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 »
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 »
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 »
Staff Sergeant Arthur M. Dunne (1916-2009), a World War II veteran, first came to East Hampton in June 1942, the day after the Nazi saboteurs landed in Amagansett. The next month he was assigned to Montauk to install and operate a radar tower at the Montauk Point Lighthouse. By this time, the Coast Guard had… Read more »
A logbook, or ship’s log, is an official record of events, conditions, and observations documented during the voyage of a ship, generally kept by captains or first mates. Historical logbooks provide information about the ship’s position, weather, ports visited, and daily life aboard the vessel. The engineer’s log of the steamship “George Appold” chronicles the… Read more »
September 5 will be Day 1 for Montauk School students – a Thursday, which should give them a soft landing after summer vacation. For the second September in a row, Jack Perna, the school’s longtime superintendent and principal, will still be on vacation, however, having retired in 2023 after more than 50 years. Hired by… Read more »
During the dog days of summer, you will find splashes of pink dotting the roadsides throughout Montauk, especially in low-lying areas on the margins of wetlands and shorelines. These lush native displays belong to the swamp rose mallow or Hibiscus moscheutos, as it is known scientifically. The swamp rose mallow, commonly called the hardy… Read more »
Most of the historic audio materials in the Montauk Library’s archives consist of recordings of oral history interviews, lectures, and local community organization meetings captured on cassette. But hidden among the stacks was a copy of Old Montauk: The Song for People Who Love It on vinyl record. Old Montauk is a country-inspired ballad performed… Read more »
Barbara Metzger (1944-2023) was an award-winning novelist, editor, writer of greeting card verses, artist, and longtime volunteer with the Friends of the Montauk Library. It was in that last capacity that Bob-E, as she was known, was instrumental in organizing book fairs on the Montauk Green on July Fourth weekends from 1980 to 2014. In… Read more »
“Sportfishing, even for the biggest fish, was not just a man’s sport,” Bill Akin wrote in The Golden Age of Montauk Sportfishing. “Women had always been part of the picture.” Women – particularly the partners of wealthy sportfishermen – boated some impressively large specimens. One was Chisie Farrington, the wife of the sports journalist and… Read more »