Singing in the Morning

On Sunday, June sixth, it will be twenty-five years since Henry Beetle Hough, the founder of Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, and for forty-five years the editor and publisher of this paper, died at his Edgartown home. From the window of his upstairs study, he had looked out for decades onto Sheriff’s Meadow Pond gleaming in the sun. And most days, until his final months, he and one of his collie dogs would set off mornings through the pine and oak and cedar woods of Sheriff’s Meadow. They would cross the dam separating the pond from John Butler’s mudhole. In spring and summer, while the dog went in pursuit of rabbits, the man would pause for a view of gray-green Nantucket Sound in the distance, or he would listen to the songs of the chickadees and robins and red-winged blackbirds. Then, back in his study, he would write lyrical editorials about what he had seen. Or sometimes, they would be feisty and snappish if he felt the thoughtlessness of man was endangering the beauty of his Island.

From boyhood, Henry Hough had found inspiration in nature. As a child, it was in the woods along the north shore, that he found it, in the place where his family spent their summers. In later years, after he and his first wife, Elizabeth Bowie Hough, had become owners of the Vineyard Gazette and built a house in Edgartown, it was Sheriff’s Meadow that had provided renewal for him.

So it was, in the 1950s, when the pond Henry Hough so loved was slated to be sold and the ten acres of land around it developed, that the impecunious Gazette owners scraped together seven thousand five hundred dollars to buy the property. Five years after their first purchase — though their joint Gazette income was only sixteen thousand dollars — they borrowed seven thousand dollars to buy five more acres of Sheriff’s Meadow. Then in 1959, to assure that the land would remain untouched forever, they established the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation “to preserve, administer and maintain natural habitats for wildlife on Martha’s Vineyard.” Eight years later, Henry Hough brought about the acquisition of nearly two hundred acres at Cedar Tree Neck, one of the favorite sites of his boyhood along the north shore of the Vineyard, for Sheriff’s Meadow.

Today, thanks to gifts from devoted Islanders and seasonal visitors, and to purchases by the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation itself, nearly two thousand acres of Island land are owned by Sheriff’s Meadow and will remain forever wild, while nearly nine hundred more acres are managed under Sheriff’s Meadow conservation restrictions.

Strollers along North Water street, too, as they enjoy the vista of the Edgartown Lighthouse, the yachts moored in the outer harbor and Cape Pogue stretching in the distance, owe its preservation as well — though it is not a Sheriff’s Meadow property — to Henry Beetle Hough’s determined fund-raising to save it from development.

Much has happened on the Island in these twenty-five years since Henry Hough’s death. Presidents have made the Vineyard their Summer White House. Extravagant mansions have been constructed on waterfront sites. Historic Edgartown homes have been demolished to make way for more up-to-date structures, including even Mr. Hough’s house overlooking Sheriff’s Meadow. Scenic overlooks now are marred by thick guardrails and rustic roads disfigured by blazing yellow road signs.

Today’s Vineyard is no longer the Vineyard of Henry Beetle Hough. Yet a great deal of what is best and most beautiful on the Island remains, thanks to his vision, his generosity and his indomitable spirit. Had there been no Henry Beetle Hough, Martha’s Vineyard would be a far poorer place indeed.

In his book Singing in the Morning, a collection of some his best essays, Mr. Hough wrote the following about early June. Titled Hurry!, it makes a fitting epitaph to mark the quarter century that has passed since his death:

“There is getting to be something urgent about the outdoors if visitors from the city are to see it in the early summer trappings. Already the shadows of trees are black and darkening, the yellow flowers of the sassafras trees are going by, the lilacs are past, the nights are not cool enough to hold back all the warm eagerness of the days. This is the most quickened of all the phases of the growing season, and it will not last.

“ . . . Will it be a good season? Man asks the question, but there is no inquiry whatever in the fields and woods round about. On the contrary, confidence is implicit. All problems and impermanent things at the moment seem to be those of the human race. The firm, undeviating course of the outdoors holds only strength and the release of energies long hidden but never exhausted.”