Chris Baer
This Was Then: The Barber of the Black Second
William Henry Dewey was born into slavery in 1858 in New Bern, a riverfront town in Craven County, in the rural Inner Banks of...
This Was Then: The bakers
The only commercial bakery advertising in Chilmark in the early 20th century was I.F. Flanders & Co. in Menemsha Creek. It was run by...
This Was Then: Frank Bodfish, blacksmith
Blacksmith William Bodfish and his wife Polly Crowell moved to Holmes Hole from Yarmouth in the late 1850s, where they became the parents of...
This Was Then: The 1912 Fair
For generations, the fair has been a late-summer draw for kids of all ages. The late Stan Lair (1902-1987) of Vineyard Haven remembered it...
This Was Then: The tick scientists
In the early 1940s, decades before Lyme disease was discovered, there was the USDA Ticks Affecting Man field laboratory in Vineyard Haven.
The U.S. Department...
This Was Then: The coal yards
Martha’s Vineyard once ran on coal.
“We didn't have any electricity,” recalled Stan Lair (1902-1987) about his Vineyard Haven childhood in a 1980 interview. “For...
Of mink and Mink Meadows
Mink once lived on Martha’s Vineyard. When writer James Freeman made an inventory of the wild animals he found on a visit to the...
This Was Then: The Island’s lost birds
In 1602, John Brereton, chronicler of Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold’s exploration of Martha’s Vineyard, recorded the many different kinds of birds he saw on the...
This Was Then: Pig tales
Martha’s Vineyard is not known for its swine, but hogs have historically been a critically important Island livestock; only sheep and cattle were more...
Naming West Tisbury’s streets
The roads of West Tisbury are full of curious names. Some of their stories we know; others are seemingly forgotten.
Who, for instance, was “Tiah”...
This Was Then: Chief King
Before 911, before police radios and walkie-talkies, there were blue light bulbs over Main Street, Vineyard Haven. When a call for help came in,...
This Was Then: A story of three Vineyard men
Brothers William and Luther West of Chilmark were of solid Island stock. Their parents and grandparents were all Island natives, as they were. Their...
This Was Then: Doppelgängers and namesakes
Our Island shares its names with people, places, and products around the world, some for historically connected reasons and others by coincidence, complicating our...
This Was Then: Superintendent of streets
“You didn't have tractors, you didn't have the machinery that you got today,” recalled the late Basil Welch of Vineyard Haven in a 1982...
This Was Then: Welcome to Oak Bluff … Manitoba
It’s a little unfair to ridicule tourists for asking directions to “Oaks Bluff.” There is an Oaks Bluff. About a 47-hour drive west of...
This Was Then: Some assembly required
The Ford Motor Company is often lauded for the invention of the modern assembly line (a claim that begins with a lot of caveats)....
This Was Then: Smith, Bodfish, and Swift
S.B.S. — Smith, Bodfish, and Swift — was once an extensive Island chain. Their flagship store was a grocery on Main Street, Vineyard Haven,...
This Was Then: Dolph
“I recall Dolph; his job in the winter was to plow the sidewalks after a snowstorm,” remembered the late Stan Lair (1902-1987) of Vineyard...
This Was Then: Street Store
There were no fewer than seven grocery stores in downtown Edgartown at the turn of the 20th century. The list, which included Pease Brothers,...
This Was Then: North School and Hill Mill
There were four school districts in Edgartown at the time of the American Revolution: “Pohoganut,” the Plains, Chappaquiddick, and Edgartown village. In 1837, a...