In a move that is expected to knock down many established barriers to the land protection movement, The Nature Conservancy announced this week that it will buy and put into private conservation 103 acres of land along the Edgartown Great Pond. The property just last year was planned for a private luxury golf club.

Formerly owned by Katharine and Robert Bigelow, the property stretches from Meetinghouse Way to the Kanomika Neck shore of the Great Pond fronting Mashacket Cove, and includes a large expanse of globally rare sandplain grassland.

Ending months of debate, untold numbers of hours of public testimony and weeks of bruising deliberations, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission voted 7 to 6 last night to deny a proposal for a private 18-hole golf club on some 200 acres of land along the Edgartown Great Pond.

The developers who recently lost their bid to build a private golf club on some 200 acres of land along the Edgartown Great Pond intend to file a new plan and try again.

“We are neither dead nor finished,” declared a letter sent to the founding members of the Meeting House Golf Club one day after the plan was voted down by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.

The letter was sent by mail and by fax to 30 seasonal residents of the Vineyard who advanced some $2 million in start-up money for the failed golf course project.

Chip Chop, the richly storied waterfront estate built by stage actress Katharine Cornell that has graced the entrance to Lake Tashmoo in Vineyard Haven for nearly 80 years, goes up for sale today.

Heavy on Island hotels with a handful of fun and games in the mix, Boston-based developer Charles Hajjar and wife Anne own properties in Edgartown and Oak Bluffs.

The Goldstein family has owned the Mansion House at the head of Main street Vineyard Haven for the past four decades, with Sherman and Susan Goldstein buying the hotel in February 1986.

Larkin Stallings, the owner of the Ritz Cafe in Oak Bluffs, realized his prospects of becoming a famous bass guitarist were grim shortly after opening his first music club.

One of a handful of female owners of main street properties when she founded Claudia in Vineyard Haven in 1971, Claudia Canerdy says she never thought of herself as an anomaly.

Sitting on a bench in front of Vineyard Scoops ice cream shop, Geno Courtney spends his days surveying Edgartown’s downtown.

The Hall family history of Island real estate ownership runs deep in all three down-Island main streets and beyond.