Edwin (Bob) Newhall Woods, philanthropist, conservationist and a lifetime West Tisbury seasonal visitor, died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Maria, Calif. He was 93. His generosity to the Vineyard, and particularly to West Tisbury, the town where he had lived for a time as a child and where he had spent a part of each year ever since, was unparalleled in up-Island history.

In 1982 Mr. Woods made his first gift to the town: Brandy Brow Hill, the overlook at the intersection of State Road and the West Tisbury-Edgartown Road. His mother, Frances Newhall Woods, had bought the property in 1928 and built a memorial there to her mother, Virginia Whiting Newhall, the daughter of West Tisbury patriarch Henry L. Whiting. In college in Philadelphia, she had met and later married Californian Edwin White Newhall. When Frances Woods bought Brandy Brow, she said that she also hoped the hill — then bare of trees with a path children used as a shortcut — would be a village green. In giving it to West Tisbury some 50 years later, her son fulfilled that wish.

In 1991 Mr. Woods and his family gave the great Woods gift to West Tisbury when they placed a conservation restrictions on 523 acres of woods and fields that Bob Woods had inherited from his mother. The restrictions have assured that the land will remain forever wild. Bounded by Middle Road, North Road, the Panhandle and the West Tisbury-Chilmark town line, the Frances Newhall Woods Nature and Wildlife Preserve remains today under the stewardship of The Nature Conservancy. The Woods family had similar restrictions placed on two smaller properties, a 1.3-acre piece at Seven Gates Farm, and a 23-acre parcel on the Panhandle. The Panhandle property was then sold at far below market value to the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society that had been founded by Henry Whiting in 1859. Today it is the site of the Agricultural Hall and fair.

In Bob Woods’s childhood, on that property which was called the Woods Meadow, his mother held a colorful Gymkhana in 1929, with the proceeds going to the hospital. Some 2,000 people attended to see the Woods family horses prance and colorfully-clad clowns doing acts. Among them were cousins Everett Whiting and his older brother John who in a harlequin costume performed tricks on a broad-backed steed. Bob Woods and his brother Fred put on a riding demonstration described at the time as “nothing short of spectacular.”

In an interview with Linsey Lee for her book of oral histories Vineyard Voices, Bob Woods recalled that riding demonstration. Most of the horses participating in the gymkhana had been brought by Frances Woods from California where they made their winter home. On all their trips East, Mrs. Woods would have her horses transported — sometimes by train, sometimes by truck — to New Bedford, then brought across on the old steamer Naushon to Vineyard Haven; from there they would be trucked or ridden to West Tisbury.

Edwin Newhall Woods was born in San Francisco on Oct. 4, 1917, a son of Frederick Nickerson Woods and Frances Henrielle Newhall Woods. He made his first trip to the Vineyard, the home of his mother’s forebears, when he was less than a year old. The family — his mother and Granny Newhall Woods, his brother Fred and sister Virginia, dogs and cats — crossed the country in a car at a time, according to family legend, when there were only 20 miles of paved roads between the East and West Coasts. During this childhood period Edwin acquired the nickname Bob; his mother decided Edwin Newhall was much too much a name for a little boy and cheerily called him Bobolink, soon shortened to Bob.

They stayed that first summer in Granny Newhall’s house that sits on State Road opposite Brandy Brow. Behind the house, baseball was a favorite pastime for Bob and his brother. By the late 1920s, Frances Woods had bought her own home — the ice house on North Road that had belonged to Seven Gates Farm when it was a dairy.

Situated in a tranquil spot above Fisher Pond, the family named it The Retreat. In one of her poems, Emma Mayhew Whiting eloquently described its peacefulness. Although Frances Woods and the children usually rejoined Mr. Woods in California in the winter, one year when Bob was in grade school, they remained on the Island. In his interview with Ms. Lee, Bob Woods joyously remembered riding horseback or traveling by sleigh or wagon — depending on the weather — from North Road to the West Tisbury School.

Most of his school time, however, was on the West Coast, where he graduated from Palo Alto High School and Stanford University, class of 1938. There he majored in Spanish and was on the basketball and fencing teams. His schooling over, he went to work on a family cattle ranch. His great-grandfather, Henry Mayo Newhall, had gone to California from Saugus just as California was becoming a state and had managed to buy thousands of acres of Spanish land grants, turning the land into six cattle ranches and establishing the Newhall Land and Farming Company.

As a hobby in those years, Bob Woods learned to fly and it remained a lifetime passion for him. He owned a variety of planes of his own, and as recently as last month was being hoisted into his son Robin’s Piper Cub to satisfy his longing for small plane flights. He was especially proud of a trip he had made in 1973 from Santa Maria in instrument weather conditions as a member of the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Aero Squadron to airlift two premature babies and a nurse to the Stanford hospital.

When World War II broke out, Bob Woods enlisted in the Navy, serving in the Pacific and in San Diego and San Francisco. While ice skating in San Francisco in those Navy days, he met Jeanne Portnoff whom he married in 1945. He later returned to work on the family’s 30,000-acre Suey Ranch outside Santa Maria. At first he was a cowboy, buying calves in Mexico in the fall and selling them from the ranch in the spring. Then, to earn $10 more a week on top of his $90-a-week salary, he became ranch bookkeeper and in the 1950s, ranch manager. In addition to cattle, oranges, lemons, tomatoes and sugar beets were grown on the property.

Mr. Woods remained with the ranch until 1973, but before that he had bought his own place on which to raise a small number of cattle. In so-called retirement, he grew wine grapes as well as cattle. In the 1980s he established his own winery — Los Vineros — which he kept until the end of the 1980s. After that, he returned simply to grape growing, selling his grapes to wine producers.

Since ranching kept him in the West most of the year, there could only be mini-vacations on the Vineyard he loved so much. There would be annual road trips, however, not unlike his first one (except that there were more paved roads) bringing children and pets and sometimes a sailboat or a bathtub on the roof of the car. Never ostentatious in clothes or in manner, he did things the simple way.

Once on the Vineyard, he would busy himself with brush cutting at The Retreat, canoeing on Fisher Pond, sailing with his children in Edgartown, or simply sitting quietly outside listening to the birds and the pinkletinks and watching the changing light shimmering on the pond waters. Or he would be off to repair the old stone walls and barbed wire fences on his Panhandle land. He kept it fenced in to keep hunters out; following the tradition of his mother he believed in preserving wildlife.

“Many people give us easements,” Tom Chase of the Nature Conservancy said, “but very few want to know how the box turtles are doing and if the land is being mowed, the way Bob Woods always did. He really loved the land. I think of him as the quintessential Vineyarder — modest, unassuming, one of the kindest, most generous people I have ever known.”

In recent years, Bob Woods and his wife had made spring and fall trips to the Island. Once here he and Jeanne saw family — the myriad members of the Whiting clan who were second and third cousins. He would stop in occasionally at Alley’s General Store. In his winery days, there was always a bottle in hand for one or another of his favorites, John Alley recalled. “The Vineyard was Pop’s home and always in his heart,” his daughter Francine said. “He wanted to do whatever he could for it. Every care of the world fell away from him when he arrived. The spell of the Vineyard would be upon him. He would watch the otters and the turtles in the pond and then he was truly at peace.”

Mr. Woods is survived by his wife of 65 years, Jeanne, and by their children, Prudence Noon and her husband John of Martinez, Calif., Francine Woods and her children, Henry and Margaret Bell of Long Beach, Calif., and Edwin N. (Robin) Woods Jr. and his wife Caroline of Santa Maria, Calif. More distant survivors are his first cousin, Jane Newhall of San Francisco, and second and third cousins in the Whiting family of West Tisbury. He was predeceased by his brother Fred and sister Virginia.

A memorial service will be held at a time to be announced. Contributions in his memory may be made to the West Tisbury Congregational Church, the Vineyard Conservation Society, the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, or to a charity of choice.