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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 50, no. 3 (Summer 2001), p. 7

The Atheneum: Born from the Ashes
by Robert A. Frazier

JULY 14, 1846. PICTURE THE SMOLDERING RUINS of Nantucket on the morning after the Great Fire. Picture at its heart a lot at the corner of India and Federal Streets, where the skeleton jf a large building stands black against the hazy red sunrise across the harbor. Gone are the rare volumes and artifacts of a seafaring life. Gone where Frederick Douglass first spoke against slavery. Gone the town's cerebral pulse.

January 3, 1847. Picture a tall Greek Revival wonder: sleek Ionic columns footed on a wide porch and steps, two full floors, a painted front with no windows or openings save for massive double doors that seem to invite the gods down from Olympus. Reeling from total disaster, the town dedicates a new Atheneum. The simple Quaker aesthetic that had ruled Nantucket gives way to a grand gesture.

Consider the obstacles to such a phoenix-like transformation. The building's fire insurance had lapsed. The proprietors themselves suffered financial losses. The entire infrastructure of the town, from dry goods stores to clothing shops to ship chandleries, needed rebuilding during the same time frame.

Yet the library's founders dug deep, scrambled for donations, sold shares, and by October of 1846 employed the island's premier architect, Frederick Brown Coleman, and used a resourceful builder named Charles Wood. After three months of furious carpentry, a completed structure housed a speaking hall on the second floor and room for plenty of books on the first. And, of no less significance, America's first professional woman librarian, Maria Mitchell, had her beloved library back. Less than six months after the fire, a great building stood.

Picture this. An unplanted lot of mud, char, and sawdust. Within it the fire-scarred foundation of the original church that held the Athenuem. Upon the old foundation, new, a structure worthy of the name of its sister institution in Boston. And surrounding it, a town still struggling to house its homeless and get back on its feet. This is more than a mere library, more than a monolithic symbol of the island's whaling prosperity and proof of its determination to rapidly rebuild.

Picture this, at its most basic, most dramatic: brilliant white against soot black. Today, standing before its fagade, you can't help but feel a twinge of awe. It must have felt like a miracle to Maria.

 

Robert Frazier was art director of Nantucket Magazine, a free-lance writer, and island artist and poet.