WELLFLEET — Helen Miranda Wilson says she has been staring at the house at 177 Peace Valley Road her whole life. And what she’s seen there has not always been pretty.
The house, which abuts her own, was condemned by the town’s health dept. in 2018 for health and safety violations. And despite the town’s pursuit of help from the state attorney general’s office to get absentee owner Robert Bonds to take steps to save it, the place continued on a path to ruin. Until last week.
Wilson, an artist and former member of the Wellfleet Select Board, has purchased the formerly grand 19th-century house for $900,000. The transaction was recorded at the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds on May 22.
The sale was “as is,” meaning that restoration of the house, and its costs, now falls on Wilson’s shoulders. The $900,000 went to Bonds, the seller.
A History of Neglect
Boston businessman Robert Bonds bought the 3.7-acre property in 1983 for $65,000. He rented the place out rather than living there. Gradually, it fell into disrepair, with broken windows and holes in the roof that have left the interior filled with rotting walls and unsafe floors.
Wilson had seen owners of the house come and go. “Growing up, I was in and out of that house for years,” she said. Under Bonds’s ownership, groups of young people often rented the large house for the summer. Parties would keep Wilson and her late partner, Tim Woodman, awake until the early morning hours. As Wilson colorfully described it in an earlier report, “It was like living near a biker bar, with people puking in the bushes.”
The house became a source of complaints from neighbors and the town’s regulatory agents as far back as 2001. The building is now uninhabitable.
Condemning the house in 2018 failed to get Bonds to make repairs; that’s when local officials looked to the state for help. The attorney general’s Neighborhood Renewal Division oversees a program under which the state works with property owners to bring houses with severe code violations back into compliance. The attorney general’s office accepted the property into the program in 2023.
No Results From AG Action
Also failing to get results from the owner, the attorney general’s office began the process in Southeast Housing Court of putting the house in receivership in May 2024. Bonds avoided that outcome by signing an agreement in court on July 31, 2024 saying the repair work would be done in 270 days, making his deadline this May.
The grounds were cleared of brush, and some interior demolition was done late last summer. Then the work stalled. The Housing Court judge warned Bonds at a hearing in December that restoration work needed to show considerable progress by the next hearing in mid-May.
Bonds’s contractor, Adrian Moylette, had applied for a building permit in late November, but Building Commissioner Victor Staley told him detailed plans must first be submitted. Those didn’t arrive until late February.
Staley also told Bonds that the demolition portion of the project would require review by the historical commission under the town’s demolition delay bylaw, because the house was more than 75 years old.
David Freed, a Quincy architect hired by Bonds, discussed a proposed renovation plan for the house during an April 2 historical commission hearing. Freed said no demolition was planned because the house was structurally sound. Freed had not been inside the house, but he said someone from his office had done three-dimensional imaging that showed the structure was still solid.
Commission co-chair Merrill Mead-Fox expressed some doubt about that conclusion, pointing out that the house had been open to the elements for several years. But because Bonds’s architect said no demolition would take place, no action could be taken by the historical commission.
Options and Trees
Wilson started negotiating with Bonds for purchase of the property about six weeks ago, according to attorney Bruce Bierhans, who represents Wilson. By the time of the May 21 status hearing in Southeast Housing Court, all that was needed was for the judge to approve the sale, which he did. The sale was recorded at the Registry of Deeds the next day.
For now, Wilson will take Bond’s place as the defendant in the court case. The judge set a date of Aug. 12 to check on her progress.
Bierhans said that although Wilson has been given the information and conceptual plans that Bonds put together, she will do her own evaluation.
“We’re going to assemble a team that will work together to see what the best options for the property are and make this a piece of property that the town is going to be proud of,” Bierhans said.
Wilson has a keen interest in the grounds and its four grand old trees. The ancient American chestnut and Dutch elm qualify as “lingering” trees, having survived diseases that destroyed most others of their kind. “The elm was seeded from the six Dutch elms on my property,” Wilson said. Her own elm trees died of Dutch elm disease. The American chestnut tree is also a survivor of a fungal disease that destroyed many of those trees in the early 20th century. An immense apple tree two stories high still produces edible fruit, said Wilson. A black walnut tree, a good shade provider, also grows there.
“Those trees are, in some ways, as important to me as the house,” Wilson said. It’s been more than a decade since she was inside, but she remembered “the house is pretty wonderful in terms of space.”
According to a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, the Peace Valley Road property is the only one in the four Outer Cape towns enrolled in the Neighborhood Renewal Division. Statewide, the program has gotten more than 2,200 referrals on derelict properties from 140 cities and towns. Communities can refer up to 10 properties for inspection by an assistant attorney general. Code violations on most of the properties are resolved without resorting to receivership.
But that kind of resolution did not appear to be in the offing for this house. Had Wilson not stepped in before the May 21 hearing, the court would likely have determined the house’s fate, selecting a receiver to take it over and placing a lien on the property to pay for repairs. The receiver would then have been able to sell the house to collect those funds.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on May 29, incorrectly identified one of the “lingering” trees at 177 Peace Valley Road as a horse chestnut. It is an American chestnut, the variety that was destroyed by a fungal disease in the last century.
“It never resolves,” she says. “It continues. Every year there are budget problems, and this year, there is dealing with the structure, which needs to be revamped. But it’s always ongoing.”