Beach Bating at 'Sconset

Beach bathing was a national craze beginning in the 1870s, and in Siasconset, beach-going formed an essential ingredient of summer life. The Ocean View House hotel promoted "sea-breezes, salubrious air, surf-bathing, and other delights of a first-class watering place." One visitor detailed the rituals of the Siasconset beach:

Everybody bathes and the bathing hour is from 11 o'clock until noon. There are a few bathing houses on the beach, but the villagers turn up their noses at bathing houses, preferring to make their own toilets in their own houses. Standing on the bluff, in the bathing house, one can see the cottagers wending their way to the beach—men, women and children, all in bathing suits ready to plunge into the surf. The newcomer is apt to shrink from falling in with the custom of this place, but soon gets over it. The bathing is fine. Persons familiar with beaches up and down the New England coast say the water here is much warmer and pleasanter to bathe in than the water at any other resort they have visited. Sometimes the waves come strong and knock the bathers about considerably, but ordinarily the sea is very quiet. One important feature of the beach is that there is no undertow. Bathing here is said to be safe. Children go into the surf unattended.

"Like a Village at Sea, Siasconset, Mass."
The New York Times, August 27,1896

In her story-memoir 'Sconset Heyday, Margaret Fawcett Barnes describes her childhood experience of bathing in 'Sconset:

Any day except in the pouring rain, precisely at eleven o'clock you find everyone gathered at the beach not in front of their own homes, generally, but at the end of a sloping road, or a rickety stairway leading from Front Street to the beach directly in front of the village. There, under tents, primitive affairs, sat the grand ladies, in hats and sometimes even veils. No venomous sun rays must mar the peaches and cream complexions. They watched the antics of the young as they scrambled in and out of the surf and got "boiled" (no liquor involved). This was a matter of not having caught the curve of the turmoil of the comber at the exact spot to come out unscathed on the top of the next wave but to have been caught in the curve of the turmoil of the wave itself, swirled around in a most undignified fashion and then flung up on the sands. Your bathing suit might be intact, but your cap was gone, your shoes and stockings, yes, stockings, were full of sand down around your ankles, and layers of sand were in every fold of your ornate bathing-suit. It had knocked the breath out of you but done little or no other physical damage, but your dignity had suffered considerably. That was being "boiled " and few escaped it from time to time. You could be compensated on your way home by stopping by Mr. Cash's fisherman's shack and indulge in succulent Little-neck clams, fresh from harbor waters, and opened while you waited.

A digital exhibition by the Nantucket Historical Association