USA > Massachusetts > Dukes County > Marthas Vineyard > Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935 > Part 2
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Any Island life in those times was self reliant and independent, and any Islander could draw a check against nature whenever he wished. The arts of spinning and weaving were in use, there were millers and tanners, dyehouses and paint works, salt vats and clay pits. It was necessary for Martha's Vineyard to ask no favors of anyone, and to go afield for no skilled labor she did not possess herself.
Even in that day, before the first summer visitor, the climate was a natural resource which added one more measure of value in the Island economy. The prolonged autumns, with warm sun and crys-
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tal air, not only invited attention to harvests of wild cranberries, grapes and beach plums, but, a little later, brought all sorts of wild fowl to the great ponds. There was little snow in winter, and no intense heat in summer. The surrounding sea was a tempering, stimulating influence which made for health, for ease of work, and for survival of all living things.
Into such a climate the Vineyarders, descendants of English blood, fitted with so cordial an adaptation that the same families were to flourish for almost three hundred years, and how much longer no one can say. There were Nortons, Peases, Smiths, Mayhews, Vincents and Daggetts long before 1700, and these same families are vigor- ously represented today. Many others are hardly less ancient.
Already a century ago whaleships were bringing home Azoreans who found an outlet for their thrift and industry on the Island; but except for these Portuguese pioneers, who were to be followed by others, the population of Martha's Vineyard was made up entirely of what may be called the old stock, the family names of which have been mentioned, and the Indians.
III "Without a Single Dash of Chesterfield"
Plainly there was nothing in this scene to attract the social world which had its choice of open country, and in a day when something like sulphur baths was necessary to give point to a watering place. Moreover, the difficulties of travel were a stumbling block. Martha's Vineyard was reached from the mainland by packets, small sailing vessels, usually sloops. An excellent account of a passage from New Bedford to Nantucket is to be found in Moby Dick, together with a suggestion of the sort of company a passenger would be likely to have. There were crude provisions for comfort, but nothing more. Travel to the islands was a serious business, not a diversion. But it was subject to interruption by storm and calm, and to such distresses of the weather as seasickness, which is no respecter of persons even today.
The steamboat appeared early in the service of Martha's Vine-
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yard and Nantucket, but the first steamboats were no great im- provement over sail. A story is told which would show that Jacob Barker stepped into his counting room in New York one morning and found one of his clerks writing verse.
"Let me read it and see how it sounds," said Barker to young Halleck.
The lines began : "At midnight in his guarded tent ." The title was Marco Bozzaris.
"Good"! exclaimed Barker. "That is just the name for my little steamer" !
And so the Marco Bozzaris came steaming into Island harbors in the spring of 1829. Little is known of the craft save that she was of a hundred and forty tons, that she made running time not much better than the sloops, was costly to run, and was soon superseded.
These early steamboats had side wheels, small cabins, and low decks. They must have been queer company in Island harbors where schooners came and went with deckloads of oil, where whaleships were berthed or hove down at the wharves, and where tall spars and canvas loomed against the sky. In all this marine activity there was seldom such a thing as a pleasure craft, and the transportation of passengers was a minor incident.
It is difficult to determine just when visitors to Martha's Vine- yard ceased being travelers and became excursionists in the modern sense, or even "summer visitors." One can guess that the transition had hardly begun when Nathaniel Hawthorne came to the Island to spend the summer of 1830. A record of some of his observations is preserved in Chippings With a Chisel, in Twice Told Tales. He was wont to sit and commune with a philosophical stone cutter, and in that marble shop he saw the carving of an epitaph which one may find now in the Edgartown cemetery. It reads :
"By the force of vegitation I was raised to life and action;
When life and action that shall cease I shall return to the same source."
These lines proclaim the faith-or what the marble cutter took to be the lack of faith-of Joseph Ripley, who died January 26, 1830, in his 73rd year.
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The cemeteries of Martha's Vineyard were to become favorite studies of generations of summer visitors during their leisure hours. Other early visitors, like Hawthorne, found them interesting. And besides the cemeteries there were certain other attractions.
There was, there has always been, the surf on the South Beach. The Rev. Samuel Devens put into words the sensations of the visitor :
"Often have I visited it on foot and horse (here the high-mettled speechless animal, the better for being such, is the best company, seems to comprehend and participate your emotions, and relieves that feeling of extreme solitariness which comes over the soul) some- times with friends-generally alone-and never without an awful sense of the grandeur of God's works, felt nowhere else. The Soul cannot but inwardly breathe that highly expressive and noble pas- sage of Scripture, 'Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty.' . . When witnessed for the first time by a person of sensibility, to speak or move is out of the question."
Mr. Devens had been told, he said, that the Falls of Niagara generally disappointed those who had seen the surf under the most favorable circumstances. "For myself," he added, "expecting much in the former case and little in the latter I must confess that sublimer emotions were awakened in my bosom upon the desolate, storm- beaten shores of Nantucket and the Vineyard, than upon the Terra- pin or Table rocks."
Here, in early times, is the authentic language of the summer resort. An attraction at Edgartown, too, was the bridge built from the shore to the harbor light, a trestle of plank and timber almost a quarter of a mile in length, for the most part above the harbor waters where, at night, countless phosphorescent jellyfish sometimes glowed and vanished, where, too, the lapping of the waves and the freedom of the breeze exerted an unfailing fascination. From the end of the bridge one could survey the whole harbor and the whole town. What boardwalk built for pleasure could afford a finer promenade?
For a long time the sports of fishing and fowling were to lie in the province of the traveller. Not only did the bluefish and the striped bass, gamiest of salt water fish, abound in the rips and in certain rugged waters, but wildfowl waited the gun of the hunter on ponds
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and in marshes. As for upland game, there were grouse, snipe, quail, woodcock and plover, and the heath hen (the eastern prairie chicken which had a full century before extinction).
At Edgartown the whaling captains were building themselves comfortable homes in which there was nothing lavish and nothing stingy, but the expression of a passion for neatness and order. Along Water Street, running parallel to the harbor and looking away to sea-so much so that instead of facing the street, they stood at a slight angle to look past each other at the vista through the harbor entrance and out past Cape Pogue-the captains' houses ranged them- selves. The instinct for shipshapeness was combined with a pride in things well done, a sense of proportion, and all in all a forthright good taste which marked these homes for far-off ends. There is nothing anywhere which surpasses the fitness, the chasteness of ornamentation in gracious doorways and cornices, the honesty and art of the whaling captains' houses of Edgartown.
Whatever the attractions and the preparations so early begun by destiny, it is certain that Edgartown was not then quaint. One recalls the schoolboy puzzler : if a tree falls in the depths of a forest where there is no living creature to hear does it make a noise? In any case, far away and a century ago in Edgartown, with no summer visitors to behold, there could have been no quaintness.
Almost twenty years intervened between the visit of Hawthorne and the first arrival of Daniel Webster. Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, who was at Edgartown soon after Webster, heard that the great Daniel had been mistaken for a blackamoor at an inn. The story was that Webster drove up to the door of the Gibbs House, a tavern, accompanied by his Negro servants. He put his head out of the window of the public carriage, revealing his own "almost South Spanish complexion," and asking for accommodations. The keeper of the hotel, "casting dismayed glances first at the domestics of different shades of sable and mahogany, and then at the dark face of Mr. Webster," declared that he made it a rule never to receive colored persons. If this incident occurred, it revealed a purely per- sonal idiosyncrasy on the part of the innkeeper, and one not at all common on the Vineyard. At any rate, the error was quickly dis-
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covered and remedied without Webster's knowledge, for he thought the conversation related only to the servants.
The Gibbs House still stands, and it is no larger than a comfort- able private dwelling. The inns of the Vineyard were houses of good repute, although Lady Wortley tells of discourtesy at Edgartown. Perhaps aristocracy expected too much. Most travellers were pleased with the accommodations, plain and unpretentious as they were, and most of all with the hospitality of the people.
No sooner had Daniel Webster's presence become known than the principal men of the town called upon him. The port was delighted to have so distinguished a visitor. A grand picnic was called for August 10, 1849, and only unfavorable weather interfered with complete success. Unfortunately the affair had to be transferred from a grove to the town hall, whither, according to the Vineyard Gazette, "cartloads of recherche cake" and a bountiful supply of delicious chowder were taken. Webster was introduced by the Hon. Leavitt Thaxter, Edgartown's leading scholar.
In the oration which followed, Webster paid a tribute to the ladies of the Vineyard, alluded to the early history of the Island, adverted to the ravages of cholera in the country which kept him from appearing in public (and, one might infer, made him some- what nervous on the present occasion), and would have gone on for some time had it not been for a disturbance at the door. Appar- ently some latecomers tried to push themselves in, and the distin- guished visitor sat down. "The rogues who created the disturbance ought to be brought to justice," the Vineyard Gazette said later.
On this visit Webster wrote three letters describing the Island and its pleasures. He had, it seems, escaped the hay fever which pursued him on the mainland at this season; and he had greatly enjoyed the bluefishing in the rips off the South Side. He had journeyed the length of the Island to see Gay Head, and with Dr. Daniel Fisher he had ridden over the Great Plain, shooting plover from a carriage. Dr. Fisher was the better marksman from the moving vehicle.
Within ten years, Daniel Webster's three Vineyard letters had been printed as testimonials for the Island as a summer resort, and for a century Webster was quoted by hotels, newspapers and real estate agents. Self consciousness came early to the budding resort,
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close followed by self assurance, and neither ever departed more. A splendid natural position and soft climate, coupled with the approval of Daniel Webster-these were boasts which would carry far.
Yet even as faith and hope were growing in the destiny of Martha's Vineyard as a resort, a curious thing happened. Islanders made a Fourth of July excursion to the city. Years were still to pass before this situation would be reversed and it would be unthinkable to make a pleasure trip to the city in summer, most of all in any collec- tive fashion. One might as well go sea bathing in January.
For this July excursion and picnic in 1846, the steamer Naushon was available, "a coquettish little steamboat, so full of youth as hardly to lie still at her moorings without intriguing for a note of admiration from the wharfinger." She was commanded by "that gentleman of captains, Holmes W. Smith." Indeed, the Island was getting on; the Naushon was a fast boat with greatly improved appointments, and although she lost money in a brief career of ser- vice, she was to be succeeded by more ambitious steamboats still. Her own career ended only after she had long steamed about in New York harbor under the changed name of Newsboy, the property of the New York Herald.
The Fourth of July adventure was a pronounced success. Three whaling ships from the Pacific Ocean had reached New Bedford the night before, and the city teemed. There were fireworks and brass bands. That same year the fireworks on Boston Common were concluded with a magnificent piece a hundred feet in length, rep- resenting the Castle of St. Juan D'Ulboa, and it was this same sort of thing, on hardly so ambitious a scale, which thrilled the holiday crowds of New Bedford. In the afternoon, the steamer Naushon made an excursion to Gay Head, two hundred persons taking pas- sage. Years later such excursions were to become famous.
Such are the beginnings of the summer resort history of Martha's Vineyard. The growth of cities goes on, industry sprawls out and takes what it wants on the continent, individuals and families find their way to this Island year by year; though not so readily as to Newport.
"Now is the time for the seaside to have its visitors, where springs he cooling breeze and where the pleasures of sailing and fishing are
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Photographs courtesy of John F. Madeiros
Top: two views looking into Main Street, Edgartown, when streets were of dirt, oil lamps gave light, and big trees were small; middle: looking up Cooke Street across South Water, and, on the right, North Water Street, looking toward Daggett; bottom: maritime accents, the Harbor Light, and whalers at the docks.
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enjoyed," proclaims the Vineyard Gazette in 1858, "and a sight of the sea, that shining yet ruffled surface of green and alternate shades of blue and glittering foam, like flowers on the crested wave. To Newport wend persons of wealth and fashion to pass the heated hours of summer; but however beautiful the place, the expenses are very heavy and there are many other drawbacks to those who love to be at ease and feel at home . . . There is no doubt that the
number of visitors to our Island for summer recreation and health might be greatly increased by a wider dissemination of the advan- tages to be obtained. We don't want the blacklegs of Newport, or those of that character who visit that place in summer; neither do we wish to furnish drinking and smoking saloons to rowdy cus- tomers; and certainly, we don't want the conceited fop and the pert miss, who have not sense enough for any manly or truly feminine enjoyment."
Has not Martha's Vineyard beaches more than nine times as long as those of Newport, with the added advantages of a drive across a beautiful prairie to visit the scene of the surf? How about the un- matched and unmatchable Gay Head? The bluefishing?
"Very many excellent families," remarked one writer, "who are sick of the mere show and trifling conventionalities of would-be- genteel places and personages" would like to come to the Vineyard. What Edgartown needs to vie with Newport is a hotel which will offer inducements to the gentlemen of leisure. It need not be an extravagant house; a plain, substantial edifice, suitable at first to accommodate a hundred guests, will do quite well enough. If only the carpenters and mechanics would subscribe their services in return for stock in the project, the new hotel might burst forth like Jonah's gourd, perhaps in one night.
Meantime, "visitors from the mainland will find on the Vineyard a cozy sociableness, and a most attentive politeness without a single dash of Chesterfield in it." But that seasoning, so flatly disclaimed , suppose it should, after all, prove to be the one indispensable?
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IV
The Fleet's In
Several things happened in the summer of 1858. In thirty-five days, from May 28 to July 1, 137,750 pounds of bluefish were landed at Edgartown. The ship Junior with her mutineers arrived at New Bedford to account to the law for the bloody murder of Captain Archibald Mellen Jr. of Edgartown on Christmas night in the South Pacific ocean. And a squadron of yachts of the New York Yacht Club arrived at Holmes Hole, ran around to Edgartown, and there lay at anchor while unfavorable weather kept them from sailing on to Nahant.
Yachting on any ambitious scale was young. The first American yacht, the brigantine Cleopatra's Barge, had been built at Salem in 1816 for Retire Becket. And, after almost thirty years, a group of yachtsmen had met in the cabin of the small schooner Gimcrack, and the New York Yacht Club was brought forth. An occasional yacht had sailed majestically into one of the Vineyard harbors, its whiter canvas, fastidious hull and daintiness of behavior contrasting with the broad beamed whaleships and the freight schooners.
Squadron sailing was new when Islanders looked out and saw the flotilla at anchor almost under their windows. There were Commo- dore William Edgar's Widgeon, the schooner America which had already brought back a certain cup from across the Atlantic, and yachts which bore the names Favoretta, Irene, Julia, Una, Haswell, Madgie, Dawn, Juliette, Menacing, Mystery, and a number of others.
Now the yachts had arrived on Wednesday, and as the weather did not improve, the stay became protracted. The whaling port was bluffly hospitable always, but there were no precedents for the enter- tainment of yachtsmen. Apparently it did not occur to Edgartonians generally that here were some of the gentlemen of leisure for whom an aspiring watering place ought to exert its charms. True, certain courtesies were extended to Commodore Edgar and his staff; but as for gaiety, to enliven the waiting hours, there was none ready at hand. The situation worked itself out in this manner.
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As a woman of Edgartown sat on the bank at the harbor-front, fishing, she was approached by a visitor from the Widgeon.
"You can't be very comfortable, sitting there on the hard ground," he said to her. "Why not let me give you this stool"?
The contemporary view was that the stool was "elegantly em- broidered." It came from the Widgeon.
"I'm all right as I am," said the woman, much surprised.
"Oh, but do take the stool," insisted the young yachtsman, and, after a minute or two, she accepted.
A few remarks about the weather, about Edgartown, and about the yachts were exchanged. Then the young man suggested that it would be much pleasanter for the yachtsmen if they knew some of the girls of Edgartown.
By that time the woman's husband had appeared and joined in the conversation. Nothing could be easier than to arrange the desired introductions. How about a dance, the visitor inquired? Well, dances could be held in the town hall, but the selectmen had recently increased the rental, he was told, rather apologetically.
"How much would it cost'? he asked, a little afraid that the plan was going to fall through.
"Two dollars and a half," was the reply. The young man quickly brightened.
The upshot was that a dance was held. A piano was engaged at a rental of ten dollars for the night, and the town hall was decorated in the squadron's colors. In those days there was a scarcity of young men in Edgartown, and girls were not unaccustomed to dancing with one another; the sea exacted many sacrifices from the port and all its people. The dance of the yacht club was, for that reason, even more of an event than it would have been otherwise. Waltz followed waltz, and the gallants in white flannel found the girls of Edgar- town fair and amusing.
On the following day, the girls reciprocated by inviting the yachts- men to a singing party. There was now no point whatever in sailing on to Nahant, no matter what the wind or tide. Sunday came, and the yachts still rode at anchor, and the yachtsmen were guests of their feminine friends at the Baptist church.
Early the following day the squadron cleared and was soon a series
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of white patches against blue sky. An occasion of a special sort seemed to be passing into history, dimming reluctantly as hulls dropped over the horizon rim.
But at Newport the yachtsmen, or some of them at least, gave a humorous account of their Edgartown visit, and the story appeared in print with jests and not a little derision at the expense of the Vineyarders and their daughters. The story of the elegantly embroid- ered stool was recounted, and the stool could hardly have been more elegantly embroidered than the story itself. There was merriment that the fisherwoman and her husband should have pulled such a long face and apologized because of a $2.50 fee for the town hall; and it was said that the piano rented for the dance was undoubtedly the only one in town. In short, the affair was made to appear as a lark at the expense of Edgartown.
In point of fact the story about the piano and all that was to be inferred from it was false. Edgartown owned a number of pianos, the first one having been purchased by Capt. Abraham Osborn from Chickering and Mackay in 1835. The Mackay was Capt. John Mackay, who brought home rosewood and mahogany in his ships; and there was, therefore, a basic association between sea captains and pianos. If you looked into the homes of whaling captains you found also rare china and lacquered trays, inlaid cabinets of teak- wood and pearl, tortoise shell fans and rare silks. Behind a knotty, frugal individualism lay a richness of life, an instinct for the choice thing, which strangers could not fathom.
While the yachtsmen were still laughing up their sleeves, the squadron began to bob and strain at its moorings. The sky darkened and there was apprehension at Newport. Edgar Marchant, the Old Editor of the Vineyard Gazette, had taken his pen in hand. He lingers in the history of the Island, a dark, caped figure, glittering of eye and of spirit.
"Such characters," the Old Editor declared, "generally turn out to be better dancers, harder drinkers and more abominable liars than any other class of men." The mistake as to their being gentlemen, he thought, had an excuse under the circumstances. But "the sup- position is not improbable that a majority of the yacht company were of the miserable idlers who are found in every great city."
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He concluded with the hope that "they will not disgrace us with another visit."
In no time at all, Commodore Edgar sent letters of handsome disavowal and apology to Dr. Daniel Fisher, and they were duly spread before the public. Now, indeed, the incident passed into history.
The interlude of 1858 was, in more ways than one, a curious pas- sage. It was a sign of the times-times long since changed-that the New York Yacht Club should have to seek entertainment, and, more- over, that these visiting yachtsmen should evince any interest in the girls of Edgartown, no matter how fair. The present generation can hardly recall when there was anything but a summer colony, and plenty of summer colony girls, and a choice of diversion which makes the affair of that remote August seem strangely naive and primitive.
Some of the benches upon which the yachtsmen sat with their congenial companions at Sunday service are now preserved in the attractive quarters of the Edgartown Yacht Club. No trace remains of the elegantly embroidered stool.
V
The Magic Lantern of Gay Head
If there had been nothing on Martha's Vineyard but Gay Head, the Island must surely have become a resort. Many of the earliest records of pilgrimages across Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound are concerned with visits to the clay cliffs, the Light, and the Indians. Nearly always, the records are full of wide-eyed wonder-wonder which was hushed at first, but became more and more voluble until. the observer, at his desk at home, poured forth adjectives without stint.
An expedition to Gay Head was difficult. Samuel Devens remarked that it was necessary to drive through thirty separate pairs of bars when he made the trip from Edgartown. Daniel Webster was fatigued with the drive across the Island. There were long, tedious
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hills, miles of sandy cart track. Many visitors made two days of the journey, remaining overnight at the Light or at some Gay Head house.
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