Two Nantucket Gardens 
saken the lesser towns until their names are 
now recorded only in shipping lists and ledgers 
which have been mouldering tor half a century 
in empty warehouses and dismantled offices. 
I'he decay of commerce in a community 
preserves its antiquities. New York and 
Boston have few landmarks to show of the 
times when they were rivals of Nantucket; 
but Nantucket, Salem, Newburyport and 
New Bedford remain to-day in many respects 
unchanged in appearance since trade lan¬ 
guished in them. It is consequently in these 
towns that we find examples of streets, houses, 
gardens, and a thousand other things which 
pleased our ancestors and which now please 
us on account of their quaintness and their 
associations. The student of gardens who is 
not a worshipper of these qualities will find 
but little to interest him in the ruined gardens 
GENERAL VIEW OF NANTUCKET 
TWO 
NANTUCKET 
GARDENS 
BY 
ARTHUR A. SHURTLEFF. 
O F those frag¬ 
ments ot the 
state of Massachu- 
setts which lie 
detached from the 
mainland off the 
southern coast of 
Cape Cod, only 
one has harbored a 
comm u nity ofsuffi- 
cient size and indi¬ 
viduality to entitle 
it to be named with 
the more important 
A figure-head on the towns of the main- 
stable, sanford place land. That frag¬ 
ment is the island 
of Nantucket, and its largest settlement, 
known as the town of Nantucket, has always 
been associated in the early 
history of New England with 
the famous maritime countries 
of the Old World. In those 
days the frigates, merchantmen 
and whalers of Salem and 
Newburyport, New Bedford 
and Nantucket, were as well 
known in foreign ports as the 
ships of Boston, New York, 
and Philadelphia; and the 
world’s trade looked upon 
these towns of the early settle¬ 
ment as important centers in 
its ganglia of production and 
carrying. This glory has for- 
3 10 
