USA > Massachusetts > Dukes County > Marthas Vineyard > Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935 > Part 1
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M. L.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01100 7801
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MARTHA'S VINEYARD
Summer Resort 1835-1935
By HENRY BEETLE HOUGH
Profusely Illustrated
THE TUTTLE PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. RUTLAND, VERMONT
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ОПЛАУБИТ / ЗАНТЛАМ
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1774476
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Photograph by Richard L. Simon
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Summer in West Tisbury-the Congregational Church
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844497 .42
Hough, Henry Beetle.
Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935, by Henry Beetle Hough ... Rutland, Vt., The Tuttle publishing com- pany, inc. (1936,
276 p. front., plates, plans. 21cm.
1. Martha's Vineyard, Mass .- Hist.
I. Title.
36-16999
Library of Congress
F72.MGH74
- Copy 2.
.
H 6268
Copyright A 96639 974.49
CHY! ! CARD
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The writer of this history is indebted to many friends for con- tributions from their store of information about Martha's Vineyard. They have freely opened their records, their memories, and their wise perspective to him, and he hopes that the use he has made of this material will not disappoint them. Since this narrative is directed to the general reader and not to the student, no bibliography is appended; but a complete list of references has been deposited in the archives of the Dukes County Historical Society.
Thanks are due particularly to James E. Chadwick, who was once a director of the Martha's Vineyard Railroad; to Theodore S. Wimpenney, who can recall helping to build the first Sengekon- tacket Bridge and the famous Sea View hotel; to Marshall Shepard, president of the Dukes County Historical Society, and to all the members of the council of that Society; to Mrs. Arthur W. Davis, for records of her grandfather, Capt. Shubael Lyman Norton; to George A. Hough for a collection of Martha's Vineyard material made over many years; and to others who, unfortunately, cannot be listed by name, for general or specific contributions of annals of the past century.
Fortunate is he who ventures upon any historical research on the Island of Martha's Vineyard, for he is certain of the most helpful and loyal support.
Henry B. Hough
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I Beginnings . Page 9
II Society and Sulphur Water Page 12 III "Without a Single Dash of Chesterfield" . Page 19
IV The Fleet's In .
Page
26
V The Magic Lantern of Gay Head Page
29
VI The Groves were God's First Temples
Page
32
VII "The Angel of the Lord Encampeth"
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38
VIII "How Goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy Tabernacles, O Israel" Page 43
IX "Religion never was designed to make pleas- ure less" Page 48
X Home by the Seaside Page
55
XI A Seven Foot Picket Fence .
Page 64
XII A Summer Resort is Built .
Page
69
XIII The Days of the Great Boom Page
84
XIV Katama the Lovely
Page 91
XV A Railroad Built Upon Sand Page
99
XVI General Grant at the Cottage City Page 114
XVII Debts are Coming Due Page 117
XVIII The Cottage City of America Page 123
XIX Illumination Page 132
XX A Woman and Her Hens Page 139
XXI An Octagon for Peanuts Page [144
XXII Baptist on the Highlands Page 146
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XXIII Home Fires Page 152
XXIV Fierce Civil Strife
Page 155
XXV The Great Park Case Page 164
XXVI Liquor is a Problem Page 182
XXVII Dr. Harrison A. Tucker
Page 186
XXVIII The Oak Bluffs Club .
Page 194
XXIX Summer Entertainment
Page 198
XXX The Katama Anti-Climax
Page 209
XXXI Flames in the Sky Page 211
XXXII Episode of 1895 . Page 219
XXXIII The Woman in Red
Page 220
XXXIV Innisfail
Page 225
XXXV Red Cedars and Blue Harbor
Page 229
XXXVI Makonikey
Page 232
XXXVII Summer People Up-Island .
Page 235
XXXVIII A Hotel is Born .
Page 242
XXXIX Chappaquiddick . Page 245
XL Development by Electricity
Page 248
XLI Irrepressible Conflict Page 251
XLII Endings Page 260
XLIII Country Club Decades Page 268
ILLUSTRATIONS
West Tisbury Church . Frontispiece
Opposite Page
Layout of four typical up-Island houses
12
Layout of six Edgartown views 24
Camp Meeting Pastorale-Old print 36
Tent and cottage life-six views in layout 46
Artist's conception of the Cottage City-bird's eye view 58
Layout of four Cottage City views; tent, horse car, etc. 66
The Glory that was the Sea View Hotel 78
Layout of four Vineyard Haven views : scene over houses above, store and house below 88
Mattakeeset Lodge, Katama
96
Locomotive 112
Gateway to Vineyard-panorama of waterfront, wharf, boat, etc. . 124
Gala days-layout of two views, band and men decorating cottages 136
First plan of Highlands-legacy of confusion 148
Vineyard Haven-view from heights through trees 162
First plan of Oak Bluffs-study for town planners 172
Gay Head-ox Cart on beach 184
Reproduction of Illumination adv .- old line drawings of buildings and scenes 194
Stone walls and boulders against skyline in Chilmark 210
Abode of peace and rest-Innisfail Hotel . 226
Two views-lighthouse at end of street and winter view 234
Foot races on Main Street, Edgartown 244
Boats dominate scene at Menemsha . 252
Summer morning detail-Edgartown waterfront scene 260
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MARTHA'S VINEYARD SUMMER RESORT
I Beginnings
Martha's Vineyard has an eventful history which reaches back into the remote centuries of exploration and new horizons (in their time the mariners of the Vineyard were to change more than one horizon themselves); but this narrative begins just a hundred years ago when the first things happened which were to make the Island a summer resort. Some writers believe that Leif Eriksson visited Martha's Vineyard in the earliest years of the eleventh century, and that this was the place he called Straumey, or Island of currents. All who know the strong tides of the vicinity agree that the name is an apt one. It is not unlike the name the Indians used, which was Noepe, meaning "amid the waters."
There is evidence that Verrazano visited Martha's Vineyard in 1524 and called the Island Luisa, another poetic name. Then, with the arrival of Bartholomew Gosnold late in May, 1602, all uncer- tainty ends, and history takes the place of sagas and fragmentary maps and chronicles. The real beginning of all the history of New England is to be found in this visit of Gosnold and his gentlemen; and although the expedition had a commercial motive in the cargoes of sassafras which were sought and found, it is impossible not to notice that the English captain came at the proper time of year to be a summer visitor.
Certainly he and his men gained a summer visitor's impression, and the sunlight and pristine freshness of May, 1602, shine through the years, to the envy of newer generations. The descriptions written by Brereton and Archer, chroniclers of the voyage, have something of the same spell which Shakespeare cast in The Tempest, and that play may easily have been written after the eager, half-awed, half- inspired accounts of the returning discoverers. Other adventurers have felt the same appeal and thrill of the Island, but only Gosnold could be first on the scene.
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tive years of the resort were too early for women to be prominent as individuals, except in the case of Nancy Luce, an out-and-out "character," and the Woman in Red on the Cottage City beach, who symbolized the beauty and romance of a generation. Thus the moonlight and tenderness of summer days by the sea are reflected in faces unseen, nameless phantoms in crinoline or skirted bathing suits or smart turnouts of the nineties, and the actors who stride about and talk are sea captains, promoters, or affluent cottagers . such as Dr. Harrison A. Tucker.
The original intention was to include in these pages everything known about Martha's Vineyard as a summer resort; everything, at least, which might have a bearing upon the causes, nature and effects of resort life. Everything is not here, however. Many facts seemed too dull, or repetitious, or inconsequential, and were thrown away. In what remains, although no page should stand quite out of hearing of the surf on the South Beach, business is the dominant motive. The speculator or investor is almost as constant in the landscape as the tree.
The summer resort story begins with the somewhat difficult visits of early travelers who put up at inns; the admiration of natural marvels such as the surf, the Gay Head clay cliffs, and the climate; the exhorting and praying at camp meeting in a grove surrounded by pasture; the astonishing growth and consequences of the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting; it goes on to describe a golden age which blossomed like an exotic flower, only to fade again; speculation and land schemes; visionary cities which exist only in the strange picture books of public records preserved in a vault; bitter factional quarrels, law cases, and the permanent re-ordering of Island life. The names of the great and near-great are mingled in the drift of summer seasons. Croquet is present almost from the beginning; bicycles, stereoscopic views, golf, tennis, and roller skating appear, and some of them pass.
Some consideration at the last is given to the social characteris- tics of the summer resort today, but a complete treatment of such a many-sided subject and its numerous collateral issues would require a separate volume. For the present, enough has been written to bring our own day into relationship with the past.
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II Society and Sulphur Water
Before there were summer resorts, there were watering places. The sharpness of the older conception has faded long since. Society, those who wished to mingle with society, and invalids of certain temperaments or ailments, used to gather around mineral springs and share experiences in the communities to which these springs gave character and reputation. Saratoga was first of all in America, and there one could take the waters amid an atmosphere in which nature and human pretensions were pleasantly mingled. There were hotels in Saratoga before 1800, barn-like structures which gave way to caravansaries in an American adaptation of the grand style. The fashionables who journeyed there a century ago are more like char- acters in a book even than most past generations. Their realities are different from ours and, what is more important, their unrealities -fads, diversions, prejudices-so that they had little in common with the summer visitors of our own day except an inflection of the spirit, the insubstantial but significant quality of a gesture. It is the gesture which has survived.
After all, the tradition of watering places came from the old world. General Philip Schuyler, the first leader of society to choose a summer residence at Saratoga, was transplanting and not origi- nating a custom. Moreover, he had singularly wide latitude. There were no great cities in America, and such cities as there were offered no barrier to human beings who desired to escape the heat and dust. A short drive, or even a walk, from the business center of New York or Boston was quite enough to take one to some unspoiled river bank, sea beach, hilltop or bit of countryside. Streams were unpol- luted, and cool groves were easy to find. Crowds were quite the thing in cities, but they were not oppressive or difficult to avoid. The dreadful suburbs, smoking factories, garbage docks, power stations and rows of ready-made houses on sizzling streets have all come since the time of the first American watering places.
Accordingly, there was no premium on mere fresh air and sun- shine. Something more than a clean beach and pellucid water was required to make a resort, and sulphur springs were an admirable
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Photographs by George A. Hough
Typical old houses in the Up-Island countryside : upper left, John Baxter house, now Little Orchard, summer home of Edward G. Lowry; lower left, Shubael Gray house, now The Gray House, summer home of Mrs. C. W. Leavitt; lower right, Albert Look house, now occupied by Manuel Silvia. These three are on Seven Gates Farm. Upper right: Henry H. Norton house, now owned by James F. Sanborn.
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nucleus about which social sanction could evolve a colony. Sulphur baths and beakers of sulphur water lifted a plain rural place into the aristocracy. And so to Saratoga came the southerners after a successful season, to it the ambitious westerners, to it the gentry of the North River, to it all the expansive New England families. The place was an epitome of the best American society.
Later there were Sharon and Richfield Springs, and then the ambitious swellings of Newport as the star of the new sort of summer resort rose above the horizon. Civilization was advancing more rapidly, and nature, almost everywhere, was declining. New- port, Long Branch, Lake George-and Martha's Vineyard.
Martha's Vineyard had to wait for the drawing of a sharp dis- tinction between city and country, and for the pressure of urban changes and urban congestion to drive wealth and fashion skittishly before them into new, remoter fields. There were early visitors to the Vineyard, many of them; but insular position removed the com- munity from the beaten track, and some instinct of adventure or some unusual capacity to press on were necessary if one were to reach it. The early visitors were all discoverers.
Truth to tell, this quality has persisted. There is a special cir- cumstance about going to an island which cannot fail to have its effect upon a person who inhabits a continent. As the steamboat crosses Vineyard Sound, and the dark green woods, the white light- house, the gleaming beach sands and the buff cliffs at West Chop- as these things seem to rise above the water and grow nearer, there is an inner disturbance in the beholder. His heart is leaping up.
What one finds upon an island is seldom disappointing, unless it is a small and barren island indeed. Martha's Vineyard, as it happens, has about a hundred square miles of land (though the sea each year washes some away) and the variety of countryside makes description complicated and difficult. After the Vineyard became a summer resort, its attractions were eulogized many times in advertisements, pamphlets and handbills announcing the sale of lots. It might seem presumptuous to substitute further words of description, or to add to those already written through many decades. Yet the truth is that the Island has found its best interpreters in casual visitors, in the cul-
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tivated enthusiasm of amateurs, rather than in promoters and the enterprise of catchpenny writers.
A hundred years ago, as now, the visitor found an island lying in the form of an irregular triangle, the greatest length about twenty miles, and the greatest width not quite ten miles. At the extreme western end, a series of majestic cliffs presented a gaudy escarpment of colored clay-reds of vivid shades, pure white, yellow, deep black, green, russet, orange-to the entrance of Vineyard Sound. The great height of the cliffs-one hundred and fifty feet in places-and the manner in which they were serried and broken into planes, peaks, projections, and sweeping declivities, made them more impressive than one could imagine who had never witnessed their magnificence from a small boat, from the beach below, or from a vantage point on the heights themselves. For once a natural phenomenon found its perfect name on the tongue of some inspired but anonymous pioneer -Gay Head. The place was the home of Indians, and so it is today.
The headland itself was broken by hills, by cranberry swamps, blue ponds of fresh water, and adorned by boulders and curiously shaped trees which had grown against the sweeping winds. A deep pond, cutting almost through the Island from Vineyard Sound to the Atlantic Ocean, almost but not quite severed Gay Head from the rest of the Island. Along the north shore, bordering Vineyard Sound, a range of hills, although of no great height as hills are ordinarily judged, gave the effect of towering in lofty fashion. Prospect Hill rose 308 feet above the sea, and Peaked Hill 311 feet, highest of all. Many peaks stood by themselves, their sides strewn with boulders. This profusion of glacial rocks, some small, some enormous, marked the whole region. Boulders, too, lay along the beach, the greatest of them like monuments. All the way from Gay Head to West Chop this beach ran, cut into coves, some of them sandy and some of them indescribably cluttered with the glistening rocks, wet and weedy. Toward West Chop the hills subsided in series, until there were no more hills at all.
West Chop formed one arm of land guarding the harbor of Holmes Hole, which is now Vineyard Haven. Across the harbor was East Chop, and both chops terminated in bluffs dropping abruptly to Vineyard Sound. The harbor itself was of the utmost importance
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to passing vessels, of which there were great numbers. It served as an open roadstead, sheltered from every wind but the northeast. Time was when the three most important cities in Massachusetts were three ports, Boston, Salem, and Nantucket. The same maritime economy made Holmes Hole important also, to such an extent that Jonathan Grout in 1802 put into operation a semaphore telegraph system with stations all the way to Boston in order to keep the mer- chant princes in close touch with arrivals and departures at the Vine- yard.
Following the shore of the Island from East Chop, one found that it turned now and stretched, lower and sandier, some six miles to Edgartown. Edgartown was first called Great Harbor but its name was changed in honor of a poor waif of a prince, Edgar, Duke of Cambridge and presumptive Prince of Wales, who died at the age of four, a whole month before the rechristening of his town on the Vineyard. Across this great harbor, winding like a shell between green banks and sheltered beaches, lay Chappaquiddick, a sort of sub-island of Martha's Vineyard where lived Indians and the fami- lies of sea captains. The harbor opened into a broad bay, named Ka- tama, which was separated from the Atlantic Ocean only by a narrow strip of beach and shifting dunes. If the barrier beach was broken by storm, Chappaquiddick became an island; if the beach closed again, Chappaquiddick was again made fast.
The ocean shore, known for many generations as the South Beach, stretched out almost in a straight line from Chappaquiddick and Katama to Squibnocket, which constituted the ocean side of Gay Head. Against this shelving reach of fine sand the Atlantic drove in with majesty, booming a rhythm which was heard by day and by night all over the Island. Lonely, majestic and always appeal- ing to the human beholder, the South Beach asserted a supremacy which has never been denied.
The Island has been bounded. In its interior were valleys with winding streams, mill ponds and old dams, secret swamps well hidden from the sea, great thickets, woods of oak, pine, cedar, maple and beech, and great drifts and sprinklings of glacial rocks. One could find swamp honeysuckle and sweet pepperbush in season, the trailing arbutus, the aromatic bayberry, and the beach plum with its gnarled
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and windbeaten attitudes. The lilac was nowhere more at home than in Vineyard dooryards, and it bloomed in spring long after door- yards and houses vanished. Here, too, the daffodil grew and flowered without care. In season the air was perfumed to ecstasy by the wild grapes, and Islanders went into swamps and glades to return with baskets heaping with grapes of nostalgic fragrance.
From the hills of Chilmark, the town which lay nearest Gay Head, and all the hills of the north shore, there was an abrupt drop to the Great Plain, a level expanse of apparently endless miles which did, however, end at Edgartown. The plain was grooved with gentle depressions not unlike giant fingermarks, the beds of subglacial streams; and as it approached the South Shore, it was cut by the long coves and reaches of great ponds, a series of them, all the way from Edgartown to Squibnocket. These ponds were separated from the ocean by the South Beach alone, and sometimes the breakers would crash and crash over in a storm. Normally the Islanders opened the beaches at certain times of the year, to salt the ponds for better fishing or growth of oysters, and the openings were closed again by the force of the sea.
Once the Great Plain had been wooded with conifers, but it had been cut and burned over, so that even a hundred years ago it supported a scraggly growth of scrub oak, not much larger than brush. Here and there a deformed pine or blasted oak of larger size stood above the scrub, roosting place for hawks, eagles or crows. On the Great Plain the sweetfern grew, wildflowers in profusion, and, especially after a spring fire, blueberries and huckleberries of large size and succulence.
The wealth of Martha's Vineyard came principally from the business of whaling. Nantucket, though it had greater fame in the industry, was handicapped by a harbor bar past which laden whale- ships could not go. Accordingly, all through the stirring decades when whaling flourished between wars, Edgartown served as the port for Nantucket. All Nantucket ships left the last of their fitting to be done at Edgartown, and when they returned from voyages they discharged oil there also. But Edgartown was a port in her own right as well. She owned whaling vessels. Most of all, like all Martha's Vineyard, she owned whaling captains and mates of every degree.
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The Island was a remarkable nursery of mariners and, for the most part, of whaling captains. Edgartown had, a hundred years ago, some fifteen hundred inhabitants-she has almost as many now- and she alone could count at least eighty whaling captains at sea. There were many more later. The Rev. Samuel Adams Devens, who investigated Martha's Vineyard thoroughly about 1835, wrote that "out of a population in Edgartown of fifteen hundred (which num- ber comprises all ages, male and female), about three hundred of those who have arrived at maturity-the most active and vigorous, the bone and muscle of the community, are, I may say, ever abroad and in all quarters of the globe : and further that, out of a population of three thousand on the Island, about five or six hundred cannot be said to have a home upon the land, but go down and not only go down, but live upon the sea in ships and do business, most venture- some business, upon the great waters."
Anyone who knows the records of whaling knows how often the names of Luce, Pease, Norton, Jernegan, Manter, Daggett, Cottle, Mayhew, Tilton, Claghorn and Hillman occur and occur again. These were and are Vineyard names. More masters of whaleships came from Martha's Vineyard than from any other community. On Chappaquiddick-may it never be forgotten-there were three houses, weathered into the landscape, standing within a stone's throw of one another, and in these houses Valentine Pease, Josiah Pease and Ephraim Ripley brought up their families : thirty children, of whom twenty-nine grew to maturity, seventeen boys became ship- masters, and seven girls became the wives of shipmasters.
The Gay Head Indians had their own unique relationship to whaling. They had been the first whalemen of the new world, and their skill with the harpoon was as well founded as it was proverbial. Tashtego in Moby Dick was a symbolical figure without which the greatest classic of whaling would have been incomplete. Into all the oceans of the world the Gay Headers went, and their prowess won undying fame. Only in our own generation has the tradition come to an end, for there is nothing more for old time whalemen to do at sea. A few years ago Joseph G. Belain died at the age of seventy-nine, and sixty of his years had been lived on the far oceans. When his funeral was held in the Gay Head church, a carrier pigeon flew in
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from the sea and alighted on the hearse, and stayed until the service was done.
Outside of Edgartown, a century ago, the population was divided between the towns of Tisbury, which included the village of Holmes Hole, and Chilmark, which extended from a line not quite midway of the Island, to the border of Gay Head. Gay Head, which was a reservation and not a town, had something more than two hundred inhabitants. But there were Indians also on Chappaquiddick and at a settlement near the north shore, within the town of Tisbury, which was called Christiantown.
Of the Islanders who did not go to sea, some lived by plying the trades of carpenter, shipwright, iron worker or cooper, making casks for whale oil. There were bakeries turning out hardtack for ships, and at Edgartown a manufactory of beaver hats for captains. There were shops of ship chandlers, sail lofts, boatyards, and at Edgartown too, Dr. Daniel Fisher was soon to have the largest oil works in the world, manufacturing sperm candles and purveying oil to the federal government.
Agriculture was important, but even the farmers counted the sea as one of their resources. They kept their boats drawn up on the shore, and went after fish in season, or put them alongside passing vessels to trade fish and game for molasses or laths. The great ponds supplied them with oysters, clams, eels and herring. They carted sea weed with ox teams for their fields. And the great flocks of sheep which ranged the Chilmark and Tisbury hills (there were at one time fifteen thousand sheep on the Island) ate of grass and herbage which had been sprinkled with salt spray, so that their mutton acquired an added tang and palatable quality.
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