A Portrait Of Bridgehampton’s First ‘Summer People’

Esteemed ladies of leisure. A toy importer. A patent expert. These were just a few of the wealthy New Yorkers who would summer in Bridgehampton at the turn of the 20th century. A new book, released this spring, tells the story of the summer colony in the hamlet through photographs, most of which are at least 100 years old.

“Images of America: Bridgehampton’s Summer Colony” was assembled and written by Julie Greene, the curator and archivist for the Bridgehampton Museum and the local history librarian at the Hampton Library in the same hamlet.

Arcadia Publishing, a publisher of local history books, asked Ms. Greene to compile a new book on Bridgehampton in 2013, just 10 years after the last one was done. Having recently completed an exhibit on the hamlet’s boardinghouses and summer colony, Ms. Greene decided to focus the new book on that. “I love to research and get the history right as best we can,” she said.

She mined through the museum’s archive of photographs that were donated over the years, and carefully selected those that could tell the story of a hamlet experiencing a sea change and a few of the families that helped established the Bridgehampton summer colony.

Named for the bridge that was built to connect the settlements of Mecox and Sagaponack, Bridgehampton was settled in 1656. However, it was not until 1870, when the Long Island Rail Road came to town, that this quiet, rural community began to transform. “This was still just a sleepy farm community,” said Ms. Greene. “Here comes the railroad enabling farmers to ship their goods on trains” and infusing the area with more money as an influx of wealthy Manhattanites came out to escape the insidious pollution of the city. “Doctors were sending people out here for the salt air,” Ms. Greene said.

Initially, the railroad line ended in Bridgehampton, leaving passengers to travel by stagecoach if they were destined for a location farther east. It was not until 1895 that the line was extended to Montauk.

At first, these new visitors stayed in farmhouses that doubled as boardinghouses. Over time, they started renting private homes and eventually bought or built their own. Unlike today, the divide between the summer colony and the year-rounders was not quite so discordant. “The Bridgehampton [golf] Club was started by locals and summer people alike,” Ms. Greene noted. The harmony between groups may have been due to the fact that communities were smaller back then, “so if they wanted to build a golf club, they had to go to the people who owned the land.” The tenor may have changed after the Great Depression—“locals versus the summer people was a more defined thing.”

What remains the same, however, is the appeal of the area. “What has drawn people here in the past is still what draws people, and I hope that we can keep the summer community and local community working together to keep this place as lovely as it is,” said Ms. Greene.

Ms. Greene will host an illustrated talk on her book at the Hampton Library on Tuesday, July 14, at 7 p.m., and a talk and signing at BookHampton in Southampton on Friday, July 24, at 5 p.m.