Martha's Vineyard once threatened to leave Massachusetts and join Hawaii
In 1977, angry at losing their guaranteed seat in the state legislature, residents of Martha's Vineyard talked seriously about seceding. Vermont and Hawaii both offered to take them in, and some pushed for a 51st state. The plan went nowhere, but its seagull flag still flies on the island.
The Wampanoag called the island Noepe, land amid the streams. Its English name probably honours Martha Golding, the wealthy mother-in-law who helped fund Bartholomew Gosnold's 1602 voyage, the first recorded European expedition to Cape Cod, rather than his daughter of the same name. Only seven English names still in American use are older, and it is one of just five American place names officially allowed a possessive apostrophe, after a federal board briefly dropped it.
Thomas Mayhew bought the island along with Nantucket, and his son founded the first settlement at Great Harbor, later Edgartown, in 1642. The Mayhews kept good relations with the Wampanoag, whose population nonetheless fell from about 3,000 in 1642 to 313 by 1764. Mission schools produced the first Native American graduates of Harvard, among them Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck in 1665, who studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew. In 1684 Rhode Island sent militia in three boats to seize the island, but they turned back on seeing men ashore.
Whaling made it prosperous until Pennsylvania oil undercut whale oil, and by 1870 the trade had nearly collapsed. After the railroad reached Woods Hole in 1872, summer homes spread. Heath hens held out on the island longer than anywhere else; the very last, nicknamed Booming Ben, died there in 1932. In 1963 the linguist William Labov studied local speech in a thesis now seen as a founding work of sociolinguistics.
Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws in Menemsha and Chilmark in 1974, casting islanders as extras and in speaking roles. Today about 20,530 people live there year-round, but summer swells the population past 200,000, and roughly 56 percent of homes are seasonal.
Source: Martha's Vineyard
