The Maurading Fire-Starting Naked Dwarves of Chilmark: Fact or Fiction?

Rural legends can get pretty hinky down some of our New England roads. In the mountain hollows of Vermont, villagers were known to freeze their elderly over the winter, thereby saving on dwindling food supplies. These mountain folk stashed the ancient bodies in bales of hay and thawed ‘em out in the early spring. (A Harvard anthropologist once noted, “What rings false about this practice is that the families revived their elders.”)

I read about this quaint system of cryogenics in an exciting creep-out book called "Weird New England". There’s other odd lore; stuff about inmates of an insane asylum wandering off into the forest, and over the decades in-breeding and mixing genetic material to create a tribe of, well, green-skinned psychos. But, don’t worry, you’ll only encounter them if you wander off a mountain trail in the Adirondacks and, by the way, you’ll never be heard from again.

So it was "Weird New England" looping through my mind when a couple of weeks back, my buddy in Aquinnah, photographer Lisa Vanderhoop called to ask if I’d ever heard about the wild and naked dwarves from the Benton Commune who used to go on rampages burning houses down?

Uh no, was my answer. It turns out anyone who’s lived up Island for x number of years knows all about these putatively pyromaniacal little people, and have even seen them on occasion.

Buddy (Lisa’s husband) Vanderhoop, charter captain and knowledgeable Islander told me: “My brother ran into two of those dwarves outside the Hot Tin Roof. They wanted a fight and he was ready to kick their [backside].” Something warned him his own [backside] would be significantly kicked, and he eased off.

Lisa called her mother-in-law, Anne Vanderhoop, who owns the famous restaurant out on the Aquinnah Cliffs. “Is it true about the dwarves and the fires?” Lisa asked her. “Yes, it’s true,” Anne affirmed. I think we can take Mrs. Vanderhoop’s word for that. Or anything.

A retired fire official from Chilmark emailed me the following message: “Jim Howell caught the dwarves trying to set fire to his cottage. My sister remembers the dwarves riding their bicycles back and forth on the road and laughing as Fred James’s house was burning across from the Chilmark Church. There appeared to be grievances with the Benton Family and the owners of the houses that were torched.”

Okay, back up a minute. What or who was the Benton Family? Glad you asked: I’ll try to break it down into two sentences because that’s my job as I see it: Keep it simple, keep it sweet (although run-on sentences are allowed):

It started out in the 70s with a charismatic leader, Mel Lyman, who took advantage of the opportunity for polygamy by siring kids with, among others, the daughter of our Island’s most famous artist, Thomas Hart Benton (hence the name of Benton Commune in this region, but it’s actually more commonly known as the Lyman Clan, a group designated by People Magazine in September of 1986 as “—perhaps the most durable and financially successful of any commune to come out of the Aquarian 60s.”). Mr. Lyman is long gone, but the original tribe of 78 adults and 39 children has holdings that include a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, a construction business patronized by such big-wigs as Steven Spielberg and Dustin Hoffman, a 280-acre farm in Kansas, a Manhattan loft, an 8-house compound in Boston, and a number of homes on, you guessed it, Martha’s Vineyard.

So descendants and heirs-apparent of these communards are still in residence, some of them living peacefully and anonymously up Island – no dwarves, as far as we can discern because these little people are, let’s be honest, easy to spot – and we hesitate, we really do, to antagonize anyone.

But why, back in the day, were naked dwarves torching houses?

Well, first let’s separate nudity from pyromania. The above-mentioned Chilmark fire marshal wrote me that, yes, dwarves had been involved in the blazes, but he had no data about them being naked during the time of their criminal activities.

But other people have weighed in with long-ago sightings of unclothed little people in other, less fraught circumstances. As another friend of mine who grew up in Chilmark explained it: “We all went around naked in those days.” Kids, grownups, beacherinos, landscapers, housewives running into the Chilmark Store, engine running, themselves starkers, as they grabbed an extra bottle of mayo for the picnic (just kidding about the housewives; don’t know if anyone ever dashed au naturel into the Chilmark Store – I’ll ask former owner Primo Lombardi next time I see him.)

So, yes, we have it on oral authority that several dwarves allegedly instigated a rash of fires in Chilmark in the 1970s. We can only speculate that these frisky fellows were, upon being apprehended, sent to undisclosed locations, never to be seen again in these parts. They were either 1) Completely clothed when starting fires or 2) Infrequently naked when they tossed their torches before bicycling off and laughing maniacally.

A dwarf, by the way, is categorized by having achieved an adult height of 4’ 10” or less. In a photo of the Lyman’s musical group the U and I Folk Band (from the same 1986 People article), one can identify two little men in the foreground, one playing a violin, the other a banjo, both with smoldering dark eyes, mops of dark curly hair and, I’m telling you, these dudes are hot! (No pun intended). Behind them is a young little lady behind a cello and, at the piano, a man tickles the ivories at the perfect height: He happens to be standing.

Every single one of them is fully clothed.