Edgartown Harbor was recently named a site on the Underground Railroad as part of 12 new listings made this year.
For three years now, the museum has been hard at work restoring the historic Thomas Cooke house property, the site of its original campus, as a public green-space and satellite campus.
A tale that reaches from settlement to commerce, from orthodoxy to schism, from one church to many, from faith to tourism, from industry to resorthood.
This historic footage of a home movie shot in 1932 shows villagers attempting to dig a canal by hand to open Norton Point Beach to the sea, part of a town effort to invigorate the shellfish beds at Katama Bay.
Excerpted from The Chappy Ferry Book: Back and Forth Between Two Worlds, 527 Feet Apart, by Tom Dunlop, with photographs by Alison Shaw and a short film on DVD by John Wilson (Vineyard Stories, 2012).
This excerpt is taken from chapter five which tells the story of James H. Yates of Edgartown, who owned the ferry from 1920 to 1929. He was the last man to run the Chappy ferry as a rowboat.
Folks on both sides of the harbor love Jimmy Yates. But folks on the Chappaquiddick side loathe the ferry Jimmy Yates runs.
The second annual Cooke and South Water streets house tour will be tomorrow, Wednesday. August 13, from 2 to 4 p.m. The tour will include five historic homes in Edgartown, all within walking distance of each other, followed by tea and refreshments. At each home, guests will be greeted by a docent who will share information about the history of the home and answer questions.
Approximately 500 buildings in downtown Edgartown, most of them wood frame houses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are now part of a nationally recognized historic district.
When Edgartown residents voted on secession 51 years ago, they were 100 to one against it.
They even voted $1,000 to stop it.
They were on the other side of the stick then. Pending in the General Court at the time was a bill which would have allowed Chappaquiddick to secede from Edgartown and become an independent municipality.