Cleveland's Vineyard Childhood

George Cleveland, the son of a poor Martha's Vineyard laborer and his orphan bride, grew up during the declining years of the whaling industry. He survives relentless poverty, disastrous fires, ugly scandals, and a shifting economy before heading to sea at the age of fourteen, finally returning to begin a rocky marriage with his pregnant next-door-neighbor and step-cousin, Hattie.

Holmes Hole, Mass., later renamed "Vineyard Haven," as it appeared in the 1870s.

George Cleveland was born on March 30, 1871 about a mile north of the village of Vineyard Haven on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, on a short, dead-end road nested in the high, sandy bluffs overlooking Vineyard Haven Harbor. Today, Hatch Road looks and feels like many other old, suburban cul-de-sac neighborhoods in coastal New England – maybe a dozen homes ranging from modest saltboxes to classy but modest waterfront estates. The neighborhood is populated primarily with wealthy summer residents, and a few celebrities have made their homes here over the past few decades, including Mike Wallace (“60 Minutes” television news anchor), Col. George Washington Goethals (builder of the Panama Canal), Frank Lautenberg (Governor of New Jersey), and Kingman Brewster (ambassador to Great Britain and president of Yale University.) Even in today‘s real estate slump, homes here average over two million dollars each. But during Cleveland’s childhood this street was a typical unnamed dead-end dirt lane and one of the poorest neighborhoods in town – more than half of the paupers in the town of Tisbury lived on this short cart path.

“The Neck,” as this neighborhood was known in the 19th century, was once an independent, self-contained community – a hamlet competing with Vineyard Haven (which before 1871 was known as “Holmes Hole”) to be the dominant port and village in the town of Tisbury. There was a small schoolhouse, a cemetery, a boat-builders shop, and an ancient chandlery on the beach where visiting sailors gathered from all parts of the globe. A “rough lot,” as one resident called them, visiting seamen came in with every tide, roaming the neighborhood to forage for berries to eat or stray cats to bring back to their vessel for good luck. Unitarian missionary Rev. D. W. Stevens ran the “Seaman’s Refuge and Reading Room” on the bluffs, almost directly across from Cleveland’s childhood home, and offered the visiting seamen access to his wharf, well, and chapel, as well as his library of book, charts, and newspapers. Rev. Stevens also operated a small maritime museum housing relics and curiosities from around the world, in which young George undoubtedly spent time as a boy imagining adventures at sea.

Modern view of Vineyard Haven harbor down Cleveland Road, from the Cleveland family's property on Hatch Road.

Cleveland’s boyhood home was part of a larger tract of property originally owned by his great-grandparents, and over the decades the property had been divided and settled by his extended family of great-uncles, aunts and cousins. The neighborhood had become synonymous with the Cleveland family, and the Cleveland family of “Down-the-Neck” had become synonymous with the ocean. As a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette wrote in 1929, “The home of the Cleveland family, the locality might well be expected to produce a breed of men who would follow the sea. From the low hill top that overlooks the entire harbor the sound of waves on the beach below is always audible and the smell of salt wind and water is always in the air.” Virtually all the men in the Cleveland family were employed on the sea - most were fishermen, and many were whalers.

Martha’s Vineyard in the nineteenth century was full of whalers. Virtually every family on the island had been touched by the fortunes and tragedies of whaling. More than half of the adult men in town worked on board a vessel, and countless island families treasured their scrimshaw, Chinese jewelry boxes, African maps, and other souvenirs and curios brought back from whaling voyages abroad. Even the local grocer had circumnavigated the globe six times before settling into a quieter profession. Many island homes were built with the proceeds of the greasy, bloody business of whale oil and whalebone, and more than a few island gravestones mark empty plots of men who never returned from the sea.

Modern view of the Neck, as seen from across Vineyard Haven Harbor.

George’s family teemed with retired whalers. As he wrote in 1924, “The Clevelands of Martha’s Vineyard sailed in whaling vessels and clipper ships for generations before I was born. Growing up among seafaring men as I did, it happened quite as a matter of course that I followed the sea myself, and that the sea urged me north to become a whaleman and arctic trader.” His grandfather (and next-door neighbor, growing up) was William H. Cleveland (1819-1893), a Tisbury boatbuilder who had sailed as a teenager aboard the whaling ship Condor from New Bedford to the South Atlantic during two voyages in the early 1830s and on the whaler Virginia of New Bedford during the early 1840s. George’s uncle, Capt. Alvin H. Cleveland, had whaled for three decades, and boasted that he had sailed in every ocean. Uncle Alvin had once been given up for lost during a passage around Cape Horn and had also survived the sinking of the schooner Jane Gray in the arctic ice.

George was born in the same year as the Whaling Disaster of 1871, in which thirty-three whaleships – many crewed by Vineyard sailors – were crushed in the ice off Alaska. It was considered a mortal blow to the whaling industry, already deep in decline. By the time of George’s birth, the population of Martha’s Vineyard had been sinking for over twenty years, as young families fled the depressed economy that had so long depended upon whaling.

George was the eldest child of 22-year-old fisherman Henry N. Cleveland (1848-1929) and his 18-year-old wife Ann Eliza (Fish) Gibbs (1853-1923). He was undoubtedly named after his uncle George K. Cleveland (1850-1926) who had sailed on the whaling ship Niger of New Bedford as a teenager from 1866-1870. The Niger had cruised the South Pacific by way of Cape Horn, where his shipmate and fellow islander John Daggett was killed by a whale. Other than his four years at sea, Uncle George lived his entire life on the island as a fisherman, and was young George’s next door neighbor throughout his childhood.

His mother Ann Eliza was from the city of New Bedford, located a few short miles across Vineyard Sound and known as “the whaling capital of the world.” She had been abandoned by her own impoverished mother to the New Bedford Orphan’s Home shortly before her fourth birthday, together with her six-year-old brother George and her eight-year-old sister Fanny. Their father, a New Bedford blacksmith, had died the year before, leaving their mother destitute and unable to provide for all their seven children. The orphanage, overlooking a cove on Buzzard’s Bay, housed about thirty-five white children ranging in age from toddlers to teenagers and was run by two Methodist sisters and a Irish cook. When they became old enough, the boys in the orphanage were apprenticed with families until the age of twenty-one to learn a useful trade, and the girls were placed in family homes as domestic servants until the age of eighteen “or until their marriage within their eighteenth year.” Ann Eliza lived in the orphanage almost five years before being adopted by Mr. Gibbs, a New Bedford watchman, at the age of eight. When she was sixteen she married twenty-year-old fisherman Henry Cleveland and moved to his home on Martha’s Vineyard, followed many years later by her sister Fanny and her two sons.

The economy slowly shifted during George’s childhood. The United States was in an economic depression from 1873 until 1896, known to historians today as the “Long Depression“ and second only to the Great Depression in its severity. There was little opportunity for employment other than the meager living made by fishing, tourism, or by working at R. W. Crocker’s harness factory in the center of Vineyard Haven. A few whalers, including his uncle Alvin, had remained with the dying industry and had followed the bowhead whale population into the Arctic. Many left the island for good, and the population of Martha’s Vineyard dipped to its lowest levels during the early 1870s, even as the rest of the state and the country boomed in population. The Gazette lamented in 1882, “Something must be done to keep our young men from going abroad.” Many of those who stayed turned to a new source of income, Campground tourists, or to an old one, coastal trade.

Thanks to the rise in popularity of the Methodist Camp Meetings in the nearby town of Oak Bluffs, summertime tourism became an industry of its own, and the residents of Vineyard Haven were eager to cash in on the opportunities provided by their neighboring town. Feeling that the name “Holmes Hole” invoked an unclean perception of the town to tourists, in 1871, a couple of months before George was born, the name of the town was officially changed to “Vineyard Haven.” Later that year a bridge was built connecting Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven with the intent to encourage the Camp Meeting tourists to visit their neighboring town. It was soon followed by a “horse railroad,” a horse-drawn trolley designed to ferry tourists between the towns.

Meanwhile, Vineyard Haven Harbor had become an important anchorage on the east coast, especially to the New York - Boston trade route. By 1873, one hundred ships dropped anchor in the harbor each day; two hundred in bad weather. Vineyard Sound is said to have become second only to the English Channel for the number of vessels passing through each year - some two thousand sails passed Gay Head on a busy day; 35,000 each year. A customs office in downtown Vineyard Haven collected duties on foreign goods arriving in port. As the village of Vineyard Haven and its wharf grew in importance, the Neck was increasingly bypassed. Eventually it became just another residential area on the outskirts of Vineyard Haven, which was now the clearly dominant village in town.

George had two younger brothers and a younger sister, Robert (1875-1944), Rose (1882- 1946) and Waldo (1888-1943) who went by his middle name “Cliff”. Their childhood contrasted starkly with the wealthy summer residents from Boston and New York City who had started to make their seasonal homes on the Vineyard. While the summer families played croquet and listened to the cornet bands and ate oysters at the ice cream saloon, George and his brothers probably spent much of his childhood cleaning fish for his father and uncles, or working in his grandfather’s boathouse. Entertainment likely came in the form of the occasional baseball game, church event, or minstrel show.

R. W. Crocker

By the 1880s, George’s father Henry had quit fishing and started working at Crocker’s harness factory in Vineyard Haven. The owner, Rodolphus W. Crocker, had operated a harness-making business in the village since the end of the Civil War. Crocker had lost his mother as a boy and had been bound out to his abusive half-uncle who worked him twelve to fifteen hours a day in his harness shop. As a harness shop owner, Crocker perpetuated the cycle of abuse. He publicly declared his disgust for eight-hour work days, modern wages, and “loafers.” His business prospered. By 1875, Crocker employed nineteen men at an average wage of $2.25 per day, and by 1882 he employed over seventy workmen at his factory in the center of town, by far the biggest employer in Vineyard Haven, if not the island.

Searching for fresh workers, Crocker regularly visited orphanages and other institutions warehousing “wards of the state” such as the Monson State Primary School in central Massachusetts, a large state-run orphanage and reform school, and the New Bedford Orphan’s Home, where George’s mother had spent her childhood. He took custody of young teenage boys and brought them to the island to work in his factory. Luring them with a promise of a new trade and a new life outside of the reformatory atmosphere of the orphanages, Crocker blatantly overworked the boys and cruelly horsewhipped them for any infraction. On one occasion in 1882 two of his "young lads" attempted to run away; they stole a dory near Union Wharf and stowed away on a vessel in the harbor, only to be discovered and returned to Crocker’s factory for a sound whipping and a return to the factory floor.

The 1883 fire destroyed most of Vineyard Haven.

One stormy evening in August 1883, when George was twelve years old, a disaster occurred which changed his town forever. A brisk northeaster was blowing in from the harbor when the call when out that the harness factory was ablaze. The flames quickly spread, and within hours the entire village was on fire. Gale-force winds gusted to near hurricane strength, blowing burning shingles across town which set new fires. The flames were easily visible from the safety of the Cleveland home on the heights of the Neck a mile away, and the light of the fires was even seen clearly in New Bedford, newspapers reported. It was the most destructive ever in the history of Martha’s Vineyard, and within the week the disaster had made front page news in newspapers from Boston to New York City.

Vineyard Haven had no fire department and virtually no fire-fighting equipment, but the village did have a single telephone in Luce’s grocery store, and so a telephone call for help was placed to nearby Cottage City. But the late arrival of their horse-drawn “engines” did little to stop the destruction. By morning nothing was left of the village but acres of black, ashen char pocked with foundation holes and littered with smoking ruins. Over fifty acres had been burned together with more than sixty buildings, including thirty-two family homes and twenty-six stores. Every store but one in the village was burned to the ground. Hundreds were left homeless. Looters prowled the streets. One woman died of a heart attack. Villagers speculated as to the origins of the fire which remains a mystery to this day, although investigators agreed that it had begun in the lower levels of Crocker’s factory.

The future of Vineyard Haven looked very grim during the first couple of days after the fire, but as if to contradict the gloomy forecasts of the newspaper pundits, within days islanders spontaneously rallied around the rebuilding of their town with surprising energy. Crocker himself began work on a new harness factory while the timbers of his former one were still smoldering, and within months the new factory had been rebuilt and was bigger than ever, looming four stories over the center of an otherwise two-story new town.

Crocker's second harness factory.

Crocker now began to take custody of eight orphans at a time to labor in the new factory, stitching breechings and performing other menial tasks. He continued to unashamedly overwork his young charges and brutally beat them at the slightest provocation. On several occasions he was alleged to have lashed several of his charges with a six foot horsewhip until the whips were completely broken and unusable. When any boys attempted to make a complaint to the Tisbury Board of Selectmen, their pleas went unaddressed. It was also alleged that Crocker had an agreement with the Vineyard Haven postmaster so that any mail addressed to the state agent in charge of orphans from any of the boys would be instead returned to Mr. Crocker.

The new factory had only been operating for a few months when the story finally broke in the newspapers. On January 30, 1884 the front page of the Boston Daily Globe read “CHARGES OF CRUELTY.-- Wards of the State Complain of Cruel Treatment. -- A Harness-Maker Accused of Brutality Towards His Apprentices.” One of Crocker’s former charges, having reached the age of twenty-one, made a formal complaint before the State Board of Charities and its chairman, former Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Talbot. In the ensuing investigation Crocker denied any brutality, but admitted to giving an occasional “licking” to the boys, whom he described as “depraved and bad“ and “very insolent and stubborn.” “As long as they do their work well and behave I never whip them, but when I think they deserve it I correct them in this way,” he told the ex-governor. “I thought they deserved a licking, and I gave it to them.” The matter was soon dropped.

The Vineyard Haven waterfront with Crocker's harness factory visible in the background.

We can only imagine how George’s mother felt about her husband working for Rodolphus Crocker during this period. Crocker had been essentially enslaving orphans from the New Bedford Orphan’s Home – the same institution that had been her home for almost five years.

When George turned fourteen - perhaps upon finishing eighth grade, for studies in the little one-room schoolhouse at the Neck certainly didn‘t go any farther than that- he was faced with finding a means to make a living as an adult. His options were limited - the fishing was meager (his father had abandoned that trade already), and the thought of working at Crocker’s harness factory with his father was certainly sobering. It was no surprise that Cleveland chose to pursue the romantic life of his grandfather’s generation. He decided to go to sea.

Whether Cleveland first found employment on a vessel passing through Vineyard Haven harbor, or whether he crossed the busy sound to the city of New Bedford to find his first job, we don’t know. But Cleveland’s first professional ocean-voyage was as a sailor onboard a ship sailing to Europe and back. He was fourteen years old.

According to author Peter Freuchen who met Cleveland in his later years, young George became infatuated with China - Chinese women in particular - and upon returning from Europe he bribed a sailor to desert from a ship headed for the Far East in order to take his place. However the ship received new orders and sailed instead for London, and then to the West Indies, and finally back to Boston.

Cleveland returned to the Vineyard, now fully grown at a commanding 5’10” with dark hair and blue eyes. His newly divorced aunt Fannie had moved to the island with her two teenage sons to join the family, having been left by her husband, a French sailor who had abandoned the family to seek gold in the Washington Territory. The two boys took jobs at the harness factory with their uncle Henry.

In September 1889, at the age of eighteen, Cleveland married his pregnant twenty-year-old girlfriend Hattie Walker Chase (1868 - 1901), who had been his next-door-neighbor for most of his childhood.

Hattie’s mother, Mary Lewis, had been abandoned as a little girl. Mary’s father had died from tuberculosis when she was only a month old, and her impoverished mother left Mary and her sister Ann in the care of Mrs. Clark, who took in pauper children from around town, and then disappeared. As poorhouse children they faced a difficult upbringing. Ann became an unwed teenage mother until a cart crushed and killed her twenty-two month old daughter in a horrible accident. Mary, Ann, and a mentally retarded pauper boy named Edgar also shared Mrs. Clark’s household with a New Bedford fisherman some ten years Mary’s senior by the name of Charles Chase, and she married him at the age of fourteen. Their marriage produced daughter Hattie and her younger brother, but then quickly deteriorated.

When Hattie was still a young girl, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved in with George Cleveland’s uncle, George K. Cleveland, at the end of Hatch Road overlooking a small frog pond in the hollow known as “Frog Alley.” In 1883, after several years claiming to be employed by Cleveland as his housekeeper, Mary and the elder George were married. They shared their home with teenage Hattie, right next door to young George‘s house. Six years later, Hattie became pregnant and she and George were married. As it turned out, both marriages were headed for trouble.

The livery stable (center) and Crocker's second harness factory (left), Main Street, Vineyard Haven.

There are few records of George’s life during the early 1890s, other that the birth of his two children: Ramona “Mona” Cleveland, born in 1890, and Llewellyn William Cleveland, born in 1893. There is evidence that he continued to work on board transatlantic vessels or whaling ships, and that his first visit to the arctic may have occurred during these years. It’s doubtful whether he saw his wife or children more than briefly between voyages.

Crocker sold the failing harness factory in 1891 to George Eldridge, the ship’s chandler at the Neck. Crocker defrauded the new owner by masking the true finances of his business. It lasted a few more years and then closed for good in 1896, and the building burned down in a second fire in 1899. George’s father Henry found new work in the stables of a livery business next-door.

Next: Cleveland is hit on the head on wakes up on a ship heading for Hudson Bay.