News and Events for Nantucket Island
• by Frances Ruley Karttunen • Surfside is a product of Nantucket’s search for a new way to make money in the latter half of the 1800s. After the Great Fire of 1846, Nantucket experienced a swift decline from its former prosperity. Whales were growing ever scarcer and voyages to […]
• by Frances Ruley Karttunen • Entering or leaving the Nantucket Atheneum, visitors come face-to-face with the portrait of an aging man sitting barefoot at a table in his modest house, surrounded by baskets and his household goods. His back is to a window through which there is a view […]
by Frances Karttunen Newtown Cemetery, also known as the Old South Cemetery, faces Sparks Avenue and is bounded on the west and south by school property. When it was designated as a burial ground in the 1700s, however, it was on the extreme south edge of town, surrounded by empty […]
Wannacomet Water Company by Sarah Teach Wherever you are on Nantucket, you know you can quickly reach water. And that’s one reason we all love Nantucket. We swim in it; we sail through it; we breathe in its salty scent, thick with the promise of life. But we cannot drink […]
by Frances Karttunen On the left side of Orange Street as one proceeds outbound toward the edge of town stands the Landmark House. Now housing an assisted living community, it was previously Our Island Home. Before the prominent old building was Our Island Home, it had been Nantucket’s Town and […]
by Frances Karttunen The erosion currently ravaging the west end of Nantucket is no new thing. A long spit of land with Smith’s Point at the very tip once extended right past the island of Tuckernuck and approached Muskeget. Nobody remembers who Smith was, but the Wampanoag name for the […]
