Of all the exhibits the Martha's Vineyard Museum has to move to its Vineyard Haven location, the Fresnel lens is the biggest project. Specialist Jim Woodward is taking apart hundreds of glass prisms.
A lawsuit pits the town of Aquinnah’s efforts to improve the Gay Head Lighthouse against the rights of nearby condominium residents to enjoy their homes in peace and privacy.
Lighthouses define the character of Martha’s Vineyard. They guide people from land and sea to the same shorelines, sheltering them under beacons of home.
Today, the Island’s lighthouses are deteriorating. Bricks are crumbling in the breeze, and iron is flaking away in the salt air. Before long, these landmarks could be reduced to brittle, rotting shells.
When the good ship Uncle Toby brought the new Fresnel lens to New York and the lens was subsequently deposited at the Edgartown wharf, almost a hundred years ago, little did the drivers, or anyone else for that matter, dream that the forty yoke oxen employed to transport the lens across the Island to Gay Head would not be the last agents to ever move the sixty frames of glass prisms and the multitudinous collection of machinery necessary to operate the light. This week all of these things were back in Edgartown.
A group of Aquinnah residents who want to bring the original lens from the Gay Head Light home to Aquinnah brought their case before the town selectmen this week.
A plan by the Martha’s Vineyard Museum to relocate from Edgartown to Vineyard Haven has caused rumblings on the other side of the Island, where a number of people are now calling for the original 19th-century lens that sat atop the Gay Head Light in Aquinnah to return home.
