HISTORY PROJECT CONTINUES TO GROW

With our latest shipment to the East Hampton Library, there are now 145 interviews completed and indexed. The index alone is over 400 pages long. We have also archived 961 photographs donated by our subjects. These too, are completely indexed. We have about 35 more interviews to transcribe and index.

We hope to complete the project within the next year, funding permitting. Contributions have fallen off since 9/11 and we are urgently seeking a completion grant so that we can continue our work, uninterrupted.

  MICHELE ALLISON IS LEAVING EAST HAMPTON…BUT NOT THE HISTORY PROJECT

Michele Allison, our transcriber at the East Hampton Library, will be leaving East Hampton at the end of this month to move to New Hampshire. The Library has generously agreed to continue paying Michele to transcribe for us even after she relocates. Michele has been a loyal and important asset to The Project and we wish her much happiness in the future. The help of the East Hampton Library continues to be a major source of our funding and our thanks go to Tom Twomey, Library President, Ann Chapman, Head of the Long Island Collection, Diana Dayton, Librarian of the Long Island Collection and Dorothy King, Librarian Emerita.
     
NEW TRANSCRIBER JOINS THE PROJECT
We are pleased to have Teresa Bergen of Portland, OR, to help us with transcriptions. Teresa has been working in the field of history – transcribing, researching, writing and editing – for the last six years. She found us on the internet and offered her services. We will be using her as long as our funds permit.

HISTORY PROJECT CONTINUES TO BE A SOURCE FOR RESEARCHERS.		  
     
Dr. Alice Wexler continues her research into the history of Huntington’s Disease and its connection to the population of East Hampton. In her recent article “Chorea and Community in a Nineteenth Century Town,” to be published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Dr. Wexler quotes from our interviews with Lib Davis who had remembrances of some local cases of the disease.
  Crew of the Amagansett Coast Guard Station in 1942 when the German submarine landed off Amagansett Beach

THE ATLANTIC ARTICLE ON THE GERMAN SUB LANDING USES RESEARCH FROM THE HISTORY PROJECT

Gary Cohen, author of The Keystone Kommandos in the February, 2002 edition of The Atlantic, researched our interview with Carl Jennett, who was the Coast Guard Officer on duty the night the German saboteurs landed in 1942.
     
SOME MEMORIES OF THE
GEORGICA ASSOCIATION

Jim Eckes
 “George Wilson Pierson was a rather famous Yale historian. He wrote a two-volume history of Yale. And he’s written a book about the moving of the windmill from Montauk to Wainscott. He had, I think, a week’s time in 1942. The government ex-propriated the land that the windmill was on at Montauk and he organized the moving of the windmill from Montauk to the Georgica Association. He’s written a book about the Georgica Association and a book about the golf course that existed at one time at the Georgica Association. So really, wonderful man. Treated me just marvelously as a kid. And we all called him the Professor. And just thoroughly enjoyed knowing him. And Norah (his daughter) is a very talented artist
I spent long summer days with him. I used to always put his cat boat in and take it out and we spent long days sailing and talking about New England history on the Pond. In the meantime Norah would lie on the deck with as little as possible on. It was a little bit distracting. (Laughs)”
 




Guest cottage at the Pierson Estate in the Georgica Association, after the Hurricane of 1938 (above). The cottage has been rebuilt (below) and Norah Pierson uses it when she visits from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico
     

Norah Pierson
 Norah’s father, George Wilson Pierson, author of the seminal Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, was Chairman of the History Dept. at Yale, and President of the Georgica Association. Norah donated precious books about the Georgica Association, written by her father, including the one he wrote about bringing the windmill back from Montauk. Early in the interview Norah and Tony discovered they share common ancestors in Henry and Abraham Pierson. (See Tony’s Column for more information.)
“My grandfather, Charles Wheeler Pierson, came out here to visit a friend of his and my grandmother was out studying painting with William Merritt Chase, and they met and fell in love, and they both loved this place, and so probably without even realizing that there were any Piersons anywhere out here, they came and bought this house here in the Association. They rented it for two years and bought it in 1914.”
 

Larry Gourlay
 “My family first came here in 1923, the year I was born. My aunt [Elizabeth Rodman Litchfield] had bought property here from the Edwards, the big house that’s owned by Kennedy now, on the beach in the Association. And that had been Osborn property originally. Her husband was an architect in New York. And he built this little house for us in about 1924. And I came down the first year.
Howard Hughes came out here. And in order to ingratiate himself with the family he landed on Georgica Pond and took Peter Herrick and me up in his plane. That was exciting. Juan Trippe (former President of Pan Am) used to do this all the time. And everybody hated this. And he’d disturb all the wildlife as well as all the people, and so forth.
I was in this house in the ‘38 Hurricane when the side blew in. That’s why these beams are here now. Because originally we didn’t have them. Jack Emmett was coming down the lane to look at the water and he stopped by to see if we were okay. It was just my mother and me and we weren’t, because of this. And so he took a couple of fence posts and nailed them into the floor
against the wall. And it held!”
     

Sherrill Dayton
 “That’s [the Georgica mill] still over in the Association. That mill was built over by Al Hand’s, just the other side of the schoolhouse on the hill there. And it was moved from there…it went on toward Bridgehampton and ran for a number of years. And then it was purchased by a man who lived in Montauk. And it was moved to Montauk and it sat just this side of the lighthouse down there near Old Fort Hero. I guess, Turtle Cove they call it. It sat there. And the fellow that worked with me, Paul Collum, he was a nephew to Rink Collum of Amagansett. And he and Rink went down and they cut it loose from the house. And this G. W. Pierson…. he instigated the whole thing. God, I worked for them for years and years. We’re way back. He was a prince of a man. What a great, great guy he was. Sense of humor…my God!” Sherrill went on to help George Pierson restore the Georgica Mill and tells about it in his interview.
 

David Osborn
 “Whether we like it or not, the Georgica Association is a very unique institution. And most of us on this side didn’t like it too much. But it is there and does exist and it’s a unique institution and Wainscott would probably not have been the same without it, because it was the economic survival of Wainscott. Without it, I don’t think that many people would have survived here. It really did provide an incredible amount of employment. Nobody likes to admit any of that, but one without the other? I don’t think so. It wouldn’t have worked too well, because for the average guy to live here in Wainscott...I mean, we [the Osborns] had...the dairy you know. It was a nice business down there. Everybody was making something out of there, you know. And farming, until the First World War, completely dried up. They had prosperous spells during the First World War and the Second World War, but the rest of the time the farming really wasn’t a factor. A few people in it like the Fosters and ourselves made some money. But for the average guy, big money came out of the summer colony.”
     


Drawing of a typical East End mill by Everett Henry, formerly of Amagansett
 


Coins used in Southampton and East Hampton prior to the American Revolution and through the 1880’s, collected by David Osborn’s grandmother, Abigail Halsey. Also, silver buttons worn by David’s great-great-grandfather, Lemuel Halsey, born 1840.
 
IN MEMORIAM
We note, with sadness, the passing of James “Jimmy” Amaden, Trevor Kelsall, E. Monroe “Ed” Osborne and James “Jimmy” Cuomo. Their interviews join those of others who have gone, but whose words live on in The History Project collection.
     
TONY’S COLUMN…

GRANDPARENTS
During Amagansett’s tercentenary celebration in 1948, author Alex Haley, then a Coast Guardsman, read from his story about the German saboteurs who had come ashore in Amagansett in 1942. Interesting that the man who wrote Roots, should have an important role in preserving our own 20th century history.
In an Op Ed column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August Wilson, an important American playwright who also happens to be black, writes about the importance of having grandparents, and his sense of loss at not having had a knowledge of his own past. He talks about the detrimental effect that losing touch with ones grandparents can have on people individually and culturally. He says, “If we are not walking in our grandfather’s shoes, then whose shoes are we walking in? …Our grandfathers and grandmothers lived and fought and died to preserve a way of life that was important to them. They taught us everything we know to be true. Every conceivable facet of life was mapped out and handed to us and we got the maps stored in the closet. We got them hidden under the bed. It has been years since we looked at them. Our children know nothing about them.” He is talking about black Americans, but, of course, it is a universal truth that, as the past is prologue, the immediate past is a vital link.
The subjects of East Hampton’s oral history are our communal and in many cases literal grandparents and great-grandparents, connecting local people to their immediate past.
Perhaps the reason I’m so interested in this subject is because I had almost no contact with my grandparents. Growing up in the then small village of Amagansett, everyone seemed to have numerous relatives (even in my small grade school class there was more than one descendant of Granny Scott, of Carmine DiSunno, and of Cap’n Nate Lester.) I never met either of my paternal grandparents, and met my maternal grandfather only a few times.
My father talked about his mother, on occasion
rhapsodizing about her cooking, which he called peasant style, and about what a saint she was, without going into
much detail. She died when I was about ten, in San Francisco, where she had lived since the family moved there in 1908, from what is now Yugoslavia. I never met her, but still treasure, and keep on a wall in my bedroom, a portrait my father did of her in 1936. 		  My mother (Carolyn Pierson Prohaska), though, with a little prodding, and especially after a cocktail, loved talking about her family’s history. All that was needed was interest on my part. The problem was, that
since it concerned people I didn’t know, I had to reach a certain age before I became interested. As I grew up and became more patient and able to listen to my mother’s monologues, I was surprised to learn of the Pierson connection on the East End.
It seems she was a direct descendant of Henry Pierson, one of the original settlers of Southampton Town. Henry was the brother of Abraham, more famous because the church he founded in New Haven when he left Southampton, became part of what is now Yale University. Abraham, whose Puritan beliefs kept getting him in trouble, left New Haven and founded Newark, NJ, coincidentally the future home of my mother.
Henry stayed in Southampton where he became Town Clerk. His descendents also stayed, until sometime in the early 1800’s when descendent William removed to Cairo, NY, where he sired many children, including my great-grandfather, James Malcolm. One of James Malcolm’s brothers, Sergeant-Major William Decker Pierson died in 1898, in Montauk, at Camp Wykoff, while there with the 71st Regiment of the National Guard of New York, who were there with the Rough Riders. James Malcolm’s granddaughter, my mother Carolyn, began coming to East Hampton in the 1930’s and settled in Amagansett in 1943. Seems there was an invisible attraction that led the Piersons back to the East End.
One last thing. James Malcolm had a brother whom the family always thought was killed by a whale somewhere in the Pacific. Recently, I discovered, on the internet, that this brother, Charles, went ashore and stayed in New Zealand, where he sired a whole new line of Pierson New Zealanders, whom I am only just beginning to communicate with.

Tony Prohaska
Project Director

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