Madaket Road was once known as Mawtukkit Road for local indians’ name for the path’s destination. The legal notion of road layout in Massachusetts dates back to 1846 but Nantucketers were resistant to the notion. Harking back to the 1820s, and likely all the way back to the 1660s, Nantucket attorney Henry Barnard Worth wrote of ways across the island and around the island’s ponds that there was no evidence of “traveled use” staying to particular routes and that insofar as people did stick to the same ways, “it was more because they were open and not with the purpose of following” a particular line.
During the presidency of John Adams, all the towns of the young United States of America were required to submit a list of their streets to the federal government. This was for the purposes of taxation and there was probably little enthusiasm for the task. Furthermore, according to a visitor to Nantucket from Philadelphia, “Such is the simplicity of this primitive place, and so small the resort of strangers, that the streets which have branched out had never any names given to them, until the assessment for the direct tax under President Adams.”
Nantucket’s assessor, Isaac Coffin, finally submitted a list of exactly one hundred streets in the Town of Nantucket. He had apparently had to invent names for some nameless streets, and this included such patriotic names as Liberty Street, Federal Street, Union Street, Washington Street, and Jefferson Lane. For a while in the nineteenth century Main Street was renamed State Street. According to a Philadelphia visitor, Quaker Nantucketers resented the names and would not use them. Nonetheless, most of the 1799 streets still exist and their 1799 names have survived with them.
Fun Fact: The farther from town an older road is on Nantucket, the more likely its name is to be derived from the local native American’s name for near by land features.
Map for the nearby walking trails: http://www.nantucketlandbank.org/Map/Trails/04_barrettfarm.pdf