Golf Links, Ice Boats and the Old Waterworks: Lake Tashmoo's Hidden History

Spend an afternoon at Lake Tashmoo today and it is all quiet: moored sailboats, herring gulls, a small town beach where the channel meets Vineyard Sound. It takes some squinting to imagine golfers dodging livestock on the eastern shore, a baseball crowd cheering behind the waterworks, or eleven ice boats racing each other across a frozen pond. All of it happened, and the story is told on the historical panels inside the restored brick pumping station that started it all. For the pond as an ecosystem, and the island's other ponds, see our ponds guide.

The Spring That Watered a Town

The Vineyard Haven Water Company was organized in 1887, bought thirty acres around Tashmoo Spring, and that same year raised a steam-powered brick pumping station on the banks of the lake at a cost of about $48,300. For nearly a century that little building pushed spring water up to the growing port town. It kept pumping into the 1970s, spent a short spell as a bottling plant for Tashmoo Spring Water, earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, and was fully restored by 2012. Today the Tashmoo Spring Building sits in a town park off State Road, rented out for weddings and community events, with exhibit panels inside that read like a scrapbook of the pond's louder days.

The people behind it are an island story in themselves, told on the interpretive panel inside the old pumping station. The two resident officers were Harry Castello, a plumber who had made his money building a water system in a Colorado mining town, and Orson G. Stanley, the lawyer who had been his partner there. The push came after the Great Fire of 1883 burned out downtown Vineyard Haven, which had neither running water nor a fire department. The money came from Boston: a group of Harvard men, William Minot Jr., Francis Peabody Jr., General Stephen M. Weld and Charles Cabot Jackson among them, who in July 1887 had bought the wild headland of West Chop on a duck-hunting trip and wanted a modern summer colony with water in the pipes. Minot was the company's treasurer, the island-born lawyer William Barry Owen its clerk, and the works were formally opened with a public demonstration on December 15, 1887, the Vineyard Gazette reporting the Lieutenant Governor in attendance. Weld had been captured twice in the Civil War and later ran the Massachusetts Horticultural Society; Peabody lost the 1894 race for mayor of Boston. Between them, the West Chop syndicate ran the water company as a private concern for nearly twenty years before the town took it over.

A Golf Course Where a Bull Was a Hazard

The Tashmoo Golf Links were first laid out in 1898 at the head of the pond and quickly spread into the neighboring cow pastures, which were not cleared for the occasion. The Vineyard Gazette's Henry Beetle Hough once noted that "an old bull was one of the hazards." The course began with nine holes, three of them across the road in Snake Hollow, and by the 1930s had shrunk to six, run by a former poultryman named Jim Hughes, who strung a chicken-wire fence along the north edge to keep balls from rolling into the pond. The clubhouse was a plywood shack with a ten-cent soda machine. Local kids caddied for the summer visitors staying at West Chop. One of them, Howard Andrews, remembered the six crammed holes as "an accident waiting to happen," and claimed a woman was once knocked out cold by a ball on one of the blind fairways. Still, and in 1932 a Gazette correspondent spotted Capt. Norman Benson, a trap fisherman from Lambert's Cove, out on the course, handling his club "like an oar." The course stayed a local landmark into the 1940s, then faded back into the landscape.

Baseball at Tashmoo Park

Across West Spring Street, on the far edge of the water company's land, sat the old Tashmoo Park baseball field, where a Tisbury Water Works substation stands today. It hosted school picnics and pick-up games for decades, and by the late 1920s it was the home field of a local amateur team with a name worth reviving: the Vineyard Haven Bears.

The Winters the Lake Froze

Here is the detail that surprises almost everyone: Tashmoo used to freeze. Before the 1938 hurricane, and the dredging afterward that opened the wide, permanent channel into Vineyard Sound, the pond held mostly fresh water, and in a hard winter the ice grew more than six inches thick. Islanders skated on it, and they raced ice boats. As early as 1898 the Boston Globe wrote that there was "probably no place this side of the Hudson" with as much interest in ice yachting as Martha's Vineyard. That winter eleven boats raced each other on Tashmoo, carrying names like Dude, Blue Bird, Game Cock, Skip Jack and Diabo, the boat considered the fastest of the fleet that year; a collision the year before had ended with a broken leg for Dude's owner. A second generation took over in the 1920s and 30s, racing boats like the Miss Flapper, and Vineyard Haven resident Walter Renear remembered the two biggest, Capt. Hartson Bodfish's and Dr. Orland Mayhew's, well: "big boats with large cockpits capable of holding six to eight people. I was a passenger many times in both."

The hurricane and the new channel turned Tashmoo into the saltwater estuary it is now, and that chapter closed for good. If you visit in winter, treat any ice that forms as an invitation to keep walking: a salt pond with a tidal channel never freezes trustworthy, and today venturing onto it is genuinely dangerous.

Seeing It for Yourself

The Tashmoo Overlook on State Road, just outside Vineyard Haven on the way up-island, gives the classic view down the meadow to the lake and the Sound beyond. The Spring Building park below is open to wander, and the building itself opens for town events. And the pond's quiet little beach at the end of Herring Creek Road still makes one of the island's most low-key swim stops; our Lake Tashmoo Town Beach guide covers the sandy road in and where the locals actually swim. For the rest of the harbor town's story, our Vineyard Haven town guide picks it up from here.

Filmed May 2026