USA > Massachusetts > Dukes County > Marthas Vineyard > Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935 > Part 12
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"The style of architecture is peculiar to the locality," reported the Philadelphia Press, in 1877. "These light, airy cottages, which are met on every side as one wanders through the shady avenues, in oak grove, or on the open bluffs-pretty, dainty little bird's nests of dwellings, muffled among the low trees, with tasteful beds of flowers, shell or pebble walks in fancy colors, rustic flower baskets and stands for flowers, rustic seats built on to or between the trees in front, added to the diversity of style in which the cottages are built, and the varied colors used in painting, and the different lights and shades in which they are seen, give to the whole scene a wonderful pictur-
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esqueness. And still the view is more curious in the evening when every cottage is lighted, and the wide front doors, which open directly into the principal room, are thrown wide open, and the cottagers are sitting around inside or on the broad piazzas or bal- conies, and on gala evenings, when the fancy-colored Chinese lanterns are hung around on trees and cottages, the scene is really enchanting, as if Aladdin's lamp had transported one to fairyland."
Among the ornaments of this fairyland was "a unique pagoda, surmounted with a tasty little English cottage of cast iron."
So wrote these visitors to the resort of cottages, recording the sensations and opinions of the time. But there was one who saw things differently and had something to say in a different vein. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, keen-eyed Kentuckian, went to Martha's Vineyard in 1872 for a geological study, and from Oak Bluffs he wrote home to his wife :
"The day has been hot, and, except the sea ride, quite uncom. fortable. Oak Bluffs is a mushroom town without any oaks, except some scrubs, and little in the way of bluffs, except what one gets from the super-christianized people. White pine in the shape of gothic shanties is the only forest growth I have yet found. One is shockingly reminded of the surroundings of a race track rather than a camp meeting. The place is not alto- gether bad. There are some hundreds of box-like houses of a queer and profane architecture occupied by people of the middle classes or waiting for some one of that class to buy them. These little dabs of dwellings, about as big as boarding house slices of mince pie, are scattered around through the thickset copses of oaks! (save the mark) which are not high enough to hide their ten-foot eaves. There is no visible kitchen to them, nor any outward means of existence unless they live on acorns or are fed by the woodchucks or the emaciated crows, which look old enough to have performed the work for the Syrian hermit some centuries ago.
"The only substantial and satisfactory thing here is the sea that seems the greater for the weak things on its shore. It is as quiet as a baby tonight, but it looks as if it might claim this sand-heap as its plaything again some day and make an end of it. The only place to behold the sea is from an island : the main- land seems too steadfast, a boat is too familiar, besides uncom- fortable and makes a bitter end of sentiment; but here you are
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hemmed in by immensity, feeling like Jonah when the whale opened for him. A change of air always excites me; my young companion has gone to bed over-powered by emotions of a composite kind : affected almost to tears by the grandeur of the sea and the size of his supper. I hear his melancholy snore through the double coat of whitewash and wallpaper which form the wall of my room. I have no one to talk to and only a smoky coal-oil lamp for light, so I must try to sleep it off; I am obliged to the glacial period for having made my work at this end of the island quite simple. I go tomorrow or Monday to Tisbury
Shaler, one understands, was not a man of a period; his eyes swept impatiently past the playground of cottages, seeking stars, horizons, and all the footprints and meanings of the ages; his hunger was for windy and earthy things; his sympathy for mankind in a world wider and more real.
XIX
Illumination
This was the way the season went. The cottagers began coming in June, and the recreations of bathing, boating, promenading and playing croquet were soon in swift course. Through July the crowds increased, the hotels began to be crowded; and in August came the swift rise to a climax, the month of excursions, bands, outings, yachts, dances, ending in a grand illumination and . . . exodus. In all the earlier years there was no need for any entertainment in an artificial sense; life could not be more full, and amusement enter- prises were not in demand. Pleasure existed on the Vineyard without promotion, and there were few intrusions upon this spontaneity. The running of excursions by steamboat to Gay Head, the hops at the Sea View, the laying out of croquet grounds, the sale of ice cream, the supplying of stereoscopic views, the provision of plank walks, benches, bathhouses and tower, refreshment pavilions, and open parks-these were the principal concrete activities catering to the impulses and desires of the summer people. Nothing more deliberate
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or elaborate would have seemed justified by the occasion. Sophisti- cation and synthesis came later.
The bright spots of the season were, more likely than not, unpre- meditated,-chance by-products of the summer pleasure of the visi- tors themselves. In July, 1876, there was a concert at Union Chapel by the pupils of G. C. Wheeler, and as it happened the event was distinguished by the presence of a "celebrated vocalist" who happened to be, as well, the granddaughter of that old preacher, Camp Meeting John Allen. Her name was Lillian Norton, and she was not truly celebrated until some years later when she came back from abroad as one of the world's greatest Wagnerian singers; but then she was known as Madame Nordica.
Mr. Wheeler, who was responsible for this concert, produced an original composition which he called the Railroad Galop, and dedicated to Captain Shubael Lyman Norton. Mr. Wheeler also composed Stars of Heaven Gently Guide Me, which he dedicated to Richard G. Shute, photographer and maker of stereoscopic views. Only a little while before, Miss Etta Godfrey of Edgartown had composed her Oak Bluffs Galop, which was published by Oliver Ditson.
That was characteristic: the resort not only needed no internal promotion, but it promoted itself, spilling over into impromptu occasions and expressions in the arts.
The first illumination took place in 1869, and although it was sponsored by the Oak Bluffs Company-the Foxboro Brass Band being present, through the courtesy of the Hon. Erastus P. Carpenter -the observance took hold so naturally that soon no summer was complete without it. The whole resort entered into the festive spirit, and the Japanese lanterns were almost without number.
A good example of an illumination under favorable circumstances was that of August, 1877. For some reason the celebration had been set for the middle instead of the last of the month, and in its glow the faces and hearts of many thousands were transformed not for a day, but for a lingering fortnight. On the evening of August 18, the whole region of Oak Bluffs and the camp ground was surging with humanity-thirty thousand men, women and children milling about in the open spaces and walking along the avenues and plank
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walks. Piazzas of hotels and cottages were crowded; benches on the bluffs and in the parks were taken; the wharves seemed black with moving files of visitors. The deluge of humanity had begun on Friday. It continued on Saturday as steamer after steamer arrived, heavy laden.
The Monohansett docked at the Oak Bluffs wharf at three in the afternoon, a lane was cleared, and General Joe Hooker, leaning on the arm of General J. D. Thompson, proceeded from the gangplank in the company of Joseph S. Spinney, whose guest he was to be. The party proceeded up the wharf, boarded a hack, and drove to the cottage of Dr. Harrison A. Tucker on Ocean Park where a stop was made, after which the guests were driven to Mr. Spinney's elegant double cottage on the Highlands.
During the afternoon the steamers City of Boston from New London, Day Star and Crystal Wave from Providence, and Starry Banner from Falmouth arrived with more visitors. The Monohan- sett returned to New Bedford for another trip, and the Island Home came from Nantucket.
At eight in the evening a great procession of visitors and sightseers formed at the Sea View and was led by the Mansfield Cornet Band through a series of avenues, finally emerging before Dr. Tucker's cottage. The march had occupied about an hour, and the conclusion was the signal for the beginning of a brilliant spectacle. The illu- mination !
Ocean Park was lighted, not as by day, but with brighter, frenzied radiance. Rockets shot up, mines, tarbillons and Chinese bombs exploded, flared, soared and thundered. Colored tableaux fire filled the summer air with delightful hissing and sizzling, sent out a pun- gent odor, and reflected the colors of paradise in the eyes and upon the faces of the representatives of a generation.
Everywhere was brightness, crowded, colored brightness, the imagined outburst of holiday emotion taken from a dream. Those who looked on were hardly convinced that this was, after all, a sort of reality; it seemed to be of different substance. And while the fire- works went on, music filled the air from every direction, as closely absorbed into the whole night as the streaks and flares and sparks of colored fire. The Mansfield Cornet Band was in front of the Tucker
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cottage; Crooks' Band from New York was in front of the Barnes cottage, just opposite; the American Band from Providence gave a concert on the avenues and a special serenade at the Central House; Hill's Band from New Bedford arrived on the evening trip of the Monohansett and paraded through the avenues, proudly; the Me- chanics Band from Putnam, Conn., played wherever it happened to be.
Most of the bands had been brought by excursionists on the differ- ent steamers, but there was no proprietorship in the music. It spread out and merged in the general air, the sweet, singing, luminous air.
All the while cottages, hotels and stores were lighted as brightly as they could be by hundreds of Chinese and Japanese lanterns, hung on balconies, in parks between trees, in windows, on porches; bathing the buildings of the resort directly and indirectly in a wash of illu- mination. In front of many cottages Bengal and Greek fires were kept burning. In red, green and blue light the facades of the cottages were lighted into grotesque unreality, scroll-work, turrets, gables and all. There was no distinction of place or caste; the camp ground was as gaudy as Oak Bluffs, and the residents of different parks and avenues tried in friendly rivalry to outdo one another.
During the day the Negro town crier, whose name, so far as anyone knew, was George Washington Peckstout Glorious Valor- ious (he said that was it), had been ringing his bell and proclaiming that the Martha's Vineyard Railroad train would leave at certain hours for Katama and the famous Katama clambakes : total cost for fare and dinner, one dollar. All day the cars had been crowded, and now, as the evening slipped away into night, hundreds who were without lodgings took the train for Edgartown and the Mattakeeset Lodge. The Katama hotel was filled to overflowing; cots were set up in the parlor and were quickly taken.
At Oak Bluffs and the camp ground the rush for rooms was unprecedented. Men paid to lie on billiard tables, a large number slept on the benches under the canvas of the Tabernacle in the great circle on the camp ground. The preachers' stand was turned into a lodging for women, and no one asked what the campers of 1835 would have thought. All the beds available in the building of the
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camp meeting association were taken by ministers, and fully a hun- dred of the cloth were turned away.
The steamer Granite City had arrived with a hundred passengers who expected to be sheltered at the Highland House : there was no room, and they were turned away. In the society tents men and women lay in straw on the ground as the old custom was. Steamers at the wharves became hotels overnight, and yachts at moorings off-shore or in Vineyard Haven harbor were filled with guests. The highest price known to have been paid for a room was twenty-five dollars.
General Joe Hooker was not the only guest of honor, for General George B. Mclellan had come; and there were senators, congressmen, mayors, judges. But no guest dominated this occasion : the holiday was a holiday of the middle classes, glorified together.
On Saturday and Sunday alone, 4,500 persons landed at the High- land Wharf, and 4,100 of them rode on the horse cars around the camp ground. The Katama clambakes, in the week thus begun, used 2,225 ears of corn, 127 bushels of clams, 1,635 pounds of lobster, and 1,625 pounds of fish. Over the weekend the trains carried 3,600 passengers to Katama.
On Sunday morning sixteen cars crowded with passengers arrived at Woods Hole, bound for the Island; and the train returning to Boston that night was made up of thirty cars drawn by three loco- motives. The praise meeting in the Tabernacle was considered the largest single audience ever gathered on Martha's Vineyard.
As the week ran its course, there were receptions and entertain- ments on yachts and at the hotels; there was a moonlight excursion to Gay Head; the beaches were molded in unending repetition to the human form; croquet mallets were never silent; the resort was in fete without pause or cessation.
On the following Sunday the cottagers of Clinton Avenue-a neighborhood sometimes described as the gem of the camp ground -- held their own celebration. Of what? Of the season and the season's end. Celebration was for celebration's own sake. A parade of thirty- eight children dressed in white with red sashes, their heads adorned with wreaths of oak leaves, began a carnival in the avenue. Each girl carried a banner on which was inscribed the name of the state
GUSTIN
Times of festival: left, a band at Cottage City. Right, getting ready for an illumination. Placing the hundreds of paper lanterns properly was a nice problem for the cottagers.
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which she represented. The Goddess of Liberty was beautifully repre- sented by Miss Ella M. Packard, daughter of Eliphalet Packard of New Bedford. Upon her head rested a crown of blue and gilt, with the word Liberty emblazoned. The New Bedford Fife and Drum Corps supplied music for the procession.
Mr. John S. Damrell of Boston had illuminated his cottage in a costly manner, having placed a large Teutonic cross on one side and on the other a beautiful blue anchor, both devices covered with gela- tine lanterns. The letter "D" was shown in a gable, and on the front of the balcony was a framed picture of John Wesley, with an American flag tastefully arranged around it. Mr. H. A. Cory of Providence had a display of almost a hundred and twenty-five lan- terns.
Not in this season, but in another, Clinton Avenue presented "a sea of variously colored lights; the weird shadows of the trees scat- tered along the line, the arches and festoons and actual walls of lan- terns, the half spellbound throngs gliding along the line, all seen against the dark background of the night, conspire to throw a sort of glamour over the people and the locality. Mottoes and transpar- encies abound. Among them are 'With Light and Sound We Greet You,' and 'The Vineyard Is Our Resting Place and Heaven is Our Home.' " On this occasion there was a parade as of goblins, led by a tin band, with almost every form of beast and man, historical or otherwise, represented. The procession included Santa Claus, Gay Head, an Indian or two, a pair of gigantic frogs, the Jack of Clubs, a detachment of the Mulligan Guards, and Nancy Luce with her hen. Of Nancy Luce more must be said presently.
At these illuminations, the fireworks attained a degree of variety and elaboration which can hardly be expressed even in superlatives. The end of the season of 1880, for instance, was ushered into history with the assistance of such ornamental fires as these :
variegated spirals followed by flights of colored shells and torbillons; a caprice followed by bombshells throw- ing out brilliant streams and showers of gold rain; a beehive followed by a variety of rockets; the Pride of Aurora followed by floral shells and detonating bombs; a revolving globe, fol- lowed by flights of pigeons, rockets and dragon bombs; a
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cascade followed by shells of silver fire, flights of double col- ored torbillons and a flight of two hundred skyrockets; an iriscope followed by golden streamer bombs and meteor bat- teries; the Wonder of the Magi followed by gold rain and colored revolving courants; a flower vase followed by batteries in crimson, blue, green, purple and gold stars with rockets; a kallioptican followed by gold rain, colored streamers, bombs, rockets, etc .; all to conclude with the grand finale of an illu- mination of silver fires, changing to emerald, crimson and gold, filling the surrounding atmosphere with innumerable tints and unveiling the closing tribute to the evening's festiv- ities. A magnificent temple appears, columns of diamond and crimson lance uphold an entablature on which is emblaz- oned in crimson fires the motto 'Cottage City.' Upon this rises a pediment in diamond, gold and crimson fires, surmounted by a globe of emerald and purple. Over all waves an American flag, wrought in appropriate colors. In the niche below, formed of flaming lance fires, is a Maltese cross set in a circle of brilliant flame, containing the dates 1868, 18So. By an instantaneous transformation, the entire piece is suffused with an intense halo of rayonnant fires, and amid the discharge of mosaic bat- teries, filling the air with their stella clusters, rockets displaying fire balls of various hues or dissolving in showers of golden rain, amber streamers and colored stars, the evening's enter- tainment is brought to a close."
The display thus described was carried out to the letter, and the night sky was explored with long arcs of fire and at the same time decorated like a valentine. But it fell out that the interest and con- versation of the thousands was not so much absorbed with these masterpieces of the pyrotechnic art as with three plainer and less ornamental novelties. An electric light company had brought to. the Island a new kind of electrical device, the first ever seen in the whole region : this was the arc light. One was placed on the Sea View, one on the bathhouses, and one in Ocean Park. Word had spread that it was possible to read a newspaper under these new lights, as easily as by day. Excursionists came flocking from New Bedford, and as darkness fell each stood waiting-with a newspaper. At nine o'clock the three arc lights cut the darkness with their glare, the poignance of which has never since died away. The excursionists and summer residents eagerly scanned the printed pages held ready in their hands. "It's true" ! they cried, "You can" !
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XX A Woman and Her Hens
Far from the camp ground and the cottages, in a gray-shingled house, long weathered, near one of the coves of Tisbury Great Pond, in that region of Tisbury which was to become the town of West Tisbury, Nancy Luce lived alone. For years this woman with a melancholy face was an attraction in summer life ranking with the Katama clambakes, the illuminations and the meetings in the Taber- nacle. Her portrait shows a plain, spiritual face, close wrapped in a checkered scarf knotted under her chin, her hair parted in the middle, her eyes somewhat narrow, dark, and suggestive of the intensity of an unusual soul. She is clad in checkered dress and cape of the same material, and to her breast is clasped Beauty Linna, a bantam hen. Another picture of Nancy Luce is preserved in the narrative of a writer for the Atlantic Monthly who called her The Laureate of Hens :
"An old tester bedstead and a massive mahogany bureau seem to glower at us from behind her; a heavily beamed and smoke darkened ceiling frowns from overhead; and a broad, paneled chimney piece forms the prospect upon which her gaze is bent rather than upon us. Whenever her glance does turn upon us we meet it with a thrill-a thrill at first of repul- sion, then of ceriness, and next pity half blots out both sensa- tions, but not wholly, for she is a grotesque figure.
"From under a short woolen skirt protrude her feet, clad in carpet slippers, and the loose blouse that covers her narrow and humped body, is fastened with big brass buttons. Over her head, down on her forehead, and close under her chin, so that not one strand of hair is visible, is drawn a thick woolen hood. This accents the unusual length and pallor of her face, which reminds one of an unlighted dwelling. Her dark, heavy eyes, unshaded by lashes, are eloquent of pain and reproach. But it is her hands that bear chief witness to her sufferings, for they are gaunt and so colorless, indeed, that they look as if no ruddy drop of blood had ever warmed them.'
Nancy Luce was the daughter of Philip and Annie Luce, and in her girlhood she rode horses over the Island trails and across the pastures,
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between the stone walls. Riding she termed "the comfort of life" in later years when she gave herself to meditation and to the painting of pictures giving her own ideas of horses and horsemanship. Her health troubled her, and she was advised to drink goat's milk; thereupon she bought a kid and named it Aljigana. It was said that she lived entirely upon this goat's milk for long periods, and when the creature died she was inconsolable : inconsolable, at least, until she acquired two bantam hens, called by her Ada Queetie and Beauty Linna. With these pets she took up her lonely life in the weathered house.
In the sixties she was "discovered" to the camp meeting visitors, largely through the influence of livery stable keepers who took their fares on the long drive from the camp ground, through the village of Holmes Hole, over the road up-Island past groves of oak and pine, past lakes and across the edge of the Great Plain, and at last to the village of West Tisbury with its mill pond and fertile valley, and to the home of Nancy Luce. The drive was an adventure, and the woman of the hens was a "character"-the sort of character who stands in the background of a summer resort and has a spell to cast upon visitors, and oddities visitors can talk about.
In her psalter Nancy Luce wrote :
"Good behavior of foreign folks From camp meeting, They behaved well And bought books of me. I cannot live without them.
"I want to see tender hearted folks. I am cast down to the dust of the earth, With troubles, trials, sickness, And for sin in the world."
But she wrote also :
"Every time my head is wounded, with noise, I never get over it, I wish I never been in this world, I undergo so much with my head
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And murdered alive as I am. They come from Vineyard Haven and Edgartown, And I feel sick all my whole time, I murdered so much."
Many callers teased and tormented her to hear her scold; once some fun-loving young people out for a lark took a band, or part of a band, to her house. As she put it: "In 1867, October, some hard hearts come with band of music and sot it going to my door, to murder me alive, they was forced to go off soon, they put my head in a dreadful condition, I did not get over it for a number of weeks, and they beat me entirely out. Some of them been telling ever since, they scared me, with the music, that is false, they did not scare me, not one mite, they crueld me in my sickness."
The exploitation of her eccentricities brought her money, and she had a native shrewdness which made her appreciate and make the most of opportunities. She sold her own photographs, pictures of her hens, a treatise on the "doctoring of hens," and pamphlets of her extraordinary poems. But as she capitalized on her strangeness, she suffered persecution from callers to whom she and her hens were nothing but a subject for merriment. In 1868-she was then forty- seven years old-she wrote to Charles H. Shute at Edgartown :
"I want my hens pictures made, you can make good deal by them, folks been asking me to have them made. Now if you will come first week day in the forenoon that the weather is good to the front door, I will do the best I can, if I no sicker. I want to hold up 2 at a time twice, and hold up one once, she is heavy, others small, and I want you should make cow, and house, and myself, and hens once, that will be four pictures, then you can take as many as you please at home from them, and sell them, but if I live till summer I want you should let me sell as many as I can, for me to have 10 cents out of 25. You sent me 40 to sell just before the frolick was, storm set in I could not sell, winter coming now
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