Long before Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, Nantucket’s economic fate had been determined. Over the next twenty years, the island’s population would shrink from ten thousand to three thousand. “Nantucket now has a ‘body-o’-death’ appearance such as few New England towns possess,” one visitor wrote. “The houses stand around in faded gentility style—the inhabitants have a dreamy look, as though they live in the memories of the past.” Even though whaling would continue out of New Bedford into the 1920s, the island whose name had once been synonymous with the fishery
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