More than 82 years after his death, a Nantucket man known as “Whale Oil Gus” will finally be laid to rest on the island Sunday next to his parents in Prospect Hill Cemetery.
For decades, a box containing the cremated remains of the former whaler Augustus Eliot Folger gathered dust at the Lewis Funeral Home. When the funeral home closed in December 2013, the box containing Folger’s remains was turned over to the Town Clerk, where it remained in the vault at the Town and County Building on Broad Street until this year.
Thanks to the detective work of island historian Frances Karttunen, Town Clerk Nancy Holmes, the Nantucket Cemetery Commission, and the Prospect Hill Cemetery Commission, the mystery has been unlocked. The burial plot of Folger’s parents has been located, and the long-delayed interment of Whale Oil Gus will happen on Sunday, Oct. 17 at 1:30 p.m.
“The Town Clerk brought the fact of the shelved remains to the attention of Cemetery Commissioner Allen Reinhard a couple of weeks ago, and he notified the other commissioners. None of us knew anything about Whale Oil Gus,” Karttunen said. “I did the search to find out about him via the Eliza Starbuck Barney Genealogical Record, the website whalinghistory.com, various cemetery records, the Atheneum’s historic newspaper archive, and over 60 newspaper articles published over the decades. Once we knew the real names of the parents of Augustus E. Folger, I found the cemetery section and lot in the index to burials in Prospect Hill. Then Allen and Jeff Morash went there and located it.”
In doing the legwork to track down Folger’s lineage, Karttunen uncovered a colorful island character whose intriguing life had been largely forgotten. Folger was born on Nantucket on Feb. 10, 1852, the son of a whaling captain. He left the Coffin School at the age of 15 to join the crew of the whaleship Mount Wollaston, and would spend the better of the next decade at sea hunting whales. In between voyages, the talented singer busked in town and Sconset, and served as both an auctioneer and town crier. He earned a following performing in Boston – where he assumed the moniker of “Whale Oil Gus” – and parlayed that into a career as an entertainer and lecturer on whaling that would take him to California and back.
After he died in Los Angeles on Sept. 30, 1939, Folger’s cremated remains were sent back to Nantucket, addressed to Harry B. Turner, the editor and publisher of The Inquirer and Mirror, who knew of Folger’s wish to be buried next to his parents on the island. While Turner wrote in the newspaper that that wish had been fulfilled, what actually happened is that Turner had delivered Folger’s remains to the Lewis Funeral Home, but had provided the undertaker with the wrong names for Folger’s parents. Thus, no burial plot could be located with those names, no interment took place, and Folger’s remains would spend the next 82 years languishing on a shelf and in a vault.
“Sometimes we are too quick to imagine that what has happened in the past is lost beyond recovery, but time and again real people and their surprising stories turn up, and when they do, I can hardly keep myself from writing about them,” said Karttunen, who wrote a new obituary for Folger, which is excerpted below. “People aspiring to write historical novels about Nantucket contact me for advice, and I am useless to them, because for me as a writer the stories that emerge from historical documents are more compelling than anything I could possibly make up.”
Below is a portion of Folger’s new obituary written by Karttunen:
“He was born on February 10, 1852, to whaling Captain Henry B. Folger and Sarah (Swain) Folger at home at the corner of Bloom Street and Main Street. At age 15 he left the Coffin School to join two boys from another Nantucket whaling family—Andrew B. Coon, age 15, son of Captain Charles A. Coon, and his cousin Charles W. Coon, age 17—to sign on the whaling bark Mount Wollaston departing New Bedford for the Pacific in 1867 under Nantucket Captain Edward B. Coffin. When the Mount Wollaston returned to port four years later, Augustus shipped out on the Draco on a three-year Atlantic voyage, followed by a two-year voyage on the Callao to the Indian Ocean.
Between voyages, in the fall of 1871, Augustus busked in town and in ‘Sconset, singing “sentimental and comic songs” outdoors for enthusiastic audiences. Later he put his powerful voice to work as an auctioneer and occasional town crier. In the early 1880s, he went on stage in Austin and Stone’s Dime Museum in Boston’s Scollay Square before signing in 1889 with the Nickelodeon as “Whale Oil Gus” to follow the lecture circuit telling anecdotes about his whaling career. In announcing his prospective weekly salary, he remarked by comparison that upon completion of his whaling voyage on the Mount Wollaston he was $65 in debt.
Throughout the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century Whale Oil Gus was a celebrity with frequent local and national media coverage. He even had a soap named for him. He amassed a large collection of whaling implements that he exhibited at his public appearances, and eventually, as a lecturer for the California-based Pacific Whaling Company, he toured the country with an embalmed finback whale. In 1916, he was back on the east coast to visit his daughter in Roxbury and, after an absence of two decades, to visit Nantucket. During World War I he was a Y.M.C.A. entertainer at army camps and military hospitals, and in 1920 he delivered a lecture to Pomona, California, high school students. As reported in the Pomona Bulletin, he styled himself “Captain,” claiming to have gone whaling at age eleven and to have spent thirty years at sea. By this time, he was touring the country in a Ford fitted out as a camper.
In 1922 the Pasadena News reported that he had been there with his collection of whaling artifacts. Ten years later, at age 80, he wrote to the Inquirer and Mirror from Oakland that he was “still on deck” and carrying on with his lectures. On his 87th birthday in February 1939, he lectured to students at Hamilton Junior High School in Long Beach.
On September 30, 1939, the Inquirer and Mirror reported that Augustus E. Folger had “dropped anchor at the end of life’s voyage” in Los Angeles, where his funeral had been held on September 19. According to editor/publisher Harry B. Turner, who had met him many years earlier, “Whale Oil Gus wanted to be buried beside his parents in Nantucket.” In November, a box arrived addressed to Turner containing the “cremated remains of Augustus E. Folger.” Turner turned the box over to the Lewis Funeral Home and reported confidently that “all that is mortal of Capt. Augustus E. Folger has been laid to rest beside those of his parents.” Turner hoped that a monument might be placed there simply inscribed with “Whale Oil Gus.”
This was not what had happened. Instead, the box labeled with the name Augustus E. Folger remained on a shelf at the Lewis establishment until it closed. Then the box was turned over to the Town Clerk, and it has been on a shelf in the vault in the Town Building until now. How did this happen? Turner had mistakenly given the parents’ names as Joseph B. Folger and Sarah C. Folger. No burial plot could be found with these names, and no interment took place.
Augustus E. Folger was predeceased by his wife, Hattie (West) Folger of New Bedford and survived by his daughter Sarah (Folger) McKellar and three grandchildren. He was also survived by his partner of many years, LeClair Harris, whose stage persona was “Mate Monday.”
The burial place of Captain Henry B. Folger and his wife Sarah has been located in Prospect Hill Cemetery, and the long-delayed burial will take place on October 17 at 1:30 in Prospect Hill Cemetery. The public is welcome.”
