Welcome to the new Tisbury School! It’s 1930. Students, staff, and teachers have moved into the new school on West William Street, to pomp and parades. The deteriorating old Tisbury School on Center Street, together with its overcrowded, two-classroom annex (known as the “portable building” or “portable school”) is abandoned, soon to face the wrecking […]
The Island has had its share of colorful names. There was Major Pain, the Chilmark lawyer who fought unsuccessfully to move our county seat out of Edgartown; Mayor Blood, who gave us the name “Cottage City”; and Captain Pound, the pirate who plagued Holmes Hole Harbor. There was Harry Legg, the Helenian carpenter; Dr. Lynch, […]
He was known by everyone as “Charlie Bell” (and in his Vineyard property deeds as “Charles A. Bell”), but that, it turns out, was just his alias. “Charlie was a sight to behold,” recalled the late Stan Lair of Vineyard Haven, “strolling the Main Street with a derby hat and cane, light-colored spats, and a […]
She dressed in men’s clothing. She was openly gay. And she ran this town during the 1930s and ’40s. “Laura Johnson [was] the real, real selectman behind the scenes, out of the express office, with her mannish sweater and her tie, and her hair pulled back, and her swivel chair and all the papers. She […]
Obie Tower liked his toys. Basil Welch reminisced about him in a 1982 conversation with my grandfather, Stan Lair, in a recording made about a year after Obie’s death: “Obie always had a sporty-looking car,” recalled Welch. “He always had a motorcycle, or boats, or something. He thoroughly enjoyed life.” “He also was a musician,” […]
As the most recently departed generation of Islanders would have told us, there were no deer on Martha’s Vineyard. “There wasn’t any then,” declared Fanny Jenkinson (1893–1994) of Chilmark to Linsey Lee of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in 1983. “Never heard of a deer.” Basil Welch of Vineyard Haven told Lee, “I was born and […]
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum has produced a gem of a show that gives us a lens into what the Island looked like over a century ago. The exhibition, which greets you with some 46 framed images of the people and places of the Vineyard in the 19th and early 20th centuries, is like taking a […]
Theophilus Miguel “T. M.” Silvia was born in 1877 on Ilha de São Nicolau, a mountainous island in the Republic of Cabo Verde, the volcanic archipelago nation off the coast of West Africa known to Americans as Cape Verde. Silvia (whose surname many old-timers pronounced “Silvey”) came to the United States as a young man […]
This Was Then: Frank Bodfish, blacksmith - The Martha's Vineyard Times mvtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mvtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This Was Then: The coal yards - The Martha's Vineyard Times mvtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mvtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.