Information, News, and features from Montauk Library’s local history collection.
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 »
“There are odd and interesting histories connected with the names of most of the fishing points at Montauk,” says a bit of unpublished and unattributed writing in the collection of the historian Richard T. Gilmartin in the Montauk Library Archives. “Some are connected with some Historical event, or Shipwreck,” it says. “Others are… Read more »
Walking down Main Street in the off-season, one might feel a longing for the bustling summer crowds––smiling bronzed faces with salt-sprayed hair, babies sporting sunglasses being pushed in strollers, children’s hands dripping with melting ice cream––or you may feel the opposite, finding comfort in the quiet sidewalks, empty beaches, and shuttered seasonal businesses, offering a… Read more »
“’Cap’n Ed’ as he was affectionately known, was a man of force and a picturesque character,” Jeannette Edwards Rattray wrote about Edwin Baker Tuthill, who in 1882 built the first house in what grew into a fishing village on Fort Pond Bay. Originally from East Marion, Captain Ed spent two summers fishing the bay… Read more »
Just received your letter and I want to say It has recalled the day when we first met dear Now I’m feeling better and I promise true I will return to you So don’t forget dear When William H. Heagney released the song In Montauk Dear With You in 1928, Montauk was in a period… Read more »
Who lived in Montauk in 1930? The U.S. Census of that year shines light not only on who lived here but also what they did and where they came from. Tuthill, Grimes, Joyce, McDonald, Syvertsen, Paon, Pfund, Duryea, Burke, Martell, Pitts, Tuma, Gilmartin, Briand – many last names reverberate locally almost 100 years later. A… Read more »
Can you believe that the Montauk Fall Festival – now a highlight of Columbus Day weekends, boosting a “shoulder season” just as the Montauk Chamber had hoped – is approaching its 45th birthday? The festival started in the 1970s as a Chili Cook-Off, according to Diane Hausman, who was a newbie in the early… Read more »
At the time of its creation in 1958, the Sea and Sky Portel was a new and unique concept in resort enjoyment, welcoming aviators and mariners by way of its adjoining airfield and marina. The luxury motel featured apartment-style accommodations with a neighboring restaurant and cocktail lounge located on the eastern shore of Lake Montauk…. 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 »
Either the people on this dock are going home pitifully empty-handed after a fishing trip, or else they have just landed in Montauk on a ferry after visiting New York or New London. We think it’s the latter, and that the era could be the 1920s, when the Montauk Steamboat Company and then its successor,… Read more »