Rare 19th Century Nantucket Surf Side Hotel Scrapbook

Rare 19th Century Nantucket Scrapbook, a souvenir of a stay at the Surf Side Hotel in the days of horse-drawn carriages and an unspoiled island. Book with marbled end boards features many photographs (look like H.S. Wyer photos) of Nantucket town and Sconset, street scenes and beach scenes, with very artistically arranged dried and pressed seaweed adorning the pages. The late Victorian era saw great interest in scrapbooking where people assembled their own treasure trove of memories and souvenirs, and was also the great age of the amateur naturalist where people explored and collected natural specimens from their travels. The seaweed pressings here are far from the typical amateurish efforts however: the quality of pressing, preservation of color, and great artistic arrangement is outstanding (and I used to teach this craft to college students when still a working biologist).

The Surf Side Hotel was a bold venture on Nantucket at the dawn of tourism. A group of speculators built a grand hotel overlooking the beach on the (at the time) distant South Shore of the island when it was still a barren and relatively isolated area. To encourage tourists to venture that far out of town, the businessmen built a narrow gauge railroad that steamed from Steamship Wharf directly to their hotel. In time the tracks were extended all the way to Sconset along the Southeast shoreline. A severe economic recession in the early years of the 20th century placed both hotel and railroad in jeopardy; when the hotel burnt to the ground in a tragic fire, the entrepreneurs thought the railroad would no longer serve a purpose or be popular with our visitors and they demolished the enterprise just before World War I. We still mourn the loss of our “Dummy Line.” Coincidently, the Antiques Depot was s0-named because our original location was close to the site of the old train depot on Easy Street.

Measures: 7-1/4 in H x 6 in W x 5/8 in Thick