News and Events for Nantucket Island
• 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 Ruley Karttunen – author of Nantucket Places and People series • For three decades Town Crier Curtis Barnes walked up Main Street ringing in Daffodil Weekend, the Fourth of July, the lighting of Christmas trees on Main Street, and Christmas Stroll. His English Air Raid Patrol hand […]
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 […]
A Mary Miles Classic The notorious island woman Kezia Coffin gained a huge fortune during the Revolutionary War at the expense of her fellow Nantucketers, pulling more than one fast one on both British and Americans. She later lost everything she gained by her questionable practices. She didn’t lose her […]
by Sarah Teach Almost 70 years past the end of World War II, our ties to that time remain taut. Many of us had parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who fought in the war, and some may not have returned to the young families they left behind when they marched away […]
