It was 62 years ago this month that I first moved to West Tisbury. The shad was in bloom. I remember showers of white in the fields and on roadsides, and red-winged blackbirds seemed to be singing everywhere.
My husband, Tom Cocroft, and I had just moved year-round to the Vineyard. Although I had known the Island since childhood, it was at East Chop that I had spent childhood summers. West Tisbury was simply a stopping place for ice cream cones.
In the North Tisbury end of town in those days, a cow grazed under the big oak tree. She was, I was sure then, fed peaches, and sometimes chocolate, along with her grass and hay, for peach ice cream and chocolate ice cream (my favorite flavors) were made from her milk by Maude Call and Ole Borgen where the Goff Gallery is now. On my family’s dozen trips to Gay Head and Menemsha each summer, my father would always stop for a refreshing cone.
Then in 1964, when Tom and I were considering the Vineyard as a year-round residence, Dionis Riggs proposed the West Tisbury parsonage as a home for us. The Rev. Elden Mills and his wife, Helen, had just built a house at Abel’s Hill in Chilmark and the church was in need of a parsonage tenant. So it was that we moved to West Tisbury where, for all but one brief period in Vineyard Haven, I have lived ever since, and where Tom died.
The year-round voters in West Tisbury in 1964 were about 300, and, as nearly as anyone can estimate, there were about 400 houses.
Every once in a while in those days, a stray lamb from Everett Whiting’s farm across the State Road would baa at our back door, or a horse would gallop up the road and into our field. If it were a lamb, we always escorted it home for fear it would be struck by a car.
If it were an unidentified horse, we would call police chief George Manter, who would patiently round it up and find its owner. But, in retrospect, Tom and I, both city dwellers before, probably need not have worried so. In those days, in spring when the lambs were wandering, there was relatively little traffic passing between the parsonage and the Whiting farm. Our cats, like the lambs, ambled back and forth without incident all summer long.
We arrived in West Tisbury rather at the end of an era, I think — an era of old-time storytellers who most happily recalled an even less developed West Tisbury when they were young. Paramount among them were Charles Foote, Willis Gifford and George Magnuson whose memories and tall tales never failed them.
Charlie and Willis would recall with delight the “imitation” gorilla they had fashioned from wire and hidden in the woods when they were boys. Then they frantically reported in town that they had sighted a gorilla. They did not rest until a posse was combing the woods for it.
George, who had worked at the Look hunting camp on Tisbury Great Pond, was full of tales of rum-running off the West Tisbury shore during Prohibition.
A more dependable storyteller than these three, but an equally good one, was Joseph G. Howes, whose life spanned the years from 1875 to 1972, and whose recollections stretched back to the days when he would walk into Vineyard Haven in the snow to attend a dance.
I remember how, in those simpler times, we were welcomed as newcomers to West Tisbury by Lloyd Merry who left a pail of Great Pond oysters on our back porch, and by selectman Allen M. Look who showed us how to keep our house warm in winter (the parsonage had only a root cellar) by piling up seaweed around the foundation.
Those were the days when Beanie Alley kept a taste-tempting 45-pound wheel of Wisconsin rat cheese (sharp cheddar for discriminating humans, not rats) in a wooden box on the counter at Alley’s General Store.
They were the days when North Tisbury’s only year-round business was Joe Ferreira’s Up-Island Market that specialized in fine meat. And in summer, farmer Louis Greene would open his fruit and vegetable stand and Humphrey’s Vineyard Foodshop would tempt passersby with its sweet-smelling baked goods.
Everyone did, indeed, know everyone in West Tisbury then — even the summer people. But Joe Howes, who lived to be 97, always said when the curious asked his advice on how best to reach old age, that he had managed to grow old happily by accepting and adopting the new rather than wishing for a return of the past.
Ever since, I have been trying to follow his advice.
This article appears in May 1, 2026.
I so enjoy Phyllis’ stories!
Thank you for sharing your memories and great advice.
I moved to West Tisbury in 1972, a time when the town was slowly beginning to change, yet still had the character of the past. Willis Gifford, George Manter, Arnold and Priscilla Fischer (he the farmer at Flat Point Farm, she the principle and teacher at the two-room West Tisbury school), and some of West Tisbury’s younger residents like John Athearn, Tom Hodgson and David Murphy would became a part of my life. I fell right in step joining the West Tisbury Volunteer Fire Department, attending town meetings, elected to board of library trustees and living at various places around town. Little did I know that West Tisbury was to be one of the most gentle and caring times of my young life, a time which I’ll never relive, yet never forget.
And now, I too, will try to follow that same advice. Thank you for sharing.
Dear Phyllis, what a wonderful story! And great advice. My best wishes to you from a voice from the past.
Phyllis, such a beautiful piece, full of both history and wisdom