The recent election of U.S. Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock reminds us that seven of America’s 11 black senators have strong ties to the Vineyard. This history begins at the Overton House on...

Pennacook avenue in Oak Bluffs is a street full of stories, the latest of which is a lovely coincidence. For most of its existence and for no known reason, at the Sea View avenue end of the street...

Many contributors to black history weren’t black. Take the abolitionists, for example. It’s unknown when abolitionism became a practice on Martha’s Vineyard; although not universal...

The Old Variety Store behind the Flying Horses has come into the public spotlight with the news that the owner wants to tear it down and replace it with a new building. The old wooden edifice will...

Many splendid homes on Martha’s Vineyard were built by whaling captains, but little has been written about the origin of the money that allowed their construction. For 156 years — from...

The home at 47 Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs is a house of many stories. Owned for the past 56 years by Joseph Sequeira Vera, it was originally built in 1868 by Erastus Payson Carpenter, the leader of the...

Following the election of President Obama, longtime Vineyarder Sen. Edward W. Brooke, the nation’s first black senator and a Republican, wrote in a Boston newspaper: “Like others, I had...

It’s been a blast penning the Town of Oak Bluffs column since my first on June 22, 2012. Oak Bluffs has a great history filled with stories of people and places, many eccentric, almost all...

It seems as the season starts we take a lot for granted. Perhaps too much time spent thinking about the person driving too slow or too fast causes folks to lose focus on things that matter in Oak...

About a week ago Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, made some heartfelt and interesting remarks about the removal of the city’s insulting Confederate monuments. Bill McGrath brought the...