Chris Baer
This Was Then: Francis Lewis
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!
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...