Martha’s Vineyard residential designer Nick Waldman distills traditional design rooted in agrarian history and serves it up with 21st Century sensibility.

The roots of farming in West Tisbury run thousands of years deep in the history of Noepe, the island that explorer/colonizer Bartholomew Gosnold dubbed Martha’s Vineyard. According to the official website of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah, wampanoagtribe-nsn.gov, “The ancestors of Wampanoag people have lived for at least 10,000 years at Aquinnah (Gay Head) and throughout the island of Noepe, pursuing a traditional economy based on fishing and agriculture.” English settlers learned the ways of the land from the island’s first inhabitants, but they also brought complications, conflict, and their own methods. They erected their first permanent community in Edgartown in 1642 and incorporated in 1671. West Tisbury was the Vineyard’s second settlement, built to help feed the first community in Edgartown. In People to Remember, local author Dionis Coffin Riggs states, “When the early settlers of Edgartown wanted to grind corn they built windmills, or looked around for water power to do some of their work. They soon found the up-island streams and built mills there. Where the brooks could be harnessed, Takemmy was born. It means, in the Algonquian tongue, where one goes to grind corn.” 

Takemmy later came be known as West Tisbury (after the hometown of Governor Thomas Mayhew), and although it was the second English settlement on Martha’s Vineyard, it was also the last town to officially incorporate—on April 28, 1892— but has remained the island’s center of agriculture from the start. Since 1859, it has also been home to the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, which has been putting on fairs and livestock shows since its...