A ghost from Montauk’s history perched on an inexorably vanishing shore – this painting depicts the McCaffray/Rheinstein windmill on what was known as Sandpiper Hill.
The work most likely was painted by William A. Rogers in the 1930s. It came into the family of Harold Hone, who purchased property nearby in Ditch Plains in 1920 and spent summers there. Pamela Fitzgibbon, Harold Hone’s great-granddaughter, donated this painting to the Montauk Library last month in memory of Charlotte Hone Reuter.
The house on Sandpiper Hill, with its strictly decorative windmill, was originally built in 1928 for Walter and Alys Mary McCaffray. After Walter, a Wall Street broker, died in 1935, his wife bequeathed it to the Order of the Society of Jesus, which in turn sold it to Sidney Rheinstein, who died in 1968.
“In the early 1970s, due to the effects of erosion, a portion of the house was actually hanging over the edge of the cliff,” Henry Osmers wrote for the Montauk Historical Society.
The photographer Peter Beard purchased the house in 1973 and moved a portion of it, as well as the windmill, to another oceanfront spot, just west of Camp Hero. The windmill had been struck by lightning at its old site and thus the residence became known as Thunderbolt Ranch, attracting a bevy of Beard’s fellow artists and jet-setters.
Unfortunately – especially since it also contained Peter Beard’s art collection, photographs, notebooks, and other irreplaceable items – the house was devastated by fire in 1978.
Back at the now-vacant original property just west of Ditch Plains, East Hampton Town created today’s Rheinstein Park. The site at Sandpiper Hill is still vacant, but relics of the old infrastructure materialize every so often on the beach.
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