Edgartown Neighborhoods: Village, Katama, and Chappaquiddick

Edgartown Village: The Whaling-Captain Historic Core

The downtown core sits inside the Edgartown Village Historic District, a National Register-listed streetscape built on 19th-century whaling money. Its single most-photographed stretch is North Water Street, a row of white Greek Revival captains' mansions dating to the whaling port's wealthiest decades - real, documented houses, though this page won't invent specific construction dates or captains' names beyond what's independently confirmed, since precise dates and names for individual houses weren't nailed down in a readable primary source.

Two other landmarks anchor the village's identity as more than a pretty streetscape. The Old Whaling Church, a grand Greek Revival building commonly dated to around 1843 and originally funded substantially by whaling-fortune money, still operates today as an active event and performance venue. And the Vineyard Gazette - one of the oldest continuously operating community newspapers in the country, founded in 1846 - is genuinely headquartered here, in a building the Vineyard Preservation Trust maintains as a preserved landmark in its own right. The Dukes County Courthouse, built in 1858, sits in the village too, making Edgartown the seat of Dukes County.

Edgartown Harbor itself is a working, nationally known yachting harbor, home to the Edgartown Yacht Club, founded in 1905. The club's marquee annual event, Edgartown Race Weekend, marked its 100th anniversary in 2023 - suggesting the regatta itself dates to roughly 1923, a distinct and later institution from the club's own founding, though its exact founding year hasn't been independently pinned down beyond that anniversary framing. The harbor is also the subject of a genuinely current regulatory story: the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management approved the town's own Municipal Harbor Plan in February 2026, the endpoint of a process that began with a formal notice to proceed back in 2022.

Katama: South Beach and a Working Grass Airfield

Katama sits south of the village proper, and local real estate professionals treat it as a genuinely separate submarket rather than an extension of downtown - it's common enough for Vineyard brokerages to publish head-to-head "village versus Katama" comparisons for exactly that reason. Its defining feature is direct access to South Beach, also known as Katama Beach, a barrier ocean beach that draws swimmers and surfers away from the harbor side of town entirely.

Katama is also home to Katama Airfield (also called Katama Airpark), a currently operating grass-runway general-aviation field that's informally described in aviation-enthusiast circles as one of the largest turf airfields in the country - a claim repeated often enough to be worth mentioning, though it hasn't been independently adjudicated here, so treat "largest" as informal rather than official. The field also serves as a local base for glider and skydiving operations.

Katama is also the site of a real, still-unresolved local story worth knowing before buying nearby: the Katama Meadows subdivision, a housing proposal that drew initial town support in 2025 before running into sustained scrutiny over nitrogen loading, wildlife habitat, and housing questions that were all still contested in hearings as recently as July 2026. The outcome was still pending as this page was researched and should not be treated as settled.

Chappaquiddick: Reached Only by the On Time Ferry

Chappaquiddick is a separate island across the harbor from the village, connected only by the "On Time" ferry - a small boat that, per local lore repeated across several independent write-ups, earned its name because it runs on demand across the roughly 200-yard channel rather than to a fixed schedule. The operation scales down to a single boat each fall as the season winds down.

Chappaquiddick is also the site of a genuinely significant and extensively documented event in modern American political history, and it deserves to be stated plainly and factually rather than treated as gossip. On the night of July 18, 1969, Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy drove a car off Dike Bridge - a narrow, unrailed wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick - into Poucha Pond. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former campaign aide, drowned. Kennedy did not report the accident until the following morning. He later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended jail sentence. Historians and journalists widely treat the episode as having permanently damaged Kennedy's presidential ambitions, and it remains one of the most consequential single events in twentieth-century American political history. Some specifics beyond this well-established core - the precise hours-before timeline and a few contested details - remain genuinely debated even in serious historical accounts, and this page doesn't attempt to resolve them.

Away from that history, Chappaquiddick is largely conservation land: it's home to the Cape Poge and Wasque conservation properties managed by The Trustees of Reservations, though exact acreage and boundaries weren't independently re-confirmed in the research behind this page.

Edgartown Great Pond: Where the Obamas Bought a Home

Inland from the village, the area around Edgartown Great Pond is a quieter, pond-and-farmland part of town best known for the Obama family's purchase of a home here in December 2019. One additional, more specific detail worth flagging with a clear source attribution: a CBS News Boston report, citing the Martha's Vineyard Times, states the home was purchased from Wyc Grousbeck, the owner of the Boston Celtics. That detail comes from a single secondary report rather than two independent primary sources, so it's stated here as reported rather than as flatly settled fact.

No Area Has a Confirmed Home Price - the Honest Gap

This is the point where a lot of neighborhood guides invent a number, and this page won't. A dedicated search against Zillow, Redfin, Rocket Homes, Movoto, Hagerty Real Estate, and the O'Hanlon Group/Compass - all of which maintain live, Edgartown-specific pages - did not turn up a readable current median or average home price, for Edgartown as a whole or for any single area within it: not the village, not Katama, not Chappaquiddick, not the Great Pond area.

What can be said honestly is qualitative, not a dollar figure: multiple independent brokerage sources frame Edgartown at the top of the Vineyard's price tiers - one runs a dedicated "Edgartown Luxury Homes" page, and another's own content explicitly compares Edgartown's cost of living against Oak Bluffs, implying a real, locally understood price gap between Vineyard towns. If a specific area's current price range matters to a decision, that's a question for a licensed Martha's Vineyard agent who can pull current, address-level comps - not a blended town-wide or island-wide figure applied to an area it may not represent well at all.

A Note on Area Boundaries

None of Edgartown's four areas above are drawn on an official map the way a subdivision plat would be - they're real, locally understood distinctions used by residents, town officials, and real estate professionals alike, not marketing labels invented for this page. Where a specific address actually falls, and which area's character and access it shares, is worth confirming directly with an Edgartown-based agent rather than relying on a general description alone.