Gazette Chronicle
The approach of winter with its gray and stormy days that are inevitable, stirs an instinct among Vineyard people to turn their hands to home employments: the making of rugs, knitting and similar things; the various forms of handicraft that have survived from the colonial days in spite of machinery and machine made goods.
It is probably true that civilization is built on tradition. Even if it isn’t, traditions are nice, sweet and sentimental. People like them. They also use them as excuses for doing things that they can’t think of any logical reason for doing.
From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Nov. 15, 1929: This is the season of the year when all the Vineyard goes scalloping. The toothsome bivalves spatter and flit along the surface of the water in every cove along the marshy shores of the great ponds.
Everyone who walks through South Water street in Edgartown is in some sense a beneficiary of Capt. Thomas Milton, for it was he who, considerably more than a hundred years ago, brought home and planted the pagoda tree.
Last Saturday, Music street was the scene of a good old-fashioned husking bee, or at least the scene of the first half of it. Twenty people turned out to help Jimmy Athearn strip the field corn that he had planted in the half-acre field next to his father’s house.
On the eve of Halloween, it is fitting that Vineyard residents should recall the ghost stories native to this land.