Thursday, September 21, 2023
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Chris Baer

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This Was Then: Francis Lewis

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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It was late in the day on August 27, 1689. Capt. John Kent of Newbury, Mass., was sailing his brig, Merrimack, from New York...