Built by William H. Chadwick with embezzled funds, the sprawling estate tumbled from the grandiose heights of late 19th-century haute couture to the island's architectural equivalent of a persona non grata. What had been conceived of and constructed as a retreat for the rich fell as quickly as Chadwick himself, although the latter was treated to a gentler retribution for his crimes than the structures he left in Squam.

Intended as an escape for the wealthy, the seminal ethos of Chadwick's Folly has persisted through the more than 100 years since the completion of the estate. The only extant portion of the sundry structures, one-third of the original carriage house later renovated into a home by Marshal Farrier in the early 20th century, was put on the market in recent weeks.

The property, owned jointly by Eric Schultz and Ingrid Schultz Adam, carries a price tag of $4.7 million -- a sum unfathomable to Chadwick, but in keeping with the exclusivity that he intended in the 1880s.

Intrigue, scandal and the bank cashier

While Chadwick had been involved a variety of real estate ventures on the island in the years preceding his troubles, it was not until Jan. 1, 1885 that a fellow employee at the Pacific National Bank of Nantucket made the first in a series of discoveries that would spell the birth of the â01CFollyâ01D and a jail sentence for Chadwick.

A cashier at the bank, Chadwick was 38 when Albert G. Brock noticed that Chadwick had overdrawn his personal account and that oddities in the bank's other accounts appeared linked to the cashier.

Unable to exonerate himself properly from the suspicion of his employer, bank president Frederick C. Sanford, Chadwick resigned from his post at the bank in order that a more thorough investigation could be conducted. That inspection, in turn, found that between $10,000 and $15,000 had been siphoned from the bank's accounts.

With the support of his established family -- Chadwick came from the Coffin line -- and a wealthy father, it appeared at first that the implicated cashier could provide recompense for his actions and avoid any more serious charges.

While the townspeople may have been willing to show leniency, the state of Massachusetts -- and its bank examiner, a Colonel Needham -- were less than agreeable to that particular arrangement.

Needham and his cohorts conducted a complete audit of the bank's accounts and elaborated on the earlier conclusions drawn by Pacific National's internal investigation. In April 1885, in little more than four months since Brock's New Year's Day detections, Chadwick was arrested and transported to Boston on charges of embezzlement and making alterations to the books at Pacific National.

Because the bank possessed a federal charter, the case was to be tried in federal court in Boston. Removed from the confines of his home island, Chadwick was suddenly without Nantucketers' sympathies and sensitivities to his stature in the community.

Moreover, the already indebted Chadwick could not produce the requisite $10,000 bond and so remained in a Cambridge jail. Amidst creditors lunging for his assets on Nantucket, Chadwick bypassed a jury trial and pleaded guilty to the original charges. He was sentenced to five years in prison, which he was allowed to serve at the Vestal Street jail on Nantucket.

The object of his transgressions, the estate in Squam, neared completion concurrent to Chadwick's own downfall; yet the main building, the mansion overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, sat empty on its lofty and grandiose perch. â01CA monument to guilt and greed,â01D according to Mooney, the estate was subsequently dubbed â01CChadwick's Folly.â01D

Despite his obvious crimes, the town was steadfast in its support for Chadwick. A thief in the estimation of the law, the bank cashier survived as a diminished, but no less noteworthy member of the island community.

â01CI think in the old days on Nantucket your reputation stood for everything and Chadwick came from a well respected family,â01D said Mooney during a telephone interview on Sunday. â01CThere's all kind of larceny. I suspect he considered it borrowing because he intended to pay it all back.â01D

So while the Folly slid further into disrepair, Chadwick experienced nothing short of a welcomed return to the island. Although bereft of property and in ill repute in some circles, Chadwick settled his various debts over time and turned his solitary jail cell into a second home, with furnishings atypical of jailhouses.

An exemplary inmate, Chadwick was later released from his sentence early on account of his good behavior.

When Chadwick died at age 46 on April 1, 1893, the town honored him by including â01Cbank cashierâ01D as the occupation on his death certificate, even though he had been fired more than eight years previously for stealing funds for his personal ventures.

Speculation gone awry

In â01CThe Forgotten Landmark: Chadwick's Folly 1885,â01D Mooney speculates that the cost of construction for the entire estate approached $100,000. It was a project that sourced its materials from manifold wells: off-island lumber shipped to Nantucket and then hauled to Squam by horse-drawn transports, reclaimed bricks from the Citizens Bank on Main Street that had been torn down in 1884, among other building fabrics from various locales.

â01CIn those days, that was a far-out speculation,â01D said Mooney. â01CIt was far from town and there was nothing out there but dirt roads and horses.â01D

Although Squam, like the rest of the island, has evolved with the passage of time it retains many of the qualities that endeared its rusticity to residents and guests alike. A dirt road still leads to Chadwick's Folly. Cell phone reception amounts to barely more than a flight of fancy. And, of course, the estate's lasting attraction remains: the Atlantic Ocean, which constituted the front yard of the main building on the site.

As with most things Nantucket, rumors readily attached to the goings on at the building site in Squam. It seemed improbable to most observers that a cashier could finance the construction of such a display of wealth, a conjecture mitigated neither by Chadwick's familial standing nor financial wherewithal.

The most common of those swirling tales was that Chadwick was merely an agent for what was termed â01Cparties abroadâ01D -- in other words, individuals not native to the island's shores. Nonetheless, although Chadwick refused to name whatever associates he may have had, a fair number rushed to aid when news of his troubles broke. Among them, summer resident J.B. Tibbetts of Troy, N.Y. offered his 400 acres in Squam as security for Chadwick's debts in a letter published on Jan. 30, 1885.

Chadwick's protective instincts, if indeed there were any such parties needing protection, left the bank cashier isolated in his misfortune. A solitary figure made to bear alone his transgressions, Chadwick appeared loyal to a fault, opting to bear his penalties alone than implicate others.

â01CIt's a sad story in the long run because for some reason, he would never tell who was behind the building,â01D said Mooney. â01CIt was obviously more than the Chadwicks involved in this, but then again, Nantucket has a great tradition of blaming everything on off islanders.â01D

Ruin to rebirth

As noted, Chadwick's Folly experienced a steady decline in the years after the scandal became a public matter, with the property considered reflection of the misdeeds committed by Chadwick in order to bring about its fruition. It became, in a very real sense, an untouchable property.

â01CAfter Chadwick's demise, no one would touch the place, so it really fell into decay,â01D said Mooney. â01CNo one would go near it, but of course nobody really knew what waterfront property was worth. When you think of real estate speculation on the island, that was one of the most tragic.â01D

The accursed property was finally sold at auction in 1894, the year following Chadwick's death. The estate was parceled and resold over several years, and never achieved the extravagancy that Chadwick had wished for it. All of the buildings, except for the one-third of the carriage house now owned by the Schutlzes, had been razed by 1956.

While summer homes were installed to repopulate the landscape of Chadwick's broken dream, pieces of the original manifestation were saved. The carriage house was split, with the western end of the structure now constituting the Schultzes home.

The cupola of the carriage house was removed and turned into its own cottage. The foundation of the mansion was preserved and on top of it another home has been built to overlook the Atlantic.

According to Schultz, the carriage house was saved because its structural integrity outlasted that of the main building. As a practical issue, the section of the carriage house that he and his sister now own endured the passing years better than the rest of the estate.

â01CWhen they tore down the main part of the carriage house, it was in enough shape for them to salvage this part as a house,â01D said Schultz. â01CNothing was done with the main house because it was just so huge that it wasn't worth doing anything to it.â01D

Similar to the bricks salvaged from the Citizens Bank, the contemporary legacy of the property at Chadwick's Folly, too, retains a practice of reusing building materials.

The building materials now found in the Schultzes' home were all part of the original carriage house, although many items are believed to have been moved from their earliest locations and, perhaps, from their earliest uses, according to its current resident.

The original carriage house doors now divide the sitting room from the dining room. The tracking for the doors remains a functional component of the structure. The windows in the present, ocean-facing sitting room were horse-stall windows that the Schultzes raised in the summer to create a screened-in porch. Y

A wall, believed to have been borrowed from elsewhere in the initial building, currently serves as a partition between the forward sitting room and another sitting area in the west end of the house. That western sitting room houses the base of an upright grand piano installed in the mansion but requisitioned during the demolition of the main building.

The reconfiguration of the carriage house, in some respect, has seen the culmination of Chadwick's vision, in that during the Schultzes' ownership the property became a destination for summer guests and family friends.

â01CIt was supposed to have been for the carriages of all the people who were staying for the week, or the weekend,â01D said Schultz. â01CIt was what Chadwick had in mind -- that people would come out here and take their vacation in Squam.â01D

And people have come to take their vacations in the far reaches of the island. Schultz recalled one summer in which the family of four and their 14 guests fielded two complete, nine-person baseball teams to play in the backyard.

He also remembered a particular repeat guest, a would-be emperor from Asia whose home nation dissolved his title before he could assume it.

Still, Schultz has had his fill of the property that his parents purchased in 1955 for nearly the same amount that Chadwick skimmed from Pacific National accounts. A token of island history, the carriage house at Chadwick's Folly will shortly survive in remembrances only for the Schultz family that has owned the house for 50 years.

â01CI've got my memories and that's plenty,â01D said Schultz.

The pleasant memories of summer afternoons and seaside respites that Chadwick imagined, but through his own faults and possibly those of others as well, never knew himself.