A former longtime Vineyard Haven family won a substantial judgment in superior court last week in a case that dates to 2013 when the state took and demolished their home in order to build the new Lagoon Pond drawbridge.
A jury awarded Charlotte Holloman, who originally filed the lawsuit together with her late mother Charlotte W. Holloman, $850,000 plus interest following the four-day eminent domain trial held in the Edgartown courthouse.
The state had paid the Holloman family $260,762 for a partial easement on the property in 2006, and $266,000 for the rest of the property in 2011.
In court, the family said the state did not pay them what their summer home was worth. The family’s appraisal put the value of the house at $1.2 million to $1.5 million, according to the complaint.
The jury was asked to determine a value as of the year 2012.
The four-bedroom house sat on a small spit of land just 10 feet from the water’s edge of Lagoon Pond, next to the original drawbridge. The house dated to 1949 and the Hollomans had owned it since 1962. They were among the first African American families to live in Vineyard Haven, and the small house was a summer sanctuary for more than 40 years.
Mass Highway, which merged with The Massachusetts Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2009, was responsible for design and construction of the new drawbridge, which first required construction of a temporary drawbridge beginning in 2006. The edge of the temporary drawbridge came to within a few feet of the Holloman summer home. The original Holloman lawsuit, filed in August 2014, said the noise and vibration of the construction project severely diminished their right to enjoy their property.
In the complaint, the Holloman family said state officials failed to communicate adequately with them throughout the nine-year, $44 million project.
On Jan. 17, 2013, DOT served a notice to vacate on the Hollomans.
As the standoff continued, the state took further action. In June 2013, DOT had a moving company remove the Hollomans’ personal possessions from the house on the property.
The house was demolished later that year to make room to disassemble the temporary drawbridge. A small park now sits on the site.
Speaking to the Gazette this week following the trial, which she attended, Charlotte Holloman called the outcome fair. And she expressed weary relief that an 11-year-plus legal and personal ordeal finally had come to an end.
“I think that the jury award was probably fair given they were asked to put a value on it in 2012,” she said. “My own opinion is that it was probably worth more than that in 2006. That’s before they worked to diminish the cash and aesthetic value of that piece of land,” she added.
Edgartown attorneys Ellen Kaplan and Kathryn Sullivan represented the Holloman family in the case.
Charlotte W. Holloman died in the summer of 2015, nearly a year after the lawsuit was filed.
In May 2013, just before the home was vacated in preparation for demolition, family friend Robert Tignor recalled summer days sitting at the kitchen table and watching osprey and oystercatchers. “It’s sort of a landmark,” he told the Gazette at the time.
And while the small house that sat on a tidal sand spit in the Lagoon is gone, Ms. Holloman said this week warm memories linger of her time spent there.
“I never took it for granted ,” she said. “We worked hard to nurture that location because of what it was and what it represented. We were able to watch other people enjoy the landscape, the shoreline . . . . For everything people wanted to come to the Island to do, you could do them on that spot. Kayaks could come there, people could fish, clam, people could snorkel.”
She concluded:
“It was a phenomenal thing.
“And it’s over.”
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