The Dominy House Born Again

The story of two wings of East Hampton’s Dominy House, severed from their parent building and moved, is an odyssey reflecting the search of a village attempting to reclaim part of its architectural history while honoring the renowned accomplishments of a family who for four generations worked there as cabinetmakers and clock makers.On Friday, Robert Hefner, East Hampton Village’s director of historic services, gave an illustrated lecture on the clock and woodworking workshops that bookended the historic Dominy House, formerly located on North Main Street in East Hampton. Mr. Hefner’s talk, titled “What Goes Around Comes Around,” at the East Hampton Historical Society, focused on the Dominy legacy and the simple strokes of luck that resulted in the survival of these two small buildings.

The original Dominy House, an excellent example of an 18th-century lean-to house, located on North Main Street just west of Cedar Street, dates to 1715. From 1760 until 1840, Nathaniel Dominy IV (1737-1812), father; Nathaniel V (1770-1852), son; and Felix (1800-1868), grandson, worked in the woodworking shop on the northeast side of the house (circa 1745-50) making furniture, and in the clock shop (1798) at the opposite end of the house, where they produced clocks and performed watch repairs. The Dominys occupied the house until 1926 and it remained vacant until Oscar Brill bought the property in 1941 from Nathaniel V’s great-grandson, Charles Dominy.

By July 1940, however, architects from the Historic American Buildings Survey, or HABS, part of the Works Progress Administration established under F.D.R., came to East Hampton to begin the recordation process for one of East Hampton’s oldest and most significant structures. The documentation of the house included surveys and measured drawings by architects C.B. Stove and Daniel M.C. Hopping, and featured plans, sections, elevations, details of machine tools, the entrance door, miscellaneous hardware, early windows with sill details, fireplace and kitchen details, mortise and tenon connections, the clock shop forge, and its lathe. The building exterior and the interior rooms were also photographed. The digitized survey of the Dominy House can be viewed online at the Library of Congress website in the HABS collection.

In 1941 Mayor Judson Banister, in an effort to preserve the Dominy House, wrote a letter to The East Hampton Star with the salutation “To the Lovers of Old East Hampton.” The mayor wanted to raise money from the public to buy and restore the Dominy House, which still housed watchmakers’ tools as well as other antiques. Mr. Hefner noted that residents voted down the purchase.

During the war, East Hampton residents weren’t particularly focused on the disposition of the clock shop and its collection of tools, which had remained in the clock shop all along. Meanwhile, Ethel Marsden, a Southampton antiques dealer, bought many of the tools from members of the Dominy family and possibly from Oscar Brill as well, and stored them in a Southampton Village barn. A Connecticut antiques collector, Rockwell Gardiner, located the collection in the barn in 1957 and contacted the director of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware to come and see it. H.F. du Pont immediately authorized the purchase of more than 1,000 tools and artifacts to be installed in a new addition to the museum. Both the clock shop and the woodworking shop were re-created at Winterthur based on measurements taken by members of Mr. du Pont’s staff. Charles Hummel, author of the definitive book on the Dominys, “With Hammer in Hand,” became the collection’s curator at the museum.

The Dominy House, itself, which The Star called the one most worthy of preservation in East Hampton, was being demolished in February of 1946, when Dudley Roberts purchased both the clock shop and the woodworker’s wings at the eleventh hour and moved them to his Further Lane property. Mr. Roberts, who would later become president of the Maidstone Club, had the two wings joined together to create a guest house, which was also used as a men’s club called St. Augustine Monks. Although he had the opportunity to sell the shops to Winterthur, Mr. Roberts decided to keep them, as he felt they shouldn’t leave East Hampton. He later admitted he regretted that decision. He offered the shops in 1965 to the East Hampton Historical Society and would have paid for the cost of the move but was turned down.

The property was sold again before being bought by Chris Browne, who died in 2009. His partner, Andrew Gordon, inherited it but died in 2013. Barry Rosenstein, the hedge fund manager, bought the property from the Browne estate in 2014 and has agreed to donate the timber frame structures to the village. They will be replaced by a pool house to be called “The Dominy Pavilion.” The workshops will move temporarily to the Mulford Farm for safekeeping until they are relocated on their original North Main Street site. The main section of the Dominy house will be an identical reconstruction, attached in its original position to the shop wings. This work could not be re-created were it not for the remarkable HABS survey. The East Hampton Historical Society has partnered with the village on this project, which will become an interpretive museum on all things Dominy.

The story of the Dominy shops is also a story about political will. For many years the East Hampton Village mayor, Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., has shown a serious commitment to the preservation of East Hampton’s historic heritage. Along with the efforts of Mr. Hefner, the Historical Society, and, in this case, a willing property owner in Mr. Rosenstein, the legacy of the Dominy past looks bright.