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Martha's Vineyard Antique Photos, West Tisbury, MA (2026)

09/05/2026

It was 1:20am on a Sunday morning in November, 1937. Twenty-eight-year-old Manuel Phillips of Wing Road was walking along the beach, south of downtown Oak Bluffs near Harthaven, with a light. A gale had blasted the coast Friday night, and Phillips was out at low tide picking up scallops. He spotted a dark form near the highwater line, which at first he thought was a dog or seal. “I had to flash the light four times,” he later told a reporter from the Boston Globe, before he realized what it was: the battered body of a 39-year-old woman.

“When I saw it was a body,” reported Phillips, “I began running to tell the police. ... It gave me quite a scare.” It was clear her body had been in the water for many days.

The remains were taken to the undertaking parlors of Hinckley & Renear in Vineyard Haven, and a preliminary exam made by associate medical examiner Francis Buckley and Dr. Clement Norris. They noted her costly gold dental work and extensive bruising. Meanwhile, state trooper George Barker and Oak Bluffs night watchman Alton Bunker searched the beach. They found a woman’s shoe – a single suede pump – but nothing else.

District Attorney William Crossley of Fall River arrived later that day, and after noticing a bruise over the woman’s right eye and a hole in the skull – which, he said, “might be a bullet wound” – he ordered an immediate autopsy.

The victim wore two rings - one an imitation diamond engagement ring, the other a thin white wedding ring inscribed with initials “R. B. S. to E. H. N., Feb. 14, 1916.” Police soon identified her as a missing socialite - Mrs. Ellen Shackelford.

Shackelford was the daughter of John Reed Nicholson, who long served as both Attorney General and Chancellor of the state of Delaware. She was married to successful Philadelphia businessman Randolph Shackelford, and they produced a daughter, but the Shackelfords became estranged in 1931. He began divorce proceedings, which were still pending in Pennsylvania at the time of her death. Later in 1931, Mrs. Shackelford was arrested for drunken driving in Atlantic City, and soon afterwards involved in a minor auto accident in Philadelphia in which she was arrested again, together with her driver, when a half pint of whiskey was found in her handbag by police. Struck from the Philadelphia social register for her embarrassing escapades, she moved to a hotel in Cambridge and over the next few years embarked alone on at least two lengthy cruises - one to Italy, another to Russia. She reportedly owed a $350 hotel bill in Philadelphia and a $300 hotel bill in New York.

On October 30, her elderly father was struck by a car, gravely fracturing his hip. She visited him in his Delaware hospital (reportedly racking up another big unpaid hotel bill.) Her brother declared her, apart from their father’s circumstance, as “in good spirits and happy.” She disappeared soon afterwards.

Investigators announced that the autopsy failed to disprove the police theory that she had been “assaulted and probably murdered.” The cause of death was still undetermined. No water was found in her lungs, suggesting that she was dead before she entered the water. The external injuries were judged to have been probably caused after her death. The autopsy left police uncertain. “It could be either” murder or su***de, reported Sergeant Fratus to the press.

Providence police, meanwhile, provided a new clue.

A pocketbook, monogrammed “E. N. S.”, had been found in a stateroom of the steamship Arrow on November 1st, bound from New York to Providence. In it was a letter, signed by Mrs. Shackelford, addressed to the manager of the Walton hotel in Philadelphia, discussing her unpaid bill. The letter, said police investigators, “hinted su***de”. Oddly, though, she had not registered on the steamship, and no one had seen her on the deck. D.A. Crossley eventually admitted he was unable to find any proof that she had ever booked passage on this boat.

Her estranged husband, now living in Washington D. C., arrived on-island, together with her brother John. The body was viewed only by her brother, but he was unable to positively identify her in its decomposed condition. Her husband identified the ring. Her internal organs were removed to Boston for additional testing by the state pathologist, and the rest of the remains were released to the family for cremation. It would have been her 40th birthday.

A month passed. Dr. Timothy Leary, Boston medical examiner, eventually reported finding “salt in her heart’s blood” and declared the death was caused by “asphyxia due to probable drowning with nothing to indicate homicide.” The case was closed.

Mr. Shackelford remarried four months later. D. A. Crossley resigned in disgrace in 1944. Among other issues, Crossley had long been criticized for not bringing cases to trial that had been pending for years. (Among the open cases under his jurisdiction was the murder of Clara Smith at the Rice Playhouse in Oak Bluffs in 1940.)

09/04/2026

Joaquim Miguel "Jack" Conceicao (1903-1977) of Vineyard Haven, born on the island of São Nicolau in Cabo Verde. He worked in construction.

In the 1920s, Conceicao and a dozen or so other Cape Verdean Vineyarders founded the popular Cape Verdean Hall (aka the Tisbury Cape de Verde Club) on Lake Street.

In a 2002 interview with Linsey Lee of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, Joe Stiles (1925-2006) of Vineyard Haven recalled, “I remember the dances they used to have at the Cape Verdean Hall when I was stationed on the Island during the War. We never missed one of those. All the sailors used to go. We never had to pay to go in; just walk in and start dancing and enjoying yourself. People would come from New Bedford. Jimmy Lomba and his orchestra used to come over here; they’d play all Cape Verdean music. Their dances are like a reel. You don’t get in the middle of the floor and just drag around. You’d be dancing like mad, but you’d be going in a circle so nobody would be bumping into each other.”

Martha’s Vineyard has long been an island of immigrants. By 1905, more than a quarter of the residents of Oak Bluffs were foreign-born - mostly Portuguese-speaking immigrants from the Azores and Cape Verde. By 1920, almost one-third of the island’s population were first or second generation immigrants. (By comparison, less than fifteen percent of the Vineyard’s current population was born outside of the USA.)

09/03/2026

1930s aerial photo of Beach Road, Vineyard Haven. Ferry Boat Island (left) sports a small structure. Bass Creek, along modern Lagoon Pond Road, has been filled.

Before the Great Gale of 1815 – one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the Vineyard in recorded history – blasted the opening into the Lagoon now spanned by our drawbridge, the only entrance to the Lagoon was through the broad, now-filled, waterway known as Bass Creek. This important inlet shifted somewhat over the years, but in its final form it began somewhere near the current Steamship Authority parking lot, crossed through the Five Corners area, and connected to the Lagoon about where the marina is today on Lagoon Pond Road – roughly where the large white patch appears in this photo. Near the inner opening was a long, sandy island known as “Ferry Boat Island”, visible here. It’s said that Bass Creek was once deep enough that an ocean-going brig could anchor in what is now the mucky shallows in front of the Marine Hospital. The harbor end of Bass Creek was filled in 1835, although vestiges of the eastern end survived into the 1930s. Ferry Boat Island, on the other hand, has survived in one form or another to this day.

Isaac Chase, one of the island’s first European colonists, was a wealthy Quaker who was ostracized by his fellow 17th-century West Tisbury settlers. He was allowed to purchase land some distance away, instead - the undeveloped wilderness which is today downtown Vineyard Haven. Chase was given permission “to keep a publike house of Entertainment & to sell liquor” at his new remote harborside home, and to attract business he also began the Vineyard’s first commercial ferry service to Falmouth. He anchored his vessel at Ferry Boat Island, and so gave it its name.

A century later, after Bass Creek was closed and the ferry terminal moved, Ferry Boat Island became the site of one of three “bug lights” - range lights used to navigate the harbor in lieu of a lighthouse. (The other two were on either side of the Marine Hospital.) Lightkeeper Moses Cromwell maintained a small bridge to Ferry Boat Island, now long-vanished.

09/02/2026

Downtown Vineyard Haven, circa 1890s. Pre-Capawock, but most of the buildings visible here still stand in one form or another. Note the sapling of the original Linden Tree in front of the Luce Bros. store, in the background, to the right.

09/01/2026

"Oak Bluffs, looking south", 1877. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

"An elevated background of stunted foliage, very thick, very green, interspersed with cardboard-looking houses, white as snow-flakes. A tiny lake in the immediate foreground, a sort of mirror for this strange little city to gaze into and admire her own peculiar style of beauty. On the extreme left Sea View House and Oak Bluffs Dock. On the extreme right the Highland pier. In the semicircle, hundreds of cottages, minarets, pagodas, an enormous gospel-tent, hotels with bunting floating gayly everywhere, and everything basking in the dazzling sheen of the brightest and whitest of sunlight. Was it a toy? Was it a picture painted in those vivid colors with which the younger school of French art loves to illuminate the walls of the Salon? We had visited Pessages, that quaintest of all quaint old Spanish towns. We had inspected more than one Moorish "schaykah”; we had seen the booths in Donnybrook Fair; but anything like this we had never beheld, and we gazed from the deck of the slowing steamer, amused, fascinated, incredulous. Everything looked so small, everything looked so strange, everything looked so bright. Where did the inhabitants reside? Not in those sentry-boxes, those card-housés, those Lilliputian edifices—was this the Island of Lilliput, and was Gulliver not drawing upon his imagination, after all? Where do the 4,000 people dwell? —and, where, oh, where, do the 25,000 who sometimes swarm upon the island contrive to pitch their tents?"

08/31/2026

Horse-drawn streetcar, Highland Wharf, Cottage City, circa 1880s or early '90s.

Built in 1873, this was the oldest segment of Oak Bluffs' trolley system, which ran from the Highland Wharf (where tracks extended onto the pier itself), "over Jordan", and around Broadway (Trinity Circle). By the 1890s, the route had been extended around Oak Bluffs and out to the Prospect House at Lagoon Heights, as well as to New York Wharf in Eastville and Vineyard Haven. By 1895, the line was electrified, and the horses made obsolete.

08/30/2026

In late January, 1855, the brig H. H. McGilvery arrived in Holmes Hole (Vineyard Haven) from the Venezuelan territory of Isla de Aves – Bird Island. Aboard were 26 black men, refugee laborers fleeing an international incident that would soon be picked up by newspapers around the world.

Almost 350 miles north of the Venezuelan mainland and due west of Guadeloupe and Dominica, Isla de Aves is Venezuela’s northernmost territory. Isolated by hundreds of miles of empty Caribbean, it’s about eight acres in size, and maybe ¼ mile long. It grows a little scrub, serves as a nesting site for green sea turtles, and is a breeding place for seabirds – hundreds of thousands of sooty terns and brown noddies.

In March 1854, Capt. Nathan Gibbs, working for the large Boston merchant firm of Philo Shelton, explored and identified the uninhabited island as a potential commercial source of guano – a valuable, mineable commodity used in the production of industrial fertilizer in the US and Europe.

Returning that summer with a crew of workers from Baltimore (and even some of their families), Capt. Gibbs built living quarters, a wharf, and raised the US flag, all under the auspices of Shelton’s firm. But upon a leak of the initial discovery, a second Boston merchant company made a competing claim, arriving the same day, and the two companies maintained an uneasy truce on the tiny island, dividing the island and the guano between them. Then in December, 1854, the Venezuelan navy arrived with two armed vessels, making their nation’s previous sovereign claims on the island crystal clear. They allowed the Americans to stay, but only temporarily.

In December, 1854, two more vessels arrived – the Amazon and the McGilvery, both working for Shelton’s firm. That was the final straw. Well-armed soldiers from the Venezuelan navy ejected both companies, all of the Americans, and their vessels with the threat of force, and took full custody of the island.

Both the McGilvery and the Amazon sailed for Holmes Hole, where news of the international incident immediately spread to papers around the world. With them were the evacuated miners, who were eventually returned to their homes in Baltimore.

The incident led to the passing of the Guano Islands Act in 1856, giving US citizens legal rights to guano deposits on unclaimed islands. This led to a frenzy of island annexation by US agents throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. Several of the Caribbean islands subsequently claimed by the act – such as Navassa, currently claimed by both the US and Haiti – remain sticky territorial disputes even today.

08/29/2026

The commercial district in Montgomery Square, Cottage City (just behind the Arcade) about 1880. Very little remains today of what was once an important commercial district in the Campgrounds. The New York Store, Boston Dry Goods Store, Willard's Cafe and Restaurant (featuring "Nice Fish Dinners"), barber shop, and others shops are visible here, across from the Central House hotel (and ice cream shop.)

08/28/2026

The Oklahoma Causeway, or Barnes Causeway, once crossed the Lagoon from the bottom of modern Skiff Ave. (since blocked by Bangs' scallop shack) to the area around the modern Martha's Vineyard Film Center. It was once drivable with a vehicle, and even had utility poles along it. Much of it is still visible today, now broken by a large opening for marina traffic.

It was the last leg of Barnes Road, or "the Boulevard", which was built by Connecticut clockmaker Wallace Barnes to connect Cottage City from Wing Road via the old causeway at the head of the Lagoon to his grand development at Oklahoma, and then along modern Weaver Lane and on to Vineyard Haven. At one time, there was even a dream to build a steam railroad along Barnes' boulevard, fully encircling the Lagoon.

This photo was taken from the last Marine Hospital, now occupied by the MV Museum.

08/27/2026

Mayor Blood (inset) and his home in Cottage City (Oak Bluffs).

Cottage City summer resident Hiram Blood (1833-1895) was mayor of Fitchburg. He is also believed to be the man who gave Cottage City its name.

Blood’s cottage on Sea View Avenue, circa 1880s, was conspicuous for its patterned slate roof. Originally built about 1872 by the mayor on the corner of Narragansett Avenue, the house was soon moved to this location on the corner of Nantucket Avenue and sold to Horace Wilcox, mayor of Meriden, Connecticut. (The Sea View hotel is visible in the distance on the right.)

Blood was among the first big wave of summer visitors in the early 1870s to buy real estate and build a “cottage” on the secular side of the massive picket fence the Methodists erected to preserve the holy from the honkytonk. Blood had created the Boston, Clinton, and Fitchburg Railroad in a merger, among his other ventures. And as superintendent of this railroad, one of his principal commercial goals was to bring more paying visitors to Oak Bluffs.

The first appearance of the name “Cottage City” was in the summer of 1872. An anonymous letter printed in the Fitchburg Sentinel on July 20 titled “Oak Bluffs. The Cottage City”, gushed over the beauty of the town, especially the architecture, and noted that “the handsomest place on the island was owned by a Fitchburg man, H. A. Blood.”

The Sea View hotel was opened days later in a grand celebration attended by (and organized by) Mr. Blood and some of his Fitchburgian friends. A speech was made by George Towne of Fitchburg, whom the newspapers described as “most delicious of wits and most humorous of natural orators.” In his speech, Towne “complimented Mr. Carpenter upon making this the cottage city of America.” Towne was a long-time business partner of both Blood and Erastus Carpenter of the Oak Bluffs Land & Wharf Company. The three served on the board of directors of various railroad lines, and Towne and Blood also owned a chair company together.

By the end of the month, Blood began running newspaper advertisements declaring, “Oak Bluffs, The Cottage City of America” offering excursion tickets six days a week on his railway from all over eastern Massachusetts directly to the steamboat landing in New Bedford, with bags checked through on the “the splendid steamers” River Queen and Martha’s Vineyard.

Described as a “staunch Republican,” Blood served as mayor of Fitchburg during 1875-77, but he continued pursuing civic and commercial interests in Oak Bluffs throughout the decade.

By the late 1870s, the residents of the new summer colony were actively seceding from Edgartown. But the name of the new town was, as historian Charles Banks wrote, “a bone of contention during the agitation.”

“Logically, perhaps, Oak Bluffs should have been chosen,” wrote Henry Beetle Hough in his 1936 book, Martha’s Vineyard Summer Resort, “but this was the name of a land development which the camp meeting association had seen fit to place on the opposite side of a high picket fence. The post office at the resort had been called Vineyard Grove for a period, and this, too, was a possibility. Bonaire and Marthasburg had adherents, but fortunately few.” Banks added: “Both sides were unyielding in this matter, and the dispute threatened to disorganize the divisionists.”

So Mayor Blood proposed a compromise name: “Cottage City”, the name he had used for years in his advertising. “He claimed that through his extensive exploitation of this name throughout the country it was already known as Cottage City to hundreds of summer visitors,” wrote Banks, “and that it would be good policy to adopt it officially.” On February 17, 1880, they did. The new town of Cottage City was born.

But the name had trouble sticking. The New York Tribune reported in 1887, “The citizens of the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, want to have its name changed to Martha’s Vineyard.”

By 1906, the push to rename reached a boil. The Boston Globe reported, “After much agitation over the changing the name of this town from Cottage City back to its original one, Oak Bluffs, the originators of the idea have at last made a definite move in the form of petitions which are being circulated about town. The project is gaining in favor daily and the petitions have been signed by a large number of taxpayers, particularly among the summer residents.” By January 1907 a name-change bill advanced to the floor of the Massachusetts Legislature, and passed. “Joy at Oak Bluffs,” declared the Globe. “Marked enthusiasm greeted the news that Cottage City was hereafter to be known as ‘Oak Bluffs.’ Bells were rung, salutes fires, and flags and bunting displayed.” The Cottage City post office was formally renamed “Oak Bluffs” a month later.

“The new name - or the old name revived - is somewhat more distinctive than the old one, but not much,” concluded the Globe a few months later.

But then it could have been “Marthasburg”.

Martha's Vineyard Antique Photos

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