Backstory: North Main Saltbox Restored Over Nearly Half a Century

Today, on the northeast corner of Cedar Street and North Main Street in East Hampton, a historic 18th century saltbox house sits centered on two acres of well-mowed lawn. It’s a model farm, a museum for farm tools, wagons and carriages.  And lots of events, lectures and outdoor barbecues get held there.

When I bought a house upstreet from there in the 1970s however, those two acres were an impenetrable woods of trees, bushes and weeds. I’d drive by on my way to work every day. Certainly there was no house on that corner.

About 10 years in, however, I drove by to see an old man building a fence along the North Main Street stretch, starting out at the end farthest from downtown. He had a hammer, nails and a pile of lumber. His fence would be of clapboard, four feet high.  Working hard banging it together, he was proceeding with it down to the corner.

I also now noticed, for the first time, that deep in the foliage high up there was some shingled roof.  There was a house in there. Covered with vines, perhaps.

The man was not out there every day. But it was enough to move the project along, bit by bit, anyway. After a few months he reached the corner and, turning 90 degrees, continued with it up Cedar Street. It had taken a year.  Maybe he lived in there. I wondered why he bothered to fence it in. The foliage was so impregnable.

Then one day, six months later, I saw him out there again. He had drop cloths, buckets of paint, brushes and a ladder. He’d begun painting where he’d first built it, and he’d already painted the first ten feet of it white. Soon he would get to the corner, turn up Cedar and finish it.

But it never happened.   When the white paint got to about halfway down to the corner, it stopped.   And it stayed stopped for the next ten years. – painted halfway down, then raw wood the rest of the way to the corner and up Cedar.  I had no idea what happened to that man. But if I had to guess, I’d say he died. I still don’t know what happened to him.

It’s a long time, 10 years, to see a fence partly painted like that. But then one day, this was about 1995, the fence got taken down, the foliage removed, the lawn mowed and voila, there was this saltbox house.  The town announced it would make it a farm museum.

But it would need to be fixed up first. And that, it turned out, took even longer than the quarter painted fence. One day a shutter would come off a window. Eight years later the other shutter would come off. One day half an outside wall was newly re-shingled. Nine years later the shingles had darkened and they matched the dark old shingles on the other half of the wall. But someone was on a ladder removing the old shingles and replacing them with new light-colored shingles, so it still wouldn’t match.

Watching these repairs creeping along as I drove past this project every day, I began to see that workmen were only out there fixing it up on weekends. They had jobs on weekdays. They must have volunteered their weekends. They’d get around to it.

I think it was in 2014 that the old saltbox got finished. Uh, 45 years?  It’s now quite beautiful.  Sometimes things like that take time in the Hamptons.

Have a East End real estate story? Want to share? Text us at 516-527-3566. We’ll call you back, and then write it up for this weekly column. –Dan