If you’re here, take a ride — just about every building on Circuit avenue is being updated. If you’re longing for your return trip, it will be finished when you arrive.

When the Oak Bluffs Land & Wharf Company built Oak Bluffs, the homes, hotels and buildings were constructed of wood, perhaps, as my father suggested, out of Loblolly pine — a fast-growing tree grown throughout the southeast coast. Clay from the old brickyard in Menemsha was used for bricks. Making bricks from clay required heat by burning wood, and from the mid 1700s to 1930 when the yard operated, this consumption of both proved unsustainable. As a result, my family home, for example, is one of only a few with a brick basement in the Cottage City Historic District.

Involved with another project at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, I fortuitously came across Lucy P. Vincent Smith, who was asked in 1929 to write about the Cottage City of 50 years prior.