Sailor's

Our building

Two centuries on Middle Road

Since 2025 the bakery has lived at one of the island's old farm places: Pulpit's End Farm, the Cape farmhouse at 165 Middle Road — raised around 1820, farmed by the Beverage family for nearly two hundred years, and known to islanders simply as Sam and Eleanor's.

Middle Road is North Haven's farming spine — the inland road running through hayfields and pastures, away from the harbor bustle. When this house was new, North Haven wasn't even North Haven yet: the island was still Vinalhaven's "North Island," decades from becoming its own town, with dozens of farms, two thousand sheep, and steamboats carrying eggs, butter, and lamb to Boston. Houses like this one were built for that life — simple, square-shouldered, close to the road, barn a few steps away. A one-room schoolhouse stood down at the Middle Road junction until 1932.

The Beverages have farmed North Haven almost as long as there have been farms here — Capt. Thomas Beverage recorded his livestock mark on the Fox Islands in 1789. Hiram "Hightie" Beverage farmed longer than anyone else on the island: he shipped eggs to Boston by steamship, drove his buggy until 1925 (when he got a new Model T station wagon), and was still selling produce off Middle Road at nearly ninety — by then the last of North Haven's old farmers still working the land. It was Hightie who dammed the Mill Stream in 1932, making the brackish pond islanders still call Hightie's Pond — the same water where our neighbors grow their oysters today. The old post-and-beam shingle mill still stands out back.

Hightie's son Sam Beverage (1917–2014) and his wife Eleanor, a nurse, made the farm the island landmark it remains. Sam lived one of North Haven's great lives: schooled in that one-room Middle Road schoolhouse, a ham-radio operator whose call sign spelled "One Maine Grown Potato," an Army radio chief across North Africa and the Mediterranean in World War II. He came home in 1945, spent the next quarter-century in radio on the mainland, and moved back to the island for good in 1973 — in time to be one of the islanders who rescued the town's early deeds and maps from the dump. He and Eleanor helped found the North Haven Historical Society, and he held the Boston Post Cane as the island's oldest citizen. The house itself was later brought back over a decade of careful work by a pair of old-house people — a career historic-preservation official and a journalist who covered old houses for The New York Times — so that everything you see is original where original could be saved.

We feel the weight of all that, in the best way: this has always been a working farm, and it's working still — the ovens are warm again, and the rooms have filled with art.

Our neighbors are good company — North Haven Oyster Co. farms the salt pond next door — and the ride out from the village is 3 miles of quiet road — a 15-minute pedal. We spent three good years in our first shop on Iron Point Road; when that lease ended, this farmhouse took us in. We think it suits the bread.

"We cannot control the wind, but we can adjust the sails."

Almost everything we know about this farm we learned from the North Haven Historical Society — the egg crate, the buggy, the diaries, the deeds someone thought to pull back out of the dump. They keep the island's memory. We're grateful for it.