According to off-island enthusiasts, visiting Nantucket was something like a trip to a living history museum. As with Rome, the ancient glory of Nantucket had faded, but its heritage remained. An article in Harper’s Magazine from that time drew a connection between Nantucket’s main product— whale oil for lighting—and the experience of the “good old days” that Nantucket now represented. Between the ages of “lusty barbarism” (lighted by tallow) on the one side and “overstrained and diseased civilization” (lighted by kerosene) on the other, stood Nantucket and the “golden age of reason”— lighted by whale oil. Nantucket’s predominantly Federalist-style homes embodied “all the Renaissance classicism of Andrea Palladio as reinterpreted by Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, and Robert Adam, and then stripped down to its bare essentials for trans-Atlantic shipment, whence it found its way to the houses of American rum merchants and whaling captains. It was the École des Beaux Arts simplified—the grand formal orders of antiquity that America had long consigned to a cobwebby corner of the national attic and forgotten. Above all, it was restrained and dignified, calming, orderly, and elegant, an architecture worthy of the forward-looking, rationalistic culture of the America of the late nineteenth century.”
