History of the Edgartown Yacht Club
HISTORY OF EDGARTOWN YACHT CLUB
The Edgartown Yacht Club perpetuates the maritime traditions of Martha’s Vineyard and Edgartown and encourages friendly competition on the waters around the Island and ashore – the mission of the Club since it was founded in 1905.
Those first few years of the twentieth century were a time of great change in the town of Edgartown. The whaling era, which had come to a sudden end after the Civil War, still animated the memories of the oldest inhabitants, and family vacationing through the summer season, as we know it now, lay some years off.
Among the many daily gathering places in the town of those years stood the Home Club, a society of year-round inhabitants and a few summer visitors who liked to sail, and occasionally race, in the catboats owned by fishermen and those who freighted goods to and from the waterfront. The Home Club headquarters – formerly the home of Alexander Fisher, a retired whaling master – still stands at seven South Water Street.
As the desire to race grew more keen, and as it became clear that the Home Club was not the sort of organization to introduce the sport in a modern way, a few members met on January 5, 1905, to organize the Edgartown Yacht Club. The first commodore was Edward H. Raymond, and the first clubhouse and pier lay on rented property where the Harborside Inn stands today.
The Club purchased several classes of one-design sailboats, meaning those that could race head to head without having to handicap by size or design or rig. By 1914 the fleets included a class of fourteen-foot open catboats as well as gaff-rigged, fifteen-foot centerboard Herreshoff sloops and a mixed class of eighteen-foot cabin knockabouts. The social life of the Club – so creative and active today – began in these earliest years with clambakes and old-fashioned ice cream socials.
In 1917 the Club built a floating clubhouse and moored it at North Wharf, today the location of Edgartown Marine. This clubhouse remained the home of the organization until damage from a storm forced its abandonment in 1921. In 1924 the Club returned to the site of the Harborside Inn, renting a small house with a waterfront porch. But the membership was growing, racing was becoming ever more important, and it was clear that the Club needed a spacious, permanent home on the Edgartown harborfront.
In August 1926, Commodore Elmer Jared Bliss – a corporation president, grandson of Jared Fisher (an Edgartown whaling master) and a figure in national yachting circles – purchased Osborn’s Wharf at the foot of Main Street. This was once the main whaling wharf of the town, and from it sailed the most famous whaling ships of the village, among them the OCMULGEE and SPLENDID. Commodore Bliss commissioned architect Albert Chapman Fernald of Fuller Street to draw plans for a clubhouse on the wharf, which was also rebuilt. The contract was awarded to Frank L. Norton and Son; the Club began to enjoy it as a home in 1927, and in 1929 a number of Club members organized the Edgartown Associates, which bought Osborn’s Wharf and the new Club building from Mr. Bliss. The Club itself now owns the wharf and building.
In 1930 the associates also purchased the holdings of the former Chappaquiddick Improvement Company, which had built tennis courts and a clubhouse on Pease’s Point Way. Thus began the Edgartown Tennis Center, a forward-looking move that today offers members as lively and competitive a recreational life on land as the Yacht Club does on the water.
In the 1920s, families began to rent homes and spend the whole summer in Edgartown, and in 1923 the Club organized the Edgartown Junior Yacht Club, among the first of its kind, to enable young summer residents to learn sailing, seamanship, racing rules and tactics. Commodore Alexander M. Orr, chairman of the race committee from 1925 until 1969, encouraged youngsters to race on the beautiful, expansive, mostly sheltered waters of Katama Bay and outer Edgartown Harbor; boys and girls took to the sport avidly and have benefited from exceptional instruction ever since.
The sailing and racing program began with imported fleets before moving into purpose-built boats and then to classes that are nationally and internationally recognized. Many of these fleets grew quickly and earned places in the hearts of those who sailed and raced them.
In 1921, for instance, the Club introduced a class of six Cape Cod Dories, seventeen feet long, sloop-rigged and lapstrake-built. Just two years later, there were fifteen boats and the fleet kept growing through the 1920s. The Club adopted a class of fifteen-foot, gaff-rigged Sneakboxes from Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, and held regular races for handicapped classes of larger sloops, including three Wianno Seniors and two Herreshoff Fifteens.
In 1927 the Club launched the first one-design class designed specifically for town waters: the Edgartown Fifteen, designed by Burgess, Swasey and Paine, measuring twenty-two-and-a-half feet on deck. Built by Nantucket Boatyard, the Edgartown Fifteens were fitted with a half keel and half centerboard and jib-headed Marconi rig.
The number and variety of the fleets multiplied: For adults, there were the pretty, long-lined Vineyard Sound Interclubs, twenty eight-feet overall, designed by Commodore Francis T. Meyer; the Katama class, twenty-five feet overall; and the Rovers, measuring seventeen feet overall. Racers in these fleets often moved up from the Beachboat class, also designed by Commodore Meyer and built by Manuel Swartz Roberts, the master boatbuilder of Edgartown whose shop is now the Old Sculpin Gallery on Dock Street.
Among the early successful graduates from the racing program was Virginia Weston Besse, winner of the Prosser Cup seven times and the Adams Cup once. In recent years, Club sailors have won the Nash, Small, Jones and Gill trophies, among other championships in the Southern Massachusetts Sailing Association. They have also raced in the America’s Cup trials, and two have competed in the Olympics, with Glen S. Foster winning a bronze medal in the 1972 games in Kiel and Kristina Farrar (Stookey) coming in fourth in the 1996 games in Savannah.
Through events sponsored by the Club in its early years, sailors and racers from harbors and clubs up and down the New England coastline began to discover the pleasures of sailing and racing on the outer harbor, Nantucket Sound and beyond. The Edgartown Regatta, first held in 1924, soon evolved into an annual competition, attracting hundreds of captains and crews of cruising and one-design classes. In turn, the yacht club has sent its sailors to distant clubs and championship events, including the national finals for the Sears Cup, sponsored by the North American Yacht Racing Union.
The middle years of the twentieth century were another time of transition for the town and the Club. Members served in the Navy, Army, Marines, Coast Guard and elsewhere during World War II. The wharf and clubhouse weathered the floods and mighty gales of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and even more destructive Hurricane of 1944, when the china service was smashed, the piano ended up on the Coal Wharf – now the home of the Seafood Shanty – and the race committee boat, DEFIANCE, was badly damaged.
After the war, the Club found new fleets to race, among them the thirteen-and-a-half-foot Wood Pussies, SMYRAs (later known as the Rhodes 19s, designed by Philip L. Rhodes), International 110s and in 1967 the thirty-foot Shields Class sloop, sponsored and designed by Cornelius Shields and Sparkman and Stephens, Inc. The twenty-seven-foot Soling class raced from 1968 to 1972. In 1973 the high-performance, thirteen-foot-ten-inch Laser was introduced. In 1974 the twelve-foot Widgeons appeared and in 1975 the Doughdish, a faithful replica of the Herreshoff 12½ class. Today young sailors race the Club 420, introduced in 1983, and beginners inaugurate their racing careers in the snub-nosed International Optimist Dinghies.
In the same spirit, the Edgartown Tennis Center holds senior and junior events each summer, including yearly tournaments with clubs at East Chop, West Chop and Vineyard Haven. Adults have competed in the Spectator Bowl against the Nantucket Yacht Club since 1950, and junior players now compete too. There are seasonal tournaments to crown champions among juniors, men, women, singles, seniors, doubles and mixed doubles. The instruction and clinics run each summer by the Tennis Center staff remain unrivaled on the Island.
From the start, the Edgartown Yacht Club has emphasized camaraderie on the water and ashore. To that end, volunteer committees working with a devoted staff have established a first-rate dining room and bar where members meet and enjoy their time together. Programs such as Lunch with a View bring in speakers who discuss subjects from town history to world events. Dances, programs for children and cruises to nearby harbors fill the summer with lively enterprises. The life of the Club carries on past Labor Day and decommissioning with gams, holiday brunches, potlucks and winter meetings with members of other Vineyard clubs.
In 2005, the Edgartown Yacht Club celebrated its centennial with a summer-long calendar of events that looked back on how things were when the Club was new and where it was heading as its second century began. It could take pride in a living record of service not only to its membership but also to town and Island causes, among them the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Sailing Team, Community Services, Ice Arena and Boys’ and Girls’ Club. At the same time, it rededicated itself to ensuring that the Club would endure and thrive as the twenty-first century began:
In 1992, thanks to the foresight of Commodore S. Bailey Norton Jr., the Club purchased the land, building and docks at 11-19 Dock Street, which allowed the sailing program and Junior Yacht Club to move into larger waterfront quarters with piers; the new facility was commissioned on July 6, 1996. Ten years later, under the guidance of Commodore Owen Smith, the organization made another critical move on behalf of its youngest members:
To save time for instruction, improve safety, reduce traffic at the busy harbor entrance and add a deep-water pier at a centralized boating facility, the Club purchased a former private home and beach on the north side of Chappaquiddick Point. In 2008, this facility became the new Sailing Center, which also offers additional office space and housing for staff members. In 2014, the club will also open a new Fitness Center on the site of the Tennis Center, and it is planning to raise and rebuild the historic Osborn’s Wharf for a century in which the seas will continue to rise and northeasters and tropical storms may increase in frequency and severity.
With all this, the purpose of the club carries on in dynamic ways: In the summer of 2014, thanks to the efforts of members James Swartz and David Murphy, a new fleet of J-70s joins the Shields, Rhodes and Herreshoff 12½ classes to help keep the Corinthian spirit of one-design racing alive and evolving on the waters of Edgartown Harbor. In this, and in every effort undertaken on land and water, the membership of the Edgartown Yacht Club enlivens the nautical legacies of the past for the town, the Vineyard and for itself – but most especially for the generations that will follow ours.