The Nantucket Historical Association is always collecting. There are personal and family papers, institutional and organizational records, artifacts, artworks, textiles, moving images and sound recordings, and books on Nantucket history. The collection grows each year as new works are added. Favorites from the collection features new acquisitions, old favorites, and objects that relate to exhibitions at the Whaling Museum and Hadwen House.
The exhibition includes works of art by Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin, Abbot Thayer, and Frank Swift Chase, among others, as well as a display of textile-related objects from the artifact, archival, and library collections that relate Behind the Seams: Clothing and Textiles on Nantucket, the Whaling Museum’s featured exhibition of 2025. Different aspects of textile use and production on Nantucket are revealed through documents, photographs, and objects related to 19th-century tailor, Timothy G. Clapp; the Atlantic Straw Works hat factory (1852–1866); home sewer Elizabeth Howard West; and various turn of the century laundry services and dry goods stores.
Atlantic Straw Works, Nantucket, Mass.
Gift of Mary E. Macy, 1897.50.1
Banner image: Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin (1850–1930) Window Toward the Sea, ca. 1886 , Oil on canvas. Gift of Elizabeth R. Coffin, 1902.2.1