Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

Samuel Adams Drake’s Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast is a nineteenth-century historical journey through coastal communities from Maine toward Connecticut and Rhode Island. Drake combines travel observation with accounts of settlement, warfare, commerce, shipbuilding, religion, architecture, and local legend. Harbors, islands, forts, meetinghouses, burial grounds, and surviving domestic buildings become points from which he reconstructs the region’s colonial and revolutionary past. Illustrations translate landscapes and artifacts into a visual record beside the prose.

The book reflects both the strengths and limits of antiquarian history. Drake preserves place names, built environments, oral traditions, and details of maritime life that connect national events to particular towns. His narrative also carries the assumptions of his period, especially when describing Indigenous peoples, colonial expansion, and inherited patriotic memory. Reading the work as a historical source therefore requires attention to what it documents and to the perspective organizing that evidence. Its lasting value comes from the dense relation it builds among geography, material remains, and stories through which nineteenth-century New England understood its own coast.