'The Little House' Is Saved

“The Little House” in Wainscott met both of its possible fates this week: it was torn down, but it was also saved.

The tiny wooden shack on Wainscott Hollow Road, a relic of the fading agrarian character of Wainscott being pushed aside for the expanding seaside-resort one, was carefully dismantled on Monday and Tuesday, even as bulldozers began excavating the foundation of the modern new mansion that will sprout from the former farm fields behind it.

Esperanza Leon, the artist who had led a drive to save the structure, said that luxury homebuilder Michael Davis Construction had volunteered to dismantle the shack and store the century-old boards until a new property can be identified where it will be reassembled in a setting that harks to its history.

“I am so excited I can hardly contain myself — I’m pinching myself, in fact, and almost afraid to believe it,” Ms. Leon said when word came that MDC would rescue the building as a deadline from the new owners for its removal, rather than demolition, approached. “This sudden, fortuitous development affords us time to fundraise and properly plan the future of this little house.”

Ms. Leon said that there is a property very nearby that is a prospective new location and would allow the Little House to be reconstructed in a setting as close as possible to its original.

For decades in the early and mid 20th century, the Little House was home to Black migrant laborers who came to the South Fork to work the Strong family farm fields. The house is not thought to have been occupied since the 1960s and its crumbling frame was to be razed and discarded when construction on the new home began.

Ms. Leon and members of the Wainscott CAC spotlighted the home as a rare connection to the hamlet’s once robust, if seasonal, Black community.