Isabel White West, longtime Gazette columnist, author and Vineyard historian, died on Tuesday at Longhill in Edgartown. She was the wife of the late Francis (Pat) West and the granddaughter of the chartmaker George W. Eldridge, who developed the Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book now in its 135th year of publication. On May 16, she had celebrated her 97th birthday.

She was born in Braintree in 1912, a daughter of Wilfred O. White and Ruth Eldridge White and grew up in Waban. Family summers, however, were always spent either with her Grandmother Eldridge in Vineyard Haven or at Lake Tashmoo. There, Isabel’s mother organized Camp Tashmoo for girls in the 1920s for Isabel and her sister Sydna’s playmates. In time, there were so many campers that the Whites in the 1930s bought the old Smith farm that included a main house and a barn, a beach and meadows to play in. In her newspaper columns, Isabel West sometimes reminisced about happy childhood days “on the pond,” as Lake Tashmoo was then called.

She wrote of the pond’s sparkling channel and sandy beaches. She remembered the muskrat hutches on the lake shores, and the turtles and herring and carp that in those days could be heard thrashing in the shallows at night. There was no electricity, no town water, no phones, but she and her young friends reveled in the out-of-doors.

If she came to the Island in the spring, she and her best friend Connie Downs (who later became Mrs. Freeman Leonard), would pick mayflowers and catch alewives with their bare hands in the Herring Creek. In summer, the campers would stage plays and give dance recitals. There were blueberries in abundance to pick and sometimes walks through the woods to Vineyard Haven for an ice cream cone at Auntie Revel’s ice cream parlor. Or she and her fellow campers would be sent after a pie at Argie Humphrey’s bakery on Main street. In later years, when Isabel and Pat retired to the Vineyard, they asked the late Bronislaw Lesnikowski to refashion the old farm barn into a house for them, and with the aid of designer David Douglas, he did.

A winter in the old days that she particularly liked to remember and about which she wrote in a Gazette column, was that of 1924-25. She spent it with her Grandmother Eldridge in a house on Main street near the library. She recalled her grandmother as being “very tall and her figure sort of round. She dressed in black and wore a bit of lace at her throat . . . She was preoccupied with the League of Nations and veterans affairs and keeping the town dry.” She also remembered skating parties on Seth’s Pond “and hoping a certain boy would chase me.”

But most winters, Isabel was in grade school or high school in Waban where she attended Newton High School. After high school, she attended Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., graduating in 1934. There, following in her Grandmother Eldridge’s footsteps, she began her own life of activism and dedication to the public good as president of the Women’s Self Governing Association. And she continued to enjoy performing on stage, as she had as a child at Camp Tashmoo. She found the dramatic society much more interesting than classrooms, she admitted (though she was a member of the honor society), and the splendid posture and elegant diction of her later years were nurtured in society performances.

After college, she held jobs in New York and Boston before entering Simmons College School of Social Work. For two years after that she was a social worker with Family Welfare in Cambridge. It was in Boston that she met Pat West, whom she married in 1938 on the Tashmoo Farm. Pat was an employee of her father’s at the Kelvin and Wilfred O. White Company, a nautical instruments manufacturing company, making and selling compasses and other navigational instruments. Later, he later joined the Sperry Gyroscope Company as a project engineer developing ship’s steering systems. The young couple sailed off to Maine on their honeymoon aboard the bridegroom’s 38-foot sloop, Venture, and narrowly escaped the hurricane of 1938 by returning to Boston where they had just taken an apartment on T Wharf. With the storm approaching, Pat took Venture to a safe berth in Dorchester Basin, where he rode out the storm.

In the early years of their marriage, the Whites lived in Westbury and Sea Cliff on the north shore of Long Island. Being near the water as much as possible was essential to their well-being, for both were inveterate sailors. They continued to take occasional trips to Maine, but always, once summer arrived, they would set sail for the Vineyard where Venture would be snugly moored in Vineyard Haven harbor. Folk dancing was another favorite pastime.

For a time, Isabel taught grade school and did substitute teaching, but she had her own two children to rear, and in the 1950s, the Wests spent three years in Paris where Pat was sent by Sperry to troubleshoot steering systems he had designed for ships. There, Isabel, who loved music and art (she played the accordion and had dabbled in the violin and had an interest in painting), reveled in the opportunities to enjoy art and music. She enrolled in the Alliance Francaise to learn to speak French. An enthusiastic traveler, she had on an earlier foreign expedition taken her 15-year-old son Nathaniel (Dan) and her 17-year-old niece Caroline on a bicycling trip from Rotterdam, the Netherlands to Copenhagen, Denmark. Although the cyclists went by boat from Germany to Denmark, the rest of the time was spent on the road, sleeping sometimes at youth hostels or sometimes in barns, Dan remembers.

She traveled the world but loved Tashmoo best. — Linsey Lee

“She’d ride into a farmyard and — even though she couldn’t speak the language — manage to ask the farmer if we could sleep in his hayloft,” he recalled. Isabel White West was never one to be put off by anything.

In 1971, she and Pat retired to the Vineyard, though it was hardly retirement for either one of them. He kept busy with Venture and working on nautical instrument and aeronautical compass designs. Isabel was active — as she had been for years — in the League of Women Voters. A member of the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard, she and the late Sally Cox, and the church, started the Friends of Family Planning of Martha’s Vineyard, an organization designed to increase community awareness of the services offered by Family Planning. She was a founder of Tisbury’s Neighborhood Review Study Committee to bring understanding of the importance of town zoning and development. With the Friends of Tisbury and Dale McClure, she revived the annual town picnic at the waterworks that had been forgotten for many years.

With her husband, she figured prominently in the founding of the Holmes Hole Sailing Association.

Meanwhile, Isabel West was painting watercolors of the Island landscape and doing still lifes of flowers and vegetables from her garden which she sold at the annual Family Planning Art Show. And she was writing. She was not only writing the Vineyard Haven column for the Gazette, but contributing many recollections of her own and her family’s Island past. She depicted the Vineyard world around her in evocative nature essays.

In 2004, the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society published her book, Riv and Ruth, a Vineyard Saga of Love and Vocation. It was based on letters between her parents, Wilfred (Riv) O. White and her mother Ruth Eldridge. Ruth was 16 and enamored of 22-year-old Riv who was sailing across the Atlantic around the Cape of Good Hope back to Australia, where he had been born. Eventually, he came back to marry her. Appropriately, she signed copies of her book at a gathering at the Fourway carriage house on Franklin street, where her mother and her mother’s three sisters, Mary, Gratia and Nina had lived.

Isabel White West is remembered by her friends and family for her tireless energy and devotion to causes, her evocative writing, her love of family and its traditions and her appreciation of the natural world around her.

She is survived by her son Nathaniel (Dan) West of Friendship, Me., and a daughter Christine Goessweiner of Vienna, Austria; five grandchildren, Alexandra Stevens of Portland, Ore., Christopher West of Thorndike, Me., and Thomas, Peter and George Goessweiner of Austria; and three great-grandchildren and many cousins and nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her sister Sydna and two brothers, Gordon and Robert. She will be remembered in a private memorial service at a later date.

Contributions in her name may be made to Family Planning of Martha’s Vineyard, P.O. Box 909, Vineyard Haven 02568.