page, eight logbooks are now completely transcribed, text searchable, and available to readers through the collections catalog. More than 200 volunteers have transcribed over 2,000 pages, aiding casual browsers and scholars alike in accessing these historically valuable tomes. Manuscript materials are not the only library materials in need of transcription. The extensive oral history collections are also being transcribed. Using speech-to-text software, staff can reduce time involved in transcribing to allow for in-record integration of interviews and their text-searchable transcriptions.
RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP The NHA is excited to explore a research partnership with Housing Nantucket, Nantucket Preservation Trust, and the Museum of African American History. This partnership would investigate the history of Black homeownership on the island, specifically by looking at the development of the New Guinea neighborhood.
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“She spoke to the world through every line of her countenance… bearing a message of light and love.” —Frederick Douglass 42 Historic Nantucket | Summer 2020
The Power of Voice REFLECTIONS ON LUCRETIA COFFIN MOTT (1793–1880) By Jamie Stiehm
She’s the best-kept secret in American history, and even on Nantucket, where she was born in 1793. I met her gaze as a sophomore at Swarthmore College, a serene square of Philadelphia. Her parlor portrait arrested me. I needed to know who that woman was. It turned out Lucretia Coffin Mott was a founder of the college and a major figure in slave emancipation and human rights. So why was she a mystery to me, a history major? First, don’t be fooled by her sweet appearance. This Friend—or Quaker—was a force. Her Nantucket girlhood in a flourishing Quaker community shaped her like clay into pottery. In later life as a leading Philadelphia Friend in the “Quaker City,” Mott was an early champion for equality, known for the power of her voice. She reached tens of thousands in her time, traveling across a “House Divided” America. She witnessed the widening river of anger between North and South. The day she was born, George Washington was president, and she outlived Lincoln. Lucretia and her husband, James Mott, were founding members of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. The Motts hosted the inaugural social event. A roaring Southern slaveholder, Andrew Jackson, was president. The small radical gathering was the beginning of something big. Nonviolent resistance to slavery would take time: thirty years. But nonviolent action slowly shifted the public mind. Among the most famous women in antebellum America, Mott broke silences in the public square, literally. Voice was her gift for creating social change. She spoke in an inspired, spontaneous manner, with no notes. I found much of her eloquence is lost to history. The idea of a woman public speaker was a shock, but it shouldn’t have been. It’s important to note: her talents were nurtured within the walls of her faith. Quaker women spoke freely, as the spirit moved in worship, just as men did. That is the secret sauce of Mott’s remarkable success as a public speaker: her Quaker identity formed in
Nantucket. Islanders, in general, cultivate independence of mind and thought. Mott, denied an audience at the U.S. Capitol in 1843, delivered an anti-slavery sermon at the Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., to hushed residents and lawmakers. She was fifty on that historic night, invited by John Quincy Adams, the stern former president. Five years later, Mott was the main speaker at the first American women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Frederick Douglass was also present at this milestone event for women. Mott stands center stage at the crossroads of the two great human rights movements of the nineteenth century. For her, they were brother and sister causes, inseparable. What Mott started in 1848, a thoroughly modern leader, Alice Paul, finished with her “Votes for Women” victory in 1920. Interestingly, Paul was also a Quaker, and she graduated from Swarthmore. Mott was a leading light of inspiration to her. Indeed, Mott is the foremother of us all, giving American women a rich lost inheritance, now being found like seaglass. A walk through her life sheds light on a righteous vision and the courage to stand up and speak out. These traits make all the difference to those actively resisting oppression. Again, Mott’s nonviolent faith informed her outspoken speech in the public square. The Society of Friends embraced nonviolent resistance early on. In England in the 1650s, Quaker men refused to join the king’s army and were jailed because they would not bear arms. They would not tip their hats to authority. They worshiped in
Left: Portrait of Lucretia Mott, by William Henry Furness Jr., ca. early 1850s. Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. NHA.org | Nantucket Historical Association
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Portraits of Thomas Coffin and Anna Folger Coffin. Gift of Mrs. Mary Hallowell Lund. 1970.23.1.
stark egalitarian meetinghouses. An emphasis on conscience and “inner light” marked the Protestant sect. The English king was glad to send the dissenters off to the New World, led by William Penn. Nantucket became a harbor where Quakers could live safely away from hostile Puritan Boston, where some Quakers, including a woman, were hanged in 1660. Mary Dyer sang on her way to the gallows. My quest revealed Lucretia Coffin was born on sandy Nantucket, many miles off Cape Cod. Her family descended from one of the founding white families that settled the windswept island a century earlier. By the time Lucretia was born, the Coffins had a strong sense of belonging to Nantucket and its main religion, the Friends. In the 1790s, things were looking up in the sunrise of the American age. The bright, hopeful Early Republic was launched in Philadelphia. Lucretia was born into a world still in the making. The victory over Britain’s navy was unlikely, giving the first generation of Americans a sense of providence. It would be up to them to make the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution live and breathe. As a girl, Lucretia was aware of slavery from reading the British poet, William Cowper. In a seafaring soci-
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ety, she grasped the human misery of slave ships over the Middle Passage. America’s mainland was far in the foggy distance, but she knew slavery was unfinished business, the young nation’s tragic flaw. She felt this with fierce urgency. Lucretia’s father, Thomas, a sea captain, sailed away for years and was once presumed lost. The day a tanned man walked up Main Street, few recognized Captain Coffin. Lucretia said his homecoming was one of the happiest days of her life. While many island men and boys hunted the sperm whale on voyages, women ran the island’s homes and some of its businesses. They did a lot, caring for children, animals, and business. Nantucket Quaker women were sturdy and self-reliant. Lucretia, her mother’s best helper, roamed to the market and down to the wharves, bringing home goods for the family. Lucretia Coffin knew nautical talk and island dishes, such as blackberry pudding, that she took with her the rest of her life. An ancestor of Lucretia’s, Mary Coffin Starbuck, nurtured the Friends religion on island. Among its radical practices was women speaking during meetings for worship, as noted above. This was suspicious and subversive, especially to Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans. Growing up in this tradition, Lucretia buttressed
LUCRETIA COFFIN MOTT
Left: Bronze bust sculpture of Lucretia Coffin Mott, by Victoria Guerina. NHA Purchase. 2020.7.1. Right: Portrait of Lucretia Mott, 2019, by Heather Vance Haddon.
her strong speaking voice, later to be heard in the outside world. Flowering in her own Society of Friends, Lucretia first became recognized for her rare distinction as a speaker. The Coffin family lived on Fair Street by School Street. The Nantucket Friends believed in equal education for girls and boys, a practice much less common on the mainland, and Lucretia attended the coeducational school during her island years. Later, her family sent her to the Quakers Nine Partners Boarding School in Duchess County, New York. In keeping with their belief in a spark or light in everyone, the Society of Friends was the first religion to wholly embrace opposition to human enslavement, a full century before Lucretia was born. This gives glimmers of what made the young Lucretia unusual in her conviction as a young woman when she was ready to face the wider world. Lucretia Coffin married James Mott, whom she met when they were teachers at the same Quaker boarding school she had attended in Duchess County. She was eighteen. The couple moved to Philadelphia, the Quaker City, where James became a cotton merchant. Lucretia persuaded him to change to wool, since cotton was a product of slavery. The two were devoted, and James always went with Lucretia when she appeared publicly. They had five children, but their rosy boy Tommy died young at three. His last words were, “I love thee, Mother.” The Motts became lifelong Philadelphians, pillars of the city, yet in the radical wing. They were not proper Main Line Friends. A visitor to their home might see the first
feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by the Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. Lucretia thought the manifesto made perfect sense. Their dining room could seat fifty guests. It was a lighthouse for abolitionists and Black men and women fleeing slavery. By the 1830s, the Jacksonian era, fault lines were drawn in a burning “sectional divide” over slavery. This chapter was also the decade that mobs came to towns. One midnight mob almost burned down the Mott house after destroying a new assembly hall for abolitionists. Mott’s speaking voice is lost to us. She was not so much a writer. But her radiant influence lives through a patchwork quilt of her letters, diaries, speeches, and the living witness of other great speakers, men such as Douglass, Emerson, and Adams. Her voice started low and gathered strength, rising like a river with thoughts pouring upon her like a summer flood, one witness marveled. For all comers, the Philadelphia Quaker lady had a striking gaze and an unforgettable voice. Way ahead of her time, Mott is a testament to the power of determined peaceful progress.
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From Monomoy, 1940 Anne Ramsdell Congdon (1873â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1958) Oil on board Courtesy of AAN, gift of Mr. & Mrs. Robert D. Congdon
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An Island Seen THE ARTISTS ASSOCIATION OF NANTUCKET AND THE WOMEN WHO BUILT IT Curated by Anne Knutsen, Ph.D., and Daniel Elias, Robyn & John Davis Chief Curator
In celebration of the 75th anniversary of their found, the Artists Association of Nantucket (AAN) has partnered with the NHA to create an exhibition on the origins of the Artists Association—an organization largely founded and run by women—seen through the lens of their own comprehensive collection, supported by additional works owned by the NHA. The AAN grew out of the Nantucket Art Colony, and the Art Colony grew out of the vision of one woman, Florence Lang, a seasonal resident from Montclair, New Jersey. In the nineteen-teens, Nantucket Town’s waterfront was ghostly and decrepit, a collection of aging cooperages, smithies, boathouses, and fishing shanties, some disused since the end of whaling more than fifty years earlier. Lang and her husband, following in the footsteps of a generation of artists including Eastman Johnson, William Trost Richards, and Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin, envisioned an arts district by the water and set about making it a reality. Beginning in 1917, the Langs purchased large parcels of land along Washington Street Extension and Easy Street and moved a variety of derelict buildings to their new property. They created a zone of tiny, spartan-but -charming artist’s studios, which they made available to artists at rock-bottom rates. In time, they opened the Candle Factory Studio and, in 1924, the Easy Street Gallery, which quickly became an economic lifeline connecting artists with collectors among the summer residents and tourists coming to the island in increasing numbers. The exhibition examines the origins of the AAN in the Art Colony of the 1910s through 1940s, a time when individual women such as Lang used their resources to establish studios, galleries, and, in the case of Maud Stumm, summer sidewalk art shows. Others followed in their footsteps to create an identity for Nantucket as a place to make and see art. Frank Swift Chase was recruited to teach, and a group grew up around him.
From those early days through the first decades of the AAN’s existence, artistic practice on the island was overwhelmingly the province of talented, ambitious women, in the tradition of Nantucket’s whaling wives. The women who built the AAN were running businesses, purchasing and protecting historic and arts-focused properties, funding and leading non-profit operations, identifying teachers and mentors, acting as patrons and collectors and, above all, painting their vision of the island and its residents. Guest Curator Anne Knutson and Chief Curator Daniel Elias of the NHA, working closely with AAN’s Artistic Director Bobby Frazier and Executive Director Courtney Bridges, have sifted the collections of both institutions for works by those women, and some of the men that were teachers, friends, colleagues, and mentors. In 1945, shortly after and prompted by Florence Lang’s death, two seminal events took place. A group including Isabelle Hollister Tuttle, Louise Late Emerson, Esther Hoyt Sawyer, Harriet Lord, Elizabeth Saltonstall, Ruth Haviland Sutton (who had purchased part of the Lang’s properties), and Emily Hoffmeier, among others, founded the AAN as a formal institution. Initially, the focus was on plein air painting technique and on landscape and seascape subjects. At the same time, the Group of ’45 coalesced as a loose affiliation of artists such as Emerson, Saltonstall, Charlotte Stuart Kimball, Katherine Dunn Pagon, and Charles Green Shaw. Dubbed the “local moderns,” members were interested in painterly abstraction, portraiture, and the process of painting and experimental printmaking as subjects. These divergent directions initially led to friction
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New York Regatta in Nantucket Harbor, circa 1935 Frank Swift Chase (1886–1958) Oil on board Courtesy of AAN, gift of Helen Wieand Cole
within the artistic community, but eventually the view prevailed that the two approaches complemented each other and expanded the offerings on the island. By 1950, the Group of ’45 had integrated with the AAN.
By the Wharf 1952 Emily Leaman Hoffmeier (1888–1952) Oil on canvas Courtesy of AAN, gift of Marguerite Lederer
Given the organizational and esthetic strength of the largely female founders, and the fact that many of the hired teachers were men, strong collaborative relationships grew between students and teachers. The work of Isabelle Tuttle and Millicent Clapp, working across three decades with Frank Swift Chase and Phillip Hicken, two teachers with distinctly different styles, demonstrate a shift from brushes to palette knives and from realism and landscape subjects to abstraction and a focus on the process of painting. The founding of Main Street Gallery by Reggie Levine, a member of the Group of ’45 and, later, of the AAN, created a locus for contemporary art on the island.
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Deep in the Woods, 1947 Elizabeth Saltonstall Stone lithograph Courtesy of AAN, gift of John Brewer
Artists such as brother and sister Bobby and Polly Bushong, Sybil Goldsmith, Pat Gardner, Keith McDaniel, and John Austin pushed boundaries and expectations of the nature of art. The exhibition includes a range of works created by Levine and the artists he worked with, including a series of images of the various locations and configurations of the gallery itself. Finally, the curators present the strong tradition of experimental printmaking on the island, with examples of drypoint, etching, relief printing, and stone lithography, showing a surprising range of experimental techniques and tremendous skill. Elizabeth Saltonstall, one of the core painters of the Colony, developed an extraordinary skill in lithography, a medium being re-captured in the 1930s through ’50s by fine artists from commercial printing uses. The subtlety of her observation and deftness of touch with which she drew images on the heavy litho stones resulted in inspired images of nature from woodland and shore. Emerson Tuttle’s equally deft handling of drypoint etchings of birds, a medium famous for the atmosphere it produces, the quickness and suppleness of its line, and the limited numbers of prints that could be produced from a single plate, was a counterpoint to Saltonstall’s
Above: Margaretta Hinchman Katherine W. Dunn Pagon (1892–1988) Oil on canvas Courtesy of AAN, gift of the artist Below: Nantucket Landscape Isabelle Hollister Tuttle (1895–1978) Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of AAN, gift of Estate of Andy Oates
painstaking lithographs. Other artists experimented with block- or linoleum-printing as well as monotype and monoprint. The exhibition is a long look into the storehouses of Nantucket art, showing works rarely seen and exploring a long, successful chapter of Nantucket history. It celebrates the hard work, time, and treasure committed by these extraordinary women in providing a safe haven for artistic expression on the island. The Artists Association of Nantucket continues their legacy today, and the Nantucket Historical Association is proud to partner with the island’s artists in this way.
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Deepening Our Commitment to the Community Upon your return to the Whaling Museum, you will notice an absence of our fabulous interpreters. For decades, members have enjoyed their spirited narrations of The Hunt and The Gam, which make the exhibits come alive. Our social distancing protocols force us to suspend these unique educational and entertaining programs. Not surprisingly, though, interpreters have adapted. Perhaps the most visible project is a new audio tour that will provide a comprehensive guide in both English and Spanish. A highlight this summer is the unveiling of the new children’s Discovery Center (as seen in the photos above), underwritten in part by Alisa and Alastair Wood and Franci Neely. It is a visually stimulating experience, with both indoor and outdoor components. Originally intended as a “high-touch” space, revamped exhibits and strict protocols are well in place to make your child’s experience fun yet extremely safe. Complementing this are lots of online “ACKtivities for kids.”
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HIGH SCHOOL INTERNSHIP PROGRAM
Left to right: Dayner Javier, Bishaka Dhamala, Amy McAveety, Samir Banjara, Isobelle Fleming, Gillian Antonietti, Cameron Christie, and Caiden Shea.
The winter and spring High School Internship Program successfully engaged with eight amazing students. It was a great pleasure working with these young adults. This important paid four-hourper-week after-school commitment allowed students to 1) partake in life-coaching sessions (such as banking 101, resume writing, etc.); 2) learn in a professional milieu while engaging with staff; 3) work on a group project (check out their excellent final project on the website: “We All Read Moby-Dick” at nha.org/whats-on/exhibition/digital-exhibitions. This multilingual experience literally gave voice to many communities on the island as chapters are recorded in eight languages.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE “We All Read Moby-Dick” Committee
Spanish Jill Surprenant Evelyn MacEachern Jackie Echeverria Tina Fournier
Portuguese Devin Durand
Bulgarian
1800 HOUSE CRAFT CLASSES The NHA 1800 House craft classes continue unabated following late winter success. Many of these classes have moved online, with live instructors from on- and off-island. Private instruction is available by choosing from a menu of projects by visiting NHA.org. Make it an event by including your small group of family or friends. Small group in-person workshops will resume when circumstances allow. For those of you who are “crafty,” check out the new “how to” classes online, all which are fun to watch and easy to do.
Ralitsa Mitrakieva Virginia Kostadinova
Lithuanian Kristina Ralkova
French Joan Hull
Italian Lydia Syssek
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EDUCATION
LEARNING GOES DIGITAL As we pivoted to online instruction, a new history course was written for ninety-six Nantucket third grade students. They participated in digital classroom presentations through 10 sessions, thus encouraging us to do more. Work with fifth grade students is underway. This is in addition to a six-month long in-school history module teaching over 600 students in K–5th grades. If streaming content is our new model, then our blockbuster hit must be the presentation of The Hunt. This Emmy-worthy performance by Peggi Godwin was so well attended that we ramped up production of new presentations. Bob Kucharavy presented The Essex Gam; Karen MacNab The Quakers of Nantucket; Liz Schaeffer Scrimshaw: The Sailor’s Art; and a panel discussion, featuring Michael Harrison and Amelia Holmes, discussed Harrison’s new research on The Real Women of Petticoat Row.
Graphic design passport project developed by Kean students to explore and “travel” to each NHA Historic Property.
Innovative approaches to streaming content took a giant leap forward with the much-heralded “NHA University”—this title, with its humorous hint of hyperbole, is a vehicle to provide curated content looking deeply at our collections. Additionally, the daily history posts and daily teasers on social media platforms continue to stump even the best of us.
COLLEGE INTERNSHIP PROGRAM The NHA continues its decade-long partnership with Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Students worked on interactive projects related to the Old Mill and this fall, will research a semester-long project remotely. Through the good offices of Rose Gonnella, ‘Sconseter and Associate Dean at Kean University, we enthusiastically signed a memorandum of understanding with the university. This past fall and spring, students were challenged with two semester-long graphic design projects. Two paid “virtual” summer internships are underway under the supervision of Novation Media. Two interns, one a student in the Cooperstown Graduate Program student and the other a recent Duke University graduate, will work remotely with the Education Department, while students at NYSID work on interior design projects under the direction of Ellen Fisher, the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the New York School of Interior Design. The NHA Research Library continues its year-round internship program with four interns this summer. Three graduate-level interns, a recent Simmons University graduate and current students from UNC-Chapel Hill and Long Island University, will complete projects related to archival processing, research, and outreach. An undergraduate intern from Smith College will conduct research related to the island’s cemeteries.
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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2020 NHS SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS NHA Scholarships are awarded to graduating seniors of NHS who pursue a four-year college degree and have demonstrated a commitment to Nantucket’s community through volunteer time and initiatives. Tori Dixon Tori’s interests include sociology, environmental studies, art, business, and Mandarin Chinese. She volunteered at the Maria Mitchell Association, Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum, ASAP Board, and is a member of the Student Council, National Honors Society, Chinese Club, Students for Sustainability/Environmental Club, and Art Club. She will attend Northeastern University. Caleb Mailloux Caleb is a founding member of the NHS Latin Club and a member of the Quiz Bowl team, Math Club, and Game Club. A life-long reader, Caleb participated in Nantucket Atheneum’s programs from a young age and joined the Teen Advisory Board in 2014. Caleb will attend Rochester Institute of Technology, majoring in microelectronic engineering.
Maria Silva Marchi Maria came to Nantucket when she was 10 years old. Maria has dedicated her time helping the community and playing soccer for NHS and NSC. Maria visited Puerto Rico with Interact Club to deliver supplies to schools that were devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. She is an intern at the hospital. Maria will attend Husson University, majoring in nursing. Jarret O’Connor Jarret is a sports enthusiast and participated on the football, baseball, and swim teams. He also surfs and skis. He is a member of the Latin, Spanish, and business clubs, and president of the surf club. His love of the water attracted him to the Nantucket Shark Protection program. Jarret worked at the NHA in the “School to Career” program. He will be majoring in history/political science.
Congratulations, Nantucket High School Graduating Seniors. Special NHA gift bags were delivered to every graduate (as seen on the left). Specialty At-Home Learning Kits were given to every third grade student (as seen on the right). These educational programs are underwritten in part by Cape Cod 5 Foundation, Nantucket Golf Club Foundation, M.S. Worthington Foundation, Community Foundation’s ReMain Nantucket Fund, and individuals like you.
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Financial Report TREASURER’S LETTER The 2019 Audited Statements of Financial Position represent the work and accomplishments of our staff and supporters. We are pleased to once again report that the association ended the year with a surplus, before applying depreciation. Philanthropy increased over 2018. Results account for 56% of our revenue; indicating strong community support for our mission. Following the new strategic plan, approved by the Board of Directors in January 2019, the NHA continued the work to make more of our historic properties publically accessible. In 2019, the NHA unveiled exciting new exhibition spaces, including our new Williams Forsyth Gallery and an expanded Discovery Center in the Whaling Museum. We also overhauled our collections catalog, as well as made needed capital investments to our historic properties. The Board of Trustees and staff remain focused on sustainability strategies. Our endowment grew by over $6M in 2019, ending at over $26M, and overall net assets increased by over $5M, ending the year at over $44M. Independent auditors have once again given the NHA a “clean” audit, reflecting the good work of the financial team led by CFO Johanna Richard. Importantly, the contribution by the interpreters corps and volunteers should be singled out as they passionately share their time and expertise with the public.
OPERATING REVENUE
ASSETS Cash and cash equivalents
2019
2018
$1,998,516
$2,545,228
Inventories
150,000
120,783
Other current assets
114,423
122,403
2,769,455
1,832,596
Land, buildings, and equipment, net
15,408,529
16,894,387
Long-term investments
26,147,633
19,804,244
Pledges receivable, net
Collections (non monetarized)
— —
$46,588,556
$ 41,319,641
LIABILITIES AND NET ASSETS Accounts payable and accrued liabilities
$314,661
$ 326,441
Note payable, bank
2,041,892
2,041,892
Total Liabilities
2,356,553
2,368,333
Net assets Unrestricted Undesignated
REVENUE, GAINS AND OTHER SUPPORT
27%
CONTRIBUTIONS
8%
MEMBERSHIP
20%
FUND-RAISING EVENTS
7%
MUSEUM SHOP
15%
ADMISSIONS
7%
12%
ENDOWMENT DRAW
2%
54 Historic Nantucket | Summer 2020
509,871
735,349
Designated for endowment
10,297,000
6,176,572
Investment in land, buildings, and equipment
13,366,637
14,852,495
With donor restrictions
20,058,495
17,186,892
EARNED REVENUE
Total net assets
44,232,003
38,951,308
PROGRAM REVENUE
$46,588,556
$ 41,319,641
OPERATING EXPENSES
OPERATING ACTIVITIES
2019
2018
Revenue, gains, and other support Contributions
$1,702,676
$ 1,458,605
Admissions
933,144
949,346
Memberships
522,666
508,167
Education Programs
144,957
133,761
Museum Shop revenue
452,886
631,160
Endowment Draw
755,000
698,500
1,258,252
1,153,191
Special fund-raising events Other earned revenue
446,847
574,517
6,216,428
6,107,247
Curatorial
1,673,263
1,402,796
Education and public programs
1,068,641
1,063,811
670,399
664,795
607,310
389,454
General and administrative
912,703
1,014,043
Development & Marketing
650,140
782,152
Museum Shop
404,045
501,167
5,986,501
5,818,218
Total Operating expenses Program services
Research Library Special events Supporting services
PROGRAM SERVICES
28%
CURATORIAL
11%
RESEARCH AND LIBRARY
18%
EDUCATION AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS
10%
FUND-RAISING EVENTS
15%
GENERAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE
7%
MUSEUM SHOP
11%
MEMBERSHIP AND DEVELOPMENT
Total
Change in net assets before depreciation 229,927 289,029 Depreciation Expense
1,079,176
1,109,516
Change in net assets before depreciation
(849,249)
(820,487)
3,317,172
(1,916,297)
6,187
7,462
Non-operating activities Investment return, net of draw Interest income Gain on the sale of property Friends of NHA contributions
NOTE TO MEMBERSHIP:
Capital campaign contributions
Staff administrative capabilities are curtailed because of the virus. The NHA will print donor lists and acquisitions lists in the fall issue of Historic Nantucket.
Capital campaign expenses
1,250,304
—
174,232
174,000
1,790,137
178,926
(3,956)
(100)
6,534,076
(1,556,009)
Change in net assets before changes related to collection items 5,684,827
(2,376,496)
Change in net assets from non-operating activities
Net assets released from restrictions Acquisition of collection items Purchase of collections items
The Financial Statements for 2019 have been audited by Bollus, Lynch, LLP, which has rendered an unqualified opinion on them. Complete financial statements are available upon request.
Change in net assets Net assets beginning of the year Net assets end of the year
—
—
(404,132)
(220,468)
5,280,695
(2,596,964)
38,951,308 41,548,272 $44,232,003
$ 38,951,308
NHA ENDOWMENT
NHA Endowment
$30,000,000 $25,000,000 $20,000,000 $15,000,000 $10,000,000 $5,000,000 $0 2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2107
2018
2019
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Museum Shop is Open Online 24/7 NHA members receive 10% off every purchase Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment
Shop online at NantucketMuseumShop.org Curbside Pick-Up is available
Read NHA Publications from
an
island
community
Disturber of Tradition
artifacts
SHERBURNE TO ‘SCONSET
Collecting Nantucket
SHERBURNE ’SCONSET A Nantucket Success Story
Disturber of Tradition A Portrait of Anna Gardner
Graduation of the first normal school class at the Jefferson School, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1876. Five new teachers hold their diplomas in the back; Anna Gardner is seated in the front.
“Anna Gardner devoted her life to equal education, justice, and civil rights. Her commitment was genuine, consistent, and unwavering. Volunteering to live under difficult circumstances for years, she sacrificed a great deal for her principles, for example, her conviction that her black students were every bit as capable as white students.
51495>
Most importantly, black teachers emerged from the normal schools where she taught. The graduates of the Jefferson Normal School and other normal schools in the South kept a modicum of education alive during the horrors of Jim Crow. Some teachers who studied with Anna and Philena continued to teach under hostile conditions into the next century, forming a cadre of important educators who impacted generations of students.” – Disturber of Tradition, chapter 14 $34.95 ISBN 978-1-882201-08-2
53495>
9 781882 201082
9 781882 201099
NHA Souvenir Book Covers.indd 1
5/29/20 11:05 AM
By Barbara Ann White
$14.95 ISBN 978-1-882201-09-9
Nantucket Historical Association
Michael R. Harrison
Her victories were real. Nantucket’s schools were integrated. Massachusetts passed a ground-breaking law to guarantee equal access to education for all citizens. Women gained the right to vote, at least for school committee elections, in Massachusetts.
By Barbara Ann White
Katie Kaizer Photography April 9, 2020
The Guardian Fund Support the NHA with a Gift
Since 1746, the Old Mill has continuously provided for the needs of this island, giving it the distinction of being the oldest operating mill in the country. When the NHA wrapped the American Flag over its shingles during the early days of the pandemic in support of the healthcare workers, it became a symbol of strength. Today, the NHA is the guardian of many of the cultural treasures that embody all that we love about Nantucket and recognizes its important role as a vital year-round contributor to the island’s economy, culture, and social fabric. In the past months, the NHA has responded to the situation we all face by adapting to the new needs of the community and providing enriching experiences and services. Help the NHA continue to engage the community, showcase its collection, and protect its staff by giving to the 2020 Annual Fund and, if you can, consider an additional donation to the NHA Guardian Fund. This fund was created in direct response to COVID-19 and will provide critical support to operations in order to offset losses due to closures and other lost revenue. With this bulwark of support, the NHA will be better positioned to steer a safe course.
Thanks to a generous 1:1 matching-gift challenge of up to $150,000 from a trustee, your donation will have double the impact. Your donation can be targeted to three different areas of support to reflect your interests: • Staff retention and organizational strength, • Community access and educational programs, • Preservation of the collection and properties. The economic impact of the NHA on the local economy is high, with over 80 full-and part-time employees and 100 on-island contractors. The vast majority of this investment is reinvested on-island. For 126 years, the NHA has served this community and continues to do so now resolutely. Thank you in advance, and we look forward to welcoming you back, as one day this too will be history.
PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT NANTUCKET, MA AND ADDITIONAL ENTRY OFFICES
P.O. BOX 1016, NANTUCKET, MA 02554–1016
SCHEDULE YOUR TIMED VISIT Members are encouraged to reserve timed tickets at NHA.org Extended hours: 8am–6pm, Monday–Saturday, closed Sundays
SUMMER PROGRAMS & EVENTS Friday, July 10: *126th Annual Meeting, 5pm Wednesday, July 15: *Friends of the NHA lecture, 6pm Tuesday, July 23: *Nantucket Lightship Baskets lecture, 5pm Wednesday, July 29: Members’ Evenings, The Hunt, 6pm Thursday, July 30–Saturday, August 1: *Nantucket by Design–see inside front cover
Tuesday, August 4: Exhibition opening at the Whaling Museum: The Road from Abolition to Suffrage Wednesday, August 5: Hanna in Her Garden performance, 5pm Tuesday, August 18: *Disturber of Tradition, by Barbara White, book launch Wednesday, August 19: Members’ Evenings, The Gam, 6pm Thursday, August 20: *History of the Oldest House, 5pm
Visit NHA.org/learn/1800 to sign up for virtual 1800 House Classes The Old Mill will run when conditions allow. We hope to open the Historic Properties on an episodic basis.
* Virtual program