Chris Baer
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...
This Was Then: The gamblers
Joseph Thaxter, born in Hingham in 1744, grew up sickly and impoverished. He worked on his parents' meager farm until the age of 19,...
This Was Then: The Old County Road
The Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road dates back to the late 18th century and probably earlier, although not entirely in its modern location.
It was along this...
This Was Then: From islands to Island
It shouldn’t be a surprise that an island would attract islanders. Many of the families who settled on the Vineyard in the late 1800s...
This Was Then: The Christmas mutiny of 1857
An empty grave in Edgartown is topped with a stone bearing a remarkable engraving:
"Capt. Archibald Mellen Jr.born at Tisbury June 5, 1830, and murdered on...
This Was Then: Old Island cooking
Want to prepare an authentically old-fashioned Vineyard meal for the holidays? Look no further than the "Island Cook Book," published in 1924 as a fundraiser...
This Was Then: Island Hermits
Our Island has hidden a lot of hermits and recluses over the years. Some perhaps hiding, some just peculiar, some maybe seeking a little...
This Was Then: Keeping warm
My grandfather, Stan Lair (1902–87) of Vineyard Haven, worked a lot of jobs in his life — helping tear down the brickyard in Chilmark, catching...
This Was Then: Transfer steamer Maryland
To see a huge, open-ended car ferry in Vineyard Haven Harbor is normal. To see one in 1875, a full generation before the first...
This Was Then: T. M. Silvia
Theophilus Miguel “T. M.” Silvia was born in 1877 on Ilha de São Nicolau, a mountainous island in the Republic of Cabo Verde, the...