Recounting the feuds, affairs, other melodrama of Hallock family in the 1800s

A blasphemous melodeon organ and feuding church factions. Bitter political divisions over the Civil War and scandalous headlines about a minister's wife running off with a deacon.

Historian Richard Wines recounted these tales of rural melodrama to a rapt audience of about 50 people at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead Saturday.

All were plucked from his recently released book, "A Farm Family on Long Island's North Fork: The Lost World of the Hallocks and Their Sound Avenue Community."

Wines, a descendant of the Hallock family, relied on personal diaries, newspaper clips, captioned black and white photographs and family trees to tell the stories that often get lost in the wider historical narrative.

"The tendency is to sanitize things, to not talk about things you don't want to talk about, not talking about things that are personal," Wines said in an interview, adding that uncovering the messy, human stories was part of the fun.

Saturday's lecture focused on contradictions between what was chronicled and wasn't explicitly included in family accounts. One primary source were diaries kept by patriarch Halsey Hallock, who was born in 1838 and lived to 101.

"He got to witness the railroad coming to Long Island, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity," Wines said. "There's a broad spectrum of stuff that happened in his lifetime."

According to Wines, Halsey proudly supported President Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause, even erecting a "liberty pole," a protest symbol that dates back to the Revolutionary era used to signal support to the north during the Civil War. The pole in the Hallockville neighborhood was subsequently vandalized. Absent from the accounts was the fact that his grandparents, great grandparents and other family members owned slaves.

The Hallocks also embraced temperance while their neighbors orchestrated a rumrunning operation during Prohibition. "But they never reported that to the Feds, and it was in plain sight," Wines said. "I mean, you couldn't have been doing that stuff and have the next door neighbor not know it."

Conflicts arose over just about everything from politics to churches adding modern steeples and embracing change, a humanizing parallel Wines connected to society today.

"These people were all related to each other, they're in the same church, they're all descendants of the same Puritan founders of the North Fork, they're all white, the economic differences were fairly minor," he said. "And they're at each other like cats and dogs."

The historical society's collection includes Hallock mementos, from genealogy charts and photos to jewelry, sewing baskets and other items, according to museum director Victoria Berger.

"It's interesting to see that some things haven't changed that much," she said.

Wines' talk also covered more recent history, including how the Hallockville Museum Farm on Sound Avenue was ultimately established to preserve the Hallock homestead after a battle against the Long Island Lighting Company, which sought to build a nuclear power plant at the site in the 1970s.

A recent visit to the Hallockville museum and neighboring state preserve intrigued Judi Bird of Brookhaven to learn more about the family that lived there.

"It was very humorous to find out about all the clashes, the family and separations of the churches," Bird said. "They didn't see eye-to-eye."