NHA
The isolation of Quaise was part of the plan. Nantucket believed its poor could live and work on a remote farm far from Town. This 19th-century view of Miriam Coffin’s house and barn captures that exposed landscape — the same remoteness that became deadly when the asylum burned in 1844.
By Don Costanzo • September 1, 2026
There’s a small cemetery hidden in Quaise that Nantucket nearly forgot. No church stands beside it. There are no rows of carved 19th century headstones, family monuments or iron gates announcing the importance of the ground. For much of the 20th century, even its precise location came close to disappearing from living memory. Polpis Road had been rerouted in 1884, separating the cemetery from the road that once passed beside it, and an old boulder that helped identify the place was later removed. Brush and scrub oak did the rest.
Today, a granite memorial identifies twelve people known to be buried there. Two died in 1841. The other ten died together on February 21, 1844. Their names are Sophia Beebe, Lydia Bowen, Jonathan Cathcart, Abiel Davis, Wealthy Davis, William Holmes Jr., Thomas Hull Jr., William Hutchinson, Paul Jenkins and Phebe Jones.
They were residents of the Quaise Asylum, Nantucket's poor farm. The word asylum can be misleading to modern ears. This was not simply a psychiatric hospital, it was a place for people the Town described as indigent: men, women and children who could not support themselves, including the elderly, chronically ill and disabled, people with mental illness, the homeless and, at various times, sailors and strangers who became sick far from home. The people housed there were routinely called “inmates,” another word whose meaning has shifted; they were wards of the Town rather than necessarily prisoners.
Their story raises a question Nantucket has been answering, in one form or another, for more than two centuries: What does a community owe the people who can no longer take care of themselves?
For a generation in 19th century Nantucket, the answer was Quaise.
Poor in a Prosperous Town
Nantucket had been wrestling with poverty long before the Quaise experiment. In 1773, the Town built a workhouse on land between Vestal Street and Upper Main Street. At first, residents receiving public assistance were not necessarily required to live there. Around 1796, however, the policy hardened. According to Nantucket historian Obed Macy, people who wanted supplies from the Town were told they would have to move into the workhouse. Some refused.
Macy wrote that families became so desperate rather than surrender their homes and enter the institution that the policy nearly caused some of the poor to starve. That detail reveals the philosophy behind early poor relief. Assistance was not necessarily viewed as something the community simply owed people in distress. Dependence carried stigma, as aid could come with conditions, separation from one's home and family, institutional rules and an expectation that those receiving support should contribute labor whenever they were capable of doing so.
Macy captured the contempt that sometimes surrounded the poor in another entry from 1822. He wrote that they were being “miserably provided for,” while also noting that it was being said of them that they were “nasty and wicked.” It’s a startling phrase today, but an illuminating one. Poverty was often treated not simply as misfortune but as a reflection of character.
In 1805, the Town built a jail on the site of the old workhouse, forcing Nantucket once again to consider what it would do with those who needed public support. The solution took nearly two decades.
From left: Produce and dairy records from the Quaise poor farm show the institution’s effort to support itself through agriculture, with sales of milk, butter, eggs and vegetables. A second ledger records the labor of hired men and residents, underscoring how work was built into the poor-farm system. At right, a page from the 1845 journal of James Cook Hussey, preserving newspaper clippings about crime, drunkenness and public disorder. Two notices refer to women being sent or taken to Quaise, including one sentenced there for three months, an indication that the Town’s poor farm and asylum also served as a place of confinement and social control.
Images and transcriptions courtesy of the NHA
The Farm at Quaise
In April 1822, Nantucket purchased Mark Coffin's farm at Quaise for $6,700. The Town spent another $1,910 building a poor-farm complex of four buildings, followed by additional improvements costing nearly $1,680 in 1825. The poor were transferred there in 1823, and the reasoning had an appealing simplicity.
Instead of supporting people in Town, Nantucket would place them in what officials considered a healthier rural environment with enough land to produce food. The residents would farm. The institution would become at least partly self-sustaining, and public expense would be reduced, while work and country life might provide order and purpose.
There was only one problem. Obed Macy warned the Town that the idea didn't make sense. Quaise was too far from the community and from residents' families, he argued. Transporting people and provisions back and forth would be expensive. More fundamentally, the very people Nantucket intended to send there were often the people least capable of doing the physical work upon which the plan depended. They were old, sick and disabled. If they were capable of fully supporting themselves through farm labor, many would not have needed the poorhouse in the first place.
Macy urged the Town to purchase a smaller farm closer to Town, but Town Meeting went ahead with Quaise anyway.
An old Nantucket history preserves an almost too-perfect piece of local tradition about what happened next. Mark Coffin, the man whose farm the Town had purchased, is said eventually to have fallen on hard times himself and become a resident of the poor farm that had once been his property. He died in 1839. The account is presented as tradition rather than documented certainty, but if true, it would be difficult to devise a more powerful illustration of the thin line separating independence from dependency in 19th century Nantucket.
Fortunes changed. Ships were lost. Husbands and wives died. Businesses failed. Illness came. Families disappeared. The poor were not necessarily some permanent class of other people, sometimes they were the people who had simply run out of alternatives.
Life at the Poor Farm
By 1826, Town officials were reporting confidently on their investment. The buildings stretched more than 100 feet east to west, stood two stories high and could accommodate considerably more residents. The complex sat on a knoll east of Bellows Pond. It was also segregated.
An 1826 Town committee report specifically described accommodations for Black residents in the rear of the building. Nantucket Historical Association research indicates that eight Black Nantucketers moved to the Quaise poor farm after its establishment. They were not disproportionately represented among people receiving public support — most of Nantucket's poor were white — but the arrangement demonstrates that the island's racial divisions extended even into an institution for people sharing the same condition of poverty.
Surviving records allow small glimpses inside daily life at Quaise. The NSA's Quaise Asylum Records include journals, correspondence and receipts connected with Captain Alexander Coffin, who settled at the asylum in 1839, along with accounts of produce moving through the institution. A November ledger reads almost like a farm kitchen inventory: potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, beets and cabbage, recorded day after day in pecks, bushels and dozens.
They are mundane entries, which is precisely why they matter. Most of life at Quaise was not catastrophe. It was meals and chores, sickness and aging, planting and harvesting, people living together under rules imposed by the Town. Some residents could work. Others could not. Some likely spent months there; others reached the poor farm at the end of lives that had been lived almost entirely elsewhere.
One of them was Sophia Beebe. Her father, Nathan Beebe, was a baker whose house still stands at 11 Union Street. Sophia appears in the federal historical documentation of the house because she later became one of the 10 people killed at the Quaise Asylum. The historical record uses the crude language of its period to describe her intellectual disability. What matters more than that label is the connection: she had a father, a family and a home in Town before history reduced her largely to a name on a list of poorhouse dead.
That’s one of the hazards in telling the story of institutions. The building survives in the record more easily than the people do.
Then, in 1844, even the building disappeared.
From left: 11 Union Street in the 1890s, the former home of baker Nathan Beebe and his family. His daughter Sophia later became a resident of the Quaise Asylum and was one of the 10 people killed in the 1844 fire. Center and right, the small Quaise Asylum Burial Ground, where a granite memorial now marks the resting place of 12 known residents, including all ten victims of the fire. The cemetery itself nearly disappeared from memory after the road was rerouted and the site became overgrown.
The Night the Bell Rang
On the night of February 21, 1844, Nantucket was buried in snow when fire broke out at the asylum. There were 59 residents inside. The alarm bell rang in Town, but Quaise was miles away. Deep snow complicated the response. By the time firefighters could make their way out to the farm, the main building had burned itself out. Ten people were dead.
The Town's history credits resident Lucretia Brackett with saving several others by pulling them toward windows where rescuers waited with ladders. Another resident, Lydia Bowen, managed to get her child out of the burning asylum. She went back inside and did not come out again.
The 10 who died were Sophia Beebe, Lydia Bowen, Jonathan Cathcart, Abiel Davis, Wealthy Davis, William Holmes Jr., Thomas Hull Jr., William Hutchinson, Paul Jenkins and Phebe Jones. The oldest identified victim, Abiel Davis, had been born in 1757. Lydia Bowen, born in 1810, was only in her early thirties. They were buried near the asylum in the little cemetery that survives today.
The fire gave terrible force to the warning Macy had made more than 20 years earlier. Isolation had been sold as one of Quaise's virtues. In an emergency, it became its greatest danger. There was no modern fire department waiting a few minutes away. No paved Polpis Road. No ambulance. No telephone.
The alarm could ring in Town, but that didn’t mean the Town could get to Quaise.
Nantucket Tries Again
The disaster did not immediately end the poor farm. The following year, Nantucket spent nearly $2,000 constructing another asylum building at Quaise. The Town was still trying to make the model work. But the fundamental problem remained. Quaise was remote. Supplying it was cumbersome and many of the people living there were poorly suited to the agricultural labor the farm had been intended to extract from them. Within a decade, Nantucket changed course.
In 1854, the Town abandoned the Quaise experiment and moved the replacement asylum building in sections back toward Town at a reported cost of $7,500. It was reassembled on Orange Street, where the institution continued caring for the needy, mentally ill, homeless and sick. Residents were still expected to grow vegetables, but now they did so on nearby land that acquired a wonderfully blunt Nantucket name: Poverty Point.
There was a chapel in the new asylum, and also a locked cell in the basement. Those two details capture the institution's uneasy position between care and control.
It wasn’t the only piece of Quaise that came back to Town. Another building built as part of the Quaise complex in 1826 was eventually moved beside the jail off Vestal Street and used as Nantucket's House of Correction. It survived until the 20th century before being declared a fire hazard and demolished.
The physical migration is almost symbolic. Nantucket had attempted to remove dependency from the center of community life, placing poverty and incapacity several miles away on a farm. Eventually, the buildings — and the people they housed — came back.
From left: Owen Chase, first mate of the whaleship Essex, survived its 1820 sinking and 93 days adrift before later becoming a whaling captain and author; in old age, after years of severe headaches and declining mental health, he died under the care of Nantucket’s Town asylum in 1869. Dorcas Honorable, a Nantucket Wampanoag woman long remembered in island histories as one of Nantucket’s “last Indians,” died at the Orange Street asylum in 1855; this image was made from an 1844 daguerreotype. Portrait of Robert Ratliff, a former Royal Navy sailor, whaleman and Nantucket rigger whose life included witnessing Napoleon’s exile, died at the asylum in 1882. Frederick Parker, the “Hermit of Quidnet,” photographed outside his cabin around 1875, eventually entered the poor farm and died there in 1880 at age 80. Together, they reflect the very different lives that eventually converged in Nantucket’s system of public care.
NHA
Who Ended Up at the Asylum?
The later history of the Orange Street institution helps explain why the word asylum should not be allowed to flatten the people who lived there into a single category.
Consider Robert Ratliff. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1794, Ratliff served in the British Royal Navy, participated in the War of 1812 and was aboard HMS Northumberland when Napoleon Bonaparte was transported into exile at St. Helena in 1815. After being shipwrecked at Nantucket in 1820, he stayed, went whaling, married and established himself as a waterfront rigger.
Then his fortunes changed. His rigging business was destroyed in Nantucket's Great Fire of 1846. His wealth declined. His wife died, and the couple had no children to care for him. In old age, Ratliff entered the Town asylum.
There, remarkably, he became something of a local celebrity. Visitors sought him out to hear his stories of the Royal Navy, the War of 1812 and Napoleon. Artist Eastman Johnson painted his portrait in 1879, preserving the face of a man whose final address might otherwise have obscured the extraordinary life that came before it.
Ratliff's presence at the asylum is a reminder of just how varied its residents could be. Behind the institutional records were people with careers, families, adventures, losses and histories that reached far beyond Nantucket. One of them had survived perhaps the most famous disaster in the island's maritime history.
The Essex Survivor Who Ended Up at the Asylum
Among the people who eventually entered Nantucket's asylum was one of the most famous survivors in the island's history.
Owen Chase had survived the Essex. He was first mate of the Nantucket whaleship when it was struck and sunk by a sperm whale in the South Pacific in 1820. Twenty men escaped in three small whaleboats and attempted the long journey toward South America. Over more than three months at sea, starvation and exposure killed most of them. The survivors eventually resorted to consuming the bodies of dead crewmates. Chase was among just eight men who lived.
He returned to Nantucket, went back to sea, became a whaling captain and published his account of the disaster in 1821. His narrative later helped inspire Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. But the ordeal appears to have followed him for the rest of his life.
In old age, Chase suffered severe headaches and declining mental health. Most hauntingly, he reportedly began hiding food in the attic of his home at 74 Orange Street — nearly half a century after almost starving to death at sea.
He was declared insane in 1868 and died the following year while under the care of Nantucket's Town asylum. Although the NHA refers to it in its records as the “Quaise Asylum,” the institution had been moved from Quaise to Orange Street in 1854. Chase had survived one of the most extreme episodes of hunger in Nantucket history, returned home, built a successful career and owned his own house. And near the end of his life, he too needed the Town to care for him.
His story is a reminder that the people who ended up in Nantucket's asylum were not necessarily a permanent class of “poor.” They could be sailors, tradesmen, widows, laborers and even celebrated captains whose circumstances had simply changed.
NHA
From left: A house at Poverty Point, where residents of Nantucket’s Town asylum cultivated vegetables after the institution was moved from Quaise to Orange Street in 1854; the area’s name reflected its association with the Town’s care of poor and dependent residents. At right, the former asylum building on Orange Street, photographed in the early twentieth century. Originally erected at Quaise after the 1844 fire, it was moved to Town in 1854, renamed Our Island Home in 1905, and later converted into Landmark House, housing for older residents.
From Asylum to Our Island Home
By the beginning of the 20th century, even Nantucket's language for the institution had begun to change. In 1905, the Town's overseers abandoned the name Asylum and renamed the facility Our Island Home. Its stated mission became the “tender loving care of the infirm aged.”
It was a remarkable shift from the philosophy that had sent poor residents to Quaise 80 years earlier. A Town history of Our Island Home describes it as a movement away from the 19th century's judgmental and punitive model toward care. The old Orange Street building remained in service until 1981, when Our Island Home residents moved into a new nursing facility. A five-year effort followed to convert the historic building into housing for independent seniors.
It became Landmark House. So, the building that descended from Nantucket's poor-farm experiment did not disappear. It changed purposes again, and Our Island Home continued.
Today the Town-owned facility on East Creek Road is a 45-bed skilled nursing home. This year, in 2026, Nantucket voters approved construction of a new Our Island Home facility after years of debate over its future. The present-day mission speaks of individualized care, keeping families together and allowing residents to age in place.
There is something extraordinary about setting those words beside the logic of 1822. Then, the answer was to send people away from their families to a distant farm partly so they could grow enough food to reduce the cost of supporting them. Now, the stated goal is to keep families together.
The institutional lineage between those two ideas runs for more than 200 years.
The Cemetery That Almost Disappeared
Quaise itself retained almost none of the institution. What survived was the burial ground.
Oral tradition holds that 17 people were buried there between the years of the poor farm and its removal. Only 12 can currently be identified with certainty: Benjamin Davis and Eliza Morrison, who died in 1841, and the ten victims of the 1844 fire. Records show hundreds of deaths associated with the asylum during the wider period, but many residents were buried elsewhere around Nantucket.
Even those twelve almost lost their place on the island. After Polpis Road was moved in 1884 and the old cemetery fence disappeared, James H. Gibbs, Nantucket's longtime bell-ringer and an Atheneum custodian, helped preserve its location by setting cement markers at the corners. Decades later, his son Jay Gibbs remembered going with him to the site. Those corner markers helped later Nantucketers find the cemetery again. Cedar fencing, signs and eventually the granite memorial followed. As recently as 2022, additional signs were installed to keep the place from slipping back into obscurity.
It’s an appropriate ending to the story because Quaise was always partly about visibility. Nantucket had people who were old, poor, chronically ill, disabled or simply unable to survive without help. In 1822, the Town's solution was not merely to care for them but to move them several miles from the center of community life, to a farm where their labor might help offset the cost of their existence. And, more importantly, they wouldn’t be seen.
For some, the arrangement may have provided food, shelter and stability that they otherwise would not have had. It would be too simple to portray the asylum only as cruelty. Nantucket was attempting, with the institutions and assumptions of its time, to answer a genuinely difficult civic problem.
The people sent to Quaise were expected to work even though critics had warned that many were too debilitated to do so. Aid carried stigma. Residents were separated from family and community. Black residents were separately accommodated. When fire came on a February night, the very distance that had made Quaise attractive to Town officials left help miles away, and 10 people died.
This makes the story particularly resonant around Labor Day. We usually tell the history of work through the people who worked — the fishermen, whalers, farmers, builders and tradesmen whose labor created Nantucket.
Quaise asks us to remember another part of that history: what happened to people when they could no longer work.
Two centuries later, Nantucket is again investing in a new place to care for islanders who cannot live independently. The cost, location and future of Our Island Home have once again required the community to decide what responsibility it has toward its oldest and most vulnerable residents.
The question is remarkably similar to the one Nantucket faced in 1822.
The answer, fortunately, no longer begins by sending them away.
Postscript
By Frances Karttunen
More about the Quaise Asylum fire and heroic rescuers. I was unaware of Phebe Lovelace's actions until I came by chance on the March 14, 1844, newspaper account. I then used the Barney Genealogical Record, the Atheneum's digital newspaper search, and the death records in the Town Clerk's office to compose this brief bio.
On February 21, 1844, fire broke out in one of the buildings at the Quaise Asylum for the Poor. Of the fifty-nine "inmates" of the asylum (several bedridden), ten—aged 33 to 80—lost their lives before firefighters could make their way to Quaise. Their remains were buried in a nearby field facing Polpis road. Ten years later, the Asylum was moved to town, and sixteen years after that, Polpis road was relocated to the north.
Not visible from the new road, the burial place might have been lost to memory if James Gibbs had not taken the trouble to mark its boundaries with cement posts at each corner. Nonetheless, the location had been all but forgotten by 1966 when Jay Gibbs, Nantucket's aged bell-ringer, led interested people to where his father had set the corner posts back in the 1880s.
The Cemetery Commission erected a monument listing the names of those interred there that includes one person who took heroic action during the fire. Thirty-three-year-old Lydia Bowen carried her child to safety and then re-entered the burning building and perished. Other rescuers survived. Among them was thirty-nine-year-old Phebe Lovelace.
According to the March 14, 1844, issue of the Morning Telegraph, "Mrs. Phebe Loveliss" saved six fellow inmates "by her own strong arm," and in recognition of her efforts she had been issued a check for fifty dollars from Massachusetts congressman Joseph Grinnell. A portion of the award was to be used for the benefit of the survivors and another portion was specifically for Phebe Lovelace, whose actions had "given her an enduring name among her fellow citizens."
In the course of three weeks, recognition of the extent of Phebe Lovelace's accomplishment had expanded. Previously, on February 23, 1844, the same newspaper had reported that she had personally rescued two or three people "at the imminent risk of her own life." Now it was six.
Who was Phebe Lovelace, and why was she an inmate at the Asylum on that bitter winter night?
She had been born in 1805, the fourth of six children of William Bennett and Phebe Swain. Her father had come to Nantucket from England, while her mother was a descendant of Richard Swain "the first of Nantucket" (1601–1682). Named for her mother, young Phebe married Charles Lovelace, of whom nothing more is known than that he was born in 1803. They had no children. By 1844 Phebe was on her own and a "pauper inmate" of the Quaise Asylum. Whatever had become of Charles Lovelace, she was free to remarry, which she did after the fire in April 1849. Her new husband was forty-one-year-old shoemaker William R. Folger. At the time of this second marriage, Phebe was an orphan, her mother having died in 1846 and her father in 1848 at the Asylum. Unsurprisingly, considering their ages, Phebe and William had no children. Nonetheless, one would hope that Phebe had at last found a comfortable life.
Unfortunately, this was not to be. On May 27, 1859 — 10 years after her marriage to William — Phebe was found "in an old building on Pleasant Street in a state of beastly intoxication." Carried to her home, she died at noon that day. Once again, her heroic accomplishment back in February 1844 was magnified. According to the newspaper, Phebe had been "instrumental in saving the lives of seven of the inmates at the Asylum at Quaise." So, as prophesied in 1844, her name had endured to the end, tragic though her own end was. William survived Phebe by three years, succumbing at age 52 to "palsy," perhaps Parkinson's Disease.