A Short History of Nantucket

1659, and the Twenty Proprietors

In 1641 the English merchant Thomas Mayhew acquired Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands as a proprietary colony. English settlement of Nantucket did not begin in earnest until 1659, when Mayhew sold nine tenths of his interest to a group of nine purchasers led by Tristram Coffin. Those nine and Mayhew each took on partners, and the twenty men and their heirs became the Proprietors. The number of shares was raised to twenty-seven to attract tradesmen, who were given half a share on the condition that they lived on the island and carried on their trade here for at least three years. Within two years of arriving, the settlers had persuaded two sachems, Wanackmamack and Nickanoose, to give up their rights to the island for sixty-six pounds sterling. In 1750 a judge of the General Court upheld those deeds against petitions from the Wampanoag arguing that the sachems had never had the authority to sell.

A County Carved Out of New York

Nantucket was not always part of Massachusetts. Until October 17, 1691 it belonged to Dukes County, New York, and it only became Massachusetts ground when the charter of the Province of Massachusetts Bay was signed. Nantucket County was partitioned off from Dukes County, Massachusetts, in 1695. Then in 1795 the town changed its own name: until that year the town on this island was called Sherburne, and on June 8, 1795 a bill filed by Micajah Coffin to rename it the Town of Nantucket was signed by Governor Samuel Adams. The town’s own history records the rest in outline. Whales were found offshore in the late 1600s, and between 1750 and 1840 Nantucket was one of the major whaling ports in North America.

New Guinea, and the Record That Goes With It

The island’s history includes slavery, and this guide states it plainly. The early settlers brought enslaved African Americans to Nantucket, and slavery was not abolished on the island until 1773. Earlier in that same century, freed African Americans established a neighbourhood on the south-west edge of the main town called New Guinea, later Newtown, near the windmills on Mill Hill. It had shops, churches, a school and a dance hall as well as houses, and it was also home to Hawaiian Islanders who sailed on Nantucket whaleships and to Wampanoag families who had married into the community. The building at the corner of York and Pleasant Streets, founded in 1824 as a school, church and meeting house, was acquired by the Museum of African American History in 1999. By the nineteenth century Nantucket was predominantly Quaker and supported the abolition of slavery, and the island became part of the Underground Railroad.

1996: The Island Rewrote Its Own Government, Twice

Here is the piece of Nantucket history that most directly affects you. In 1996 the Legislature passed two acts for this one island. Chapter 289 of the Acts of 1996 is the charter of the Town of Nantucket, and it is the document that created the Town Manager’s office and set out what Town Meeting, the Select Board and the manager each control. Chapter 290 of the Acts of 1996 is the charter of Nantucket County, and it did something unusual: it declared that the five people elected as Nantucket’s selectmen are, by that fact alone, the Board of County Commissioners, and then required that the person chairing one body may not chair the other. The town’s own site records that the voters adopted the charter in 1996 at Town Meeting, and that the vote substantially changed town government in Nantucket to meet the expanding scope of the town.

Both charters can be amended the same way they were adopted, which means the arrangement you live under is still an open question that Town Meeting can reopen.