Disappearing Ancient Ways

On Thursday night the Martha’s Vineyard Commission will hold a public hearing on a proposal to include five ancient ways in the town of Edgartown in a special ways district of critical planning concern.

Public attendance is encouraged at this important gathering, which may well decide the future of Watcha Path, Tar Kiln Road, Middle Line Path, Pennywise Path and Ben Tom’s Road — old byways which are so much a part of Island history and are now threatened by encroaching development and misuse.

By BRAD WOODGER

We’re all busy. More important, however, is that everybody else knows that we’re busy. Few street meetings or catch-up phone calls conclude without at least one reminder (lest we forget) that “I’m-we’re sooo crazy-wildly-insanely busy.” There seems to exist a fear within our community that we may be perceived as being idle. God forbid.

By Polly Woollcott Murphy. From the Vineyard Gazette editions of November 1976:

50 Years Ago

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of September, 1957:

TEAR IT DOWN

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

A building permit is given to an individual in 2003, to construct a garage to replace an existing 200-square-foot garage. The proposed cost for the replacement garage was to be $22,000. Instead, the project grew to a three-story building with balconies, sliding glass doors and a roof deck. The cost probably exceeded $200,000.

My questions are:

Why must this saga continue?

Wasn’t the present garage built illegally in the first place?

Being a seasonal Island resident, when I return to my other homeland I am often asked what do people on Martha’s Vineyard do in the winter? My most immediate impulse is to react to this probing inquiry by saying that they, the entire Island population, immediately after the last seasonal resident or tourist has disappeared over the horizon, take off all their clothing, paint their fundaments an intense shade of aqua and indulge in the worship of various forms of fungi.