Trina Kingsbury, an Island character whose life of accomplishments — as an artist, poet and award-winning horsewoman to name just a few — was extraordinary by any measure, died Friday, August 31 at her home in Chilmark.

She was 74 and had been battling cancer since 1997.

She was born prematurely on Feb. 15, 1944, at home in Vineyard Haven in a snowstorm, the daughter of Craig and Gertrude (Turk) Kingsbury. She weighed less than four pounds at birth and her father had to ski to Tashmoo Farm that night to call the doctor. “Twenty one years later, this tiny creature was over six feet tall and stronger than could have been imagined. Growing up on that farm, going barefoot most of the time, nature and her family nurtured that little girl,” she recalled in her obituary which she wrote herself and which will be published in the Gazette this week, at her request.

Trina learned to ride at Tashmoo Farm and later became a master equestrian in Europe. She traveled the world and the country pursuing various jobs, but never for long and always returned home to the Vineyard. She lived on her property off Tea Lane and was a devoted animal lover and a natural history expert. Her crow quill pen and inks of rare and endangered Wildflowers of Martha’s Vineyard, and a companion Butterflies of Martha’s Vineyard, became well known prints. She was a perennial winner of the woodsman competition at the Agricultural Fair until she was sidelined by illness.

Archives at the Gazette are filled with letters to the editor and essays written by her on a range of topics, from Island friends who had died to her own hilarious escapades. In a 2010 letter about the election to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy, she wrote:

“It’s true. I’ve been trampled by horses, gored by an ox, completed three grueling days passing my exams with the British Horse Society with a ruptured disc, almost careened into an abyss several thousand feet in the Swiss Alps, escaped a mountain lion lurking in the Pyrenees, barely made it through a fence with a herd of irate bulls in hot pursuit and gone unscathed in barroom brawls that I conducted. I have survived cancer and have been fighting Lyme disease for a quarter century. I even survived a marriage, but this all pales to these last few weeks which have been more brutal than the Chinese water torture.

“I am referring to the Jan. 19 special election in Massachusetts.”

Ms. Kingsbury was buried in Chilmark. There will be no services.