Nahant

Bostonians went to a place that's not quite an island.

It's almost an island called Nahant, which is a small peninsula, maybe about 15 miles north of Boston.

And it's first developed in like the 18-teens.

And already by the 1820s, people are complaining that it is essentially Beacon Hill transplanted to summer houses.

It is fashionable, elite, Brahmin Boston that simply sort of shuts up the townhouse and goes to Nahant for the summer.

Now, this may sound sort of like Newport, but Nahant from the very beginning set itself up in some ways as a kind of an antidote to that kind of resort opulence.

So Nahant became the seat of what Thomas Appleton called Cold Roast Boston.

Meaning, you know, you sort of ate the cold beef during the week that you had cooked on Sunday.

For the moment, he has discovered that the sun does not rise and set exclusively in the United States, and that there were just a few shreds and patches of history in the world prior to the Declaration of American Independence.

Still, when the big ship has steamed on into the shallow waters which narrow into Sandy Hook or Plymouth Sound, and the broad panorama twixt Long Island and Staten or Plymouth and Nahant opens on the view, the old feeling comes back with the old scenes again.

Sir, the Bay of New York closely resembles the Bay of Naples.

There is not a slightest use in telling him that that is quite as like the Bay of Tunis or the Hodspar of Bulgaria.

But Florida is peculiarly adapted to the needs of people who can afford two houses and want a refuge from the drain that winter makes on the health.

As people who have summer houses at Nahant or Rye, so they might, at a small expense, have winter houses in Florida and come here and be at home.

That is the great charm, to be at home.

A house here can be simple and inexpensive and yet very charming.

But Florida is peculiarly adapted to the needs of people who can afford two houses.

and want a refuge from the drain that winter makes on the health as people who have summer houses at nahant or rye so they might at a small expense have winter houses in florida and come here and be at home that is the great charm to be at home a house here can be simple and inexpensive and yet very charming already around us a pretty group of winter houses is rising and we look forward to the time when there shall be many more, when all along the shore of the St. John's, cottages and villas shall look out from the green trees.

CHAPTER IV.

A LETTER TO THE GIRLS.

Instead, the story of Frederick Tudor begins with a moment of what can only be described as either genius or delusion, depending on how the venture turned out on any given year.

The most widely repeated account of the idea's origin places it at the Tudor family's summer estate in Nahant, Massachusetts, a rocky peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic just north of Boston.

Sometime around the year 1805, Frederick and his older brother William were spending time at the estate, and the conversation turned, as conversations sometimes do among restless young men with more ambition than direction, to the question of what a person might do to make a fortune.

According to family tradition, someone in the group, possibly Frederick's brother or a cousin, made an offhand remark about how absurd it was that the West Indies, those hot Caribbean islands so central to the economy of the era, had no access whatsoever to ice, while New England ponds froze solid and useless every single winter, the ice simply melting away every spring without anyone extracting a single dollar of value from it.

But Florida is peculiarly adapted to the needs of people who can afford two houses and want a refuge from the drain that winter makes on the health.

As people who have summer houses at Nahant or Rye, so they might, at a small expense, have winter houses in Florida, and come here and be at home.

That is the great charm, to be at home.

A house here can be simple and inexpensive, and yet very charming.

What the state has done is invest millions of taxpayer dollars into town-owned beaches, many of which are entirely or mostly off limits to the public that helped pay for those improvements.

But state spending data show coastal towns such as Nahant, Chilmark, and Westport received hundreds of thousands of state dollars to improve beaches that are accessible only to local residents.

Chris began his investigation into the issues surrounding beach access in Massachusetts in 2022.

It's been a couple years since then, and apparently not much has changed.

and explicitly says, you may not sell this to anyone other than a white Christian, right? And it's a little startling to kind of see that.

I was at the registry of deeds in Eggertown and they pull out these giant old books of deeds and that's one piece of it.

And then the other piece is the towns with these restrictive parking rules and regulations, right? And they'll single out you know, Nahant and Marshfield.

These are communities that, if you want to get to the beach, you basically can't park anywhere near the beach.

But Florida is peculiarly adapted to the needs of people who can afford two houses and want a refuge from the drain that winter makes on the health.

As people who have summer houses at Nahant or Rye, so they might, at a small expense, have winter houses in Florida and come here and be at home.

That is the great charm, to be at home.

A house here can be simple and inexpensive and yet very charming.