MORTON PENNYPACKER: THE WEATHERVANE WAS WRONG

Had a local historian not questioned a date published in a New York newspaper 185 years ago - the same one etched much earlier into a copper weathervane - generations of East Hamptoners might still claim 1649 as the year their community was settled.

That being the case, this year's gala 350th anniversary celebration would instead have been next year.

In October 1947, however, the diligent Morton Pennypacker, a student of history, and Suffolk County and East Hampton's official historian, proved that English settlement here dates not to 1649, as had been thought, but to the year before. Mr. Pennypacker did his research in connection with the town's tricentennial.

By tradition, when settlers in the New World established a house of worship, they placed a weathervane at its peak showing two dates - of the town's settlement and the church's completion, in East Hampton's case, 1649 and 1717.

"Could an ancient weathervane be wrong?" the town fathers wondered as Mr. Pennypacker made his case for a 1948 celebration.

While most agree that the "main body of emigrants" settled here in 1649, a small band of pioneering settlers were here first, Mr. Pennypacker told an assemblage of town officials. The pioneers "prepared log cabins as temporary shelter and secured a stock of provisions for sustenance. . . . The wives and children of the emigrants required shelter from the pitiless storms."

Lyman Beecher, East Hampton's minister in the early 1800s, gave evidence of that small group in an 1806 sermon. He told of a Montaukett woman, who had died about 50 years earlier having lived 100 years or so, remembering that six families "first planted themselves at the south end of the town and were discovered by some Indians on a hunting party."

Because the settlers were hospitable to the Indians, the elder was said to have recounted, the Indians welcomed them.

"Indian history was perpetuated by tradition," Mr. Pennypacker maintained, "and their aged women were their select repositories. Their traditions were remarkably reliable."

More so, apparently, than H.G. Spafford's, the editor of The New York Gazetteer, who in 1813 published, in error, 1649 as the settlement date. It was based on information supplied by Benjamin Thompson, then a young man, whose credibility as a historian Mr. Pennybacker called into doubt.

Twenty-six years later, when Mr. Thompson published his first history of Long Island, he corrected his error.

"It would be most unfortunate for East Hampton," Mr. Pennypacker told anniversary planners 50 years ago, "if the community failed to agree as to the correct date."

He added that the deed from the Indians covering East Hampton to Montauk Highlands, which was given to Theophilus Eaton, then Governor of the Colony of New Haven, and Edward Hopkins, Governor of the Colony of Connecticut, was dated April 29, 1648.

Three years later, on April 16, 1651, Governor Hopkins assigned the deed to the people of East Hampton, who reimbursed him for the purchase price of 30 pounds, 4 shillings, 8 pence.

History, Mr. Pennypacker noted, is a "light shining into a dark place, and clothing with lustre and beauty the land of forgetfulness. It gives a kind of antedated existence, by which we live over the lives, and participate in the joys or sorrows of past generations."

Susan Rosenbaum