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    Southampton
    Southampton
    Southampton
    Ebook172 pages48 minutes

    Southampton

    By Mary Cummings

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    About this ebook

    Settled in 1640 by a group of Puritans from Massachusetts, Southampton, NY, changed very little until the railroad line from New York City reached the village in 1870. Then, with daily trains traveling east, wealthy New Yorkers were amazed to discover a bucolic backwater just hours away. By the turn of the century, Southampton was ranked among the most fashionable resorts on the East Coast. Over 200 photographs, many rare and previously unpublished, illustrate the changes that came to agrarian Southampton as successive waves of summer residents arrived, first to stay in farmhouses refurbished as boarding houses, then building their own sprawling summer "cottages." Drawn from local historical archives and private collections, these images will show how small-town life continued over the years in a place now world-renowned for its exclusive clubs, grand mansions, and celebrity residents.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439633731
    Southampton
    Author

    Mary Cummings

    Mary Cummings is a writer and historian. She has been awarded by the New York Press Association for her obituary of Joseph Heller and a Best In-Depth Reporting Award for "Troubled Waters" a series on Long Island's threatened groundwater supply. She has written for The New York Times, Newsday, Time Out New York, and more, and was the arts editor and principal feature writer at The Southampton Press. She is a graduate of Smith College with a master's degree from Stony Brook University. She lives in Southampton, New York.

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      Book preview

      Southampton - Mary Cummings

      Siedlecki.

      Introduction

      Southampton, rich in history and scenic beauty, is one of ten towns in Suffolk County, New York. Situated on the south shore of eastern Long Island, it was settled in 1640 by a small band of English Puritans who had obtained permission from the Earl of Stirling to sitt downe upon Long Island ... there to possess improve and enjoy eight miles square of land. When they arrived by boat from Lynn, Massachusetts, they found fertile soil, fish-filled waters, beautiful vistas, and a generally friendly Native American population that had preceded them by thousands of years.

      The Shinnecock, whose tribe was one of thirteen on Long Island in 1640, shared their survival skills with the Europeans. With their help, the settlers weathered the first difficult years and prepared the way for Southampton’s eventual expansion to its present dimensions: 109,530 acres (89,570 of land and 19,960 of water) with a total of 658 miles of waterfront. Within its borders, the town encompasses five incorporated villages—Southampton, Sag Harbor, North Haven, Quogue and Westhampton Beach—and more than a dozen hamlets, each with its own distinct character.

      During the summer months, Southampton’s year-round population of approximately 46,000 swells as much as threefold, but despite its reputation as a resort of international renown, the town remains remarkable for its open spaces and farmland, for the new England flavor of its village streets, and for its many visible links with the past. Among them, at the place where the original families first stepped ashore, is a boulder that bears the inscription: Near this spot in June 1640 landed colonists from Lynn, Massachusetts who founded Southampton, the first English settlement in New York State.

      During the Colonial era Southampton maintained strong ties to New England, which was easily reached by boat, while the 90-mile trip to Manhattan via stagecoach took more than two days. At home, daily life followed agrarian rhythms, town business was conducted in the meeting house, and Puritan morality was written into the town’s legal code by the colony’s Calvinist minister. While farming was the colonists’ principal occupation, fishing was also important and by 1650 the first commercial whaling company had been formed. Because Long Island was lost to the British near the start of the Revolutionary War, local military activity was minimal but the hardships of enemy occupation were considerable, causing some families to flee to Connecticut.

      Even before independence, Sag Harbor, a village that never fit the agrarian pattern, had developed a thriving coastal and foreign trade and by 1789 its port was busier than New York City’s. During the golden age of the whaling industry, which peaked in Sag Harbor between 1837 and 1847, there were more than fifty ships in the harbor fleet and the mansions built for their wealthy owners brought a new elegance to village streets. With its urbane architecture, its crowds of exotic foreigners, and its lively taverns, the village of Sag Harbor was the exception in a town in which the century following the Revolutionary War was marked by normal growth in relative isolation from the rest of the world.

      The arrival of the Long Island Rail Road around 1870 ushered in a new era. New Yorkers and others, who could now reach the town’s charming villages and unspoiled beaches in a few hours, at first sought lodging in boarding houses, then built their own sprawling summer cottages. By the turn of the century, Southampton was ranked among the most fashionable resorts on the East Coast and was undergoing rapid physical changes. Between 1895 and 1913 a host of impressive new public buildings went up in the villages, not a few of them conceived and financed by wealthy summer residents who took it upon themselves to fill perceived cultural gaps. It was also during this period that Southampton acquired its fabled golf links, private clubs, and many of its lavish estates.

      This heady activity was reined in when the first federal income tax in 1913 was followed almost immediately by World War I. When the good times returned, it was less common—though not unknown—for summer residents to arrive for the season accompanied by ten or more servants. But if defenders of the town’s puritanical heritage, who had waged a relentless temperance campaign in the local press, hoped for a return to the old ways when Prohibition was passed in 1919, they were disappointed. Instead, speakeasies came to Southampton, as did rumrunners and others whose lawlessness went largely unpunished. Automobiles also arrived in increasing numbers, bringing glamour to village streets which were taking on a decidedly twentieth-century look. The Great Depression, which hit Southampton somewhat later than elsewhere and was cushioned for farm families by the availability of food, was effectively ended by the terrible hurricane of 1938, which put many people to work rebuilding.

      World War II put progress on hold once again in Southampton as patriotic duty summoned men to serve in Europe and the Pacific while

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