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

Squam, 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 02554. It sits by Squam Head. The Survey maps it on the Siasconset OE E quadrangle.

Squam within Nantucket County

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 Squam, surveyed 1994

Topographic sheet of Squam, 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.

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.

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.

In 1663 there were about fifteen hundred Indians on the island. For the hundred years succeeding the settlement of the island by Macy and others in 1659, the Indians steadily decreased, till, in 1763, there were but 358. That year a '' plague" swept off 222 of these, leaving but 136 in all on the island. In 1795 there were but three wigwams remaining. These were at Squam. In 1822 the last full-blooded Indian died, and in 1854, at the age of eighty-two, the last who was possessed of any Indian blood. This was Abram Quarry, who lived at Shimmo, on the other side of the harbor from the town. There is a fine oil painting of him in the Atheneum showing him at his home there.

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.

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 Squam 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 4,026 shown

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. Museums hold 4,026 specimens collected within 10 miles of Squam between 1825 and 1974: 2,653 Plantae, 854 Animalia, 382 Fungi, 110 Chromista, 20 Unrecorded, 7 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 4,026 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
Chadwicks Folly	0.2 miles	31
Wauwinet	0.9 miles	31
Quidnet	1.0 miles	31
Pocomo	1.6 miles	32
Polpis	1.7 miles	32
Hoicks Hollow	2.3 miles	31
Sesachacha	2.3 miles	31
Quaise	2.8 miles	32

Provenance

This settlement is recorded in the Geographic Names Information System as feature 616964. 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.