WENHAM - There may not be a prettier spot in town - 13 acres in the southeast corner of Wenham sloping down to some 1,600 feet of frontage on Wenham Lake.

Developers would likely pay a pretty penny for it, but the town is looking to buy it for less than a song, and help solve two chronic problems to boot.

Windover Development, the company that built The Boulders, 12 duplexes for people 55 and older on a former tree farm in the downtown, agreed to provide two affordable homes elsewhere in town as a condition of its permits.

Conveniently, a portion of the former Dearborn family farm came on the market at the last minute. The town has the right of first refusal on it, and officials would like to see it used to solve a chronic shortage of affordable housing.

So Windover has agreed to give the town the $703,000 asking price, and if everything goes according to plan, three homeowners with jobs that pay less than the average in the area will someday have homes a millionaire's money can't buy, on land once owned by a man so rich he didn't work a day in his life.

"It's a good deal for the town and for affordable housing," Selectman Peter Hersee said.

The affordable single-family homes will help the town reach its state-mandated goal of having at least 10 percent of its housing occupied by people making less than 80 percent of the median income in Essex County.

But the news gets even better.

If voters at the Special Town Meeting on Jan. 22 agree, the town will look to sell 3 acres of the property to the Salem and Beverly Water Supply Board. The purchase would give the board control over a stream near the former Vitale fly ash dump in Beverly that is being monitored for contamination from the site.

It would also give the board control of three test wells it uses to monitor runoff from Beverly Airport.

If the sale goes through, Wenham would use the proceeds to set up an affordable housing trust fund - providing the money to build the three affordable homes.

"If it goes as well as we think it will, we would work with Habitat for Humanity to build one affordable unit a year," Town Administrator Jeffrey Chelgren said.

That would give the town a measure of control it might not otherwise have over future development..

In communities that have not reached their goal of 10 percent affordable housing, developers can skirt some local zoning and wetlands regulations under the state's Chapter 40B affordable housing law. Wenham needs to build another 15 units to reach the threshold where it can dismiss 40B proposals out of hand.

Space crunch

Building any new home in town, affordable or not, is becoming increasingly challenging.

"The fact is Windover looked high and low, primarily at town-owned land," Hersee said. "They couldn't find anything that would perk or was buildable."

Planning Board member David Geikie said every developer proposing to build 10 or more housing units in town is required to make 10 percent of them affordable. Windover spent a year trying to fulfill this requirement, he said.

"After suffering 12 months of great disappointment this came up and we said, 'Whoa, this could work.'"

Geikie said by their very nature, planning boards encourage diverse housing in their communities, including housing affordable by people who could not otherwise live in an affluent suburb.

"We think their living here makes the town better," Geikie said. "We want their children going to school with our children."

The Planning Board doesn't get many proposals for developments as large as Windover's. In this community, like some other highly desirable towns, new construction often takes a very different form.

"It's not unheard of for someone to buy a piece of property with a beautiful house and tear it down to build a bigger beautiful house," Geike said.

Rich man's hobby

Frederick Dearborn Jr. and his wife, Pauline, bought their estate in the late 1940s, said John Pews, who was brought up in a house on the property. His father, Frank Pews ran the farm for the Dearborns; his uncle, Charlie Pews, was their caretaker.

The original mansion burned to the ground in February 1951, Pews said, and was replaced with the one that can now be seen from Route 1A.

Frederick Dearborn was appointed a special assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957, but he died less than a year after the appointment.

The Dearborn estate was originally part of a larger estate owned by Dr. John Phillips, who was indeed trained as a medical doctor but preferred the outdoor life to working and never opened a practice.

National Grid bought the land from the Dearborns because it needed space when it was reclaiming the Vitale fly ash site in Beverly, where ash from coal burned at the Salem power plant was dumped for years. With that project completed, the electric company had no further need of the land, and former Selectman Tom Tanous worked out the deal that gave the town the right of first refusal on it.

"These types of opportunities don't come up very often," Selectman John Clemenzi said.

If everything works out, Habitat for Humanity can count on at least one warm body showing up to help build the three homes.

"I intend to volunteer," Geikie said. "It's good for Wenham, it's good for me."