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Island Back Roads

This past week we explored some of the back roads on Martha’s Vineyard and found some interesting sites and stories along the way. Our first back road was North Road, a perfectly nice alternate route from West Tisbury to Menemsha. It’s a road that rambles through some beautiful scenery. I also noticed there are a lot of mailboxes that say Flanders along it, as well as a big old place called the Captain Flanders House, with what looks like an old windmill that doesn’t have blades any more. I think the whole place is a bed and breakfast now.

Mike’s cousin Bill had told us that there was a house on North Road where the actor James Cagney used to live. He also mentioned that Cagney had bought the mineral rights to a number of acres around him in Chilmark. There had once been a brickyard there (one of the side roads is still called Brickyard Road, in fact), and Cagney had thought the brick industry might start up again; the mineral rights included the clay in the ground. Menemsha and Aquinnah both have clay cliffs, now preserved, but for many decades the clay was just a natural resource and the clay bricks made in the area were exported to the mainland—there are very few brick buildings on Martha’s Vineyard. But you can still see the clay in the cliffs and even along the beach at Aquinnah.

Above, a clay deposit beneath the cliffs at Aquinnah,
and below, the Gay Head (Aquinnah) clay cliffs 

So having the mineral rights to clay didn’t really work out for Cagney, but he did live on the Vineyard for many years and had friends there, including the artist Thomas Hart Benton. Apparently Benton’s daughter and her husband started a commune in the 1970s that used Cagney’s house, a farmhouse built in 1728, as its residence. We saw the road that leads back to the house, but it was marked No Trespassing so we didn’t explore there.

But we did drive down Tea Lane, where several greats grandparents of the Flanders family lived. Tea Lane got its name from the fact that the residents boldly drank contraband tea, on which no taxes had been paid, before the American Revolution. Rebel tea bootleggers!

Tea Lane took us to Middle Road, which not surprisingly lies between North Road and South Road. We stopped at Mermaid Farm on Middle Road, where Mike’s cousin Alan has a popular farm stand. The farm is also a dairy; we didn’t try the dairy products but did get some delicious late season tomatoes.

Mermaid Farm Stand (Photo: Mermaid Farm)

Not exactly a back road, off South Road in Chilmark we visited Abel’s Hill Cemetery to see if we could find the graves of Samuel and Lillian Flanders, Mike’s great grandparents. We did find them without any trouble, as they are just up from the small parking area in the graveyard. But most people who visit Abel’s Hill Cemetery don’t have relatives buried there; they are usually looking for a famous gravesite that was moved to near the entrance so fans didn’t trample through the cemetery:

We went to Menemsha on a windy Indigenous People’s Day and had a cup of chowder from Larsen’s Seafood Market while we were there, to sustain us for some more back roads travel. I am happy report that I managed to navigate Dutcher’s Dock without tripping as I did the last time we were down that way. We saw a red boat shack down in the harbor that Mike thinks might have belonged to his great-grandfather, and we definitely picked out Sam and Lillian Flanders’ house up on the hill in Menemsha.

On the jetty at Menemsha Bight

Then it was on to Indian Hill Road, back in West Tisbury, to see the Christiantown memorial to the “Praying Indians,” which seemed like a fitting thing to do that day. Back in 1659, Sachem Josias, a native leader on the Island, set aside land in Takemmy, the former name of Tisbury, for a few Wampanoag tribe members who had converted to Christianity. There were only four of them at the time, but they intended to establish a village there. What’s left is a small cemetery with plain stones marking the graves (there are a lot more than four stones, so I suppose they garnered a few more converts), and a miniscule chapel that was built in 1828.

On the way home, we went down Old Stage Road to make sure we knew where the dump was so we were ready on Tuesday, the day the dump is open, to take our trash and recycling there. The dump was right where it was supposed to be, and happily the little building where people can drop off “good stuff” and other people can find what they need is operating again. It was one of my father’s favorite places on the Vineyard. They had a set of very nice bentwood chairs painted blue that definitely intrigued me, but I resisted.

Finally, we took Scotchman’s Lane from State Road across to Old County Road and back down to New Lane, after our travels along the back roads of the Island. There are many more back roads, some we’ve explored, some near the cottage that I’ve walked down, like Dan’l’s Way and Road to Great Neck, so maybe there will be a few more back road adventures in another installment.


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