Menemsha

Larsen's Fish Market · the counter

No tables and no waiters: you order at the counter, carry it out to the jetty and eat by the water.

Plate 01

Part of the town of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard, Menemsha is a small, historic fishing village on the edge of Menemsha Pond and Vineyard Sound. It has a working harbor, seafood sold on the dock and a sunset that draws people from all over the island, and it is the stop many people remember from an up-Island drive.

This guide was written and photographed by MV Vacation, from years of filming and walking around the village.

We respectfully acknowledge the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) as the original stewards of this land.

Finding Menemsha

Where to eat in Menemsha

Eating in Menemsha is simple and seasonal: takeout seafood from the docks, including lobsters, chowder, bisque, scallops, and sashimi from Larsen's Fish Market and Menemsha Fish Market.

Menemsha Galley is a long-running, family-owned counter-service spot known for lobster rolls, chowder, swordfish sandwiches, burgers, fries, vegetarian options, and soft-serve ice cream.

The seasonal Home Port Restaurant and Oyster Bar is a classic New England seafood dinner spot, with a dining room and takeout. A newer Iggy's Bread outpost in the former Bite shack adds pastries, coffee, and baked goods when open for the season.

Menemsha Hills · golden hour Plate 03

Golden hour on the rocky north shore: boulders on the sand and the sun low over the water.

A

B

C

The working village · three studies Plate 04

A: the draggers Richard and Arnold and Four Kids rafted at the dock; B: a shed door that has been repainted more than once; C: the fish-market window, hand-lettered as always.

The harbor that was rebuilt twice

Menemsha looks like it has always been here, but the harbor is younger than most of the houses around it, and much of the waterfront you walk along has been put back at least once. Around 1900 this was Creekville, a few buildings beside a shallow creek that wandered from Vineyard Sound into Menemsha Pond over shifting sand, too unreliable to moor a fleet. The lobstermen worked from Lobsterville, on the far shore of the pond. Starting in 1903 the state dredged a deep channel, built the stone jetties that hold it in place, and pumped the spoil ashore into the sand spit the fish shacks stand on today. By 1906 the work was done and the village took the name of the pond, a Wampanoag word usually translated as still water.

The Great New England Hurricane of September 21, 1938 took almost all of it back in an afternoon: three surge waves crossed the creek and carried off the boathouses, the fish market and the piers. Fishermen raised close to 13,000 dollars among themselves, state and federal money followed, and the basin was rebuilt with the bulkhead that still lines it. A Vineyard-born Washington columnist, Rodney Dutcher, started a fund for a proper dock for visiting boats, and after his death his wife saw it through. The town dedicated it in his name on August 22, 1941, with the governor in attendance. That is the Dutcher Dock the fish markets sit on.

Thirteen summers later, on Tuesday, August 31, 1954, Hurricane Carol arrived in the last week of summer, just before Labor Day weekend. Early radio bulletins said the storm would pass out to sea. By mid-morning Vineyard Sound was coming through the jetties as one rising wall of water, and by early afternoon the harbor as people knew it was gone: fishing boats and yachts lay smashed on Dutcher Dock, small boathouses floated loose in the middle of the basin, and the parking lot was buried under sand. Everett Poole, who had opened his fish market on the harbor as a teenager in 1944, lost the building. He rebuilt, ran Poole's Fish until the Larsen family bought it in 2005 and served as Chilmark's town moderator for 45 years, until 2021. Thomas Hart Benton, who summered up the road in Chilmark, came down to paint the wreckage.

Eleven days later, on September 11, Hurricane Edna tracked even more directly over the island. The airport anemometer recorded a 120 mph gust, still the strongest wind measured on the Vineyard in modern times, and the eye passed overhead in an eerie yellow calm around 2:30 in the afternoon. Edna did less harm at Menemsha only because Carol had left so little to break and because the worst of it came at what should have been low tide. Islanders still date things as before or after 1954.

The most recent rebuild is the Coast Guard boathouse at the water's edge. The old wooden one, in service since the 1940s, burned to the waterline on the afternoon of July 12, 2010, along with its pier, several private boats and the wooden causeway, and the fire came within a few yards of the village. The replacement opened in April 2015 with a ramp that hauls the station's 25-foot response boat straight inside. The station itself sits on the bluff above the harbor you see in Jaws.

Menemsha on film

From Our Lens A working harbor, from dock to dusk. 57 photographs · View the Menemsha gallery

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More photos: our Menemsha gallery.

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