They doubted her before she arrived, scorned her while she served and forgot about her after she left.

But the ancient Hudson River ferry Hackensack — which adopted the name Islander and sailed bravely if not always reliably between Woods Hole and Vineyard Haven for three years right after World War II — turns out to have been one of the most consequential vessels ever to steam between Martha’s Vineyard and the mainland.

The history of Seven Gates Farm goes back to 1887, and for generations a parade of farmers, shareholders and conservationists have done just about all they could to keep the land and buildings of this enclave looking, working and feeling largely unchanged.

The film comes from 1957, so the colors look elemental and crayon bright. The music is jouncy and insistent, like something you’d hear in an old-time Friendly’s Restaurant. The men wear neckties and smoke, pretty much no matter where they are or what they’re doing.

If we want written accounts of Island life before the Gazette began to publish in 1846, we must usually rely on letters, town records, deeds, wills and diaries, many kept at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, some at the newspaper office, others at the county courthouse.

In the middle 1970s, trap fishing enjoyed a brief revival on the Vineyard on the site of an old Campbell and Flanders trap near Menemsha Bight. Chris Murphy of Chilmark set up exactly the same type of trap that the old-world Island fishermen were using in the 1930s, only he rigged his netting from floating 55-gallon barrels anchored to the bottom rather than using heavy wooden stakes.

Put plainly, most of the movie footage is not terribly good. Some of it is out of focus or overexposed. Some of it lingers too long on fish lying dead on the rocks. Some of it wasn’t even shot on the Vineyard, and it takes a judicious eye to determine which scenes show the Island and which show Nauset, Cotuit or the jetties at the northern end of the Cape Cod Canal.