USA > Massachusetts > Dukes County > Marthas Vineyard > Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935 > Part 20
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24
XXXII Episode of 1895
A portly man with a massive head and eyes described as searching and keen boarded the Martha's Vineyard Railroad at Cottage City. It was hard to recall later what one had noticed at the time, and what one was tempted to put in afterward, when one had learned that the large man was Collis P. Huntington, railroad builder and master of empire. The cars were crowded, and Mr. Huntington found his way into the baggage car where he sat upon a box. He was, at the time, seventy-four years old, and reputed to be worth seventy millions of dollars.
As the train went puffing backward to Edgartown, the great man bought popcorn bars from Harry Collins and fed them to Trip, the popular spaniel belonging to the baggage master.
"I like that young man. I like the way he sells his corn," said Mr. Huntington to Capt. Jethro Cottle.
Harry was then in his twenty-first year. Now it so happened that the popcorn vendor and the railroad builder, and Capt. Jethro Cottle as well, were of one blood, for the mother of Collis P. Huntington was Elizabeth Vincent, daughter of Abner Vincent, and she was born and raised in a house at Quenomica, near Edgartown Great Pond on the Great Plain; and the mother of Harry Collins, Mrs. Grafton Collins, was a daughter of an own cousin of Mr. Hunting- ton. It was, therefore, a curious scene in the battered old baggage car : the mightiest of multimillionaires, and the boy selling popcorn, and paying twenty-five cents a day for the privilege, and both of the blood of the-great-plain people.
Mr. Huntington got off at the Edgartown station, and the train went on to the South Beach where Trip, the spaniel, accompanied the passengers to the shore where they viewed the surf, and ran at
1
1
220
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
full speed back again when the warning whistle blew for the return.
Mr. Huntington visited his sister, Mrs. Isaac Gates, and her husband, who was his secretary; they were spending the summer on the Island. News of the visit spread, and townspeople wondered what results might follow. Several times the great man went to Quenomica and visited his mother's birthplace, and he said that he meant to do something for her memory.
What would he do? Something for Edgartown! Anything lay within the power of this fabulously rich old man whose eyes were said to be searching and keen. Perhaps a great hotel, which the town so much needed; perhaps a memorial building; perhaps some monu- ment which would attract and delight summer visitors. The visit ended, and Collis P. Huntington went away. For a long time there was occasional discussion of his plans-surely he would not forget! -- and speculation as to what he might do for Edgartown.
Not until the great man died in 1900 was the question answered. Collis P. Huntington did nothing at all for the memory of Elizabeth Vincent of Quenomica, and nothing at all for Edgartown.
XXXIII The Woman in Red
The bathing beach at Cottage City in the carly nineties was the inspiration of many romances, and of these one was of a quality which has enshrined it forever in the annals of the resort. The Woman in Red is still mentioned in accents of wistful remembrance by those who saw her : she was a young girl of so striking a beauty that from the time she first showed herself in a red bathing suit-a shapeless, overlarge bathing suit, with skirt reaching to her knees-she was more admired and more discussed than any beauty of the summer seasons had ever been. The fact that the skirt of her bathing suit reached only to her knees, leaving her stockinged lower limbs exposed as a charm to onlookers, was significant; so, too, was the fact that the suit was of red, altogether a daring costume-one which not every girl could have worn if she would, and one which made the heart of the male beat faster.
221
SUMMER RESORT
Nellie Sands had hair of Titian red-she resembled Titian's Flora in dazzling beauty-eyes deep brown, features regular, and perfect skin lighted by exquisite coloring. Her figure, even in the slack bathing folds of the carly nineties, was something to excite jealousy, admiration and unending gossip. Wherever she went at Cottage City she was known and followed by the gaze of a worship- ping or envious resort. They called her the Woman in Red, though she was lacking some years of twenty. But for all this public attention and worship, Nellie Sands was unspoiled.
She had come to Cottage City as most visitors came, with a certain vagueness of background, for summer stood by itself, set aside out of life as a whole in a separate parcel with its own wrap- pings-hers being a suit of red. But the fact was that Nellie Sands was the daughter of a New York City drug store proprietor, and she lived in a third story back on Madison Avenue, a rooming house of no pretensions whatever. Indeed, she could hardly have aspired to Newport in summer, or Narragansett Pier; Cottage City was her own predestined Arcady, combining the pastoral ideals, the seashore, and the informal society into which she swept without challenge as a princess by right of her hair, eyes, skin and form.
In these seasons which found Nellie Sands an acknowledged rage of the resort, it happened that a modern Monte Cristo returned to Martha's Vineyard in his steam yacht. Monte Cristo was, by his own name, Captain Joseph Raphael De Lamar, and his history began many years before. He was born in Amsterdam in 1843, the son of Maximilian and Johanna Teune De Lamar. As a boy he left home and went to sea, presently turning up as mate and subsequently cap- tain of a brig plying between Rotterdam and Java.
He was twenty-three when he came to Holmes Hole and set up as a diver and ship contractor. He fitted into the life of the port and showed that he was unafraid, able, and aggressive. Many of the vessels which came to grief on shoals and rocks around Martha's Vineyard he salvaged under difficult circumstances. He had helped raise the active when that engine was submerged at Woods Hole. At the Vineyard, too, he came to know the young Lillian Norton, she who was to become-some said with his help-the celebrated Nordica. Little is remembered of those events and relationships, for
1
222
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
at the time they were in no way singular and in no way different from the accustomed life of the port.
As Captain De Lamar prospered, he took contracts larger and more important, and at a distance from the Vineyard. At last, in. December, 1875, a significant piece of news was printed in the Vineyard Gazette. It ran as follows :
"It has at last got into the papers that Capt. J. R. De Lamar, for a few years past a well known resident of Vineyard Haven, and a prominent submarine diver and contractor, is among the missing. We have hitherto refrained from mentioning the fact, owing to the excellent character borne by the missing man. But his long unexplained absence, we fear, points to another of those unfortunate defalcations which are constantly occurr- ing among men of heretofore unblemished reputation .
The fact was that the captain had taken a contract to salvage a cargo of marble sunk in the ship Charlotte near Bermuda. He had fitted out an expedition at the Vineyard, started early in the spring, "set about saving the wrecked cargo with his well known energy, and before the summer was ended he had secured it all-some $40,000 in value-and shipped it to New York." But it is not clear that the marble was worth this much, for apparently it had been damaged by salt water and the cost of the expedition had been greater than anticipated.
At all events, he settled with the owners in New York and was said to have received fifteen thousand dollars in cash. He was now to sail to Bermuda and pay off his impatient crew, who had been kept waiting overlong. His steamer left New York on October 1, but the following day a friend met him, by chance encounter, still in New York. Captain De Lamar said that he had been left by the steamer, but intended to make the trip in an old sloop he had found at the Battery. She was a "very old sloop" and the captain "had no navigating instruments, but he guessed they would get there all right."
This was the last that the Vineyard knew of Captain De Lamar for some years; he had settled his affairs, collected all that was due him, and vanished. The sloop had, in fact, cleared at the New York custom house for Bermuda and some of the captain's friends were
223
SUMMER RESORT
"charitable enough to think he has been murdered for the money he must have had about him, or committed suicide on account of a known disappointment in a love affair with a young and fascinating Boston belle."
Despite the charitableness of his friends, however, the captain had, as it was learned later, set out for the west. Chicago was his first stopover, and there he worked as bartender, butcher and sausage salesman. He was working in a glue factory at the stock yards when he interested his employers in buying a gold mine in Idaho. A partner- ship was formed, but before the mine became productive Captain De Lamar acquired the whole property, giving his notes and a mort- gage to his former employers in Chicago. A month after the deal was completed, it was said, the captain had mined enough gold to pay for the property in full. His methods of mining were unique, for he amazed the westerners by adapting the technic of submarine diving to subterranean digging. His rigs and hoists were in the true tradition of the sea, and they seemed to work smoothly. ;
And then a new figure came to the east, not the old Captain De Lamar, sea diver, any longer, but the Idaho Monte Cristo. His wealth seemed without limit. The Vineyarders heard of him again, and a young Vineyard Haven lawyer, Charles H. Brown, negotiated a complete settlement of the old Bermuda marble claims. The cap- tain's steam yacht was anchored in the harbor at the bottom of which he had worked often in a diving suit, and at Cottage City he met the beautiful Nellie Sands. The captain was fifty, and the Woman in Red was in her teens, but a romance grew and flourished in the Island summer. Nellie's mother was a silent but shrewd figure in the background, and when Captain De Lamar took the drug store girl for his bride he settled upon her the sum of half a million dollars.
Then came chapters of a quest which took the Idaho Monte Cristo and his wife far from Cottage City. Mrs. De Lamar was hailed in newspapers as the most beautiful woman in America, but she was not received into the best homes of the land. The captain tried Washington society. He drove in a stylish carriage, with blooded horses. He tried New York society. He and his Titian beauty attended the Bagby musicales and drove in Central Park at the correct hours. They tried Newport, but Nellie Sands De Lamar had a reputation
1
- ..
224
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
for beauty which helped her out of doors rather than in the drawing rooms of substantial homes.
Then came Paris, and success undreamed of. The charming Mrs. De Lamar was the mistress of a mansion in the Avenue Niel and then of a grander home in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Her portrait was painted by Duran, Bounot, Chartran and Constant --- all the painters fashionable and admired in that day. True, Captain De Lamar continued to pick his teeth with a pocket knife, and his stories were unsuited to parlor conversation; but in Paris such things were nothing in the light of the beauty of Nellie Sands. The chill of Newport was forgotten in the warmth of Paris. Once Mrs. De Lamar went to Egypt, and the Khedive took her for a drive.
A photograph of Nellie Sands De Lamar shows her in a pose with her right hand at her bosom, her left touching the folds of a long white cloak at her side; on her shoulder are clustered flowers, about her neck pearls, and in her hair a feathery ornament. She is not smiling, but her large eyes are gentle, and the repose' of her face, slightly rounded, is suggestive of wistfulness. She has a loveliness which shines through the years.
The marriage of the De Lamars lasted five years, and then the captain found some letters and sued for divorce. Captain De Lamar said, "She is very young, very beautiful and was flattered beyond description. I am a very busy man and naturally thought that when she drove out with her mother she was safe." Nellie Sands said, "Time will vindicate me. Indiscretions are not evil deeds, but no thoughts of mine upon happenings between myself and husband shall ever break into speech." Mrs. Sands said, "We little thought when we lived in our quiet home at Parkersburg, West Virginia, that we should encounter such domestic difficulties as those which confront us now The newspapers have exaggerated the present mis- understanding . . In his jealousy he misconstrued these letters and would not listen to explanations."
Friends of Nellie Sands spread reports that the captain was a little gay himself, and that he had spent fifty thousand dollars on presents for his old love, Madame Nordica, who had been Lillian Norton. The divorce was granted, however, and some years later Nellie Sands was married to James R. Hatmaker, for many years secretary
-
225
SUMMER RESORT
to Cornelius Vanderbilt. As for Captain De Lamar, he bought a place on Madison Avenue in New York, and the stories were that he intended it for Nordica when she should become his bride. But the granddaughter of Camp Meeting John Allen, though much married, never surrendered to the impetuous Monte Cristo. In 1908, near the end of her career, she returned to Vineyard Haven and sang for her friends and cousins in the Methodist church, and the Island turned out in her honor. But Captain De Lamar and Nellie Sands had gone for good from the life of the resort which had brought them together.
Yellowed newspaper clippings still preserve tales of the "world's four most beautiful women" of the nineties: three of them are named as the Czarina of Russia, Vera Boardman and Princess Henry of Pless. The fourth, of course, is Nellie Sands De Lamar, drug store daughter and Woman in Red of Cottage City's dreams, who met on the walks and avenues under the Island moon a sea diver turned millionaire.
The will of Joseph Raphael De Lamar disposed of twenty million of dollars, half to the daughter Nellie Sands had born to him, and half to the medical schools of Columbia, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities.
XXXIV Innisfail
Among the litter of land developments which followed the great . boom was Oklahoma, one time Chunk's Hill, on the west side of the Lagoon. The beginning has been recorded already. Sheriff Howes Norris, ship chandler of Eastville, purchased the tract of sightly and somewhat hilly land in 1872. From the pond a bluff rose, but a bluff largely turfed or bushy instead of sandy, and broken into declivities and rolling surfaces which stretched back from the pond shore and into woodland. Steep cliffs and mossy dells, ravines, rounded knolls, cedars and pine and oak woods-all these made Oklahoma varied and fascinating. Particularly the scene had color, from the darker green of the cedars and bayberry bushes to the pas-
1
1
1
226
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
telle shades where white sand, trailing vines, and moss met and overlapped. The pond had depth, and its usual serenity contrasted with the straits beyond the beach where Vineyard Haven harbor and the Sound were in view. The Lagoon opened under the draw- bridge of the Beach Road into the harbor; its upper reaches were fed by clear springs among serried glacial kames.
Howes Norris sold a half interest in Oklahoma to Edward Ingra- ham of Bristol, Conn., in 1872. Progress was slow, but two years later another mainland investor, Wallace Barnes, became interested, and five cottages were built, all of them supplied with pure spring water. The advertisements assured the public that the tract was "tastefully laid out with parks, avenues and walks" and that more than thirty acres out of two hundred and fifty were to be devoted to public uses.
Trouble was experienced from the beginning because of inade- quate transportation to and from town. Oklahoma lay in the town of Tisbury, and nearer to Vineyard Haven than to the camp ground. An effort was made to obtain à road from Vineyard Haven, but the outlook for roads was bearish at that time. Taxpayers were grumbling about the cost of the Beach Road, for they had discovered that the first cost was not the last cost. Someone scored heavily by pointing out that Oklahoma taxes were somewhat in arrears, and arguing that the enterprise had no immediate prospect of success. That finished the road possibility, and the best the promoters of Oklahoma could do was to run a steam launch to and from Vine- yard Haven, which required periodical opening of the drawbridge in the Beach Road and amounted to a sort of revenge. A singular aspect of the plea for a road was the fact that most of the petitioners for the road were later found to have signed a petition against it.
Howes Norris sold the last of his interest, now reduced to a third, in 1875, the purchaser being W. T. Gilbert, president of a bank in Winsted, Conn. The consideration was $5,000. This placed Okla- homa entirely in the hands of mainland promoters. That same year, J. T. Case of Bristol, Conn., became the backer of a hotel project, and construction was begun and completed in the early summer of 1876.
The new hotel stood near the end of a point of land, about a
1
Photograph Courtesy of Arthur R. Frecdlander
"The abode of peace and rest"-Innisfail
.
L
-
SUMMER RESORT
227
hundred feet above the water level; its front ran up into a tower with a bell-like top, from which extended a flagstaff. Below the covered veranda, the cliff dropped gradually to the grassy shore of the Lagoon. No Island hotel was ever more immediately and inti- mately in the presence of air and water. From the first it became a resort of singers and musicians. Here Emma Cecilia Thursby, as famous in her time as Patti, spent summer days; and here Professor Frederick Bristol, a teacher of music, offered instruction at the Villa Bristhall. Once or twice a summer his pupils gave concerts at the public hall in Vineyard Haven. Then appeared the two singers with whom the memory of the hotel will be always associated.
Tom Karl was born in Dublin in 1846. He was twenty-five when he came to the United States and began a career in light opera. His partner in the hotel enterprise was Dellon Dewey, like himself a member of the original cast of Robin Hood. The heights overlooking the Lagoon and the remoter harbor reminded Tom Karl of his native soil, and the hotel became Innisfail, which was the name given to Ireland by the Phoenicians, signifying "the abode of peace and rest." Yet this new Innisfail was not so much the home of peace and rest as of fellowship and song. The hotel was constantly en fete, aglow with the conviviality of the hosts. Friends, followers and pupils, many of them prominent on the stage, were the guests, and cach new arrival was the occasion for a party or a celebration. There had never been a hotel like Innisfail; everywhere it bore the imprint of the personalities and tastes of the hosts.
An oriental room was adorned with a portiere which Tom Karl had worn in the duel scene in Carmen; elsewhere the summer sun glistened on a cloth of gold which had come to Innisfail from the British Army where it had served as a military scarf for the first husband of Parepa Rosa. The prima donna had presented it to Mr. Karl, and he, after using it as part of his costume in The Daughter of the Regiment, had made it a hanging in the hotel on the Lagoon. Wherever the guests went they felt the imminence of old songs and laughter, the yet living reflection of footlights and romance.
By day the pupils of the hosts could be heard practicing their songs. In the evening the music room was the scene of informal gatherings, and sounds of melodies tender and gay floated over the
1
1
228
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
pond. The distant sea rumble supplied a response; and down from the cliff floated the glorious notes of Tom Karl's tenor or Lucille Saunders' contralto.
"How different from the busy nights soon to come," wrote Annie Russell in 1897, "of the footlights and the nervous tension. I really believe that of all my vacations spent in America, this will prove the most enjoyable season."
The years of Innisfail were happy years, and they were full of activity. Each summer three or four concerts were prepared by pupils and visiting artists. Sometimes there were playlets, too, and Vine- yard Haven, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown had a chance to hear many a worth while voice. Twice the concerts were given far afield at Nantucket.
"We were a self sufficient little crowd," one of the number recalls today, "and did our sailing and swimming in the Lagoon and held our clambakes on its shores as well."
An old program, perhaps a representative one, preserves the record of a "Tom Karl Concert" given at Union Chapel, Cottage City, August 16, 1901. The artists on that occasion, besides Mr. Karl, were Joseph A. Phillips, Arthur Freedlander (then a 'cello soloist, but today a distinguished painter), Madame Greta Risley Casavant, Miss Whitlock, and Miss Ffolliott Paget. Mr. Karl sang Then You'll Remember Me, from the Bohemian Girl.
Among the guests at Innisfail were Joseph Holland, famous actor, who sailed over from his summer home at Quisset at least once each season; Miss Victoria Torrilhon, concert pianist, who later married Clarence C. Buel, editor of the Century Magazine; Mr. and Mrs. Edward C. Parsons, pianists and teachers from New Haven; Miss Frances Robinson-Duff, now a prominent teacher of stage and voice technique in New York City; Mrs. Sarah Robinson-Duff, a well known teacher of voice, who was Mary Garden's first instructor; and Richard T. Percy, organist of the Marble Collegiate Church, New York City.
Artistically and socially delightful (no one used the epithet Bohe- mian), Innisfail suffered nevertheless from the best qualities of the hosts. There was little care, which was a fine thing in a resort hotel, but there was not much responsibility, either. If Karl and Dewey
229
SUMMER RESORT
found themselves paying last year's bills with this year's receipts, they were not at all perturbed. But that sort of thing hastens its own end. Eventually Charles S. Norton of Vineyard Haven was called in to straighten things out. He operated the hotel for three seasons, in behalf of Karl and Dewey, and then came a spring forest fire. In May of 1906 the scrub oaks and huckleberry bushes of the plain were kindled, and a blaze swept fiercely toward Vineyard Haven. The men of the town turned out with shovels and fought for two days, until the fire seemed under control; but the third day it rose, scorching and crackling, to race before the wind to the Lagoon.
A barrage of sparks reached Innisfail and kindled the hotel before the onslaught of the red line itself. Nothing was left unburned, and the loss was estimated at $10,000, not entirely covered by insurance. This event led directly to the development of Bayside, a summer hotel colony on the shore of Vineyard Haven harbor, by Charles S. Norton, who had already acquired the land. A long career lay ahead of Bayside, but Innisfail, where Tom Karl had sung, and Annie Russell had listened, was changed into that form of ruin com- mon in New England, no less eloquent but far harder to reconstruct than the ruins of the Old World,-a cellar hole.
XXXV Red Cedars and Blue Harbor
Closest to the heart of Vineyard Haven of all the land develop- ments was that of West Chop, and it held, as events were to prove, no idle promise. If the unorthodox beauty of Katama was a snare, and the heights of Chunk's Hill on the Lagoon doomed to emptiness, the cedars of West Chop did not mislead. The first West Chop development was announced in the spring of 1872 by Thomas Bradley of Vineyard Haven, who set forth its attractions in these terms :
CEDAR BLUFF; COTTAGE LAND FOR SALE
The undersigned offers for sale between fifty and sixty acres of the most beautiful Cottage Lands in Dukes County, situated on the West Chop of
1
230
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
Vineyard Haven Harbor at a point bordering on the Vineyard Sound, called
CEDAR BLUFF
to the Westward of West Chop Lighthouse.
Cedar Bluff is the highest point of land on this shore, and commands the most
PERFECT VIEW OF VINEYARD SOUND
east and west. These lands are mostly covered with FOREST TREES except the land near the edge of the Bluffs, where stands a large number of
RED CEDAR TREES
of peculiar shape, being flat on top so that persons can walk or sit on the top of them.
These trees make a delightful shade so that PICNIC PARTIES resort there in the summer time, it being a
MOST ROMANTIC SPOT.
Cedar Bluff is the most proper and appropriate spot for a signal station, as it commands the best view of Vineyard Sound, and is the nearest point to the mainland. All vessels passing through the Sound pass nearer to this point than any other, the water being bold close in to the Bluff, many of the vessels passing within hailing distance.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.