Hot on the Trail of a Family Tale
Tracking down the Huntting and Banister history in East Hampton
 Carissa Katz
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(11/13/2008) It began with the smallest bit of information, a detail of family history that had gone unmentioned for decades.
Looking through Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s “East Hampton History and Genealogies” years ago at her mother’s house in Connecticut, Carol Rideout learned that her mom, Beryl Huntting Stanley, who was born and raised in East Hampton, had been divorced before she married Ms. Rideout’s father. Soon after she confronted her mother with the discovery, the genealogy book disappeared from the shelf.
For Ms. Rideout and her husband, Stephen, that peek into a hidden part of her mother’s past piqued their curiosity about Ms. Rideout’s ancestors in East Hampton, in particular her grandmother, a schoolteacher named Edith Banister who married Jeremiah Huntting, and her grandmother’s brother, Judson Banister, who followed his sister to East Hampton, opened the village’s first laundry, and went on to become the village mayor from 1936 to 1954.
 Stanley Family Photo
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Fed by a trove of family memorabilia, that curiosity became a healthy obsession for the Rideouts, who live in Shutesbury, Mass., and have been visiting East Hampton for the past three years to research Mr. Banister’s life story. They have pored over the minutes of East Hampton Village trustee meetings, read through years’ worth of East Hampton Stars, interviewed older people who knew her uncle, and delved into the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection looking for details about Mayor Banister’s life and times in East Hampton.
Mr. Rideout, a retired fishery biologist with the federal government, has become so fascinated that he is writing a book about Mayor Banister. “This story really intrigued me,” he said a few weeks ago during one of the couple’s research trips to East Hampton.
“I figured, let me try something completely new in my second childhood,” he said. He took a writing course at a local community college and began to chronicle the life and times of Judson Banister. “The book is a biography, but it’s also about my journey of trying to find all of this stuff,” he said.
“It’s his story, but in the broader sense, it’s the family story,” Ms. Rideout explained.
 Stanley Family Photo
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The couple had a good starting point in Ms. Rideout’s grandmother’s photographs, newspaper clippings, and letters. “She was a great record keeper,” Ms. Rideout said.
“The family was close, and she was obviously very proud of where Jud had come from,” Mr. Rideout said. “He had a sixth-grade education.”
She had even kept the sign-in books from her brother’s funeral. The Rideouts referred to those when looking for people who might remember Mr. Banister. But as the years pass, “we’re finding fewer and fewer older people here,” Ms. Rideout said.
Edith and Judson Banister and their sister, Stella, grew up in upstate New York. The family came from Potsdam, but Mr. Banister moved to Malone to live with an uncle at the age of 12.
Edith came to East Hampton in 1901 and convinced her brother that it was a good place to live and start a business, which he did. With Jeremiah Huntting, his sister’s first husband, he opened the Huntting and Banister Steam Laundry on Cedar Street. The building burned down in 1909, but by then Mr. Banister had already sold out of the business and was working as a plumber and steamfitter.
 East Hampton Fire Department
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In 1911 or 1912, he built a new laundry on Race Lane, but that building, too, burned in 1913. In its place, Mr. Banister built a brick building, the East Hampton Steam Laundry. It still stands on Race Lane, the former site of the Laundry restaurant and now the Lodge restaurant. Mr. Banister ran the East Hampton Steam Laundry for close to 50 years before selling it to one of his nephews in the 1960s.
During that time, he served as mayor for 18 years, as captain of the hook and ladder company, and as chief of the Village Fire Department. He was also a Mason and played in a Fire Department band.
“He was the type of guy that people everywhere just loved him, from the highway guys to other mayors of other towns,” Ms. Rideout said. “I remember him that way, too.”
“Knowing he had been mayor that long, I assumed there were going to be documents around,” Mr. Rideout said. They found plenty with little effort, but sussing out other details of Mr. Banister’s life required more diligence.
Stanley Family Photo
Judson Banister, left, and Fritz Leddy, an East Hampton Village police chief at Mr. Banister's retirement party in November 1954
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Why, for instance, did he decide to go into the laundry business? There was a hint in a story on Mr. Banister that Arthur Roth wrote for The Star.
Mr. Banister’s father had been a steamfitter. Perhaps he learned something about the laundry equipment from him. Then, looking at census data, the Rideouts found that in Malone Mr. Banister’s uncle owned a steam laundry and that he must have learned the business working there as a teenager before coming to East Hampton at the age of 18.
“It’s been hard hunting, but I’ve been incredibly lucky,” Mr. Rideout said. Answers to one question lead to other questions. “There are still so many holes to fill,” Mr. Rideout said.
“My biggest regret is that I didn’t talk to my grandmother more,” Ms. Rideout said. Through her research, however, she is reconnecting with her late grandmother and gaining a new appreciation for her and her family.
Stanley Family Photo
Edith Banister, right front, camping with her friends on Three Mile Harbor circa 1910
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The couple knows, for example, that Mr. Banister’s entire extended family, including his sisters, mother, and grandmother, lived at a boarding house on Newtown Lane around 1910, but they have been unable to find any photographs or information about the owner of the boarding house. It was the second house counted on the census as you go up Newtown Lane, but is, they assume, no longer standing. They are hoping that someone might have photographs or family records of it.
They lived there before Mr. Banister built his own house on Cooper Lane and married Harriet Conklin. Mr. Banister also had a “camp” on Three Mile Harbor where Ms. Rideout’s family spent summers throughout her childhood years. “That’s how I was introduced to East Hampton,” she said.
The Rideouts are interested in Mr. Banister’s first step into local politics, something they still know little about. “Apparently he ran for highway superintendent in 1926 and lost the race,” Mr. Rideout said.
Judson Banister, left, and his sister Edith Banister Huntting, holding Beryl Hunting in front of the Huntting and Banister Steam Laundry on Cedar Street
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They are also looking for photographs from East Hampton’s 275th and 300th anniversary celebrations, which Mr. Banister took part in, and pictures of the Masons and the Fire Department during Mr. Banister’s tenure.
“It’s like putting a puzzle together,” Ms. Rideout said. They have asked that anyone with information about Mr. Banister and the organizations and businesses he was part of contact them by e-mail at sgrideout@verizon.net, or by phone at 413-259-9123.