Nantucket -- The local visitors office provides an excellent brochure for a self-guided walking tour of the mansions on upper Main Street. It begins here -- at a bank. It's one of the few survivors of the Great Fire that destroyed a third of the buildings in Nantucket in 1846. (Mason Capen's brick constructions survived and the reconstruction featured mostly brick buildings which characterize lower Main today.)This building was the childhood home of Nantucket's most famous female, Maria Mitchell, a scientist and astronomer who in 1847 discovered a comet from a rooftop observatory here built for her by her father who was the president of the bank (and required to live on premises.)Today Nantucket's multi-site science museum is named for this woman who became a Vassar professor and the only woman to be named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for a century. She had a cousin who was also a scientist, Ben Franklin.
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