Vineyard Haven is the main village of Tisbury, a town on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Of Tisbury’s roughly 4000 permanent residents (those who live there year-round, as opposed to most of the city’s homeowners, whose properties on the island are vacation houses), a little more than half live in Vineyard Haven.

One interesting part of the island’s culture is the large deaf community that existed from the 17th to early 20th century. In the 1800s, Martha’s Vineyard had a large deaf population (deafness on the island was at least 20 times as common as the national average), partially due to hereditary deafness in one family that had migrated to the island in the 1600s. This created a unique community in which sign language was widely used, sometimes even when deaf people were not present. A special variant of the language, called Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, derived from Old Kent Sign Language (in England), was widely used. The language is now extinct, as migration to and from the mainland has decreased the prominence of the deaf community on the island.

Vineyard Haven is an extremely tourist-oriented community, as the population of Tisbury swells to many times its off-season size between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Celebrities such as Diane Sawyer, Spike Lee, the Clintons and members of the Kennedy family often vacation here at their summer homes on Martha’s Vineyard. The island is also popular with movie directors; films such as Stuck on You and Sabrina and episodes of The X-Files and Gilmore Girls have been set here.