Chris Baer
This Was Then: The Jetties
Until a major storm reconstructed our coastline around 1725, Cape Poge and the whole northern tip of Chappaquiddick — the landmasses we sometimes refer to...
This Was Then: Tallman’s octagon
Henry Beetle Hough, in his 1936 book “Martha’s Vineyard, Summer Resort,” listed the Island’s five most colorful, outward-facing characters of the late 19th century:...
This Was Then: Mephitis mephitis
Updated 1-5-2024
Skunks have lived on Martha’s Vineyard for at least four or five hundred years. (Except, that is, for about 50 of them. We’ll...
This Was Then: Dave Curney
At 3:45 am on Friday, Jan. 18, 1884, the 275-foot steamer City of Columbus, bound for Savannah from Boston, struck Devil’s Bridge off Gay...
This Was Then: Here and there
The English settled Martha’s Vineyard from the outside in; early colonial settlements clustered around natural harbors and mill-powering streams, mostly near the periphery of...
This Was Then: The Tisbury School
Welcome to the new Tisbury School!
It’s 1930. Students, staff, and teachers have moved into the new school on West William Street, to pomp and...
This Was Then: Francis Lewis
Deborah Lewis was born about 1730 in Yarmouth, the daughter of John and Thankful Lewis. She came to the Island of Martha’s Vineyard with...
This Was Then: KaBLAM!
It’s Labor Day, 1929, at the New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard & Nantucket Steamboat company wharf in Oak Bluffs. The last steamer has departed for...
This Was Then: Jane Wamsley
In 1859, two writers for Harper’s Magazine visited Gay Head on a day trip “to see something of the Indians.” One of them was...
This Was Then: Rollo Wigglesworth
The Island has had its share of colorful names. There was Major Pain, the Chilmark lawyer who fought unsuccessfully to move our county seat...
This Was Then: The joys of Oak Bluffs
The area we know today as downtown Oak Bluffs was known as “Squash Meadow” for longer than it has been called “Oak Bluffs.” The...
This Was Then: Charlie Bell
He was known by everyone as “Charlie Bell” (and in his Vineyard property deeds as “Charles A. Bell”), but that, it turns out, was...
This Was Then: Laura Johnson
She dressed in men’s clothing. She was openly gay. And she ran this town during the 1930s and ’40s.
“Laura Johnson the real, real...
The New Vineyard
My son and I took a trip up to New Vineyard, Maine, a few weeks ago. New Vineyard is exactly what its name suggests:...
This Was Then: Attendance required
In October 1837, teachers and officials from around the Island gathered in Edgartown for the first-ever “Dukes County Common School Convention” — a public...
This Was Then: Hiram and Tom
Hiram Dunham was 3 years old, and his older brother Tom was 15, when their father’s seizures began.
Ralph Dunham, a 41-year-old Edgartown native, had...
This Was Then: The Scarecrow and the Confectioner (Part Two)
The North Atlantic Ocean, 250 miles west of Bermuda, October 1841. The whaling brig William and Joseph of Holmes Hole is heading back to...
This Was Then: The confectioner and the scarecrow
London, England, January 1830. A tall, very slender, and considerably deaf 40-year-old man was badgering the acclaimed English author Mary Russell Mitford, bringing her...
This Was Then: Shrinkage
By 1870, it was an open secret that things would sometimes disappear into Holmes Hole (soon to be renamed Vineyard Haven.)
Like nearby Woods Hole,...
This Was Then: The Holmes Hole skyline
Behold Vineyard Haven — or as many of the locals still called it, Holmes Hole — as it appeared in the late 1870s. This...