What’s in this name? A bunch of sour grapes.

By Toby Brissett

In this section of a map of Scarborough, published by Frederick W. Beers in 1871, we’ve added a star indicating the approximate location of Vinegar Road.

How do roads get their names? Sometimes they honor a family. Sometimes they describe a landmark. And sometimes, if an old family story has it right, they begin with someone losing an argument.

Take Holmes Road here in Scarborough. On December 12, 1822, Scarborough’s selectmen laid out a route from the Saco line to what they noted as “Pains road,” which is today’s Payne Rd.

The route would have included a stretch later known as “Vinegar Road,” though it was not mentioned in the 1822 report. Instead, the survey report is full of the things official records love: compass bearings, landowners, marked trees, a great sand gully, a place called “Canada Swamp,” and a road exactly four rods wide.

Sixty years later, though, Charles T. Libby’s 1882 family history tells a different story about one section of the route. Libby wrote that Nehemiah Libby, a Beech Ridge farmer who raised apples and made vinegar, had been “chiefly instrumental” in getting the road officially established as a town road. Someone opposed him. When Nehemiah prevailed, the unnamed opponent was, in a splendid phrase from the family history, “vexed with his defeat.” And what does one do when vexed? In this case, he began calling the new route “Vinegar Road.”

If you can’t win the battle, apparently the next best thing is to name the battlefield after your own sour grapes.

That is as much as the source tells us. It does not name the opponent, explain the quarrel, or say how Charles Libby came by the story. The exchange itself remains family history, not sworn testimony.

We can, however, see that the name stuck. The 1882 book says the road was then “known as Vinegar Road.” A 1905 town warrant calls it “the Vinegar road (so called),” and Scarborough was still budgeting separately for Holmes Road and Vinegar Road in 1949. It’s safe to say that a joke has achieved a certain immortality when taxpayers are maintaining it.

By 1951, a town warrant was proposing that the Holmes Road name be extended east of Broadturn Road to Payne Road. Today, that entire stretch is Holmes Road, a name with its own local history, though considerably less tang. If the family story is right, Nehemiah Libby got his road, his opponent got in a little dig, and Scarborough got a story worth repeating. The name Vinegar Road may have disappeared from the map, but it never quite vanished from the records. Apparently, even sour grapes can have a remarkably long shelf life.

Toby Brissett is a Scarborough resident and freelance writer with over 30 years of experience. Learn more at WordsAndIdeas.com.