The Silas Paddack House is a one and one-half storey timber frame cottage built ca. 1767 for Silas Paddack, mariner, on land inherited from his wife’s family. Mariner Silas Paddack, who was the first owner of this house, was the great-nephew of Ichabod Paddack, a Cape Codder who had been invited to Nantucket in 1690 to teach the craft of whaling. By the mid-eighteenth century Nantucket was one of the world’s leading centers of whaling and the production of whale oil, and Silas Paddack was a participant. After the Revolutionary War, Paddack and his family moved to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, with about a dozen other Nantucket families to set up a whaling center there, but it was not successful. Captain Silas Paddack died at sea on his way to Halifax in 1795, and his family returned to Nantucket, but not to 18 India Street, as they had sold the house in 1791. The next owner of 18 India Street, mariner William Barnard, served as first mate on the ship Leo in 1797 when the captain was killed by a whale, gaining Barnard promotion to captain. Following the death of William Barnard in 1804, his daughter, Nancy Starbuck and her husband, Josiah, occupied the house. They sold it in 1816 to her brother, Frederic. The house was purchased by Peter G. and Lurana Chase in 1821. The Chase family occupied the dwelling until 1829 when it was sold to George Paddack. His descendants sold to George H. Mackay in 1920. In 1942, the property was purchased by George B. and Grace Yerkes.
Local tradition reports that the small one-story shed was added to the building’s west side was a “rum shop”; however, physical evidence demonstrates that the structure was built as part of the house’s original construction. Whether rum was sold or another business conducted there, it was not uncommon for Nantucket women to supplement their seafaring husbands’ unpredictable incomes with enterprises of their own.
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