City in the Woods: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting on Martha's Vineyard

The Wesleyan Grove Methodist camp meeting, founded on the island of Martha's Vineyard, had become by 1860 the most famous in the nation. Around this time, local carpenters invented a new building, the campground cottage, in which architectural allusions to tents, houses, and churches were combined into a sophisticated and memorable form, now often referred to as the "gingerbread house." The peculiar natures of the cottages were made further unique by their arrangement on the land--they sit cheek to jowl on tiny lots with virtually no private outdoor space, facing directly onto public paths or small parks. Wesleyan Grove astonished tourists, who saw it as an exoticism, a "fairyland" with a better society than the norm. In 1866 developers bought the adjacent land to lay out a resort, Oak Bluffs, planning the style in reponse to the campground configuration. In City in the Woods, Ellen Weiss describes the development of these fanciful architectural oddities and suggests that Wesleyan Grove must be included among the sources of the American romantic suburb. The values inherent in this campground community--a physical environment of psychic dislocation, social density, and nature immersion--add to a better understanding of the American urge to live in the suburbs. This beautifully written work includes over forty photographs which depict the charm, grace, and meticulous preservation of one of the most prominent historical New England communities.