The West Tisbury Farmers’ Market paused Saturday morning to remember Ethel Sherman, the longtime Chilmark resident and well-known figure in the Island farming community who had sold jams at the market for more than two decades.

Mrs. Sherman died on Sept. 4 at the Windemere Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. She was 91. She and her husband Ralph Sherman had mentored countless Island farmers and backyard gardeners through the years, beginning in the 1970s when they were proprietors at SBS.

At the market Saturday morning vendors stopped working their booths just before nine for a moment of silence. Ralph Sherman was on hand to ring the opening bell for the market.

At the time of her death last Thursday, Mrs. Sherman was in the company of her grandson who had stopped by to wish her good night.

Ethel had a second career at the farmers' market selling home-grown jams. — Courtesy Ralph Sherman

Ethel marred Ralph after work on a hot day in June 49 years ago. They moved from the Cape to the Island permanently in 1973 after years spent in search of bass on the beaches of Squibnocket. Together they saved the struggling Smith, Bodfish and Swift grain store, then located on the harbor in Vineyard Haven. With Ethel’s meticulous attention to detail and organization, and Ralph’s knowledge of gardening and animal husbandry, they supplied generations of farmers with the tools, supplies and advice they needed to continue the Island’s agrarian traditions during an era when they could have easily disappeared.

Ethel joined the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market in the late 1980s, a quasi-retirement, when she taught herself to make jam and sold all she could can alongside Ralph’s perfectly grown and sorted yet perpetually underpriced produce. In 1989 the Gazette took note of the occasion in a small item: “Ethel and Ralph Sherman are well-known to many friends on the Island, but until now not many have known about the fruit trees growing on their land in Chilmark,” the newspaper reported. “Mrs. Sherman says this is the first year they are selling jams and other produce from their garden. One recent Saturday she had jars of pear, raspberry and strawberry jam at the market.”

Ethel was sharp witted, and those lucky enough to be in her presence were always laughing or had smiles on their faces. She was dedicated to making the Island community better and was involved with the Methodist Church of Chilmark and active with the Council on Aging. She wrote honestly and simply about her life, self-publishing multiple books.

“In our Chilmark yard, the trees reach higher and higher to the sky,” she wrote in a 2007 essay published in the Gazette that described the years she and Ralph spent cultivating their two-acre plot in Chilmark with fruit and nut trees, a vegetable garden and naturalized spring bulbs.

Services will be determined soon, as Ralph is busy sorting beans in the two-car garage they built together, admittedly in a less organized way than Ethel would have.

Ivy Ashe contributed reporting.