Job Chase Built It. A Family Wants It Back.

The building at 108 Route 28 in West Harwich has been a lot of things. In 1778 it was a new house, built by Job Chase Sr., one of the early settlers along that stretch of road between the Herring River and the Dennis town line. By the 1940s it had become Bishop's Terrace, a white-tablecloth restaurant remembered by generations of Cape diners — the kind of place people put on a jacket for, on a Cape Cod highway.

Then it closed. And for years, if you drove that corridor — the one locals call Captains' Row — the building just sat there getting quieter, more crooked, more gone. According to the restoration application reported by the Cape Cod Chronicle, the structure had been condemned, sat vacant and unheated, and showed signs that people had been living inside it over the winter. A preservation label on the neighborhood didn't stop any of that. It just made the decay easier to see.

This spring, the property changed hands.

The new owners are a local family. Jeffrey Handler, a Harwich select board member, has said the effort is driven by his mother-in-law, Sandy Wycoff — owner of the Bank and Main apparel shop in Harwich Port — who used to hold fashion shows inside Bishop's Terrace when it was still open. The building meant something to her. So the family bought it, through an entity listed in Registry records as JSLW LLC.

Their reported plan is not to bring back the restaurant. It's to strip away the additions that piled up over decades of business and restore only the original 1778 Chase house underneath — the Georgian structure Job Chase built when this part of West Harwich was a dirt path through the woods. "We're not recreating the Bishop's Terrace," Handler told the Chronicle. By his account, the original house is in rough shape and wouldn't survive many more years without attention.

The connection between this block and Harwich's maritime past isn't incidental. Chase bought the land from the Herring River to the Dennis line in the 1770s and used the timber to build coastal schooners along the river. More than 20 historically significant structures still line that roughly one-mile stretch of Route 28, many of them built by sea captains in a neighborhood that once ran on wood, herring, and shipbuilding. Today it's a working commercial corridor — traffic, signs, storefronts — with the captains' houses still standing among all of it. Most of them, anyway.

The preservation picture is layered. The corridor is already part of the West Harwich Special District, a designated planning area along Route 28. Separately, local advocates have pushed for National Register of Historic Places recognition for Captains' Row — an effort discussed for years that had not yet come to fruition as of last summer. The two are easy to confuse and worth keeping straight: one already exists; the other is still a goal.

Handler brought the restoration plans before the Harwich Historic District and Historical Commission, which — per the Chronicle's follow-up reporting — approved the project on June 17, 2026. He's described the process as more about navigating preservation review than clearing a single hurdle, and he's sounded genuinely glad to be doing it. That matters. People have been talking about Captains' Row for a long time. Here's a family actually working on a piece of it.

Check the Cape Cod Chronicle's reporting for the latest on the restoration timeline before treating any date as final.

The fashion shows are long gone. So is the restaurant. What Sandy Wycoff and her family are trying to save isn't Bishop's Terrace — it's the house that was there before the dining room, before the highway felt like a highway, and before Captains' Row became something people had to fight to remember.