Lovelace recounts history of Monomoy in new book
BY LAURA RASKIN INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER

C. S. Lovelace was named after his maternal grandfather Clarence. His mother caught much

grief from the elder Clarence the first time around, when she did not name Lovelace’s older brother after her father.

She never did like the name, said Lovelace, who has been known as “Butsy” since kindergarten. He cannot remember where the name came from or why it stuck. But he knows that the onus of being called Clarence might have had something to do with why he had to repeat kindergarten.

He need not have worried, Clarence or Butsy. He did just fine post round two of kindergarten. He went on to graduate from Princeton in 1944. He was a marketing director of Fortune, a publisher at Time, Inc. and most recently Nantucket Magazine, until he retired in 2000.

Now in his early 80s, Lovelace has published his first book, “A Nantucket Enclave: Monomoy Heights, 1852-2005.” The history, a first to be compiled on the area, is subtitled “From Sheep Commons to Cottage Colony to Gold Coast.” The book is dedicated to Lovelace's mother Olivia, who, besides bestowing the name Clarence upon him, was a gutsy single mother and brought him to Nantucket every summer beginning with his fifth, in 1926.

Lovelace’s quest was post-retirement busy work at first: find out more about the house his mother bought that year from the widow of his great uncle Frederick Russell. What he found intrigued him and left him wanting more — he searched the deeds of other Monomoy Heights houses, followed family chains and looked at old photographs at the Nantucket Historical Society research library.

“Just a lot of wonderful people turned up here. I got more and more involved,” said Lovelace in an interview a day after returning to the island from his other home in Essex, Conn.

Lovelace's in-depth probe ebbed from one-dimensional to intricate and the layers he unearthed about Monomoy were like dominos, reviving dead spirits and the old enclave as they fell. What began as a creek-protected sheep commons grew to be one of the first successful land schemes on the island — a secluded and subtle pocket where people who may have been bigshots in the States were just regular folks in Monomoy.

For Lovelace, the story is about the people, he said.

Russell, his great uncle, came here in 1890. He was a successful architect in Pittsburgh who bought 75 percent of the enclave. Although Russell was born in Ravenna, Ohio, his grandfather Reuben Russell was a whaler with connections to Nantucket and a ship called the Susan. Frederick bought up 45 acres (in shoebox 50feet by 100-feet lots) sight unseen from some of the original investors. Lovelace can only guess as to why, but he speculates his great uncle wanted to build shingled cottages and sell them off. He died before he could.

Lovelace writes about Henry and Florence Lang who owned property in Monomoy from 1912 to 1920. Henry was an early Walter Beinecke, rebuilding the Old South Wharf, and Florence was an artist involved with the beginnings of the artist colony on the island. Lovelace remembers one prominent resident himself.

Edgar Jenney was an artist and interior decorator who had a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the island, he was just another neighbor. “Wonderful and funny,” Lovelace described him. Jenney helped decorate Lovelace's mother's home in 1930. Jenney became the first preservationist on the island, teaching future carpenters to build in a historic style, he said.

As Lovelace began to collect more information about his long-lost neighbors and their predecessors, he began to think of self-publishing a book for other Monomoy people. But doing so would not allow him to share all of the color photographs and graphics he had amassed with the help of NHA librarians and town employees. He passed an early version to his friend Nathaniel Philbrick, author and founding director of the Egan Institute for Maritime Studies.

“He said, ‘Butsy, this is pretty good and it’s fun to read,’” said Lovelace. It was the highest compliment he hoped to get. The Egan Institute's Mill Hill Press published the book.

“It really seemed like a story that needed to be told," said Philbrick in a telephone interview. Philbrick was a sailing journalist and came across Lovelace at the respected Nautical Quarterly. “I think Monomoy is one [area] that is emblematic on the island as far as change. The time was right, as far as a historic view. He puts together a lot of important information at a time when we’re all taking stock.”

Mill Hill Press published two of Philbrick’s books about the island and is especially interested in publishing Nantucket and nautical-based material. A1931 Edouard Stackpole novel for young readers will be reissued this year, called “Smugglers Luck.”

For Philbrick, stories from institutions like Lovelace are becoming subject to erosion.

“He personifies an era on Nantucket. He was a past commodore of the yacht club, his roots run that run deep. He knows it intimately. It’s important that people with that kind of connection to the island, that there are ways that their perspective is preserved,” said Philbrick.

Lovelace had lifelong islander and historian Robert Mooney in his mind as his ideal reader. Mooney had written historical pieces for Nantucket Magazine during Lovelace's tenure. “I wanted to make it as good as some of what Bob had written,” he said.

Recalling what it is he loves about the island, Lovelace talked about childhood visits that took him three days of travel from Baltimore, Md. His father died when he was one, in 1922. He was a chemist with a significant hand in the invention of silica gel.

While Olivia Lovelace struggled to raise three children alone at first, she soon became stable as Lovelace's father’s invention gained ground. Olivia “taught us to love and taught us to love Nantucket,” Lovelace wrote in the dedication.

His love of the island and Monomoy is now permeated with his children and grandchildren’s adoration for it. The simplicity here spoke to him, as did the uniform character of Monomoy, which he never left. “We went to 'Sconset for ice cream cones,” he said.

The lots his great uncle sold for $200 dollars now cost $13 million, said Lovelace. He was relieved to have finished the book in 2004, as he sees more of the island of his childhood disappear.

Mill Hill Press managing editor Peter Gow said it was a transition worth documenting.

“It's looking at the transition of this neighborhood from farmland to a summer colony for affluent but essentially middle class people, to another neighborhood for hyper rich. It’s important that this transition is well documented, and the fact it was documented by a man so obviously in love with Nantucket and Monomoy Heights brings history alive in a way it wouldn't have been done by an urban historian,” said Gow in a telephone interview.

Lovelace repeated a sentence in his epilogue. “I don’t want to know who gets the first helipad.”

“A Nantucket Enclave" sells for $30 and is available at all bookstores on the island, the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies and their Web site, www.eganinstitute. org.

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