At the end of a long dirt road in Chilmark, a huge white tent arches above the meadows at Quansoo Farm. Inside the tent is the historic Mayhew-Hancock-Mitchell House, under renovation since last year.
Today the weight of history is more apparent than ever at the Mayhew Chapel, with its moss-covered roof, peeling white paint and crumbling ceiling. New efforts are underway to restore the chapel, clear out the underbrush in the burial ground and take inventory of the ancient fieldstones that mark the graves.
Once located on Beach Street in Vineyard Haven where the Stop & Shop now stands, the Great House served for years as a tavern before being moved to its present location on West Chop.
Twelve years in the making, the complicated deal with the town, the land bank and the Howard B. Hillman family will create affordable housing, add conservation land and save a historic home in Chilmark.
Terry and Marcia Martinson began to move into an old house looking down on the Edgartown harbor this week. Unlike most people who live on the Island waterfront these days, the Martinsons will live there year-round. But taking the whole history of the place into account, their time in the home will be short.
With the much-discussed big-house bylaw now a fact of life in Chilmark, discussion at the town planning board this week turned to preservation of historic houses.
Pamela Goff, who owns a pre-Revolutionary house off Tea Lane, asked the board to consider an amendment to the bylaw approved by voters last year to regulate very large houses. The first-of-its-kind bylaw could have the unintended consequence of actually encouraging people to demolish old houses instead of preserving them, Mrs. Goff said.
An old house on South Water street in Edgartown changes hands. The previous owners had deep Vineyard roots and a sense of social justice ahead of its years. But the whale is not there anymore.
A complicated three-way land swap designed to create affordable housing, add conservation land and save a historic home is valid and enforceable, a superior court judge found.
The history of Seven Gates Farm goes back to 1887, and for generations a parade of farmers, shareholders and conservationists have done just about all they could to keep the land and buildings of this enclave looking, working and feeling largely unchanged.
Tearing down old buildings is most often cheaper than restoring them, so the sale of two antique houses to private buyers this week marks a positive turn for historic preservation on the Vineyard.
The Old Parsonage in West Tisbury, a seventeenth century farmhouse believed to be the second oldest home on the Island, and the Warren House, an eighteenth century merchant’s home on North Water street in Edgartown, are both in urgent need of extensive renovations.
