West Tisbury, Massachusetts
A Short History of West Tisbury
From a Wampanoag community and the original site of old Tisbury’s first settlement, to a farming town that voted itself free of Tisbury in 1892, to the island that invented a way to buy back its own open land.
Wampanoag Ground
Long before any English settler arrived, the land that is now West Tisbury was home to the Wampanoag, who have lived on Martha’s Vineyard for thousands of years. One of their communities here was Christiantown, in the northern part of town, a village that kept its own meeting ground and burial place. The name North Tisbury still marks a village that early records called Newtown. When you drive the up-island roads you are crossing ground that was organised by its first people long before there was a town line to cross.
The Original Settlement, and 1892
West Tisbury holds the original site of Middletown, the first settlement in the parent town of Tisbury, which was incorporated in 1671 and whose harbor village of Vineyard Haven was called Holmes Hole until 1871. For more than two centuries the up-island farming villages and the down-island harbor shared one town government. In 1892 the up-island part voted to set off on its own, and West Tisbury became a separate town, taking its early records with the parent town where they still live.
A Farming Town
West Tisbury grew up as the Vineyard’s agricultural heart, a town of pastures, stone walls, and mill brooks rather than wharves. Its farms set a rhythm that still shapes the town’s zoning and its open-space decisions today. That inheritance is why so much of what the town takes up at Town Meeting, from watershed protection to housing, comes back to a single question: how a small island town keeps land working and keeps people able to live on it.
The Land Bank and the Housing Bank
In 1986 the island’s voters created the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank, funded by a 2 percent fee on real estate transfers. It has since protected about 4,200 acres across the Vineyard, including 191 acres at Waskosim’s Rock in West Tisbury, land that can never be developed. Thirty-six years later, on April 12, 2022, West Tisbury Town Meeting voted 324 to 27 to try the same idea for a different problem: a 2 percent fee on the sale of expensive homes to fund housing that working families could afford. West Tisbury was the first town on Martha’s Vineyard to adopt it, and the vote happened in the same open Town Meeting that still decides the town’s business today.
Sources: Town of West Tisbury, History (Historical Records of Dukes County), westtisbury-ma.gov; Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank, mvlandbank.com.