Planting Houses Among The Crops

Sayre Baldwin’s family owned the historic Carwytham dairy farm as well as a potato farm on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton until 1993, the year of his death and the sale of the property.“It was easier to sell your land than try to farm for a living,” recalled his daughter, Mary Ann Gabrielle.

By the time Mr. Baldwin’s health no longer allowed him to farm, he had sold off his cows and installed a riding ring as well as boarding for horses on the property.

“My brother moved away,” Ms. Gabrielle said. “There was no one else to take over. That was it.”

Looking at the larger picture, a similar story emerges. Southampton Town lost 27.7 percent of its farmland between 1970 and 1998, dropping from 11,663 acres to 8,428 acres, according to a 1998 report prepared by the town’s Agricultural Advisory Committee. More has been lost since 1998, of course, and the town is working on a study of the remaining agricultural land that will be released in coming months—very preliminary estimates peg remaining farmland at approximately 6,800 acres.

According to a handful of farmers in Bridgehampton who have been active for generations, 25 percent of their former agricultural land has been taken out of production since the mid 1990s.

“We’ve had so much large acreage taken out for large house building,” said Ed Wesnofske, a Bridgehampton resident whose father, Remi Wesnofske, was a farmer. “It took a lot of land out of the use of farmers.”

He recalled his father’s concern as the value of land continued to rapidly rise in the 1960s. One of the first farmers to use Suffolk County’s purchase of development rights program, which was established in 1974, the elder Mr. Wesnofske was worried that a high estate tax would make him unable to pass the land on to his sons.

Suffolk County was first in the country to create the development rights purchase program—a mechanism to help to keep land in the hands of farmers, where the town or county can purchase the development rights on the land, attempting to devalue it to its agriculture worth as opposed to its value as residential real estate.

Today, Remi Wesnofske Farms is one of the last wholesale potato farms on the East End, operated by Remi’s grandsons.

Some residents have become disheartened in recent years as protected crop-producing fields have become riding rings. However, according to New York State’s definition of agriculture, there is no difference between a high-end equestrian facility and a field of corn.

In the 1990s, a large portion of the historic Carwytham Farm became Two Trees Farm, owned by Brooklyn-based developer David Walentas. The 114-acre property was a horse farm for the elite, hosting the annual Mercedes-Benz Polo Challenge. Two Trees was split up into 19 house lots by Mr. Walentas in 2015, with five lots on 12 acres being sold for development to Farrell Building Company and Mr. Walentas intending to develop the rest on his own.

Ms. Gabrielle said the land wasn’t ever supposed to be developed, but that she doesn’t see the change of farmland to houses as anything else than progress. “When you sell it, you sell it,” she said, although she admitted that her father might have been upset if he saw the development at his former dairy farm.

“You can’t hold it back,” said Ms. Gabrielle, who still lives on Scuttlehole Road on a 1-acre lot. “Once they started coming, there was no stopping it,” she said. “It’s the Hamptons.”

“Back then, it was like the building was burning,” said Robert DeLuca, president and CEO of the Group for the East End , referring to the days before the town, county and others tried to stem development by purchasing easements and farmland. Without them, he said of Bridgehampton, “the place would’ve been flattened and looked like Medford.”

Mr. DeLuca moved to the East End in 1985 and recalls the Bridgehampton Commons project as an emblem of the city reaching the South Fork. Although the area where the commons now sits already had a drive-in movie theater and King Kullen, it transitioned to a major retail center in the 1980s.

Paul Jeffers, chairman of the board at Bridgehampton Child Care Center, remembers protests in the mid-1970s against the Bridgehampton Commons development, saying most of the uproar “came from the mom and pop stores, the people that owned business in that area.” Personally, he didn’t mind the project, but he was upset that the property tax revenue from the Commons went to Southampton School District, rather than Bridgehampton.

Mr. Jeffers’s family had moved to Bridgehampton from North Carolina in 1958 to work on the farms here, and he recalls when Bridgehampton was “potato country of the world” and his family could gather at the beach without worrying about if they had a permit to park there.

“It is no longer a farming community,” said Mr. Jeffers. “You see more real estate and restaurants.”