Keith Gorman has been at it sixteen months now, excavating and cataloguing a library-wide collection of artifacts at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Edgartown. For though the museum has been in business since 1922 – faithfully saving Vineyard whaling logbooks, journals, photographs, letters, deeds, and memorabilia of every imaginable type – the E. Gale Huntington Memorial Library has never before had a trained archivist to organize or lead it.
Keith holds a doctorate in European history and a master’s degree in library science. He came to the Island in June of last year from the Smithsonian and
several professorships at Boston-area colleges. The archival work is part of a huge effort by the museum – until recently known as the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society – to make its holdings accessible, interesting, and useful to all comers, whether they walk through the gate at the corner of School and Cooke streets, or visit the museum’s website (www.marthasvineyardhistory.org).
The library offers Keith a probably unrepeatable chance to archive a vast but unmined collection from the basement upward. The museum can jump over obsolete cataloguing systems and adopt the latest ideas and technologies as it protects and assembles its holdings for everyone from children to scholars. For Keith, every day brings a new discovery. He spent part of a morning recently explaining why these particular findings are his favorites – so far.
Thomas Cooke house
The Thomas Cooke house stands at the northeast corner of the museum campus in downtown Edgartown, facing no nearby street (the way the rest of the houses in the neighborhood do) because in 1765, about when the house was built, there were as yet no streets.
Thomas Cooke was the collector of customs, the house was his office, and three generations of Cookes lived there after him. “I’d been in other colonial houses,” says Keith, “but something about this one just hit me. I don’t know if it was the light or the eleven exhibit rooms in there – you turned and looked back in time. You tried to imagine an unobstructed view of Edgartown harbor. You looked down at the floorboards that had been worn by ships’ captains coming in to pay their customs – human feet wearing those big boards down. The house hasn’t been tampered with. They didn’t add electricity. They didn’t add plumbing. That experience for me, in my first month, took my breath away. You can look at it as one of the prized artifacts in the collection, but it’s also one of the prized artifacts for the whole Island.”
Letter to George Washington, 1776
“This was one of the first colonial-era documents that I worked with in the collection,” says Keith. In March of 1776, a vessel belonging to a mainland merchant named Wemyss Orrock went aground near the Island, and its cargo – provisions destined for the British army under siege by the Continental army at Boston – was plundered by Vineyarders. The merchant was wounded, robbed even of his clothing, and left on the wreck by the pillagers. He was rescued and taken to the Island, where he promptly wrote to General Washington asking that his cargo be returned to him.
“It was mind-blowing to me that he actually thinks he’s going to get a response,” says Keith. “But what’s significant from a historian’s point of view is that the British didn’t want to recognize Washington as a general. But this guy, clearly a merchant and somewhat sharp, in March of 1776 does Washington the honor of calling him ‘Excellency’ and ‘General of the Continental Army.’ This is really early to be acknowledging something like this. It gives you a sense of our collection of Revolutionary War documents. This is quite unique.” (Yes, the merchant got his ship off the shoals. No, he never got his cargo back. We’re not sure what happened to his clothes.)
Amelia Watson watercolors
Amelia Watson, an artist and faculty member at the Oak Bluffs Summer Institute, a summer school for teachers, visited the Island for at least twenty summers between 1870 and 1900. “We’re not sure what she taught,” says Keith, “but my guess is some sort of drawing class.” In her travels across the Island, Watson painted at least thirty or forty small watercolors of the landscape as she knew it. “I think our watercolor collection is a hidden, amazing gem. She does these astonishing watercolors of schooners and sunsets around West Chop. For me, as a commuter from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven and back, while it can be rough at times, I’m privileged to see lots of sunsets – they can change in a minute, from reds to purples to blues. I think she captures the maritime experience, and she captures the beauty of the Island. There are these moments on the ferry when I think of Amelia Watson painting from shore, and me on the boat looking toward shore where she may have been painting. That feels remarkable to me.”
J.N. Chamberlain photographs
John N. Chamberlain was a late-nineteenth century Cottage City (now Oak Bluffs) photographer who shot many pictures around the hotels and Camp Ground of the town. He was a savvy businessman who knew that the first generation of middle-class Americans was going on its first vacations, and that people had enough money left over in their pockets (or bathing suits) to be able to memorialize the moment. “Unlike photos from the 1850s and 1860s, when everyone was serious, these people allowed themselves to show pleasure,” says Keith. So free of self-consciousness are the subjects in this image that they do not mind the audience looking down on them from the boardwalk as they indulge themselves in the shoot. “These people are actually smiling,” says Keith of the subjects who were on the Vineyard shoreline getting to know the brand-new concept of leisure time. “Well, some of them, at least.”
Post card collection
The library has a collection of 10,000 Island post cards. “I have a real interest in hand-painted post cards,” says Keith. “There was a whole industry at the turn of the last century in which photos were taken on the Island, the post cards were printed, sent to Germany and hand-painted, and printed again. They were returned to the Island, sold to tourists, and then mailed away again. You had this amazing commercial circle going on – German technicians painting post cards of Vineyard landscapes that they would never see in their lives, and then having their work sent all over the country.”
For Keith, the deeper, lovelier irony is that these cards were bought by visitors who thought they were seeing the Vineyard through the eyes of genuine Island artists. You can study an original photograph and see how it was cropped and retouched to help make the image even more insular and idyllic. “But if I can move away from the history for a moment,” he says, “it’s just a joy to look at these.”
