Following establishment of the Methodist Camp Ground in 1835, the speculation of Martha’s Vineyard knew no bounds. Our 7.5 square mile town is about 4,500 acres.
We return to the home originally owned by Ebenezer G. Lamson, an abolitionist who owned a company that helped manufacture many of the firearms used in the Civil War.
Some of the most interesting Oak Bluffs stories begin with the homes in town.
Although the first federal census was taken in 1790, over 100 years after Martha’s Vineyard was discovered, Oak Bluffs was a part of Edgartown so we don’t know how many people lived here.
Some of Oak Bluffs’ whaling captains who financed the Oak Bluffs Land and Wharf Company moved their business to San Francisco. The price of whale oil went into a tailspin when it was found more expedient to dig oil from the ground. So whalers hunted bowhead whales for baleen in the north Pacific.
Writing a column about Oak Bluffs has its surprises, like a week ago when a guy walked into the office with his wife to see if I knew a friend of his and I found out he’s a famous football coach who used to live in Oak Bluffs.
In his memoir, Knocking Down Barriers, Truman R. Gibson Jr. drops several interesting names associated with his visits to Oak Bluffs in the 1940s and 1950s.
As Oak Bluffs characters go, William Melvin Davey (1844 to 1949) may have escaped attention save a foolish highly visible marriage.
Oak Bluffs almost had another golf course near Farm Neck. In 1948 a group of enterprising friends saw an opportunity for what they hoped would become a new neighborhood around what they had named the Sengekontacket Country Club.
