Nantucket Went From Whaling Capital to New England's Quietest Old-Money Island

Nantucket's fortune was built on whale oil. By the years just before the American Revolution, this small island 30 miles off Cape Cod was home port to more than 125 whaling ships, run largely by a tight network of Quaker families, the Starbucks, Coffins, Macys and Folgers among them, whose religious discipline and commercial instinct made Nantucket the whaling capital of the world. The industry's collapse in the mid-19th century, hastened by overhunting, competition and the arrival of petroleum, emptied the island fast: its population fell from close to ten thousand people to little more than four thousand between 1840 and 1870.

A decline that became a preservation project

With no whaling money left to fund new building, Nantucket's captains' houses, cobbled streets and Quaker meeting houses stayed largely as they were, rather than being redeveloped as they might have been in a wealthier town. That accidental preservation is what later drew wealthy summer visitors from the late 19th century onward, looking for an island that still looked the way it had a century before, and it remains the reason the entire town of Nantucket is a National Historic Landmark today.

Sconset, the actors' colony turned quiet enclave

At the island's eastern end, the former fishing hamlet of Siasconset, generally shortened to Sconset, became a summer colony for Broadway actors in the early 20th century, its tiny, rose-covered cottages with weathered grey shingles giving it the nickname the Actors' Colony. The Wade family bought a cluster of these cottages in 1929, and Sconset has kept its low, intimate scale ever since, in contrast to the larger captains' houses closer to Nantucket Town.

What the island still guards closely

Nantucket's historic district commission enforces strict architectural rules on the island, limiting new construction largely to the same grey cedar shingles, and there are no high-rise hotels or chain developments anywhere on the island. It is this combination, protected scale, restricted building and a working harbour rather than a manufactured resort strip, that has kept Nantucket a favoured, low-key summer address for wealthy East Coast families for well over a century.

Traveller tips

• Nantucket is reached by ferry from Hyannis on Cape Cod, or by short flights from Boston and New York in summer.
• Sconset is a short bike ride or drive from Nantucket Town along the island's bike paths.
• Summer weekends book out hotels and ferries well in advance; shoulder-season visits are markedly quieter.
• The Nantucket Historical Association runs walking tours of the whaling-era town centre.