So now another President of the United States has visited Martha’s Vineyard, bringing the total number to seven. John Adams came in 1760 to visit his friend Jonathan Allen at Chilmark.
This short public service announcement describes the Vineyard Gazette's Historic Movies of Martha's Vineyard Project. If you have home movies you think would be appropriate for this project, please email us at historicmovies@mvgazette.com
The Gazette presents a local film clip on monarch butterflies as ecologists around the country raise a cry over the fate of the monarchs, whose numbers have fallen off perilously in the last few years.
It’s difficult to imagine today, but there was a time before resorthood on Martha’s Vineyard — a time before summer houses, before restaurants and shops and sportfishing and sailing.
They doubted her before she arrived, scorned her while she served and forgot about her after she left.
But the ancient Hudson River ferry Hackensack — which adopted the name Islander and sailed bravely if not always reliably between Woods Hole and Vineyard Haven for three years right after World War II — turns out to have been one of the most consequential vessels ever to steam between Martha’s Vineyard and the mainland.
The film comes from 1957, so the colors look elemental and crayon bright. The music is jouncy and insistent, like something you’d hear in an old-time Friendly’s Restaurant. The men wear neckties and smoke, pretty much no matter where they are or what they’re doing.
Sept. 21 marks the 75th anniversary of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Although in many respects the hurricane of 1944 was much worse (it killed more people around the Vineyard than any storm in the 20th century), the 1938 hurricane is the one that stands in the record books.
Put plainly, most of the movie footage is not terribly good. Some of it is out of focus or overexposed. Some of it lingers too long on fish lying dead on the rocks. Some of it wasn’t even shot on the Vineyard, and it takes a judicious eye to determine which scenes show the Island and which show Nauset, Cotuit or the jetties at the northern end of the Cape Cod Canal.
