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...

Nostalgia is bitter sweet by definition and a burden one would just as soon not experience like last week when I found that Mary’s Linen is no more, replaced by a T-shirt shop some other nice...

It’s charming working at a place like the Vineyard Gazette where someone on staff, apparently researching a story, left a page behind from the Sunday, May 20, 1883 Boston Sunday Herald. What...

For the 62 years our family has been blessed with living in Oak Bluffs family tradition allows our kids to go to “town” unaccompanied at night. Town of course was Circuit avenue with...

In the Sept. 21, 2012 column I wrote about a June 1953 article entitled Oak Bluffs Was Definitely an Island Once by Joseph Chase Allen. The piece posited that an ancient passage from the head of Deep...