By the mid-1890s, Cottage City (Oak Bluffs) was a resort town in decline.
Massive fires had claimed the two largest landmarks in town — the Sea View Hotel and the Casino — in 1892, together with the Highland House in 1893, and the Cottage City schoolhouse and five cottages on Clinton Avenue in 1894. Arson was strongly suspected in each case, and was proven in late 1894 when Augustus Wesley was convicted and jailed for torching his own hotel, the Wesley House, for the insurance payout.
It wasn’t just the fear of firebugs. A dead infant washed up on the shores of Sunset Lake in 1892, and its mother was charged with infanticide. There was an attempted hatchet murder of a hotel employee by his roommate in 1894. There were a string of cottage burglaries that went unsolved for several years before the stolen items were discovered in the home of a former Cottage City Police officer (who was also charged with forgery).
It wasn’t all bad. Electricity had come to Cottage City. The roads were newly macadamized, drawing bicyclists from all over the country. The electric street railway would begin operations to Vineyard Haven in June 1895. Croquet had become a popular fad.
But after a string of disappointing and skipped years, the Grand Illumination was canceled for 1894. “‘Illumination Night,’ which a dozen years ago was one of the things that made Cottage City famous,” eulogized the Providence News that August, “has been long since done away with on that Island.”
So in 1895, a group of businessmen and town leaders formed an “amusement committee” to raise donations for the specific purpose of entertaining summer visitors to Oak Bluffs. The committee tasked themselves, according to one Boston paper, with “saving Cottage City from a dull season.” (It wasn’t the first time such a group had formed. In 1886, a short-lived group known as the Martha’s Vineyard Club was founded for much the same purpose, and provided us with, among other things, the bandstand in Ocean Park. But it didn’t last long.)
The new committee got right to work. They funded and organized a Children’s Day parade and picnic, hosted concerts and a clambake, and ended the summer of 1895 with a townwide carnival, including a wagon parade, a band concert, an “old-time illumination,” and a fireworks show in Ocean Park. (The latter included “a full-size trolley car covered with Roman candles and pinwheels … started at full speed along Seaview Avenue,” as well as “an eight-foot fireman holding a hose, which threw rockets instead of water.”)
Worried that this casual committee was destined to fade away as its predecessors had, town leaders introduced and helped pass a bill on Beacon Hill in early 1896 empowering the town of Cottage City to appropriate tax dollars specifically for “public amusements.” A Cottage City Board of Trade was formed to oversee the funds. As the Boston Herald described the new group, “The board of trade has a dual mission. It will, in the first place, hold the prestige of the Vineyard as a watering place at the top notch; secondly, its patrons will be given fun and plenty of it, so that if a person does not love the sea and the breezes that sweep its bosom, he can find abundance of entertainment in music, etc.”
The first Board of Trade president was Zenas Linton, who also served as Cottage City’s town treasurer and tax collector. The board’s treasurer, Capt. Henry Rice, was a lime and lumber dealer. Its secretary was Postmaster Charles Scranton. Other founding members included Linton’s nephew, selectman and insurance agent Edmund Eldridge, as well as Island House proprietor Eugene Hayden, druggist James Norton, grocer Horatio Pease, realtor and contractor Ezekiel Matthews, grocer Christopher Look, and other local businessmen.
Their first big event — hosting a massive gathering of bicyclists from around the country — was something of a catastrophe. Hundreds, if not thousands, of wheelmen descended upon Cottage City at the end of July for a three-day celebration that by the second night had turned into an alcohol-fueled “riot.” In a public statement, leaders of the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association decried it as “a succession of disgraceful scenes, drunken orgies, the destruction of property, and many indecent acts, grossly repugnant to [our] time-honored traditions …” The selectmen nevertheless pushed to have the entertainments planned for the third day go on as scheduled, but the Board of Trade, pressured by the Camp Meeting Association, made the contentious decision to end it prematurely. The band, parade, and fireworks were all canceled. The rowdy wheelmen went home grumbling.
The next big event went much better. The board hired a young aeronaut from Vermont, “Professor” Clarence Bonette, to come to Cottage City and perform over three days in mid-August. A tightrope and trapeze artist who took up ballooning only two years earlier, Professor Bonette arrived during an unparalleled heat wave. There was an “elbow-to-elbow jam” as children and adults gathered in the heat of Waban Park, watching Bonette inflate his massive canvas balloon — some 60 to 90 feet in diameter — and then make an “ascension” nearly a mile above Oak Bluffs.
There are only cursory details of the act Bonette performed three times over the course of three days, high over Waban Park, but it definitely involved going up some 5,000 feet and then jumping out, returning to earth hanging from a trapeze suspended from a parachute (or “air umbrella”). He was sometimes accompanied by his dog, Nero (using a canine-size parachute) and his pet goose (sans parachute). Sometimes, too, Bonette was shot out of a cannon suspended from the balloon. For some ascensions, he was accompanied by his wife and aeronautic partner, Minnie, in a second balloon. Later in his career, he was known to perform such stunts as hanging from his parachute’s trapeze by only his teeth as he descended. But whatever act he chose to perform three times on the Vineyard, it was clearly a superb one. “In nearly 10 years past, there has not been an attraction in this neighborhood that so aroused the interest of the residents and visitors,” bubbled the Boston Herald about this Cottage City spectacle. “The jumper was an artist, a reckless fellow, and his act 5,000 feet above the scrub oaks will not soon fade from the memories of the summer.”
The final event of the summer of 1896 — the “Crowning of the Season” — was the Grand Illumination and fireworks. The night began with a “parade of phantom boats” on Lake Anthony, followed by an “aerial cannon” blast, then a “mammoth aerial bomb,” and finally a “massive parachute” launched from floats in the lake to signal the syncopated illumination of various parts of town (for the Illumination was not just a Campground event then). Local residents performed the second phase of the show, privately contributing “red and green fire, bengolas, mines, batteries, Roman candles, etc.” from their homes, businesses, and cottages.
And then the real show began: “A flood of rockets, bombs, parachutes, and shells,” “water fireworks … squirming snakes and contorting serpents,” a “balloon ascent, carrying a powerful magnesium light and colored fires, discharging at great height showers of golden rain and superb jewels,” a “revolving wheel, giving a circular sheet of flame,” “flying pigeons; birds of fire flying … lighting mines on their way,” “prize arteroids, each detaching floating stars which repeatedly change color,” a “flight of rockets with celestial stars, opals, peacock plumes, silver streamers, liquid fire and hissing serpents,” “large weeping willows,” “a grove of jeweled palms, followed by Jack-in-the-box,” a “mammoth balloon with fireworks attachment,” and many other novel spectacles, including an “illuminated electric car run at great speed and grandeur.” “Let the Eagle Scream,” trumpeted the Martha’s Vineyard Herald. “The crowds were much pleased.”
But it was not to last. Although the “amusements” line in the town budget would continue for decades afterward, the Illumination and fireworks were canceled for the following year, 1897. (“Cottage City’s season has been gay enough without it,” explained the Boston Herald.) And it was canceled again the year after that. A modest Illumination was held in 1899, but the press compared it poorly with the “halcyon days of the ’80s and early ’90s.”
Nor were other amusements repeated. “It was expected that a balloon ascension would be held, but the Board of Trade do not see fit to engage a parachute jumper,” reported the Boston Herald in August 1897. (Five weeks later, aeronaut Minnie Bonnette fell 40 feet to the ground during a double balloon ascension with her husband at a fair in New Hampshire; she spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair, paralyzed.)
In 1905, two of the founders of the Cottage City Board of Trade came into the public spotlight one last time. Zenas Linton, longtime Cottage City town treasurer and first president of the Board of Trade, was found to have embezzled thousands of tax dollars, laundering at least $2,400 through his nephew, former selectman, fellow board member, and now Dukes County District Court Judge Edmund Eldridge. They were both arrested and charged with larceny and conspiracy.
Chris Baer teaches photography and graphics at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. His book, “Martha’s Vineyard Tales,” containing many “This Was Then” columns, was released in 2018.
