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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 56, No. 1 (Winter 2007) p. 19

Monument Square by Helen Seager

The neighborhood known as Monument Square—around the intersection of Main, Upper Main, Milk, and Gardner Streets—was at one time the thriving civic hub of Nantucket Town. The island’s original rural settlement had been gradually shifting closer to Nantucket Harbor throughout the eighteenth century, assuming the characteristics of a village. In 1798, the town had changed its name from Sherborn/Sherburne to Nantucket. In the midst of this resettlement, Monument Square became the site of civic buildings, a meetinghouse, an early school, and the dwellings of some of Nantucket’s most prominent citizens.

Beginning where a Quaker Meeting House had been built in 1790 at State Street (as Main Street was known before 1825), Pleasant Street ran south and then southeast to the Newtown Gate. The meetinghouse was taken down in 1834. Pleasant Street would not be paved until 1864. The new meetinghouse was only part of the residential, civic, and commercial development in the area in the post- Revolutionary period.

In 1799, a federal tax policy necessitated naming the streets in every town. A new village center for Sherburne had long since evolved on the extreme end of West Chester Extension, as it is now called; a 1716 Town Building from that area was moved in 1783 to the southwest corner of Milk and Main Streets to serve as a courthouse for at least fifty years.

In the early nineteenth century, court held only two sessions a year. The sheriff took responsibility for the jails [gaols]. One stood on High Street near Pine, with an adjacent workhouse built in 1770; they were taken down soon after 1800. The still-standing “Old Gaol” was built in 1805.

The Town Building housed a schoolroom on its upper level, where William Mitchell, who lived around the corner at 1 Vestal Street, taught the first public school classes (1829) on the island, serving 202 students. The building sported a belfry for the town’s largest bell, which served as a fire alarm. A faded sign on its façade announced “State Street”; “Main Street” was painted over it. In 1849, the island’s first Roman Catholic community held its first Mass in the Town Building, and its rectory was housed on Pleasant Street.

The building was used even after the town offices were moved to Union Street in the 1880s and schools were established elsewhere. The square was still considered important enough in 1874 to be the location of the Civil War monument. The developing civic center at the intersection of Main and Milk, behind the backyards of the Pleasant Street dwellings, had on its northeast corner Christopher Starbuck’s dwelling, which had been moved into town from Sherburne and expanded. Joseph Starbuck would build his house close by on New Dollar Lane in 1809. Starbuck ran his tryworks and candle factory behind his house and to the west of Macy’s backyard. The tryworks building was reached by a still-existing way from Pleasant Street called Starbuck Court. The building, remodeled as a residence, still stands, visible from New Dollar Lane.

A long gully ran from Main to Mill Street, parallel to the western side of Pleasant Street behind the houses. A number of whale-oil factories and warehouses were situated there. A candle factory, cooper shop, and well were on the south side of Mill Street on land owned by Isaiah Coffin. Although the wharves soon pulled the business center toward the harbor, retail shops still operated until well after World War II; several different businesses occupied 106 Main, one after another. A hose-cart house and retail businesses, including a grocery store, were opened later on Gardner Street. A cooper shop, now a residence, once stood at Pleasant and Summer Streets.

At one time, Monument Square was named “Old White Bone,” after a bleached jawbone of a whale that had been placed at the corner of Main and Gardner Streets. That name faded when a “Liberty Pole” was erected during the Revolution. Important meetings then and during the War of 1812 occurred there, and a soup kitchen was set up at Main and Gardner to feed poor families during the bitter winter of 1814–15. The building was taken down in 1865. The Liberty Pole was replaced in 1874 by the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in memory of the seventy- three Nantucket men who died in the Civil War. Its foundation is a millstone from the Round Top Mill, demolished the year before.

A large Victorian-era house now stands on the site of the old courthouse. Despite the ill advised demolition in 2001 of the unoccupied but sound commercial structure at 106 Main Street (the original Monument Square Grocery, subsequently a branch of the A&P, and then a dry-cleaning establishment), and the destruction in 2006 of most of the historic interior of the Christopher Starbuck residence at 105, the intersection still displays small features of its former importance as a civic center: a postal box, a bike rack, and a bulletin board for the Maria Mitchell Association, now the area’s most active organization.

 

Helen Seager, a founder of the Friends of the African Meeting House on Nantucket, is a lifelong advocate of historic preservation.