The island of Nantucket, located south of Cape Cod off the coast of Massachusetts, boasts a rich maritime history and one of the highest concentrations of pre-Civil War structures in the United States. In 1894, the children and grandchildren of the great whaling generations of this island community founded the Nantucket Historical Association to protect and preserve the island’s threatened cultural and material legacy. A sense of urgency toward this goal was relayed by the NHA’s first secretary, Mary E. Starbuck, who wrote of the need to “secure all possible material relating to old Nantucket…before it is too late and these valuable mementoes are carried away from the island as trophies, or by progressive housewives ‘cast as rubbish to the void.’†Since that time, the NHA’s mission has focused on preserving the island’s treasures for posterity, mainly through donations from individuals and families. The collecting mission of the institution was greatly advanced when the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association was founded in 1986 by a group of collectors who looked beyond the island’s boundaries to secure valuable and vulnerable treasures for posterity.
