Honoring The Past, Securing The Future

At the start of a yearlong celebration of East Hampton Town's 350th anniversary, the importance of honoring the past has never been clearer. In history lies wisdom, or at the least knowledge, for anyone willing to learn the lessons of the past.

East Hampton is, as this still-young country goes, an elderly community, with roots, traditions, and a firm sense of people and place that is unusual today except in parts of New England and the South. Farmers and fishermen, light and landscape, Lion Gardiner, Chief Wyandanch, Fishhooks Mulford, John Howard Payne, founding families whose names still crowd the telephone books - East Hampton thrives today because of its past, in fact in many ways it depends on it.

As the celebratory festivities get under way, The Star, which is beginning its 113th year as the town's newspaper of record, will publish a special page each week of related news and features. It will be a place for old-timers to reminisce, for scholars of history to show off their knowledge, for photographs of forgotten places, news of upcoming anniversary events, and recipes of yesteryear, for insight into the significance of local street and place names, for interviews with people working on celebratory events, for synopses of commemorative lectures, and for a calendar of late-breaking events as well as those already cast.

East Hampton is changing rapidly. Much of what we most prize is in danger of disappearing under the demands of an ever-increasing population. But each child who moves in and enrolls in a local school represents another chance for the future, if only he or she can be taught about the past.

Fifty years from now, today's schoolchildren will be planning East Hampton's 400th anniversary celebration. Their teachers have a golden opportunity this year to use the resources that the 350th-anniversary will summon, but also to continue to emphasize that history when 1998 comes to an end.