Great events shaped the history of Martha’s Vineyard in the second half of the 20th century and made the Island famous around the world. There was the accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969, the filming of the movie Jaws in 1974, the purchase of land by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1978, the visits of the late Princess of Wales and the President of the United States in the 1990s, the plane crash off Aquinnah that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999.
For a time, it felt as if the Vineyard had no more story to tell of itself than could fit into a three-minute segment on Entertainment Tonight.

But the true history of Martha’s Vineyard is a story laced with drama and contradictions. In one sense, it is a recent history, for the Vineyard is the newest piece of real estate in the geologic evolution of New England. In another it is one of the oldest histories, for the Vineyard remains the home of the some of the first settlers in the northeast, both Indian and English. It is a story rooted in the Atlantic adventure of fishing, the global adventure of whaling, the labor of farming, the booms and busts of resorthood. In his book Martha’s Vineyard – an Elegy, written by the late Everett S. Allen (once a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette), Hattie Tilton, of an ancestral Vineyard family, said: “I imagine everything that ever happened on earth has happened on the Vineyard at least once. And some things twice.”

The story of the physical creation of the Vineyard begins about 12,000 years ago, as a huge shoveling wall of ice crept to a stop under what was probably – for an ice age, anyway – a relatively mild afternoon sun. One lobe of ice to the north was forming the peninsula of Cape Cod. Another, about 20 miles to the east, was shaping the crescent of Nantucket. The lobe that would create the Vineyard had advanced as far as what is now the northwestern shore of the Island. As the parade of warmer days marched on, the glacier began to melt and retreat, leaving behind a landscape of highland and valley, boulder and stone, along the whole western spine of the Vineyard from West Chop to Aquinnah.

The winds blew much of the sand, dirt and grit to the south and east, forming a granular, acidic bed of topsoil called sandplain. Today this sort of soil is to be found no place on earth except where the last glacial advance finally stopped, along Long Island, the Vineyard and Nantucket. The sea slowly flooded the lowest areas around the Islands, separating them from Cape Cod. With its unique sandy soil, its prairie landscape, its perpetual battering by sea and storm, the Vineyard began its life as a place biologically disconnected from the mainland not more than three miles away. Everything above and around the Island – the land, the sea and the sky – conspires to treat nature pretty hard, and for many generations existence on the Vineyard was hard on people too. No matter the species, life here begins with a sense of being somehow separate from the everyday, uniform world of the mainland.

THE FIRST SETTLERS

The first people on Martha’s Vineyard were Indians of the Wampanoag tribe, who probably were able to walk here before the sea filled the lowest valleys and plains. Wampanoags still make up a large part of the town of Aquinnah, known as Gay Head until the spring of 1998. The modern history of Martha’s Vineyard begins with the arrival of a single English ship in 1602, commanded by Bartholomew Gosnold, who built the first colonial settlement in New England on Cuttyhunk, a small island just across Vineyard Sound. Gosnold crossed the sound to visit the Vineyard many times during the single summer season he remained in the New World; the Indians called it Noepe, meaning “Amid the Waters” – a reference to the two distinct and often conflicting tidal currents the native people saw at work around the Island. Gosnold named it “Martha’s Vineyard,” probably after his infant daughter and because the Island was covered by wild grapes.

The right to settle permanently on the Vineyard was purchased by Thomas Mayhew Sr., a miller from Watertown, Mass., who obtained his title from two English noblemen who held overlapping claims to the Islands. His son Thomas Jr. moved to what is now Edgartown with a handful of settlers in 1642, and his father followed soon after. The senior Mayhew established himself as governor of the Island; the younger became a teacher and missionary to the Indians, converting the first of them to Christianity less than a year after his arrival.

The newcomers spent the first 150 years on the Vineyard farming and fishing. When they arrived, there were about 3,000 Indians living in four main tribes on the Island – one of the densest concentrations in all of New England – but the native people were stricken by diseases brought by the English, and soon the only tribe left was the Aquinnahs at the isolated far western end of the Island. For many generations after the coming of the whites, the total population of the Vineyard hovered around 2,000 people.

They lived on an Island roughly shaped like a triangle, about 25 miles long and only seven miles wide at the widest. In colonial times, there were only two towns on the Vineyard. Edgartown, the county seat, encompassed the eastern half of the Island, including the adjacent island of Chappaquiddick; Tisbury made up the western half, including the tiny village of Chilmark and what would become an enclave of relatively arid land for the Indians at Gay Head.

WHALING

Shortly after 1800, the Vineyard and its sister island of Nantucket began to embark on extended whaling voyages to distant parts of the world. Indians had been whaling along the shore for decades, and Islanders had joined the hunt in these nearby waters almost from their arrival. But it was these distant voyages that brought sudden and immense wealth to the two Islands. Nantucket grew famous for providing the ships, and though it had a small fleet of its own, the Vineyard became best known for providing the captains, the crew, and many of the services whaling ships needed as they headed out sea, or returned with their catch.

Whaling expeditions sailed all over the globe, into the South Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian Ocean, and many times around the stormy southern tip of South America and into the Pacific. Nantucket’s harbor was too shallow to accommodate her own whalers when they returned laden with oil, so Edgartown grew rich by offloading Nantucket vessels when they came home. With whaling money, great mansions were built in the oldest Island village. By 1840, the names of both Islands were famous all around the world.

It was during this period of tremendous prosperity that the Vineyard Gazette was born. Edgar Marchant, a printer and newspaperman with a reputation for bullheadedness (“A man of positive convictions, he waited not first to learn what others thought, before uttering his own opinions,” read one tribute after his death), put together his first four-page sheet on May 14, 1846. He set type by hand, one letter at a time. The Gazette still has the press he used. With other mementos of the old hot-lead days, it is preserved in a small museum at the newspaper office on South Summer Street in Edgartown.

RESORTHOOD

In 1859 oil was discovered in Pennsylvania. It was far easier and cheaper to light lamps with petroleum products than whale oil. By 1871 the whaling industry had collapsed almost completely. Suddenly Martha’s Vineyard had to find another way to make a living.

It would do so, first, by finding salvation.

In the 1820s a great fundamentalist revival swept the country. The nation had secured its liberty, villages were growing into cities, and a new class of merchants and businessmen was beginning to rise up and grow comfortable on its earnings. But prosperity brought with it the worrisome notion that a country founded by puritans was losing sight of God and the rigorous meaning of faith. Vineyarders growing ever more wealthy on whaling money looked around at their Greek Revival houses and began to feel the same sense of uneasiness. In the summer of 1835, a small knot of Edgartonians, newly converted to the fundamentalist principles of John Wesley and Methodism, left the town and all its comforts behind and set sail for a wilderness of oaks, standing on a bluff on a northern headland of the Vineyard, about five miles away. For a week they held a revival camp meeting there.

The event was so invigorating to the spirit that they returned the next year. Soon a few mainlanders joined them. And some of them fell in love with the beauty of the land and water, and the healthful saltiness of the air. They too began to come back year after year.

Eventually, these worshippers built elaborately decorated homes where their tents once stood. These became summer cottages in the Victorian “gingerbread” style. The visits grew less and less spiritual and more and more recreational. They lasted longer each summer. Word of the Island spread across New England, and soon people began to associate the words Martha’s Vineyard with the word resort.

In the summer of 1863, it was still possible to wander through this wilderness of oak and meadow on the old Camp Ground and see not a single permanent building. Ten years later the oak and meadow were gone. In their place stood the village of Cottage City – the future town of Oak Bluffs – as a visitor would recognize it today.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

It’s hard to believe, seeing the Vineyard now, but for the rest of the 19th century and for many years into the 20th, the Island struggled just to make do.

After the death of whaling early in the 1870s, the Vineyard continued to make a living fishing and farming, but these enterprises didn’t bring in much mainland money. Vineyard men also acted as pilots for sailing ships. There was, as yet, no Cape Cod Canal, and so the clippers and schooners of the 19th century had to brave the perilous shallow waters around Cape Cod and the Islands as they carried their commerce between New York and Boston. Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds were called the second busiest waterway on the face of the earth, after the English Channel. Only Vineyard men knew these waters well enough to get deep-draft sailing vessels through the tides and over the shoals with reasonable safety.

But as a resort, the Vineyard was slow to build first-class hotels or improve roads. It made no recreational use of its harbors. (Menemsha, now a famous fishing port, stood on a narrow, unnavigable creek until it was dredged starting in 1899, and what had been a freshwater pond at Oak Bluffs wasn’t opened to the sea as a harbor until that year.) What modest summer business there was withered in the wake of every stock market crash or recession. Summer residents came to enjoy the simplest kind of life – because that’s the only kind of life Martha’s Vineyard could offer.

MODERN TIMES

World War II shot the Vineyard forward into modern times.

Servicemen from all around the country were stationed on the Vineyard during the war, many of them at an air base built quickly in the center of the Island – it is now the county airport – where they learned aerial gunnery and how to fly on and off the decks of aircraft carriers. They went home to their families after the war and spoke about a place of astonishing beauty off the coast of southern New England. Even without the war, the Vineyard couldn’t have escaped attention forever. It lay on one corner of a triangle on whose two other points stood the cities of New York and Boston. And the interstate highway system was heading this way.

Today, the year-round population of 15,000 lives in six towns. From east to west, these are: Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, Tisbury (Vineyard Haven), West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah (formerly Gay Head). Histories of these towns may be found on this Website.

Today this Island, laid down by the ice and shaped by the sea, is famous around the world. In summer the population swells to 100,000 residents and more, and the Vineyard sees more than 25,000 additional visitors coming and going every day.

With this sort of traffic, and this sort of fame, the pressure on the Vineyard to grow and conform to mainland standards of size, pace, comfort and appearance are constant. Conservation groups and individuals fight a never-ending battle against the forces of change that would make this place less and less as it was for the past 350 years, and more and more like everywhere else.