“A seven-story office building went up on Great Plain, in the middle of a new business section,” Jeannette Edwards Rattray wrote in 1938 in her book about Montauk history. “On the top floor of the Montauk ‘skyscraper’ was Carl Fisher’s office, with a balcony around it, where he could sit like a monarch surveying his… Read more »
“No telegraph, no telephone, no mails even, to the Chincha Islands.” — An East Hampton Childhood Mary Esther Mulford Miller was referring to three islands off Peru so richly populated with seabirds that their dung was packed as deep as 200 feet. Guano is highly valued as a fertilizer, which is why the clipper John Milton was filled with… Read more »
Richard B. Webb, an architect, designed the original Montauk Community Church and was a founding member when it opened in 1929. So it was fitting that almost 40 years later, when a new wing was added for offices and Sunday school classrooms, Richard Webb was the architect once again. He had moved to Montauk in… Read more »
Prohibition went into effect on January 17, 1920, creating a golden but dangerous opportunity for Montauk residents who wanted to earn extra money. Fishermen and others often moonlighted as bootleggers, taking small powerboats out to meet large international ships where U.S. territorial waters ended at “Rum Row.” They would pick up liquor and run it… Read more »
In January of 1942, the Army took over 468 acres next to the Montauk Lighthouse to create a coastal defense station — what today we call Camp Hero. Remote yet strategically vulnerable, almost all of Montauk would come to be occupied by the U.S. military during World War II. “You had the Coast Guard up… Read more »
Santa looks like such a contented fellow. The red and green color scheme, the Dalmatian pup, the fishing lures placed inexplicably on top of a drum. Fred Guardineer, the illustrator, lived in Babylon and wrote a “Fish & Game” column for The Babylon Beacon. So what does he have to do with Montauk? Fishing lines… Read more »
The first passenger train to run to Montauk left Long Island City at 8:30 a.m. on December 17, 1895. There were about 50 “excursionists” that day, and 30 of them boarded in East Hampton with lunch baskets in their hands. “The train consisted of one private dining room car, a parlor car, mail and baggage… Read more »
Construction of the Montauk Community Church broke ground during the winter of 1928, with the help of community contributions of labor and resources under the direction of the Pearson Construction Company. Before they had their own building or formalized congregation, members of the Presbytery of Long Island originally met in the Montauk Theater. In January… Read more »
The Depression was in full swing and one in four workers was unemployed when, on December 2, 1932, the East Hampton Star reported that commercial fishing on eastern Long Island was “almost at a standstill.” For decades fishermen had taken advantage of an abundance of menhaden, or bunker, along the coast. Factories, or “pot-works,” on… Read more »
Early local settlers waited till the cows came home – literally — before celebrating Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving holiday was almost exclusively a local New England tradition observed as early as October or as late as January, depending on the town. On the eastern end of Long Island, the date was determined by the homecoming of… Read more »