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Sag Harbor's Heyday

The port once rivaled New York City's, attracting people from around the world

An 1871 view of the Montauk Lighthouse. A brown stripe was added in 1900. (National Archives Photo)

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

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On a typical day in the early 1800s, the streets of Sag Harbor were the world's streets, teeming with people from places as exotic as the Fiji Islands, the Sandwich Islands, Madagascar, Ceylon.

Algonquian Indians walked around the waterfront clutching steel-tipped harpoons; Africans strolled the narrow streets speaking in languages never heard before in America. European businessmen brokered deals for whale oil; carpenters lugging tool bags negotiated for work in shipyards and on vessels that had sailed around the world. Ship captains who'd seen everything, been everywhere, stood at the bar in waterfront gin mills and told stories. And they were some stories.

This was Sag Harbor, Long Island's metropolis.

Soon after the English arrived on the South Fork in the mid-1600s, they discovered deep water on the bay side, where big ships could drop anchor and unload trade goods. Farmers from Sagaponack on the ocean side could ride there in their carts to meet incoming boats, and soon the broad meadow overlooking the deep harbor took on the name Sagaponack Harbor. Then it was shortened to Sag Harbor.

By the mid-1700s, houses were being built. Soon, Sag Harbor became a village of firsts -- the first deep-water port in the region, the first U.S. Customs House on Long Island, the first great whaling community, the first newspaper on the Island, and perhaps the first place on the Island where milk was delivered to front doors. In contrast to the rest of Long Island, it was cosmopolitan, outward-looking and wide open. Ships that stopped in Sag Harbor after years at sea had crews of American Indians, Polynesians, runaway slaves from the South, Africans and aborigines from Australia. The working world of the sea was integrated.

It was the village's status as a busy port, where a polyglot of languages was spoken, that made it Long Island's window to the world.

``Sag Harbor in the early 1800s was like no other place in America,'' said the late Robert Keene, the Southampton Town historian. ``But it began before then, with the growth of the ship-building industry in the late 1700s. Then, with the growth of the whaling industry, the village was remade again. It's really true that the world came to Sag Harbor, from all parts of the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, Africa.

``The village burned down four times and was rebuilt four times, that will tell you something about Sag Harbor,'' he added. ``In 1843, a history of New York State was published. In the Long Island section, it says there were only two places of any importance -- Brooklyn on the west end and Sag Harbor on the East End.''

In 1789, the U.S. Congress declared Sag Harbor a ``port of entry'' and set up a customs house to collect import duties. That year, according to Dorothy Zaykowski's ``Sag Harbor -- The Story of an American Beauty,'' the village ``had more tons of square-rigged vessels engaged in commerce than even New York City.'' The first customs collector was John Gelston of Bridgehampton; the second was Henry Dering, who held the position for more than 30 years. He was succeeded by his son, Thomas.

Henry Dering was also the village's first postmaster. Sag Harbor's post office, one of the first on Long Island, was set up in Dering's house. Mail went back and forth between Sag Harbor and New York City by stagecoach. Delivery time: three days. Two years after the port of entry designation, in 1791, the first newspaper on Long Island, called Frothingham's Long Island Herald, was started.

During the War of 1812, British naval troops raided the village. There were no known casualties, but there was extensive property damage. Soldiers from surrounding villages arrived, and a pitched battle erupted on the waterfront. ``Limbs were falling from trees, solid shot were screaming overhead, houses were being shattered and pandemonium reigned generally,'' wrote A.M. Cook of Bridgehampton.

The war devastated Sag Harbor's commercial fleet. ``We formerly had twenty to twenty-five coasting vessels employed in southern trade and in carrying wood to market,'' wrote Rep. Ebenezer Sage. ``Three or four of them remained . . .''

While slow to recover from the war, Sag Harbor went back to being a sophisticated community. But a fire -- the first of four devastating conflagrations -- erupted in the spring of 1817. The blaze, which started in a hay barn, roared along the waterfront, destroying dozens of homes and businesses. As a result of the fire, the village formed a fire department, the Otter Hose Company, which was the first volunteer company in New York State.

Rebuilding was slow, but by 1820 -- on the eve of a boom that would come to Sag Harbor with the growth of the whaling industry -- there were 150 houses in the village, one of the first circulating libraries on Long Island, and a thriving sea trade based in the harbor.

Seven years later, a businessman named Nathan Tinker took out an unusual advertisement in the Jan. 6, 1827, edition of the village's other newspaper, the Republican Watchman. ``The subscriber offers to supply families in this vicinity with MILK, upon such terms as will add greatly to their convenience.'' Milk delivery -- at a rate of four cents a quart -- had arrived on Long Island.

For the three decades between 1820 and 1850, the whale trade brought Sag Harbor untold profits. It also helped transform America, because what the whalers really brought back in their holds was more than oil. It was light.