The original posts and beams from the 1755 house sag with history. Bittersweet clings to the rafters of the 1850 barn. Milking stalls still stand from the 1950s, waiting for the cows to come home.

Tea Lane Farm has been many things in its more than 250-year history — a longtime dairy farm, once a vegetable farm and even host to a Revolutionary War contraband tea operation.

Now, with any luck the old farm off Middle Road in Chilmark will soon get another lease on life with a new tenant farmer.

Stonewalls and outbuildings dot the 51 acres of land. — Mark Alan Lovewell

Chilmark town leaders are hoping to return it to a working farm. The town hosts an open house tomorrow for prospective farmers interested in renting the house and surrounding farmland.

Perched on the top of a hill off Middle Road, the farmhouse is 256 years old. In the 1920s a covered arched porch in front and rear dormer were added; otherwise, the house remains intact from its earliest days.

The front porch creaks when walked on, and some say it’s only a matter of time before someone falls through. Inside the house, the rooms are small, the ceilings low and sagging. The entryway is so narrow that the front door, master bedroom door and door to the upstairs can only be opened one at a time. Original two-foot wide floorboards are intact throughout, their paint chipped and faded.

The farmhouse has framing typical of the 18th century, and the house is a three-quarter Cape. Downstairs there are two small bedrooms, a kitchen, pantry and bathroom. Up a set of steep stairs hidden behind a door are three more small bedrooms, carved out of the eaves.

Beams sag and dishes remain untouched. — Mark Alan Lovewell

The house is uninsulated.

The town is looking for a tenant farmer to lease the property as-is for 75 years with a $20,000 one-time payment. The tenant farmer will be responsible for a long list of improvements spelled out in the lease. The farmer is also required to live on the property 11 months out of the year, and cannot sublet the farm.

A plan for the farmland will be up to the tenant farmer. Letters of interest from prospective farmers are due Jan. 13.

“We will evaluate any plans anyone gives us, we’re not saying no to anything,” said Chilmark selectman Warren Doty during a tour for the Gazette at the farm this week. “It seems to me I would give priority to someone who is growing and selling their food, but we have a lot of people who question who in their right mind would do this. And we do need to look at the financial viability of someone doing it.”

“We have to know you have a plan to support yourself, and it’s not likely that farming this plot of land is going to give you an annual income to support a family,” he added.

Farm plans will be evaluated by a specially-appointed town committee, which will award the lease to one tenant. There will not be a lottery system.

Warren Doty: “could be a place for a greenhouse.” — Mark Alan Lovewell

“We really want it to work so we would like to evaluate the farm plans, and say this farm plan is the one we like best, then maybe we’ll have a second and third choice,” Mr. Doty said.

This marks the fourth attempt for the town to work out a plan for the farm. The selectmen last proposed spending $550,000 to restore the house to living condition, a plan that was turned down by voters last fall. Voters previously rejected requests to upgrade the property – a $150,000 request at the annual town meeting last year and a $300,000 request at a special town meeting last fall.

The town and the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank jointly bought the 51-acre farm in 2001, giving a life estate to Bobby Silva, who lived in the house. He died in February 2010.

The town owns the farmhouse, three outbuildings and the surrounding three acres. The land bank owns the remaining 48 acres of farmland. The tenant farmer will hold a separate lease with the land bank. About 15 acres can actually be farmed — the rest is swamp and heavily wooded land.

Where cows once came home for milking. — Mark Alan Lovewell

The leasing plan is still subject to approval by voters at the annual town meeting in April. The warrant will also include a $100,000 article from the community preservation committee to go toward the renovation of the house, if voters agree. The money would go directly to the tenant for repairs.

Recorded history of the farmhouse is scant. It is one of four neighboring homes on Tea Lane and North Road built around the same time by the Hillman family in the mid-1700s. A nephew of the family, Robert Hillman, was a sea captain who brought contraband tea to his ailing Aunt Eunice at the farmhouse, giving Tea Lane its name.

The ownership history between the Revolutionary War era and the early 20th century is unclear. The family of Virginia Jones, a longtime West Tisbury resident, owned the property for about 10 years in the early 1900s before the Silva family purchased it. The Silvas ran the farm as a dairy until the 1970s. When the house was cleaned out recently, journals dating to the 1750s and 1760s were found containing entries for bushels of corn and bartered items.

Tea Lane was once a hub of Chilmark town life, and the Chilmark Community Church (with no steeple) once sat in the front pasture of the Tea Lane Farm property on Middle Road. The church was later moved to its current location on the Menemsha Crossroad location; this is when the steeple was added.

The house has been largely untouched since Mr. Silva’s death two years ago. Charming country chicken and house wallpaper is on the walls; in the kitchen and pantry bright blue cabinets hold utensils well worn from use.

There are four outbuildings, including the old dairy barn with its red door.

Beyond the barns lie fenced fields. This past summer the land bank leased the property to Mermaid Farm for grazing cattle. Mr. Doty kicked a pile of frozen dung left by the cows.

“It could be cropland or pasture land or a garden plot, maybe even make one of the buildings a greenhouse,” he said, adding: “I think the soils would not get a high grade.”

For now it is wait and see.

“Our goal is to see who’s interested and go from there,” Mr. Doty said.

The open house tomorrow is from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.; all are welcome. Interested farmers who are unable to attend can call Chuck Hodgkinson, farm committee administrator, at 508-645-2114 or e-mail chodgkinson@chilmarkma.gov to arrange a time to visit the property.