Edgartown is booming with renovations and new construction, invigorating the economy and contributing mightily to the Island’s population explosion. But perhaps this growth is also contributing to the loss of the town’s truly historic fabric — its colonial and 19th century interiors and the knowledge as well as beauty that long-forgotten craftsmen left to us. Ancient interiors simply disappear and do so without documentation. It is as if no one cares.

The Cooke/Mayhew/Shinn house at Cooke and School streets, which was built around 1740 and still has its historic exterior (more or less), has lost its two great brick chimneys with, we assume, a cooking fireplace and beehive oven in at least one of them. Where were they and just what were they like? Shouldn’t we be able to learn about our colonial domestic technology in high-end circles? Then there were the four great fireplace walls with raised paneling. I was told that they were taken away for conservation would be put back in place. They weren’t. I now hear that they went “someplace South”. If conservation work did take place, we could have the conservator’s photos, measured drawings, and materials analyses with, perhaps, the dendrochronology or carbon 14 dating that would tell us when and where the trees from which they were made were felled. There could even be makers’ marks so that we could learn who our talented colonial builders were. The Martha’s Vineyard Museum across the street would be an appropriate repository for such documentation. This house was one of the Vineyard’s two or three great 18th century mansions, and it remained in the Island’s foundational Mayhew family until recently. It deserves a permanent record even if the interiors have go to make way for modernity. Perhaps the real deal must disappear because a higher bathroom-to-bed ratio is needed for whatever reasons.

Historic districting does not protect interiors, so what happened to the Cooke-Shinn house is perfectly legal. But it fails as stewardship because such demolitions erase our cultural history and aesthetic values. This is happening again at the same intersection with the Norton-Achelis house across Cooke street from the museum’s gate house. In this case we do have a few published interior photos as well as some serious research, but I know of no measured drawings of the now-lost plan. Architectural historian Jonathan F. Scott included this house in his excellent Pioneer Houses of Martha’s Vineyard. Dr. Scott, who combines documentary research with construction analysis, believes that the house was built between 1700 and 1720. He was frustrated, however, that he could not see inside the plastered interior walls to establish the corner posts’ measurements. A post diameter can be a time and place indicator. Did those who took away the innards catch that information and pass it along before destroying the evidence? Did anyone make a measured plan? How about that rare good-morning staircase? And how about saving labeled wood samples? There has been a public call from the distinguished historian who analyzed Sheriff’s Meadow’s Hancock-Mitchell house to collect wood samples from more of the Island’s old buildings so that we can establish a dating matrix with tree-ring analysis. The last time I saw the Norton-Achelis house, it was it was its outermost skin only hanging in the air with nothing inside or underneath. I have heard that most of its remaining exteriors have been replaced too.

Edgartown needs a preservation architect, one that respects what is there along with respecting her ability to design a persuasive historic façade or squeeze in ever more bathrooms and garages for, one suspects, an AirBNB or private hotel. A preservation architect might have enough love for an old building’s craftsmanship to communicate those pleasures to a clueless client. Yes, old rooms tend to be smaller than what many think they need. But these smaller rooms are also well compensated by subtleties in spatial proportioning and the varieties of light coming from different directions. There are domestic charms in doorway views from room to room and in the shifting perceptions of daylight and greenery as we move about them. Finally, there are priceless architectural details that the next generation — or even our own when we start looking — will yearn for. Our descendants will be mighty tired of our open plans, cathedral ceilings, and granite counter tops and just might want what once was.We owe them the evidence for rebuilding the past since we seem so determined to obliterate it.

Ellen Weiss
West Tisbury and New Orleans