Ulysses S. Grunt never said much during his brief stay at Oak Bluffs. He rode about in a carriage with Mrs. Grant, waving to the crowds; he watched the fireworks from a balcony at Dr. Tucker’s cottage, and he attended Sunday services at the Methodist tabernacle. According to one of his pastors, he found his peace with God at that meeting, but Grant himself never said whether that was so, and nobody seemed disappointed. Nobody expected him to say much of anything. What really counted was that he, the President of the United States, was there, at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. And for anyone who likes to see the people of history make a highly appropriate entrance, even if only on a very small stage, it is a fine thing that he cruised over that August afternoon aboard Lincoln’s old steamer, River Queen.

In the years just preceding Grant’s visit, the carpenters of Martha’s Vineyard had put aside all their no-nonsense, salt-box architectural heritage and, working with scroll saws and fresh pine shipped in from Maine, had built an entire town in that particular style later to be known as General Grant Gothic. There was, to be sure, plenty of gingerbread glory to be seen in other places—in Cape May, New Jersey, and in Sea Cliff and Chautauqua, New York—but Oak Bluffs was something else again. It was quite possibly the most joyous-looking little town in the land, all new and freshly painted, a fair-weather place of countless turrets and towers, fancy trimmed gables, stained glass, porches, balconies, and endless plank walks. It was, just as its publicity so proudly proclaimed, the Cottage City of America.

Twenty years earlier, before the war, Oak Bluffs had been only the site of a Methodist camp meeting. The brethren had been gathering there summers since 1835, pitching their tents in a grove of scrub oaks just back from some meager clay bluffs on the island’s landward shore. But after the war more and more tents had been replaced by tiny cottages built almost exactly along the lines of the tents. (Often a cottage took several years to evolve from the tent, with board walls replacing canvas this summer, a porch being added the next, and so forth.) At the end of the eighteen sixties the real boom began. A great many other people besides the Methodists had by then discovered the island’s charm, and the islanders recognized that the summer trade might well supplant their all but vanished whaling industry.

Within three or four years, hundreds of summer houses were built at Oak Bluffs, and unlike those across the way at Newport, these were truly “cottages.” For all their elegant style—their grandeur, really—they were with few exceptions quite small in scale, modestly furnished, and remarkably inexpensive. The place was, as one man put it, “the delight of the middle classes.” Through July and August, excursion steamers plowed back and forth from Boston,