Dr. Theodore Dreier Jr., a Seven Gates Farm summer resident whose family spans five generations of Vineyard life, died peacefully on Feb. 4 at Care Dimensions Hospice House in Lincoln. He was 89.

In 1972, Theodore and his wife Katharine built a post-and-beam house modeled on a neighboring barn, developing a Seven Gates site given to them by his parents, Barbara Loines Dreier and Theodore Dreier Sr.

Barbara Dreier’s parents, Russell Hillard Loines and Katherine Conger Loines, had helped to found Seven Gates in the early 1900s. Straddling West Tisbury and Chilmark along Vineyard Sound, the farm is one of the Island’s oldest planned communities.

Ted and Kit, as they were known, enjoyed 43 years of family gatherings at the rustic shorefront home they called Cranberry Hollow.

Ted had a graceful crawl stroke. He enjoyed swimming and snorkeling in the Sound, clearing brush and gardening, and joining friends and neighbors for cookouts, sing-alongs and charades.

In his 80s, he sang in the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and returned to writing poetry, drawing and painting. Toward the end of his life, he retained his ability to waltz and to appreciate music ranging from classical to bluegrass.

Longevity runs in the family. Ted’s mother, Bobby, died at 99 in 2006. His aunt, Margot Wilkie, who also came to the Vineyard almost every summer of her life, died on the island at 101 in 2013.

Born in Albany, N.Y., he acquired the nickname Quintus as the fifth Theodore Dreier in his family. When he was four, the family moved from Winter Park, Fla., to North Carolina, where his parents helped found Black Mountain College.

As a boy, Ted attended the Asheville Farm School. He enjoyed raising goats, naming them Abercrombie and Fitch.

After graduating from Vermont’s Putney School, he attended Black Mountain College for two years. He transferred to Harvard, where he majored in music, graduating cum laude in 1952.

Throughout his life, he oscillated between two main themes, artistic expressive and intellectual scientific, as he described them in Harvard reunion notes. Before switching to embark on a medical career, he had prepared to become a professional musician in Germany.

He graduated from the Temple University School of Medicine in 1961. His psychiatric practice spanned the life cycle, beginning with children, at Boston Children’s Hospital, then proceeding to couples’ therapy and evolving to specialize in geriatrics at McLean Hospital in Belmont, where he worked for more than 30 years.

At a Cambridge dinner party in 1965, he met Katharine Eaton Read, a recently widowed mother of two and teacher at Shady Hill School. Kit, a fellow cellist, invited him to join her chamber music group. Their courtship included visits to her family in Vermont and his parents on Martha’s Vineyard and in Lake George, N.Y. With two small cars, they could not drive anywhere together with their cellos.

The couple married in 1967. The family, which had grown to fit into a Volkswagen bus, settled into a Cambridge home where they lived until 1994, when Ted and Kit moved to Belmont.

Survivors include his wife Kit of Lincoln; a sister Barbara Beate Dreier of Livingston Manor, N.Y.; three daughters, Katharine Read Villars of Norwich, Vt., Elizabeth Low Dreier of Menlo Park, Calif., and Ruth Antoinette Dreier, of Santa Rosa, Calif.; son Richard Read of Portland, Ore.; and one granddaughter. Two brothers, Mark and Edward, predeceased him.

A memorial gathering will be held on May 12 in Belmont.

Donations in his name can be made to the Vineyard Conservation Society, www.vineyardconservation.org or the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, www.blackmountaincollege.org.