USA > Massachusetts > Dukes County > Marthas Vineyard > Martha's Vineyard, summer resort, 1835-1935 > Part 5
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
However, the directors are kept on their mettle not alone by their own consciences, which may be flattered by the wonders taking place before their eyes, but by sterner reminders. No less a defender of the faith than the Christian Advocate joins the ranks of-can they now be called "illiberal critics"?
"There is constant reason to fear," the Advocate says in 1865, lest camp meetings "shall degenerate into mammoth picnics. . In regard to one of our noted meetings, such fears seem already realized. We received in the dailies glowing accounts of the beautiful situation, fine opportunities for sea bathing, and luxurious private dwellings at Martha's Vineyard. The singing was pronounced su- perb, the preaching superior, the congregations immense, and, of course, it was but reasonable to anticipate valuable spiritual results. But the secretary of the meeting, in his published notice, tells a tale that should make every church, every minister and every Christian who spent the week at that meeting blush for shame and weep in penitence. With an innocence of intention which makes his satire all the more pungent, the secretary states that 'at least one soul was converted, and there may have been others.' A good many fishers of men to drive so little business!"
Does not the Christian Advocate understand that times have changed? These are not the days of Reformation John Adams, al- though Camp Meeting John Allen is still among the preachers; these are not years in which the spirit of revivalism awakens miraculous signs among such people as those who visit Wesleyan Grove; these are not times when narrow, dogmatic tests from old meetings can be used for literal measurement of spiritual accomplishment.
There is no answer to the attack, on the record, at least. But Mr. Vincent has still further elaborated his former theme: "Formerly we came here for the benefit of the soul only; now we come for the cultivation of the social elements as well . . . We had not the luxuries, nor the 'congress water'; but we had what was quite as useful as the furnishings at Saratoga, and at far less rates; and we were under better influences."
-
SUMMER RESORT
53
Meantime apocryphal tales of life at Wesleyan Grove in camp meeting time get started about the country. One of them comes back to the Vineyard, a clipping from an unnamed Missouri newspaper : "The way people get acquainted in the evening in the vicinity of the religious camp ground at Martha's Vineyard is thus described : 'Good evening,' says the owner of a cigar. 'Ah! Oh!', a titter and a blush, and a few more exclamation points, and the surrender; the preface is over. 'My arm?' 'Oh, no!' but she takes it, and they walk the sea-beat shore. They soon discover that they are cousins. 'The breeze is chill,' and his shawl enfolds them both, and so they dis- appear in the distance."
Another anecdote is more delicately garnished. It is going the rounds in the east. "In the course of his remarks, one of the preachers said, 'If there are any lambs here, let us take them to our bosoms.' Shortly after, when going towards East Chop, we saw a young man under a tree with one of the lambs on his bosom. We thought, if all were as ready to obey instructions, the millenium was actually at hand."
This sort of chaff was to be regretted but not feared, nor could it be considered to merit any answer from the camp meeting association. No, the institution at Wesleyan Grove was safe from the assaults of its enemies, safe in the garments of logic fashioned for it by such men as Hebron Vincent. That being so, who was there left to be afraid of? Could it be, by any chance, that there was danger from the camp meeting's friends?
At that time the notorious eccentric, George Francis Train, was attracting a great deal of attention in the land, and suddenly he was found (where everyone seemed to be going in those days) at Wesleyan Grove. For him, to be present was to be vocal, and one day, to their distaste, the camp meeting directors read Mr. Train's impressions in the New York Express.
"The association bought these thirty-five acres for $3,000," he writes. (This was August, 1866, and the purchase had been consummated prior to the 1865 meeting.) "They are now worth $300,000 and in ten years I could make them worth $3,000,000.
"I had seen the hanging gardens of a Chinese prince at
$
1
1
١
54
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
Foo-Chow-Foo, but it was nothing like the Martha's Vine- yard Camp Meeting.
"I saw the City of Canvas at Melbourne, Australia, in 1853, on the banks of the Yarra-Yarra, but it was nothing like the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting.
"I have been astonished to see some thousands of pilgrims bound to Mecca, in their queer tenements, but it was nothing like the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting.
"I was in the French Camp, the Russian Camp, the Turkish Camp, the Sardinian Camp, near the Redan, the Malakoff and at Kammísh and Balaklava, but it did not so much surprise me as this Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting.
"I have gazed in startled astonishment at the Bedouins in Asia Minor, at the Ladrone pirates in the Bocca Tigris in China, at the Sepoy encampment in India, at the Turkish village of tents of Said Pasha, and the emigrants' corral at Omaha in Nebraska, but none of these things came up to the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting.
"Thirty years ago there were only four tents, now there are six hundred; ten years since there was one cottage, now there are two hundred; then fifty people knelt down, now fifty thousand."
The camp meeting was, Mr. Train wrote in enthusiasm, a "grand fete cold water," a "monster tented tea party."
He had grossly overstated the facts. The Vineyard Gazette had begun publication of a daily edition for the camp meeting, under the style of Camp Meeting Herald-the only newspaper of its kind in the world-and the Herald proceeded to trim Mr. Train's sails.
"As for the fifty thousand upon their knees, of which Mr. Train speaks, we can only say that no one has seen them. The largest number upon the ground at any one time-and that was on Sunday -- was, perhaps, fifteen thousand. Had the weather been settled and pleasant, it probably would have reached twenty thousand. Of these, the largest number we have seen on their knees-and we allude to what are called 'the anxious seats', was eighteen on Friday evening, at the close of the public service at the stand."
But the harm had been done. Mr. Train had sent shivers up and
الله
55
SUMMER RESORT
down more than one ministerial spine. He had performed the unique disservice of appearing as an admirer, full of indiscreet enthusiasm, and proceeding to overstate the speculative and secular aspects of the camp meeting. His words, bizarre as they were, must have given form and color to thoughts which the camp meeting association itself had never uttered, never even put into words in the inner recesses of its collective mind. Few things are more disconcerting than to have one's inhibited ideas blazoned forth by a stranger who does not see or cannot appreciate their implications.
"It was designed," Hebron Vincent wrote, "that these grounds should remain ever, as they now were, under Christian control. The rumored offer of fifty thousand dollars by a speculator would not have been regarded as the least temptation whatever; nor would the estimate of George Francis Train, who visited the place this season,-viz., three hundred thousand dollars,-be sufficient to make Judases of the men who worship the Lord in this sacred retreat."
Notwithstanding the sincerity and conviction of the directors of the camp meeting association, all the straws were being carried gently in one direction. As early as 1860 a more sober-minded man than Train had written to the Boston Courier, observing, "Some enterprising men will make princely fortunes here, in purchasing lands, soon, in my judgment, to be in demand." Events were not subject, like Wesleyan Grove, to Christian control.
In the very year that George Francis Train applied the thick and gaudy pigments of his vision, something occurred which was to bring consequences tumbling one upon another. The flood gates of human affairs were open, and the camp meeting was not to escape.
The Civil War had ended.
X
Home by the Seaside
The mid sixties had come. Edgartown had been entertaining visi- tors and summer boarders, most of them interested in bluefish and striped bass, for a good many years; Holmes Hole, too, had been acting as a host.
.
56
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
"Some of our solid men," a Holmes Hole citizen wrote to the Vineyard Gazette in 1864, "are talking soberly and earnestly of building a new public house on a somewhat extensive scale. There appears to be a strong determination on the part of our monied men to make our cosy village more attractive than it ever yet has been. I really believe that we possess as many facilities for an enticing summer resort as yourselves, although an opinion may be entertained to the contrary by the majority of your people. We will show you what we can do by and by."
That was the way Islanders were talking. The idea of making Martha's Vineyard into a watering place had grown, and until lately the old towns had never dreamed that the camp meeting was about to take the show away from them. While Edgartown and Holmes Hole were occupied with wishful thinking and ambitious plans, the full splendor of a gilded age was breaking upon Wesleyan Grove and the surrounding region, the Great Pasture of old times.
The great oaks among which the worshippers sat were beginning to pass. Some had been cut down already, and others were losing their foliage. The ground beneath them was beaten down by thous- ands of feet, and the packed earth choked and starved the roots which used to feed from a loose compost in the native wood. The last of the trees which shaded the preacher and audience was removed in 1870; but progress must bring penalties, and canvas awnings and tents were to replace the branches of the oaks. In the rest of the great circle the trees continued to flourish, and do so today.
The camp ground passed into the proprietorship of the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, first through trustees just prior to the meeting of 1864, and finally into the hands of the asso- ciation itself in 1866. In 1868 the association was incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts. These formal steps had been delayed for a length of time which seems inexplicable, except in the light of the stubborn conservatism of a religious body and a failure to read aright what should have been so obvious, the premonitory symptoms of the birth of a summer resort.
Additional acres of land had been cleared and lotted, new trees had been set out, streets and avenues turned the ground into a sort of labyrinth. Applications for cottage sites and tent locations flowed
.
57
SUMMER RESORT
in. The first wooden cottage had made its appearance about 1859, and now the change from canvas to wood was taking place with amazing rapidity. Carpenters were busy all summer long, except when their hammers and saws were stilled during camp meeting week. The association took steps to curb speculation through re-sale of cottage rights.
When August came, few places in Massachusetts had so large a population as the camp ground, or a gathering of so many distin- guished personages. Here were governors, senators, doctors, members of Congress, judges, and clergymen almost without number. The multitudes pictured by George Francis Train were a reality.
One approached the camp ground by the road from Eastville, a sandy, unsteady wagon track passing through scrub oak and pines, between pastures with rail fences, and open to the clear sky. Where the road entered the encampment, there were three or four large tents on the left side, constituting the boarding establishment of Mr. William Vinson of Edgartown. Many campers still brought cold provisions to last them through camp meeting week, and some had set up ambitious housekeeping arrangements. But the boarding tents were the popular recourse, and there were many of them in different parts of the ground, some of them of large size. Often they were filled and filled again, in relays, for a single meal.
Close by was the pond-Squash Meadow-and on the side nearest the camp ground a boat bazaar where one could find a boat of almost any convenient size, for one person or for six or eight. Across the pond, on the Vineyard Sound shore, was a bathing establish- ment to which sojourners were continually going during the heat of the day. But the most popular bathing place was that owned by Captain Shubael Lyman Norton and Captain Ira Darrow, east of the camp ground and across a wide open space of sand and tall grass. Here were the larger bathhouses, and here at eleven in the morning the fashionable plunge into the salt water took place in a gloriously collective fashion.
Near the boarding tents at the camp ground entrance were five beautiful cottages which looked "as if they were all run in one mould." It was nothing to build a single cottage at a time; con- tractors took orders in dozens. For the most part these cottages cost
1
1
58
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
from $150 to $600. They were small as compared to houses, but large as compared to tents.
All of them were decorated with scrollwork along the eaves, with gables of curious angles and contours, with turrets or small spires, with fantastically shaped windows. There were always tiny porches with fancy railings, miniature balconies above, and fancy cut shingles of different designs. These dwellings were painted in many colors, some striped, some trimmed, some frosted like cakes. As rapidly as they were occupied, the owners cultivated grass plots, edged them with white stones or shells from the beach, hung out lanterns and ornaments of glass, and cultivated flowers and plants, many of them exotic with foliage as arresting as the cottages them- selves.
The distance to the main circle was short; one approached through an avenue which was, in reality, a lane, passing between more tents and cottages. But if dwellings and avenues were miniature, there was nothing of this quality in the great circle-here was a sight which swept the imagination. In the center were the benches, ranged before the latticed preachers' stand, and around the inner rim twenty large society tents. All other tents had been removed beyond the avenue which encircled this inner sanctuary of the camp ground. The result was a series of vistas which opened to the onlooker no matter where he stood, and attracted his eye across the open space, around the natural curves of the meeting place itself, or through the avenucs and ways which led off here and there into other parks and circles.
Although the camp meeting association had exercised control in plotting the land, the tent and cottage community showed its origin and a natural evolution which was responsible for the completed design. The main ampitheatre was a glorification of the first circle of nine tents pitched in 1835; other circles were variations, improv- isations on the same theme. Thus there were County Park and Forest Circle, to the north and south respectively, both the outgrowth of past rings of tents. All through the camp ground ran curving streets and intersecting avenues, with here and there an enclosed grass plot hemmed in by tents and cottages.
Near the edge of the encampment stood the largest permanent building erected by individual enterprise, a structure of two and a
An artist's conception of the Cottage City in the very carlies
MITH
MARTHAS VINEYARD
011
...
...
...
-
7
59
SUMMER RESORT
half stories built for a Mr. Dunbar of New Bedford. It contained thirty-one rooms, intended to rent for fifteen dollars a week. The cost of the establishment was between two and three thousand dollars. One or two rooms were occupied before the carpenters had finished their work. This later became the Central House, and still later the Beatrice House.
By night the streets of this cottage and canvas community were lighted by means of lanterns. In 1861 a patent whale oil burner, developed by a Mr. Topham, was used, but with sperm oil as a fluid to give an even better light for camp meeting week. After dusk had fallen, the yellow flares dissolved into a cool darkness, and moths and night insects kept flying about them. The tents and cot- tages, each dimly lighted by a single lamp or lantern, might be "imagined to resemble the celestial city's pearly gates where trans- lucence would manifest the beauty of the glorious light within." The luminous white canvas was spectral, and the night watch, as he made his rounds, beheld a spectacle more stirring even than that which basked under the August sun at noonday, for the ghost of the camp held its suggestions of mystery.
In the early days there had been no money for police, and no police had been needed. Isaiah Pease was sheriff of the County of Dukes County for forty years, and his faithful attendance at camp meeting was in itself a guarantee of order. A state law, enacted in 1838, had prohibited peddling, gambling, horse racing and play acting within a mile of camp meetings, and this served the purposes of Wesleyan Grove exceedingly well, since the landing at Eastville came just within the mile limit. From time to time there was a vigilance committee, and at last the meeting came to the necessity of a real police force. In August, 1869, there were six arrests for gambling.
Instead of one well for drinking water, there were now several, and campers and cottagers came to the pumps with pails and other receptacles. Nor must they fail to keep a bucket full of water in readiness every night, for protection in case of fire, although some observers said it would be easier to run to the pump for a fresh bucket than to grope about for the one waiting in the darkness.
The times of nocturnal prayer meetings had passed, and no hos- annas could be uttered at midnight or early dawn. But the camp
. |
-
60
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
meeting kept a seventeen hour day. At 5:30 in the morning the bell rang for rising, and men and women bathed in cold water and got into their clothes; then at 6:00 the bell rang again, for prayer meeting. Breakfast was at 7, and family and tent meetings began at 8. Preach- ing from the stand was set for 10, and lasted well along toward dinner, which was at 12. A children's meeting was held at 1, and preaching at the stand began again at 2; there was a gathering of young people at 6, and the final preaching of the day began at 7. The bell for retiring rang at 10, and the camp subsided into silence and the half light of its lanterns.
George Francis Train had praised the crinoline he saw at the camp meeting; and there were stove pipe hats, sun bonnets, walking sticks, and sunshades. Camp meeting week was a series of high spirited Sundays, as Sundays would be if each were a holiday as well as a day of worship.
As the great crowds came, visitors were still accommodated in the straw on the ground under society tents; and licensed victuallers and hawkers catered to the needs of the stranger. To make a morning toilet, one visitor complained, cost him fifty cents: he had to pay ten cents for the pumping, ten for a towel, ten for use of a blacking brush, ten for the blacking, and ten for having the looking glass held. There was a celebrated entrepreneur who went about the grounds with a sign on his hat advertising board and lodging, “In- quire Within."
Such was the camp ground, and such the way of life during the short August season. There was one phenomenon which should have excited the amazement of the visitor. The camp ground itself was well taken up with tents and cottages, so much so that leasing privileges for good locations were held at a premium; and this ground teemed with its thousands of visitors. Yet just beyond, sepa- rated from old Wesleyan Grove by no more than an imaginary line, were the remaining open lands of the Great Pasture, reaching to Vine- yard Sound and the bluffs which overlooked the water. Camp meet- ing visitors were wont to promenade across this pasture land; over it they went to reach the bathhouses and the beach, or to stroll at the top of the bluffs by moonlight. Certainly it was anomalous that the one region should be so populous, so teeming with activity, and
--
61
SUMMER RESORT
the other so pastoral. Only one building of consequence had appeared outside the limits of the camp ground, the tintype saloon of Enoch C. Cornell of Edgartown. Why should there not be more? Why should not the tents and cottages spread out comfortably, and the campers avail themselves of the freedom this ample space would give?
The directors of the camp meeting association were thinking about this in 1866, but they had just now taken title to their own camp ground. Any new departure would require long deliberation, and there was certain to be opposition to every secular step. On the one hand, it would be desirable to protect the meeting by controlling this neighboring pasture; but, on the other, religion and business ought to be kept separate. There were many who believed that the association had been drawn too fast and too far from its original simplicity and unity of purpose already.
While this reflection and discussion went on, the opportunity was snatched away. Before the end of the gathering of 1866 the ominous news came to the camp meeting directors : Captain Shubael Lyman Norton had sold five-sixths of his seventy-five acres, including all the open land between the camp ground and the beach, the beach itself, and the bluffs southeast of the lake, to five associates who, with himself, were to constitute the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company.
These were the new owners, the fathers of a new summer resort, the riders of the post-war wave at its crest : Captain Norton himself, an honorable and a graceful figure, destined to become patriarchal with the years. He was a retired merchant captain who had been born not a mile from this same pasture land in 1824. He went to sea at eighteen as supercargo for R. C. Mackay & Son in the East India trade, was master of a vessel at twenty-one, followed the sea in the India and China trade for ten or a dozen voyages, and returned to Martha's Vineyard to occupy this property which his father had acquired after the division of the estate of William Butler.
Next was Captain Ira Darrow of Edgartown, who had been mas- ter of packets plying between the Vineyard and the main, the owner of a coal business which consisted of the ordering of an annual schooner load of coal and its discharging at Darrow's wharf, at the foot of the captain's homestead lot, and subsequent distribution to
1
62
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
those who had placed orders. He had been, too, a partner of Captain Norton in the bathhouses at the newly christened Oak Bluffs.
Then there was Captain Grafton Norton Collins of Edgartown, former master of the whaleship Walter Scott, heir to the fortune of his uncle, Grafton Norton, also of Edgartown, for years an agent and outfitter of whaleships. He was short of stature and stout. The back of his head was bald, and he had dark whiskers. On him, more than on the others, the spirit of the future was looking with an ironic smile.
Next was William Bradley of Edgartown, storekeeper and bank director, who had added hardware to the stock of groceries and pro- visions kept by his father, Captain Edmund Bradley, in a shop near the Edgartown waterfront. He was to bring with him to the new Oak Bluffs, in patrimony and savings, the sum of $30,000.
The fifth member of the group was William S. Hills, a Boston flour merchant. He had a brother Joel who was to succeed him.
Last, and in a certain respect, most important of all, was the Hon. Erastus P. Carpenter of Foxboro, Mass. Most important, because it was he who set the new company in motion, took the proprietorship and plain outlook of Captain Norton, and the accu- mulation of whaling capital, added the ferment of his own pro- motional spirit, and merged them into a land company which knew a boom when it saw one. He was a rather small man, with bright dark eyes, always well dressed in a way that commanded business confidence, and he had schemes which were not only grandly imag- inative but soberly attainable as well. He was born in Foxboro in 1832, the son of a veteran of the war of 1812, a successful manufac- turer who had accumulated a fortune.
Erastus was educated in public and private schools, but chose business instead of college; at the age of twenty he apprenticed him- self to a cousin in the straw business for one year for a remuneration of $125. Then he became a salesman, and later consolidated the straw factories of Foxboro in one building. Business increased, im- provements and additions were made in the plant and, at length, in 1852 he built the Union Straw Works, employing nearly 6,000 persons, the second largest factory of the kind in the world. At the opening of the Civil War he sustained losses in the South, and his
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.