From the September 12, 1958 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:
Martha’s Vineyard just missed seeing a waterspout late Monday afternoon. Black clouds gathered in the northwest and still later in the northeast, and a sudden downpour of rain occurred with flashes of lightning and intermittent thunder, none of it violent. All this, along with bulletins warming of a tornado in Falmouth, these received by courtesy of Emerson McLeod of Northeast Airlines, the Island experienced — but Buzzards Bay had a waterspout.
Evidently the formation was not on such a scale as the famous spouts of 1896 or 1866, but observers on the Cape guarantee that it was a real spout. A motorist described the formation as an ominous black funnel some distance from the beach, carrying with it dirt, sand, water. Wind gusts were so strong that he had difficulty controlling his car. He said the funnel was a small one, and he could not estimate its height.
Other observers saw the funnel when it was over the land, and at Otis Field it was said that stones and sand had been swept up and cars moved. No real damage was reported, however.
William A. Draper of the Boston Weather Bureau told the Falmouth Enterprise that a waterspout such as this would ordinarily have disintegrated quickly, but because of the warmth of the bay, warm air continued to rise. The Enterprise traced the course of the spout from Onset to Wings Neck and finally toward Monument Beach.
Mr. Draper said that waterspouts and tornadoes are essentially the same. Strong, swirling winds suck up water to form the familiar funnel shape while over the land the funnel draws up dirt, sand, trees and houses. He added that conditions on Monday were unfavorable for a real tornado. The air mass was fairly cool, instead of warm and humid.
Although gusts of forty miles an hour were experienced on the Cape, the Vineyard had lighter squalls with a brief downpour of rain. But some section of the Island were pelted with hailstones as well.
Speaking of waterspouts, on Sunday, Aug. 26, 1866, some 6,000 persons made up the assemblage for “High” Sunday at the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting, and at about 9 that morning — the weather fine — some thousands of them looked out upon a remarkable phenomenon, “a splendid waterspout reaching from the clouds to the water below” in the vicinity of Cape Pogue.
A Gazette account spoke of an opaque body like an inverted cone extending downward from a black cloud to which it seemed to be attached.
“As the cone approached the surface of the water, the latter became violently agitated, and, rising in spray or mist, was whirled about with great rapidity, and as this inverted cone descended, the spray ascended until both united and formed one continuous column.”
Some persons were near enough in boats to hear a loud hissing noise in the “complete and beautiful waterspout” which had both a rotary and progressive motion. They said that the interior of the spout “appeared to be traversed by a running steam.”
Finally the spout became thinner and thinner, until it formed only a silver thread, and the upper part was drawn into the cloud while the lower part fell into the sea. Some observers said they saw three separate spouts.
Contrasted with this detailed description is a laconic note in the Gazette of June 23, 1871: “A waterspout was seen in Vineyard Sound last Friday.” Nothing more.
What may be called the classic waterspouts of all time, for the Atlantic coast at any rate, occurred on Aug. 19, 1896. In the first place they were grand and beautiful, models of their kind; in the second place, they were leisurely, providing an extended performance; and in the third place, they exhibited themselves to a great vacationing population which had ample opportunity to photograph and observe them.
The sky that day was partly cloudy, clear in the west, with a bank of doubleheaders a few miles to the eastward and northward. At 12:45 p.m., a long pendant dropped from part of a cloud from which rain was falling, about eight miles from Cottage City. Like the 1866 cone, the pendant raised a disturbance as it neared the surface of the sea. A corresponding column of salt water shot upward to meet it, forming a lofty and gigantic spout.
This spout lasted for thirteen minutes, and two other spouts were formed in the same way at later intervals. After the disappearance of the third spout, heavy rain fell on the Vineyard, and it was found to be salty to the taste.
Many years later, Robert Ripley, in his Believe It or Not cartoon, used this incident of salt water rain on the Island.
Many an encyclopedia has pictures of the 1896 waterspouts off Cape Pogue, and the Weather Bureau completed a detailed study of them. Anyone interested may learn the precise dimensions — for instance, the diameter at the base of the largest column was 240 feet, and the diameter of the cascade at the base was 720 feet.
Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
library@vineyardgazette.com
This article appears in September 11, 2026.