10 Southampton History Lessons

Local historians of the and Julie Greene of the contributed several history columns to Southampton Patch in 2011.

As the year come to an end, look back on 10 of their best pieces on local history:

- The stone marking the grave of Pyrrhus Concer, which can be seen at the southwest corner of the Old North End Cemetery near Windmill Lane, bears this very beautiful inscription: Though born a slave he possessed virtues without which kings are but slaves.

- The Morris Studio, which has operated in the same building on the east side of Main Street since 1898, actually opened six years earlier in 1892 when photographer George W. Morris set up shop above Madame Juliette’s Millinery Shop on the other side of the street. A dapper fellow whose portrait shows him in bowler and bow tie assuming a jaunty, Chaplinesque pose, Morris came to Southampton at age 21 from Sayville, where he had apprenticed in photography.

- The extended Yastrzemski clan, successful potato farmers, put Bridgehampton baseball on the map in the middle of the 20th century with the White Eagles team, and produced a baseball great, triple crown winner, and hall-of-famer in Carl Jr., but Bridgehampton’s baseball heritage didn’t start there.

- Feminine fussbudgets and finicky old gents may have dominated the social scene in Southampton at the turn of the last century but not without plenty of competition from the irrepressible Zella de Milhau, who came to Shinnecock Hills to study at William Merritt Chase’s Summer Art School and stayed to stir things up.

- If you Google Pierson v. Post, you’ll find a whole host of hits and even a Wikipedia entry. The court case has been widely taught in first-year property law classes since the turn of the 20th century and the New York State Supreme Court ruling of 1805 has been well documented in most of the South Fork history books. One of the earliest mentions of the case was made by Bridgehampton’s Judge Henry P. Hedges, a legal authority in Suffolk County, who wrote about it in in 1895. But even so, in these parts the story has become more local lore than legal precedent.

- Southampton’s ascendancy as a fashionable resort is usually thought to have hit its stride in the 1890s, which doesn’t mean that summers lacked glamor in the years before “cottagers” began buying up land and building country estates. No sooner had the railroad reached Southampton in 1870 than word spread that just a few hours from the city were wide, pristine beaches, quaint village streets and cool country air. But where to find suitable lodgings?

- It was 150 years ago, on April 12, 1861, that a bomb bursting over Fort Sumter in South Carolina signaled the start of America’s Civil War. The many bloody battles of that terrible conflict took place far from Long Island where, as James Truslow Adams observes in his history of Southampton, its effects “were felt solely through the fortunes of those who left their homes and went into the fighting forces on land and sea.” One of those patriots was George Culver (1839-1912), son of Merritt and Caroline Marshall Culver.

- Tensions of the culture vs. counter-culture variety are not, we discover, a modern phenomenon. They seem always to exist in one form or another — and Southampton at the turn of the last century was no exception. Back then the local press filled its social columns with news of the teas, musicales and high-minded gatherings that were the very serious business of socially prominent women. This was official Southampton Society, under the iron rule of the so-called "Dreadnaughts."

- There must have been a few daring souls in Southampton who were capable of riding a “high-mount,” that absurd-looking bike with a sky-high front wheel.

- When word reached Southampton in 1849 that gold had been discovered in California, there followed “a general exodus” of the village’s able-bodied young men, all “bent upon reaching the land of gold and sunshine and continual pleasure as quick as a ship could take them.”