John Keene Excavation

John Keene Excavation is a West Tisbury company that's been doing excavation and septic installation work on Martha's Vineyard since 1987, and its record here is unusually deep for the trade — a business with decades of visible civic work behind it. Beyond excavation and septic systems, it handles land clearing, demolition, driveway prep and road maintenance, and runs its own materials yard selling and delivering mulch, soil and stone, with its own off-island trucking. Local news coverage stretching back over a decade tells much of the story: the company built the roadway and cleared ground for the 2015 relocation of the Gay Head Lighthouse, graded sand for a dune restoration at South Beach, hauled a 13-ton composter to the island in a 12-hour overnight trip in 2019, and was the low bidder at $439,500 for Chilmark's Squibnocket Beach rebuild in 2017. When that project wrapped in 2018, a resident who had been a critic of the underlying bridge told a reporter the new beach looked beautiful and that John Keene's team did an incredible job. Google reviews back that up with specifics from actual customers. In a 2022 review, someone who hired the company for a project said it exceeded their expectations — thorough, prompt and professional from the first call to the final delivery, with the office manager responding quickly to emails and calls. A February 2026 review described a scheduling mix-up where the crew wasn't available to plow a driveway but went out of its way to line someone else up instead. Several more reviews, including two from spring 2026, praise fast, easy service from named staff at the materials yard — picking up mulch, soil and stone rather than a contracted excavation job. Google shows a 4.9-star average from 40 ratings, and the Better Business Bureau gives the company an A+ grade, listing 39 years in business from a January 1987 start (a 2020 news report describing the company's "38-year history" that year would put the founding slightly earlier, though the BBB date is the more precise figure). Worth knowing: many of the recent reviews are about the retail materials side of the business — buying and picking up landscaping supplies — rather than excavation or septic contracting, so it's worth asking directly about current availability and lead times for a dig or installation job. For Vineyard site work, from a lighthouse move to a driveway, the mix of long civic experience and consistently well-reviewed service is the strongest signal here.