6 Photos
Stuart Vorpahl displays a t-shirt at an East Hampton Town Board public hearing on the rental registry law in November 2015.
Visiting hours for Stuart Vorpahl will be held at Yardley & Pino Funeral Home on Pantigo Road in East Hampton on Sunday, January 17, from 2 to 4 p.m. and from 7 to 9 p.m., and on Monday from 7 to 9 p.m.
Funeral services will be held at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, followed by a reception at the Amagansett Fire Department headquarters.
ORIGINAL STORY:
Stuart Vorpahl, a bard of the oldest East Hampton families and an encyclopedia of local history, died on Thursday morning at Southampton Hospital.
He was 76 years old and had been undergoing treatment for cancer.
Mr. Vorpahl was the official East Hampton Town historian, a former East Hampton Town Trustee and traced his roots in the community back a dozen generations.
He worked his entire life as a commercial fisherman, toiling on haul seine crews along the Atlantic shoreline, fished traps and dug shellfish in Gardiners Bay and worked on trawlers at sea.
He was a champion and crusader for the autonomy of local authority over fishing rights he argued were guaranteed by colonial edicts from the era when his earliest ancestors settled on the South Fork. Later in life he refused to hold state-issued fishing licenses, because he said the state held no right to restrict fishermen working local waters—a stance that twice led to charges brought against him, though ultimately dismissed. In September he received a $1,000 check from the state Department of Environmental Conservation as reimbursement for fish seized from him 17 years earlier.
Dates of services have yet to be announced by his family.
on Jan 14, 2016