The original people of Martha’s Vineyard included the Native American Wampanoags, immigrants from England and the Cape Verde islands, people of color, farmers and fishermen, blacksmiths and merchants. Learn their stories and you will come to know the Island.

The earth here tells the story erased elsewhere in New England. The Aquinnah cliffs lay bare to geologists the history of the past hundred million years. Traveling the South Road to Aquinnah, one goes over low hills and valleys cut by streams that ran off melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. The first humans probably came here before the Vineyard was an island. It is thought that they arrived after the ice was gone, but before the melting glaciers in the north raised the sea level enough to separate Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from the mainland. Native American camps that carbon-date to 2270 B.C. have been uncovered on the Island. The Wampanoag people have lived for thousands of years on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

“Wampanoag” means “People of the First Light.” Before Bartholomew Gosnold renamed the island Martha’s Vineyard in 1602, it was called Noepe by the Wampanoag, meaning “land amid the waters.” Many Wampanoag still live on aboriginal lands on the southwestern end of the Island, a 3,400-acre peninsula called Aquinnah. At present, there are over 900 members listed on the Tribal rolls. Of these, approximately 300 reside on Martha’s Vineyard.