New Owners Preserving Historic Former Potato Weigh Station In Southampton

There is a new display — which is actually quite old — on view outside the big red brick building next to the Southampton train station.

Decorated with pumpkins for fall, it’s an authentic John Deere wagon from the 1880s.

“That is the exact type of wagon that the farmers would have been using when they were bringing potatoes from the fields to this facility for processing,” explained Stuart Andrews, the new owner of both the wagon and the red building at 7 Powell Avenue, which was built sometime in the late 19th century.

“That’s what this building was all about, the processing of potatoes that were shipped from this location by rail car, initially probably to New York, and then the potatoes went all over the country,” he said.

The building was most recently host to The Spur, a coworking space. It had been an electrical supply house earlier, and before that, it was a potato and grain barn and weigh station. Mr. Andrews purchased the facility in February and is in the process of restoring it before his pool company, Shinnecock Pools, moves in.

“I will be operating my swimming pool company from this location while also preserving all the amazing historic aspects of the building,” he said.

He had wanted to relocate the Shinnecock Pools headquarters from a rented facility on Mariner Drive to a building that he and his wife, Karen Andrews, would own themselves. When 7 Powell Avenue went on the market, they jumped at the opportunity. Not only was it the only light industrial-zoned building available in Southampton Village, it has a deep history — and they love history.

“We just love old buildings,” Ms. Andrews said, noting that her own family goes back to the first settlers of Southampton. She is related to Jobs Sayre, who Southampton Village’s Jobs Lane is named after, and the Ellistons, who lived not far from the Powell Avenue facility.

“To have this history that we can actually take care of and be stewards of, it’s a passion of ours,” Ms. Andrews said.

According to the Southampton History Museum, the building was developed by Captain George White for his Southampton Coal & Produce Co. Tom Edmonds, the executive director of the museum, said the railroad came to Southampton in 1870, and the original, brick portion of the building may have been built around then and used by a different occupant.

“The brick part of the building is in great shape,” Mr. Andrews said. “I mean, it is so solid. This entire structure is solid brick and concrete. It’s just phenomenally strong. The train goes by, you wouldn’t even know it. The wood part of the building, which dates back to 1910, has all the issues that you would expect with a 100-year-old wooden building, but for the most part, it’s in very good shape.”

The earliest shipping record Mr. Andrews could find for the facility states that 25 railcars full of potatoes shipped from there in 1910.

“If you can imagine 25 boxcars of potatoes being shipped from here, and how many wagon loads of potatoes it would have taken to fill 25 boxcars, these wagons would have been lined up right down Powell Avenue,” Mr. Andrews said.

His authentic horse-drawn wagon sits atop a wagon scale. The surface of the scale just looks like an old wood deck that’s level with the ground. But underneath are mechanicals that go into the basement.

From inside the building, the scale operator can look out the window to the wagon and push around sliding weights to determine how many pounds of potatoes are on the wagon. The scale was manufactured by the now-defunct Howe Scale Company in Rutland, Vermont, “the premier manufacturer of accurate measuring devices back in the mid-1860s to 1890s,” according to Mr. Andrews.

“That company kept very accurate records of all their sales and all their manufacturing,” he said. “When they went out of business, their entire corporate archive was donated to the University of Vermont. So one of the things that’s on my to-do list for establishing the history of this building is to get up to Vermont and to find the purchase order for that scale at this location.”

He knows that the New York State Division of Weights & Measures last inspected the scale for accuracy in 1970, and now he’d like to find out the exact year it was installed. He believes it to be the only wagon scale in Southampton Village, and likely the only one in the whole Town of Southampton. It may even be the only one on eastern Long Island, although he found evidence that one did exist in Aquebogue.

Mr. Andrews’s wagon, which he bought from a dealer in South Dakota, has a maximum load of 4,500 pounds. “This is an amazing barn find. This wagon is almost like a museum piece,” he said.

“You can tell I’m very excited about it,” he said of the wagon. “This thing is just fascinating. And it’s also a fantastic first impression. When people arrive in Southampton Village, by train, this is going to be one of the first things that they see.”

The Andrewses live one train stop to the west, in Hampton Bays, where Ms. Andrews owns Good Ground Antique Center, a shop that Mr. Andrews now peruses for more period-appropriate pieces to complement the Powell Avenue building.

Currently, the interior is being partitioned to provide office space and shop space, while everything that was original is kept in place. Though Mr. Andrews has a good idea of how his business will use the building and where everything will go, it’s not entirely clear what it was like when potatoes came through there.

“The whole workflow in the building is something that I’m still trying to analyze,” he said. “How did the potatoes flow through the building, from the wagons, getting bagged, and getting loaded onto the boxcars?”

There are a number of features inside the building that suggest how things worked — eye hooks hanging from the ceiling with trapdoors in the floor directly below, and four loading docks, for example. There is also, hidden behind a wall, a bucket chain loader for a grain elevator. More apparent is a large freight elevator, which Mr. Andrews plans to illuminate as a showcase piece rather than using, though it still functions.

“You couldn’t just buy an elevator,” he noted. “They built this elevator, and they bought the motor. And the motor is a whole ’nother amazing piece of machinery that’s hanging from a hook up on the third floor.”

There are grain chutes on the north side of the building, facing the now-abandoned rail spur that connected the facility to the Long Island Rail Road. Mr. Andrews said he has the original ramps that bridged the gap between the chutes and the railcars.

Then there are the building’s 10-over-10 windows.

“Every aspect of this building has an amazing story, and one of the amazing stories are all the windows. The windows in this building were originally installed at the old Fowler House, which was a Civil War-era hotel that was located right across the street in that empty lot there,” Mr. Andrews said, pointing near the train station parking lot. “When the Fowler house was demolished, the windows were repurposed and installed in this building.”

All of the windows are being restored.

“We rescued some of the rotting wood, but when you look closely you’ll see that some of these panes are the original panes of glass from the mid-1800s,” Mr. Andrews said.

The original glass has a distinct waviness to it, and he intends to replace any modern glass panes with replicas that will match the originals.

There had been an effort in the 1970s or ’80s to landmark the building, but for whatever reason, New York State did not do so, Mr. Andrews said. Only the train tracks of the rail spur were deemed historic and protected.

“This is a great building that showcases what that heritage really was here, which is part of the reason I have that wagon there,” Mr. Andrews said. “Because once this history is gone, it’s gone forever. People forget. Once these historic elements are removed from a building, they’re gone forever, and this history slowly becomes erased and forgotten. And that is exactly what we’re going to be preventing from happening with this building. We’re going to be preserving every historic aspect of this building because we know we are not the permanent owners of this property. At some point, somebody new is going to be owning this, and when that transition happens, we want to be handing this building over with all of its amazing history features intact.”

As for the wagon, Mr. Andrews plans to keep it outdoors year-round to welcome visitors to Southampton.

“It does have a good coating of preservative on it, and I’m going to decorate it seasonally,” he said. “Through October, November, we put pumpkins in it. In the spring, we’ll probably put spring flowers in it. For Christmas, we’ll probably put Christmas lights on it. For the Fourth of July, maybe we’ll put some red, white and blue banners on it. So the wagon is going to be here, and we’re just going to decorate it as the seasons and the holidays come through.”

And for the village’s annual Fourth of July parade, the wagon may make an appearance, pulled by a horse down Powell Avenue, just like 100 years ago, and down Jobs Lane, the namesake of Ms. Andrews’s relative.