Nancy Luce: A Woman of 1000 Oddities
The story of Martha Vineyard's famed "chicken lady"
If you happen to visit Martha’s Vineyard, you might have passed by the local museum. It’s the kind of museum so many small towns have and I’ve always loved: filled with local lore, lighthouses, and even a community gallery which hosts collections like the current one—a mix of natural items collected “on trails and beaches around the island” as well as old family belongings. The museum is a mix of community contributions and lovingly preserved history which includes two gravestones displayed in the permanent collection. They’re inscribed with three names: Ada Queetie, Beauty Linna, and Tweedle Dedel Bebbee Pinky. (Two of them share a headstone.) Under each name is a small poem. These marble headstones, which likely cost quite a bit when they were made in the 1800s, commemorate three small bantam hens—the companions and best friends of island folk artist and writer Nancy Luce.
(Portrait of Nancy Luce and one of her pet hens)
Known as “The Chicken Lady of Martha’s Vineyard”, for most of her adult life, Luce was the kind of local curiosity that could have easily been forgotten if it weren’t for her own efforts to make herself into a character and tourist attraction. In her later years, Luce who began to suffer from an unknown illness at the age of 26 (some people believe it may have been Lyme disease) and never recovered, sold books of her poetry and photographs of herself with her chickens to help pay her bills. The Vineyard’s many summer tourists came out to visit her at her home—both to buy her wares and sometimes to gawk or laugh at her. In Walter Magnes Teller’s biography of Luce, Consider Poor I, he mentions that she “could not tolerate noise”, local knowledge of which inspired people to “serenade [her] with pots and pans.” People desecrated the graveyard (the previous home of her chickens’ gravestones located in a fenced area), tried to break into her home, shut her into her own closet, and even once beat her up. Teller writes that local newspapers “reported Nancy sick or harassed or both, again and again. Her persecutors seem to have been Island people,” in other words, her neighbors.
The poems she wrote often beseeched God and her fellow humans for kindness. In one, Luce wrote:
Be sure and have tender feelings for the poor harmless dumb creatures
And not abuse them, and not let them suffer,
And not be cruel them in no way, they can’t help themselves,
Consider how you would feel, if you could not help yourselves,
And folks crueld you,
If you had any of the love of God in your hearts,
You would not cruel the poor harmless dumb creatures…
Be sure and do as you wish to be done by,
In deeds, words and thoughts,
To human and to the poor harmless dumb creatures too,
Be sure and not do or say anything,
To damage, nor plague any one,
Consider what a wicked thing it is,
Consider, and stamp all wickedness under foot…
Her parents became sick when Luce was in her teens, leaving her to run the farm and care for the family all on her own. She rode her horse into town to buy and sell items like yarn and candles. For a woman of her time, Teller writes, this was almost an unheard of amount of independence. It was likely the fact that she never married along with her uncommon (for the time period) attention and care for her animals that turned her into such a target.
Cruelty—both toward humans and animals—was all too common in the 1800s. (Though there was sporadic intervention in egregious cases, the first society to protect children didn’t even come into existence until 1875.) There were few animal cruelty laws in the early 1800s and most of them were more concerned with the illegality of destroying someone else’s property than the animal’s welfare. By the end of the century, many states passed the first animal cruelty laws prohibiting poor treatment of animals regardless of ownership but the idea was still a new one and mostly focused on working animals like dogs, oxen, or horses.
It wasn’t only through her poems that Luce tried to beseech others to practice kindness. She also wrote books on the care and keeping of chickens and, by all accounts, was an expert flock owner for the time. Luce’s chicken house was placed in a large hole, eight feet in diameter and five feet deep, according to Teller: “Lined with brick it was nice and dry…the door on the east side of the house allowed light to shine down into it when the trap door was raised at daybreak.” Though chickens bred for production can lay upwards of 300 eggs per year today, even in the 1900s 80-150 eggs a year was common. Luce, thanks to her care, got her chickens to each lay roughly 200 eggs per year.
She sold a pamphlet titled “Hens—their diseases and cure” which offered general advice for raising hens as well as how to help a hen whose egg has broken inside of her oviduct, gapeworm, broken bones, and mites. In one section titled “feeling” Luce writes simply: “it is your duty to take good care, and not let anything hurt your hens, consider dear little hens.”
Though Luce had a small flock of hens throughout her life (each of whom had outlandish names), she bonded especially with the three who she eventually commissioned the marble headstones for. Most of what we know of her relationship with them comes through her poems. When Ada Queetie and then Beauty Linna died after illnesses, Luce wrote a long poem, “Poor Little Hearts” dedicated to the bantam hens. It talked about their lives together, nursing each other through various illnesses (if Luce had bad dreams or was sick, the hens were there to sit in her lap or comfort her with their soft chicken-speak) as well as Luce’s heartbreak at their death. None of the things she mentions in the poem seem that extraordinary—they’re a catalogue of the small quirks any owner notices in a beloved pet. It’s only how different her attitude toward animals was from the prevailing attitudes at the time and that Luce’s pets were chickens that made the descriptions noteworthy.
Despite Luce’s friendship with her chickens, it’s hard not to feel like her story was a sad one. When I think of her, I wonder how she might have fared if she’d been born a hundred years later. Better, I’d like to think. She died at 75 and was buried in the local cemetery. The town paid for her burial. Notices of her death ran in newspapers throughout the country. They all mentioned the chickens.
She wanted to be buried with her flock when she died. That wish did not come true. But at some point, people started leaving chicken figures around her headstone (look at a photo here). There seems to be an almost constant assortment of plain stone ones, painted ones, or whimsical and stylized chickens in clothing showing up and disappearing from the grave. Luce was a self-published writer, folk artist, and local celebrity yet, as The Boston Globe wrote at her passing, “Her reverence and attachment for her fowls is certainly the most remarkable of her thousand oddities.”
A true chicken lady indeed.
(Easily the most famous photo of Nancy Luce. Taken by SF Adams and perhaps showing dear Ada Queetie and Beauty Linna in their keeper’s arms.)
News from the Coop
Since this week’s newsletter is longer than normal, I’ll keep this brief. You may have noticed that I’m trying something new—moving this newsletter to twice a month! I hope you like the change.
The chickens are still enjoying the long summer days and regularly stay out until about seven (still an hour or so from sunset where we live) when I round them up so the dogs can take a turn in the yard. It is much harder to do this with ten chickens than it was with six and a few of the flock members are consistently delinquent. I think they’ve weighed “mealworms” against “more time to dust bathe and free range” and decided the latter sounds more appealing. I celebrate whenever I get them all in by myself.
I never thought I’d look forward to the days getting shorter!
As always, email me at underthehenfluence@gmail.com with any tips or comments. See you in two weeks.
-Tove