Block Island is a small, sandy interruption of Long Island Sound. Despite its apparent accessibility—it lies within two hundred miles of more than twenty million people—Block Island is as stubborn an interruption of the twentieth century as it is of the sea.

Islanders often reassure first-time visitors that their initial impressions won’t fade: with its rolling hills and stone walls spotted with lichen, Block Island is reminiscent of southern England or Ireland. It is European, too, in its sense of the past. On Block Island, history accumulates like a kind of local natural resource.

The Indians called Block Island Manisses, “island of the little god.” Only three miles wide and seven long, it was aptly named. In 1614, however, Adrian Block of Amsterdam changed the name to his own when he circumnavigated the island and drew a map on which he labeled it “Adrian’s Eyland.”

After being annexed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early seventeenth century, Block Island was sold in 1660 to sixteen individuals, many of whom took up residence one year later. These settlers encountered a vastly different island from that which is known to their descendants. It was heavily forested and inhabited by a local tribe of about three hundred Manissean Indians. That these few families left any descendants at all is something of a surprise; in that era it was commonplace for such settlements to end in failure. That the original settlers’ family names were accounted for in a 1790 census is a testimony to perseverance. That the surnames of the 1790 census remain well represented in the current telephone directory is proof of formidable tenacity.

Over the next two hundred years, Block Island gradually assumed its characteristic treeless appearance as virtually the entire island was cleared to supply food for the necessarily self-sufficient community. By this time experience had taught the islanders three rules: Never expect a day without wind; never expect visitors; but always be prepared for a shipwreck.

It was no coincidence that sailors nicknamed the island the Stumbling Block. For it is surrounded by some of the most treacherous waters in New England. The sea ensured Block Island’s almost total isolation well into the nineteenth century. Although it is only ten miles south of Point Judith, Rhode Island, and fourteen miles northwest of Montauk Point, New York, the lack of a natural harbor guaranteed that the island’s few guests would be castaways. There was no convenient port for island fishermen either, but they learned to cope in two ingenious ways. They invented the Block Island double-ender, a fishing boat designed so that it could be hauled onto the beach after each outing. And off the eastern coast of the island, the fishermen drove long oak poles into the sand when the tide was low to secure