Unsung Heroes of the Civil War

by Frances Ruley Karttunen

Nantucket’s Main Street exists in three distinct segments. The wide part from the head of Straight Wharf uphill between storefronts is known as Main Street Square. The square resulted from widening the street after the Great Fire of 1846. At the foot of the Square is the old brick customs house. The Pacific Club has relinquished its meeting room on the ground floor to a crafts gallery, but the ghost of the days when aging whaling captains, veterans of voyages to the Pacific whaling grounds, played endless rounds of cribbage there lingers on.

At the head of the square is the red brick Pacific National Bank, built in 1818. From a makeshift observatory on its flat roof, Nantucket’s premier scientist, Maria Mitchell, observed a comet, the discovery of which launched her off-island career.

Beyond the bank building, Main Street narrows. Like the square, it is paved with cobblestones that were purchased from Gloucester for the purpose in 1837 (not, after all, brought to the island as ballast in the holds of empty ships, as we used to imagine). The cobbled street passes between handsome houses, including the famous Three Bricks constructed for the three sons of Joseph Starbuck and the two neoclassical columned mansions across the street. This section of Main Street could be said to reek of whale oil wealth accumulated in the first half of the 1800s.

The cobblestones end at an obelisk, beyond which the cobbles give way to yellow brick leading to the edge of town.

Where the obelisk stands was once the town center, located at a distance from the stench of the whaling-era waterfront. Here the town building once stood with the town’s liberty pole out front. Within was a court room, and nearby stood the whipping post where punishment was meted out to wretched miscreants. A jail built in 1803 (quaintly known as the Old Gaol) still occupies a back yard between Upper Main Street and Vestal Street. Not far away there were an alms house and a Quaker home for the aged. A large Quaker Meeting House also stood nearby.

By the 1870s, Quakerism and the whaling industry had both collapsed on Nantucket; a brick building on Union Street, just off Main Street Square, had been taken over to serve as the Town Building; and the whipping post and the liberty pole had long since faded from memory. The intersection of Main Street with Gardner and Milk Streets was no longer a hub of activity, but like the Pacific Club, it retained an aura of by-gone importance. Where better to place Nantucket’s Civil War monument?

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