We had a long, romantic lead-in to owning this home. We used to have a cottage nearby and would pass this house on the way to ours, always admiring it from afar. We finally got a close-up look around 2010 when we stopped in to the huge estate sale happening. We clearly remember wandering around betwixt awe and horror thinking, "Whoever gets this place will have their hands FULL." We hoped resourceful friends would buy it. But it sat, and sat.
In 2018, life triangulated us to be there on the exact day we needed to be to make her ours. So, now WE have our hands wonderfully full with the honor of being the next family to love and care for her. We have decades of projects lined up but we force ourselves to stop and enjoy it, as we hope you will, too. We think the house is happy that more laughs and happy times are being had within the walls. Sometimes we can't help but wonder about all of the world news shared and chewed over here; the work and tending that once was a large swath of the area, now down to these two acres.
Neat tidbit. We have heard some history from the family who owned for 120+ years. It seems that the man who purchased in 1869 was the descendent of a young man who had come from England via the headwright system in the 17th century. He ended up purchasing the home from a descendent of the man who'd received acreage for "sponsoring" his own forefather. Many of the old homes in the Fleeton area were/are owned by members of both families.
The nearby remnants of one of the areas many fish factories (only Omega remains) was the Douglas Menhaden Company, owned by the same family, generations of fishing boat captains turned area businessmen. Americus "Mac" Douglas was the longest resident of the home.
Take a paddle out the cove, heading toward the Bay, and you can see the collapsed brick fish processing stack up close. It's marked "ruins" on the map.