This Was Then: The rich stories gravesites tell

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In the Old Westside Cemetery on Robinson Road, just behind Edgartown School, stands a grave marker like no other. Amid stately rows of traditional granite, marble, and slate headstones, cordoned off with no-nonsense iron pipe railing, this one stands out like a sore thumb — if the thumb belonged to a giant green metal robot, maybe. About eight feet tall, with a diagonally serrated top and a wholly industrial look, this odd monument reads, “Sacred to the memory of my beloved wife, Myra Reehle /Died Feb’ry 1 1893, aged 28 years.” You may have seen it and easily mistaken it for something other than a grave.

Who was Myra Reehle? Born in Edgartown in 1866, Myra was the ninth of 11 children of Caroline (Fisher) Blankenship and her husband Frank, an Edgartown fisherman. In 1886, at the age of 19, Myra married Jacob Reehle, a 29-year-old steamboat engineer from Jersey City, N.J.

Who was Jacob Reehle? After his discharge from the Navy in 1880, Jacob joined the crew of the Utowana, a brand-new, 135-foot mahogany-sheathed luxury racing yacht owned by Washington Connor, a Wall Street stockbroker. (“The elegant and costly furnishings present a scene which would put a Turkish harem in the shade,” gushed one reporter visiting its main saloon.) Reehle was hired on as assistant engineer, in charge of the 15- by 28-foot coal-fired steam engine powering the yacht’s seven-foot propeller.

One of the Utowana’s first stops after its 1883 launch — and a regularly visited port thereafter — was Edgartown Harbor. Between social stops and racing events in New York, Newport, Boston, and Bar Harbor, the Vineyard became a frequent stop for the Utowana, even tarrying here in the spring of 1885 to take on new furniture and fittings.

In August 1885, Connor entered negotiations with the government of the United States of Colombia (a precursor to the modern country of Colombia) to fit Utowana with Gatling guns and a 57mm Hotchkiss cannon and use it as a warship on the Río Magdalena, fighting insurgents. But the deal fell through, and that fall the yacht was again visiting both Vineyard Haven and Edgartown for pleasure cruises. The Utowana was instead sold to Eugene Van Rensselaer Thayer, a Boston banker, and renamed Oneida.

That winter also, 19-year-old Myra Blankenship of Edgartown became pregnant with Jacob Reehle’s child. A wedding was arranged, and the couple tied the knot at the Vineyard Haven Methodist Church in early June, Myra by then in her sixth month of pregnancy. Ten days later, the Oneida was back in Vineyard Haven, presumably picking Jacob up for a new season of yachting in Marblehead and Maine. The Reehles’ son, Benton (soon nicknamed ”Ben”), was born in Edgartown on Oct. 1.

In early 1887, the Oneida was sold to Elias C. Benedict, a New York City banker and yachtsman. Reehle spent the next six years in the Oneida’s engine room as the yacht spent its summers in New York and New England waters, its VIP passengers socializing in ports up and down the coast. One of Benedict’s regular guests was Edwin Booth, a world-famous Shakespearean actor, and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Aboard the Oneida, Edwin Booth and others founded the club known as the Players, an exclusive actors’ social club still active today. Booth visited Cottage City on the Oneida in 1888. Benedict and his crew spent their winters in the Caribbean — Trinidad, Bermuda, Havana, and elsewhere — traveling more than 4,000 miles during the winter of 1887–88 alone. Spring seasons were usually spent in drydock at Tebo’s Pier in Brooklyn.

In 1891, Benedict brought a new guest to Edgartown — former (and future) U.S. President Grover Cleveland, who had become obsessed with bluefishing upon leaving the White House. Cleveland had recently purchased a summer estate on Buzzards Bay in Bourne, which he named Gray Gables, and Benedict began a tradition of providing him first-class luxury transportation to and from his new summer home on the Oneida, which one writer described as “one of the very handsomest pleasure palaces” on the water. In the fall of 1892, after a four-year hiatus, Cleveland was re-elected president of the U.S.

Myra’s health, meanwhile, began to decline. She suffered from peripheral neuropathy — a growing weakness in her muscles. During the winter of 1892–3, the Reehles rented a room on 23rd Street in South Brooklyn, near Tebo’s Dock. Jacob cared for his wife while he managed the work on the dry-docked yacht, extending the “social hall” on the deck, and painting its hull (white) and smokestack (yellow). The vessel was now widely referred to as “Mr. Cleveland’s boat,” even by its owner. Then Myra slipped into full paralysis. She died in February 1893, at the age of 28, in their rented room in Brooklyn. Her body was soon returned to Edgartown for burial. Their son, Ben, was only 6 years old.

An unusual metal memorial, more at home in a modern art museum, perhaps, than a graveyard, was soon erected. Its form is not dissimilar to the “broken column” stone memorials of the era, symbolizing a life cut short, but its shape and its choice of materials strongly suggest the smokestack of a steam yacht.

A month later, Grover Cleveland was sworn into office for the second time. He became the 24th president of the U.S. in the midst of a national economic crisis soon to be named “the Panic of 1893.” Meanwhile, there had been rumors about a decline in his health. The new president, already obese, had been gaining weight and suffering from “rheumatic affliction”; the public worried about his heart. But what the public didn’t know was that the true worry involved a sore in Cleveland’s mouth, which tests secretly confirmed was cancerous.

In what appeared to be another routine trip from New York City to Bourne on the Oneida on July 1, 1893, a team of surgeons secretly boarded the yacht. Offshore, they sedated the president and removed the tumor, together with his entire upper left jaw. Cleveland was then fitted with a prosthesis to restore his appearance, and, eventually, allow him to speak normally. He spent the rest of the summer recuperating at Grey Gables, and didn’t return to Washington until August 31.

The crew was sworn to secrecy. The story didn’t come out until 1917, nearly a decade after Cleveland’s death. “I have always thought that due credit was not given to the crew for their never betraying what had taken place,” wrote the surgeon, Dr. W.W. Keen, in his confessions to the Saturday Evening Post in 1917.

Reehle continued his work aboard the Oneida, helping taxi the president, his family, and guests, and select VIPs up and down the New England coast to various yachting and social engagements.

Meanwhile, Benton Reehle had evidently returned to Edgartown, presumably cared for by his grandparents or the extended Blankenship family. In August 1895, Ben’s body was discovered lying on the sand under several feet of water off the north wharf in Edgartown Harbor. He was fished out with a net, and was successfully resuscitated by Dr. J.A. Vaughn, a visiting physician. Ben recovered, and eventually became a newspaper pressroom foreman in Everett.

Jacob Reehle eventually left the Oneida, going on to serve as chief engineer aboard the steam yacht Norman, and then on Howard Gould’s “palatial yacht” Niagara, described as “the largest pleasure yacht ever built in the U.S.” There is no evidence he ever returned to the Vineyard.

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.