Dylan Thomas
The birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses I rose in rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. – Dylan Thomas
July 5, 1996
Founders Vision: To Root a New Newspaper Deep in Island Life
The great storm had wheeled off into the Canadian Maritimes about 45 hours before, leaving a jungle of limbs and power lines almost two stories high on the corner of South Summer street and Davis Lane, just outside the Vineyard Gazette office in Edgartown.
Gutenberg to Computers: Gazette Printing Keeps Up With Changing Technology
There’s little to record in the history of the printer’s art between the invention of movable type in the early 1400s by Johannes Gutenberg and the first publication of the Vineyard Gazette some four hundred years later. In fact, if Joe Gutenberg could have been brought back to stand in front of the old Adams…
Oak Bluffs Celebrates Fourth
Oak Bluffs is the place to be for the Fourth of July weekend. That’s always been the case, according to many residents, and now they have one more reason to think so. This weekend, the community will conduct its First Annual Juneteenth Day of Independence, a Multicultural Celebration. Events include a beach concert Friday and…
Gold Fever: Impoverished or Greedy, Islanders Sailed for California
Six ships sailed from the Vineyard to San Francisco between February and October 1849, carrying away more than 400 Island men to the gold mines of central California. Not long ago Ann Allen calculated that in Edgartown and Chilmark roughly one man in five between the ages of 18 and 50 set off for “the…
It Took Many Years for the Gazette to Fully Report the Tisbury Fire
The Tisbury fire, which began one summer evening in the very heart of downtown Vineyard Haven, destroyed 62 buildings valued at $200,000. Photographs of the center of the village the next morning show smears and patches of black spread across a grid of lanes and roads. Every store but one burned to the ground. …
When Oak Bluffs Seceded: The Gazette’s Fulminations Were Bitter But Unavailing
The whininess, contempt and partisanship with which the Vineyard Gazette reported this story over six years is journalism in its brightest rain-slicker yellow – all the more embarrassing and entertaining today because the paper lost the fight. The tedious, never-ending complaint of Mr. Marchant and his successor Samuel Keniston was that Edgartown men had…
Death of Whaling Ended an Island Way of Life
No single event finished off whaling, of course. It was doomed from the moment in 1859 when geologists discovered oil in the crust of Pennsylvania. Then came the piracy and scuttling of whaling ships during the Civil War (including the Edgartown whaler Ocmulgee, sunk by the Confederate raider Alabama), the loss of most of the…
