Decorative drawing: a small American settlement seen from a low hill. Not a photograph of this place.

Siasconset, Massachusetts

31 topographic sheets cover this place, the earliest surveyed in 1889 and the latest in 1994. It stands in Nantucket town. It lies in ZIP code area 02564. It stands on Cains Hill. The Survey maps it on the Siasconset OE E quadrangle. 505 people lived here at the 2020 count. It stands 171 feet above sea level.

Siasconset within Nantucket County

Population over time

2 figures

Siasconset grew from 205 to 505 between 2010 and 2020. These are the recorded population figures Wikidata holds for this place, reached through the Geographic Names Information System number this page is keyed on rather than by name, so they belong to this place and not to another of the same name. Most are census counts, but not all are: an early figure may be a founding or settlement estimate. The change column is computed, and is left blank where more than 20 years separate a figure from the one before it, because a gap that long is not a change between two counts.

Year	People	Change
2010	205
2020	505	+300 (+146%)

Then and now

1889 to 1994

The same ground, surveyed 105 years apart. Drag the handle to wipe between them. Both sheets are United States Geological Survey originals; neither has been altered.

Topographic sheet of Siasconset, surveyed 1994

Topographic sheet of Siasconset, surveyed 1889

Topographic sheets covering this place

31 sheets

Matched by testing this settlement's coordinate against the published boundary of every sheet in the United States Geological Survey's historical collection. Each opens the scanned sheet at the Survey.

In the county-history sources

17,013 words on this township

Illustrated Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Taunton, New Bedford, Fall River; a Guide and Souvenir to the Famous Resorts and Noted Cities of Southeastern Massachusetts, with Maps, List of Hotels, Rates, Time-tables, Etc, published 1889 names this settlement in its chapter on Nantucket Town. These are the passages that mention it, exactly as the scans read.

There is a remarkable similarity in shape between Cape Cod (almost an island) Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket, in that each terminates on the east in an arm, with distinctly marked elbow and long finger, those of Cape Cod at Chatham and Provincetown, those at Martha's Vineyard at Chappaquiddick Island and Cape Poge, and those of Nantucket at Siasconset and Great Point.

Passage source: Illustrated Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Taunton, New Bedford, Fall River; a Guide and Souvenir to the Famous Resorts and Noted Cities of Southeastern Massachusetts, with Maps, List of Hotels, Rates, Time-tables, Etc, published 1889.

Nantucket is the name of a county, a township, an island, and a town. As a county and a township it is the same, embracing the main island, Tuckernuck, Muskeget, the two Gravelly Islands, and, when cut off by the sea, Smith's Point Island. On the island is the town itself, the village of Siasconset, the summer resorts of Surfside and Wauwinet, and many separately named localities or districts, as Coatue, Squam, Quaise, Polpis, North Pasture, Middle Pasture, and South Pasture, the Plains, Maddequet, and Great Neck.

The principal public buildings are the Town House, on Orange street, the Custom House, foot of Main Street Square, the Pacific National Bank, head of Main Street Square, the Nantucket Institution for Savings, near the head of the Square. The large asylum, with its farm grounds, is on the outskirts at the south of the harbor, on the left of the road leading to Siasconset.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Nantucket Town - it names this place 1 more 1 time.

Photographs

2 photographs,

Taken for the Office of War Information and the Farm Security Administration, who photographed the country between 1935 and 1944. Works of United States government photographers, with no known restriction on use. Each opens its catalogue record.

Heart's Ease, Center Street, Siasconset, Nantucket, Nantucket County, MA
Unattributed, . Library of Congress

Siasconset Union Chapel, New Street, Siasconset, Nantucket, Nantucket County, MA
Unattributed, . Library of Congress

Fires near this place

5 since 2005

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 5 fires within 5 miles of Siasconset between 2005 and 2017, burning about 3 acres in total. None started naturally. 4 were recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Arson/incendiarism	4
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
20 August 2005	Arson/incendiarism	under an acre	Massachussetts State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
22 July 2005	Arson/incendiarism	1.0 acres	Massachussetts State Fire Marshal's Office	not named
8 May 2017	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
23 April 2017	Arson/incendiarism	under an acre	Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control	not named
18 March 2006	Arson/incendiarism	1.0 acres	Massachussetts State Fire Marshal's Office	not named

Settlements close enough to share some of these fires:

Every fire recorded in Nantucket County

Specimens collected near this place

12 of 3,978 shown

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. Museums hold 3,978 specimens collected within 10 miles of Siasconset between 1825 and 1974: 2,640 Plantae, 828 Animalia, 381 Fungi, 105 Chromista, 20 Unrecorded, 4 Bacteria. 12 distinct Species records are shown. Collected by A AND P STARRETT, A. B. Seymour, A. Cohen and others. Each is a physical object with a catalogue number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be concluded from a species being absent.

Species	Year	Collected by	Where, as recorded
Anemone quinquefolia L.	1900	M. A. Day
Rumex maritimus var. fueginus (Phil.) Dusén	1825	Collector unspecified	Martha's Vineyard. Block Id.
Chrysopsis falcata (Pursh) Elliott	1827	F. A. Greene
Platanthera flava (L.) Lindl.	1827	T. A. Greene	Nantucket.
Desmodium rigidum (Elliott) DC.	1829	Oakes
Ceramium cimbricum H.E.Petersen	1831	not recorded	Nantucket.
Gloeosporium polygoni Dearn. & House	1836	Guba E. F.	Nantucket Co. Cultivated Fields on Hummock Rd.
Chondria dasyphylla (Woodward) C.Agardh	1848	M. L. Owen
Ludwigia palustris (L.) Elliott	1849	J. L. Russell
Acer rubrum L.	1899	Nellie F. Flynn
Aletris farinosa L.	1899	Flynn, N. F.	Nantucket
Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.	1899	Nellie F. Flynn

All 3,978 specimens within 10 miles, at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Nearest settlements

The eight closest, with where each one stands in the county. Distances are straight-line, computed from the Geographic Names Information System coordinates.

Place	Distance	Sheets
Codfish Park	1.2 miles	31
Plainfield (historical)	1.2 miles	31
Sesachacha	1.7 miles	31
Hoicks Hollow	1.7 miles	31
South East Quarter (historical)	2.0 miles	31
Middle Pasture (historical)	2.8 miles	32
Quidnet	3.0 miles	31
Polpis	3.5 miles	32

Elsewhere

Matched on this settlement's Geographic Names Information System number rather than its name, so it cannot be a different place of the same name in another state.

Wikipedia article on Siasconset	An encyclopaedic summary. Its text is share-alike, so it is linked here rather than copied.
Wikidata item Q7506866	The structured record the population and elevation above come from. Public domain (CC0).

Provenance

This settlement is recorded in the Geographic Names Information System as feature 616962. The sheet list is computed by point-in-boundary test against the United States Geological Survey's historical topographic inventory. Both are works of the United States government and carry no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.

Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.

Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.