Cottage City was the first Island town to have electricity in 1884 and the first with street lights in 1895. One writer called ours the “City of Lights, a fairy land,” and nothing...

SKIP FINLEY508-696-3742(sfinley@mvgazette.com)In 1881 Cottage City’s telephone service started with the first line laid to Vineyard Haven. To use a telephone one had to go to a hotel or a store...

SKIP FINLEY508-696-3742(sfinley@mvgazette.com)The busy summer of 1908 in Cottage City’s second year as the town of Oak Bluffs ended that Labor Day weekend with balloons over Lake Anthony,...

SKIP FINLEY508-627-4311(Sfinley@mvgazette.com)Last Friday’s 42 minute Oak Bluffs fireworks achieved yet another milestone. Of the nine U.S. presidents who have visited the Island, the first,...

SKIP FINLEY508-696-3742(sfinley@mvgazette.com)Ellen Weiss, the prolific writer, architectural historian and professor emerita of Tulane University’s School of Architecture, is author of An...

SKIP FINLEY508-627-4311(Sfinley@mvgazette.com)The president’s visit popularized Oak Bluffs and made for national headlines as newspapers described every event, activity, church service and meal...

SKIP FINLEY508-696-3742(Sfinley@mvgazette.com)By almost all accounts, from historian Arthur Railton to the Vineyard Gazette, to the national press, the summer of 1874 in Cottage City was the biggest...

SKIP FINLEY508-696-3742(Sfinley@mvgazette.com)Back in the 60s, those of us teens and pre-teens lucky enough to have been able to stay in Oak Bluffs all summer learned quickly that what was important...

SKIP FINLEY508-696-3742(sfinley@mvgazette.com)It could be nostalgia that brings so many to Oak Bluffs for so many years where. As Arthur Railton said, “something was always going on.”...

SKIP FINLEY508-627-4311(Sfinley@mvgazette.com)The early summer heat and confounded traffic that snarled everywhere except the roundabout is making the Vineyard Transportation Authority’s #7, #9...