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 »
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 »
*A version of this post originally ran on September 28, 2022. New photographs and information about our current exhibition have been added.* As Autumn sets in, beachgoers clear the Montauk shorelines, retreating to apple orchards, pumpkin patches, and fall foliage excursions. Meanwhile, for surfers in the Northeast, the fall signals large swells generated by late-season… Read more »
Life-saving service history is linked to early Chinese practices, like the Chinkiang Association for the Saving of Life established in 1708. It was the first life-saving station institution in the world, consisting of a complex series of stations dotting the coastlines of rivers, bays, and oceans. Chinese benevolent societies and the Imperial Chinese government also… Read more »
By taking just a short jaunt from the parking area on Napeague Harbor Road through a maritime forest of gnarled oaks and knotted pitch pines, one can travel back in time to an ancient forest and duneland resembling a far-off desert destination. The Walking Dunes, as they are aptly named for their ever-shifting voyage southward… Read more »
Forty-five years ago this week, New York State took ownership of the privately owned Montauk Golf and Racquet Club and named it “Montauk Downs State Park.” The state was well into planning a public golf course at Hither Hills State Park, but an option to buy the existing 171-acre Montauk Golf tract for $1.325 million… 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 »
Who else remembers card catalogues and date-due stamps and brontosaurus-size desktops? Leased for $1 a year from the Montauk Community Church, the first Montauk Library opened on November 24, 1980, in a cottage that was miniature but a massive improvement over not having any library at all. “On opening day, it was reported that there… Read more »
Jeannette Edwards Rattray wrote in 1938 about a previous time, in the late 19th century, when Montauk was a “Gunner’s Paradise,” a “practically womanless Paradise for groups of men who went ‘on’ gunning for days and weeks at a time.” They camped in little shacks and packed few provisions, as they could live on… Read more »
“A great price for a great waste of sand” – that’s how the New York Times described the auctioning off of Montauk for $151,000 in 1879. White settlers from East Hampton had used Montauk for pastureland for more than two centuries, building First, Second, and Third House for shepherds and visitors. Now Montauk’s new owner… Read more »