Choose Granite Countertops in Halifax, MA for Elegance and Durability

There is a pair of seven-foot legs hanging around Halifax, Massachusetts, seemingly with nowhere to go. They belong to a man of stone who clearly favored fancy boots, but why is he just standing there—cut in half like that—on the side of the road? And who is this poor half-a-man?

Before he lost his top half, the man of stone was a 14-foot tall Myles Standish, military commander of the Mayflower. After retiring from an active career protecting and serving the Pilgrims, Standish spent his retirement years up the road from Halifax in the town of Duxbury. Over there, about ten miles east, there is a grave memorial and a 116-foot stone tower built in his honor.

On top of the tower is a 14-foot granite statue, the second Standish statue the tower has held. The first one went up along with the tower in 1872, but being on the highest hill in town it turned from a memorial tower into a lightning rod. In 1922, poor Myles was struck and his top half was destroyed.

The bottom half, these very fancy-booted legs, were cast aside and disappeared for decades. It wasn’t until the 1990s that they were discovered 20 miles away in Quincy, left in a quarry without a body or head to keep them company.

It took a few years to recast a new statue, but one finally made it up the tower in 1930. The only piece from the original is his extended arm. Those old legs—they were given to Halifax where Standish also had some farm property. They’re waiting patiently for a fitting memorial of their own, or at least a spare head and torso if they can find one.

Update: The legs were moved about 100 feet west to their current location at 20 Dwight Street (seen 6/25/2017).

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Halifax is about half way between Boston and Cape Cod, in a few miles from the south shore. The legs are on the west side of Monponsett Street, a bit north of Ocean Avenue and south of Twin Lakes Liquors. His lower half is in the scrub along the road, but kept clear and easy to see from the road.

Four hundred and thirty mobile home owners in Halifax, Massachusetts, have made history.

For $27 million, these residents bought the land beneath their homes. It is the largest purchase of its kind ever in the country.

“I almost didn't think I'd live long enough to see it,” says Myrna Yunits, who has lived at the Halifax Mobile Home Estates – about an hour south of Boston – since 1980.

As Yunits and her community have freed themselves of an outside landlord, they’ve ushered in a new sense of security — and also a lot of work.

At the community center, the residents are eating a cake in celebration. The frosting reads: “We Own It!” Out the window are streets and streets of manufactured homes, pastel vinyl between tall pines, all of which residents here now own.

Before today, they were like most mobile home parks; they had the worst of both worlds: buy the home and rent the land.

A mobile home can cost tens of thousands, if not a few hundred thousand, dollars. But, residents still pay hundreds in rent each month.

Despite being called "mobile homes," these houses are very hard and expensive to move. Increases in land values go mostly to the landlord, not the homeowner. Plus, the residents are at the whim of whoever owns the land.

“When you had a complaint. It was so sad, too bad,” says Barbara Davis.

Davis lives at Colonial Estates, a 55 and older manufactured home community in Taunton. Soon after Davis moved here, a big corporation bought the park and, she says, the company wasn't taking proper care of the property.

A year ago, when the land went up for sale for $11 million, residents tried to buy it as a cooperative. Massachusetts is one of just five states that, by law, ensures residents have first dibs to team up to buy the land.

“I fought it, like crazy,” Davis says. She admits she didn’t think the residents should collectively purchase the property.

“Honestly, I didn’t think that we had the capabilities within the park to be able to run it,” she says.

However, a majority of the residents voted in favor of the purchase.

Now, Davis is a cheerleader for the other side.

“How wrong I was. This is the best thing that ever could have happened,” she says.

Colonial Estates homeowners formed a low equity co-op, where residents bought in at $1,000. The rest of the purchase was financed by a loan to their association and didn’t require personal liability.

This model started in the 1980s in New Hampshire but has taken off, especially in New England. Since 2009, seven percent of Massachusetts’ manufactured home communities have become resident-owned.

They function like a mini-democracy. One house, one vote. Collective responsibility.

Davis says everyone does what they can. She mows the lawn. “This week, I mowed Wednesday for four hours and, yesterday, I mowed for three hours,” she says.

Davis swears there’s a totally new sense of community since the purchase: residents volunteered to buy new benches, and neighbors are getting to know one another. There's a bocce team, bingo on Mondays, cards a few nights a week, and a bonfire every Friday — to name just a few of the community events.

However, democracy can be messy.

“You have 147 households now. So, you have 147 different personalities,” says Michael Scarlett, who is on the board at Colonial Estates.

He says despite seeing a lot of benefits from the purchase, rents did go up from $500 to $580 per month. He says that’s hard on many residents, especially seniors on a fixed income.

And, he says, many communities struggle with setting expectations correctly.

“When you buy the community, the first thing people feel is: We own the community now, things will get done. They don’t realize that it doesn’t work that way,” says Scarlett.

Colonial Estates needs to update their power lines, redo some roads, repair the communal tool sheds. Scarlett has had to explain to everyone: “It's going to have to be figured into the budget, which is going to definitely increase the rent, because we're just by the skin of our teeth now.”

Scarlett says it helps that there's no profit motive. And it also helps they're not alone. There’s a management community that helps with day-to-day operations. And there’s Resident Owned Communities USA.

ROC USA is a nation-wide nonprofit that helps manufactured home communities figure out their financing and set up their governance structure.

“In the beginning, it was really messy. I actually I had no idea what a board of directors even was,” says Jeanee Wright.

Wright lives in a resident-owned community and, for the past five years, she's worked with an affiliate of the ROC USA network – called Cooperative Development Institute - teaching other manufactured home communities. All the resident-owned communities get one-on-one coaching for a decade and free leadership trainings forever.

“The sense of empowerment of people goes far beyond basic daily problems,” says Wright.

Having grown up in a manufactured home park, Wright says the communities are often stigmatized. She was called a ‘Tin Can Kid’ in school. And she knows her family worried about rent increase.

“I remember my parents not feeling very secure,” says Wright. She adds that when a community becomes resident-owned, “people who have never had the opportunity to have a say in almost anything they did in life, have that opportunity. It's a hugely empowering process.”

ROC USA has helped more than 200 communities nationwide become co-ops. “And not one co-op that we’ve assisted with their purchase and afterward has ever failed – has ever resold their property, ever closed down, ever gone bankrupt or filed for bankruptcy or lost it due to a foreclosure. Not one,” says Paul Bradley, president of ROC USA.

The community in Halifax is ROC USA's biggest test yet.

"It's kind of scary. We're taking on a lot,” admits Myrna Yunits. “But we can do it."

Yunits says for the 430 families at Halifax Mobile Home Estates, having a sense of security and control of their own fate is worth the work and the rent increase.

In the wake of the Halifax Town Administrator and two selectmen resigning, a public meeting was held to discuss the next steps.

About 30 residents attended the meeting, and questioned how the town would continue operations.

Selectman Jonathan Selig told residents the town will continue to follow the status quo, through the state rule of necessity.

“No changes or anything, no reinventing the wheel,” Selig told WATD. “We’re just going to make sure our bills get paid, our warrants get signed, and we just continue with the day to day as close as possible until we can get to the election and get our full board.”

According to Town Clerk Susan Lawless, the special election to fill two seats will be held on November 8th. Nomination papers are available today, and the deadline to submit them to the Town Clerk is October 4th. October 29th is the voter registration deadline.

“From inside town, from outside town, our state reps have been reaching out, Selectmen from other communities, Town Administrators from other communities,” said Selig. “Everybody recognizes that this is an unprecedented situation. Their response has been the same – ‘what can we do, what can we do to help?’ Sometimes through the dark, you see the light. It’s been really encouraging to see so many good people trying to help us out.”

He’s the remaining member of the three-member board, Chair Ashley DiSesa and Selectman Alexander Meade resigned last week. Town Administrator Marty Golightly announced his resignation after he was appointed on July 6.

According to audio from Area 58 Halifax on YouTube, an emergency Selectmen’s meeting was held on August 25th.

DiSesa read a letter from Golightly, that said the town was not the right fit for him. After reading the letter, DiSesa apologized on behalf of the board for his treatment by some residents and employees saying “I’m sorry that our town is very toxic.”

Announcing her resignation, she said she “weathered a storm of misogyny, sexual harassment, underestimation, and doubts about my abilities to perform my expected duties.” She said she was being attacked by residents, and the town was being torn apart by personal vendettas.

Meade, who was elected in May, said in the interest of protecting the health and safety of his family – especially his children – he was resigning from the board.

Dick Wright is a 47-year resident of the town, and served 12 years on the Finance Committee. He moved to the area for a rural feel, and says this situation does not highlight the true Halifax.

“I have to give [Jonathan] all the credit in the world to stand tall, and take the brunt — that we will pursue, and we will go forward,” said Wright. “I think like Jonathan said – when our nose is pressed to the wall, people will come forward. I think there’s a good heart in Halifax. It’s a small enough community, where everybody knows everybody, and everybody is pulling together. I think we will weather the storm, personally.”

Due to the state election on the same day, many current poll workers in town will be used for that process.

Selig said state law dictates that they will need to use their own election workers for the special election.

“We’ll need at least a handful of extra poll workers to help us out. So if anybody has some time, they can help us in this situation, great, reach out to our Town Clerk,” said Selig. “My advice is, watch what we do. Watch what this community does in the face of adversity. I think you’ll be impressed.”

The meeting concluded with applause for Selig after a resident thanked him for stepping up.

Longtime resident Alan Dias hopes Selig gets the support he needs.

“Halifax is a great town. I’ve lived there 42 years, the last five or six years have been very contentious with the elections. There’s been some lawsuits, a lot of allegations back and forth. That created a gigantic turmoil with town employees and personnel,” said Dias. “I think it’s time for us to put that behind us. We need to rebuild. I think that we need to support whoever our selectmen are, so we can move forward.”

WATD’s Gill Johnston contributed to this report.

I’m part of the New England Legends Facebook group, and you never know what kind of oddities you’ll find people posting in there. Today, it was a pair of legs. Not just any legs, though – these were the stone legs of the great Myles Standish.

Normally, a photo of a statue’s legs wouldn’t catch my attention, except that’s all there was. Just the legs. No torso, no head, just his legs.

I was intrigued enough to start looking deeper into this, and wondering a) how did Myles Standish’s legs end up in a yard in Halifax, Massachusetts and b) how did they know these were the legs of his statue? After all, I know the Myles Standish statue still crowns the monument that bears his name in the town of Duxbury, on the land on which he once lived.

There he stands, looking eastward over Massachusetts Bay, holding the colony’s charter in his hand. As the military leader of the Pilgrims, he stands watch and represents the Pilgrim’s perseverance and determination to forge a new life for themselves here in the New World.

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A little research across multiple websites started cobbling together the history. The cornerstone was laid for the Standish Monument on October 7, 1872, but fundraising issues kept it from being completed until 1898. The 116-foot granite shaft features 125 steps to the top, where the 14-foot statue rises above the tree line.

As it turns out, though, the Standish statue we know atop that monument is the second version to stand there. The first was damaged by a lighting strike on August 26, 1922, which destroyed the upper part of the statue and left just the legs.

The new statue was erected in 1930, and it has stood ever since.

Those legs were later discovered in a Quincy quarry in the 1990s, and brought to the town of Halifax, where they still stand today. Apparently, you can still see scorch marks on the legs from the lightning strike, according to some online reports.

The seven-foot-high granite legs are displayed just off Route 58 (Monponsett Street) at 20 Dwight Street. They’re perched on a section of train tracks, and you can see even as you drive by where these legs, well, stand-ish.

These statuesque legs are not the only weird thing related to the name Myles Standish. There was also that time a hiker discovered this mysterious and creepy Elmo tree deep in the woods of the Myles Standish State Forest in Plymouth.