The 300-year-old Vincent House, perhaps the oldest home on the Island, is open once again to the public in Edgartown for the summer.

 

The remarkable aspect of this house is it’s architecture. There are only limited furnishings inside, and the restorers - John Warren Norton, Anne Baker and C. Stuart Avery of the Martha’s Vineyard Historic Preservation Society - have fashioned the house in the most interesting way possible.

 

The trustees of the two-year-old Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Society have begun a campaign - low-key, by mail - for funds and something besides.

 

“At the moment we are preparing a federal tax exemption application requesting tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service,” says a letter signed by trustees Paul R. Anderson and C. Stuart Avery. “In making this request we are anxious to show the Internal Revenue Service that what started out as an interest of a group of people does have public support and is likely to continue to do  so.”

 

The columns on the Dr. Daniel Fisher house in Edgartown could not be called fakes, because they certainly have done their job of holding up the portico for over 130 years. They are better called copies, for originally they were designed for the Tower of Winds built in Athens from 100 to 35 B. C., and they come highly recommended by Asher Benjamin, who was the godfather of this period of American architecture.

 

An agreement to sell Edgartown’s handsome Dr. Daniel Fisher house on Main street, built in 1840 for that great whaling era figure, has been reached between Island Properties, who president is Dr. Alvin M. Strock, its owner for the past seven years, and a newly formed nonprofit corporation, the Daniel Fisher Corporation.

 

The old house on Main street, Edgartown, which has been referred to as the Edson house, has received an official and appropriate christening. It is now the Desire Osborn House, called after James Coffin’s youngest child, Desire Allen Coffin, who married John Osborn in 1813, and for whom the house was moved to its present site from the neighborhood of Mill Hill.