Margaret Ferris, 86, Loved Morning Walks on Beach

Margaret (Miggie) Allan Ferris died August 7 in Ithaca, N.Y., near the home of her daughter, Susan Hatch. She was 86.

Miggie was born August 8, 1919. She first came to the Vineyard in the middle of the 1930s to visit her boyfriend's mother, Ada Crump Ferris, on East Chop. She and her future husband, Bob Ferris, came with a chaperone on the steamer overnight from New York city, with a connecting boat in New Bedford - all very romantic except that he had a bad case of impetigo.

Later, they spent their honeymoon in a shack on Tisbury Great Pond. After their first child, Nancy, was born, they stayed in another beach house on Parker's Point, washing the newborn in a galvanized tub. Ada Crump's sister, Julie, had a house on Greenhouse Lane in Chilmark with her husband, Graema Darling. (Peter and Della Darling have it now.) Bob and Miggie spent several vacations there.

In the early fifties, a New York friend of Bob, Horace B.B. Robinson, urged him to build a house in Chilmark. Bob said he didn't want to spend his two weeks of yearly vacation fixing screens. Horace said, "Oh, give me a dollar." Which Bob did - and then forgot all about it.

Next spring, Horace asked Bob to pick a spot in what became Blacksmith Valley. When Bob told him he wasn't interested, Horace said, "But you've already put a dollar down."

What actually happened was that Miggie championed the idea and, that fall, Bill Dugan and Huck Stevenson built the house from a sketch that Miggie had worked out with Bill, literally on an envelope. When Miggie wanted to review a point in the design, Bill said, "Oh, I know what you want." And in the spring, there it was. He had included a dining room table, two side tables that could extend the dining space, and a carving of a striper over the fireplace. Years later, Bob, who was a great fisherman, caught a bass the same size, 23 pounds. Miggie and Bob called the house, "the best thing we ever did."

Moving away from East Chop and the older generation did not meet with everyone's approval. When Ada Crump's dear friend Gus Brooks heard about it, she called to Bob at the beach club: "Robert, come over here."

"Yes, M's Brooks."

"The fields of Chilmark are no place to raise children," she said. And that was to be that.

But Bob and Miggie were undeterred, and spent the next 60 years up-Island with their children and grandchildren, even when it meant driving from Indianapolis. Miggie loved a morning beach walk with each of her dogs. She loved her children and their families, driving them to and from summer jobs, dances and parties. She cooked all caught fish and picked all berries and vegetables. She also loved sailing, being on the Menemsha Pond committee boat, and golf - but she most treasured the open sea and sky. This summer her great-grandchildren were on the beach at Squibnocket.

She will be interred in the cemetery on Abel's Hill.