News and Events for Nantucket Island
by Amy Jenness In 1890, a group of island citizens said they were concerned about declining morals in the island’s youth: “It is a fact that the moral sentiment of the community is becoming tainted, and to preserve it from entire corruption, these gentlemen have conceived a plan, which, with […]
by Amy Jenness Maria Mitchell spent the first 11 years of her adulthood living a quiet life on Nantucket, first as a teacher and then as librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum. But that changed on a clear October night in 1847 when she saw a comet through her telescope and […]
~ by Sarah Moreau ~ Whenever friends and family come to visit the island and ask for suggestions of where to go and what to see, the Nantucket Historical Association properties are always on the top of my list. The Whaling Museum is one of my favorites, giving you an […]
~ by Katherine Brooks, Maria Mitchell Association ~ Among the historic gray-shingled houses of Vestal Street and hidden in the gardens of the Maria Mitchell Association’s Hinchman House Natural Science Museum, sits a whale skull found thirty years ago at Cisco Beach. The bone belongs to a right whale: an […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ In 1913 an Edgartown fisherman named Sam Jackson was dragging for flounder around Tuckernuck Shoal when he discovered a massive bed of quahogs and forever changed the island’s shellfish industry. For centuries local fishermen had harvested large clams, also known as quahogs, as well as […]
~ by Katherine Brooks, Maria Mitchell Association ~ Have you seen stones inscribed with these messages? “Northern Extremity of the Town’s Meridian Line” “Southern Extremity of the Town’s Meridian Line” These two stones are located near the Pacific National Bank and the Fair Street Quaker Meetinghouse in downtown Nantucket. The […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ More than 100 years after the first white people settled on Nantucket, the French-American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoer visited and recorded his perceptions of island life in his influential book Letters From An American Farmer. Published in 1782, the book was the first […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ For centuries Nantucket mariners used the ocean as a global superhighway that took them away on business ventures to almost every continent. But when the United States entered World War I, the island’s culture of the sea shifted to the sky. The months around the […]
