From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Nov. 16, 1962:

Everyone who walks through South Water street in Edgartown is in some sense a beneficiary of Capt. Thomas Milton, for it was he who, considerably more than a hundred years ago, brought home and planted the pagoda tree — sophora japonica — which flowers above the street from the grounds of the Captain Milton House, now part of the Harborside Inn.

Captain Milton was born in Tinmouth, England, a place he left at the age of 10 to come to America. He made voyages to the East Indies in ships owned by William Gray of Boston, and later was master of a line packet running between Boston and Philadelphia. In the war of 1812 he held the title and authority of Prize Master of the privateer Yankees.

He left the sea twenty five years before his death, and lived in Edgartown “an amiable, kind, courteous, liberal man”. In 1808 he had married Jane Hammett, born in Edgartown — as the Gazette reported when her death occurred in the same month as her husband’s — “long ago when Edgartown had none of its present claims for wealth, attractive houses and personal decoration”. She “appeared to have preserved in her character all the simplicity and hard virtues of an older time”.

It is saddening to report that Walter P., son of Capt. Thomas and Jane H. Milton, died before he had attained the age of two, and the vital records preserve the descriptive words “a poor Thing torn out of Shape by the Ricketts”. But the pagoda tree has endured and now, a full century after the death of Captain Milton and his wife, is a monument and adornment to the town.

The Freeman Hancock house, for many years the home of Miss Pricilla Hancock and the place where forty years she made her famous candies, has been purchased by Mr. and Mrs. C. Russell Walton of Cambridge and Chilmark.

The sale went through about two weeks ago. However, much of the surrounding pasture land, and the beach that went with the property, was bought seven years back. Miss Hancock now retains a portion of a beach, a woodlot and, of course, the Hancock furniture.

The land has been owned by the Hancocks for 200 years, and the nearby farm is still owned by Herbert and Hariph Hancock. In fact, Miss Hancock’s great-great-grand-father, Capt. Samuel Hancock, owned the whole tract of land, both the Quenames section near Chilmark pond and the Quansoo section on Tisbury Great Pond. Of Mr. Walton’s recent purchase, which rounds out the transactions begun seven years ago, Miss Hancock remarked, “It’s sort of nice to have the land all of one piece again.”

The house itself was built 100 years ago by Miss Hancock’s grandfather, Freeman Hancock. “I don’t know that he really built it all himself,” she explained. “I guess he did some. But in those days, everyone helped.”

There are nine rooms, all told, including two candy kitchens. “For what they’re worth,” says Miss Hancock. She began to make candy in 1915.

“At least, that was when I started to make fudge,” she says. “That’s what all girls did then.”

In 1922, she started making more elaborate chocolates, and developed a big “little” business, with lots of Island customers, and a mail order trade that took her candies to all parts of the globe. Once an off-Island customer wrote to ask that a box of candy be sent to a friend, and enclosed her own gift card. On the card was written “This candy was made in the woods.”

That seems to sum up the charm Miss Hancock’s candies had for people, all outside of the fact that they were so good. It was an outing and an adventure to the hundreds of people who drove down more than a mile of road thickly wooded on either side to pick out a box of their favorite confection.

About six years ago, Miss Hancock decided that forty years of candy making was enough for her.

“Friends keep asking me if I don’t still make a little just now and then for myself or close acquaintances. I don’t. It takes all sorts of special equipment and ingredients, and I can’t do it just once in a while. So I’ve gone back to fudge, to give myself something to do when I feel like it.”

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Hotchkiss have announced the pending sale of their house in West Tisbury, known as the Squire Rotch house to Miss Priscilla Hancock of Chilmark.

The Rotch house, which was the home of the late William J. Rotch of West Tisbury, is a landmark for the reason that the West Tisbury town office was situated in a room of this house for half a century.

Mr. Rotch, active in working for the division of the town of Tisbury and the chartering of West Tisbury as town in 1892, was elected to the board of selectmen. He prepared the room in his house for use by the town in transacting its official business, and held his office without opposition for half a century or more. Sometimes called the Mill Pond House, and sometimes the Rotch House, somehow it has never been called the town office, which once would have been as appropriate as any name.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com