From House to Homestead
by Helen Seager
The house for the family of Obed and Abigail Macy was built in 1801-1802 by David Hussey, housewright. The house lot had been assembled by Obed and his brother/business partner Silvanus at the end of the eighteenth century through a series of intricate family real estate transactions, including their inherited property from the estate of their father Caleb Macy.
The earliest houses on Nantucket were not designed by architects. Rather, housewrights followed familiar building customs and post-and-beam framing patterns. The “typical” Nantucket house prior to the Federal period had three or four front bays, an off-center front door and a massive interior chimney which supported the frame and staircase(s); adaptations of this pattern were made to accommodate the needs of the occupants, either when the house was first built or later as needs were identified. Colonial houses were commonly oriented to the south for the sun, with sloping roofs on the north to deflect the wind, like the Colonial style dwellings already in place on the north side of Mill Street when Obed had his house built. Many are of the ‘typical Nantucket’ style, and although built on a named street, still have the solar advantage of south-facing orientation.
An 1801 entry from Volume I of Obed’s journal records, “David Hussey began his work upon our house — he is to finish the inside of the house.” Today, the style of the house built for Obed is described as “transitional Colonial-Federal.” The largest house on Pleasant Street until 1827, when Jared Coffin constructed the large brick building now known as “Moors End,” the Obed Macy House is oriented to the East, toward a main thoroughfare in a village, rather than to the south.
Federal-style houses commonly had a center hall with staircase and a pair of chimneys with fireplaces built on the outside walls. Rooms in the main mass of the Macy house are built around two massive interior chimneys with flues for four fireplaces (two on each floor); both chimneys support a frame similar to that of a single-chimneyed “typical” Nantucket house. The somewhat off-center front door opens to a center hall with central staircase which separates rooms on the north chimney from rooms on the south chimney. Interior architectural features are governed by Quaker restraint and practicality.
The south chimney supports the framing for the first story front parlor and a back room on the first floor, the second-floor parlor chamber (bedroom over the front parlor) and another second floor bedchamber behind the chimney. The north chimney supports the framing for the small first floor room, small chamber above it, a large first floor room behind the chimney (which may be the original kitchen) and a chamber above it as well.
Interior solid plank walls in the main mass divide the rooms. Most of the plank walls are finished with lathes and hair plaster applied directly to the planks and painted, although some plank walls were not plastered. Another staircase in back connects the two floors.
The front door opens onto an east-west hallway with three (formerly four) doors. The door on the left opens to a parlor in the southeast corner with three windows and a fireplace. A second door, at the end of the hall, opens to what is now the dining room. The third door is under the hall stairs, down to a rubble-walled basement with a dirt floor.
It appears that Obed established a first floor office for himself in the small room in the front northeast corner of the main block of the house. It has a fireplace and once had windows on the north and east; the north window became a door to a porch built about one hundred years ago. Access to his office was a fourth door from the front hall. The door, door frames, and wall were later removed to create a wider entry area.
Obed began a personal journal before the family moved to Pleasant Street. The journals include his observations and reflections on island commerce, weather, scarcities, civic affairs, family matters, island births and deaths, islanders at war, crop prospects and yields, shipwrecks, town business, diseases, epidemics, cures, travels, construction, the national economy, politics, and wartime affairs. In his second volume, for example, he describes two letters to President James Madison asking for freedom for ships on whaling and cod fishing voyages to pass the blockades imposed during the War of 1812, and describing the economic hardship on Nantucket resulting from the war. The journal eventually grew to six volumes, covering the period from 1799 to the end of his life, with additional notes by an unidentified person.
As clerk of the Nantucket (Quaker) Meeting, Obed recorded the decisions and actions of the Meeting in a Book of Minutes, but he included in his journals his own observations about Meeting life. He was hired to take the censuses of 1810, 1820, and, with his son Reuben, 1830, and summarized the results in his journals. He kept accounts of all of his business transactions. Both he and his son Reuben developed notebooks of medicinal and other “receipts” (recipes) for ailments and nuisances (e.g., bug repellant) and chemical mixtures for dyes, paints, and lubricants; many of these compounds are described in his journals. Especially poignant is his record, Family Mirror, a small volume of his accounts of the deaths of family members — parents, brothers and sister, and his own children. Volumes of these personal journals and notebooks, in his own handwriting, are available for perusal and study by the public at the Nantucket Historical Association Research Library on Fair Street. It is easy to picture him at his desk at home writing entries in any of these volumes.
Upstairs from his office is a landing in the front of the house, with doors to large and small front bed chambers on either side. A door at the top of the stairs leads to a hall running to the west ell; doors open to bedrooms on the north and south in the main block, and a fifth bedroom in the west ell; all have fireplaces. All of the interior doors between rooms have transoms at the top of their frames, not as decorative elements, but to detect flames in case of fire spread from the fireplace behind a closed door.
Topping off the main mass is a third story garret under the slant of the roof reached by a finished staircase. An open wooden stair then leads to a small loft extending north and south under the eaves, with another three steps to a roof hatch or scuttle. There is no evidence that there ever was a roof walk. The garret was not finished during Macy ownership. Both Obed and his son Reuben dried herbs in the garret, and stored their herbs and mixtures. Years later, the daughter of the present owner dried bouquets of flowers in the garret.
The two-story ell, ending in another chimney, extends to the west at the end of the halls, giving a total of three chimneys with ten flues in this house, four fireplaces on each of the front chimneys and two on the rear. A carpenter who worked on the western ell in the late 1980s observed that the framing and other materials in the ell were inferior to the those used in earlier parts of the building, and concluded that the ell might have been built during a period of scarcity. Although no document has yet been found to ascertain the exact year, it is likely that a two-story addition with chimney was added to the west side of the house during the lean years of the second decade of the nineteenth century, to accommodate the expanding and bustling Macy household.
Fires in the fireplaces provided heat for the whole house. A fire heated the room where the fire was lit, but also the chimney itself, Heat from the warm chimneys radiated to the rooms around them. One current island resident recalls her grandmother’s house where the fire burned winter and summer, so that the chimney was always warm. When her grandmother died, her aunt let the fires go out during the summer; an uncomfortable and inhospitable chill could be felt from the stone cold chimneys during the summer.
Almost all of the present framing and sheathing of the main mass of the Macy House are original old growth pine and nearly all of the plank-framed windows of the main mass have their original sash and many panes of very old glass. Each sash is held together with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints, and is assembled like a jig-saw puzzle. Modern sash relies on glue for the joints. The mortise-and-tenon sash probably fit snugly into the frames when David Hussey installed them, keeping the warmth of the chimneys inside. Years of weathering and of opening and closing have loosened the fit in the frames. The original sash are being repaired rather than replaced with inferior sash of new growth wood. Modern storm windows were installed on the outside of the window frames during the 1990s as much to prevent further weathering of the sash as to prevent heat loss from loose frames.
Most of the floors in the Obed Macy house today are the original random width pine, well patinated after years of hand rubbed oil finish. However, it was the preference in the early nineteenth century to finish floors and woodwork with paint, if it was affordable, rather than leave them bare. The floor and stairs, described in articles in House Beautiful in 1923, “were painted a soft olive green.” Some time after the articles were written, the light green floors were painted pumpkin yellow, which can still be seen on closet floors. By lightly scraping the yellow paint on those floors, we can see samples of the light olive green. Later still, the floors were sanded bare, in the fashion of the twentieth century and have been oil finished since that time.
Obed and Abigail were comfortable in their homestead on Pleasant Street, which was home also to eight children, their grandmother for a while, perhaps some sons- and daughters-in-law, and later to two more generations of Macys. Summer-only residence at 15 Pleasant Street began in the twentieth century; all accounts suggest that the house served the families well as a summer retreat. Because of its cultural and architectural significance, its association with an important person in Nantucket nineteenth century history and letters, and because so much of its original and/or period material remains, the building is designated as “individually significant” among the buildings in the Nantucket Historic District. These features document important characteristics of Nantucket life and building practices during several eras. Although the character of its occupants changed, the Obed Macy House exists today as a cultural and physical document as valuable as the records kept by its original occupant.
At its Annual Meeting in summer of 1999, the Nantucket Historical Association heard this from Mr. Lonn Taylor of the Smithsonian Institution: “(B)uildings are valuable evidence(;)... wantonly destroying them is the equivalent of burning books.” His words then deserve our attention now during National Historic Preservation Month on an island that is, in its entirety, an Historic District.
Helen Seager has lived at 15 Pleasant Street year round and is an occasional writer or speaker on topics of history for island publications organizations. Her articles this summer are based on research in the NHA research library and elsewhere about residents and owners of 15 Pleasant Street.
