Looking back at the start of the East Hampton summer colony

The East Hampton Historical Society’s summer exhibition is titled “East Hampton’s Summer Colony: 1880-1940,” and though it adheres to its time frame, one of the more fascinating insights offered by Society Director Richard Barons in the course of a recent tour through the show is that the village had actually been welcoming a trickle of summer visitors for many years before it became a flood.

“Kaleidoscopic” was how Mr. Barons chose to describe the exhibition, which uses historical photographs, costumes, maps, documents, decorative arts and memorabilia to tell the story of how a quaint seaside village acquired its seasonal prominence as a gathering place for artists, clergymen and old-line families seeking refuge from urban tumult and social pretense.

Mr. Barons cited evidence that as early as 1845 members of the Dix family were summer boarders on Georgica. From the East Hampton Historical Society’s own collection of boarding house daybooks dating back to the early 1860s, he has selected one from the Miller House for display. Next to it is a contract

in which a member of the prominent Gallatin family agrees to pay $350 to spend the summer of 1880 in a 17th-century structure that had once served as a poorhouse.

Of course, before 1896, when the railroad arrived in East Hampton, getting there meant taking a steamship to Sag Harbor and continuing by stagecoach over dusty roads, a rather grueling trip though hardly daunting for an ever steadier stream of visitors.

“It surprises people that the resort is older than they thought,” said Mr. Barons. “So often they think it started with the Tile Club.” The club’s members—artists and writers who decorated tiles at their weekly New York City meetings in mild mockery of the decorative arts craze—traveled to East Hampton in 1877, rhapsodized over its quaintness in an article for Scribner’s magazine, and are given much of the credit (or blame) for the rise of the resort.

While the attributes that make East Hampton a world-class summer resort today—the beach, the healthful sea air, the farm fresh foods and the village’s rural charm—have remained essentially the same over the years, what the exhibition reveals is how differently succeeding generations have gone about enjoying and appreciating them.

Take the beach for example. An 1895 full-coverage lady’s bathing suit of wool with porcelain buttons underscores Mr. Barons’s assertion that “swimming was mostly a male activity until the next decade.” Staying afloat—let alone swimming—would have been nearly impossible in such a cumbersome garment, which was more about protection from the sun and immodest exposure than athletic activity.

Women and children at the time were also shielded from harmful rays by graceful, vine-covered bowers built on the beach, and those who insisted on splashing around in the surf were often tethered to logs sunk into the sand, lest they be swept out to sea. These long-discarded devices for keeping danger at bay can be seen in early 20th-century postcards and photographs from the society’s collection.

“The Way We Get to the Beach,” c. 1910, is an illustration of transportation in transition. Bicycles have been hastily parked beneath a boardwalk at the end of Ocean Avenue. Horses and carriages are also in evidence, as well as a few newfangled automobiles.

A carriage on exhibit might have been the very one in the image. Bicycles, however, are more exotic than those piled haphazardly beneath the boardwalk. There is one of those extraordinarily silly-looking high-wheel bicycles that look as though they were designed for a clown act but were, said Mr. Barons, “a fad among young men” who used them to show off and turn female heads. With the rider perilously perched high above the center of gravity, the least obstacle in the path was apt to send him flying into the air, attracting the kind of attention he would surely have preferred to avoid.

Also on view is a chainless bicycle, an oddity made by the Weed Sewing Machine Co., proudly displayed at the Paris Expo of 1900, and destined—one wonders why—for oblivion.

Women’s fashions went from ultra-modest to slinky and sexy in the time span covered by the exhibition, though Sarah Murphy, one half of the wealthy bohemian couple that enlivened East Hampton society and helped bring many European artists to the area in the ’30s and ’40s, had both extremes in her wardrobe. Two of her dresses, along with other accessories and objects that belonged to her or to her husband, Gerald, are on display.

One dress—cotton, pin-striped, long-sleeved and ankle length—would have been suitable for a Sunday School picnic. The other, clingy, sleeveless and cut on the bias, would not look out of place at Nello next weekend. Indeed, says Mr. Barons, female visitors to the exhibition seem to covet it.

No surprise that women’s fashions have changed dramatically. Less expected, perhaps, is the gap between what people did for fun 100 years ago and what amuses today. As photographs and newspaper accounts accompanying the exhibition demonstrate, dressing up and standing still in tableaux that mimicked master art works or scenes from history was high on the list of fun things to do. Family and friends of the artist Thomas Moran were famous for them. They loved them at “The Creeks,” where the arty Albert and Adele Herter were popular hosts, and, over on Huntting Lane, the Playhouse of arts patron Mary Woodhouse provided the perfect setting.

Wall space devoted to club life displays images and accounts of activities planned under the rubric “gymkhana”—a word as arcane as the events it embraced, among them “pig sticking” (spearing potatoes while on horseback), watermelon racing, egg and spoon races and a goose-driving competition for women.

Quotes from R. Heber Newton, a clergyman and resort pioneer have been placed on opposite walls at the Clinton Academy and serve as bookends of a sort for the exhibition. In 1888, the Reverend Newton declared East Hampton to be “the easiest place to keep house. Dealers of every kind come to the door each morning. Scarcely half a dozen foggy days all last summer. Its salvation from the Philistinism of our near city has been its distance…”

And, on the opposite wall he extols East Hampton as “one of the quaintest, old-fashioned places to be met with anywhere in this dreadfully new country.”

“East Hampton Summer Colony: 1880-1940” remains on view through October 12. Museum hours at the Clinton Academy are Friday and Saturday (July and August) 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 12 to 5 p.m.