Fire Island

From Pirates to Slavery to Fun in the Sun

By Tom Morris | Staff Writer

Across three centuries, the famed Fire Island barrier beach has been the setting for Indians, settlers, whalers, pirates, buried treasure, shipwrecks, slaves, murdering thieves, valiant life-savers, developers, gay people and the pursuit of seashore fun for everybody.

Once, in the late 17th Century, the entire sandspit was owned by an ambitious and well-connected Englishman, William (Tangier) Smith. Today it is a fabled resort of 18 private communities interwoven with a series of public parks. Connecting those two points in history is a Babylon entrepreneur named David S.S. Sammis, who bought 120 acres just east of the Fire Island Lighthouse in 1855 and built a huge hotel that marked the end of the barrier's reputation as a somewhat scary, even dangerous place.

The origin of the name Fire Island has never been clear to historians. Some say it resulted from errors by 17th Century mapmakers who confused the word ``fire'' with ``five,'' for the five small islands around what was then known as Huntington East Gut, now Fire Island Inlet. Others say it came from fires set on the beach by Indians signaling the mainland or by settlers calling for help when a whale was landed on the shore. And another suggestion is the Dutch word vier (four), easily confused with the word fire. In earlier times, when seals were prevalent, the Secatogues had called the barrier Seal Island. One thing seems certain: Fire Island wasn't always an island. In an earlier period, it was a peninsula attached to the shore around Quogue.

Smith, the original settler-owner, had grown up in the court of Charles II in England. He came to America at 20, became a friend of New York colonial Gov. Thomas Dongan and set about collecting a real estate empire in Brookhaven. In 1693 Smith received a royal grant that included the entire barrier beach from the inlet to about the Southampton Town line, about 24 miles. He called the estate the Manor of St. George, and its remnants - the manor house and surrounding grounds - are open to the public as part of the Fire Island National Seashore in Shirley.

Brookhaven had about 100 slaves by 1800, and boats called slaverunners sailed through Fire Island Inlet to supply estates. Local historians have written that stockades were built on the beach to hold slaves for sale.

Pirate activities on the Fire Island coast are well documented, and legends are legion. As early as 1795, ship ``wreckers'' appeared. Jeremiah Smith, considered the first inhabitant of Fire Island, built a hut - later a sizeable house as business prospered - at what is now Cherry Grove. Smith was said to have lured ships ashore with lights and murdered the crews to get the booty. There were yarns about ``two brutal women'' who in 1816 were said to have murdered 10 crewmen from a ship they waylaid.

Between 1640 and 1915, more than 600 ships were reported in distress off Fire Island, prompting the first lighthouse on Fire Island, in 1825, and its successor, the current light, in 1858, which then was at the inlet. Unmanned rescue huts had been put up by volunteer groups as early as 1805. Starting in 1887, the newly created U.S. Life-Saving Service created 23 manned stations in Suffolk - 11 on Fire Island, where many heroic rescues occurred.

As the 19th Century waned, so did Fire Island's dubious reputation. Smelly fish-oil factories were eliminated. Far fewer ships foundered as the steam vessel era arrived. Mainland groups began to come to Fire Island for picnics. The key turning point had been the arrival in 1855 of David S.S. Sammis, the man who first made Fire Island a resort. His huge Surf Hotel drew large, monied crowds for three decades, until 1892, when the state, in an emergency move, took it over and turned it into a quarantine station for ship passengers after a cholera scare in Europe. In 1908, the hotel site, in the current Kismet, became the first state park location on Long Island.

As the new century unfolded, Fire Island grew, with Ocean Beach established in 1908, Saltaire in 1910 and Cherry Grove -- dubbed ``the summer capital of the gay world'' by one author -- emerging in the 1920s and '30s, burgeoning after World War II. Homosexuals found a base at Cherry Grove when Ocean Beach and Seaview began making them unwelcome. Their numbers increased slowly through the Depression, but in 1939 the opening of Duffy's Hotel brought a new surge of popularity. In recent decades, according to historians, about 90 percent of Cherry Grove's residents have been gay, and they dominate also at nearby Fire Island Pines.

By 1927, Robert Moses was head of the new Long Island State Park Commission and pressing for a highway to Fire Island. World War II put his plans on hold but by 1954 Moses had built the Captree Causeway across the bay to the inlet and the road seemed inevitable. But opponents who believed a road would ruin the barrier organized and stopped the plans, enticing the federal government to back creation of a public park. In September, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill creating the Fire Island National Seashore. That seashore now extends about five miles to the west of where it ended in the mid-1800s, the result of natural sand-shifting forces. The ``new'' land is the site of Robert Moses State Park.

Where to Find More: ''Fire Island, 1650s-1980s,'' by Madeleine C. Johnson, at Bay Shore-Brightwaters Public Library, and other area libraries.