Martha’s Vineyard

Insights into the Island’s History, Ecology and Conservation

Resources and Maps

Wequobsque Cliffs and Lucy Vincent Beach

In his 2017 book, A Meeting of Land and Sea : Nature and the Future of Martha’s Vineyard, author David Foster, now Director Emeritus of the Harvard Forest, explored the powerful natural and cultural forces that have shaped the storied island to arrive at a new interpretation of the land today and a well-informed guide to its conservation in the future. Two decades of research by Foster and his colleagues at the Harvard Forest encompassed the native people and prehistory of the Vineyard, climate change and coastal dynamics, colonial farming and modern tourism, and land planning and conservation efforts. Each of these has helped shape the island of today, and each also illuminates possibilities for future caretakers of the island’s ecology.

The book is just one element of a rich trove of research and resources about Martha’s Vineyard compiled by David Foster and his colleagues.

Maps

A true understanding of the Vineyard begins with the island’s past: how people, farm animals, and nature shaped it centuries ago.

Martha's Vineyard Maps

To develop this new version of Henry Laurens Whiting’s map of the Vineyard—the product of 14 years of survey in the mid-19th century—a Harvard Forest design team (David Foster and Jenny (Meskauskas) Hobson) began with Whiting’s beautifully engraved chart and added rich color, wayfinding elements, and more.

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View 1850 Map

The key to today’s landscape truly lies in the past. The interactive map viewer, created by Brian Hall at the Harvard Forest, allows a close examination of the landscape of 1850 and how that gave rise to patterns today. On a mobile device, use the map to wander the Vineyard in real time, placing yourself in the present or the 19th-century landscape.

Launch the Map Viewer

Through our research that led to the writing the book, our Harvard Forest group has compiled a large collection of digitized maps of the Vineyard from the 16th – 21st century.

Explore the Maps

Resources

Excerpts from the Vineyard Gazette

For insights into the changing nature of the Vineyard, no resource equals that of the Vineyard Gazette. Beginning in 1846, the Gazette captures the peak of two critical activities in Island history—agriculture, which shaped and conditioned the land, and whaling, which shaped lives, connected the Vineyard to distant lands, and fueled local industry and wealth.  Both leave legacies on the land, in local character and lore.  From this mid-nineteenth century base, the paper brings us forth through the Civil War, the growth of the nation, and siphoning off of Island sons and daughters to California and other distant lands; the decline of farming and whaling; and the emergence of the Island as a self-conscious destination for outsiders who became a critical part of the place.

The Gazette’s Time Machine is an interactive online tool that allows users to browse historical articles, photos and videos from the Gazette’s extensive archive of Vineyard history.

How to use these Excerpts

The document is organized chronologically with tabs to browse by year.  An efficient way to research is to use the “Find” option (under “Edit” in the top bar) to search by name for a location, person, or topic. Using this approach one can quickly locate references to the Agricultural Society, Daniel Webster, fires, eels, plovers, or any topic of interest.

The following excerpts are courtesy of the Vineyard Gazette. Copyright Vineyard Gazette, all rights reserved.

Digitized historical excerpts from the Vineyard Gazette

Browse Excerpts

Photographs and Figures

Photographs from the book, A Meeting of Land and Sea, plus additional content, are available for exploration and download through The Harvard Forest Martha’s Vineyard Collection at Digital Commonwealth.

Martha's Vineyard Photos and Figures

View image collection

Bibliographies of Martha’s Vineyard-focused research

Research on Martha’s Vineyard has produced a wide range of bibliographic materials that are shared here to allow others to undertake their own explorations of the Island’s history, environment and cultural qualities.

Bibliographic Materials for A Meeting of Land and Sea

A comprehensive listing of the documents tapped in studies for the book, excluding articles from local newspapers.  This bibliography includes articles from major national newspapers, e.g., the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post. This bibliography can be downloaded as a pdf and searched using the “Find” function provided by Acrobat.

View bibliography

Due to space constraints in publishing the book, the length of the printed bibliography was drastically reduced to include only the principle references used.  Here we provide the comprehensive bibliography of materials referenced in writing the book. This bibliography can be downloaded as a pdf and searched sing the “Find” function provided by Adobe Acrobat.

View bibliography

A listing of the articles from local newspapers, Vineyard Gazette and Martha’s Vineyard Times, that were consulted in the production of the book.

View bibliography

Research Notes and Materials

A wide variety of published and unpublished materials were uncovered and consulted in the production of A Meeting of Land and Sea.  This section provides the resulting compilation of typed and hand-written notes and related materials.  The organization is by chapter in the book but, given that there is considerable overlap among chapters in content, all relevant chapters should be consulted in searching through these files.  Many notes are referenced by author and date.  The full bibliographic sources should be found in the list of references in the volume.  Additional references are located in the bibliographies (above).

It addition to the typed and handwritten notes there are many thousand note cards (5×8 inches) on journal articles and books. That habit was initiated in David Foster in an undergraduate course taught by Bill Niering who required that all background notes be collected on cards and that these be turned in with each writing assignment.  These have not yet been scanned.

Additional resources are available in the maps, photos, and Vineyard Gazette excerpts sections above. Many of the original articles that were consulted and other related materials are filed in the Harvard Forest Archives.

Research Notes and Materials