From the April 21, 1989 Just a Thought column by Arthur Railton:

Every year at this time, I get to thinking about Nancy Luce. I guess it’s all those “Open for Business” signs that are popping up as Island entrepreneurs begin the ritual of separating the tourists from their money. It’s been going on for years.

But nobody has come close to doing it with the style and the class of Miss Nancy Luce, one of the first. She was an original. She sold books of poetry — her own poetry. And she made a living at it.

Nancy was a self-sufficient lady who knew how to turn her talents into money. And she supported herself doing it. With dignity.

Miss Nancy was born in 1814, in the same West Tisbury farmhouse she lived in all her life. A bright, active and imaginative young woman, she loved horseback riding and, even as a teenager, showed she had good business instincts. She would ride her horse to Edgartown to buy tobacco and sundries that she would take back to West Tisbury to sell. She used the profits to buy paints, brushes and paper for her painting and her writing.

Nancy never married. In her 24th year an undiagnosed illness — it seems to have been both physical and mental — turned this vibrant, lively young woman into a depressed, introvert recluse. She rarely left her house after that. She began to have severe headaches and couldn’t stand bright light or loud noises.

After her parents died, she lived alone, often in considerable pain with her recurring headaches. A cow and some hens were her only companions. These animals became her family and they helped pay her bills.

At first, her hens were just hens that she fed and watered for the eggs they laid, which she sold to neighbors, along with milk and butter. Gradually, this lonely, isolated woman began to see in certain of her hens a special quality, a human intelligence.

They became her best friends — her only friends. Not all her hens — only a few very special ones. Three, especially. These three hens lived, not in her cellar hen house with the rest of the flock, but upstairs with her. They ate with her, often the same food, and they watched as she wrote her poems and painted her pictures.

She was an expert on hens, writing about their illnesses and how to cure them. She designed a cellar hen house so the hens would be cool in summer and warm in winter, increasing their egg production sharply.

When one of her special hens died, she wrote a long poetic lament. She mourned the loss of her friend, a hen. That wasn’t something folks could understand. So she soon became “that crazy hen lady,” who treated her pets as human, who mourned the death of a hen. Had her pet been a cat or dog or a canary, nobody would have thought anything about it. But it was a hen, and to some folks that made her peculiar, even crazy.

Word spread about this West Tisbury eccentric who wrote poetry about hens. The tour bus drivers of her day, carrying buggy loads of tourists from the Camp Ground to Gay Head, took a long side trip down New Lane to show their customers this crazy woman. At first, she tried to ignore them as they came to stare at her sitting in a straight chair holding a hen. But soon she realized that if folks would come all that way just to stare, she had something she could sell — and money was something she needed.

She began hand-printing a few lines of her poems in stylish block letters, decorating them with hearts, the symbol that soon became her trademark. The tourists bought them as fast as she could letter them — tiny four-page booklets with wallpaper covers, bound together by thread. The little poems were about her pets, her hens. And about her cow.

When she couldn’t hand-letter the booklets fast enough to satisfy the demand, she sent a collection of her full length poems to a printer in New Bedford who produced a little booklet entitled Poor Little Hearts. A good title because it was Nancy who first made the heart symbol famous. But folks just smiled at the crazy hen lade and her childish poetry and her silly hearts.

But Nancy knew what she was doing. Next, she hired a photographer from Edgartown to take pictures of her, her hens, her cow and her house. She had them made into postcards which she sold to visitors, who mailed them off-Island, spreading her fame. National magazines carried articles about her. And soon this recluse, in a tiny farmhouse on a dirt lane a mile off the main road in West Tisbury, became a celebrity — the Island’s first.

Her writing, along with her butter-and-egg money, paid her bills. She supported herself until she died in 1890 at age 75, our first successful woman entrepreneur. Our first professional writer.

But Nancy never got the respect she had earned. She was called crazy, a person to be mocked, even tormented.

Each year she asked the authorities for help, but it never came.

Nancy just wanted to be left alone, to be respected for what she was, a primitive poet who loved her pets.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com