What's In A Name?

APAQUOGUE

Apaquogue Road in East Hampton begins where Lily Pond Lane ends, near Georgica Beach. "Apaquogue" meant that general area around Lily Pond. Today it's a tony neighborhood of vacation houses, but in earlier centuries it was farming country, where locals took in summertime boarders.

Appaquogue, Appoquogue, and Apoquogue are variant spellings. The name is found not only on Long Island but in Connecticut, and means "a place where flags grow" - in this case, the flags of cat-tails. Native Americans used the "flags" to cover their wigwams.

The root of the word means "to cover," according to William Wallace Tooker's "Indian Place Names on Long Island," as in appuhquau, "he covers it." An appaqui-auke was a "lodge-covering place."

A clipping from The Brooklyn Advance, found in the Long Island Collection of the East Hampton Library, mentions the farms of A.D. Candy, Asa Miller, and Joseph H. Dimon as being in Apaquogue. The undated story was written when Bridgehampton was the easternmost stop on the Long Island Rail Road.

Abraham Candy and his wife kept a guestbook, now housed in the Long Island Collection. On Sept. 1, 1850, one "I.A.D." inscribed a poem therein, which reads in part as follows (translated from the mid-19th century handwriting with the help of the collection's librarian, Dorothy King):

Fair Appoquogue! how oft I've trod,
In dreamy thought, thy sand-girt plain!
Pondering the wondrous works of God -
The Earth, the sky, the trackless main.

Behold that narrow zone of sand
Guiding the never-resting sea,
That pours its billows o'er the strand
In loud, majestic minstrelsy.

M.N.