East Hampton Village

The First Resort of the Wealthy

By Tom Morris | Staff Writer

Exuding as it does the charm of a tranquil American colonial place, East Hampton Village nevertheless owes much of its modern grace to its emergence in the last 120 years as an affluent resort community. The evolution from pioneer beginnings of a Puritan enclave in a new world 350 years ago to the quiet elegance of today's renowned village provides one of Long Island's richest histories.

After East Hampton Town's founding in 1648 by a handful of English immigrants, most from Lynn, Mass., the first settlers built their huts and cottages on both sides of what is now Main Street.

The 17th-Century inhabitants were almost all strongly independent Puritans, who named the community Maidstone for the first 14 years, after their home area in Kent, England. By 1651, the new Maidstone had 37 families, most from Connecticut and Southampton, which had been formed a few years earlier.

What is now the area of large Victorian homes near the ocean around Lily Pond Lane in the village was once the best grazing land. The village played a key role in the huge cattle drives to Montauk that occurred annually for most of three centuries.

Perhaps nothing better evokes the village's early history than the South End Cemetery just off Main Street, where the oldest stone, that of the first minister, Thomas James, dates to 1696. James was a friend and business associate of Lion Gardiner, who is also interred in the cemetery.

Gardiner lived for many years in the village and was the guiding force in the entire town's early development. He was known for his amicable dealings with the Montauketts, which resulted in much of the land on the East End being ceded to the settlers without feud or bloodshed. Gardiner was generally a calming influence, though in 1657, his daughter Elizabeth, then 15, set the fledgling community on its ear by accusing a woman, Elizabeth Garlick, of witchcraft. She was acquitted at a trial in Hartford.

The village abounds in historic places, including two of its most venerable houses, on Main Street. Home Sweet Home, built in 1650, was the boyhood home of actor-playwright John Howard Payne, who penned the famous song the house is named after. Adjacent is the Mulford house, circa 1680, also one of Long Island's oldest. There is also Huntting Inn, which encloses a 1699 house built for the community's second minister, and Clinton Academy, the first college prep school in the state, established in 1784. The venerable Hedges Inn, family owned from 1652 to 1923, was perhaps most famous as an inn between 1954 and 1964 under the late Henri Soule.

It was in the 1870s that the major turning point occurred: the start of the summer colony that would transform East Hampton and give it the stamp of sedate prosperity it bears to this day. Well-to-do New York vacationers began to pour in from the nearest rail station six miles away in Bridgehampton and via steam packet. Scribner's Magazine in 1877 commissioned a group of writers and artists - known as the Tile Club - to depict the best of Long Island, and they quickly discovered the ambience of East Hampton. The Tile Club lingered for two decades, attracting more visitors, and by the 1880s the village had become a thriving resort for well-heeled New Yorkers.

In 1891, the Maidstone Club was organized - dominated, as one history book put it, by ``genteel, Episcopalian and rich'' summer visitors. One of its founders was Thomas Moran, an artist and Tile Clubber who first came to national attention with large canvases of Yellowstone and Yosemite that helped create the national park system. Moran's former home on Main Street is on the National Register of Historic Places. It adjoins the summer White House used in the 1840s by President John Tyler, whose wife, ``the rose of Long Island,'' was the former Julia Gardiner of East Hampton. The first couple turned many heads as they strolled down Main Street.

Another president's wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, spent many childhood days at Rowdy Hall, a social hall that served as the center of an artists' colony in the 1890s and was later turned into a rambling house that remains on Main Street. Jackie's parents, Jack and Janet Bouvier, rented the house after their 1928 marriage, and held her second birthday party there.

After the railroad was extended to East Hampton in 1895, the gates opened wide to summer visitors. Some arrived with 10 or more servants at their shingled mansions near the shore. The village incorporated in 1920.

The resort reputation is longstanding. Officers of the crown once came to East Hampton for the ``waters.'' In 1869, a society writer for a New York newspaper declared East Hampton to be ``innate with good breeding and good family,'' excluding ``rabble ... the vulgar parvenus that so often make life wretched'' in other places. A local celebrity was the actor John Drew, who could be seen driving along Main Street in his carriage with his niece, Ethel Barrymore. (The latest acting Barrymore, Drew, is named for John Drew.)

Where to Find More: ``East Hampton, a History and Guide,'' by Jason Epstein and Elizabeth Barlow, 1985, Random House; ''East Hampton on Long Island,'' Suffolk County Tercentenary pamphlet, 1983; ``The Land of Home Sweet Home,'' by Marjorie A. Denton, Paxson Press 1962; Long Island Forum collection; at East Hampton Public Library.