The room in which more Vineyard history has been researched, written, and edited than any other measures fourteen feet by seven feet and a few inches. It stands near the center of the basement of the cinder-block library building at the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, a block and a half from Main Street, Edgartown. The walls are plasterboard and hollow, like something you’d find on a stage set. Three fluorescent lights buzz overhead. A computer with a big new screen sits in one corner, a small light table stands near the door, and an ancient map of Cape Cod and the Islands, backed by canvas, hangs from the ceiling along one wall. On one of the four bookshelves stands a row of journals of Island history, the first published in August 1959, the most recent in February 2006.

There are forty-seven volumes of these booklets, which are published quarterly by the historical society and colored teal, beige, slate, and pale yellow. Arthur R. Railton has written a great deal of what’s in the last twenty-seven volumes, and edited all twenty-seven, beginning in the winter of 1978. The body of his work this spring surpasses 5,000 pages.

The man himself favors plaid work shirts when the weather is cool. He is bald on top, but his hair on the sides and back is white, curling over his ears and collar. At the fringes, and in his snowy beard, you see hints of gold. He wears big, square-framed glasses when he works. He used to wear a Greek fishing cap. Now it’s a baseball cap with the playful outline of a Volkswagen New Beetle on the front. He worked for Volkswagen of America beginning in 1959, the same year the historical society launched its journal, The Dukes County Intelligencer, and in the 1960s Railton wrote an American history of the original Beetle for the company. (He drives a convertible New Beetle now, but because of the trouble he’s having with his eyes and bright light, he rarely puts the top down.) His voice is gravelly but strong. There is an occasional hitch in his speech – not a stammer so much as a hesitation, an extra pause for thought. He has worked in this room for twenty-eight years, twelve years longer than he has at any other job.

This spring, the historical society publishes a book he wrote, a serialized history of the Island published in The Intelligencer over the course of the last four years. It is the first comprehensive history of Martha’s Vineyard to appear in print in ninety-five years. On September 23, Art Railton will have lived ninety-one years himself. The publication of The History of Martha’s Vineyard: How We Got to Where We Are (Commonwealth Editions of Beverly) is, by his own admission, the most important work of his life. If, at this hour, we are measuring things in the life of Art Railton, we should note at the start that though he may one day earn a little for his work on the book, he has never been paid a dime to write or edit The Intelligencer. Thus the dividend we’re about to receive for his three-decade investment in the history of the Vineyard is beyond any plausible accounting.

But spend only a few minutes with Art Railton, who can turn shy and a bit grumpy when the spotlight swings his way, and it will come as no surprise that he refuses to describe himself as a historian at all. He was a newspaperman once, and he calls himself a journalist of the past. Read his entertaining and discursive new history of the Island, which begins with the first inhabitants and ends with the start of World War II, and you figure out that all he was ever looking for down in the basement of the historical society was a good story to tell.

For a guy who spent all that time figuring out what happened in the past, Railton takes pains to tell you what he doesn’t believe in now. Doesn’t believe in the afterlife, doesn’t believe that there is a history we can be certain of, doesn’t believe there is any such thing as an identifiable character to Martha’s Vineyard.

“No, I take exception to the term ‘Vineyard character,’” he says, leaning back in the chair in his room. “The Vineyard is a place that’s inhabited by people like almost every other place on the planet. I don’t see any examples of the towns on the Vineyard being any different from the towns in New Hampshire where I grew up. We, the Vineyard, were a little slow in adopting things, but that was not because of something in the character of the people living here; it was just that we were farther away from the flow.” Whaling, fishing, piloting, and freighting – men risking their lives and spending years at sea didn’t set the Island fundamentally apart from mainland hamlets with duller callings? “You can say that the mariner has a certain mind-set, whether he’s on an island or whether he’s in New Bedford. And the farmer, out in Iowa, has a mind-set.” To Railton, the two mind-sets are pretty much the same, born out of people working hard at whatever hard work they do to survive.

No belief in history, at least of a settled kind? “History is what was recorded and what survived, whether it’s in letters or documents, but so much never survived. Who knows what the hell was happening here? Women aren’t going to sit down and write journals when they’re taking care of the house and the kids and paying the bills [while their husbands are at sea]. I mean, that’s an occupation for some well-heeled woman or man: to sit down every day and write what’s going on. And I wish there had been more of it, but it’s very hard to find.”

No afterlife? Well, he doesn’t draw a precise line here, but an afterlife implies that something out there is looking after folks down here. He doesn’t buy it. Having been drafted with the first American inductees in March 1941 and serving the whole length of World War II, Railton, posted to the 112th Anti-Aircraft Group of the Third Army, walked into Ohrdruf, a forced-labor sub-camp of Buchenwald. This may have been April 4 or 5, 1945, within a day or two of its discovery by the Americans. General Patton was coming that afternoon to inspect it. Railton, a captain, was given permission by a guard to walk around the camp on his own. Lying in a circle around a flagpole outside what might have been a hospital he saw “a couple of dozen dead men.

They had been crunched on the ground and shot in the back of the head.” In a corner of the camp he found a building with a large smokestack. Inside he found “piles of human hair. And teeth with gold fillings in them were on tables. And outside there was this cart-like thing [of the type you see at the] ferryboat, these four-wheeled carts, bigger than that. Stacked high like cordwood with naked men. I think they were all men; I didn’t go to find out. And between layers there was all this lime scattered on them, and there was lime all around. And you know, to see this total denial of the human spirit just was shocking to me. And there was a path that went from there up the hill a little bit, and there were these huge open trenches into which bodies had been thrown, partially covered, some, and they hadn’t finished the job. As I understand it, the German people who were running it, the soldiers, as soon as the Americans came close enough, they just took off and left everything.”

If nothing else, what he saw at Ohrdruf that April morning confirmed for Art Railton what life had suggested to him almost from the beginning, and what he believes to this day: Where you begin and how you end up is almost entirely a matter of luck. And the disadvantaged man, the underdog, the unlucky man – he needs a champion. If he’s gotten the short end of the stick in life, he deserves to have someone tell his story as honestly and fully as possible after he’s gone.

Art Railton never knew the exact reason why his father Albert and mother Anne steamed away from Yorkshire the day after they married in 1913. “I don’t know what he did in England,” he says. “But whatever he did was not promising. He knew he wasn’t going anywhere.” The family wound up in Saskatchewan, his father working at a wheat farm owned by an uncle of some kind, then for the city government. Railton was born in Regina. After Canada entered the Great War in 1916, Railton moved with his mother and three sisters to Methuen, where a maiden aunt worked in a textile mill in nearby Lawrence, and where Railton himself would work summers after graduating from high school in 1933. Eventually the family moved to Salem, New Hampshire. Railton worked his way through college in two stints, the first member of his family to go beyond high school, graduating in 1939 from the School of Journalism at the University of Iowa. A fellow student in the program, Marjorie Marks, had fallen deeply in love with him. Railton had a girlfriend at home and left Marge behind. He paraded into the world believing he was going to make something of himself. But the Depression was biting hard. Railton wound up back at the mill in Lawrence, working under his father, first as a cloth carrier and then as a percher, or inspector.

“Same room,” he says of the place he thought he’d left behind in high school. He had never felt lower in his life. “Well, I had given up – no question – on this dream that every young guy has. And I had worked so hard. You know, I didn’t have any money – myself, or my girlfriend – and we broke up, and then there was nothing. I was back where I started.”

Then came the first peacetime draft and the Second World War. “I don’t like war. I’m a pacifist. I hate war. It’s repulsive to me,” says Railton. “And yet I would not be anywhere if it hadn’t been for war.” He was stationed as a staff sergeant at Camp Devens, still feeling low, when out of the blue, he got a letter from Marge saying that she and her mother were going to tour New England by car. Could she and Art get together? “And I took leave for three or four days, and I drove them [around], with my mother and her mother in the back seat, and Marge and me in the front seat of their car. And we toured New England. And the whole notion was rekindled. I felt, ‘Boy, if she came all this way, maybe I didn’t feel so bottomed out.’”

Art knew he’d have to aspire to more than being a sergeant if he wanted to spend his life with Marge; they married right after he graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1942. At the end of the war he retired as a major, and with Marge moved to the Midwest, where Art and Marge wrote for several newspapers before Marge stopped working to raise their four children. Acting on a tip he got from a colonel under whom he’d served in the Army, Railton was hired to be the automotive editor of Popular Mechanics. In 1959, he became vice president in charge of communications for Volkswagen of America.

Railton had fallen for the overachieving little Bug, the way it stood out from the fat barges that were floating out of American factories. In other ways, too, the man who knew how luck could consign even educated, ambitious fellows back to the factory floor – the guy who had walked through Ohrdruf alone – was thinking harder and more often about the disenfranchised, the underdog, those who fell victim to the strong and merciless or just to the fates. At Popular Mechanics he went to the publisher’s apartment overlooking Lake Michigan in Chicago and convinced him to hire the first Jew the magazine ever had as an editor. At Volkswagen of America, he persuaded his bosses to admit their first African American into the corporate ranks.

In 1977 Art retired from VW and he and Marge came to the Vineyard, where he had spent his first summer in Edgartown in 1923, living part of the season with his aunt and uncle, Jane and Everett C. Fisher, an eighth-generation Islander of Portuguese descent. As an eight-year-old boy, with only a few Vineyard friends and feeling neither quite like an Islander nor quite like a summer lad, he had walked over streets paved with bleached scallop shells, had watched the blacksmith Orrin Norton and boatbuilder Manuel Swartz Roberts toil down on Dock Street, had seen the Edgartown Yacht Club rise on the old Osborn whaling wharf at the foot of Main Street. Years later, with their children, Art and Marge regularly drove all the way from Chicago to spend a few short weeks on the Island racing on Menemsha Pond and renting the Chilmark summer camp of E. Gale Huntington, historian and editor of The Intelligencer. The two men became friends, and when Huntington retired from running the journal in 1978, he asked Art to take over for a year until the historical society could find a permanent replacement. Railton started digging through what was then a cluttered and rather haphazardly catalogued basement. He never left.

When Marge died after a long illness in December of 2000, Railton began looking for something big to fill the space she had left behind in his life. Had there been no Marge, he says, he would never have overcome the sadness that followed him from the mill in Lawrence to the Army at Camp Devens. He would never have gone to OCS to better himself for her sake, never met the colonel who urged him to apply to Popular Mechanics after the war, never had the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren he has now. Indeed, he says, there would have been no reason of any kind to write the book. “Without her,” the dedication reads, “there would have been nothing.”

Did you know that several Islanders kept slaves? That the first Vineyarders to reach their senior year and graduate from Harvard – with the very first class – were two Wampanoags from Gay Head? That within a few short months, scores – perhaps hundreds – of Islanders abandoned the Vineyard to seek their fortune in the California Gold Rush? That the Vineyard once belonged to the colony of New York? (That’s why Kings, Queens, and Duchess counties are there, and Dukes County is here.)

The History of Martha’s Vineyard breaks old but thrilling Island news on nearly every third or fourth page. In his swift, wire-service style, Railton, the former newspaperman, reconstructs and reintroduces Island history not so much by theme, but by bulletins from an undiscovered or unremembered past.
His great gift as an archival journalist is knowing when to stand aside for the perfect quote – for instance, the 1823 letter describing how the newest born-again converts to evangelical Methodism, which was then just beginning to sweep the Island, “become self-confident and swell with spiritual Pride like a puff-Fish when Boys scratch his belly.” Or a petition by thirty-five Chilmarkers trying, as diplomatically as possible, to alert the General Court in Boston that the Island felt too exposed and undefended to help much with the Revolutionary War: “There is a considerable number of men here who appear to be very Doubtful which side will finally overcome . . . and who therefore chuse to be as stil and inactive as possible . . . and are accordingly averse to doing anything toward the Defending of this Island by arms.”

There are, of course, larger ideas in this new history. Railton writes that if Bartholomew Gosnold, the English explorer who named the Island, had set up a permanent trading post on Cuttyhunk as planned, rather than abandoning it after one summer in 1602, the tiny island at the foot of the Elizabeth Islands chain would be a “national shrine” and “the nation’s birthplace. Instead of praising pious Pilgrim fathers [who came eighteen years later], we would be honoring Gosnold and his adventurers, men who came seeking freedom of enterprise, not freedom of religion. There would be no paintings of pious-faced believers walking through the snow to church, no Thanksgiving holiday.” The one sentence he doesn’t write, but you can see all but printed in invisible ink: “And the nation and the world would be much, much better off.”

We may break some news here ourselves: As this edition goes to press, the thinking at the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society is that the May edition of The Intelligencer may be Art Railton’s last. He stopped his story at the start of World War II because the change the Island went through after that was simply too vast and tumultuous for him to tackle. He says it’s harder to sit down and get the work done nowadays. “I feel like mentally I’ve aged more than any year I can remember,” he says. “And I don’t know why. I’m in good health.” His vision is getting worse, and he’s losing a little of his old confidence. “I’m hoping I can cut the cord. I don’t like the idea of being the old man who wants to do this, or wants to add this. I think it’s time for fresh views.”

There will be a first reception for the publication of the book at the historical society from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 27. There will be a reading, questions and answers, book signing, and refreshments. There will be more events like this during the course of the summer. He grumbles a bit about it, wonders what sort of clothes he’s supposed to wear. But he says he’d like to say thank you as much as be thanked. He has enjoyed this work more than any other he ever did. “Since I came here,” he says, looking around the basement office where he has spent a third of his life, counting by years, “I never have ever thought that I was doing the community a favor. I always thought that the community was doing me a favor, by letting me be here. I’ve learned so much, and I’ve learned things about human character and other things that you never learn working for a living someplace.”