Our town of Nestor and Nestorianism

M. Alice: Is there any relationship between our local village of Nestor (east of I. Beach) and Nestorianism, the early Christian heresy? — Jim Edwards, Coronado

Nestor a nest of Nestorians? Not likely. There once was a mess of Methodists in a hamlet named Oneonta, the present-day site of Ream Field, west of I.B.; do they count? Nestor got its name the same way the New York borough of the Bronx did. Back in the days when the Big Apple was just a little sprout, a well-known Dutch family named Bronk owned a big patch of farmland north of the city, so of course people called it the Bronks’. Or so the story goes. Nestor’s story begins in the late 1880s, when local settlers in that nameless outpost told friends, when asked, that they lived near Nestor’s place. Nestor was Nestor A. Young, the local celebrity, a gladhanding charmer who was elected to the state assembly and later appointed San Diego’s harbormaster. The flood of 1916 rearranged the town a bit, but since then it’s been pretty quiet.

On the slim chance that you Alicelanders are not familiar with obscure Middle Eastern religious sects, Nestorianism dates from the Fifth Century and holds that Christ has a dual nature, human and divine, and Mary was simply the mother of Jesus, not the mother of God. The Roman Church declared Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, a heretic in 431, but the belief is still part of certain Middle Eastern Christian dogmas. Our Nestor, on the other hand, is a fine example of the divine truth that no distance is too far to drive for a killer burrito.