🇺🇸 United States · New England
Martha's Vineyard is one of those islands that seem made for summer. Set off the southern coast of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, it is the largest island in New England and a destination that combines sandy beaches, white lighthouses, colored clay cliffs, houses of salt-weathered gray shingles and towns with a classic New England charm. Presidents summered here —Barack Obama chose the island on several occasions— along with celebrities, but it is also a place of fishing communities, farmers and families who come back generation after generation.
The island has two halves with distinct characters. The 'Down-Island', with the towns of Edgartown, Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven, is the liveliest and most touristy area: Edgartown dazzles with its white whaling captains' mansions and its lighthouse; Oak Bluffs surprises with its neighborhood of colorful little wooden houses trimmed with lacework, the famous 'gingerbread cottages', its historic carousel and its lively harbor. The 'Up-Island', with West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah, is more rural and quiet, of farms, woods, ponds and the spectacular clay cliffs of Aquinnah (Gay Head), territory of the Wampanoag people.
This guide tours Martha's Vineyard with a practical, warm eye: how to arrive by ferry and get around the island, which towns and lighthouses to visit, where the best beaches are, how to explore it by bicycle and where to eat lobster and fresh oysters. The island can be enjoyed without a car if you organize yourself, combining bike, bus and ferry, and it gives you quiet days of sea, landscape and postcard towns.
Long before the Europeans arrived, Martha's Vineyard was the territory of the Wampanoag people, who called it 'Noepe' (sometimes translated as 'land amid the currents') and lived off fishing, shellfishing, hunting and farming. In 1602, the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold sailed these waters and gave the island the name 'Martha's Vineyard', by tradition in honor of a Martha in his family (possibly his daughter or his mother-in-law) and for the wild grapevines he found there. English colonization began around 1642 with Thomas Mayhew, whose family governed the island for generations and kept, unlike other areas, relatively less violent relations with the Wampanoag, many of whom converted to Christianity. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the island prospered on fishing and, above all, on whaling, which made Edgartown rich and filled its streets with captains' mansions. In the mid-19th century, Oak Bluffs was born as the site of huge open-air Methodist religious camp meetings, whose tents turned over time into the celebrated 'gingerbread' wooden cottages. With the decline of whaling, the island reinvented itself as a summer destination, a role it keeps to this day. The Wampanoag people of Aquinnah (Gay Head) maintain their identity and their land at the western end of the island. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of the nation: Wampanoag land where the Mayflower pilgrims landed, stage of the Revolution in Boston, home of Harvard and of the summer season on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.
Read the history of Massachusetts →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before any European gave it a name, the island we now call Martha's Vineyard was 'Noepe' to its inhabitants, the Wampanoag people, speakers of an Algonquian language. The place name 'Noepe' is usually translated as 'land amid the currents' or 'land surrounded by waters', a reference to the strong currents that ring the island. The Wampanoag also lived on nearby Cape Cod, the Elizabeth Islands and Nantucket, forming a network of related communities across the southeast of what is now Massachusetts.
On the island, the Wampanoag lived from a combination of fishing, shellfishing, hunting and farming. They made the most of the abundance of the sea —fish, clams, oysters— and grew corn, beans and squash, as well as gathering fruits and plants. Their life was organized around the cycles of the seasons and around a deep knowledge of the marine and land environment, passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition.
The area of the Gay Head (Aquinnah) cliffs, at the western end of the island, was and remains a central place for the Wampanoag, charged with spiritual meaning. Despite centuries of colonization, disease, dispossession of land and pressure to assimilate, the Wampanoag people of Aquinnah (Gay Head) did not disappear: today they are one of the recognized tribal communities, they keep their land and identity on the island and they keep the memory of Noepe alive, a reminder that the history of Martha's Vineyard begins long before the European ships arrived.
The island's current name was born in 1602, when the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold sailed these waters aboard the ship Concord, on the same voyage in which he christened Cape Cod for the abundance of codfish. Landing on the island, Gosnold found plentiful wild grapevines and, by tradition, gave it the name 'Martha's Vineyard'. The 'Vineyard' part alludes to those vines; the 'Martha' part, to a woman in his family.
There is some historical debate about which Martha the name referred to. The most widespread explanation holds that it was in honor of his young daughter, named Martha; another version proposes that it honored his mother-in-law (or another relative) of the same name. What is certain is that the place name stuck and, over time, came to prevail over the Indigenous name Noepe in official use, although the latter was never entirely forgotten.
Gosnold founded no permanent settlement; his voyage was one of exploration and reconnaissance. But, as with Cape Cod, his names stayed on the map. Curiously, for a while the name came close to losing its apostrophe and its exact form varied in documents, until it settled as 'Martha's Vineyard'. Today, the name evokes both that Elizabethan exploration and the wild vines that surprised the English sailors more than four centuries ago.
The permanent English colonization of Martha's Vineyard began around 1642, when Thomas Mayhew, an English merchant who had obtained the rights over the island (and over Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands), established a settlement in what is now Edgartown, then called Great Harbor. The Mayhew family would govern the island as a kind of manor for several generations.
One distinctive feature of the island's colonization, compared with other parts of New England, was that relations between the Mayhews and the Wampanoag were, comparatively speaking, less violent. Thomas Mayhew Jr. and other missionaries devoted efforts to evangelizing the Wampanoag, and many of them converted to Christianity, forming communities of 'praying Indians'. This did not, however, prevent the progressive loss of land and autonomy of the Indigenous peoples, nor the devastating impact of European diseases. Notably, during King Philip's War (1675-1676), which ravaged the mainland, the island stayed relatively clear of the armed conflict.
Over the following centuries, the English population grew and the island was organized into the towns we know today. The economy rested on fishing, farming and maritime activity, laying the foundations of the prosperous whaling era that would follow. The mark of that colonial period is still visible in the names of the towns, in the layout of Edgartown and in the persistence of the Wampanoag community of Aquinnah, which held on to its identity throughout the colonization.
Between the late 18th century and the middle of the 19th, Martha's Vineyard lived through its period of greatest economic prosperity thanks to whaling, the region's great industry along with neighboring Nantucket and the mainland port of New Bedford. The whalers set sail on voyages of months or years to the world's oceans in search of whales, whose oil was an extremely valuable product, used for lighting and as a lubricant, at a time when industrial petroleum did not yet exist.
Edgartown was the great beneficiary of that boom. The whaling captains and shipowners who made fortunes invested their earnings in building the imposing white mansions in the Federal and Greek Revival styles that still line its streets today, especially those facing the harbor. Those houses, with their columns, their white fences and their gardens, are the visible testimony of the wealth the sea brought to the island, and they give Edgartown the elegant, stately air it keeps.
The whaling era went into decline around the middle of the 19th century, hit by the overhunting of whales, by disasters such as shipwrecks and by the arrival of petroleum (kerosene began to replace whale oil after the first oil wells of 1859). The island, like so many whaling ports, had to reinvent itself. But the legacy of that era —the mansions, the captains' names, the museums and the seafaring culture— remains a fundamental part of the identity of Martha's Vineyard.
One of the island's most singular stories is that of the town of Oak Bluffs, born out of a religious phenomenon. From the middle of the 19th century (from 1835), a Methodist congregation began to organize large open-air summer religious gatherings at this point on the island, the so-called 'camp meetings'. Thousands of the faithful arrived each season and camped in tents around a central preaching space, in days of prayer, singing and sermons that went on for days.
As the years went by, those temporary tents were replaced by small permanent wooden houses, built on the same tiny lots the tents had occupied. Their owners decorated them with elaborate fretwork trim —filigree, lacework and motifs recalling the 'Carpenter Gothic' style— and painted them in bright colors, giving rise to the celebrated little houses known as 'gingerbread cottages' for their look of decorated confectionery. At the center of this neighborhood rose a great iron tabernacle that still presides over the whole today.
The success of the gatherings and the beauty of the place drew secular summer visitors, and around the camp a prosperous tourist settlement grew that ended up being constituted as the town of Oak Bluffs. The gingerbread cottage neighborhood, run by the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, survives today as one of the most endearing and most photographed ensembles on the island, testimony to that singular religious origin. Oak Bluffs has also been, for more than a century, a prominent summering place for the African American community, with Inkwell Beach as one of its symbols.
With the decline of whaling and the rise of the summer gatherings, Martha's Vineyard was transformed over the 19th and 20th centuries into one of the most celebrated summer destinations on the east coast of the United States. The arrival of steamships and, later, the ease of the ferries brought the island closer to the cities, and its beaches, lighthouses and towns attracted well-off families, artists, writers and, in time, public figures and celebrities in search of quiet and discretion.
The island became especially tied to the presidency of the United States when Barack Obama chose Martha's Vineyard as his summer holiday spot on several occasions during and after his term, adding to a long list of personalities who frequented it. That fame as a summer refuge of the elite coexists, however, with the everyday life of fishermen, farmers and year-round residents, and with a solid tradition of historic communities, among them the African American community of Oak Bluffs.
Popular culture also put the island on the world map: in 1974 the director Steven Spielberg shot the film 'Jaws' here, using the island's landscapes —renamed in the fiction as 'Amity Island'— and locations such as State Beach and Menemsha harbor. The film turned Martha's Vineyard into a recognizable setting for millions of viewers. Today, the island keeps its double soul: that of the postcard tourist destination, with its beaches, lighthouses and colorful cottages, and that of a place with a history and a community of its own, where the mark of the Wampanoag, the whalers and the summer visitors overlaps in a single landscape of sea and light.