From the August 30, 1965 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

So the day after tomorrow will be the beginning of September. The lavender blossoms of rose of sharon bushes are already pronouncing a dirge for August, the cat tails are brown and full, the sun lopes lazily, the spirit of arrival blends with the spirit of departure, and nature, usually so purposeful, has nothing to do. This makes for a feeling of assurance and content.

In ruddy fields the everlastings are crisp and white. The Sound is a deeper blue. Meteorologists of the air waves talk about radiational cooling and after a new chill in the night the first white hazes lie like smoke over Island ponds.

They say the wild grape harvest will be excellent, and news of the beach plums is as mixed and ambiguous as usual. Schools will be open next week, but will there be insects buzzing in the languorous air? Probably not, for schoolrooms are well screened nowadays, but children at their desks can watch the fingers of sunlight and shadow on the walls and floors.

Summer slips away into September, and before the month is ended it will have kept its tryst with fall at the appointed leveling of the autumnal equinox.

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One of the last of the very old houses in Edgartown to remain completely unrestored, the ancient and derelict Worth house on the corner of North Water street and Simpson’s Lane, is to get a new lease on life. The house and the old Chester E. Pease house next door on North Water street have been bought by William L. Parker of Redding, Conn., from Mrs. Alfred Hall.

Mr. Parker, who was on the Island last week, was not prepared to go into detail concerning his plans for the property, which includes a large number of garages, an old barn and another outbuilding as well as the two houses, but he did say that it was his intention to embark on an extensive program of restoration on both the Worth and the Pease houses to bring them back to their original states as pure New England “half houses.” He indicated that he realized that the restoration of the Worth house, which has lain in disuse and growing disrepair for a number of years, would be a special challenge.

Mr. Parker said that he had restored his own home in Redding, a house of similar vintage to his new acquisitions, and had been planning to work on others in the Connecticut town until he came to Edgartown, which he has found immensely to his liking.

The property, which has the shape of a long rectangle extending through the block, with a smaller rectangle cut out to form the Herbert R. Simpson property on Simpson’s Lane, came into Mrs. Hall’s possession by inheritance from her uncle, Mr. Pease, who died in 1951.

Mr. and Mrs. Pease made the second house from the corner their home for many years, but Mr. Simpson recalls that a family named Darrell lived there before the Peases. However, the Summer street end of the tract was Pease country even before. Mr. Pease’s father, John Pease, moved his stable business from where the old telephone office on North Summer now stands to the location farther up the street, the late Theodore S. Wimpenney recalled in his reminiscences taken down by his daughter, Miss Mary Wimpenney.

The elder Mr. Pease lived in the house on the corner of North Summer and Simpson’s Lane that is now the home of Mrs. Russell E. Wells, which had been moved, Mr. Wimpenney believed, from Main street where the courthouse now stands. The stable business was continued by the son of the founder until the arrival of the automobile age, and the transition from stabling to garaging was begun.

The Worth house was the home for many years of Mrs. Joseph Baylies Worth, whose husband died when their daughter, the late Mrs. C. C. Nevin, was only 3 years old. Mrs. Nevin lived in the house until her marriage to the late Dr. C. C. Nevin and she moved to the Shiverick house on Pease’s Point Way. Also for a time many years ago, Mrs. Worth’s parents, the Daniel Dexters, lived there after they had sold their South Water street home. Mrs. Nevin’s daughter, Mrs. Kenneth T. Galley, remembers her grandmother Worth well, and recalls many happy hours spent in the house. She thinks that perhaps since the Dexters were originally a South Water street family, the house may well have been in her grandfather’s family for some years before his marriage to her grandmother, but is not sure.

Mrs. Nevin inherited the Worth house from her mother, and she in turn sold it to Mr. Pease, who took advantage of his ownership of the house next door to add a sunporch to his own home, bringing the two dwellings even closer together than the customary closeness that characterizes Edgartown domesticity of one period.

Down through the years, neither time nor Mr. Pease’s sunporch nor the strange excrescence above the doorway of the Worth house have dimmed the potential charm of the dwellings.

Compiled by Hilary Wallcox
library@vineyardgazette.com