Martha's Vineyard Information

The first people on Martha’s Vineyard were Indians of the Wampanoag tribe and Wampanoags still make up a large part of the town of Aquinnah, also known as Gay Head. 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 newcomers spent the first 150 years on the Vineyard farming and fishing. 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 wealthier on whaling money looked around and began to feel the same sense of uneasiness. In the summer of 1835, a small knot of Edgartonians, left the town and all its comforts behind and set sail for 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.

But as a resort, the Vineyard was slow to build first-class hotels or improve roads. It made no recreational use of its harbors. 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.

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.

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).

Suggestion of how to spend your vacation day on Martha’s Vineyard…

Take the early morning ferry, high-speed or traditional.

Upon arrival, take a narrated 2-1/2 hour island tour (TICKETS CAN BE PURCHASED AT OUR TICKET OFFICE PRIOR TO BOARDING), rent a bicycle or moped and explore on your own or hop on the VTA bus that will take you to your choice of town or beach. .

Shop, take a walking tour after lunch or simply sit on a bench overlooking the harbor with an ice cream.

DON’T FORGET to ride the Flying Horses Carousel, the oldest continuously operating carousel in the country on your way back to the dock...go for the brass ring!!!!.

Return on a late afternoon ferry and be back in Hyannis for dinner.

Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce

Martha’s Vineyard Online

Oak Bluffs Association

Martha’s Vineyard Transit Authority