Chris Baer
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...
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,...