Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts
A Short History of Oak Bluffs
From a summer camp meeting of Methodist tents, to a village of gingerbread cottages, to the island town that welcomed Black families when others would not. Oak Bluffs grew up around its summer visitors, and its Camp Ground is a National Historic Landmark.
Part of Edgartown
Europeans settled this stretch of Martha’s Vineyard in 1642, and for more than two centuries the land that is now Oak Bluffs was simply the northern end of Edgartown. It stayed farmland and pasture, quiet and unremarkable, until a religious revival reshaped it into the resort village it is today. The town you live in is younger than the cottages that made it famous.
Wesleyan Grove
Beginning in the 1830s, Methodists came here each summer for open-air camp meetings in a stand of oaks they called Wesleyan Grove. Families returned year after year, and the canvas tents they pitched hardened, season by season, into small wooden cottages trimmed with the elaborate scrollwork that gave them their name: the gingerbread cottages. At the center of it all stands the Tabernacle, the great open-air iron pavilion raised in the late 1880s, where the community still gathers. The Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association grounds were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and named a National Historic Landmark in 2005.
Cottage City to Oak Bluffs
By the 1870s the camp ground had grown a full resort around it, with hotels, a wharf, and Ocean Park’s wide green overlooking Nantucket Sound. The residents decided they no longer wanted to be governed from Edgartown, and on February 17, 1880, they broke away and incorporated as a separate town called Cottage City. In 1907 the town re-incorporated under the name it carries today, Oak Bluffs, for the oak grove along the bluffs above the sound. That founding decision, made by residents in a meeting, set the same form of self-government that still votes the town’s budget every April.
The Inkwell and a Summer Haven
Across the twentieth century Oak Bluffs became a celebrated summer haven for Black American families. When other resorts turned Black families away, Oak Bluffs welcomed them, and generations of teachers, doctors, writers, and, later, public figures made the town their August home. The town beach they claimed, known as the Inkwell, took a name meant as an insult and turned it into a point of pride. That history is still visible every summer, and it is one of the things that makes this small town nationally known.
Sources: town of Oak Bluffs; the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association; U.S. National Register of Historic Places (1978) and National Historic Landmark designation (2005); U.S. Census Bureau.