October on this Island has a rhythm to it, and this year that rhythm runs through our historical buildings. On Oct. 10 and 11, from 10 am to 4 pm, the Grange Hall in West Tisbury fills up with tables of handmade goods for the Vineyard Artisans Fall Festival. On the 25th, the Agricultural Hall fills up, but this time it’s with pie contests and sustainability demos, for the Ag Society’s sixth annual Harvest Festival. Two weeks apart, two historical halls, two completely different definitions of what it means to make something with your hands.
I want to start with the artisans, because I think we undersell what actually happens at that festival. It is easy to walk through a room of vendor tables, call it “shopping local,” and move on. But every single item on those tables started as raw material in a person’s two hands, with no factory line in between. If anything, this should be called “shopping big” not “shopping small”! I can’t imagine how much courage you must have to create and sell your wares to the public, which is why I’m shining a light on them today.
Take Amy Nevin or Up-Island Pottery, both throwing functional, beautiful pieces that will end up as somebody’s everyday coffee mug for the next 20 years. Walk a few tables down and you’ll find Hypatia Book Arts, where living masterpieces are created by binding books by hand, a dying craft that somebody on this Island decided was worth keeping alive.
The jewelry alone could fill its own paragraph, and it will. Analog Archival creates pieces from repurposed dead stock, broken or unsellable pieces of jewelry. Cecilia Designs has always been a favorite of mine, just the wide variety is admirable, and she works with Island beach rocks, quahog shells, and other semiprecious stones in a unique way. Kenneth Pillsworth Jewelry, Liam McGorman Jewelry, L A Hart Jewelry, and Cynthia McGrath all round out the jewelry offerings, each with a completely different eye, none of them interchangeable the way mass-produced jewelry always is.
Then there’s the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into a category. Amy Benford’s adorable beach glass series of art, Beldan Radcliffe’s mixed-media and one-of-a-kind garments from upcycled materials, Debra and Warren Gaines’ incredible, Island-inspired fine art with their landscape photography, along with original oil, acrylic, pastel, and encaustic paintings. Don’t worry, I had to look up what encaustic meant, so let me share the definition with you: It’s an ancient art form that uses heated beeswax mixed with dammar resin and colored pigments! All done right here on this Island!
Here’s why I think this matters more than a nice weekend browsing tables and saying hi to friends. “Locally made” is not a trend or a marketing angle, even though I say a version of that sentence in nearly every client meeting or conversation I have. Long before anyone on this Island called it a “festival,” people here were making what they needed with what was around them, out of necessity first and pride second. The instinct to work with your hands and make something that lasts did not start with an Etsy shop. It is baked into this Island; it’s human nature.
And while speaking about humans and nature, Indigenous Peoples’ Day falls on the 12th, the Monday right after the local artisans pack up their tables. I don’t think it is a coincidence worth overemphasizing, but I also don’t think it should pass without a mention. The Wampanoag were making baskets, tools, and textiles on this land for thousands of years before any festival table existed here, a tradition of working with your hands that the rest of us are, in our own small way, still borrowing from every time we choose to buy something made by a person in favor of something made by a machine.
Which brings us to the other kind of harvest, two weeks later, when the Ag Hall fills up for its Harvest Festival on the 25th. This one is less about what people made and more about what the land itself produced this year, and October is when you can actually see it. The festival is packed with all the classics of an autumnal festival: pumpkin carving, farm animals, crafts and games for kids and adults, gardening and sustainability demos, tractors, antique power displays, and scavenger hunts. There are plenty of contests, like corn husking, squash toss, pie baking, pie eating, tug of war, and more. I’m excited to learn there will also be a clothing swap, indigo dyeing, local eats, and live music by Blues Switch and the Flying Elbows.
Now, if you want to eat your way through this month the way I plan to, here are farms worth driving to before the season turns.
Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown is filled to the brim with both edible and ornamental pumpkins and squashes, gorgeous mums, and with a kitchen and bakery that never seem to slow down. Beetlebung Farm up in Chilmark is one of my new favorites, with their baked goods offering even delicious brownies that are alpha-gal friendly — a must-try. North Tabor Farm, also in Chilmark, is where the talented Irene Wong, chef-in-residence, had been all summer, creating some of the tastiest biscuits, dips, and treats: I hope she left some of her recipes for us to keep enjoying. Mermaid Farm and Dairy has raw milk, yogurt, lassi, and cheese, the latter of which we will need a lot of while we cook at home the comfort-food recipes that we know are coming with the cooler weather. I’m thinking I’ll start with making a French onion soup topped with Mermaid Farm Gouda, and take it from there.
Native Earth Teaching Farm keeps goats, and is as much an education as it is a farm. Allen Farm Sheep and Wool has been running since 1762, which puts this month’s harvest in a pretty serious historical context: wool and lamb meat from a farm older than the country it sits in. Ghost Island Farm in West Tisbury grows something like a hundred varieties of open-pollinated tomatoes, and leans hard into the season with their own fall displays — I’m still jumping out of my passenger seat whenever we drive by.
Local farms and local artisans, two halls filling up with the results of their year, pie contests and squash tosses layered on top of it, because apparently we cannot celebrate a harvest on this Island without also turning it into a competition — and know that I will be competing in both pie baking and eating!
What strikes me, looking at these two weekends side by side, is that they are really the same, deep down. One is hands shaping clay, wood, metal, and leather into something that did not exist before. The other is hands pulling something out of the ground that the land was already growing, then turning it into dinner, or a jar of jam, or a slice of pie good enough to win a contest. Both are proof that this Island still runs, at its core, on people making things themselves rather than buying the easiest version available. That was true for the Wampanoag long before it was true for any of us, and it is still true now, two weeks apart, in the town of West Tisbury.
So go to both, and buy the mug, the handcrafted earrings, the fresh loaf of sourdough, the pie. It all comes from the same place, and at the end of the day, aren’t we all but the same humans, all living profound experiences on this Island we call home?
With that, may your harvest be plentiful, may your tables be filled with nourishment, and may you bake an extra pie this season to bring over to a friend.
