Where bay meets beach in history

Long Beach is a tombolo, as anyone who has followed the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s summer exhibit at the Annie Cooper Boyd House to its final panel will know.

The dictionary defines a tombolo as a sandbar that connects an island to the mainland or to another island, a definition that conjures up images of featureless sand spits, useful perhaps as links but otherwise of interest only to shore birds and bugs.

Long Beach, which connects North Haven to the Sag Harbor mainland is, and apparently always has been, another matter entirely, as the rich collection of photos, drawings, facts and lore compiled for the exhibit by Jean Held and Dorothy Zaykowski reveals. From earliest times, when Native Americans gathered at Weckatuck Spring, Long Beach has been where people from Sag Harbor and surrounding communities have converged, at first for practical reasons, later on for the picnics and swimming, the parties and danc

es that made Long Beach a recreational hot spot for locals and visitors alike.

The exhibit begins with a painting of Native Americans gathered at Weckatuck Spring on the Noyac end of Long Beach. While the creative talents of Southampton artist David Martine are evident, the painting, like everything else in the exhibit, is faithful to history. To re-create the setting, the artist worked from an early photograph of the area discovered at the Southampton Historical Museum. Confirmation that such gatherings actually took place was found in very early Southampton Town records.

“It was a meeting place for all the local tribes,” Ms. Held asserted on a recent July morning when she offered a guided tour of the exhibit. One reason they came, she added, was for the healing power of the water’s heavy minerals.

For many years after the arrival of the white settlers in the 17th century, Long Beach was prized mainly for the benefits it provided to a population made up mainly of farmers. Text and images tell of their activities, harvesting sea grass for fodder, bringing their cattle and sheep to graze near its waters and, in the days before there was a bridge, making the trip between North Haven and Sag Harbor along trails created by the wheels of their wagons.

Even after the bridge was built, some continued to take the long way around, said Ms. Held, “because there was a toll.”

Among other reminiscences that enliven the exhibit is Bridgehampton farmer Richard Hendrickson’s memory of seaweed-gathering expeditions to Long Beach in his grandfather’s wagon circa 1917. There was no formal road at the time and the wagon would have to make its way through the soft sand, which became considerably more difficult on the way home when the wagon was filled with wet seaweed.

“They used the seaweed for insulation, to fill mattresses and for mulch,” Ms. Held explained.

The two women did research for the exhibit every Thursday in the history room of the John Jermain Library, where old issues of the Sag Harbor Express were their primary source. Excited by their discoveries—far too numerous for the show—they filled two notebooks with those that did not make the cut.

Also in the library’s collection were wonderfully precise drawings by William Wallace Tooker that confirmed visually what they knew from printed accounts. Among others on view are a drawing that shows in detail the old wagon trails and a carefully drawn scene with a fish house indicated on an early 19th-century map.

The many changes in ownership of the land around Long Beach are carefully noted, a complex history that becomes increasingly interesting in the section headlined “The Pleasure Seekers Arrive.”

“This was a discovery for us,” said Ms. Held displaying all the excitement of the researcher rewarded. “The very first New Yorker known as a local owner of Bay Point was the industrialist, philanthropist and founder of Cooper Union, Peter Cooper.”

When Cooper’s daughter married Abram Hewitt, he got the land as well as the bride (and eventually offspring who launched the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.) Then, in 1890, some time after he had first come to Sag Harbor, the well-connected Charles A. Lamont, a board member at Cooper Union who counted the Cooper clan among his most prestigious connections, took ownership of the land and became the undisputed leader of Sag Harbor’s burgeoning yacht club/lawn tennis summer society.

In 1894, the Express reported: “Charles A. Lamont is having a very tasty cottage erected on Hogonock near his present summer residence.”

According to Ms. Held, “he was the first to be actively involved in Sag Harbor social life.” In the mold of the sportsman aristocrat, he raised a family of hardy participants in all the pleasurable activities of summer.

“All his kids went out hunting, fishing and sailing,” said Ms. Held, including with Annie Cooper Boyd, who “sailed and played lawn tennis with some of them.”

When his aristocratic instincts went too far and he blocked passage along the beach with boulders meant to prevent people from invading what he considered his private domain and had town workers who had been assigned to remove them arrested, the judge, not surprisingly, was not sympathetic. He sent the men home.

“There are other Lamont stories,” said Ms. Held, noting that “the locals used his docks for wild parties. Local people by that time were sailing by ferry or their own boats for picnics.”

The ’80s and Gay ’90s were evidently full of picnics and parties on Long Beach, occasions that are well represented with images and contemporary accounts in the show. A favorite destination was Gray’s Dock, which attracted crowds of pleasure-seekers every weekend. One newspaper clipping on view notes that on August 20, 1885, nearly 100 people gathered there for their revels.

Visible in some family beach photos of that era, beyond the bathers out on the bay, is a barge operated by the E.W. Bliss Company, which tested torpedoes (sans explosives) on Noyac Bay until the end of World War I.

It was “a great economic boon” for Sag Harbor people, Ms. Held noted, but others with no stake in its success complained of the noise and the danger and eventually triumphed.

With the advent of the automobile and improved roads, the ferries that had brought people across Sag Harbor Cove from the village were phased out. More people came via car from Noyac and Bridgehampton and the action moved to that end of Long Beach.

“The road went in in 1930,” observed Ms. Held. “That was the big event. It completely eliminated the activities in the Short Beach area.”

Long Beach as we think of it today—the Clifford J. Foster Memorial Park—was deeded to Southampton Town by Mr. Foster’s sons in 1950, in accordance with their father’s wishes. Among the many fascinating facts to be found in the show is an account of this last phase of the land’s ownership history.

It seems that Mr. Foster, the Sagaponack farmer whose descendants remain on the land, purchased the first 13 acres of the Long Beach parcel in 1925 by paying Suffolk County $16.24, the unpaid taxes owed by the Charles Lamont estate. Another 13-acre parcel on the Southwest was purchased the following year for $100. Additional purchases, made by the town, added the meadowlands, which were transformed to create today’s widened and straightened Long Beach Road, opened in 1965, as well as the ample parking lot.

As the show moves toward present times, people with long memories will surely experience pangs of nostalgia. They may remember that before the Waterside, which went down to make way for condominiums in 2004, there was the Salty Dog. And before that, Lenny’s Casino, the Noyac Casino and beloved McNally’s.

So many good times.