November 22, 2008
E P I L O G U E
Struggling to Keep the Past Alive
Despite the efforts of many, links to LI's history are threatened by neglect
A lover of his town's rich past, Thomas Twomey knew there were gaps in the story of East Hampton -- letters, diaries, journals that would complete the history of a people and a place. He wanted to find them.
"I had been a history buff for years, and I spent a lot of time at the Long Island Collection at the town library," Twomey said. "I knew the documents we had, and I had a good sense of what might still be out there. But there was no concerted effort to look or acquire."
He knew of private collections, of pieces of history moldering in basements and attics. And the clock was ticking. So in 1996, Twomey formed a group of East Hampton residents -- Realtors, artists, a fuel oil dealer, a food market proprietor, an editor and two restaurant owners -- who shared his vision of bringing history home. They gave their group a name -- the East Hampton Rare Book and Map Society -- and a mission: Find historically significant documents, buy them and donate them to the town library for preservation.
"We felt that without a group of people in the community broadcasting that we wanted our written heritage preserved, certain precious materials would seep out of the community and be destroyed, or be sold off to outside institutions," Twomey said.
The group passed the hat among themselves and raised $4,500. It was enough to get started on a document hunt. Since its creation, the group has acquired a trove of whaling documents important to Sag Harbor history from a New Jersey woman; two mid-17th Century maps from a dealer in New York City, and a 300-year-old account of the arrest and hanging of the pirate Capt. William Kidd. It is believed to have been written by a friend of the earl of Bellomont, then governor of New York, who hired Kidd to work as a privateer off the coast of Long Island.
"We retrieved one-of-a-kind documents and brought them home," Twomey said. And the search goes on.
The struggle to preserve our history goes on across Long Island in a multitude of ways heralded and unheralded. The East Hampton Rare Book and Map Society is one example of hundreds of individuals and groups working to save the Island's history from being lost, sold, destroyed or ignored to the point of extinction. They locate old records and documents and donate them to libraries and museums, record oral histories, identify historic structures and work to preserve them, and raise money for museums and historical societies.
Preservation efforts now under way run the gamut from Shinnecock artist David Bunn Martine's work to build a cultural and historical museum on the tribe's Southampton reservation to Old Bethpage Village Restoration, where volunteers recreate past centuries, to the Northport-East Northport Public Library, where an extensive oral history collection includes an interview with "On the Road" author Jack Kerouac, who once lived in the area.
Such efforts are vital, historians say, if Long Island is to maintain its links to the past. "Long Island is the cradle of America," said Rep. Rick Lazio (R-Brightwaters), who is proposing the creation of a history task force to catalog those records and houses that make up Long Island history and then work to preserve them. "We should care as much about our history as about balancing the budget or keeping taxes low. This is who we are as a community. Without a strong sense of history, without a place to go to see it, it will slip through our fingers."
But there are enormous problems that, if not addressed immediately, could mean huge pieces of the historical puzzle will be lost, much of it through neglect. Some of the oldest archival material in Suffolk County -- land deeds and other records that date from the 1660s stored in the Suffolk County clerk's office in Riverhead -- are deteriorating badly because of the high humidity in the building. Other records stored in the clerk's office, including veterans records dating from the Civil War, are uncataloged because the county does not employ an archivist.
"We are talking about priceless documents that are literally rotting," said County Clerk Ed Romaine. "It is a terrible tragedy."
A large collection of photographs and engineering plans documenting the history of Long Island's state parks to the 1920s are also endangered. They are stored in three rooms in the basement of regional headquarters at Belmont Lake State Park. Two of the rooms -- containing 25,000 photographs, negatives and engineering plans -- are not protected against heat and humidity, or against water sprinklers and sewage pipes.
On the larger stage, efforts to locate and preserve Long Island history in all its forms are being conducted on a catch-as-catch-can basis. With the notable exception of the East Hampton group, there are no organizations of private individuals working to acquire documents in any other Long Island town. Most societies and museums have only tiny acquisition budgets, if any at all.
And there is no concerted regional effort under way to catalog historically significant homes or sites before they are lost. There is no clearinghouse to tell people what they can do to help. There is no single repository of historical documents, or a region-wide library or museum, dedicated to searching out Long Island history and preserving it under one roof. Nor is there any computer system that connects the dozens of small collections across Long Island. Many societies and museums are so poorly funded they can not afford to install even the most basic computer system. The 112-year-old Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead is just one example of a first-class museum with third-rate technology -- it does not even have a fax machine.
Homes Face Demolition
And the clock is ticking. Long Island has an estimated 100 First Period houses -- built between 1639 and 1720 -- that are still standing, said Robert MacKay, director of the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities. But experts say many of these homes are in towns without strong preservation ordinances and could face demolition.
Several early 19th-Century farmhouses sit on Sound Avenue in Riverhead, on property owned by the Long Island Power Authority, and have been ignored for so long that trees have grown up through them. Other classic homes are dependent on the kindness of strangers for their survival, as is the case with the Booth house in Southold, which dates to the 1650s, and was dilapidated until town resident James Grathwohl bought it. He is rebuilding it.
And the story of Indian history, already 10,000 years old when Europeans arrived in the early 1600s, is largely untold. Collections of arrowheads and spear points in a museum display case only explain so much. Nowhere on Long Island can anyone hear the ancient dialects spoken by the Algonquians -- the last speakers of a dialect once spoken on the Island live today in Canada.
The Suffolk County Archeological Association recently prepared a map showing dozens of Indian sites on Long Island that have been lost to development. A current example is a site in Southampton on which evidence of wampum-making was recently found; a developer has proposed building 40 houses there.
Efforts to tell more of the Algonquians' story have gone nowhere. Martine raised enough funds to start the construction of a Shinnecock museum and cultural center, but money ran out before the roof was put on. The project now languishes. And while Suffolk County maintains the Pharaoh Museum, a tiny Indian museum in Montauk , it is largely empty -- a feeble reminder that the Indians the English called Montauketts lived at the site for thousands of years. And other than the Joseph Lloyd Manor House on Lloyd Neck, there are no permanent exhibits anywhere on Long Island to show people that slaves once toiled here.
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