Who Is William Barry Owen

The Great Fire.

Before it was destined to become The Ocean Club, our historic building played a starring role in Vineyard Haven’s past. The stable and harness shop that occupied the site in the 1800s burned to the ground and took all of Main Street with it. You might look at the ship Captain’s houses on William Street a block north to imagine the splendid buildings lost in the fire

William Barry Owen

Owen was an Island native and wildly successful entrepreneur, builder of West Chop and the Tisbury Water works and majority owner of Martha’s Vineyard National Bank. In 1905 he erected this building and relocated the bank from Edgartown to Vineyard Haven, where it operated for more than a century. 

The building’s distinctive look derived first from Owen’s determination to build a structure of inflammable materials, and second from the fertile imagination of one J.W. Beals, an architect who clearly marched to a different drummer. While the composition used beach stone readily available on the Island the terra cotta roof tiles were a rarely seen Mediterranean invention. Intentionally or not the combination of materials in the hands of the imaginative duo led to one of the most beloved structures on the Island. We are proud to repurpose it as the Ocean Club.

Nipper

As if William Barry Owen’s local accomplishments were not enough he became taken with the fledging gramophone industry and founded one of the first gramophone companies in the United States. While travelling in England he came across a painting (made with no apparent commercial intent) of a fox terrier named Nipper, his ear cocked into a gramophone. Owen purchased and copyrighted the image. He owned a succession of fox terriers of his own, naming them all Nipper. When he later sold the image to RCA it became arguably the most recognized icon of the 20th century. This legacy is memorialized with a larger-than-life 1930 paper mache statue of Nipper on display in the restaurant. Owen also gifted Owen Park, the gateway to the inner harbor, to the Town of Vineyard Haven. Legend has it Nipper is buried somewhere on William Street.

The Vault

We have converted the vault to a wine room and the vault door to a common table in the restaurant. The former was rather easy to do; the latter took a Herculean effort. The vault door weighed 9000 pounds and to move it a mere 10 feet required the custom construction of a massive steel gantry crane on tracks inside the restaurant. After the job, the crane was disassembled, likely never to be used again.