What's In A Name?

ALEWIFE BROOK

Alewife (locally pronounced "elly" and used interchangeably with Ely) is the name of several roads in Northwest Woods. There's Ely Brook Road, which ends at its intersection with Alewife Brook Road. There's Ely Brook to Hand's Creek Road. And there's Alewife (or Ely) Brook Pond and Alewife (or Ely) Brook, which runs from the pond to Northwest Harbor, near the roadend also known as Alewife Brook Landing.

Alewives, small, bony, oily fish, make an annual spring run through the brook. Their "pursuit," wrote Everett T. Rattray in "The South Fork," is "as well carried out with a washtub as with a rod," although the quarry is "not really worth the trouble to eat unless it is pickled long enough to dissolve the bones, in which case the common fish becomes a rare delicacy."

Alewife Brook itself "meanders like the channel leading into Pond of Pines eight or 10 miles away at Napeague, although on a grander scale. The brook's twists and turns and travels across the marsh are like those of a mountain stream in a beaver meadow, and follow the same rules of progression - deep water on the outside of a curve where water velocity is greater, shoals building out on the inside of a curve, and eventually cutoffs - the rules obeyed by all streams, from little Alewife Brook, less than a mile long, to the great Mississippi."

"Alewife Brook, however, outdoes the Father of Waters in one respect: it is tidal, changing direction four times a day and complicating the equation beyond imagination."

Alewife Brook Pond is within Cedar Point County Park and a protected part of East Hampton's natural environs. The first mention of Alewife Brook in the East Hampton Town records is in 1654.

M.N.