Commentary
A recent Vineyard Gazette article reported a legal challenge by the Cape Cod Commission to the certificate of environmental impact and public interest issued to Cape Wind by the unanimous vote of the Energy Facilities Siting Board (EFSB).
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.
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.
Recently the natural resources department of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) was honored at the state house as a Champion of Toxics Use Reduction for our lead-free Vineyard fishing project, which encouraged fishermen to adopt non-lead tackle.
Brown University, Tufts University, Wellesley College, Middlebury College, American University, University of Virginia. Two senior males. All the rest senior women. And there were more. And all of them women. And all of them with honors. All to be celebrated in a special way, not just for graduating from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, but for graduating with special recommendations.