Our Heritage

Bartlett’s Farm over the years

Bartlett’s Farm has been owned by the Bartlett family for seven generations since William Bartlett settled on Nantucket in the early 1800s. While still growing a wide variety of vegetables, the farm has expanded to support multiple families. The garden center began in the 60s and 70s with the construction of a glass greenhouse and Quonset huts. To keep up with the Island’s economy in the 80s, a large greenhouse range was built, which is still used today. In the early 90s, the farm published its first cookbook and converted the old dairy barn into a commercial kitchen. In 2005, a new outside sales area was built, and in March 2006, the farm market opened, offering locally and regionally sourced products.

William Bartlett moved from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Nantucket Island in the early 1800s. In 1817, he married Lydia Macy, a descendant of Nantucket’s first settler, Thomas Macy. Together, they lived a modest lifestyle as subsistence farmers, growing enough food to fully sustain their family of five children. Their son, Albert C. Bartlett, eventually took over the family farm, using the same method of tilling the land with livestock and growing enough to eat, preserve, and store for year-round island living. At that time, there were over 100 farms on Nantucket. While the whaling business was booming, most healthy men were at sea, and women, children, and elders worked the farms.

It wasn’t until the third generation of farming that the Bartletts took over the family land near Hummock Pond when John H. Bartlett started a commercial venture in the dairy business. Cows grazed the property toward the ocean and all the way to Hummock Pond.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, many local dairy farmers gave way to the regional processing of pasteurizing milk. During this time, John H. Bartlett, who was getting on in years, decided to retire. His son John Junior, affectionately known in the community as ‘June,’ continued operating the dairy until 1947 when he chose sheep as an alternate method of farming. He brought a small flock of sheep over on the ferry, not in trucks, but just loose, and herded them up the streets of town and out to the farm. Eventually, the logistics of getting sheep to market from the island and the uncertainty of the market compounded by disease in the sheep caused the demise of the sheep business.

While the fourth generation focused on cows and sheep, young Phil Bartlett, the fifth generation, started growing tomatoes in his grandmother’s yard at the age of thirteen. Soon, he began growing other varieties of vegetables as well. Phil, along with his father and his brothers, started growing more and more vegetables for commercial harvest on the tract of land where they lived on the shores of Hummock Pond. Called Pocoy, this piece of property is still in agricultural use today. The vegetable business grew to become the main form of farming at Ocean View Farm as the brothers and their father began to sell the veggies they grew from a truck on Main Street. Phil went away to college and then joined the Marines in 1955, and June eventually took over sales from the produce truck on Main Street.

Phil met Dorothy (Willman) upon his return to Cornell in 1958, and they married in 1959. Coincidentally, Dorothy’s father, John P. Willman, was a professor of animal husbandry at Cornell and was known as a national authority on sheep. Nearly a decade before Phil and Dorothy met, Professor Willman had advised June on the health of his ailing flock.

Phil and Dorothy (who became first-grade teacher at Nantucket Elementary School) also started growing their family. When Dorothy discovered her third pregnancy was a set of twins, she retired from teaching to concentrate on the family and to take a leadership role alongside Phil in the family business. Though there had been a few small greenhouses before, it was in 1966 that the Bartletts acquired a glass greenhouse from another property on the island. Dorothy ran the greenhouses for two decades, beginning with growing and selling cut flowers and moving them into garden plants. This brought customers out to the farm earlier in the season, long before the field flowers could be harvested. During these years, they decided to add Black Angus beef cattle to the farm but eventually sold the herd when the number reached over 70 to focus more on vegetable production. In 1974, June Bartlett passed away, and a monument was erected on Nantucket’s historic Main Street, in his honor near where the produce truck was parked.

In the early 1980s, a wind energy company signed a lease to build and operate wind turbines at Bartlett’s Farm. While the project was eventually removed due to the disappearance of federal tax incentives, the Bartletts recognized the potential of renewable energy and began exploring the idea on their own.

As demand for crops increased on the island, the Bartletts expanded their growing space and labor force, with their first Dutch greenhouse arriving in 1985 and international farm workers joining the team. They also hired their first non-family members, Pete Smith and Hilary Newell, to work in a leadership capacity on the farm’s plant growth and marketing.

Throughout the 1990s, the farm continued to grow, offering more services such as a cookbook, a commercial kitchen, and a full-service garden center. Phil Bartlett also gave back to the community by serving on various committees and organizations. In 1998, Bartlett’s Ocean View Farm was incorporated, and the farm was preserved for future generations through a conservation restriction purchased by the Nantucket Land Council in 2004.

Today, Bartlett’s Farm is the largest and oldest farm on Nantucket Island, with over 125 acres of cultivated fields that will be certified organic in 2025. The farm’s vegetables are now sold at the farm’s 18,000 square foot farmstand and served in many local restaurants, and their plants and flowers are enjoyed island-wide. In the summertime, Phil can usually be found on a tractor, plowing or cultivating, and Dorothy enjoys visiting the historic farm and visiting with new and returning customers.

As Bartlett’s Farm continues to evolve with the times, organic farming and renewable energy are current interests. And the seventh generation of Nantucket Bartletts (nine in all) is learning the family business. They’re farm people.

Our Heritage

Bartlett’s Farm over the years

1795

1816

1822

1822

1840

1843

1906

1930s

1930s – 1940s

1935

1945

1950s

1959

1969

1960s – 1970s

1970

1974

1983

1985

1987

1989

1995

1980s

1990s

1991

2006

Present