A unanimous East Hampton School Board awarded tenure on Tuesday night to its elementary school principal, adopted a calendar for the 2016-17 school year, and approved an energy performance contract that will begin the process of adding solar panels and many other energy efficiency features at all three school buildings.

Beth Doyle, who is in her third year as principal at John M. Marshall Elementary School, was granted tenure about five months ahead of the end of her initial probation period, which was to end in June. The district is allowed to grant early tenure under state rules, and the board did so upon the recommendation of Rich Burns, the district superintendent

East Hampton has had problems in recent years retaining talented educators and administrators, said Mr. Burns. “This is my way of expressing to Principal Doyle that she is doing an outstanding job and I hope she stays with us. . . . It is within my jurisdiction and discretion to grant her tenure early, and I am proud to do that.”

A community member had raised a concern about sticking to the initial probation period, but in response, Rich Wilson, a school board member, said Ms. Doyle deserved tenure early. Calling her “an outstanding educational leader,” he said that “she has the vision of where we are going and she has the ability to bring along the teachers. This is a great day to have Beth Doyle in our district.”

The board adopted next year’s calendar after seeing a draft of it for the first time. School will begin on Sept. 7, the Wednesday after Labor Day. Mr. Burns said the calendar was in line with that of the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and that it had been discussed with the sending districts. School will not be in session on Election Day, which officials said was good news, given recent concerns over security when residents come in to vote.

The energy performance contract that was approved is expected not only to make school buildings more energy-efficient but to save money for the district. The Milwaukee-based firm Johnson Controls Inc. has been hired to install solar panels and new transformers, switch to natural gas and bring in a co-generator at the high school, add weather-stripping, insulate pipes, and more. The work is projected to cost nearly $4.9 million, to be paid off gradually over the course of 13 years, and has the potential to save the district more than $350,000 a year.

“This is big. This took a long time,” J.P. Foster, the school board president, said.

The first section of the Army Corps of Engineers’ sandbag “dune” on the downtown Montauk beach has been finished. It covers the western third of the project, the entirety of which extends from South Emery Street to near Surfside Place.

“The bags are in, the sand is in place, and it’s covered to the final elevation,” Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said after a visit to the site on Tuesday with other board members.

Contractors hired and paid by the Army Corps dug a trench on the beach and placed sandbags filled with a slurry of water and quarried sand in the hole, piling them on top of one another.

 While the final elevation of the sandbag pile is 15 feet above a point in the surf zone where mean sea level is measured, the finished pile of sandbags itself does not rise far above the beach surface.

They are topped with three feet of sand, with the top portion being sand taken from the Montauk beach rather than the coarse orange upland quarry sand.

“It pretty much runs above the existing dune line,” Mr. Cantwell said earlier this week. “When it’s finished the sandbags are actually buried in the existing beach.”

Wooden walkways will be placed over the piled bags for pedestrian access to the water. While tall pilings to support the walkways have been driven into the sand all along the downtown project area, those poles will be cut and shortened so that the walkways will be only a foot and a half above the beach, Kim Shaw, the town’s director of natural resources, said last week.

The sandbag wall is meant to prevent the ocean from licking away at and eroding the beach, Mr. Cantwell explained. “When we have a storm and we have erosion it cuts the beach; it undermines the beach,” Mr. Cantwell said. The Corps of Engineers premise is that the sandbags will hold where the beach sand would have been lost.

And, he said, “if you look at the way it is shaped,” rather than “a flat beach that runs right up to the natural dune line, now [an ocean surge] has got to climb 15 feet to get over the top.”

Though high tides and stormy conditions earlier this week caused a tidal rush onto the areas of beach still under construction, which was documented by Montauk residents carefully watching the project, the completed section “actually held up pretty well compared to the section that is under construction,” Mr. Cantwell said. At high tide “the water came up to the base” of the finished sandbag wall, he said.

Once the Army Corps is done, the town and county will have to shoulder the financial burden of keeping the sandbag pile covered with three feet of sand — a cost that opponents have said will far exceed estimates as storms continually remove the sand topping.

“This is short term at best,” Mr. Cantwell said on Tuesday. He and other board members have stressed the need to press the Army Corps to replenish the beach, adding sand to widen it, under its longer-range coastal plans for the area from Fire Island to Montauk Point.

Besides raising questions about negative effects of the sandbag wall, opponents have raised doubts about the potential for the Corps to actually undertake that larger project and whether the sandbags would be removed, as has been discussed, should that take place.

Once the sandbags are all in place, the beach area around the wall will be fenced off. “They’re trying to keep people, vehicles, and activity off the dune,” Mr. Cantwell said.

“The usable beach areas will definitely be less than it would have been . . . and that’s a problem, until we get a lot of sand in front of this,” he said.

Negotiations are taking place with the Army Corps, Mr. Cantwell said, about the contractor’s removal of a natural dune at the project’s western end. The sight of machines digging into that dune galvanized a wave of protest against the entire project, including work site protests last fall that resulted in a number of arrests.

The natural dune rose much higher than the artificial one made of the covered sandbags.

“We are asking the Corps that that dune be replaced to its original elevation,” Mr. Cantwell said. “They’re fixed on this 15-foot elevation,” he said. “I want that dune totally restored.”

Brenden Snow of Montauk Boy Scout Troop 136 received his Eagle Scout Award on Sunday, and just in the nick of time. To achieve Eagle Scout, one must be under 18 years old, which he turned just two weeks after his project was complete. He is only the 12th Scout from Montauk to become an Eagle Scout.

At a ceremony at the Montauk Firehouse on Sunday, he received the award from Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming and East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell. For his project, Brenden and his troop members built a set of bleachers to hold 42 people on the outdoor field on the grounds of the Montauk School.

But it was no easy feat, according to his father, Scott Snow, who said that from start to finish the project took about eight months. The Scout had to come up with a concept, which he did with the help of Dave Rutkowski, who oversees the Montauk Mustang collegiate baseball league games in summer on the field. Brenden had to raise the money for the materials, which he did with a pancake breakfast at the firehouse, and then he had to have the project approved by the Suffolk County Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

His fellow troop members helped out, digging holes, pouring cement, anchoring footings, and bolting the bleachers to the ground. Through it all, Brenden’s scout leader, Sean Tyrell, said he proved to be a born leader. “He had the respect of the whole troop,” he said.

And though it was quite an accomplishment, it wasn’t his only one recently. Back in the spring, Brenden won a First Congressional District high school art competition with a photograph he took with his GoPro camera from the water at Terrace, a popular surfing beach on the south side of Montauk.

Representative Lee Zeldin chose Brenden for depicting Long Island at its finest. Mr. Zeldin sent Brenden and his father two round-trip tickets to Washington, D.C., to claim his proclamation. They were there only one day, but it was an enlightening experience for the young man. He said he and Mr. Zeldin had a lot to talk about, including movies, beaches, and local art.

As soon as winter break is over, Brenden will return to finish his freshman year at San Diego State University, where he is majoring in graphic design with a minor in photography.

Correction: Brenden Snow is the 12th Eagle Scout in Montauk, not all of Long Island, as previously reported. According to Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming, only 3 percent of the Scouts nationwide achieve this status. 

Developers of waterfront property in Sag Harbor Village on the south side of the bridge to Long Beach and North Haven have made it clear they do not intend to sell it to the village for a park. Now the village board is exploring condemnation, a legal process that would allow it to take the properties at 1, 3, and 5 Ferry Road.

During a meeting on Tuesday, the board retained Saul R. Fenchel, an attorney with the Garden City firm of Berkman, Henoch, Peterson, Peddy & Fenchel, who has 35 years’ experience representing clients in eminent domain matters. His website is newyorkeminentdomain.com.

The move toward condemnation comes three months after the Town of Southampton placed the properties on the community preservation fund list, at the request of the village (only towns can administer community preservation funds and Ferry Road is on the Southampton Town side of the village).

Representatives of the owners, which include Greystone Property Development, a Manhattan company, told the town board back in October that they were not interested in selling the property for preservation, and they have subsequently moved forward with plans to develop it. 

Reached by phone yesterday, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., the village attorney and chairman of the South­ampton Town Independence Party, laid out the process involved should the village pursue condemnation. Quite a lot of preliminary work would be involved, he said, including real estate appraisals, surveys, and the hiring of an engineer to help with the state’s Environmental Quality Review Act process. A public hearing would follow.

An issue, however, is how the village would pay for the property since community preservation fund money cannot be used in condemnations, according to Mr. Thiele. A bond, which the public could be asked to approve by permissive referendum, is one option, while private funding is another. The village could also seek grants from state or federal sources.

Mr. Thiele declined to speculate how much the property may be worth. “It’s a fairly unique piece of property with a checkered history, questions about title, a number of variables that come into play with regard to value,” he said.

Greystone purchased an interest in the parcels, totaling 1.7 acres, for $1.92 million, according to deed transfers dated Aug. 14. It is unclear how much interest the firm holds in the owning partnership,  known as East End Ventures, L.L.C.

Mr. Thiele described the procedure that village officials would have to take to proceed toward condemnation. While it would have to determine whether “a valid public purpose for the taking” exists, Mr. Thiele said, “That’s not going to be an issue here. If there’s any valid public purpose, it’s a park.” 

Once the village decided to move forward, it would go to State Supreme Court to vest the property and offer the owner what it had determined to be fair market value. The money would be paid to the court, and the property owner would have the option of accepting or challenging the amount. A court proceeding would ensue, and if the owner and municipality could not agree, a judge would make the decision. Regardless of the amount, the village would be on the hook.

“The risk in condemnation is you could acquire the property and the judge could determine the value is different than what your appraisal told you it was,” Mr. Thiele said, noting that the board would have to decide how much risk it is willing to take.

Making matters more complicated, the developers are moving forward with a longstanding condominium project. While the plans have taken several shapes in recent years, the current one is now undergoing the SEQRA process.

“The village board and the planning board have to wall themselves off from each other,” Mr. Thiele said. “The village board cannot influence the planning board in any way, shape, or form,” he said, adding the planning board must proceed. Both he and Denise Schoen, the attorney for the planning board, have advised the boards: “In a phrase, they have to act in good faith."

In a move on Tuesday to buy additional restrictions on nearly 25 acres of south-of-the-highway land in Bridgehampton, the Southampton Town Board continued its efforts to ensure farm fields remain as such, authorizing the $2.46 million purchase of the enhanced development rights on Hayground Farms in Bridgehampton. The property lies off Montauk Highway next to Kellis Pond, across from the PSEG-Long Island station.

No one quite anticipated, according to John v.H Halsey, president of the Peconic Land Trust, that anyone without an interest in farming would buy restricted farm fields for other purposes, but it is perfectly legal within the framework of the preservation program. Any agricultural use is allowed to take place, from a horse stable to a Christmas tree farm. While legitimate uses, Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said at a hearing, they are not what the public has come to think of as farmland.

“This will kind of guarantee that it stays more in the spirit of the original program, right, of food production,” he said.

Despite decades of active farmland conservation, farms where fields are tilled and crops harvested are still threatened. “It’s only in the last decade problems became apparent,” Mr. Halsey said.

The purchase of the additional restrictions, which preclude equestrian use, nursery operations, and vineyards, and require that 80 percent of the farmland be used to grow food, is “a tool we’re seeing used in other parts of the country because of the realization that after a huge public investment to protect farmland it isn’t always actually farmed,” he told the board.

The purchase also provides the town a safety net: it comes with the right to lease the land to another qualified farmer if it lies fallow for more than two years.

The board agreed to pay the land trust, which owns the prime agricultural property, with money from the community preservation fund. Peter Dankowski has a five-year lease with the trust to grow corn and potatoes there. He never used a farm stand nearby at the side of the highway, but it could be resurrected in the future.

The land trust bought the parcel, including a 20-acre tract and three smaller lots, from the descendants of William Haines in 2013 for $125,000 an acre, using borrowed money from a conservation lender. Mr. Halsey said the town’s purchase will allow the trust to repay the debt.

“In the face of a real estate market where we’re seeing up to $200,000 per acre spent to purchase, in many instances by non-farmers, farmland that is sometimes being taken out of production altogether,” Mr. Halsey said, farmers who want to rent or purchase farmland can’t compete. Enhanced rights, he said, will “cap” the value of the land in the future to about $25,000 per acre, as with the Bridgehampton farmland, with an appreciation over time of 3.5 percent per year maximum.

Mr. Schneiderman said preserved land was being used in other unintended ways as well, such as a backyard for a neighboring estate, “all hedged in, and hard to understand why the public would have supported that or funded that.” Once enhanced development rights are purchased, he said, “You can’t do the hedgerow and the lawn.”

Southampton was the first town in New York State to purchase enhanced restrictions on farmland, when, in 2014, under Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst, it bought the enhanced development rights on 33 acres, formerly the Danilevsky Farm, on Head of Pond Road in Water Mill for just over $11 million (the land trust had purchased it for just over $12 million). In turn, a third-generation farmer bought 19 of those acres for about $26,000 per acre. The acquisition approved Tuesday makes the third purchase of its kind (one other, in Noyac, did not involve the Peconic Land Trust).

East Hampton Town has yet to institute a similar program, though Mr. Halsey said there have been ongoing discussions with the town board. “I think we need to do some more education on the concept and the need,” he said, predicting that the North Fork would soon be faced with the same issue.

“It’s interesting that we’re going in this direction, but I think that it’s one we have to go in if we’re going to see the land maintained the way the original intent of the program was, so when we look out we see rows of cornfields or potatoes,” Mr. Schneiderman said.

He hopes this is the final solution. “I don’t want to, five years from now, have someone come back and say there are further enhanced rights. We want to get this over and done.”

All along, people knew where the grave was. But who exactly was in it and why the man named Ned was there at all were mysteries lost to time.

Several years ago, when a group of people began compiling a list of the burial grounds large and small in East Hampton Town, one of the volunteers wrote down the inscription on the lonely headstone in a tiny plot off Morris Park Lane. It read:

“Ned

Faithful Negro Manservant to Capt. Jeremiah Osborn

Died August 8, 1817”

Beyond those spare words, anything else about Ned had long since been forgotten, and it was only recently that an effort was made to discover who he was.

East Hampton was demographically complex even as far back as the early Colonial period. A town church list of deaths, begun in 1696, was “only of English & not negro or Indian, slaves or servants,” its keeper wrote.

Later records indicate that Ned was not alone as an African-American living in East Hampton around the time of the Revolutionary War. Baptisms for “negroes” conducted in 1764, for example, included Hagar, Joe, Abagail, Dina, Peggy, Hittie, Pegg, Jars, Judge, Virgil, and Peg and her children; last names, if any of them had them, were not included. And for most, the locations where they were buried when they died have been lost.

Zachary Cohen, a Springs resident who heads an official committee that keeps an eye on the town’s far-flung burial plots, said that Ned’s burial site was one of only two or three known here that dated to pre-Emancipation times.

As an effort to restore Ned’s grave and learn more about him got going a few years ago, Russ Calemmo, who builds and restores household lighting fixtures from his home workshop on Three Mile Harbor Road in Springs, took on the legwork.

“It was a project of love. ‘Hey, let’s find out who this person was,’ ” Mr. Calemmo said in an interview.

Mr. Calemmo spent days on end in county offices, tracing property records for clues. “They started to call me Ned’s uncle,” he said.

Eventually the search reached the East Hampton Library, where Steve Russell Boerner, who works part-time in the Long Island Collection, was quickly able to locate a key deed that had been in the collection for years. Ned, it seemed, must have been the same person who was apparently deeded a half-acre plot in Sandy Hook — which would a century and a half later become Morris Park — by one Jeremiah Osborn, in 1804. Adding a key detail, the deed described Ned as “a free blackman.”

A space remains on the deed where the price, if any, for the transfer would have been written, though at the bottom, as Mr. Boerner pointed out, the signatures of two witnesses can be found. To several people who have seen the deed, this suggests that the property had been a gift, but that is unclear. Also not clear is whether Ned at some point in his life had been a slave, though it appeared that Osborn had been a slave-owner.

Pastor Walter S. Thompson Jr. of East Hampton’s Calvary Baptist Church said that Ned’s grave was an important story, not just for African-Americans but for East Hampton as a whole.

“We have stumbled upon it, but it may have become a way to bring the community to remember its history,” he said in an interview. “Some of it has been painful, so we learn about the past so we don’t repeat that pain.”

Today, Ricardo Guichay and his wife, Ilda Oleas, originally from Ecuador, live on what now is thought to have been Ned’s homestead. Their daughter Maritza Luna Guichay, who grew up there with her siblings and now works as a comptroller for a local house builder, said her father had at first thought that Ned had been a Native American and had always taken care of the site.

Sometimes when she or her sister or brothers were acting up as children, their father would keep them in line by warning that Ned might come to get them, Ms. Luna Guichay said.

She said that as members of an immigrant minority in East Hampton her family appreciated the importance of Ned’s burial ground. “It’s really nice to know that someone really valuable is in the backyard.” Now, when no one else is around, his memorial is guarded by Princess, the family’s loud but apparently friendly dog.

Freedom laws in New York State were slow in coming. In 1799 the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was passed by the legislature. A later law set a date of July 4, 1827, for the liberation of most slaves in the state.

A good deal is known about Jeremiah Osborn. Despite the title, he was not a seafarer or a military captain, Mr. Cohen said, but rather gained the honorific by loaning money to the rebels during the Revolution.

After Captain Osborn’s first wife, Mary, died in 1797, he married his late cousin Lewis Osborn’s widow, Jerusha, herself by birth a member of the Gardiner family of the island that bears the same name.

The Gardiners are known to have kept slaves, and, intriguingly, a line in the town church record for 1779 indicates that Katurah, “Jer. Osborns Negro,” was baptized that year on March 28. Whether Katurah was in the same household as Ned, or perhaps was the same person, is a question that remains for another day.

If it is not entirely proven that Captain Osborn was a slave-owner, it is clear that his contemporaries were. Among the library’s collections are several records of slave sales in East Hampton. In 1806 Ambrose Parsons sold Cato, age 13, to Lodowick Post of Southampton. As late as 1829, “a certain black girl named Tamer, aged fourteen years,” was sold to John Hedges of East Hampton for $25.

Ned’s life, even the little that is known about it, matters a lot, said Hugh King, the director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum in East Hampton Village. “There aren’t many stories of African-Americans from that time on all of Long Island,” he said.

“There had been some talk of moving him to a more notable place, but once we began to suspect that he was buried on his own land, we recognized that he should remain there,” Mr. Cohen said.

In an email, Mr. Boerner said that the project had been a “win for the restoration of a man’s dignity and place in our collective history, as well as a factual clarification of the complex, still not fully understood slave system here. . . .”

As things stood prior to the restoration effort, the site was indeed town property, but it had been all but overlooked by officials. A narrow path leading from Morris Park Lane had grown over, Mr. Calemmo said, and by 2007, Ned’s headstone had been moved and was left leaning in a corner of a stockade fence.

Mr. Guichay was concerned about what had seemed to him a portion of his own yard, but came around. “He saw the light, so to speak. He was very, very generous,” Mr. Calemmo said.

Today, a white fence surrounds Ned’s headstone, which Mr. Calemmo placed in a bed of gravel more or less where he thought it should go. Recent visitors to the site have suggested that it be turned about 180 degrees to catch the evening light, as had been tradition.

Jeremiah Osborn’s death, at the age of 67, came about a year before Ned’s, according to Jeannette Edwards Rattray’s “East Hampton History and Genealogies.” In the church records for 1817, the year Ned died, there was only a single entry. It was not his.

“This is a part of history that has been forgotten in East Hampton, but we found it. We’ve found this fellow,” Mr. Calemmo said.

A representative of the Sag Harbor Village Board’s waterways advisory committee asked the East Hampton Town Trustees at a meeting on Monday to support a bill that would grant the village authority over waterways beyond the present 1,500-foot boundary.

Appearing at the request of Mayor Sandra Schroeder, John Parker told the trustees that the moorings and anchored vessels in the area outside the breakwater, which number as many as 70 in the summer and are now unregulated, has resulted in boats sinking and washing up on the breakwater or Havens Beach, with one disintegrating for the past 15 months in the middle of the mooring field. Debris, fuel, or other contaminants enter the water under such circumstances, he said. Further, it has become clear that many of the vessels outside the harbormaster’s jurisdiction are improperly discharging sewage.

“It’s very frustrating for the harbormaster specifically, and for the rest of the village, to anticipate problems, to see boats that aren’t moored properly but not have authority to do anything about it,” Mr. Parker said. The bill, introduced in the State Assembly by Fred W. Thiele Jr., who is the Sag Harbor Village attorney as well as an assemblyman, passed the Senate in June but has not been voted on in the Assembly.

The trustees, who manage most of the town’s beaches, waterways, and bottomlands on behalf of the public, have always been protective of their jurisdiction. The matter was initially discussed at a trustee meeting on Dec. 8, before the current majority took office. Diane McNally, then the presiding officer, or clerk, said the bill was not to be taken lightly. Bill Taylor, who became one of the trustees’ two deputy clerks this month, said at that meeting that the trustees should assert jurisdiction.

Robert Bori, the Sag Harbor Village harbormaster, said in an interview last week that “the thought was to get an idea of who’s out there” — beyond the village’s 1,500-foot jurisdiction — “and get some kind of order. It wasn’t by any means to try to cut into the trustees’ jurisdiction. But we’re getting the brunt of it: All the boats, the dinghies, come ashore here. We’re taking all their garbage, on and on. We’ve got to get some idea of what’s going on.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Parker reasserted the village’s respect for trustee jurisdiction. “We’d like to cooperatively deal with the problem. There is no intent whatsoever to infringe on any right of East Hampton or the trustees.”

The trustees seem amenable to a cooperative relationship. Ms. McNally spoke of “jurisdictional boundaries getting more and more clouded,” rather than clarified. “I would rather see it get delineated and finalized, and then perhaps an understanding of the problem Sag Harbor is having now . . . a way to allow for the increased enforcement over a larger section of the water without using that word ‘jurisdiction.’ ” She suggested that Mr. Thiele and Rick Whalen, the trustees’ newly appointed attorney, jointly determine respective responsibilities.

Pat Mansir, a deputy clerk presiding at the meeting in the absence of Francis Bock, the newly elected clerk, assigned Ms. McNally, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Whalen, and Tyler Armstrong to a subcommittee to follow up on Sag Harbor’s request.

In other news at the meeting, the trustees debated legislation drafted by the town board to make permanent the ban on alcoholic beverages within a designated area during lifeguard-protected hours on summer weekends and holidays at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett. The ban, enacted midway through the summer of 2014 and re-enacted last year, was supported by a bare majority of the prior trustee panel, with several members disputing beachgoers’ complaints of excessive drinking and poor behavior of large groups of young adults.

Ms. Mansir said that “alcohol, the hot sun, and saltwater don’t mix” and never will. Mr. Taylor and James Grimes, a new trustee, agreed.

Ms. McNally opposed a permanent ban, however. “Forever is a long, long time,” she said of a permanent ban, adding that after the trustees had compromised with the town board, a sign implying a 24-hour, year-round ban was erected. “Proper signage of what was agreed to last year would be okay,” she said.

Mr. Grimes said he sees the issue from the viewpoint of an emergency medical technician who has responded to many calls to beaches. “A few beers is fine,” he said, “but when you catch a kid who’s had a few beers, a few roofies” — a powerful sedative — “and is running naked through the dunes because he thinks he’s on fire. . . .” A ban, he said, “makes it easier for law enforcement.”

Elaine Jones, chair of the East Hampton Independence Party, told the trustees at the meeting that “I have always opposed drinking on the beach. At Indian Wells, my mother went, I went, my daughter went, but my grandchildren can’t go. If two people want a glass of wine, fine, but now you don’t get two people. These people are causing problems.” Alcohol, she said, “should be banned on all beaches.” 

Of the seven of the nine members of the board present, only Ms. McNally opposed the proposal. Councilwoman Sylvia Overby of the town board, who arrived while the meeting was in progress, encouraged the trustees to make their position known.

In Richard G. Hendrickson’s monthly weather reports, summarized from the daily data he diligently collected in Bridgehampton for nearly 85 years, one could find not only a record of temperatures, precipitation, and wind directions, but anecdotes and wisdom from bygone days on the South Fork. He brought to them a farmer’s appreciation of the joys and challenges that came with each month of the year and an environmentalist’s concern for the future of the South Fork in the face of overdevelopment and global warming.

Mr. Hendrickson, a volunteer with the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program since he was a teenager, continued to take measurements and readings at his backyard weather station on Lumber Lane until early last year, when he was 102.

He was the country’s longest-serving volunteer observer and was honored numerous times for his longevity of service and the volume of historical weather information he contributed to his country by chronicling the area’s weather twice a day, almost every day since 1930. An award for 80 years of service was named in his honor, and last year he was recognized for 85 years of service.

“He was such a hero,” said Tim Morrin, who manages the Cooperative Observer Program. “He was so unselfish; he would go over and beyond.”

“He represented the true art of taking weather observations,” said I. Ross Dickman, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s office in Upton, who praised his “dedication and loyalty” over the years. “He would call in with not only his weather observations, but he would tell us a story.”

When the observer program was modernized, volunteers were given the chance to report their observations electronically. “He really didn’t want to have any part of that because to him, the most important part of his daily observation was actually talking to one of the members of the National Weather Service,” Mr. Morrin said. “It was a special thing for all of us.”

Mr. Hendrickson died on Saturday at the Westhampton Care Center at the age of 103.

A farmer by profession like his father before him, he was also a historian, author, and collector extraordinaire whose basement was a veritable museum of interesting items and artifacts from the South Fork and beyond, each of which had a story that he knew and loved to share.

He collected arrowheads, spear points, and Native American tools, hand-carved decoys, and antique firearms and cannons, among other things. An expert on firearms, he had given more than 100 lectures on the subject and had a firearms business on the side, buying and selling new and used hunting guns and pistols as well as ammunition, cannons, powder horns, and swords. His collection of antique guns included one that dated to the 1400s and another that had belonged to the famous lawman Wyatt Earp.

He fired the working cannons in his front yard on Independence Day and New Year’s Eve for 60 years and took them to such events as the Bridgehampton Museum’s annual antique road rally, where they added a bang to the starting line festivities.

“They just don’t make people like Richard Hendrickson anymore,” said Bob DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, which had an office in Bridgehampton for many years. “He had a passion for life and the world around him and an unending curiosity that fueled his consistent learning and his desire to educate others.” Each month Mr. Hendrickson would take his handwritten weather summaries to the group’s offices, where staff members would type them up before he sent them on to local newspapers. In the process, Mr. Hendrickson would regale them with stories and interesting tidbits.

“He was a rare treasure,” said Julie Greene, curator and archivist for the Bridgehampton Museum. Mr. Hendrickson had long served as the museum’s historian and was a founding member of the Bridge Hampton Historical Society, as the museum was formerly known. “Whenever I had a question, he would be the first person that would pop into my mind,” she said. “He told some of the most incredible stories of the area, and not just about the people but the land and where the world is coming from and how it’s changed.”

“He was interested in all things related to history,” said his granddaughter Sara Hendrickson of Bridgehampton.

On his mother’s side, Mr. Hendrickson’s ancestors had deep roots on the South Fork. His great-great-grandfather Capt. Jesse R. Halsey sailed on a whaling boat out of Sag Harbor. His father, Howard Hendrickson, was born on a farm and came to work in 1907 at a Bridgehampton potato farm, where his father eventually bought him the Hill View Farm on Lumber Lane. After trying potatoes he turned to dairy farming and later the poultry business.

Richard G. Hendrickson was born at Hill View Farm on Sept. 2, 1912, to Howard Hendrickson and the former Edith Rogers. Finding arrowheads and spear points while clearing farmland with his father as a boy sparked a lifelong interest in the South Fork’s original inhabitants.

He lived and worked on Hill View Farm or nearby for his entire life, with a brief exception. In 1917 and ’18, to avoid the flu epidemic, he and his brother, Erwin, were sent to live with his mother’s parents on Gardiner’s Island, where his grandfather rented land to raise sheep, hogs, and cattle and grow corn and hay.

He left high school to help out on the farm. When he was 18, Ernest S. Clowes, an author who had operated a backyard weather station for the National Weather Service, convinced Mr. Hendrickson’s father to set up a station at Hill View Farm and taught the teenager to take the measurements.

“We had 30 head of milk cows, 5,500 white leghorn breeders [chickens], were hatching 2,500 baby chicks weekly, and shipping hatching eggs to nearby states and overseas,” Mr. Hendrickson wrote in his 1996 book, “Winds of the Fish’s Tail.” “We also raised 4,500 pullets each year, raised all our new calves, acres of corn, alfalfa, and wheat, plus we experimented with types of new and improved pastures by importing different grasses and clovers from around the world. All this was reason enough to want to study and work with nature.”

At that point he was already running the poultry operation on the farm. Working at first with Mr. Clowes and later on his own, he took weather readings at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. almost every day from then on, providing data daily to the National Weather Service and later summarizing his observations for a monthly weather column sent to local papers.

In 1935 he married Dorothea Haelig, a teacher from New Jersey who had come to work at the Bridgehampton School. She was 10 years his senior, said his granddaughter. They had a son, Richard H. Hendrickson.

The family left dairy farming in 1953, when Suffolk County passed a law requiring that milk be pasteurized. “We couldn’t afford to pasteurize, so we gave up the herd and imported 50 head of beef cattle weighing 400 to 500 pounds, and kept them till they weighed over 1,000 pounds, and sold them at livestock auctions in Pennsylvania,” he told The Star in 1993. Failing to make money on the steers, Hill View Farm instead expanded the poultry operation through the 1970s and ’80s, then turned to field corn and sweet corn.

Mr. Hendrickson retired from farming in the early 1980s and rented space in the chicken houses for car storage.

He was a man of his place and rarely left town, but in 1959 he and his wife made an unlikely journey to New Zealand, where they dined with the prime minister. The trip was “courtesy of the Hormel Meat Co. because they had purchased the one billionth can of Spam,” according to a 1997 article in Newsday.

His first wife died in early 1982. He was married later that year to Lillian Baldac, who died in June.

Mr. Hendrickson remained both engaged and active into his 90s and 100s, even chopping his own wood and mowing his own lawn in the last decade.

“He consistently had a boyish fascination, a whimsy about how wonderful every aspect of the natural world is. He had it to the last day I saw him. And there wasn’t a thing that went by that he wasn’t curious about,” Mr. DeLuca said.

He published his second book, “From the Bushy Plain of Bulls Head,” a memoir written almost entirely in verse, in 2006.

In addition to his granddaughter Sara Hendrickson, he leaves two other granddaughters, Leah Hendrickson and Rachel Green, both of Jamesport, a sister, Edith Williams of Raleigh, N.C., and several nieces and nephews. His brother died before him, and his son died in 2014.

Services for Mr. Hendrickson are to begin on Friday, Jan. 22, with visiting from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Brockett Funeral Home in Southampton. A funeral will be held at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church on Jan. 23 at 11 a.m., followed by burial at Edgewood Cemetery in Bridgehampton.

Donations have been suggested to the Bridgehampton Museum, P.O. Box 977, Bridgehampton 11932.

The Springs Fire District is suing the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, challenging its determination that town building inspectors acted incorrectly in allowing the construction of the district’s 150-foot tall communications tower.

The pole, which stands behind the Springs Firehouse, has already been equipped with devices that fire commissioners say will make it easier to reach first responders in an emergency, though the devices have not yet been activated.

The zoning board found, by a 4-1 decision, that the fire district must seek site plan approval from the town for the project.

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are the office of the town clerk and the Building Department. The telecommunications company that erected the pole, Elite Towers, is co-plaintiff with the fire district.

The appeals board’s determination, written by its attorney, Elizabeth Baldwin, states that the fire commissioners failed to conduct a required “balancing of the public interest test,” and that the district, despite its status as a municipal entity, did not have “blanket immunity” from the permitting process.

“The Z.B.A. got it wrong,” Carl Irace, the district’s lawyer, said yesterday. Among other things, he questioned its use of the term “blanket immunity,” saying it was not legal parlance.

Further, Mr. Irace said that “when the town issued the building permit, it was saying ‘we are not going to review this anymore.’ They gave the ball back to the fire district,” he said, and no officials ever appeared at public hearings on the matter. “The town took deliberate steps to stay out of it, and the zoning board is attempting to reassert itself in, where the town chose not to tread.”

Both radio and cellphone communications have historically been poor in Springs, the suit says, with “large areas” having “minimal or no radio service, including numerous areas inside the Springs School District.” The tower, it says, is an attempt to rectify the situation.

The action was filed with the county clerk on Friday, after which the town was served. The town has until Feb. 16, when the two sides will meet in State Supreme Court in Riverhead, to respond to the suit.

The Montauk precinct has a new commanding officer. East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo announced on Tuesday during a town board meeting at the Montauk Firehouse that Sgt. Joe Kearney will take on the job, one that has been staffed in the recent past by officers at the rank of lieutenant.

With the recent retirement of Lt. Thomas Grenci, however, coupled with the transfer of Lt. Austin McGuire from the East Hampton force to Sag Harbor Village, to become the department's chief, East Hampton is down to two officers at the lieutenant rank.

But to Chief Sarlo this challenge is actually an opportunity. “Given the level of activity and issues facing Montauk, we decided to put a first-line supervisor in the precinct commander post,” he said yesterday. “Working nights and weekends alongside the officers, supervising the part-time officers and the special directed patrol shifts, Joe will have less administrative responsibilities and less office hours than our previous precinct commanders have in the past.”

The advantage Sergeant Kearney brings, the chief said, is his many years of experience on patrol.

“Our senior staff and I will continue to handle most of the planning and communication with our Montauk residents, along with Joe. The public can still go to the Montauk precinct, which will have a secretary on weekdays, and weekends in the summer, and we will make sure that we maintain open lines of communication with the public.”

Sergeant Kearney, an Army veteran, has served on the East Hampton Town force for 18 years and has been a sergeant since 2009. “He has been a field training officer, defensive tactics instructor, [emergency services unit] team leader, and has overseen our State Liquor Authority enforcement over the past two years,” Chief Sarlo said.

“He brings a great deal of professionalism and dedication to the assignment. He is a quiet leader who will follow through on the focused and directed enforcement plans we put forth last summer.”