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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Volume 51. Number 4 (Fall 2002)

Following publication of the China Closet photograph on the front cover of the summer 2002 issue of Historic Nantucket, we received a number of queries about the cottage. Following is an excerpt from The Other Islanders, Part III, and should help to answer some of the questions.

Living in the China Closet, by Frances Ruley Karttunen

EDWARD Underhill WAS BORN IN 1830 IN Wolcott, New York of "Quaker stock." At age sixteen he lost the fingers of his left hand in an accident. Professionally limited by his disability, he learned to take shorthand and became a court stenographer. He also developed into a prolific writer. During the Civil War, while employed as a correspondent for The New York Times, he was taken prisoner by the Confederates, tried as a spy, and imprisoned for some time. After his release, he returned to New York and was instrumental in the professionalization of court stenography in his home state.

Becoming prosperous, he first invested in a vineyard in Chatauqua County, which he sold in order to go into resort development in 'Sconset, where he put $20,000 into buying property and building new cottages carefully modeled on the old 'Sconset cottages. An energetic promoter of seaside vacations in the village, he was credited by the Inquirer and Mirror with the extension of the Nantucket Railroad track from Surfside to 'Sconset.

Edward Underhill's connection to Nantucket through his own Quaker heritage had been reinforced through his marriage to Evelyn Stoddard. She and both her parents had been born in Hudson, New York, where Nantucketers had migrated during whaling days. Two of the streets along which the Underhill Cottages were built are Evelyn Street, named for his wife, and Lily Street, named for his daughter Lily Doubleday. (The third street in the development is Pochick Street.)

The NHA has a copy of a published poem by Edward Underhill called "The Summer Skaters." Among his other productions are a long series of architectural and historical studies of 'Sconset architecture titled "Some Old Houses on 'Sconset Bank." In 1912 Roland B. Hussey published Underhill's essays almost verbatim in a pamphlet titled "The Evolution of 'Sconset." The pamphlet was reprinted by the Inquirer and Mirror Press in 1954 as Hussey's work, but in 1961 architectural historian Henry Chandlee Forman printed Underhill's originals under Underhill's name. Underhill indulged his late-nineteenth-century humor in jocular promotional material for his cottages, "Cap'n Shubael Paddack's Advice to His Son as He Is About to Launch on the Ocean of Marriage," and a fabricated will of Obed Gardner, a fictional old Nantucketer.

The China Closet was the Underhills' personal summer home. World travelers, the couple acquired a vast collection of chinaware, mostly English. In the summer of 1895, Forman's grandmother visited the China Closet, where Mr. Underhill showed her and her companions "his beautiful collection of old china . . . many rare and curious pieces" with which they had furnished their cottage. There were plates, teapots, and bowls on every surface, horizontal and vertical, even on the ceiling.

When Edward Underhill died in New York in 1898, he left the cottages, all thirty-six of them, jointly to Evelyn and Lily with the stipulation that they not be sold. The income from their summer rental was intended to support his widow and daughter for the rest of their lives. When one of the women died, the other would become full owner.

Lily Doubleday disappears from the records. Perhaps she died young off-island. In any case, Evelyn Underhill carried on with the cottage rentals for another three decades after her husband's death. Around 1920 she met Florence Clay Higginbotham, a young African-American woman living and working in 'Sconset. When Mrs. Underhill's white housekeeper died, she hired Florence Higginbotham to take over management of the cottages.

Florence Clay had been born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1894. Leaving home in her mid-teens, she got a job with White House Coffee in Boston and then accompanied some friends to Nantucket to do summer domestic work in 'Sconset. When her friends returned to Boston in the fall, she remained on the island. In 1917 she married Robert D. Higginbotham, who was also employed in 'Sconset. Mrs. Elizabeth Watts and Mrs. Alice Morton of 'Sconset were their witnesses.

Florence Higginbotham's young husband, four years her junior, soon joined the U.S. Navy as a cabin steward. After sending a series of postcards to "my Dear Wife" from his ship as it cruised to Rio de Janeiro in the winter of 1918-19, he dropped out of her life. When she filed divorce papers in 1924, she gave his place of residence as San Francisco and dated his desertion of their marriage to the summer of 1919.

In 1921 Florence gave birth to her only child, William Caroll Higginbotham, whom she and her friends called "Bunny." Three months after William's birth, Mrs. Underhill had mother and child come to live with her in the China Closet. Other white 'Sconset families provided housing for their African-American employees in Codfish Park, but as Florence Higginbotham wrote to William in 1969, "They [the Underhills] never owned any property down bank, that is why she wanted me to come and live with her."

For the rest of the 1920s the two women and the boy lived together in 'Sconset in the summers. As William grew, they moved from the China Closet to another of the cottages, the Double Decker, to get him away from all the breakable china. At the end of each summer season they would close the cottages, take the boat to Woods Hole, and drive to Mrs. Underhill's mainland home in Waltham, Massachusetts, where William began school.

But as Mrs. Underhill approached her eightieth birthday, her fortunes spiraled downward. Losses followed losses as her husband's uninsured rare-book collection was destroyed in a warehouse fire and the stock market crash of 1929 wiped out other Underhill investments. The women decided to stay on in Nantucket in the winters, and William transferred from his Waltham school to the 'Sconset school, which he attended in 1930 and 1931 before transferring to the new Cyrus Peirce School in town.

The move to town was a reversal of the roles of Mrs. Underhill and Mrs. Higginbotham. When Florence Higginbotham had been a young single mother, Evelyn Underhill had taken her and William into the China Closet. Now Mrs. Higginbotham took the elderly Mrs. Underhill into her home. In 1920, she had invested in a house at 27 York Street, buying it from Edward and Elizabeth Whelden for $200 to use as a rental property.

One of her tenants, Harold W. Folger, described as "one of the last of the dory fishermen of this vicinity," died in bed in the house.

Adding a front porch and a sunroom to the house, Mrs. Higginbotham moved Mrs. Underhill, her family photos, and her china collection to York Street. For the remaining years of her life, Mrs. Underhill lived under the care of her former housekeeper. When she received guests, Mrs. Higginbotham withdrew to the back of the house. At other times the woman sat together smoking cigarettes, reciting poetry to each other, listening to the radio, doing jigsaw puzzles, and working on scrap-books. Some of the scrapbooks were of celebrities and the world of high fashion. Mrs. Higginbotham kept an article about African-American history. In the 1890s Edward Underhill had also kept a scrapbook. It concludes with his own obituary, pasted in by his wife, and is now item 68 in NHA Collection 64.

William made new friends on York Street and sought his mother's permission to join the Catholic church, to which his friends belonged. Mrs. Higginbotham and Mrs. Underhill were not churchgoers but encouraged William to follow his own inclinations.

Bit by bit, through the Depression years, Evelyn Underhill and Florence Higginbotham sold furniture and pieces of the china collection to support their | household, including a Spode platter for thirty-five I cents and a Wedgwood teapot for forty-five cents.

Despite their straitened circumstances, Mrs. Higginbotham made another investment. In June 1933 she bought the land adjacent to her York Street house, land on which stood the long-closed African Meeting I House. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she rented I the Meeting House to Nantucket businesses to use as I storage space, and at one time as an artist's studio.

The Underhill Cottages had ceased to support Mrs. Underhill long before her death. In a document executed before Reginald T. Fitz-Randolph in August 1932, Mrs. Underhill sold to Mrs. Higginbotham "all the personal property, including household furniture and personal effects, now situated in the building numbered 27 York Street in said Nantucket." Two weeks later she signed another document, witnessed by two of her close friends from 'Sconset, stating that "I have given Florence Higginbotham my watch and rings for her faithful services to me for the many years she has been with me."

On April 17,1935, Evelyn Underhill died at the age of 84 years, eight months. Some of her china collection remained in storage at 27 York Street until 2001, when William Higginbotham sold the house to the Museum of Afro-American History.