Long Island Books: Images Of History

The East End of Long Island's being over-represented by histories of all types, I didn't expect to discover anything new in the Amagansett Village Improvement Society's reissue of "Amagansett Lore and Legend," first published in 1948.

Most of the written word about the East End's past, put down by amateur historians, including my prolific grandmother, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, has tended to the romantic, and this book is no different.

I am well aware, from experience in making historical documentaries, of how difficult it is to step beyond one's preconceptions and prevailing interpretations of long-past events. Consequently, I remain ambivalent about this book. I worry that this reprint, nearly identical to the half-century-old edition and with only minor editing, may actually be a disservice to contemporary readers in that its antiquated notions, especially as they concern the area's native population, may be perpetuated as historical fact.

Period Piece

In fact, this collection of stories may say more about the period in which it was first published than it does about the days its stories purport to chronicle.

History is hard work, I know, but I wish that someone had provided footnotes and additional context for this edition. In the lone exception, Tony Prohaska writes, in a thoughtful introduction to the new edition, that " 'Lore and Legend,' then, is a period piece: one rich period [1948] gazing back at another. . . ."

Nonetheless, the stories in this 128-page book are interesting and fresher than most, since they were, with one exception, not written by a member of my own family.

The best material - and not incidentally, the closest to primary sources - are two accounts concerning the discovery of German saboteurs on the Amagansett beach by a United States Coastguardsman, John Avery, on a dark night in June 1942.

The Saboteurs

Alex Haley, later of "Roots" fame, wrote the official version, which appears in "Lore and Legend" and documents the Government re sponse to the incursion. Mr. Haley's account is followed by a letter written by the Long Island Rail Road's Amagansett stationmaster at the time, Ira Baker. He sets straight the wildly exaggerated stories about his heroism that appeared in papers as far-flung as Delray Beach, Fla.

Mr. Baker wrote simply that he sold four tickets to Jamaica, Queens, to a "swarthy man who spoke good English" and later found some wet clothes and a single tennis shoe in the hedge outside.

These two stories hint at a country terrified by the war in Europe and driven nearly to hysteria by the reports of the German mission.

Much of the book, however, is devoted to fables really, reflecting a rosy-tinted view of the past that is neither illuminating nor especially accurate. Rather, it is a reflection of America's national myth of the goodness, thrift, and industriousness of the early settlers.

"Amagansett Lore and Legend"

Carleton Kelsey, Ed.

Amagansett Village

Improvement Society, $15

It is a convenient fiction that those who first populated these shores did not include a fair number of miscreants, rogues, and criminal oddballs for whom resettlement in the dangerous and unknown new world represented something better than prison or poverty in Europe.

As a recent study of the treatment of Indians on Long Island by the colonists and their descendants indicates, our forebears were hardly the virtuous and honorable pioneers many of the essayists in "Legend and Lore" would have us believe.

Indeed, evidence is abundant in town records that the settlers were a litigious and acrimonious lot as inclined to sue as lend a hand to a needy neighbor. Our national dogma is dependent on such patchwork histories of benevolence and good-spirited ancestors.

A recently published collection of photographs of Southampton Town, edited by Mary Cummings of Bridgehampton, is part of Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America" series, and will be of interest to history buffs. Suprisingly, however, it contradicts the adage about a picture's being worth a thousand words and does not manage to come close to the Amagansett volume in the amount of information it conveys.

Its endless numbers of poorly reproduced black-and-white photographs go by - like watching an interminable vacation slide show - without leaving much of an overall impression.

The paperback volume is organized chronologically, with the earliest shots from the 1890s. The images are jumbled on top of each other, and the book is difficult to penetrate.

Stunning Ziel Entries

It should be noted, however, that the book contains stunning photographs from the Ron Ziel Collection, part of what was the Long Island Rail Road's archive. In contrast to much of the rest of the book, these shots were made largely by professional photographers and are far more compelling.

One view of Sag Harbor's waterfront from a hilltop shows a bucolic meadow with white-clothed children and Long Island Sound steamboats in the distance. Another, probably the strongest in the book from an artistic point of view, shows a man walking toward the camera as the railroad's rotary steam snowplow whirls in a blizzard of white behind him.

"Southampton"

Mary Cummings

Images Of America Series

Arcadia Publishing, $16.99

These photographs underscore the reality that this kind of book demands both an artist's eye and a historian's sense of context to help the reader make sense of the vast amount of material locked in the images. Neither is in evidence.

Problems In Text

Ms. Cummings's informational captions are not all they might be. The homegrown whaling industry that took place along Long Island's Atlantic Coast is identified as "on-shore" (italics mine).

Whether this was someone else's error or not, this and other problems, like two conflicting counts of the number of sailing ships in the Sag Harbor fleet and sloppy dating of pictures of the Hurricane of 1938, render the text suspect. As further indictment of Ms. Cummings's text, I found that the book improved on a second go-round. Freed from the compulsion to read all the captions I was able to immerse myself in the images and soak up some of what life might have been like a century ago.

Given the choice between the romantic view of history circa 1948 that the Amagansett book offers and the vacuous collection of photographs in the contemporary volume, I prefer the former, not for any significant historical reason, but simply because "Amagansett Lore and Legend" does not pretend to be what it is not.

Both of these books are not so much histories themselves, but about history, reflections of how we thought and think about the past.