Looking Back at Life on Tea Lane

I keep getting pulled back to the Island. This time it was an article about Tea Lane written in 1953 by Joseph Chase Allen, reprinted a few weeks ago in the Gazette.

When I decided to abandon New York City in 1985, the plan was to build a house on Martha’s Vineyard, raise dairy goats and homestead on a plot of land off Tea Lane — three things I knew absolutely nothing about. I didn’t realize that Tea Lane would become a defining part of my new Island identity.

Not long after I arrived, I learned that my property had once been the Silva Homestead, already derelict when it collapsed during the brutal hurricane of 1938. My early attempts at landscaping took meandering detours each time I dug a hole to plant something and hit rusted farm implements, pottery shards and glazed crockery, turning my landscaping efforts into amateur archeology.

The home building progressed slowly over time along with a vegetable garden and a growing herd of dairy goats. Before long my days began by milking goats and ended by milking again. People asked if I didn’t feel tied down. It wasn’t something that occurred to me before, but yes, tied down in ways more wonderful than I could possibly describe. The metronome of life had shifted from the crazy artificial maelstrom of urban life to the age-old rhythms of a spinning planet, and my life revolved around breeding, birthing, milking and planting.

My goats and I went walking nearly every day, down into the woods, across the stone walls that bordered my property into unexplored areas. I discovered an old clay pit that had been turned into a rubbish dump with bits of leather harnesses, shoes, bottles and the detritus of lives long gone. In the middle of my woods, I found a sphagnum patch that dried in summer to a lush carpet I could lie on. The goats and I wandered farther afield just to see where we’d emerge from the woods before heading home with a dozen goats leading the way.

I met many of the Tea Lane Old Timers like Bobby Silva and his cow down at the Tea Lane Farm, which is now managed by Krishana Collins, and Walter Sherwood, a retired barber, and his wife Natalie (nee Engley). I met the wonderfully irascible Lew King, owner of The Blueberry Inn, and, of course, Trina Kingsbury who had a storied reputation all her own.

I also encountered the famously private Edwin Newhall Woods, who lived in a converted icehouse on over 500 acres, and Francis Sayre, grandson of Woodrow Wilson, who was born in the White House. He confided that he’d sometimes liked to lie in the brook that ran along the edge of his property to cool off on a hot summer’s day.

But it was Frank Dunkl who let me in on a special bit of little-known Tea Lane lore shortly after I opened Offshore Ale, the Island’s first commercial brewery in Oak Bluffs in 1997. He told me there were some hops growing not far from my house, protected by a thicket of blackberries. I found them and collected the sticky blossoms used to impart bitterness to beer and added them to a batch at the brewery.

According to Bartholomew Gosnold’s diary, the ship’s supply of ale was running low, and barley was planted on the Island he had just named Martha’s Vineyard. Could those hops climbing up a telephone pole along Tea Lane be East Kent Goldings, the variety used in English ale? Could they have been grown from rhizomes brought by early colonial settlers?

Lester, the class clown and lovable gentle giant of my herd didn’t seem terribly interested in the mystery of the hops although he enjoyed draining an entire bottle of beer in one long swallow. And Nibby, the herd’s venerable and grumpy queen couldn’t be bothered with such matters since she spent her time alone in the pasture on moonless nights with head tipped up at the vast array of stars overhead, pondering more important mysteries.

My homesteading life eventually faded as my restaurant career took hold. The hayloft, which once occupied the entire end of the house, became a bedroom and the vacant barn directly below it became a sad reminder that those wonderful years of homesteading had ended.

Over the years rambling along that beautiful dirt lane, I met a retired judge, a lobsterman, an inventor, a five-time Olympian, several doctors and a Cuban refugee who arrived as a child during the Peter Pan airlift. There was a magazine editor, an artist, a builder, a chef, a photographer, a passionate conservationist, another homesteader and the infamous real estate mogul and force of nature who wanted to pave Tea Lane. There was also an outlaw, a few miscreants and one or two wastrels like me, each sharing in the indescribable charm of that shady byway described in Joseph Chase Allen’s article written 73 years ago.

When it happened, my time on the Island ended as abruptly and unexpectedly as how it had begun over 30 years before. The mysterious origin of those hops would never be revealed, but Tea Lane would always remain a formative part of the life I’m still trying to unravel.

Robert Skydell lives in Antigua, Guatemala.

This article appears in July 31, 2026.