Martin House Inn was built in 1803 by sea captain and gentleman Nathaniel Sherman for his bride Hepsabeth. Situated in the heart of Nantucket’s famed “historic district”, this resplendent mariner’s mansion will take you back to a romantic place and time when the new world was still being discovered and America was hardly yet a notion. William Worth, patriarch of one of Nantucket’s founding families, acquired the land on which Martin House Inn stands in 1692 from its original owner, a Nantucket Indian named Wassaqual. William passed the property to his son Matthew Worth, who later deeded it to his daughter Hepsabeth and her newlywed husband Nathaniel Sherman “in consideration of love and affection, 20 square rods of land, being half my piece of land at a place [then] called No Headed Hill” at around the turn of the 19th century.

Nathaniel and Hepsabeth built their dream house at 61 Centre Street (then Darling Street) to raise their six children: Alexander, William Edwin, Sophia, Frederick, John and Margaret. After generations of private family use, the Inn was first opened to the public in the 1920s as the Wonoma Inn, and in 1941 it became Martin’s Guest House, blending today as it did then an unsurpassed combination of sumptuous new world luxury accommodations with the warm atmosphere, nostalgic charm and romantic intrigue of the old world.