Joseph E. C. Farnham was born in Nantucket in 1849. He was a keen
observer of the people of the Island and their customs and wrote at
considerable length “Brief Historical Data and Memories of My Boyhood
Days at Nantucket.” It delightfully describes the town at the close
of the whaling era.
Worth observes that “the gambrel-roofed house never attracted the
attention of the Nantucket people. The few that are still standing
were erected after 1750. After the Revolution, when prosperity dawned
on the Island, the common type of house was the square two-story
structure, with large center chimney, numerous examples of which are
to be seen. The same regard for ancient houses has also led people
to retain the large center chimney. While in many towns desire for
increased room or for the appearance of a small chimney has led
house owners to replace the old structure with one greatly inferior
in size, at Nantucket the disposition has prevailed to keep without
change this distinguishing mark of the 18th century construction.”
1876--Nantucket after the end of the whaling, at its lowest ebb.
Read “Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast” by S. A.
Drake.
1882--This date is early in a new period of prosperity due to
the summer visitors. The back log and fore log of this
growing and practically only sizeable remaining “industry”
are now the owners and renters of houses. Visitors used to
come for a “vacation” of a few days or weeks, but now they
stay the season or longer. Read “Island of Nantucket, What
It Was and What It Is” by E. K. Godfrey.
1924--From an article by Walter Prichard Eaton:
Individually, and in the mass, the architecture of old Nantucket was
and is extraordinarily dignified in its quiet simplicity and nice
proportions, and often really exquisite in its use of ornamental
detail.
Nearly every other American town, once rich in Eighteenth or
early Nineteenth Century architecture, has been injured by the
intermingling of later buildings, but by a curious set of economic
chances, old Nantucket has almost entirely escaped, and remains
today architecturally much as it was when the crest of the whaling
prosperity enabled the islanders to build it more than a century ago.
Then came sophisticated moderns, and the best these moderns could
do were hideous casinos, sprawling cottages with verandas stuck all
over them helter-skelter, houses with broken and meaningless roof
lines, windows badly spaced and without style, ornamentation without
dignity, gingerbread trimmings and nothing, anywhere, that had
repose, unity, beauty of outline, or even adaptability to its site.
The Puritans of Nantucket left behind no poems or plays, but to say
they left behind no art is ridiculous. They left behind an entire
town which is a work of art, in its way as charming and as nearly
perfect as anything in the Old World, and utterly different from
anything in the Old World--a unique expression. They were able to
do this because, to them, art was expressed through the crafts, and
every man who used a tool (which meant almost every man) was an
artist.
[Illustration: CHIMNEYS, OLD AND NEW]