HISTORIC PHOTO: Longtime followers of this page will know of our reverence for Manuel Swartz Roberts, who built boats in the building with the offset, third-story tower, which stands right across the street from the Edgartown ferry landing. Since 1954, it’s been the home of the Marthas Vineyard Art Association and Old Sculpin Gallery, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary there this summer. Unknown until the gallery found it in an archive this summer, this photo is the earliest we have of Manuel, who designed and built scores of catboats, fishing boats, recreational sailboats and motorboats during a career that began around 1901 and carried on until his retirement in 1953. Among the boats he built, rebuilt or redesigned were seven vessels that served as Chappaquiddick ferries or launches to the Edgartown bathing beach on Chappy Point, now the Chappaquiddick Beach Club. So the legacy of the ferry is tied up tightly with Manuel’s. But as those with even a passing interest in town history know, his importance to the waterfront and Edgartown as a whole was indispensable. His boatbuilding shop was one of several places in town where villagers stopped by every day to visit, catch up on news, tell stories, and watch the craftsmen of the town at work, be they boatbuilders, blacksmiths, or riggers. At these gathering places, the character of a village lived on, bridging the time of whaling in the nineteenth century to the time of resorthood in the twentieth. To Joseph Chase Allen, the waterfront columnist of The Vineyard Gazette for six decades, Manuel was “the Old Sculpin,” a nickname he earned because, like the fish of the same name, Manuel had a large and rather bony head. It is hard to find a column of Allen’s that does not take note of -– sometimes with exaggeration, humor or pure fancy -– the work Manuel was doing that week. Which, given the enormous span of time over which Allen wrote, signifies just how long and hard and creatively Manuel toiled. To this page, and to others who love the many legacies of the Edgartown harborfront, it is joyful news that this photograph of Manuel Swartz (or just Manuel as most people knew him) exists. It gives us an image from the earliest years of the twentieth century of a man in his prime who was already giving the village and the waters around it everything he had by way of talent, skill and effort. It is delightful to see, from this photograph, that he loved his work. Given what he accomplished, how could it have been otherwise?
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 23:56:34 +0000
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