Charles Jagger Lived Fully and Died Tragically

There were so many Jaggers living on North Main Street at one time that the whole neighborhood was known as Jaggertown. Everyone knew a Jagger or two and everyone knew that Jaggers were smart. But even in a family of intellectual overachievers Charles A. Jagger (1862-1914) stood out.

So brainy was he that it looked at first as though he might spend his whole life breathing library dust and producing scholarly tomes. After exhausting the academic resources of Southampton’s North End schoolhouse and the Southampton Academy, he proceeded to do the same at the Wesleyan Seminary in upstate New York. Then it was on first to Oberlin, then Princeton, graduating with honors in 1885 but remaining for three years of graduate study to earn a master’s degree in arts and a doctorate of philosophy.

Thoroughly educated, he then made the transition from brilliant student to gifted college professor, a career he followed until 1893 when he left for Germany to do special work at the university in Berlin.

The next year, changing course rather dramatically, he returned to his native Southampton. His wife, also from Southampton, was a daughter of Captain George White. After first buying an interest in the Republican newspaper, The Sea-Side Times, in 1896 he assumed full ownership from George Burling, whose founding of the rival Southampton Press just one year later was a hard, but not fatal blow. Both papers survived and Jagger established himself not only as an opinion-maker but as a civic force in Southampton.

An August 1901 item in the Brooklyn Eagle reveals that Jagger was willing to cross swords with no less a figure than Samuel Parrish, Southampton’s well-loved village benefactor.

“There is a merry war now on between Village President Samuel L. Parrish and Charles A. Jagger, editor of the local weekly …” noted the correspondent. It seems that Jagger had accused Parrish of “breach of public confidence,” most notably in promoting “an obnoxious bicycle ordinance.” In retaliation, the editor was arrested and fined “for not carrying a light on his wheel at night,” a deliberate provocation, claimed Jagger, to make “a test case.” Parrish then prompted the village trustees to revoke the Sea-Side Times’ designation as the official village newspaper and publisher of the board’s minutes. Jagger countered that he would simply continue to print them “unofficially” as the minutes were, after all, public property.

The following March in its Suffolk County election primary coverage, the Eagle reported that President Parrish would not be standing for reelection as he would be traveling in Europe and that “Editor Jagger has been asked to become a candidate …” While the paper hailed Parrish as “a leader among the aristocratic colony” and “very popular with the villagers,” it was less effusive in its assessment of his potential successor, asserting that “Editor Jagger is a temperance man, notwithstanding his name, a college bred man, and he wields a caustic pen.”

Jagger was never elected president, but around 1910 there was word in the village that he was planning to take another new tack, joining with J. Edward Elliston to open a school in the castle-like structure Elliston was building — and which still stands — at the corner of Little Plains Road and Herrick Road. It never happened perhaps, as some said, because the two men had a falling out. The building remained only partially completed and Jagger missed an opportunity to put his gifts as a teacher to use in his hometown.

In 1912 Jagger turned his talents to the creation of the Southampton Magazine, which, though short-lived, was highly praised and remains a valuable historical resource. Then, in July 1914, as he headed off to Riverhead to attend a Republican convention, Jagger was tragically killed, crushed under his overturned car after swerving sharply, probably to avoid an animal in the road. He was 52.

Resources from the Archives: Oral history interviews of Cyrus Jagger (1996) and Glena Jagger (2002); The Suffolk County Press, “Brief Sketches of the Principal Newspapers and Their Editors”; The Brooklyn Eagle (online); interview with Ansley Elliston, 1984; Colonial Society Scrapbook 1898-1937; "Old and New Southampton: The Transformation of a Long Island Community, 1875-1900" (manuscript slated for publication by State University of New York Press).