'Sconset's Early Architecture

The Whale Houses
'Sconset's venerable whale houses—the cluster of structures on Front, Broadway, Center, and Shell Streets— are the core of the village's architectural heritage, emerging from the late-seventeenth-century fishing and whaling village. Plain and practical small shelters were formed from crude, often salvaged materials and furnished with the barest necessities for a rugged crew of six determined fishermen. Ladder-like rungs or wooden pegs were used to climb to the top of tall mast-like lookout posts to scan the ocean for schools offish, or whales.

The shelters' designs were derived from traditional post-and-beam hanging-loft structures in existence for fifteen hundred years in Wales, England, and Scotland. The compact frames held up against fierce winds and rain. Similar shelters from the first white settlers' whaling station at Sesachacha were gradually moved to 'Sconset. Incredibly, several of the earliest frames remain in place today, notably within Auld Lang Syne (ca. 1675) and Shanunga (ca. 1682), and possibly Nauticon Lodge. The one-story-with-loft whale houses were built on dry stone foundations, with low-pitched north and south gables separated from neighbors' houses by paths only three feet wide, fronted by entries made of vertical boards that faced the ocean, and horizontally boarded or battened (called "clinkers") roofs and walls, the walls fitted with irregularly proportioned and placed small-paned windows.

Initially, the one-room interior space, called the "hall," or the "great room," was kept barely warm by an open fire made on a dirt floor. An opening called a "wind-hole" was cut in the roof to draw smoke for ventilation and to provide light. The loft, an open balcony, was a sleeping nook reached by a removable ladder over two sleeping areas, called "staterooms," below and separated from the hall by a wall of vertical boards, called a "parclose," also known as a "heck." Cooking took place outside, over open wood fires.

Gradual Expansion
Beginning in the 1820s, the village was increasingly favored by townspeople as a summer escape. Gradually, the old vernacular dwellings were joined by more refined, one-and-a-half-story cottages on Main Street and around the village. Several small houses such as Sea Spray, also known as Whale Spray, at the north end of Broadway, were moved from Nantucket town to 'Sconset. The new houses retained the timber-frame construction, but the interior and exterior finishes were modest interpretations of the symmetry, order, and detail of the Federal and Greek Revival styles.

Detail of Siasconset whaling station from 1775 plot plan in Nantucket registry of deeds

Interior of Sconset cottage kitchen.
GPN2815

A digital exhibition by the Nantucket Historical Association