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Summering in Windsor Cottage
By Isabel Stewart

Originally published in the Summer issue (Vol. 53, No. 3) of the 2004 Historic Nantucket

In 1899 my grandparents, John Carter and Mabel Pugh, eloped from Windsor, North Carolina, and went to live in Philadelphia. To begin with, my grandfather tried his hand at running a grocery store in the modest little neighborhood where he and Mabel lived, but it was not a great success. Then he secured a government job, employment highly prized by "colored" (term of the day) people coming north because of its relative economic protection. I have the papers he saved signaling every promotion he received at the Post Office. With his earnings from the Post Office and Mabel's from seamstress work, they bought a house on a numbered street (as opposed to a back street) in Philadelphia. It was sold to them only because it was in the worst possible condition, but they fixed it up beautifully over the years and were proud of their accomplishment and their location.

Mabel's grandmother, Sarah, had worked on a Windsor plantation, Liberty Hall, the whole of which repaired by barge each summer to Nag's Head on the coast in order to get out of pestilential northeastern North Carolina in the brutal heat of summer.

Sarah's daughter, my great-grandmother Belle Pugh, owned several properties in downtown Windsor left to her by Sarah. Windsor newspapers document the fire that burned down her restaurant, where it is said she had only been permitted to serve whites.

Grandmother Mabel had been raised in Windsor and told stories of going as a child to Nag's Head "on vacation." In 1925 she visited Nantucket with a seamstress friend from Philadelphia. She took one look at the island's South Shore and saw in her memory the Nag's Head beach of her girlhood. She came home to Philadelphia from that first visit to Nantucket and announced to my grandfather John Carter that they would proceed to buy property and build on Nantucket to get away from (pestilential) Philadelphia in the summer. (As a child, their daughter Florence, my mother, had almost succumbed to an epidemic and was considered fragile by the family.)

Building began in 1926, the summer their daughter Isabel went off to Europe with three girlfriends. It was completed in 1927. I have in an album an outline of the plan for the first floor of Windsor Cottage drawn by my mother in white ink on black photo paper. The family was so excited. Needless to say, such a move was most unusual for African Americans in their circle at the time.

My mother, Florence, and her sister Isabel were schoolteachers and had summers off. When Windsor Cottage was built, they were in their twenties and joined other African Americans on-island working "in service," catering fancy parties, mostly for "richwhitefolks" (spoken as one word in our milieu). Our modest little Windsor Cottage became a gathering place on Thursdays and Sundays for the more socially conscious among those working in service. And so they created their own self-sufficient world for socializing and recreation. At the same time, I gather from family stories, the family was accorded respect and dignity by the salt-of-the-earth population of old Nantucketers with whom they shared common values-modest means, respect for hard work, lack of ostentation, and love of the island. The story was that my grandfather always wore a coat and tie when going "downstreet"; in his view, I imagine, that signaled for others his station in life and sense of self-respect that required a proper response from those he encountered. And, sure enough, in my memory he was best known to Nantucket acquaintances and tradespeople as "Mr. Carter."

Windsor Cottage was also the place of choice for the Nantucket Information Bureau to recommend when their staff was confronted with the rare "colored" visitors to the island and were stymied as to where to send them for lodging where they would be welcome. So our guest bedroom on the first floor was occasionally "let" for, as I remember, $2.50 a night. Repeat guests I recall were a physician and his wife from New Jersey, another an esteemed elderly lawyer from Connecticut whose graduation gift I still own-a dictionary to take with me to my freshman year at Wellesley-and, yet another, a well known artist who used to leave the house each morning with easel and paints.

In Nantucket my grandparents recreated a bit of Windsor. When my grandfather retired, he would travel to Nantucket from Philadelphia each April to set out his vegetable garden in the backyard. Each summer there were chickens, Rhode Island Reds. And there was the front porch for rocking and enjoying the sunset, which was at that time unobscured by brush and foliage across South Prospect Street, then a simple dirt road.

Their small piece of property was on the edge of what, in days long past, had been the black quarter known as "New Guinea," a fact never mentioned during my growing-up years. Not until I wandered into the firehouse one day back in the late 1950s and spied the designation "Colored Cemetery" on the town map hanging on the wall did I realize distinctions that should have been apparent to me all along. Our part of town was indeed populated by Cape Verdeans and a very few African American families. The daughter of one of those families whose father was a respected island dentist was refused admission to the children's program at Jetties Beach, but as I recall, after an initial flurry of protest and consternation, my family made little of the incident. On a happier note, during the 1950s and 60s I remember overtures made to my mother and aunt by members of the Quaker and Jewish communities on the island-and the modest beginning of another dimension of their social life that included occasionally being welcomed to concerts and lectures in churches and in homes.

My mother and aunt had been extremely close to their parents. After my grandparents died-six weeks apart in December of 1948 and January of 1949-the sisters cast about for something to do to ease the pain. They decided that my aunt, a home economics teacher, and my mother, an elementary schoolteacher with a good head for numbers and excellent organizational skills, would be a good team to tap the increasing numbers of tourists coming to the island. They started Florabel Carter's Box Lunches, the first take-out business of its kind on the island. I recently found the hand-lettered sign that hung near the fence out in front of Windsor Cottage in the first couple of years. Customers would sit in our front yard waiting for their orders:chicken and ham sandwiches, coleslaw, and a brownie for ninety-nine cents-just right for the beach-and the business took off. The third year they moved to a small storefront owned by the Barretts on Federal Street. My Aunt Isabel also collected antiques and put a few in the window as decoration and for sale. After the third year, though, they found themselves simply too exhausted at the end of the summer. As teachers they had been accustomed to some relaxation during the summer months; they could not adjust to the pressure of such an arduous summer commitment, so the business closed.

I am terribly proud of those two women and my grandparents for being such intrepid pioneers on this island. Windsor Cottage has become the residential "constant" for our family-the place we each know we can repair to for quiet time and reflection. Almost seventy years after my grandparents first foray, my husband Don and I last summer welcomed the fifth generation-our son Carter's daughter Nicole. She landed on the island just before her first birthday, honoring a family tradition that started with me, arriving on island for the first time at nine months of age. The main difference: I traveled with my parents by steamship from New Bedford; she jetted in with hers from California.

Isabel Stewart has visited the island almost every summer for all of her sixty-five years. She is the executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women and a current member of the NHA Board of Trustees.