Storied Streets is a history series by Nantucket historian Mary Bergman, written for Bernadette Meyer. Each installment starts with a single house and works outward, to the history of its street or neighborhood and the people who shaped it.
Some of the houses are among the island's best-known landmarks, like the Hadwen-Wright House at 94 Main Street. Others are newer, and their history belongs to the neighborhood around them: every house on Angola Street was built after 1974, but the street itself appears on Nantucket's list of street names from 1799. What connects the series is Mary's way of reading a place, through its buildings and the families who lived in them.
At the corner of Main and Pleasant Streets, the Hadwen-Wright House was the last grand mansion of the whaling era, finished in 1847 to a design by Frederick Brown Coleman. Mary traces its two-story portico and domed second-floor ballroom, and the families who kept it standing, up to the preservation easement that protects it today.
Angola Street was part of Newtown, one of the island's historically Black neighborhoods. Mary tells the story of Arthur Cooper, whose neighbors helped his family escape a slave catcher in 1822, and of the pockets of green space the neighborhood and the Land Bank have worked to protect.
Brant Point was built for summer. Mary follows the neighborhood from the resort hotel that stood near the lighthouse in the 1880s to the cottage lots Isabella Orr laid out along East Lincoln. On one of them, the builder Elmore Swain designed Red Shutters, the 1926 Colonial Revival cottage at number 1.
Monomoy was once part of the island's sheep commons. On one of its unpaved country roads, Kim Stahl Bailey is creating the compound at 7 Brewster Road, the first Nantucket project she has conceptualized from start to finish. Mary follows the family building tradition behind it, from her father's millwork shop to the crew on the jobsite.
Mary Bergman is a writer and historian specializing in Nantucket's architecture and preservation history. She is the former Executive Director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust and a contributor to The New York Times. Learn more →
The series grew out of Bernadette Meyer's work with Mary researching the history of individual Nantucket homes. Bernadette publishes Storied Streets on her site, and new installments are added here as they are written. For readers drawn to the island's historic homes as places to live, Bernadette's guide to stewardship, not just ownership looks at what owning one involves.