End of the Boom

So more evidence of the change in the Vineyard’s real estate market is emerging, with Island banks reporting brisk refinancing activity that brings good and bad news for banks, homeowners and our towns.

Rescue This Old House

So the Chilmark historical district commission has given an eighteenth century home — one of just a couple of dozen structures existing on the Island from before the American Revolution ­— six months to live. Inspiring stories abound of patients who beat the odds in doctors’ death sentences, and so too perhaps can houses, provided they have strong advocates.

RARE SURVIVOR

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Carole Cohen misses the point. I did not decide the pre-Revolutionary Tilton/Weckman house was historically significant, the town of Chilmark did, when it designated it as such in the town’s master plan. Which is why public comment is invited before a rare survivor of 250 years of Island history is consigned to a dumpster and lost forever.

From a 1972 Gazette edition:

The little white house behind shrubs at the corner of Cooke street and Tilton Way that, for more than three decades, has been a home away from home for household help in Edgartown, no longer will be welcoming the lonely next summer.

Mrs. Edna Smith, who in 1939, with the late Mrs. Louise Harper conceived the idea of the Open Door Club, a friendly, hospitable place where black help in Edgartown could come on their days off, cook their meals and rest a little, has been forced by poor health to sell her house.

Juneteenth is the celebration of African Ameri can freedom and achievement and the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Tex., with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — which had become official on Jan. 1, 1863.