“When I struck the Napeague road I thought I had come to the abomination of desolation,” said Florence Sammis in 1967 of her first trip to Montauk, in 1918.
Interviewed in 1976, Martha Greene remembered a similarly lonely landscape when she commuted from East Hampton in the 1930s as a secretary for the Montauk Beach Company.
“I used to drive to Montauk to work and be the only person on the road,” she said. “Mr. Conway was the only person going in the other direction,” as he lived in Montauk but worked for a bank in East Hampton.
“There was nothing there but a few screaming sea gulls and the bell buoy,” remembered Mary Gosman of Montauk Harbor during World War II, when her husband traveled from Amagansett to work at a commercial fish dock.
In an oral history seven years later, in 2003, Kathryn Abbe described her own magical first encounter, which took place in 1942:
“To arrive in Montauk on a foggy mysterious evening … whirling fog and I could see windmills along the way. I was just so taken with Montauk in the very first moment.”
These voices and others still speak eloquently thanks to oral history interviews conducted by the Montauk Historical Society and the Montauk Library over half a century or more. From Eugene Beckwith Jr. debunking the myth that it was the 1938 Hurricane that decimated the fishing village, to his father describing how fishermen hunted swordfish, to Frances Ecker’s nostalgia for a childhood spent in and on the water, each narrator has a strikingly unique perspective and personal story.
For listeners who’d like to hear a full interview – which usually lasts about an hour or less — more than 50 can be accessed online through New York Heritage. Smaller bites, in the form of roughly two-minute clips, are also available now on YouTube for a growing number of the interviews. Check them out!
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