Peaceful and pleasurable.
Those are the two words Michelle Jones Galvin used to describe the inn where she stayed while finishing her book about her great-great-great-grand-aunt abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
For a little over a decade, Galvin and her family spent their summer vacations at The Inn at Shearer Cottage, a historic Black-owned guest home in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. As guests at the inn, the Galvins have grown to consider it a second home. It was where they hosted summer parties on the cottage veranda. It’s the chosen venue for Galvin’s birthday and it’s where she finished writing her book “Beyond the Underground: Aunt Harriet, Moses of Her People,” which was published in 2013.
“There are so many memories that really made it special,” she said.
For a little over a century, The Inn at Shearer Cottage had been a home away from home for generations of African Americans vacationing in Oak Bluffs, a small island town on Martha’s Vineyard. Overlooking the Baptist Temple Park, this 12-bedroom inn was the town’s first Black-owned guest home.
The inn started as a summer home for Charles and Henrietta Shearer, two Black entrepreneurs, who founded Shearer Cottage in 1912. After opening a laundry business in their home to support their stay on Martha’s Vineyard, the couple later expanded their house to an inn, contributing to Oak Bluffs developing into a haven for Black people to enjoy summer life.
The inn’s impact has been felt by many former lodgers through the years who say they’ve had the honor of staying at the historic guest home.
Elvira M. White-Lewis sits on a chair outside Cottage Six at the Inn at Shearer Cottage during a July summer in 2018. White-Lewis said she fell in love with the cottage only just moments after she arrived at the inn because of its “homeliness.” She was a longtime guest at the inn and stayed for several summers until 2020.Elvira M. White-Lewis
The first time Elvira M. White-Lewis, who’s originally from Maryland and now lives in Texas, stayed at Shearer Cottage was in July 2018.
As an older woman who likes to travel alone, White-Lewis wanted a place to stay that made her feel safe. The minute she stepped inside Shearer Cottage’s Cottage Six, she said she fell in love with it and asked to book it again in 2019. Except next time, she wanted to stay for a week.
“I was just impressed that it had gone this long, all of these years and I just felt blessed to be a part of that history, to be able to say, ‘I lived [and] I stayed at Shearer Cottage,” she added.
Some of the nation’s most prominent Black figures — Lionel Richie, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American from New York elected to the U.S. Congress, and singer Paul Robeson — have all stayed at Shearer Cottage.
Its 108-year-old history was featured in “The Power of Place” exhibit at The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and was listed in “The Negro Motorist Green-Book,” as a place of refuge for African-American visitors touring the island.
But the days of happy families lodging inside Shearer Cottage are past. In 2020, the inn fell victim to the pandemic, like many hospitality businesses.
Once the world went into lockdown, guests who planned to stay at Shearer Cottage canceled their reservations and deposits. With a lack of steady revenue and a future shrouded by uncertainty, the inn was forced to temporarily shut down.
White-Lewis said she cried the day she found out the inn had temporarily closed. She loved Cottage Six so much that she planned on making it her retirement summer home.
“I mean to be in one of those cottages — I will never ever forget Cottage Six,” she said. “It was mine at that time.”
The future of Shearer Cottage is still unfolding, Lee Van Allen, a fourth-generation innkeeper of Shearer Cottage, said. The guest home rests in the hands of her son, Eric, who has yet to announce what he wants to do with his family’s inn.
Whatever the future may hold for this historic inn, Van Allen and her family only wish for one thing: That it continues to be called Shearer Cottage.
