Back to Oak Bluffs
We know the neighborhood of decorative wooden cottages and narrow winding streets in Oak Bluffs as the Camp Ground for good reason. The community--indeed, the town of Oak Bluffs itself--got its start as a Methodist camp meeting. Church folk first came to that spot in August of 1835 to preach, pray, reflect and repent amid a grove of towering oaks.
The early campers lodged in large canvas tents erected for the use of church societies. Men, women and children slept on straw (a curtain divided the sexes) and ate outdoors under canvas awnings. The society tents stood in a semi-circle before a rude wooden preaching platform.
That first year there were nine tents. By 1842 there were 40, and by 1851 there were 100 tents running in a circle right around the meeting's assembly place.
By now Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting was well established, even famous. Families who returned year after year began to pitch small tents in irregular ranks behind the large society tents. Behind the family tents could be found the tents of barbers, bootblacks, launderers and other entrepreneurs who came to serve the growing population of the meetings. A canvas community blossomed on the oak wood every August.
Gradually, the families who leased tent lots from the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association began to build wooden floors and tent frames over which canvas could be stretched every summer. From these structures grew the colorful, exuberant cottages that make the town of Oak Bluffs, once known as the Cottage City of America, unique.
To step into the Camp Ground is to step back in time. Cottage owners have preserved the unique area of the Meeting Ground beautifully throughout the years and by doing so have also preserved a state of mind. The people who have chosen the Camp Ground as their summer retreat or for year-round living have done so to bask in the tranquillity and charm of the past while at the same time enjoying all the conveniences of a modern age.
