Sometime after dark on Sunday night or early Monday morning, someone carefully removed a hand-carved wooden sign that hung from a post outside the Sandpiper Realty office on Winter street in Edgartown. The thief used specialized tools, not force, to cleanly detach the signboard, which featured a three-dimensional carving of the emblematic Sandpiper bird, then stole away with it in the night.

“This wasn’t an act of vandalism, that’s very clear. It was a deliberate removal of the sign from the signpost. It took special equipment to get it off of its hooks,” said Sandpiper Realty owner Sharon Purdy this week.

“In a community such as the Island, to have this happen is the biggest disappointment. It’s a 20-year-old hand-carved sign that was done by Kai Dawley, who is now deceased. He is no longer, and it’s sort of a piece of him, gone. And he was a real staple, and very well known as an artist, as a sign carver,” Mrs. Purdy said.

She commissioned the carved wooden sign to mark her office move to Winter street in the 1980s. Mr. Dawley warned her to be wary of theft. “He said to me, ‘Make sure it’s permanently and securely affixed, or locked to your signpost because it will be stolen,’” recalled Mrs. Purdy. For years, she couldn’t find a permanent fixture, and resorted to storing the sign indoors at night and re-hanging it in the morning. “We finally figured out a situation that we thought was very secure. Well, I guess we were proven wrong, weren’t we?” she said.

Mrs. Purdy has little doubt as to what kind of person stole the sign, and it certainly wasn’t a group of rowdy kids. “There’s no damage to the signpost at all and because of the way it was attached you actually needed to come with tools to take it off,” she said. “If it was kids fooling around, you’d see the post kind of out of sorts, and whacked at, and so forth.”

Instead, she believes it was a collector in search of a classic Dawley. “I think it’s probably going into somebody’s private collection,” she said. “I don’t know what value it would have other than to a collector.”

The sign would not have a high resale value. It would be immediately recognized on the Island, and Mr. Dawley’s craftsmanship wasn’t nearly as well appreciated off-Island.

But to Mrs. Purdy, the sign is priceless. “Anyone who’s been around the Island for a long time would recognize [Kai Dawley’s] name,” she said. “He was sort of one of the Island staples before he passed away.”

Mrs. Purdy has filed a police report for the missing sign, but there’s not much local law enforcement can do except spread the word. It’s not as though a wooden signpost can be fingerprinted, she said.

But she’s not so concerned with finding the thief as she is with recovering the sign. “I’d like to offer a $250 reward, which is just a pittance of what it’s worth,” she said. “They can just leave it right back on the signpost and we won’t ask any questions. And it will restore our faith in human beings. It sounds silly but it really did have meaning, both to the agency and I think to the Island, as a remembrance of Kai.”