Founded in 1642 as Great Harbor, Edgartown is the oldest of Martha's Vineyard's six townships. It has been a shire town and a center of learning, a whaling port and a fishing village, a manufacturing center and a mecca for sportsmen. Its gleaming captain's houses and majestic public buildings are a testament to the wealth that whaling brought to the island in the mid-1800s, but the end of New England whaling was far from the end of its story. Faced with the loss of the industry that had sustained it, Edgartown reinvented ...
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Founded in 1642 as Great Harbor, Edgartown is the oldest of Martha's Vineyard's six townships. It has been a shire town and a center of learning, a whaling port and a fishing village, a manufacturing center and a mecca for sportsmen. Its gleaming captain's houses and majestic public buildings are a testament to the wealth that whaling brought to the island in the mid-1800s, but the end of New England whaling was far from the end of its story. Faced with the loss of the industry that had sustained it, Edgartown reinvented itself as a summer-centered community of resort hotels, bathing beaches, and genteel vacation homes. It welcomed the world to its shores and became an unlikely cultural icon--a backdrop to a best-selling memoir, a political scandal, and a blockbuster film--famous for being its inimitable self.
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The United States is blessed with many varied, individual communities, each with their own story. Among them is the town of Edgartown, located on the island of Martha's Vineyard south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Edgartown is the largest city on Martha's Vineyard and also the county seat. An adjacent island, Chappaquiddick, is part of Edgartown and has its own claim to fame. I have never been to Edgartown but took the opportunity to learn about it in this 2018 pictorial history, "Edgartown", in the Images of America series. I have found the Images of America books an outstanding way to learn about American places and people, familiar and unfamiliar. The author of this book, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, is a historian who has written extensively about science and technology and, in his words, about " the stories we tell ourselves about the past, and the ways we try to capture it -- and make sense of it". Van Riper is research librarian at the Martha's Vineyard Museum; and most of the images in his book are drawn from the mueum's archives.
In images and text, this book tells the story of Edgartown from its earliest days in the 17th century to the present. In the earliest days, Edgartown functioned as the center of commerce and trade for Martha's Vineyard. The part of the history that most interested me was Edgartown's role as a famous whaling port from approximately 1820 -- 1870. I have long been fascinated by Melville's "Moby-Dick" which also is set in the whaling days of New England. Edgartown does not play a role in Melville's novel, but much of the background Van Riper describes would fit well with the New Bedford and Nantucket Melville describes. Van Riper offers many images of Edgartown during its whaling days, including the harbor, ships, wharves, supporting streets and local businesses, seaman's churches, and people. The images are well reproduced with Van Riper's informative textual commentary. The whaling days of Edgartown came to life.
Much of the rest of the book describes Edgartown's many attempts to reinvent itself following the demise of whaling. Tourism came to the community early but the first attempts were overly-ambitious and ultimately failed. I enjoyed seeing the images of the railroad that was built in the community to encourage access by tourists together with the images of the first, large, and probably poorly sited resorts.
For many years, attempts to establish tourism competed with the gritty commercial concerns of fishing and water transportation. Van Riper shows the long period of tension between these two visions for Edgartown and explains how tourism ultimately won out. The book describes the changing character of the waterfront and of the town, and how development accelerated as a result of the two World Wars. The presence of the military helped change the character of Edgartown as did several large hurricanes that did severe damage to the community. I was interested in learning how slowly Edgartown had adapted to many of the technological advances in most of the United States.
Van Riper discusses the changing character of the tourist trade with the emphasis on yachting and fishing. The community was able to move beyond a summer tourist residence for the wealthy to a mostly year-round operation that included the middle class. The book also shows the character of local life in Edgartown with families that have called the area home for generations. I enjoyed learning about Henry Beetle Hough, the editor of the local newspaper, the Gazette, an avid conservationist for the community, and the author in his later years of many books including his best-selling memoir of small town life, "Country Editor". In the later pages of the book, Van Riper describes Edgartown in the contemporary world, including the rise of the NAACP, the famous Chappaquiddick accident involving Senator Edward Kennedy, and the publicity Edgartown received as the site for the filming of "Jaws".
This book will be of interest to readers with a knowledge of Edgartown and Martha's Vineyard. It is unlikely that I will ever visit Edgartown, but I was moved by making the acquaintance of the community in this fine pictorial history.
