MARTHA'S VINEYAED AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Delegated by the Board of Agriculture to attend the 

 Annual Cattle Show and Fair of the Martha's Vineyard 

 Agiicultural Society, on the second and third days of October 

 last, I landed at Cottage City on the afternoon of Monday, 

 the first, and was at once driven over to West Tisbury, in 

 the centre of the island, where the society has a building and 

 grounds for their exhibition. 



The island of Martha's Vineyard, or "Martin's" Vine- 

 yard, as formerly called, — the Indian name of which was 

 Capawack, — lies five or six miles south of the mainland, is of 

 irregular shape, about twenty-one miles long from east to 

 west, and from five to ten wide. It has now five towns, — 

 Edgartown, Cottage City (set off from Edgartown in 1880), 

 Tisbury, Chilmark, and Gay Head (formerly part of Chil- 

 mark) . The eastern shore is generally a bluff, some thirty to 

 fifty feet above the ocean, thence to West Tisbury is a nearly 

 level plain, thirty or forty feet above the sea. The land then 

 rises with a broken character to the west and north, in two 

 ridges of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty feet 

 in height for miles, the highest point being three hundred 

 feet. 



Among these hills and between the rido-es there is excel- 

 lent pasture, with valleys of good mowing and tillage land. 

 There are several large brooks which, with their tributaries 

 rising among the hills, furnish water for stock, and in some 

 cases power for small mills. 



About twenty-five years ago Dr. Daniel Fisher of Edgar- 

 town, a man of great enterprise and business capacity, who 

 had acquired a large fortune in the oil business, believing 

 that wheat could be grown and good flour made upon the 

 island, bought some six hundred acres of land lying on one 

 of the largest of these brooks, and built on the line of the 

 brook five heavy, expensive stone dams, making as many 



