Scientists, Conservationists and Government Leaders Hope Plum Island's Future Is Informed by Its History

About 4,000 years after the last ice age dumped debris and soil, granite and quartz, till and sand, and the boulders called glacial erratics, from a retreating glacier to form Long Island and its neighboring tiny islands, and about 12,000 years before the first Europeans laid eyes on what early Dutch explorers called Pruym Eylant, Native Americans were likely already there, fishing for sturgeon and hunting deer.

In the ensuing millennia, the land mass we call Plum Island, part of a small archipelago that stretches from Orient Point to the Connecticut coast, has had a multi-millennia history of human habitation that has, surprisingly, left a fairly light touch on the island. It is not pristine, but the remarkable collection of flora and fauna — including dozens of species of special interest — are found in giant swaths of undeveloped land which make up the greater part of the island. Together with a human history that starts at the beginning of mankind on the east coast of North America, up through early English colonists, the U.S. military and federal scientific researchers, the island has much to recommend it for preservation and study.

Which is what a group of conservationists and government officials hope will happen on the 820-acre, pork chop-shaped island, presently owned by the federal government under the Department of Homeland Security. While the government currently operates the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, in existence on the island since 1956, that operation is slated to be moved to a new facility in Manhattan, Kansas, in the next several years. A proposal by the federal government in 2008 to sell the property to the highest bidder was met with outcries from local organizations and officials, who worried that the island, with its natural assets and rich history, would be transformed into a golf resort (Donald Trump had reportedly expressed an interest in it), or developed into a colony of luxury residences. Locals prevailed and the island was withdrawn from an inventory of federal property scheduled to be sold.

The good news for preservationists is that the government has agreed to maintain ownership of the island, and ultimately transfer it to another governmental agency. Just this past December, that effort was goosed along with language in a federal omnibus bill that supports the conservation of Plum Island and directs the Department of the Interior, the Department of Homeland Security and the General Services Administration to brief Congress on how the animal disease center would close, and how the land would ultimately be protected.

Earlier this year, representatives from U.S. Senate offices in New York and Connecticut met on the island to discuss its future, including talks with New York State Parks and Recreation officials.

And just this past March, U.S. Representative Nicholas LaLota from the East End introduced legislation that would permanently protect the island, declaring it a National Monument.

“It is a magical speck of land,” said Thomas Halaczinsky, who has often observed the island in its many moods from the cockpit of his sailboat.

Halaczinsky, a filmmaker from Greenport who has created several short videos about the island for the Preserve Plum Island Coalition, has actually never set foot on the island, but yearns to one day walk across its fields and hills, and explore the remains of the 19th century Fort Terry along its eastern shore.

From his boat, looking over the rise of the island, he often considers “this island and its history, when you think about it, is a microcosm of what America was and is. The native population, the coming of the Europeans.”

There is the struggle early settlers had with the land, the impact of the American Revolution and preparation for subsequent wars, and, like so many other areas of the East End, conflict over development.

“All these stories happened right here, and much is still visually extant,” said Halaczinsky. “It helps us understand who we are and how we got here.”

For the Indigenous people — the ancestors of the Montauketts and Corchaugs who once held sway over the farthest eastern parts of Long Island — they got here sometime after the last ice age, perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Little is known about the prehistory of Plum Island, or when exactly the Native Americans first set foot on it. But as hunter gatherers, pushing farther along the North Fork — or paddling across from the shore of Connecticut — they likely found the island bountiful for fishing, and harvested the island’s namesake beach plums.

We do know that during the late-Archaic Period, and early Woodland Period, sometime about 2,700 to 3,200 years ago, according to historian John Strong in his book, “The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700,” there is archaeological evidence of an Indigenous presence just across the gut at Orient Point. Mortuary sites were discovered there in 1935 by a group of Boy Scouts preparing to build a cabin. Digging at about 5 feet down, they discovered stone axes and quartz projectile points. Archaeologists later discovered about 25 circular pits, each about 3 to 5 feet in diameter and about 3 to 5 feet in depth. At the bottom of the pits was a collection of what Strong called “grave goods,” including remains of steatite vessels, projectile points, gorgets — or pendants — and fire-starting kits.

Other bits of scant archaeological evidence of Native American occupation of the island include a stone “net sinker” that was discovered near the island’s shore by one of the workers at the lab, according to Marion Lindberg of The Nature Conservancy, one of about 120 organizations operating under the umbrella of the Preserve Plum Island Coalition.

In a letter to Save the Sound, another of the PPIC groups, archaeologist Allison McGovern wrote: “Due to the island’s location and its natural resources, Plum Island may yield significant archaeological resources that could shed light on the Paleoindian period … The island could also yield archaeological traces of Indigenous habitation during the Archaic, Woodland and post-Columbian periods.”

It is perhaps the combination of little-known data and the tantalizing likelihood of more artifacts and evidence of pre-Columbian culture that contributes to the desire to preserve the island and the potential stories it has to tell — a key point made by the PPIC in its report, “Envision Plum Island: A Connecting Landscape of History, Nature, Research,” where the coalition calls for additional archaeological research on the island. The document, which was presented to Congress as well as local, state and federal officials and stakeholders in 2020, outlines proposed future efforts in preserving the island for study and public use.

“We don’t know what is on the island at this point,” said Sandi Brewster-walker, a spokesperson for the Montauketts, who said her ancestors had occupied much of Long Island leading up to the arrival of the first Europeans.

“Nobody has explored this,” she said. “We’re hoping to find cultural artifacts, but we’re kind of asking the same questions.”

We don’t know if they settled on the island, but it is quite possible it was used as a summer camp, like Native Americans elsewhere on Long Island, who tended to move from inland to shore and then back as the seasons progressed.

“What does the island have to uncover?” wondered Brewster-walker.

But we do know that, by the time the first colonists arrived in the early 1600s, the native population had been using the island for growing and harvesting at least one crop. The Corchaugs — the resident native population of the North Fork — called the island Manittuwond, or “the island where we go to plant corn.”

And we do know that the arrival of English settlers triggered a succession of land transfers that would ultimately change the face of an island that had remained largely unchanged for millennia.

Never mind that different European nations had claimed Plum Island as their own without consulting the Indigenous population that had inhabited the place for thousands of years, but when a “legal” transfer of ownership occurred in the mid-1600s, it was fraught with confusion. It helps, though, to illustrate a bit about the thinking of the native population at the time and the dynamics within the various tribes or extended Indigenous family groups.

Much has been said about the understanding Native Americans had of deeds with the earliest colonists. Brewster-walker makes the point that the Natives’ notion of land use was, by signing a deed, they were granting the right for colonists to use the land in question, not that they would own it. Europeans, obviously, felt differently, and believed a deed gave them absolute ownership.

In the case of Plum Island, there was added confusion. According to an article written by Strong for the Suffolk County Historical Society, not one, but two Corchaug sachems, negotiated two different deeds with two different colonial buyers for lands that included the island.

By the mid 1600s, English authorities were trying to stall Dutch expansion, and thus pursued as much land from the Native Americans as they could. Governor Theophilus Eaton of New Haven, who had influence over the East End of Long Island at the time, negotiated a deed to large tracts of land on the North Fork that included Plum Island. However, in subsequent attempts to clarify that transaction, which was admittedly confusing, much of the land involved was mentioned by location, but did not include Plum Island by name. In the late 1650s, a man named Samuel Willis (or Wyllys) — who had “extensive business interests in Antigua sugar plantations” — noting the lack of activity, and sensing there was no longer an interest in Plum Island, approached the Corchaugs in an effort to buy the island, which, at least one report indicates, he believed he was successful in doing.

But the Montaukett sachem Wyandanch, who had emerged as arguably the most powerful Native American on Long Island at the time, due largely to his relationship with Lion Gardiner, apparently had concerns about the transfer. Gardiner, among other things, was proprietor of the manor on Gardiner’s Island, and was in charge of the British fort at Saybrook in Connecticut, from where he waged a successful war against the Pequotts, who were the nemesis of the Montaukett and to whom the Montauketts and other tribes paid tribute. In addition, Gardiner was responsible for rescuing Wyandanch’s daughter from the Pequots, and so the two men developed a powerful relationship.

That relationship made Wyandanch — who wound up having his hand in many Native American land transfers — a powerful individual. Because of this relationship, the English declared him the grand sachem and, at a time when negotiations between the two cultures was frequently confused, Wyandanch was often called in to authorize a deal.

When Wyandanch asked to meet with Corchaug leaders and Southold officials, according to Strong, the sachem told them all that the Corchaugs were never the true proprietors of the land on the North Fork, including Plum Island, and instead claimed the lands had all come down to him and his “brethren” through his ancestors.

Given the chance to respond at that meeting, the Corchaug leadership present sat silent and said nothing, perhaps acknowledging the authority the grand sachem had in the white world, and thus affirming Wyandanch’s proprietorship over Plum Island.

Four months later, on April 29, 1659, notes Strong, Willis met Wyandanch on Gardiner’s Island and negotiated the purchase of Plum Island for the sum of “a coat, a barrel of biskett, one hundred muxes (drill used for making wampum), and fishhooks,” making him the real first colonial owner of the island.

While the hand-carved rock described by Lindberg that was designed to hold down a fishing net may be the earliest relic of human habitation found on the island — if, in fact, it actually originated on the island — the earliest remaining evidence of colonial era habitation is the grave of Colonel Thomas Gardiner, who died of smallpox on the island in 1786. His grave is marked by a stone placed by his descendants in the early 20th century.

Also, noted Lindberg, “I understand there may be remains of a colonial house.”

The two items are representative of a long period that has long ago disappeared. There had been farms and farm houses, there had been a manor house, out buildings, fences and foundations.

All functional structures when the predominant activity on the island among the handful of families who had subdivided the land after Willis was farming, raising cattle and sheep, corn and wheat. It was a story that was common across the country: Land once unbroken by walls and borders was slowly being cut up for private use.

By the mid-19th century, activity on the island took a slightly different course; with the rise of a leisure class, some sought the island for its recreational opportunities. Visitors from Long Island, New York and Connecticut arrived at the island for fresh air and rusticity. One such group, the Smoke Pipe Club, an association of businessmen from Hartford, Connecticut, built a clubhouse on the island. The club’s members visited the island for two weeks every year for fishing and relaxing through the mid- to late-1800s. This was during a relatively short-lived period when many inhabitants and visitors to the island were there for rest and recreation, and not for farming.

The members of the club, like many others who spent time on Plum Island in this era sought leisure, according to the book “A World Unto Itself: The Remarkable History of Plum Island,” and “spent their time ‘as best pleases them.’”

But the 19th century cottages are gone, as are the colonial farms.

The only building that remains from the time is the island’s lighthouse. The two-story granite structure with tower on the west tip of the island you can see today, if you take a ferry or your boat through Plum Gut, is the second light. It replaced the original 1827 lighthouse in 1869, and was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. It has helped guide mariners through the mile-wide and, at times, treacherous gut between the island and Orient Point on the mainland.

Keepers of the light were called on not just to keep the flame burning or the light shining, but also other tasks, including helping and rescuing mariners who had wrecked or were stranded. According to “A World Unto Itself,” more than 70 shipwrecks have been documented in the waters around Plum Island.

For example, the schooner “Richard M. Johnson,” carrying a load of pig iron, struck a rock and wrecked during a snowstorm in 1887. With the crew freezing and water coming in, a crew member leapt overboard and swam for help on Plum Island. He alerted the lighthouse keeper, William Wetmore, who then took his own boat out into the storm to rescue the ship’s captain and its crew.

Keepers were also enterprising and entrepreneurial. As the island became a popular destination for fishermen and the curious, many found room and board in spare rooms at the lighthouse, enjoying a comfortable bed and a good meal. According to “A World Unto Itself,” writing in a guest book kept by keeper Henry Conklin, one group from 1839 wrote, “Arrived on Tuesday Augt 6 … All were very kindly entertained by Mr. Conklin and family and left Plum Island very much pleased with their visit.” Another complimented the lodging and the “excellent breakfast.”

After a long line of keepers — with some family dynasties lasting 50 years — the changes in technology allowed for the lighthouse service to discontinue humans maintaining the light.

Finally, in 1978, the last keeper left the island and a new, automated, tower was set up outside the historic lighthouse.

The 1869 building, like many lighthouses of the era, has fallen into disrepair, and the PPIC has called for efforts to secure its location and restore and rehabilitate the building. In the coalition’s envisioning package, it suggests future uses could be as a museum for the island, a visitors welcoming center, or — formalizing its former casual history — making it a bed and breakfast for visiting tourists.

“There are many ways you can tell the story of Plum Island,” said Lindberg.

“There’s the early colonial period,” she said. “There’s the agrarian period, when the west side of the island was subdivided; there’s the Gilded Age and the potential resort period.”

And then there’s the island’s long history with war and the military.

The largest historical asset on the island is Fort Terry, which is also on the National Register of Historic Places. While it is a late 19th century construction, how it got there actually traces its roots back to the American Revolution.

During the Revolution, much of Long Island, including Plum Island, was under control of the British. Plum Island was also subject to the hectoring of the British several decades later in the War of 1812.

In those wars, the British fleet set up blockades and a rendezvous point off Gardiners Bay, from where they would initiate raids, pursuing supplies and livestock from the residents of the East End.

In August 1775, for example, according to “A World Unto Itself,” the British began removing stock from the islands in the sound. Fishers Island was particularly hard hit, the authors note, but the lessee of the island was reportedly compensated for what the British took. However, “from Gardiner’s and Plum Islands, they took what they wanted without payment.”

Controlling Long Island, its waters and the entrance to Long Island Sound was a strategic move for the British or, indeed, any other invading nation, who hoped to control commerce and supplies in and out of New York harbor.

It was the lessons learned from those wars, and recognizing the vulnerability of the East End — and its potential as a strategic defense location — that ultimately prompted the federal government to rethink its coastal fortifications.

An 1874 report from the Army Corps of Engineers identified many of these vulnerabilities, especially noting that foreign navies were greatly improving their war technology, but it wasn’t until the early 1890s when concern about America’s coastal defense took hold among the public, according to “A World of Its Own.”

By 1897, the government had purchased 193 acres on Plum Island for the purpose of building a fortification. They bought the land from former New York City Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, who by that time had owned almost all of the island with hopes of converting it into a summer resort. By 1901, Hewitt sold the rest of the island to the government, ending over two centuries of private ownership of the island.

Many believe Fort Terry was built for the short-lived Spanish-American War. Truthfully, money had been allocated and planning had begun before that conflict, and the war, which lasted all of about four months, was over before work on Fort Terry was completed. The fort was actually one of five designed to protect the entrance to Long Island Sound, the others included fortifications at Napatree Point in Connecticut, Fisher’s Island, Great Gull Island and Gardiner’s Island.

While the guns at the various forts were never fired in conflict with an enemy, the underlying principle of strengthening fortifications here was sound, and the fort served roles in both world wars. It remained an important element of homeland defense and, leading up to and during both wars, hundreds or thousands of soldiers passed through Fort Terry, training and preparing for battle. For many, it was where they shipped off from for battle overseas.

When they weren’t training, they lived their lives as best they could, doing what others their ages might be doing elsewhere: playing football and baseball, fishing and swimming. It was life on a military base that was intended to appear as a semi-occupied island.

“It really is one of the finest examples of a Taft-Endicott fortification,” said Lindberg, referring to the new design elements coming out of the late 19th century.

“Rather than building an obvious masonry fort that looked intimidating, planners concealed the gun emplacements to make them difficult for the enemy to target,” wrote the authors in “A World Unto Itself.”

Parapet walls and ammunition storage were designed to form a clean line that was easily hidden behind an earthen wall, giving the illusion of a continuous hill, and specially designed carriages allowed the guns to be concealed below until the time of firing.

There were dozens of buildings constructed for the fort: a hospital, brick barracks and officers’ quarters that resembled homes in any New England neighborhood, three power plants, a firehouse and a network of telephone and telegraph lines across the island.

Despite the fact that some gun placements may have tumbled into the water and many of the original buildings are uninhabitable — or nonexistent — the complex of Fort Terry can still tell a powerful story about how the nation prepared for war and defense.

“Many of the structures are still standing in their places around the parade ground,” said Lindberg, who has visited the island. “There’s the bakery, the hospital …”

Standing on the vast lawn of the parade ground, she said, you get a clear vision of the layout of the fort.

Some buildings, she said, have actually been used in recent years. The guard house, for example, was used as a library for the lab, and the firefighter’s quarters were used as accommodations for visiting guests of the lab. In its envisioning package, the PPIC suggests these two buildings in particular could be reused, providing overnight accommodations and possibly classrooms for study.

And, of course, the fort complex itself, which was decommissioned in 1956, could be instructional, giving evidence of the island’s role in more than a half-century of defense. But coalition members hasten to add that, like the lighthouse, work is urgently needed to protect and preserve the remaining buildings from further deterioration.

The spot also has a transformative effect.

“On the parade ground, I looked across to Gardiner’s Island,” said Lindberg. “I felt transported back in time. You have that view that hasn’t changed in thousands of years. It felt timeless.”

Louise Harrison of Save the Sound had a similar experience.

“I was taken by the beauty of it all,” said Harrison, who has visited the island three times.

A scientist by trade, Harrison has been one of the leaders of the coalition, and a chief spokesperson in the effort to conserve the ecological assets of the island, which are legion.

“There are 111 species of special concern on the island,” said Harrison, which include plant and animal species and ecological communities. These are all species named on either state or federal lists that are threatened or in danger.

“That’s a lot for an 820-acre island,” she said.

Inside the 100 acres of rolling dunes lie swales of grasses, above which northern harriers glide spying a mouse or other small prey below.

With undisturbed habitat, and lying in a flyway for migrating birds, researchers have identified 229 different species on the island.

“To put that in perspective,” she said, “that is more than 24 percent of all bird species found in North America. That’s considering from the tip of Florida up through the Arctic Circle.”

But it’s not just the big number of birds seen on the island, you also have important numbers of those breeding, said Harrison.

According to the envision report, 63 different bird species are known to breed on the island, 13 of which are identified as at-risk, including the common eider, northern harrier, glossy ibis, least tern, common tern and roseate tern.

Animals from the tiny hairy-necked tiger beetle to large fauna like harbor seals and gray seals — which bask on the rocks along the south shore on one of the state’s most populous haul-out spots — inhabit the island. Bats take up residence in the former bunkers and rare dragonflies and damselflies flit about the wetlands near the harbor. There are box turtles and brown snakes and a moth so rare it was believed to have been extirpated from New York.

Researchers have also found 23 species of plants on the island that are of conservation concern, like spring ladies tresses, wild pinks and saltmarsh aster, in a wildly diverse collection of natural environments.

Twenty-five distinct ecological communities have been identified on the island, ranging from shrub swamp and maritime forest, to heathland and maritime bluffs that largely haven’t been trod on since the military left more than 50 years ago.

And it’s not just the number of plants or animals or environments, but the quality and the potential they hold.

“We’ve all walked on beaches or bluffs out here that we consider pristine,” observed Harrison, “but you see footprints all over. On Plum Island, you see beaches where there are no footprints.”

There is a 97-acre freshwater pond that supports an ecosystem of its own, providing habitat for snapping and painted turtles, waterfowl like egrets and dozens of wetland plant species, and where remnants of Atlantic white cedars have been found. The tree, once found all over Long Island, was over-harvested and is now unusual; but Harrison said there is potential for it to be reintroduced on the island.

There is an eelgrass meadow that provides habitat for crabs and scallops, and a waterfront and rocky shore where seals have been known to give birth — unusual since seals are not often known to have pups this far south.

But, said Harrison, “Plum Island is important not just for what it is, but where it is.”

As part of an archipelago close to mainland, the island is part of a chain that allows animals to travel more easily.

“We do have those stepping stones,” she said. “And it’s why you’re seeing species like otters and, maybe, beaver moving across the island.”

“I challenge you to find an 820-acre island, just 100 miles from New York City and a hop, skip and jump from an intensely suburbanized environment that has the diversity of Plum Island,” said Harrison.

Human activity on the island today is limited to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Dark theories aside (think the Montauk Monster, the birth of Lyme disease, and a vacation destination for Hannibal Lecter), PIADC has been responsible for significant research in animal disease, most notably with foot and mouth disease — for which it created a vaccine in 2012, positively impacting global livestock markets — and African swine fever.

While in its early days the lab occupied a couple of the buildings from Fort Terry, an expansion to a new complex on the western part of the island strictly for lab purposes was developed in the mid-1970s.

In the nearly 70 years since the military vacated the island, the human footprint has shrunk considerably, limited largely to what the lab uses on the north western corner of the island. In its Envision report, the coalition imagines an island with two principal zones: one, the Plum Island Conservation District, which encompasses the vast amount of the island, and the second, the Plum Island Research District, which includes about 182 acres, mostly encompassing the lab buildings and its campus. The lab currently employs about 400 individuals, and it is the hope of the coalition there would still be an engine that — beyond tourism and environmental researchers — would drive employment on the island. To that point, it is intended the lab’s buildings would be reused by an academic or research institution to continue scientific investigation of some sort on the island.

It is worth noting that the Envision report is subtitled “A connecting landscape of history, nature, research,” as it is the intention of the coalition to connect myriad environments and communities of the island, through trail systems and interpretive storytelling. In addition to the research district, the balance of the island would have sections devoted to environmental field research, two historic districts for the lighthouse and Fort Terry, nature preserves and hiking trails.

When the Envision report was created, the coalition had “envisioned” the island would be underway toward securing conservation status by this year. Government moves slowly, but the recent actions by Representative LaLota and all four senators from New York and Connecticut indicate that the effort is moving forward. While LaLota’s proposed legislation does not yet have a sister bill in the Senate, which would be required for it to move through Congress, it asks either Congress or President Biden to declare the island a National Monument. Senator Charles Schumer’s office responded by forwarding a 2022 letter from the four senators urging Secretary of the Department of the Interior Deb Haaland and the Biden administration to “consider and utilize all available executive and administrative tools at your disposal to ensure the permanent protection of Plum Island …” National Monument status can be achieved either through an act of Congress, or an executive decision by the president.

New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. confirmed that federal authorities have met with the state parks department to discuss future management of the island. He also was optimistic about future movement in Congress, noting that LaLota’s Republican Party is in control in the House of Representatives and Schumer’s Democratic Party is in control of the Senate.

“Maybe the stars are lining up,” said Thiele.