USA > Massachusetts > Dukes County > Marthas Vineyard > Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935 > Part 18
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The next year the club offered a cup, of the value of $250, for the races of the New York Yacht Club off Martha's Vineyard. For
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some years this sort of promotional activity went on, and there was behind it an unmistakable desire to boom Cottage City. Summer residents and residents alike took part, and the collaboration was a pleasant one. This was the ancestor of many boards of trade, cham- bers of commerce, and improvement associations; but in the course of time the partnership of the summer people began to lapse, and the booming was left to the business men of the resort.
But the town, too, was to go into the promotional business on a fairly large scale. In 1889 a special act of the legislature was obtained, authorizing Cottage City to spend as much as five hundred dollars a year for amusements. The appropriation was duly made, and part of the sum for that year was spent to obtain the services of the Fitch- burg Band. By the year 1910, modern civilization had developed to that place at which advertising could be -nay, must be-conceived as a force for the public good, and an activity for which taxpayers could be assessed without violence to old ideals of government. The town of Oak Bluffs (as Cottage City had now become) and Tisbury petitioned the legislature for the right to expend some of their funds in advertising their attractions, and the authority was granted. Not long afterward Edgartown followed suit.
A long transition was then complete. From the time of happy holiday celebrated in the seventies and eighties, when the sheer enthusiasm of summer visitors spilled over into efforts to make resort life gay and to win new converts to share their pleasures, the general point of view had altered by degrees until, at length, enthu- siasm was delegated to advertising copywriters and they were paid to spread the infection in sound business ways, more or less coldly calculated. In a sense, however, this was the completion of a circle; affairs were back where they had started when the Oak Bluffs Land & Wharf Company was launched to promote a land development and build a new resort.
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XXIX
Summer Entertainment
Almost every recreation or amusement which the ingenuity of mankind could devise, or the swelling trend of fashion could bring into popularity for a year, was played or offered to the public at Cottage City. The beginning was entirely spontaneous; then came deliberate efforts to exploit amusements, some of them accompanied by queer expressions of the American craft of ballyhoo. In every instance it is history that the spontaneous waves of this recreation or that proved more exciting, more fruitful in pleasure and in dollar and cent value to the resort, than the calculated efforts to entertain and attract. Thus, at the height of all the summer amusements on Martha's Vineyard must still stand the' game of croquet, which came from nowhere even before there was a real resort, never to disappear; and at the bottom may be found the great Katama fox hunt and the swimming pig race of Cottage City. In between there are many summer entertainments, the bicycle and the roller skate looming prominently; but they flourished not in proportion to the financial backing, but as a mysterious breeze of public interest rose into gusts or lapsed fitfully into a calm which no promoter could stir again, whistle as he might.
This narrative is to treat here primarily of the amusements which flourished in the later seventies and eighties, and in the early nineties. But croquet has covered the whole span of the summer history of Martha's Vineyard since the Island's first boom. It has a grand sweep which is somewhat startling for a game now esteemed to be so slight.
The game itself was old when it first came to the camp meetings in the early sixties of the last century; it had emerged by evolution from the pall mall of England and the royal diversions of France. For some reason as hard to trace as the origin of any contagion, there was an American craze which came in and grew as the war between the states was drawing to a close.
The Vineyard Gazette was moved to say, in August of 1866, after a survey of the camp ground : "Instead of giving attention to the earnest words and practical zeal that so successfully wrought
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out the work of grace and goodness, we hear the merry jest and see the rallying around the croquet ground . . . a game, we are told, that tends to the softening of the brain, but which, at least, we shall pronounce absurd. The radical difference between this game and billiards-a game which the prejudice of the people leads them to denounce as demoralizing-is that one is played upon the ground and the other upon a well finished and convenient table."
This was an idle voice, forgotten as soon as it was heard. The camp meeting association was constrained to make a rule that croquet could not be played on the greensward immediately around the preachers' stand, even in the periods before and after camp meeting week. But it was played everywhere else, and not alone by the laity but by the clergy. One must walk carefully in the open places of Wesleyan Grove or his foot would be caught in a wicket, and he would be stretched on the ground.
A serious critic in 1869 uttered these damning words: "The only development liable to lower the moral standard of the camp is croquet. This is played incessantly for weeks before the meeting, and we have yet to witness a game in which cheating and lying are not common occurrences, especially among the fair sex, we deeply regret to say. It is the general practice of the ladies to push balls into more favorable positions when unobserved, and if detected to deny it. We have seen ministers' daughters do it time and again."
If this was the case, there was no proof of greater turpitude on the part of the ministers' daughters and other girls: theirs was the greater opportunity, since the long and ample dresses of the day made it a simple matter to do things with croquet balls which no proper male eye could see. Fathers and brothers were as much wrapped up in the game, and as intent upon winning. Sometimes clergymen were late for services because of croquet, and had to be severely reprimanded. But croquet went on.
It was a rule that the first person to put out the wickets in the morning had the right to use the croquet grounds. A minister now living recalls distinctly how he hurried from his tent at one in the morning, only to find that another minister was before him, pre- pared to hold the ground against all comers.
When the Oak Bluffs Company opened its grounds, the new parks
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were admirably suited to croquet, and there were more wickets to trap an unwary walker, and more mallets clicking in the August air. Clerical croquet players continued to be denounced-Mrs. Amanda Smith, a colored revivalist, flayed them from the stand at the camp meeting of 1877-but the ministers saw no inconsistency between croquet and their Master's business.
Croquet sets could be bought for a dollar, and all that was then needed was a bit of turf, an eager eye and a light heart. They did wrong who denounced croquet; it contributed to the well being of the race.
Instead of disappearing, like a fad, as the years passed, croquet persisted. In 1882 a National Croquet Association was formed, and the players of Cottage City became affiliated with it. Then, in 1899, a group of thirty men, among them several summer residents of Cottage City, gathered at Norwich, Conn., to discuss ways and means of making croquet a more scientific game. The result was the birth of roque, in which the wickets were narrowed, the courts made hard and smooth, and borders provided against which balls could be caused to carom. Croquet did not disappear even now, but roque grew and flourished. The game was standardized; and there were national champions and tournaments.
Indeed, in a secluded part of the town of Oak Bluffs, cool under the shade of oaks which have now grown tall, the Martha's Vine- yard Roque Club in 1935 held its fifty-fourth annual tournament. And among the players were ministers who first came to Martha's Vineyard many years ago to preach at the camp meeting.
In 1897, when golf was becoming a new rage, and a golf course was in play at Oak Bluffs, observers remarked that croquet was at a discount. This may have been true; indeed, croquet seemed to fail in interest. But when one thought it was gone, he heard a familiar sound, saw a reminiscent sparkle of sunshine on a striped and var- nished ball. Croquet again.
Roller skating reached Martha's Vineyard on the crest of just such a wave as had brought croquet. The roller skate had been invented in France in 1819, but not until 1874 was it improved to anything like its present finished state. In 1876 Samuel Winslow, a man of considerable wealth, got up a new and advanced roller skate and,
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together with his son Frank and a young man named Aline, built the first roller rink in the United States at Worcester. It proved suc- cessful, and there was a wave of "rink fever" in the country similar to one which had just been sweeping England.
Then, in 1878, Mr. Winslow built the celebrated rink on Martha's Vineyard. He called it the Vineyard rink, and gave his skates the same name. Other promoters followed his lead, and soon there were rinks in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Sara- toga, and Newport. Active on the Vineyard was Mr. Winslow's younger son, Samuel E., in later years chairman of the United States Board of Mediation.
The rink at Cottage City involved an investment of thirteen thousand dollars. A site was chosen on the waterfront, just across the street from the Sea View. The building was something like an armory in design, but a close view disclosed that its tremendous bulk was shingled only, although its curving roof was of iron. Over the roof, at intervals, were placed small towers, each with a staff and a flag gaily blowing in the wind. There were square towers at either side of the front, also.
The rink was dedicated in July, 1879. The Hon. E. P. Carpenter could not be present, and the enterprise was welcomed to Oak Bluffs by Joel Hills in his place. Seven hundred invitations had been issued, and after an inspection of the structure and an appreciation of its elaborate decorations, there were addresses of mutual congrat- ulation. Then followed a graceful exposition of "parlor skating" by Mr. W. H. Purdy, one of the staff of instructors, after which the gathering which almost filled the great shell turned to and tried out the new skates and the new floor.
In the rink the summer dwellers of Cottage City discovered anew the swift joy of motion, the sweep and dash of rollers which gave them a sensation of being disembodied. This was, to say the least, the next thing to flying. And it was a convenient adjunct of the simpler and more natural recreation of bluffing. Young people of the best families met freely and went to the rink together, and the rage flourished and was good in the eyes of everyone.
In that same summer, Pinafore was presented at Cottage City, with Lake Anthony for a background; another year or two and the
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Kearsarge anchored offshore and added dignity and importance to the season; the rink was illuminated when the days of celebration came; the Martha's Vineyard Summer Institute was launched, and the Highlands had come to new life.
There was no doubting the success and pleasure of the summers, but the resort seemed to need still more material to feed upon. Accordingly, in July, 1881, the swimming pig race was arranged to supply an early attraction and bring new conviviality and business. The event was held in the name of a committee of summer residents with the Sea View as a background. A pig was taken to the shore, thoroughly greased, and then launched into Vineyard Sound at a distance from shore, while crowds along the bluff and on the Sea View verandas craned and peered to be sure of a good view. The idea was that the pig, which was named Ben, would swim for the shore, several swimmers hard after him, and that the first swimmer to catch Ben would receive a prize of twenty dollars.
It happened, however, that the pig turned the surprise on the sponsors of the race; instead of making for the shore, he started paddling for deep water, in the general direction of Cape Cod. The swimmers started after him, and the race was turned into a rescue with the action receding rapidly from the vision of the onlookers on the shore. The pig named Ben was rescued, unhurt, but the attempt to inject new excitement into Cottage City summer life was aban- doned abruptly.
In the eighties, the occasional excursions to Gay Head became institutions. At intervals, increasing in frequency during August, Cottage City was spattered with colored handbills announcing trips by steamboat to the clay cliffs and the light.
"Three hours to explore this world renowned headland of Martha's Vineyard, and inspect the magnificent light with its wonderful mechanism," the broadsides proclaimed, invitingly. "Take your knife and paper box along and cut out some of the variegated clay."
Sometimes, in addition, the public was exhorted to "take a ride in a Gay Head omnibus, driven by a Native Indian." The Gay Head omnibus was the ox cart, for oxen were used alike by farmers for the tilling of the fields, and by the fishermen for the hauling out of boats and net.
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Sometimes, too, it was hinted that the sightseers could see savage red men in their native surroundings-an exaggeration which was too palpably a showman's invention to occasion any feeling either on the part of the Indians, who were urbane and intelligent, or on the part of the visitors, who found plenty of novelty without this added attraction.
A wharf was built on the Vineyard Sound side of Gay Head, at which steamboats docked after their run through the strait, between the Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands opposite. The boat trip was one of the fascinations; for the water lay calm and stratified in many shadings of blue on a gentle summer day, and the islands on either hand were fresh and varied with bluffs, great rocks, steep ascents and rounded woods-green, yellow, and white. The excur- sionist entered a world of sky and sea; and then, at Gay Head, he was eager to rush off, clamber over the cliffs, visit the light, and spend his energies in an untamed region of sea winds and sunshine. He saw small Indian children, with their bright eyes and straight dark hair; he saw Indian fishermen with their boats, tall and as straight limbed as any proverb, he saw the broken uplands and the long curving shoreline, eternally washed with white in rhythmic advance and recession. Beyond the first reaches of the sea he saw No mans Land, also, and in the unaccustomed spaciousness of the world about him-spiced with the scent of sweet pepperbush, colored with lavish pigments of clay and bayberry and butterfly bush, salted even in this August interlude by a challenging and cool breeze from the water-he was called out of himself and out of his past. Then the steamer carried him back, tired and impressed, to the cozy delights of Cottage City.
Sometimes there were excursions by moonlight, sometimes a brass band was on the steamer, sometimes among the passengers there was a teacher from the Summer Institute to discourse on the geologic wonders of the region, and to hold the passengers spellbound.
Gay Head excursions in the eighties cost fifty cents a passenger, and they consumed the whole day, from nine-thirty in the morning until late afternoon. There were also occasional excursions to Nan- tucket, Newport, and small ports on Cape Cod.
It was many decades before the roads of the Island were sufficiently
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improved, and overland transportation became fast and pleasant enough for the steamboat excursions to fail in the new competition. Long after the shift of centuries, the excursions continued to run; but then came the state highway and the automobile.
The Flying Horses were early on the ground at Oak Bluffs. As the horse's neck is an innocent drink under a gallant name, so the Flying Horses were an amusement celebrated out of all proportion in the title: they were, in brief, an ordinary merry-go-round or car- rousel, upon which children of the resort whirled about in some peril of dizziness and vied to see which would catch the brass ring. Except for this institution, there was only one commercial amuse- ment enterprise of the carnival variety. It was a summer roller toboggan slide erected immediately in the rear of the rink in 1887. From a tall tower the slide led not far from the side of the build- ing, in swift descent, then turning and completing a single ellipse. There were none of the terrors of the roller coaster; indeed, the con- trivance was a naive translation of the winter toboggan coast, and the first of the sort to be built in New England. It was the hope of the promoters that clubs would be formed, not unlike the toboggan and ski clubs of the snow countries and winter resorts. From top to bottom the chute measured eight hundred and fifty feet, but its thrills were not sufficiently varied to sustain popularity.
Once, in 1895, an itinerant carrousel concern set up its apparatus in Edgartown, and still later there was a carrousel at the bathing beach on Chappaquiddick. But anything suggestive of a carnival was frowned upon, and commercial amusement enterprises were never licensed by the selectmen. The tradition was established early that Cottage City should be the place of merrymaking, and that the other Island towns should maintain a greater reserve.
In the year of the Centennial Exposition, Col. Albert A. Pope of Boston saw bicycles on display, and one of those curious impulses occurred in his imagination which, out of all chance impulses of the world, lead to great results. He went at once to England, imported a number of English wheels, and, in 1878, began to manu- facture at Hartford the famous "Columbias" -- the first bicycles in the modern sense in America. There had already been an uprush of bicycle invention in the United States in the late sixties, and the
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public had seen no end of fancy riding. But this had been the province of a few daredevils who stood in the same relationship, almost, that the pioneer aviators did later; and the phenomenon had reached a sudden peak and then disappeared. Now there was a great deal more than trick riding, and a broader and greater wave arose. Among the first places reached by its rising waters was Martha's Vineyard.
Cottage City was marked as the wheelman's summer paradise. There were many acres of almost level land, and some thirty miles of smooth roads of hard tar surface over which bicycles hummed and sizzled, yielding sounds and sensations of the utmost pleasure to the riders. One of the first formal expeditions to the resort was made by the Capital Bicycle Club of Washington in 1885. The pneumatic tire was still four years in the future, and the old high wheels were just yielding to the so-called safeties, which were considered by some critics to be effeminate. The Rover wheel had appeared in 1884, and for a long time all safeties were to be known as Rovers.
In 1887 the Massachusetts Division of the League of American Wheelmen-which had been founded in 1880-appointed Cottage City for its summer rendezvous. A reception and hop were held in honor of the wheelmen at the Sea View, there was sailing, and a baseball game was played.
After this the visit of the wheelmen was a recognized part of the summer program at the resort; Cottage City had become a bicycle capital. The steamboats transported wheels free; striped blazers, caps and tight trousers became conspicuous and dashing in the summer crowds; and after dark the red and green lights skim- med along the streets, astonishing and pleasing the eye of the gener- ation with a new wonder.
Representative of the functions of the wheelmen-although rather more elaborate than most-was that marking the summer of 1888. There was a grand costume ball at the casino, and a parade of wheels wound all about the town, led by a committee of the Martha's Vineyard Club and the Fitchburg Band. The line of march was made up, precisely, as follows: the marshal and his staff, 17 in number; Cambridge, 22 men; Somerville, 25 men and 7 ladies; Fall River, 8 men; Suffolk, 3 men; Massachusetts Club, 2 men; Jamaica, 16 men; New Bedford, 24 men; Hyde Park Ramblers, 7 men; unattached
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wheelmen, a smattering; Secretary Bassett; Rhode Island wheelmen, 27 men and 10 ladies; unattached wheelmen, several; Portland, 4 men; unattached wheelmen, assorted.
Some of the riders carried Japanese umbrellas, and some had decorated their machines with sunflowers and ribbons. The Jamaica contingent wore humorous placards with inscriptions such as: "Jamaica Ginger," "Jamaica Plain," "Jamaica Straight," and "Plain Jamaica."
The races included one mile for the Rover type of wheel, the first race of the kind in America; and other events were one mile novice, one mile open, one mile tricycle, and one mile handicap.
The visits of the wheelmen were gay, and each year they attracted more spectators and more riders. No one had managed this addition to resort life : it had come without advertising and without invest- ment, as spontaneously as croquet. Fifteen summers; at least, were preoccupied and characterized with and by the wheel in this free play of the folk spirit, as the young men of the land, particularly, snatched eagerly at the gift progress had made to their generation. Wheels were decked with ribbons, parasols and Chinese lanterns; wheels on parade carried arches of lighted Chinese lanterns spanning the road between them; one paused of an afternoon stroll to watch the easy grace of a trick rider demonstrating his accomplishments on the pavement. It was incredible that the bicycle should ever become an old story, anything less, indeed, than a recurring extension of the human personality by means of easily mastered mechanical devices and principles.
The wheelmen, being young for the most part, and gay from first to last, sometimes deserved the anger of cottagers and police. But then : "Every crowd of men has a few among the number who do not know how to behave, and the others suffer for the few . . . " So it was explained then, in regard to the wheelmen, and so it has been explained ever since and doubtless ever will be, in regard to the excesses of all human groups on holiday bent.
In the year 1896 there was enough unseemly behavior among the wheelmen to invite retaliation. Property had been destroyed and residents had been insulted by men wearing the bicycle emblems; hence the use of the band for the parade was refused peremptorily.
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Wheelmen gathered in the street in front of the official headquarters and stirred up one another's wrath, until they were in a frame of mind to cancel the parade, the races, and the rest of the mect entirely. Happily a better suggestion was offered. The wheelmen could leave Cottage City flat and scorch over the Beach Road to Vineyard Haven, under their own power. So they did, and the races were held with the added spice of defiance. Banners of welcome were stretched across Vineyard Haven streets, red fire was burned, and the town gave an unstinting reception, troubled not at all by any neighborly compunction.
This upset, however, did not interrupt the annual custom of visiting Cottage City. The Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror said to the Martha's Vineyard Herald, in an exchange of compliments in 1890, "That Cottage City cannot offer the natural attractions of Nantucket is no fault of the dear little doll house town with a camp meeting annex. But then, it should make the most of its bicycle opportunities and brace up."
That was a decade when bicycle opportunities were to be envied, and at Cottage City they bore fruit; as to the strictures concerning the houses of Cottage City, they were hardly justified-for the town had grown and stretched out, and many stately homes had arisen at Oak Bluffs and on the Highlands.
The day of the wheelmen flourished, until at last it turned, as all periods must, into a rosy twilight, dimmed steadily by a rising haze in which the Cottage City outings are obscured into phantom shapes, with ghosts of bicycle riders scarcely seen, mauve shadows, pedaling silently and vainly to keep in sight the more rapidly receding horizons of years to come.
Among the summer entertainments there was always the surf on the South Beach. When the breakers were high, a bulletin stood in front of the Sea View, and the trains carried crowds to the ocean shore beyond Edgartown and Katama. Often the bulletin was not needed, for the visitor awoke in the silent hours just before morning and heard the distant repeated rumble. The wonder was not that the resort could remember and flock to the sea when it was grand, but that it could forget the sea.
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