She could see the rooftops of town, sloping down to the sparkling blue of the harbor, the sunlight slanting through the windows, the personal histories that people had left written on the window trim since the whaling days, and the feeling that it was her special hiding place. To the young girl Pammy Griffin was back then, the cupola was magic.
“It had windows on all sides, and on the trim – which I am glad was never painted over – were all these stories in pencil,” she remembered about summering on the grounds of Moors End at 19 Pleasant St. where her grandmother lived.
“Up in the cupola there is very legible writing from the diaries of these ship captains who stood up there and saw wrecks. It was very vivid about shipwrecks and a fire on the channel of the jetty, dated around the 1800s.”
It is easy to imagine young children, on their summer vacation years ago, gazing out those windows.
“The third floor was the most fun place,” Griffin said. “None of the adults ever went up there. It had two bedrooms, a sitting room, this amazing cedar closet with all these hidden compartments, and the stairs up to the cupola.”
If Moors End is not the most classically magnificent house on the island, it leads the conversation about which house is.
Jared Coffin, mariner and shipbuilder, made a fortune in whale oil and owned the whaleships Montano, Daniel Webster and Catherine. After purchasing the property at the corner of Pleasant and Mill streets in 1820, he built the brick mansion between 1829 and 1834, by which time he and his wife, Susan Ring, were living there. This area was then considered the edge of town, hence the name Moors End.
What makes Moors End particularly magical and mysterious are the high brick walls that encircle the grounds. One can only guess what lies on the other side, which is a sweeping lawn that leads to traditional English gardens lined with boxwood hedges and a beautiful garden planted with heirloom roses.
Moors End is the oldest brick home on Nantucket, although Pacific National Bank was the first brick building, built in 1804.
The original building was a simple design, a square brick house with chimneys at the end walls. The bricks traveled to the island as ballast on one of Coffin’s ships.
Local legend has it that Coffin built what is now known as the Jared Coffin House, on the corner of Broad and Centre streets, in the heart of downtown, because Moors End was deemed by his wife to be too far out of town.
The whaling money that built the house, the design and the fact that it was once on what was considered the edge of town, say much about life on Nantucket in the early 1800s.
Reuben Hallett bought the house from Jared Coffin in 1851. The property was expanded and land added to build what today is the magnificent formal garden, in 1899. Presumably, the famous brick walls around the grounds were added at the same time, according to the publication Historic Nantucket.
Over the years, revisions have been made to the house by several different owners. Most of them had the same vision quoted in 1927 in a story by an architect name Fiske Kimball.
“Given a superb early American house, the effort was to restore and furnish it with artistic sympathy and historic accuracy, while at the same time seeking comfort and convenience for modern living,” Kimball wrote.
That statement is true even today. There is a small list of newly-reconfigured rooms and bathrooms, which hold the line to the past nicely.
Kimball was speaking of Edward F. Sanderson, who owned the house in 1926. He is best known, according to Historic Nantucket, for being one of the earliest benefactors of the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
Sanderson also left his mark on the Moors End house, consulting architect R.T. Haines Halsey, creator of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sanderson reconfigured much of the house, adding a two-story porch in the rear, three dormers in the back of the house, and turned what was then a simple stable for the carriage horses into a model of a Venetian church.
The most spectacular change was the addition of a mural, painted onto the dining room walls, just off the front hallway, by Stanley James Roland. It depicts a whaler’s voyage to the Pacific Ocean.
In a 1927 issue of House Beautiful, a writer said of the murals, “It is a marvelous panorama of a bit of American history, and it is appropriate that is should be housed not on the cold walls of a museum, but in a house built by the very industry it depicts.”
The writer said it was less of a decoration and more “a record of an epoch, an historic document.”
“Sitting in that room with the Captain Cook wallpaper all the way around the room was wonderful,” Griffin said. “That was the main living room and there was a sweet little den off it. There was also a great screened-in porch. It had this wonderful view of the garden.”
Walk down the hallway and you come to a parlor, whose walls are covered in another mural, called the Captain Cook wallpaper. It was painted in 1806, according to “The Architectural Record,” but never hung before it went up on the walls in that parlor. Both murals turn the rooms into places of wonder.
During that same time other changes were made, so that there are rooms – especially the huge library, which has a six-foot fireplace, bookcases on every wall, two oversized leather couches and a pool table – which come from a different time than the rest of the house. The combination of the styles of different eras, plus the upgraded bathrooms, especially on the third floor, make for an interesting stroll from room to room, floor to floor.
There is a small cottage, formerly the gardener’s residence, and a large horse barn, which still has the stalls, on the property.
“My grandmother lived in the big house and we lived in the little white cottage and played in the barn. That beautiful 18th century barn was just spectacular and still is,” Griffin said.
“It is just a fortress of a place, the way it was built. There were legendary parties in the barn that people crawled over the walls for. My father worked for the Eisenhower campaign and they had these dirigibles all across the country that said, ‘We Like Ike’ and he had one stored up in the attic of the barn. It was wonderful to grow up around that barn. The stalls are just massive, with these huge doors that slide back and forth.”
There are also large screened-in porches that cry out for August afternoons. And there is the beautiful garden, the soul of the property, in the style of a traditional English garden, with dogwoods framing roses and lilies.
“It was just a lovely, unbelievably wonderful piece of property and there was a wonderful gardener who took care of all the roses,” Griffin remembered. “The garden was spectacular with roses and lilies. My grandmother loved to arrange flowers and spent a lot of time in the garden picking out flowers.”
Griffin’s grandmother was Louise Allan Melhado. On Sept. 15, 1957, her husband was killed, along with 11 other people, when a Northeast Airlines DC-3 he was traveling on crashed in New Bedford, which meant she was in that house alone every summer. Her granddaughter, of course, spent as much time as she could there with her.
“She was alone in that house for a long time,” Griffin said. “But she filled it with friends and joy and roses. It was filled with lots of people when I was growing up.”
It is a house of memory and old photographs. It was a bygone era when Griffin was a little girl and her grandmother owned it. It was the days of summering, when families spent the entire season on-island.
“I am glad it is still standing. I appreciate it more when I look back,” Griffin said. “I can see now the unbelievable maintenance it took to keep the garden beautiful and the barn painted and the heating costs. It was staggering. As a child that doesn’t occur to you. I think we always knew how special it was. But when you are young it is just there. We have an expression in my family, ‘your home is where your family is.’ And Nantucket was always the north star for our family. It has always been where we felt community and home. But I don’t think you knew as a child how special it was, but as you got older you certainly did.”
In 1986, Melhado sold Moors End to Marilyn Whitney. Once again it is on the market.
You can still climb the steep stairs to the cupola. You stand on the floorboards of history. Some of the penciled notes can still be seen on the window trim. Nantucket town over the rooftops and down to the flash of sparkling blue water spreads out before you.
