history

“When you move to a town that doesn’t have a good year ~ round restaurant, you have to build one ! And we did!”

~ CAPT. ROBERT DOUGLAS

Captain Douglas and Black Dog

IN 1971, A RESTAURANT OPENED IN VINEYARD HAVEN on Martha’s Vineyard in January. This was not exactly an auspicious time to open a dining establishment in an area known as a summer resort ~ but The Black Dog wasn’t built to attract summer visitors. Now, nearly thirty years later, all of the tales of

The Black Dog Tavern’s beginning seem to harken back to two things ~ a cannon and a bowl of good fish chowder. The chowder’s part of the tale is easy to explain. Most of the food establishments on the Vineyard closed right after Labor Day, and Islanders tended to look at the winter as the stay-at-home season.

If you didn’t want to cook, or were looking for some entertainment and human contact, the options were slim to none. The idea of a place where you could enjoy a good bowl of fish chowder (Capt. Douglas’s favorite) and sit around the fire exchanging stories had universal appeal, but it was just a matter of wistful conversation ~ until the cannon…

ROBERT DOUGLAS COLLECTS maritime memorabilia ~ ship models, half shells, and harpoons. You can see a lot of it on display inside The Black Dog. Sometime in the late 1960s he found a cannon at a wrecking yard outside of Boston. After service on some Civil War vessel it had been recycled as a bollard ~ nose down in the ground at the edge of a pier securing mooring lines from berthed ships. Being an astute observer and extremely knowledgeable about maritime history, Bob recognized how unusual it was to find such a cannon intact and he was determined to have it for his collection. Since this particular cannon weighed over 9,000 pounds, getting it to the Island became a challenge. The only truck capable of handling its weight at the wrecking yard was already loaded with salvaged pine. To get the cannon, Bob had to buy all that wood, and he did ~ 6,000 pounds of yellow pine for six cents a foot. As it turned out, the timber had an even longer pedigree than the cannon. The knot-free beams, salvaged from old mill buildings, were estimated to have been cut when the trees were at least 100 years old ~ trees that were saplings in the 1600s.

Since Bob Douglas already owned land along the waterfront, it was not long before the idea of The Black Dog Tavern was transformed from a rough sketch on a napkin to a building on the beach by master builder Allan Miller. Its size was determined by the number of yellow pine beams that came on the truck; its height was equal to half the length of the six longest beams. All of the yellow pine was used ~ “waste not, want not.” The name of this new establishment was almost a foregone conclusion since Black Dog was Bob’s ever-present four-legged companion, and “tavern” evoked all of those wistful visions of camaraderie and conversation. The fact that Vineyard Haven was, and is, a “dry” town never mattered.

From the beginning, The Black Dog Tavern occupied a place in the heart of the Island community ~ a combination of Yankee tradition and free-form fun that drew from the entire Vineyard talent pool, and beyond. Known as one of the Island’s great cooks, Sally Knight was drafted immediately. She made chowder for The Black Dog at home and drove through Vineyard Haven with a large pot in the passenger seat of her car during the first few months of operation. Chefs from other Island restaurants came to cook on “special nights.” Customers helped clear tables. During one crowded dinner, a fierce nor’ easter at high tide broke a barge from its mooring in the harbor. As it was headed towards the Tavern, several “regulars” who happened to be there eating jumped up, unsolicited, grabbed some other diners, and tied the barge to the dock before it could smash into The Black Dog porch. The stories continue ~ cooks running out of the kitchen during lunch with fishing poles in hand, because they could see from the open kitchen the bluefish breaking the water at the end of the dock.

The Black Dog Tavern has been in continuous operation now for nearly thirty years. Even though our namesake, Black Dog, is gone, black dogs still wander around the beach and give rise to the question most often heard: “Is this THE black dog?”