Information, News, and features from Montauk Library’s local history collection.
Funny – considering it was she who advocated, in “A Room of One’s Own,” for a peaceful, quiet space to write – that it was Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that made it possible to provide just such a space for writers and visual artists here in Montauk. In the 1960s, after Albee… Read more »
Every week, the Montauk Library Archives fulfills historical reference and research requests from local newspaper reporters, documentarians, podcasters, authors, and the like. You may have seen images from our archives last month in the East Hampton Star’s article “Carl Fisher’s Montauk, 100 Years Ago” or aired on a recent episode of the Smithsonian Channel’s Mysteries… Read more »
A friend wrote recently to ask if there were ghosts at the Montauk Manor. About 20 years ago, he said, his sister and her husband stayed in a room on one of the upper floors — perhaps one built into the roof level, as she remembered a sloped ceiling – in the massive, four-story landmark…. Read more »
Presumably in town to wrestle the native landscape into a Miami Beach of the North, Carl Fisher’s investors (above) at least had the deference to remove their hats at Montauk’s oldest settlers’ cemetery. That was wise: In 2011, East Hampton Star reported in jest that Montauk’s first lighthouse keeper, Jacob Hand, who was laid… Read more »
“The first annual Community Picnic and Field Day Saturday, sponsored by Montauk Youth Inc., has been termed a success,” The East Hampton Star reported on October 2, 1980. The newspaper added rather poetically that many local families had taken part despite the fields at Montauk County Park having been “windswept.” Baking and cooking contests… Read more »
In late October of 1903, a young couple joined hands in marriage atop the lighthouse tower. Their choice of the venue arose from their happenstance meeting there, when Evelyn Cook was visiting her aunt and uncle, Margaret and Captain James G. Scott, who was the lighthouse keeper living there at the time. The groom was… Read more »
It was August 1898 when Camp Wikoff opened to what quickly grew to be more than 20,000 sickened, injured, and weakened soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War. A hastily created patchwork of tents and infirmaries blanketed virtually all of Montauk, from Fort Pond Bay to Ditch Plains to Third House. It was intended to… Read more »
“Gather wild grapes in early September,” Jean Fischer advised in her recipe for Wild Grape Jam with Lime in Montauk Cooks with Friends. “Many vines will not have fruit. The heady rich aroma of ripe grapes and your nose will help you find them.” It’s true that only the female vines of wild fox grapes… Read more »
After Ruth Woodrow died in 1983, Bessi Hochstein wrote a letter to the East Hampton Star describing her memories of boarding at Mrs. Woodrow’s cabins in Shepherd’s Neck. “The first time I was in Montauk was early spring, 1979, the year before I entered college,” she wrote, “I came, like hordes of others my… Read more »
After a bright and fair morning on September 21, 1938, an unexpected Category 3 hurricane made landfall on Long Island around 2 pm. With no cause for alarm, the New York Times’s forecast for the day read “Rain, probably heavy today and tomorrow, cooler.” No one had predicted the storm to take its path north… Read more »