Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum

Sailors aboard the Nantucket lightships had thirty-day deployments and not much to do. So they wove. The baskets they made — rattan over a wooden mold, with a solid base and an odd number of staves — became one of the most recognizable craft objects in America. This museum exists to trace that lineage, from utilitarian shipboard work in the mid-to-late 1800s through the purse-style "Friendship Baskets" that followed, and into the hands of the artisans still making them on the island today.