Trust for Architectural Easements Tours the Wesleyan Grove Historic District in Martha’s Vineyard

Sept. 19, 2011 - PRLog -- It’s been called a fairyland. There are more than 300 tiny clustered cottages, painted in a rainbow of pink and purple and pastel blue and green, and decorated with curlicue trim that drips off the roofs like icing on a cake. But this isn’t Wonderland at the end of a rabbit-hole. It’s the Wesleyan Grove National Register Historic District, located in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Wesleyan Grove started out in 1835 as a Methodist revival camp named after John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church. The location was chosen for its undeveloped, primeval beauty – an oak tree grove, quiet lake, ocean breezes, and island location made for an ideal spiritual retreat.

The first revival meeting lasted a week. Participants gathered in the grove for open-air sermons given by celebrated preachers, and retired to dormitory-style canvas tents at night. The revival was so successful that the preachers and participants returned the following August, and every August after that for nearly a century, their numbers continuously growing.

Each year, the participants came a little earlier and stayed a little later, so that before long, the camp lasted all summer, even though the revival portion lasted only one or two weeks. Over the next several decades, the Martha’s Vineyard Campmeeting Association purchased more than two dozen acres of land in and around the oak grove.

Nine tents provided shelter for the first campers in 1835, but as the campers grew in number, families chose to pitch tents of their own – 100 tents in 1851, and 320 by 1858. In neat, concentric circles, the tents ringed the central preaching ground, where over 20,000 congregants gathered on a summer Sunday in 1858 to listen to a sermon.
By 1859, families began to erect wooden cottages instead of tents. Like the tents, the cottages were narrow – between 11 and 16 feet in width, with wide, double-door entrances and tall roofs with steep gables pitched at 90 degrees. They were one and a half stories in height, and generally twice as tall as they were wide. The wooden platforms over which the tents had been erected morphed into the wide front porches of the cottages.

Cottage windows and doors were arched, with either round-headed or pointed lancet arches. Of course, the use of such Romanesque and Gothic Revival style features was well-suited to the spiritual nature of the camp, as many of the campers’ home churches had been constructed in these styles. Yet, Romanesque and Gothic elements were so overlaid with whimsical architectural flourishes – and painted in so many different pastel colors – that the cottages became something else altogether – Victorian flights of fancy born from the holiday atmosphere of a summer retreat.

“Gingerbread” was added to every edge and eave. This ornate wooden trim – usually painted white like frosting, but sometimes colored to contrast with a cottage’s exterior walls – was a new product in the 1860s, its mass-production made possible by industrialized band-saws and jig-saws. Bought in bulk and by the yard, gingerbread trim was a quick and inexpensive way to dress up a house – and for a summer seaside cottage, the more gingerbread the better.

Other little touches were added as well: dainty second-floor balconies with ornate balustrades, delicately carved gable verge boards, and carved brackets, railings and zig-zag window trim. The only limit was the imagination of the builder – coupled, of course, with the budget of the owner.

But a Martha’s Vineyard Campground Cottage was not expensive. It couldn’t be – the campers were mostly middle-class folks who had worked hard to save up for a few weeks’ worth of summer seaside vacation. They rented cottage lots from the Association, and placed their orders for cottages with local carpenters.

Thanks to mass-production, all of the lumber required to build a cottage could be purchased in pre-sawn parts, just like the gingerbread. Carpenters could erect a cottage in just a few days using the new balloon-framing method, whereby tall studs and horizontal sheathing (usually wide boards of various widths) were nailed together to create a rigid skin around the volume of a cottage’s interior. Because the cottages were used only in the summertime, insulation was not needed, and as they were so tiny, neither was cross-bracing. Windows and doors were cut into the walls, the cut-outs saved to board up the cottages for the winter.

On the ground floor, a typical cottage had both front and back parlors –Victorian mores dictated the separation of formal and informal spaces – but the parlors were tiny, and often separated by a curtain. A little bedroom was sometimes included on the ground floor, and one or two (or sometimes three) bedrooms were located under the eaves at the second floor. A narrow winding staircase connected the two levels. Kitchens and dining rooms were not necessary, as meals were taken communally in the camp.

This cottage form was widely copied at other camp meeting sites across the country in the late 1800s. The architectural style – now known as Carpenter Gothic - became associated with communal summer retreats in rustic settings, and was one of the most original architectural styles ever to develop in the United States.

Today, Wesleyan Grove is no longer a revivalist camp. Sunday services are still held in the summer, but the Grove has been non-denominational since the 1930s. The cottages are privately owned, often by the descendents of the original owners. Most have been modernized with kitchenettes, plumbing, bathrooms and insulation, and many are available for summer rental.

Visitors are invited to stroll amongst the cottages and relax under the oak trees. The centerpiece of the Grove is the vast cast-iron, open-air Tabernacle, one of the largest such structures in the country, and a National Historic Landmark. The Tabernacle replaced the makeshift preachers’ pulpit in 1879, but still contains some of the 19th-century benches, and seats over 2,000 people. Near the Tabernacle is the little Trinity Methodist Church, c. 1878, another charming example of the rustic Carpenter Gothic style.

Every summer, on a Wednesday evening in August, the annual Grand Illumination takes place in the Grove. Thousands of Japanese lanterns are hung from cottage eaves, balconies, porches and gables according to a tradition dating back to a visit by the governor of Massachusetts to the Grove in 1869. The effect is ethereal – the Grove is more fairyland-like than ever.

For more information on Wesleyan Grove, please visit the Martha’s Vineyard Campmeeting Association website, at http://www.mvcma.org/, particularly its history section, complete with historic photographs and a chronology. A recent article about visiting Martha’s Vineyard can be found on the New York Times website, at http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/travel/26hours.html.

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The Trust for Architectural Easements is one of the nation’s largest non-profit organizations dedicated to voluntary preservation through easement donations. The Trust protects more than 800 historic buildings across the United States.