According to the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread – yes, there is such a thing! – Irish soda bread was born of necessity during the potato famine. Ireland was importing a soft type of wheat from America, and yeast was difficult to obtain. Adding baking soda (also called bread soda) to… Read more »
“A great force of engineers and surveyors is now engaged at Montauk,” the County Review reported in November of 1925. “They have dug a channel from Great Pond to Block Island Sound, and the pond was drained last week. In two hours it fell 11 inches.” Known today as Montauk Inlet, that channel was… Read more »
In Carl Fisher’s mind, apparently, there was nothing an Aerocar couldn’t do. Designed by Glenn Curtiss using lightweight materials and applying aerodynamic principles, the trailer could be hooked to a Hudson Light Runabout to create a land yacht for cruising America’s virgin highways. Fisher hoped to drum up interest in manufacturing several classes of… Read more »
“A virtually self-contained community with its own power plant, the Station has been called Montauk’s second village,” the East Hampton Star noted in May of 1978 after the Air Force announced that it planned to close its base at Camp Hero. The Army had built a coastal defense infrastructure disguised as a fishing village on… Read more »
“The days began in bathing suits then to shorts to pants, long sleeve shirts and jackets,” Lynn Stayton-Eurell wrote in a post on her local history blog, Montauk Unspoiled, of her childhood vacations in Montauk during the 1960s and ‘70s. “Barefoot, to socks and sneakers. Every summer we packed four seasons’ clothing. It got… Read more »
“Jake Wells, he was a bigshot,” Gus Pitts recalled in an oral history interview in 1984. “If you didn’t behave yourself, he’d have you chased off of the beach … You had to go under Jake Wells. Whatever Jake Wells said, you had to do.” Capt. Jake Wells’s Montauk Fish and Supply Company was just… Read more »
Tired old farmers, spritely young wenches, fiddler and dance master, hombreros and sun bonnets, blue denim and gingham, square dance and quadrille, Charles Chaplin and Spanish senoritas mixed colorfully last Saturday night at the Montauk Theatre, after the benefit movies, to the delight of many spectators. That’s what the East Hampton Star reported in… Read more »
“Cranberries are plentiful at Napeague this year and it is predicted that every dinner table will hold a large dish of tasty cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving,” the East Hampton Star reported brightly in September of 1917. It was an announcement that could well have been made more than a century later, one of many updates… Read more »
East Hampton’s settlers fattened their cattle out in Montauk in warmer months, whooping it up on Cattle Day to celebrate the beginning of the season and observing Thanksgiving only after the animals had been driven back home. Town records speak of herding at Montauk as early as 1661, and there were cattle drives to, from,… Read more »
“There was nothing there but a few screaming seagulls and the bell buoy, and the old fish house with the roof caving in,” Mary Gosman recollected, in a 1996 oral history interview, about the harbor area – mostly still swampland and sand — in 1943 when she and her husband, Robert, took over Charlie Bonner’s… Read more »