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 panels inside the restored brick pumping station tell the story. 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 incorporated in 1886, bought thirty acres around Tashmoo Spring, and in 1887 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 interpretive panel inside the old pumping station also tells who was behind it. 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. Castello was the company's president and Stanley its treasurer, the island-born lawyer William Barry Owen one of its incorporators, 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, people kept playing: 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 away.

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

Tashmoo used to freeze. Before a 1932 storm cut through the sandbar at its mouth and let the Sound in, 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 storms and the open channel turned Tashmoo into the saltwater estuary it is now, and that chapter closed for good. If you visit in winter, any ice you see is best admired from the shore: a salt pond with a tidal channel never freezes solid enough to trust.

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 locals swim. Since July 17, 2026 the town lot at the end of the road has been closed to cars to protect nesting birds; walkers and cyclists are still welcome. For the rest of the harbor town's story, our Vineyard Haven town guide picks it up from here.

Filmed May 2026

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tashmoo Spring Building?

It is the brick steam pumping station the Vineyard Haven Water Company raised in 1887 on the bank of Lake Tashmoo for about $48,300 to push spring water up to the port town. It pumped into the 1970s, was briefly a bottling plant, joined the National Register in 2008 and was fully restored by 2012.

Can I go inside?

It sits in a town park off State Road and is rented for weddings and community events; the interpretive panels inside tell the pond’s louder history.

Was there really golf at Tashmoo?

Yes. The Tashmoo Golf Links were laid out at the head of the pond and spread into the cow pastures, and the panels inside the Spring Building also cover the baseball field and the ice-boat races.

Is the water still used?

Not from the old spring station, which retired in the 1970s. Tisbury Water Works still pumps town water from the Tashmoo Well on West Spring Street, drawn from the island's underground aquifer rather than from the pond itself. The lake today is moored sailboats, gulls and a small town beach where the channel meets Vineyard Sound.

Where is the pond guide?

Our ponds guide covers Tashmoo as an ecosystem along with the island’s other ponds, and the town beach page covers the swimming.