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Eastport

Ducks Fit the Bill to Pay the Bills

Beginnings: Hard to imagine - it's barely 11/2 square miles - but Eastport started out as two communities, Seatuck and Waterville. The two hamlets joined in the 1850s and hoped to be christened Seatuck, but the U.S. Post Office nixed the idea. Seatuck was too close to Setauket. The runner-up was Eastport. Gristmills were built at the heads of local creeks, one as early as the 1730s, and farming was the mainstay of the community.

The Ducks: Eastport was the unofficial capital of Long Island duck farming. A few years after the Pekin duck was introduced to the United States from China in 1873 (not to be confused with Peking duck, an American dish developed in the 1950s), the first commercial farms sprouted along the creeks leading to Seatuck Cove and Moriches Bay. By 1900, 29 farms dotted the Eastport landscape, whittled to 15 by the late 1940s when Long Island produced 6.5 million of the ducks going to market. Penny postcards and early photographs depict men ``picking'' the ducks, and women plucking the birds before they were shipped. Recalls Mervin Tillinghast, who worked summers on a duck farm and freezing plant as a teen-ager: ``We packed them in the freezer, six to a box. Waited 24 hours and took them out. Then they were packaged for Swanson and other companies. I made sure I wore a lot of extra clothing. It was about 20 degrees below zero in those freezers.'' Though there were other farms in East Moriches and Speonk, many farmers brought their ducks to Eastport for processing.

Turning Point: Pollution pressures of the late 1960s and early '70s put most of the duck farms out of business. The farmers were forced to build pollution pits to divert the duck waste from waterways. Today, Chet Massey, whose family has operated a duck farm in Eastport since 1944, is the only duck farmer left. Now antiques reign where ducks once roamed. At last count, 15 antique shops lined Eastport's main street, drawing crowds of weekend shoppers and tourists headed to the Hamptons.

Where to Find More: ``History of Eastport, L.I., N.Y., 1775-1975,'' by LeRoy Wilcox, available at the Mastic-Moriches-Shirley Library.