Oldest house in Dewey for sale

Dewey oldest house is easy to miss, surrounded on three sides by three-storied, setback-maxing buildings, with a two-story building on the fourth.

It’s also for sale, and before it gets torn down and rebuilt like its neighbors, current owner Tracy Phillips said she’s enjoying every last minute she has in the house.

“I don’t want to sell. It’s not easy,” said Phillips of the For Sale sign. She was recently in town for her annual long weekend with friends from high school who have been coming with her to Dewey for decades. “This has been a great place to grow up and now raise kids of my own. My grandparents had opportunities to move to Rehoboth, but they never wanted to.”

Known by locals as the “Y House” after it served as a YMCA summer camp for Baltimore youth in the 1920s, the Caribbean-blue, two-and-a-half-story structure is landlocked and tucked away behind a fence off McKinley Avenue, a stone footpath on a shared right of way the only access.

Phillips, 48, grew up and still lives in Lancaster, Pa. She has been spending summers at the house her entire life. Her grandparents, Frank and Verla Phillips, bought the house in the 1970s, and she has a deed dated from 1898.

“I couldn’t wait for school to be out, when I was growing up,” said Phillips. “It was all I thought about.”

Sarah Dougherty, whose family ties in Dewey date back to days when people covered themselves in kerosene oil before going crabbing in the town’s yet-to-be-developed bayside marshes so they weren’t sucked dry by mosquitoes, confirms this is the oldest existing structure in Dewey.

“It’s one of the last remaining survivors of old Dewey,” said Dougherty, who assumed the role of town historian in 2015 after her mother Barbara, the original town historian, died. “It’s really amazing.”

Dougherty, who said she would like to see it saved, complemented Phillips’ family with keeping true to the house all these years.

“The family has it well kept,” she said.

There have been some changes over the years, said Phillips, but they’ve been minimal. She said a portion of a wrap-around porch got torn off during the Storm of ‘62, storm windows have been installed, a summer kitchen was enclosed, a small addition for storage was built, and electricity was run to all three floors in the 1970s. The beadboard on the walls, the hardwood flooring and a significant portion of the cedar shingling are all the same, she said.

The house is pretty much the same as when it was built, Phillips said, adding that a bureau on the second floor was in the house when her grandparents bought it, and two wicker chairs in the living room survived being buried in sand from the famous storm 50 years ago. On the stairwell and ceiling beams are the names and dates left behind by users of the YMCA camp and others over the years. It’s just a tradition the family wanted to keep alive, Phillips said.

Phillips said the house, built on tree stumps, used to have a couple feet of space underneath it, and she can remember playing underneath the house as a youngster. Now, the house looks like it was built on the sand, Phillips said, because storms have filled in the space over the years. A set of steps off the back of the porch, and its handrail, lead into the sand for the same reason.

Phillips said she isn’t sure why the house has survived, but she has theories. She said other than a brief period after it was first built, the house has been surrounded by other structures for its entire existence. She also said the tree stump foundation would sway back and forth during bad storms, and she thinks that helped the house absorb storm-related energy.

Phillips said she’s forgotten more memories at the house than she can remember. One memory she’ll never forget, she said, is the time a whole pot of live crabs, freshly caught using chicken necks in Rehoboth Bay, got dumped on the kitchen floor as her grandmother was getting them ready for dinner.

“They just scattered,” she said, laughing. “There are just so many memories.”

On the northeast corner of the lot, and unusual in southern Dewey, are pine trees and other plant life more commonly found on the back side of dunes in Delaware Seashore State Park to the south. Phillips said her grandparents loved having the open space.

“The property has a pretty big footprint, but we’ve just never used it at all,” she said.

On the market for less than $1 million, Phillips said there has been some interest in the house, and she said, all of it involves tearing down the house. She said she doesn’t have any ill feelings toward a buyer who might demolish and replace.

Phillips said she’s just grateful her grandparents were beach bums who liked this little, cozy house in Dewey.

“We’ve never rented the house out. This was a real family place,” she said.