Please Walk Your Horses up This Hill: A Nantucket Boyhood

By Bill Hoadley

Nantucket is an island approximately thirty miles off the Massachusetts coast. Along with Tuckernuck and Muskeget Islands, they compose Nantucket County. The island was discovered by the Englishman Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602, and was first settled in 1659 by Quakers from Salisbury, Massachusetts, originally from West Country in England. Though Nantuckets days of glory are long gone, it is still remembered in mainstream culture as the initial setting of the fictional tale Moby Dick, as well as a handful of limericks that begin with, There once was a man from Nantucket

Author Bill Hoadley is a son of Nantucket, and in his autobiographical book, Please Walk Your Horses Up This Hill, he shares with readers the rich history and notable personalities that have walked through or lived in this island since the first Western settlers arrived. Emphasis is placed during the years of his life and the places and people that he lived with. It also contains a genealogy of the authors family, with notable members of his ancestry given special mention. The vivid descriptions and narrations contained within this book are supplemented by authentic photographs of people and places close to the authors heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465363794

Bill Hoadley

After leaving Nantucket, the author attended college for two years, but did not know what he wanted. He left and joined the US Navy, which enabled him to see a lot of the world. He lived in Boston for fourteen years working in a distillery, but the city life soon paled. Nantucket was now out of the question, so he bought a small house on Peaks Island near Portland, Maine. Six years later he moved there and for eleven years commuted to Portland where he worked as a clerk at the Maine Superior Court. At age fifty, deciding to go it alone, he quit his job and moved to Matinicus Island, which became his Shangri-la and substitute Nantucket. He has been running Tuckanuck Lodge, a bed-and-breakfast, since. In addition to his duties as an innkeeper, he is also the clerk-treasurer for the Matinicus Plantation Electric Co., the smallest publicly-owned generating facility in the United States, and is the caucus chairman for the island Democratic Party, often attending state conventions in Maine. A bachelor, he enjoys long walks around the island with his beloved dog, Sandy.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Nantucket

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies… So began Herman Melville’s description of the island in his novel Moby Dick.

Nantucket is located at latitude 41° north and longitude 70° west, approximately thirty miles off the Massachusetts coast. The island along with Tuckernuck and Muskeget Islands compose Nantucket County. All are made up mostly of clay and sand, material pushed there by the last two glaciers—the first giving it a terminal moraine along the south shores, and the second giving it a recessional moraine throughout the middle sections.

The island was discovered by the Englishman Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602, and was first settled in 1659 by Quakers from Salisbury, Massachusetts, originally from West Country in England. They had purchased the island from Thomas Mayhew of Martha’s Vineyard for 30 pounds and two beaver hatts, one for my wife and one for myself. It would be a refuge from puritan Boston’s persecution of their sect. The buyers consisted of ten proprietors and equal amount of partners or half share men. Relations with the native Indians apparently were more cordial than those on the mainland. It was yellow fever that reduced their numbers, the last full-blooded Indian being Dorcas Honorable, who died in 1855.

It didn’t take too long for the settlers to discover that the thin soil of the island could not support intensive agriculture. The discovery of a beached whale led to the pursuit of that creature as the main economic means of support. An unnamed individual said, There are the green pastures our children will husband.

Nantucket grew and prospered. There were 131 ships of all kinds engaged in the whale fishery at the beginning of the American Revolution, and Nantucket, being Quaker, declared its neutrality. The British, fearing the loss of whaling revenue, invited some of the islanders back to the mother country where they set up a whaling town at Milford Haven, Wales. Other islanders went to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, for the same purpose. Still others chose to set up a whaling port in Dunkirk, France.

After the Revolution, whaling continued to flourish—only to slump briefly during the War of 1812. The population in 1790 was 4620, gradually rising to 9712 in 1840. The banner year—1842—saw eighty-six full-time whaling ships at a gross tonnage of 36,000. By then the ships had fanned out throughout most of the world, with the South Pacific Ocean being the most lucrative whaling ground.

During this prosperity, many elegant mansions were built by the ship owners and captains, especially on Main Street for the owners and Orange Street for the captains. In addition to the Quakers, many churches of other faiths were built, among them Congregational, Methodist, Unitarian, Episcopal, and Baptist denominations. Not until 1855 were there Catholic services, a demand for which was created by Portuguese and Irish immigrants. The town bristled with banks, stores, counting houses, sail lofts, rope walks, chandleries, blacksmith shops, and tryworks. There was a cosmopolitan air about it. It had no village green, and streets were laid out in grid fashion. Lyceums, schools, and libraries were built and an interest in the rest of the world evinced. In its heyday Nantucket was the third commercial town in Massachusetts after Boston and Salem. Its population in 1840 made it the thirty-eighth town in the nation.

The decline in the whale fishery was due to many factors and disasters that seemed to come one after the other. For one thing, the harbor had a sandbar at its mouth and was becoming too shallow for the larger ships. (Islanders developed a camel sort of a floating dry dock to lift the ships over the bar, though it was a clumsy and time-consuming rig.) The advent of the railroads made shipments of whale oil by train cheaper than by water. A devastating fire in 1846, which wiped out most of the business district, and the discovery of gold in California in 1849 lured a lot of men away, often leaving their ships to rot in San Francisco Bay. The discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 and the Civil War spelled doom for the industry. The last ship to leave Nantucket harbor was the Oak in 1869—it never returned. It was the Eunice Adams, captained by Zenas Coleman, that was the last whaler to return that year.

By 1870 the island had been reduced to near poverty. The population dropped to 4600 and would continue to drop the rest of the nineteenth century. Those leaving often would take their houses with them, as they could easily be taken apart and shipped in bays to the mainland.

The fortunes made by the Civil War created a leisure class in the United States, and they were looking for resorts to escape the summer heat of the cities. Nantucket, with its unpolluted air and moderate climate, was considered, and soon the tourist trade was on. Several hotels were erected and a railroad was run to Surfside and later out to ’Sconset. During this time there was a small fleet of trawlers and with the discovery of scallop beds, a fleet of scallopers was also fishing. But the fishing fleet petered out in the 1960s. The scallopers are still going strong. However it is tourism that is the mainstay of the island’s economy to this day.

This, then, is the place of my birth and upbringing, a place in history, its glory days far behind it.

Chapter 2

Roots

I am descended on my maternal grandmother’s side from Tristram Coffin, Thomas Coleman, and Peter Folger, all of whom came to the island from the lower Merrimack River in northeastern Massachusetts in 1659. Thomas Coleman’s son, John, married Johanna Folger, daughter of Peter and Mary Folger. Her youngest sister—by many years—Abiah had the misfortune of marrying an off-islander, Josiah Franklin; they were the parents of Benjamin Franklin. Among the noted Folgers were Mayhew, captain of the sealing vessel Topaz, who discovered the Bounty mutineers’ hideout on Pitcairn Island; Walter, who provided the data about the Gulf Stream to his cousin Benjamin Franklin (and who built an astronomical clock—still working to this day); James, founder of Folger’s Coffee (he and his two brothers decided they could make more money provisioning the gold miners in California, and in the process blended their own coffee); and it was Clinton Folger who owned one of the first automobiles on the island and who broke the back of the Nantucket Automobile Exclusion Act, which was finally repealed in 1917.

Important as the Colemans and Folgers were, it was the Coffin family who was the largest and most influential family on the island. My great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Ellenwood Coffin (1820-1881), was the daughter of Reuban Coffin and Elizabeth Ellenwood Bunker of Nova Scotia, where Reuban’s father had gone during the Revolution. She married Henry Bunker (no relation) Coleman (1815-1894). She accompanied her husband, who was captain of the Hoquah, owned by the Lowe Company of New York City, on a merchant voyage to China in 1855-56. En route, they stopped off at Nagasaki, Japan. When the company agent in Canton heard, he presented her with a beautiful ebony wood and ivory sewing table in honor of her being the first white woman to visit Japan. On the return voyage they again stopped at Nagasaki where a son, Robert, was born to them aboard ship. (He learned to walk on the ship, and when they reached Nantucket a couple of years later, he had to learn to walk all over again.)

Their daughter, Lydia Bunker Coleman, born in 1858, married Arthur Howland Cook (1859-1933), who could trace his roots back to John Howland of the Mayflower. Arthur’s father, John (1834-1934), came to the island in 1838 from Newburyport and ran a bakery for many years. It was located next to the Atheneum. Arthur was a printer and was half owner of the Inquirer and Mirror, along with Harry B. Turner. He ran the printing side of the business. The Inquirer was founded in 1821 and the Mirror in 1845; they merged in 1865. It claimed to be the largest page in America, and measured forty-four inches wide by thirty deep, folded in half to make four pages. It was run off one sheet at a time on the Cranston press that had been bought in 1890.

Arthur and Lydia had three children, the oldest of whom was my grandmother, Marion (1884-1961). She stood at a mere four foot eleven inches and was left-handed. She had been forced by her teachers to write with her right hand, though she did everything else with her left including perpetual crocheting. When I knew her, she had wispy gray hair and her face was lined by fine parchmentlike wrinkles. Though she was a registered nurse, she was a chain-smoker. (But did not take up the habit until after her husband’s death.) By lighting one with the other, she saved on matches and by smoking as many as she could, she saved more Raleigh coupons. While she smoked, she whistled and chewed gum. How she managed that I never knew. She graduated from Nantucket High School in 1902 and for three years she taught grammar school, first on Tuckernuck Island, which supported a small fishing community, and later at Polpis, a farming community east of town. She attended nursing school at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital and graduated about 1908 with the first class of industrial nurses. She worked a few years at Plymouth Rope and Cordage company and went west (why, no one seems to know) before becoming freelance. My grandfather was Chester Sevrens of Woburn, Massachusetts (1891-1927). He was an electrician and taught that craft at a state school for boys. He was looking for a private nurse for his mother and engaged Grandmother’s services. Their meeting was fateful, for they immediately fell in love and married around 1915. It was after they compared notes about each other that they discovered they both could trace their lineage back to Tristram Coffin. When grandmother heard this, she exclaimed, My god! You can’t get away from them!

His progenitor was John Severance (there are twenty-four spelling variations of this name) who came to Salisbury, Massachusetts from Salisbury, England in 1635. His daughter, Mary (born 1645), married James Coffin (1640-1720) son of Tristram; they moved to Nantucket with his old man. (Grandmother’s line goes back via James’s brother John.) James’s line is the Quaker side of the family, among whom was Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880), famous suffragette along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Of the Severance line, one stands out and that is John Severance (1863-1936), my grandfather’s ninth cousin. He was treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, and with his money he had Severance Hall built in 1931 at a cost of $3.1 million for the Cleveland Orchestra. (He also built a Severance Hall at Wellesley College, his wife’s alma mater.) They had no children and most of their fortune was given to Korean hospitals and orphanages.

My mother, Elizabeth Mary Sevrens, was born in Woburn on August 7, 1917, the second of three children. Grandfather died of tuberculosis in 1927. Grandmother must have worked at a local hospital—probably Choate Memorial—for it was not until 1930 that she returned to Nantucket. And it must have been her sister, Bessie Brock (1887-1952) who called to tell her of the opening for school nurse. She and her children moved into her father’s house at 10 Milk Street, a block from Main Street and the Civil War Monument.

Bessie’s daughter was also named Elizabeth, and island wisdom had it that since she was born on Nantucket and my mother was not, it was she who had to change her name. She always went by the name Mary. In pictures of them together—as teenagers—I cannot tell them apart.

Mother graduated from high school in 1935 and attended a college at Framingham, Massachusetts for one year.

My paternal roots are obscure. I cannot trace the line back farther than my grandfather, William P. Hoadley. He married Catherine Higgins and had seven children, the youngest being my father, Paul V. Hoadley (1908-2001), who was born in Broadway, New Jersey. The only thing I know about Grandfather was that he managed the Star Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania, where the family lived. Father remembered that it was a silent-picture house all in red plush and gilt, and had an orchestra rather than either a piano or organ. He recalled seeing the film Tom Sawyer, especially the part where a cannon is fired from a steamboat. He could see the bass drummer getting ready to hit the drum as soon as he saw puffs of smoke coming from the cannon, and when he hit it, the audience screamed. He deserted his family in 1922. Legend has it that when he announced he was leaving, Grandmother said Wait! We’ll come with you! As father was the only member of the family still living at home, he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother. Father never talked about his father, and it was not until I was fifty that I even knew his name. In 1932 he was laid off from the Ingersoll-Rand Corporation across the Delaware River from Easton in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where he had been employed in the office. He had learned of Nantucket when a man calling himself a whale captain came to Easton on a train to give a lecture about the island. Since he had put money aside, the layoff gave him the chance to visit Nantucket. He drove his 1929 Chevrolet two-door to New York City, where he boarded one of the Fall River Line steamers for New Bedford, changing boats there for Nantucket. He was to stay two weeks, and during that time he talked about himself to the owners of the guest house where he was staying. The evening before he was to leave, the telephone rang, which was answered by the proprietor, who said, It’s for you. The only person who knew his whereabouts was his mother and the call alarmed him. He took the receiver and a voice said, This is George Rule. I am President of the Pacific National Bank. We understand that you do not have a job. Father said it was so. Well, we have a job as a beginning teller, would you be interested? He said he was, and for several days he was walking around the island in a trance to think he was to be living on Nantucket. He spent the