Information, News, and features from Montauk Library’s local history collection.
It was a misty morning on January 16, 1894, when “Fannie J. Bartlett,” a three-masted schooner transporting coal from Philadelphia to Boston, ran onto an outer bar just two miles east of the Napeague Life-saving Station. Captain A. T. Hutchins was following a pilot boat when he lost his bearings in the fog at 4… 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 »
This week’s chilly weather gave us a taste of the biting temperatures and harsh winds our Montauk ancestors experienced in winter. With lower recorded temperatures and less forestation and development hindering the wintry maritime winds, Montauk must have felt uninhabitable to year-round families struggling to stay warm. “All of the local bays and harbors are… 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 »
A nasty horse named Humpty Dumpty gets a kick out of throwing riders. A bathtub morphs into a UFO and lifts off. A little girl wins a baby elephant in a mail-in coupon contest. A surfcaster hooks a mermaid off Montauk Point. The imagination of the illustrator Frank Borth extended all the way from drawing… 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 »
Ever wonder how you can learn more about the history of Montauk? Reading our weekly Throwback Thursday posts is a great starting point and if you want to dig deeper into a topic or have local history-related questions you can visit the Montauk Library’s archives. But what is an archives anyway? “An archives is a… 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 »
Montauk’s forests, hills, valleys, cliffs, and shorelines have long inspired creative types flocking to the East End for open spaces and wild muses. Montauk’s untamed woodlands and resident trees have been contemplated by writers and artists alike. In the library’s collection and on the community room walls we see instances of their influence in poetry,… Read more »