Chris Baer
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...
This Was Then: Turkey Land
Former President Barack Obama summers in a quiet part of Edgartown known as Turkeyland (sometimes spelled “Turkey Land”). Edgartonians were long mocked as “Old...
This Was Then: MacNeill’s Grocery
At the edge of downtown Oak Bluffs, on the corner of Pennacook and Circuit Avenues, stands a building with a long and colorful history:...
This Was Then: Forgotten films
Obie Tower liked his toys. Basil Welch reminisced about him in a 1982 conversation with my grandfather, Stan Lair, in a recording made about...
This Was Then: The Sanitarium
Martha’s Vineyard was widely promoted in the late 1800s and early 1900s as a place of healing. The ad-packed 1932 booklet titled “Martha’s Vineyard:...
This Was Then: Pernambuco, Brazil
The Brazilian state of Pernambuco could be compared geographically to Massachusetts: a small, populous, Atlantic coastal state shaped like a rectangular(ish) slab, sporting 100...
This Was Then: Captain Pound
It was late in the day on August 27, 1689. Capt. John Kent of Newbury, Mass., was sailing his brig, Merrimack, from New York...
This Was Then: Floods, eclipses, and volcanoes
An alarming report began to circulate in newspapers across the country during the summer of 1796. “Extraordinary Occurrence” ran the headlines. Under a New...
This Was Then: Heck Benefit
The first of the two Benefit brothers to arrive on Martha’s Vineyard at the turn of the last century used many names and spellings...
This Was Then: Classes of 1952
Before the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School opened in 1959, there were three secondary schools on the Island: Edgartown High School, Oak Bluffs High...
This Was Then: Selim Mattar’s Dreamland
Brothers Selim and Meek Mattar immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers, about 1890. They were natives of the city of Beirut, then part of...
This Was Then: The deerly departed
As the most recently departed generation of Islanders would have told us, there were no deer on Martha’s Vineyard.
“There wasn’t any then,” declared Fanny...
This Was Then: Barnstorming
Ever since the first hydroplanes landed in Oak Bluffs in 1919, Martha’s Vineyard has had a reputation for bold and sometimes renegade aviators. Teenage...
This Was Then: Captain Cleveland and the wrong cache
George Cleveland (1871–1925) grew up on Hatch Road in Vineyard Haven, in a neighborhood full of extended family. He attended the old North District...
This Was Then: The 1950 census
It’s April 1950. The boomers are just babies, and the Atomic Age has arrived. Harry Truman is president, World War II has ended, the...