Postwar to Present

In the aftermath of the war, large hotels on Nantucket closed in favor of more intimate accommodations for visitors. In Sconset, the last of the three tag hotels, the Beach House, was demolished in 1957; some of the building fabric was used to construct the Moby Dick cottages clustered around the new Moby Dick Inn, formerly operated as the Old 'Sconset Inn, and before that known as the main building of Isaac Hill's 'Sconset Cottage Club. It is now the Summer House Restaurant. The original Moby Dick restaurant below the bank burned in 1958; the tiny Moby Dick cottages are now privately owned.

Postwar cultural changes altered the old pattern of summer life in Sconset. Families that had traditionally stayed in the village for the entire summer with household help were less common, and many houses were rented in either July or August, resulting in a less cohesive summer population with less free time for planning large-scale entertainments.

Postwar escapades continued at the Casino, where the musical revue On the Isle, written and produced by Jerome Cargill, was first performed in 1947. The lively production, featuring 'Sconset summer folk, was performed annually through the mid-1960s.

One of the primary twentieth-century concerns for the three-hundred-year-old village was rampant islandwide development, an issue that led to the formation of the 'Sconset Trust in 1984. The mission of trust is to preserve the unique character of the village, and to acquire and protect open land around it.The little eighteenth-century settlement of thirty or forty houses on the bank grew to approximately six hundred houses in 1973, and to just over eight hundred houses by the end of the twentieth century. Most of those houses are empty in the winter when year-round population is fewer than two hundred people.

Codfish Park, an area that developed due to the accretion of beach below the bank in the late nineteenth century, lost two rows of beach front houses to erosion in the late twentieth century; the North Bluff is being whittled away by the same kinds of storms lamented by Lydia Barney in 1841, forcing homeowners to move their houses as far back from the eroding edge as their house lots allow. The public path that skirts the edge of the bluff is not the same path that summer folk traversed a hundred years ago, but it is the place where dozens of islanders gathered on January 1, 2000, to watch the sun rise over the horizon in the new century.

Aerial View of Siasconset, c. 1930s
Scan gift of Martha Butler
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View from Sankaty Head Lighthouse toward southwest, August 1925
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A digital exhibition by the Nantucket Historical Association