USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume I > Part 19
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume I > Part 19
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The Indian made frequent prayers to the sun, the winds, the earth and to thunder as a symbol of power. Every Indian had a supernatural guardian and every success in life depended on the good- will of this guardian. Such spirits were called totems and usually took the form of birds or animals. On Long Island the most savory sacrifice to the Great Deity was the fin or tail of a whale. Images of the gods were consulted as oracles by paw-paws who appealed to these images for advice in all important matters. The paw-paws were priests or conjurors. The Duke's Laws, enacted in 1665, decreed that "no Indian shall be suffered to Paw-paw or perform worship to the devil in any town within the Government". The Indians attached great significance to dreams and believed that matters dreamed of must come true.
Burial of the dead was an elaborate ceremonial. After death the body was washed and adorned with all its finery and the face was painted with many colors. A great company attended the body to the grave, the women especially making loud and doleful lamentations. Many articles were buried in the grave, including clothing and the
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war implements of the deceased warrior. Food was included to succor the spirit on the way to its final resting place. All possessions that were not buried were burned or given away and the wigwam of the deceased was burned and replaced by a new one. The women of the family wore mourning for a year during which time they painted their faces black and abstained from all kinds of ornament and festivity. At the end of the mourning period a great dance was held, usually lasting all night.
Charles Wolley wrote in his Journal: "They bury their friends sitting upon their heels as they usually sit, and they put in the graves with them a Kettle, a Bow and Arrow, and a Notus or purse of Wampum; they fancy that after their death they go to the Southward and so take their necessaries along with them." When an Indian died away from his own village great care was taken to cover the grave with logs and posts to protect it from wolves and other wild animals. Under these circumstances the body was encased in the bark of trees for protection.
Dancing constituted an important feature of every Indian celebra- tion. Such a ceremony was called a Canticoy or Kintecoy and took many forms according to the occasion. Van der Donck referred to the Cantico as singing and dancing by the young while the middle- aged concluded with smoking. A calumet kintecoy concluded a peace treaty; the bear kintecoy celebrated a successful hunt; the war kinte- coy was performed before going on the warpath. Even while a victim was being led to the stake he performed the death dance. A young Montauk warrior, captured by the Narragansetts, danced the death kintecoy as he walked on red-hot stones. Such violent practices caused Governor Andros to forbid the Indians of Rockaway and Unkechaug to assemble for a kintecoy at Secatogue in 1675.
Myths and traditions were plentiful among the Long Island Indians most of which have been sadly distorted by successive writers with ever expanding imaginations.
The period of contact between Dutch and English settlers and the natives of Long Island covered a space of little more than three- score years and ten. Less than one hundred years after Hudson's discovery there were no Indians on the island except small remnants of a few scattered communities. Most of their land was sold between 1636 and 1685, a span of about fifty years.
The native population of the island at the time of its first settle- ment has been roughly estimated at six thousand five hundred. Today about two hundred people of mixed blood reside on the Shinnecock Reservation and less than fifty live at Poosepatuck. A few scattered remnants, most of whom have an admixture of negro blood, may be found at Fireplace, near East Hampton, and in the vicinity of Great Neck and Douglaston.
The sudden disappearance of these primitive people has been accounted for by many writers. The desire for war, the ravages of disease and the excessive indulgence in strong drink all combined to hasten the extinction of the aborigines. Little now remains to remind us of the virile life of the people who roamed over the hills and plains of Long Island three centuries ago.
CHAPTER VII
Suffolk's Northeastern Towns
CLARENCE ASHTON WOOD Associate Editor, Long Island Forum
SOUTHOLD TOWN, 1638
T HE northeastern peninsula of Long Island reaches out toward the New England mainland attracted as it were by some physical affinity. A chain of lesser islands spans the intervening water as if strewn by a giant hand. The New England landscape is visible from Southold on clear days. When fog blankets the Sound the warning signals from Saybrook, Connecticut, remind the residents of Southold town of their proximity to the place from whence the ancestors of many of them came.
Only eighteen years after the Pilgrims made their landing at Ply- mouth, white men were establishing themselves at Yennicott (South- old). There was no mass invasion of settlers. It was a gradual infiltration by Europeans, mostly English. In the absence of town records prior to 1651 we have meagre knowledge of who all of them were.
One group came in the spring of 1638, first having stopped in North Carolina in search of turpentine. The captain of their small vessel was Matthew Sunderland, who early built or otherwise acquired a home just west of present Greenport. These pioneers chose to locate on the neck of land opposite the northwest corner of Manhan- sett (Shelter) Island. Among them were William Salmon, William Purrier, Thomas Osman (Osborn), Thomas Reeve, James Reeve, Thomas Benedict, John Corey, Thomas Terrill, Edward Tredwell and Henry Whitney. Most of them remained permanently in what became the town of Southold.
Eastern Long Island was at this time the private preserve of Sir William Alexander, the Earl of Stirling, a Scotch poet and dramatist and a favorite of Charles the First of England. This royal grantee never visited his vast domain of which Long Island was but a part, leaving its promotion to an agent, James Farret (or Farrett), a fellow Scot who as early as 1638 collected rent from Captain Sunderland for his home at Ashamomoque, just west of Greenport.
Richard Jackson, a carpenter from Massachusetts, also built a home here and from Farrett on August 15, 1640, secured title to the land, this being the earliest known deed issued for Southold Town property. On October 25 following, Jackson sold his house and 150 acres of land to Thomas Weatherby, a mariner, for fifteen pounds sterling. About 1646 William Salmon obtained a release of land in the same vicinity from the Indians and in 1649 he sold most of it to Edward Tredwell, Henry Whitney and Thomas Benedict under an
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agreement that "what man so ever should desire to remove, and to endeavor to make sale of his accomodacons should put in such a neighbor as the other inhabitants, liveing with them should approve of." Whitney, a millwright, later did remove to New England while Tredwell became a resident of Huntington.
Stephen Goodyear, a merchant and ship-owner of New Haven, acquired Captain Weatherby's property at Ashamomoque and on May 18, 1641, also became the owner of Shelter Island which he
(From watercolor by Cyril A. Lewis)
Horton's Point Lighthouse
purchased from Farrett. His 150-acre tract at Ashamomoque, Good- year sold on June 2, 1653, to Lieutenant John Ketcham who later removed to Setauket and then to Huntington. In 1666 he sold the Southold tract to Thomas Moore, a magistrate of Southold Town.
While Salmon, Purrier, Osman, the Reeve brothers and others of their company were establishing themselves at Ashamomoque, other settlers from New England were laying the foundations of Southold village some two miles to the westward. Between the two settle- ments, near a creek which divided them, Thomas Benedict and wife Mary Bridgman located on land purchased from William Salmon. To them were born nine children. The creek became known as Benedict's or Tom's Creek and later Mill Creek. At its northerly end it is separated from the Sound by a narrow beach across which, during the Revolution, Colonel Meigs and his company of patriots dragged thirteen whaleboats en route to raid the British garrison at Sag Harbor.
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Today this beach is a town park. Until less than a century ago the only highway connecting Ashamomoque, Greenport and Oyster- ponds (Orient) with the town to the west lay along this beach. A bridge now spans the mouth of the creek and at both ends are fine highways.
Nobody knows just when the first settlers located at Founders' Landing on Hallock's Neck or who they were, although tradition has it that Peter Hallock was the first of his party to step ashore there. Be that as it may, there are now living in the vicinity many descend- ants of Southold's earliest settlers named Bailey, Booth, Brown, Case, Clark, Conklin, Corwin, Dickerson, Glover, Goldsmith, Hallock, Horton, Howell, Jennings, King, Moore, Osborne, Overton, Payne, Rackett, Reeve, Salmon, Terry, Tuthill, Vail, Wells and Youngs. Other early names have faded from the local picture.
The territory of Ashamomoque east of Tom's Creek, was not recognized as belonging to the Southold plantation until February 24, 1663, when a town meeting voted to include it at the request of Ashamomoque's inhabitants. Among the latter William Purrier even- tually became one of the town's wealthiest residents. Arriving in New England in 1636 from his native Buckinghamshire, England, he soon moved on to Southold where he became magistrate and the owner of four hundred acres of land. He died in 1675 leaving no male descendants. His eldest daughter, Mary, became the wife of Thomas Reeve and from them descended many Southold residents of that name. Thomas Reeve died in 1666.
Their daughter Mary married Thomas Terrill, another Asha- momoque settler whose name was included in a rate list of September 16, 1675, naming eighty-one heads of families in Southold Town. Following the death of Mary, Thomas Terrill married Abigail Mapes, a relative of Thomas Mapes, surveyor, who married Sarah, another daughter of William Purrier, whose third daughter married Thomas Osman (Osborn and Osborne), Ashamomoque's first brickmaker. Osman was among twelve landowners of Mattituck in 1675.
William Salmon, previously named, a smith by trade, before 1649 married the widow of Captain Matthew Sunderland. Following her death he married Sarah Horton who, becoming a widow, married John Conklin in 1657 and with him moved to Huntington. John Corey, a native of Nottinghamshire and another first settler of Ashamomoque, married Ann Salmon, sister of William.
Among the earliest known settlers of Southold village were Matthias Corwin, Barnabas Horton, Richard Terry, Henry Tuthill and William Wells. Corwin died there in 1658. Horton was a baker and became both wealthy and influential in the town's affairs. He died in 1680. Terry died before 1675. Tuthill's older brother John was appointed town magistrate in 1641. Wells married Bridget Tuthill, widow of Henry. Son of an English clergyman, Wells was town recorder from 1664 to 1672, a town magistrate and also sheriff of Suffolk County.
The Rev. John Youngs in 1640 or earlier came to Southold from Salem, Massachusetts, commissioned by Governor Theophilus Eaton of New Haven and Rev. James Davenport of the New Haven church
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to organize Southold plantation subject to New Haven's jurisdiction. He was the son of Rev. Christopher Youngs, vicar of Southwold, England. With him to Southold came a number of relatives. His sister Martha became the wife of Thomas Moore, a town magistrate. Joseph Youngs, a brother of the clergyman, became a ship master at Southold.
Pastor John Youngs was given a choice home lot on the west side of the lane which led from the head of Town Creek. His eldest son, also John, became a captain in a naval force organized by the united colonies of New England. In 1664 he organized the Southold militia to aid in the English conquest of New Amsterdam and became widely known as Colonel Youngs. He represented Southold in the General Court at New Haven and in the legislature of the Connecticut colony. Opposite the home of his father he built a large double house, much of which remains to this day.
The thoroughfare between the property of the two Youngs became Youngs avenue. At Town Creek Landing Charles Glover located his house and a shipyard. Southwold, the name of the Youngs family home in England, soon found favor as Southold in preference to the Indian name of Yennicott for the town. By 1644 there were about thirty houses in this settlement. When Pastor Youngs died in 1672, his son, the Colonel, was delegated to visit Harvard, then in its thirty- fourth year, and procure a successor which he did in the person of Rev. Joshua Hobart, a native of Hingham, England, who had gradu- ated from Harvard in 1650. He settled at Southold in 1674 and was given a home lot on the east side of the town creek where a two story house was built for him. Later his salary was advanced to one hundred pounds and he was awarded much other valuable land. He died in 1717 at the age of eighty-eight, thus culminating a pastorate of thirty-three years.
Benjamin Woolsey, a native of Jamaica, Long Island, and a graduate of Yale in 1709, became Southold's third pastor in 1720. A notable feature of his residence here was his success in inducing a number of local youth to attend college and enter the ministry, among them Azariah Horton, great-grandson of Barnabas Horton in whose original homestead he was born.
Graduating from Yale in 1735, Azariah served as a missionary among the Long Island Indians from 1741 to 1750, following which he was pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Madison, N. J., for a quarter century. A brother, Simon, was pastor for many years at Newtown in Queens County.
Abner Reeve, a descendant of Thomas, a first settler, also entered the ministry under Benjamin Woolsey's guidance and served a number of island churches as well as elsewhere. He became the father of Judge Tapping Reeve, native of Southaven in Brookhaven Town and founder of America's early law school at Litchfield, Connecticut. After sixteen years as pastor at Southold, the Rev. Benjamin Woolsey in 1736 removed to his wife's estate in Oyster Bay. With his departure the union of the church and town in Southold came to an end and thereafter the minister's salary was no longer obtained by taxation on the whole community.
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James Reeve 2nd of Mattituck in 1715 gave land there for a meet- ing house and cemetery. The building then erected was used on its original site for 115 years when in 1830 it was drawn by oxen to Sterling (Greenport) to serve as a sail-loft until destroyed by fire. Rev. Joseph Lamb, one of Yale's five graduates in 1717, was that year ordained pastor of the Mattituck church where he remained a quarter century, serving also as a trustee of Princeton.
At Oysterponds (Orient), founded about seven years after South- old village organized its church, a meeting house was built in 1718 on the site of the present Congregational Church. It was sold to the society by David Youngs, a tailor, for five shillings. Some twenty- four families were living here then, among them Gideon Youngs, a nephew of the Rev. John Youngs and owner of a large farm which he had inherited.
The first meeting house at Cutchogue is supposed to have been erected in 1732 and eight years later Rev. Ebenezer Gould, a Yale graduate, became its pastor, to be succeeded in 1747 by Rev. Thomas Payne, also of Yale. They were Cutchogue's only pastors until after the Revolution.
Rev. James Davenport, another Yale graduate who became pastor at Southold in 1738, was a great-grandson of Rev. John Davenport who with Governor Eaton of New Haven had fathered this church. He was also a brother of Abraham Davenport, chief justice of Con- necticut. James, however, because of his eccentric actions, was dis- missed from the Southold pastorate in 1746. Two years later Rev. William Throop, a graduate of both Yale and Princeton, became pastor at Southold. A great-nephew of his, Enos T. Throop, was governor of New York from 1829 to 1833. While pastor at Southold, William Throop served also as Suffolk County surrogate.
The first physician to practice in Southold Town was one Robert Trustane who arrived in 1664 but did not remain permanently. South- old's second pastor, Rev. Joshua Hobart, however, combined medicine with preaching. An inscription originally attached to his tablet in the Southold cemetery attested that he was "a skilful physician" but this tablet, according to tradition, was destroyed during the Revolution.
William Throop, Southold's fifth pastor, previously mentioned, was indeed a versatile man for he not only preached and served as surrogate but also as a doctor. A contemporary, Thomas Payne, pastor at Cutchogue, was likewise a physician. At Mattituck at the same time was stationed Rev. Joseph Park, a Harvard graduate. These three men in 1735 addressed a joint letter to Sir William John- son and Phineas Lyman, commanders of the provincial forces who had captured Crown Point from the French, assuring them that the people of Southold, many of whom took part in this war, felt allied to Connecticut and the other colonies who were participating and in token of their gratitude to the "brave countrymen of the main shore" the townspeople had collected "nearly three hundred fat sheep" as well as "some cheeses" and "clothing for the use and refreshment of of the army."
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Dr. Micah Moore, great-great-grandson of Thomas Moore, an early settler, served Southold as a physician just prior to the Revolution. Left a widower, he married widow Abigail Hempstead Ledyard, mother of John Ledyard, the famous explorer. Dr. Moore was succeeded as physician by Dr. John Gardiner whose first wife was Abigail Worth and his second the daughter of Major Calvin Moore. Gardiner served as local physician until his death in 1823. In 1780 Dr. Joshua Clark, physician at Mattituck, rode his horse to Southold, quickly arranged with Thomas Chase to marry his daughter Polly, promptly had the knot tied by eighty-four year old Judge Samuel Landon and straightway returned to Mattituck with the seventeen-year old bride on the pillion of his saddle.
During the two wars with England Southold town was especially vulnerable to enemy raids. In the Revolution, most of the menfolk committed themselves to the cause of independence and many volun- teered for military service at home and elsewhere. However, as the island was soon completely overrun by the enemy, many heads of families were obliged to take an oath of loyalty to the King if they would remain with their families. Others fled to the mainland where they enrolled to fight while their families in Southold remained to suffer untold hardships under the domination of the enemy.
At this time the Southold church had no resident pastor as the Rev. John Storrs, who had arrived in 1763, being an ardent patriot had to flee with his family to Connecticut where he became an army chaplain. In 1782 he returned to Southold and remained as pastor until 1787. By his first wife, Eunice Conant of Mansfield, who died during his early pastorate at Southold, Storrs had two sons. The eldest, Richard Salter Storrs, became the grandfather of Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, a prominent metropolitan preacher who was the prin- cipal speaker when Southold Town celebrated its 250th anniversary. Rev. John Storrs married as his second wife Hannah Moore of Southold.
The most prominent man of Southold town during the Revolu- tionary period and for nearly three decades thereafter was Ezra L'Hommedieu, grandson of a French Huguenot, Benjamin L'Hom- medieu, who had settled in Southold in 1690 and secured a home lot on Hallock's Neck. The latter married Patience Sylvester, daughter of Nathaniel Sylvester, proprietor of Shelter Island. Their grandson, Ezra L'Hommedieu, was born August 30, 1734, and gradu- ated from Yale twenty years later. Two years thereafter he married Charity Floyd, a sister of General William Floyd of Brookhaven town, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a great patriot.
Ezra's mother and wife accompanied him as refugees to Connecti- cut where they resided while he collaborated with the Committee of Safety. His first wife died in 1785 and eighteen years later, at the age of sixty-nine, Ezra married Mary Catherine Havens, daughter of Nicoll Havens of Shelter Island. Their daughter Mary married Lawyer Samuel S. Gardiner of the sixth generation from Lion Gardiner, founder of the manor on nearby Gardiner's Island. In 1847, Mary L'Hommedieu, grand-daughter of Ezra, married Professor
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Eben Norton Horsford, renowned scientist and philanthropist, long a resident of Shelter Island, as did later her sister Phebe.
Ezra L'Hommedieu served in the Provincial Congress from 1775 to 1777 and in the State Assembly from 1777 to 1783. He was also a member of the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1783 and of the State Senate from 1784 to 1809, except for the year 1793. He was repeatedly a member of the Council of Appointment and a Regent of the State University from its organization until his death. In 1784, at the age of fifty, Ezra L'Hommedieu was admitted to practice law at the first term of the Court of Common Pleas in Riverhead. He then became clerk of the county of Suffolk and served in that capacity for twenty-six years.
This unusual man had varied interests. In 1744, his father Benjamin, together with Benjamin Bailey, John Vail, Samuel Landon, John Prince, Elijah Hutchinson and Isaac Hubbard, had formed a company to fish for porpoises for their oil. The profits for a time were large and other companies were organized but the porpoises eventually disappeared. Nevertheless, son Ezra organized similar companies but instead of seeking porpoises they caught moss bunkers to be used as fertilizer. By the early 1800s many such groups were operating in an industry which paid good dividends for several generations. About 1850 these companies first began to extract oil from the fish before selling the refuse for fertilizer, a development which brought about the establishment of many fish factories in Southold and other east end towns. Eventually, however, the bunkers as had the porpoises, and before them the whales, migrated to deeper waters.
During his long life Ezra L'Hommedieu lived in the ancestral manison on the bluff just east of Founders Landing. It was demol- ished in 1841 but its barn still stands near the intersection of Horton's Lane and Main Street. In the course of a useful existence, during which he set free all of his slaves, L'Hommedieu acquired much land on Long Island as well as a large tract in Oneida County. Included in his local properties were Robins Island and Sylvester Manor and the Lord estate on Shelter Island.
Southold early provided schools for its young people besides contributing towards the founding and maintenance of the school at New Haven which became Yale College. Nicholas Eades was an early schoolmaster in Southold, coming from Southampton. John Ledyard, afterwards mayor of Hartford, ran a Latin school at Southold shortly after 1717. He also kept a store and married Deborah Youngs, granddaughter of Rev. John Youngs. Their son John became a mariner and married Abigail Hempstead, daughter of Squire Robert Hempstead, town clerk. Their son, still another John Ledyard, is known to history as "the American Marco Polo".
In 1794 a group of Southold men headed by Ezra L'Hommedieu, becoming solicitous of "the advancement of literature" in the com- munity, built a small brick school house on the north side of Main Street. The group included, besides L'Hommedieu who held the most shares, Hazard L. Moore, storekeeper; James Horton, blacksmith;
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William Albertson, Colonel Benjamin Horton, Major Gilbert Horton, Dr. John Gardiner and others. Wines Osborn, descendant of Thomas Osman, became the first teacher. Thomas Storrs Lester also taught there for a short time as a youth of nineteen and later studied law with L'Hommedieu. He married Mary Albertson, the brickmaker's daughter, became district attorney of Suffolk County and the execu- tor of the estate of his legal mentor who died September 28, 1811.
Three years after building the brick school house, the same group and other men established another institution that should "tend to diffusing of useful knowledge and the improvement of the human mind." They each paid three dollars for a "right" in the library. The trustees were Dr. Gardiner, Hazard L. Moore, Zaccheus Goldsmith, Silas Walton, James Brown and James Hallock. This institution was the precursor of the present Cahoon Library at Southold, the Floyd Library at Greenport, the Lupton Library at Mattituck, and the library at Cutchogue.
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