My husband and I recently spent an afternoon showing the Vineyard to an off-Island friend. This was our friend’s first trip here and we were eager tour guides. We wanted him to see the Island’s remarkable natural beauty and, since it was a stormy day, thought we might be able to catch a cliff collapsing at Lucy Vincent Beach or a new breach breaking through a fragile spit of land.
We started our tour in Edgartown. I had just learned that our very own Edgartown is the nation’s only Edgartown, and I wanted our friend to see what all the other towns that didn’t get named Edgartown missed out on.
“It’s odd,” I told our friend.
“The country would be saturated in Edgartowns if things had worked out a tad differently a few centuries ago.”
The Duke of York had a son named Edgar, and in what now looks like a pretty transparent attempt to garner favor with the man whose son could one day be called “King,” a New World politician apparently suggested renaming the town of “Great Harbour.”
Sadly, young Edgar died at the age of four. But the renaming wheels were already in motion, and so it is that the Vineyard likely boasts the only Edgartown in the world.
Our next stop was a walking tour through the gingerbread cottages of Oak Bluffs, which we ended rather abruptly after our guest suggested tasting one of the cottages. “Have you ever even tried?” he asked.
We piled in the car and drove south, heading up-Island. Luckily, we evaded difficult questions about why down-Island is up and up-Island is down, so we never had to explain that longitudinally Aquinnah is firmly up from the parts of the Vineyard we refer to as down. We even managed to drive through North Tisbury without our friend noticing that North Tisbury is south of Tisbury. Phew.
But when we pointed out the spectacular Polly Hill Arboretum, our friend noted that we weren’t on a hill.
We explained that Polly Hill is the name of a recently deceased and widely respected horticulturist who transformed twenty acres of land in West Tisbury into a magnificent and world-renowned arboretum. We told him that in 1932, Mary Louisa Butcher, known as Polly, married Dr. Julian Hill – and thereafter she was known as Polly Hill. Her legacy is an Island landmark that is not, as the name suggests, actually on a hill.
Hundreds of years from now, I expect there’ll be even more confusion. Polly Hill’s life story is still fresh for us, but eventually her life will become lore, just like that of a young boy named Edgar, whose short life we alone pay tribute to.