Many houses are torn down or even lost to fire on Chappy, but they are quickly replaced by new houses. I can think of only a handful that were not rebuilt.

The first that comes to mind is the old Bettencourt house on Caleb’s Pond road. It was built into the hillside facing the pond. The burned-out stone foundation remains today though it’s so overgrown that you have to know where to look. A stone stairway is constructed of small granite chunks that are suspiciously similar to the stone out at the East Beach jetties.

Not far away on the main road was the Mary Harris Frances compound. It was a rambling two-story prefab house put together in the late ‘70s. It was still there in the spring of 1995 in the Google Earth satellite photo. In the 2001 photo, there is only a sandy area remaining. The structure, foundation and even the gravel driveway were removed for conservation purposes. Very slowly, the vegetation has returned.

Up on the high bluffs of North Neck was the Champ house. It was an extensive, flat-roofed, glass-fronted architectural creation. Most Chappy carpenters took a turn at trying to get the roof to stop leaking. Google Earth shows it there in February of 2018; 10 months later, it was gone, also removed for conservation. The folks from affordable housing took away truckloads of reusable materials. Humans must have had a hand in the rapid return of the vegetation there.

Out at Cape Pogue, on the shore of Shear Pen Pond, the wooden wreckage of Isaac Pease’s house was still visible in the late ‘60s. We had no reason to doubt the stories that his spirit was still hanging around there. All you had to do was walk along the road that led to the Self’s boathouse on a foggy night to see him standing right where his house stood.

Before the hurricane of 1938, there were several structures at Chappy Point. There were a couple of garages and the pump house for the underground fuel tanks. Those tanks were dug up when the electric wires were buried just over a decade ago. Half of the former ferry house is all that remains at the point now.

There is also a story of a tiny camp many years ago among the East Beach cedars north of the Dike. I leave the details about that one to those with a longer Chappy memory.