1882--This date is early in a new period of prosperity due to the summer visitors. The back log and fore log of this growing and practically only sizeable remaining “industry” are now the owners and renters of houses. Visitors used to come for a “vacation” of a few days or weeks, but now they stay the season or longer. Read “Island of Nantucket, What It Was and What It Is” by E. K. Godfrey. 1924--From an article by Walter Prichard Eaton: Individually, and in the mass, the architecture of old Nantucket was and is extraordinarily dignified in its quiet simplicity and nice proportions, and often really exquisite in its use of ornamental detail. Nearly every other American town, once rich in Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Century architecture, has been injured by the intermingling of later buildings, but by a curious set of economic chances, old Nantucket has almost entirely escaped, and remains today architecturally much as it was when the crest of the whaling prosperity enabled the islanders to build it more than a century ago. Then came sophisticated moderns, and the best these moderns could do were hideous casinos, sprawling cottages with verandas stuck all over them helter-skelter, houses with broken and meaningless roof lines, windows badly spaced and without style, ornamentation without dignity, gingerbread trimmings and nothing, anywhere, that had repose, unity, beauty of outline, or even adaptability to its site. The Puritans of Nantucket left behind no poems or plays, but to say they left behind no art is ridiculous. They left behind an entire town which is a work of art, in its way as charming and as nearly perfect as anything in the Old World, and utterly different from anything in the Old World--a unique expression. They were able to do this because, to them, art was expressed through the crafts, and every man who used a tool (which meant almost every man) was an artist. [Illustration: CHIMNEYS, OLD AND NEW] Transcriber’s Note Words may have inconsistent hyphenation in the text; these were not changed. Quotation marks and final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. “Hits.” was changed to “Hist.” “… Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll.…”