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, and planned to become a cooper. But then he bought...
This Was Then: Capt. Abner West and the Sapelo River Expedition
Capt. Abner West (1811–1902) of Vineyard Haven had just about retired from the sea. He had been aboard ship most of his life, having begun his whaling career as a mess boy at the...
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 road that British troops drove thousands of plundered sheep and...
This Was Then: The remarkable life of Sarah Norton Wilbur
Sarah “Sally” (Norton) Wilbur (1792–1875) likely died within a mile of where she was born, in the lands just west of Major’s Cove, in what is today part of Oak Bluffs. Her lonely grave,...
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 and early 1900s were from three Portuguese-speaking archipelagos in the...
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 board Ship Junior of New Bedford off the coast of...
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 to build the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. Favorite recipes were...
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 peace and quiet. Others isolated themselves for reasons we may...
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 lines on the wharf at Woods Hole, building model ships...
This Was Then: Henry Clay Wade
The plaques on the side of the Civil War statue in Oak Bluffs have garnered a lot of attention in recent years. But you may have overlooked one of them. It reads, simply: “Henry...
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 automobiles arrived, was a spectacle.
In mid-December 1875, the 234-foot transfer...
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 volcanic archipelago nation off the coast of West Africa known...
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 North Carolina. His mother died when he was a child.
By...
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 sisters Hattie and Ida Flanders, sometimes referred to as “the...
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 Vineyard Haven’s five well-known Bodfish brothers: Josiah, the dry goods...
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 of Agriculture, established by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, oversees everything...
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 heat, we had stoves — parlor stoves — and a...
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 Island in 1807, he listed: “Besides domestick animals, the quadrupeds...
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 Island: eagles, “hernshaws” (herons), cranes, bitterns, mallards, teals, geese, penguins,...
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 numerous in centuries past.
The first written record of pigs on...