Café Moxie was, ironically, in the first building to be rebuilt after the devastating Vineyard Haven fire of 1883.

Ben Dexter, an extraordinary woodcarver and ice cream entrepreneur, was hard at rebuilding by November, just a few months after the August fire swept through Main street. He was back in business for the 1884 season.

Chris Baer knows that fact and many other historic fine points about Main street because he’s spent years painstakingly recreating its history through research and photographs.

Bookstore owner Jon C. Nelson Jr. said he will rebuild.

“Absolutely. I am committed to rebuilding the Bunch of Grapes,” said Mr. Nelson on Sunday afternoon.

That commitment was one of the few certainties Mr. Nelson had two days after the Fourth of July fire that heavily damaged the landmark Vineyard Haven bookstore.

It was warm and cloudy this year on the Fourth of July.

And as celebrations got under way, two of Vineyard Haven’s anchor businesses burned. Emergency services shut down power along Main street, cordoning off the heart of downtown. And in the aftermath, business owners commiserated, lent their support to the devastated owners of Café Moxie and Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, and shared fears about a retail season now in jeopardy.

Island police yesterday reported a busy but relatively smooth Fourth of July holiday weekend.

The biggest story, of course, was the devastating fire on Main street in Vineyard Haven that destroyed the Cafe Moxie restaurant and caused extensive damage to the landmark Bunch of Grapes bookstore, which cast a pall for many over the usually celebratory Independence Day weekend.

The town of Tisbury has repossessed two small truckloads of timber left over after work on the Owen Park pier and taken home by harbor master Jay Wilbur.

The action followed a heated scene at last week’s selectmen’s meeting, in which Gene Decosta accused Mr. Wilbur of having “defrauded the town.”

Mr. Decosta accused Mr. Wilbur of having put his assistants to work at $14 an hour, pulling nails from the timber.

Sarah Mello has stepped down as superintendent of the Chappaquiddick properties of The Trustees of Reservations to return to her former position as director of education at the organization’s Island properties.

Chris Kennedy, Islands regional director for the trustees, said Mrs. Mello relinquished the post for personal reasons.

At first glance, Rick Karney does not appear to be a farmer. He works on the water and is usually more damp than dirty.

But to watch him in action is to be sure that the work Mr. Karney does at the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group is hardly different from the work Island farmers do in their fields and stables and greenhouses every day.

First it was Owen Bennion’s two front teeth vs. a steel basketball pole. Then it was Matt Ungaro’s left ear vs. a moth of undetermined species.

Around the Farm Neck links, Don Wilks likes when fellow golfers find out he’s an artist. “They always say, ‘You’re not the kind of guy I expect . . .’ ” This may be, Mr. Wilks points out, because he is neatly turned out and he does not have long hair.

The face of Main street in Vineyard Haven has changed more by the act of fire than any street in any other Island town.

The town is like a Greek mythological phoenix, always turning the negative into the positive, and rebuilding bigger and better than before.

Main street in Vineyard Haven has a history of big fires. The greatest of them was the night of Aug. 10, 1883, when all of the street — 62 buildings — burned to the ground in a span of six hours. Coincidentally it was Illumination Night in Cottage City, now known as Oak Bluffs.