"Reflections of Tuckernuck" Historic Nantucket article from the Nantucket Historical Association

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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 38 no. 1 (Spring 1990), p. 10-14

Reflections of Tuckernuck
By E. W. Coffin

On a warm Saturday in late September, I first saw the houses on Tuckernuck Island rise up over the cockpit coaming of the old catboat, Three Sisters. The year was 1929, and I had just turned six years old. My father, Edward Brooks Coffin, and his nephew, Arthur William Dunham (we called him "Billy"), had departed from Nantucket's Old North Wharf that morning with supplies for Billy's mother, Mary Gertrude Dunham, her husband, Arthur Preston Dunham, Mary's sister, Margaret Thelma Coffin, and their mother, Mary Agnes Coffin, all of whom spent the summer months in their own homes at either end of Tuckernuck.

For a six-year-old this was a great adventure. Ever since I could remember, my father had been telling my brother, Theoron Tristram Coffin, my sister, June Anita Coffin, and me about growing up on the island with his two brothers and five sisters. They lived in a house built by his grandfather, George Black Coffin, and his father, George Edward Coffin, with the help of neighbors and relatives. That my first trip to the island would include a visit to the house made this a very special occasion indeed. Moreover, I had been given, six weeks before, my first pair of rubber boots — a prized possession for any island boy — so when I boarded the Three Sisters, I felt like a Howard Pyle buccaneer.

The Three Sisters had formerly carried the name Forest Prince. My grandfather had her built by one of the Crosbys at Osterville in 1895. Tired and leaky, the catboat had been laid up on Tuckernuck's North Pond beach in 1918. Two years later, my father removed it to the South Beach Boatyard in Nantucket and had the old boat rebuilt with new keel-garboards, a new stern post and new floors under the engine beds. The bill was $450, and father could not make the payment. Arthur P. Dunham, father's brother-in-law, purchased the boat by paying the bill and renamed it Three Sisters after his daughters, Norine, Gertrude and Margaret. The centerboard had been removed, the mast cut off two feet above the deck and a two-cylinder, ten horsepower Lathrop engine installed.

Starting this rusty engine required Billy's able arm power on that quiet morning sixty years ago. First, he filled the brass petcocks on top of each cylinder with gas from a small squirt can. Bill then reached down into the bilge for the spring-loaded handle on the heavy cast-iron fly wheel. Grasping this firmly, he rolled over the iron pistons by rotating the fly wheel and sucked the primed gas into each engine head. When he finallv switched on the double ignition system of dry cell and magneto, he spun the engine fly wheel over rapidly and was rewarded with a loud bang as the engine fired up. Large ripples rolled out from the catboat's hull across the mirror-like surface of the Easy Street boat basin. Father quickly cast off the one line to the Old North Wharf, and the thumping engine began at last to propel the Three Sisters up to a speed of five knots on its journey to Tuckernuck Island.

As I remember, the trip took about an hour and a half because the tide was fair. Father had often spoken of the swift tides which ran between Nantucket and Tuckernuck, and of the treacherous sandy shoals which could shift in months and even weeks, isolating the island from the casual boatman. Anyone who is familiar with this area knows that sand bars off the northern and eastern shores cause the water depth to vary from three fathoms to three inches; and although the tidal range is only about three feet, the current runs more than three knots in some places. If you sail or row to Tuckernuck, you soon discover that a safe and comfortable passage is scarcely possible against the wind and/or tide. I recall my father's ranting on more than one occasion when we were only halfway across in the motorless dory and the tide changed early or the wind came out dead ahead.

When we raised the eastern end of the island that summer day in 1929, the north shore bank and the sandy beach at its foot appeared rather lonely because there were no people around the boathouses or at the water's edge. As the Three Sisters approached the moored dory off the North Pond beach, a long, low cluster of buildings caught my eye. They were perched above the shore on the barren western end of the island. As they faced Muskeget Island off to the northwest, a porch on the last house gave the structures a brooding look in the midday haze. South of the buildings was a grassy plain which stretched far away to the southeast and added to my youthful impression that I was looking at a sheepherder's ranch in the Australian outback. Father later told me that the buildings had not been occupied for some years. He recalled that the owner, a Dr. Bigelow, had died in 1926.

We made fast the Three Sisters to the anchor lines that had moored the Swanscot dory off the North Pond beach and transferred all our gear and provisions into it. As we rowed up through the gut into the shallow salt pond full of eel grass, I could see the gray, weathered houses which rose up behind the stunted trees and beach plum bushes. To my young imagination they seemed to stare out through their flat black windowpanes and come alive with greetings. "Hello, who are you?" "How long will you stay?" "What did you bring?" I wondered aloud, "Where are the people that live in the houses?" Billy replied, "Well, as far as I know, there are only four occupied and tonight with you and Ed, there will be five, as Byron Coffin is over for a few days, and Harry Dunham is living at his house at the East End."

While Father and Billy rowed us across the Salt Pond to the marsh at the southwest end, I noticed that, unlike Nantucket, there were no piers where we could tie up or unload. All the material needs of life had to be handed off from the boat to the shore. When I stepped out of the dory onto the marsh bank, I could see a long-bodied Model-T Ford truck parked on the low bank above the pond. I asked Billy how the truck got over to the island, and he explained that two dories were lashed broadside together with heavy planks the width of the truck wheels. The dories were then positioned broadside to the Madaket shore, and the truck was driven aboard over the plank ramp. When the sea was calm and the tide and weather fair, the two dories with the truck aboard were towed over to Tuckernuck and unloaded at a deep spot along the shore. Billy added, "This is the fourth vehicle to be brought over this way, and we called her 'Jumbo' because of the long wooden body." Billy also mentioned that some years before, his uncle, Byron Coffin, had brought over the first car, a two-door Model-T Ford.

Our first call with provisions was just south of where we had landed the dory, about eight hundred feet from the A. P. Dunham homestead. After a short visit with Auntie Gertrude and Uncle Arthur, we boarded Jumbo for the second supply run to the house of my grandmother, Mary Agnes Coffin (known to all as "Nana"), who lived at the east end of Tuckernuck.

Old Jumbo whined along in first gear most of the way because the road was rough, and every so often we would have to cross a ploughed ridge that had defined the fence line years before. About three years after my first visit, a driver hit one of the grassed-over ridges on the North Shore Trail and propelled Jumbo into the air one last time. When the vehicle landed, the frame snapped in two; and the passenger in the right front seat was ejected into a beach plum bush intertwined with brightly colored poison ivy.

When a vehicle breaks down and is beyond normal repair, it is customary on Tuckernuck to leave it right where it died; and future traffic simply detours around it. Jumbo sat on the North Shore Trail for years as the needy removed spare parts and the elements slowly rusted the metal and rotted away the wooden seats. Finally, all that remained were four iron wheel rims and the chassis which served as a trellis for bayberries and mayflowers.

As we motored down to the east end of Tuckernuck, Jumbo carried us past the abandoned one-room schoolhouse where the Smiths, Dunhams, Barrens, Coffins, Brookses, Chapels, Ramsdells and Sandburys had first learned that the world was round and Tuckernuck Island was not the center of the universe. Nantucket voted for the first time in 1867 to build a schoolhouse on Tuckernuck for grades one through six. That same year, for $10.00, Eben Dunham sold the Town a small lot from his farm on which to locate the Tuckernuck school building. A one-room structure that had formerly been a fire station on Milk Street was transported to Tuckernuck in sections and finished off with a plastered interior and a chimney built into the south end for the stove. Prior to this, school had beenheld in various houses on the island, and their owners received rent for the use of a large room. In September 1833, the Inquirer and Mirror noted that the Nantucket School Committee made a trip to Tuckernuck Island to review its education program. At that time the Committee placed an ad in the Nantucket newspaper for a female teacher to serve from May through October. A subsequent Nantucket School Report revealed that in 1852, Tuckernuck Island had twelve pupils enrolled for schooling.

Jumbo's horn sounded our arrival as we turned into the George E. Coffin homestead and came to a halt by the kitchen ell's east door. There stood my Aunt Thelma, of ample girth; from a secure position between her legs, her small dog Polly barked a feeble greeting. Looking regal in her ankle-length black skirt and high-necked white blouse, Thelma's mother, my 68-year-old grandmother, "Nana," greeted us warmly and asked for news from Nantucket where she spent the winter months on Lily Street.

Though this September day was hazy, I would later spend long periods in contemplating the view from the Coffin dooryard. On a clear day, one could see the Unitarian Church's golden dome on Orange Street seven nautical miles away. To the northeast, eleven miles across the pale green shoal water of Nantucket Sound, stood the white conical tower of the Great Point Light, reflecting the sun on Nantucket's northern extremity. Looming up three miles away to the southeast beyond the treacherous breakers of Smith's Point opening was the lookout cupola on the Great Neck Lifesaving Station, built in 1891 at the west end of Madaket Village.

We all climbed aboard Jumbo for the final leg of our journey to the old Coffin Boathouse near the west end of East Pond. Jumbo rolled down the hill on the old "Dunham Road" towards Brooks Landing which was named after the family that had owned it since 1807. As the island's main landing and boat launching area, various Tuckernuckers had, in past years, built four boathouses on this beach section that were now owned by George E. Coffin heirs, Harry Dunham, Charles Brooks and Everett Chapel. Four older boathouses had for many years been located on the East Pond north shore area further to the east.

As Jumbo moved along the hill, I looked up a small valley to the west and saw the island's only surviving icehouse situated on the north side of a small pond. On a later trip, my brother and I explored this building and found it had a double wall, packed with dried eel grass. This, our father told us, was to insulate the ice from melting quickly. The building was about eighteen feet by twelve feet and had not been used for the last ten years or more. At one time four icehouses were filled every winter for local use, and all were located at a small island pond, cut clean of vegetation so it produced clear ice.

Jumbo coasted to a halt on the low grass bluff about a hundred feet from the boathouses. Father walked down and unlocked the door, and Billy brought in our box of food for the two-day stay. We planned to return to Nantucket with the Three Sisters on Monday. Almost immediately, we departed again on foot with two big kettles and several gallon jugs for Uncle Byron's house a third of a mile to the west on the North Shore bank. There, we took on a supply of fresh water from his yard pump since the boathouse had none. On calm days, we would fetch the water by rowing up and back along the shore in a
steel barrels, showed hard recent use. Alongside on the floor, a wooden Remington shell box with dovetail sides contained shotgun shell loading tools, cloth bags of lead shot and a colorful collection of shotgun shells which ranged from number nine shot up to BB loads of ten and twelve gauge. A large round tin can labeled Hercules Hard Grain Powder completed the lot.

The boathouse had two rooms. The small and low-posted kitchen was on the left as you entered, and on its west wall stood a cast-iron wood and coal range with the name "Home Clarion" in large letters on the oven door. A two-pane window looked out to the south over a cast-iron sink and counter. On the opposite side were a cot and a small drop-leaf table with two chairs. In the right hand corner near the door were two double-barrel shotguns which gleamed of oil. One was a LaFever with large outside hammers from the black powder era. For many years this ten-gauge Damascus twist barrel weapon had, in the hands of my grandfather, supplied ducks and brant for the market and food for a family of eight children. The other shotgun, a hammerless Ithaca twelve-gauge model with nitro-proof steel barrels, showed hard recent use. Alongside on the floor, a wooden Remington shell box with dovetail sides contained shotgun shell loading tools, cloth bags of lead shot and a colorful collection of shotgun shells which ranged from number nine shot up to BB loads of ten and twelve gauge. A large round tin can labeled Hercules Hard Grain Powder completed the lot.

The main room on the right was decorated with oars of odd sizes, a hogshead barrel with a white cotton gill net piled in and around it, and a workbench with an iron pump which gave only salt water when it was primed. Baskets of wood duck decoys, three rocking chairs and some burlap bags of shore bird decoys were piled under an assortment of quahog rakes, scallop drags and four or five wire eel traps. Stacked under the two windows on the east end of the building were selected driftwood timbers and boards washed ashore in past years. Scavaging driftwood from the shoreline in my dory would be one of my favorite pastimes on Tuckernuck in the years to come. We not only collected the wood for stove fuel, but saved the best for necessary repairs to the building. The toilet, I soon discovered, was to the east of the boathouse on the sand beach and anywhere that was a lee from the current weather. (Usually a few pages from a Sears & Roebuck Catalogue were taken along for light reading.)

In the main room the two doors on the north wall joined in the middle and opened out on Nantucket Sound. My father and Jim O'Hara, an old Irishman with a heavy brogue, would sit in the twilight with those double doors open and gaze out over the calm Sound as they puffed on their five-cent White Owl cigars and recalled various Tuckernuckers. They could not have been happier, I realize now, sitting in a men's club on Fifth Avenue.

There was a homemade wooden ladder in the northeast corner of the boat-house that led up to a cozy loft area where I slept that first night, and many nights thereafter, on a mattress laid out on driftwood lumber and oars. Foggy days ended there at twilight under an old quilt that smelled of mice, and I can still remember the hoarse groan of the fog horn on the lightship, nine miles north on Cross Rip Shoal. This fog signal incited the gray seals to sound their dog-like howl, and their chorus serenaded me to sleep.

In 1983, when I was tearing down the kitchen part of the boathouse, I found a message on a board nailed in the west end: "This building moved from North Pond to East End 1888." My father told me that this section of the boathouse had once been a single horse barn up in the North Pond area and that his father, George Edward Coffin, told him he had rebuilt the boat-house in 1909. Spread between the kitchen and the boathouse walls, I uncovered a 1909 New York Herald Tribune for insulation.

Just down the beach about a hundred yards east of the boathouse, there was part of a wrecked vessel that for years furnished hard-pine firewood for heating and cooking. A basket of this fuel would make the old stove red hot; and when the stove covers glowed, my father would usually yell at me to stop "poking the wood to her."

One of father's favorite quick foods was a pan bread made from flour, water, salt and baking soda and cooked on top of the old range in a covered cast-iron skillet. In about thirty minutes, we had fresh bread with a heavy brown crust. Before voyaging over to Tuckernuck, we usually purchased the ingredients and the rest of our provisions from the A&P Store on Gardner Street (now the Christian Science Reading Room) in Nantucket. The list was always about the same: a cardboard box of Quaker Oats, ten or more cans of White -House evaporated milk, a bag of potatoes, onions, a box of rice, two or three pounds of salt pork, five pounds of pea beans, a quart of molasses, two pounds of white sugar and a pound or two of fresh ground A&P Boka coffee. If the quahog buyers in Nantucket (Walter Glidden's or Miller's Fish Market) had a good market for Father's quahogs, the additional money would give us a large smoked shoulder ham with the supplies.

At one point our family very nearly moved to Tuckernuck year round, father's temper made him a legend in his own time, and it was almost impossible for him to hold a steady job. Finally, a retreat to the quahog and eel grass flats of Tuckernuck was seemingly his only recourse to earn a living for his family. His decision that he could support us on Tuckernuck caused concern in town, however, when he went to the principal, Mr. Burgess, and suggested that the school committee could arrange our education either by boarding a teacher with us or having the Coast Guard at Madaket Station transport us back and forth in their powerboat each school day. Father's proposal sent Mr. Burgess flying to my mother with the firm reply that neither the town nor the U.S. Government would accommodate the idea in any such manner. So ended our last chance to grow up on Tuckernuck Island year round. I often wonder if he planned for all five of us to live in the boathouse, or rather on the hill in the old Coffin house of his youth.

There were at this time about twenty-one island homes: some were neatly repaired and looked after by summer people, while others, abandoned and preserved by poverty, were in need of shingling and repair. At the time of my first trip to Tuckernuck, there was one year-round resident, Harry Elwood Dunham, who lived at the east end of the island in an Indiana-style house of the early 1880's. Harry's uncle, Edward B. Dunham, a Tuckernuck native, had built this sturdy home upon returning to the island from Richmond, Indiana, where he had been employed as a house carpenter and lumber dealer. Island lore has it that he shipped the house from Indiana as a prefab, and its architectural style and materials tend to bear out this opinion.

On the south side of the Dunham house was a lean-to shed built with an outside door. It was here that the U.S. Government installed a crank-operated Bell telephone box in 1901. The installation of a telephone system to the Muskeget Island Lifesaving stations via Tuckernuck Island had from the year 1889 been an annual request of Sumner Kimball, the service superintendent in Washington, D.C. When operated, this phone system rang at the Madaket Life Saving Station on Nantucket where a surfman was always on duty. From here you could, upon request, be relayed into the Nantucket telephone system. The underwater telephone cable was laid in 1901 from Madaket near the western end of Nantucket across the Opening to the southeast end of Tuckernuck Island.

From 1840 until the advent of this system, a visual telegraph operated periodically from Nantucket to Tuckernuck via Muskeget to Martha's Vineyard. During the daylight hours, at a preset time, each station focused a spyglass on the next, and semaphore arms mounted on a tall spar would spell out the news. Needless to say, very little, if any, gossip passed over this eye-squinting arrangement even in good visibility.

Though that first trip to Tuckernuck with my cousin Billy in the Three Sisters is a vivid memory, I soon found that the usual means of transportation was in father's eighteen-foot dory. After he loaded it with bushels of quahogs raked from the Tuckernuck flats, we would set out with oar or by sail for Warren's Landing at the west end of Nantucket. I recall that, many times, we were so well loaded, we rowed sitting on the quahogs, level with the thwarts. At the Landing, the dory would be anchored well off on two rodes to await father's return with a hired truck. Once ashore, we would then walk up the rutted sandy road to the junction of the main route from Madaket to Nantucket. Here we hoped to catch a ride with someone going toward home. My father never owned or operated a car on Nantucket until he was past fifty-five. I think I had to walk the four and one-half miles to town only twice because the two or three cars which passed were already filled with people.

We were living at this time in an old one-and-a-half story cape-style house at 2 West Silver Street which we rented from the owner, Grace Brown Gardner, for $12 a month. A coal-wood range in the kitchen heated the house, and a tall cylinder-type parlor stove commanded the front room. The parlor stove had four small mica windows in the loading door that glowed and pulsed an orange color from the fire within. In the dark of the room at night, you felt you had unknown company. Kerosene lamps with Rochester burners provided our light, and we exercised great caution when moving them from room to room. One cold water faucet at the kitchen sink furnished town water, and we children bathed on Saturday night in a large galvanized wash tub set on two chairs in front of the stove which supplied ambient heat as well as hot water. When I was five, our landlady, Miss Gardner, kindly installed a bathtub alongside the toilet in what must have been the old pantry off the dining room.

Father's ability to keep us fed in the winter with his shotgun, eel spear and quahog rake was common to many families on Nantucket Island in the 1930's. His twelve-gauge barrels were kept warm through most of the season punching lead shot into migratory ducks. On arriving home at 2 West Silver Street, he would often be loaded down with the food he had procured over a two or more week period on Tuckernuck. First, we would unpack his old strapped suitcase, bursting with ducks that were cleaned and ready for the oven. Our preferred eating choice, I recall, was the black ducks, then the mallards, the teal and finally the various whistlers. Second to be enjoyed were the many blue-black eels, skinned and coiled into various containers, such as old cardboard oatmeal boxes. Two or more burlap potato bags filled with quahogs always completed our provisions. Father would open these quahogs within two days and pack them in clean one-quart milk bottles. My brother, Theoron, and I would then peddle them about the neighborhood for fifty cents a quart. What we did not sell, Mother would grind up, mix into a batter and fry in a skillet of hot fat. Fritters were one of our favorite suppers.

In 1937, father acquired a four-horsepower Johnson outboard motor which could usually be cursed into action by his ever-varying descriptive language. Mounted right off the stern of the dory on two tapered blocks, Mr. Two-cylinder Johnson, when operating, would move us along at four knots. As we left the shore, I would immediately race to the bow of the dory to avoid the backlash of the starting cord that father yanked repeatedly from the drumhead of the engine. If he was not successful in starting this motor after four or five tries, I would break out the bow oars to keep us from blowing back upon the shore. I can recall a trip or two when Mr. Johnson enjoyed a free ride either over or back from Tuckernuck due to his obstinate refusal to run. While Father rowed on the dory thwart aft, facing that thirty-pound outboard motor draped over the stern, he invariably delivered a colorful lecture on the Johnson Motor Company's products.

Such were a child's impressions of Tuckernuck Island in the 1930's. I realize now that I witnessed a period of great change in its history during my early years on the Island. Tuckernuck was no longer the working community of fishermen, farmers and lifesavers it had once been, but neither was it yet the thriving summer colony it would soon become, a place of retreat from the Nantucket throngs and a change of pace from the daily job.

My father and other men of his generation were some of the last natives who supported their families by farming the sea with rake, net, trap, gun and spear. Cocktail gatherings and fishing for blues have now replaced their traditional way of life. Now the eel spear and trap all too often hang forgotten in the shop corner, strange curiosities to the wondering eyes of today's six-year-old.