A Rush to Stabilize Rare Montaukett House Before Winter

The Fowler house in East Hampton, believed to be the Montaukett Tribe’s sole surviving 19th-century house and listed this year on the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities’  “Endangered His­toric Places” list, has the potential to become a significant historical site, the society and members of an East Hampton Friends of the Fowler House group believe.

Now sagging in disrepair and covered with tarps, the house is on a 1.7-acre site near the intersection of Springs-Fireplace Road and North Main Street in East Hampton. It is owned by East Hampton Town, which declared it a local landmark last year. It “is possibly one of the most historically significant structures in the Town of East Hampton,” according to town documents, and could be eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Friends of the Fowler House, which was formed to advise the town on the house’s restoration, expect to form a nonprofit organization to raise money and pursue grants to support the work and, eventually, to create a museum. The organization is to meet today with Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc and consultants to chart the property’s future. 

The house is believed to have been moved in 1890 from its original location at Indian Field in Montauk during the relocation of a number of tribal members. To entice Montauketts to leave their ancestral lands, Arthur Benson, a developer who coveted the area for a planned resort and had purchased thousands of acres in Montauk at a public auction, offered deeds to plots in what was then known as Freetown. The name was a reference, it is said, to the neighborhood’s original settlers, former slaves of the Gardiner family and other wealthy local families. 

The deeds were “obtained by fraud and by undue influence,” the Montauketts claimed, and they unsuccessfully sued the Benson heirs for the return of the tribal lands.

George Lewis Fowler and his wife, Sarah Melissa Horton, some of the last Montauketts who reportedly moved from Montauk to Freetown, originally occupied the house. Mr. Fowler was employed for many years by the artist Thomas Moran as a gardener and gondolier in East Hampton Village. He also tended the gardens at Home, Sweet Home on East Hampton’s Main Street.

James Devine, a member of the Friends group and a Fowler family descendant who lived next door to the Fowler house, said it was surrounded by fruit trees, wild Concord grapes, wildflowers and herbs, cultivated flowers, and ornamental grasses. 

Robert Hefner, an East Hampton historical consultant, has said the Fowler house “puts Main Street and Freetown together,” calling Mr. Fowler “the connection, the missing link.” The Fowler house “completes the picture of the Moran house and Home, Sweet Home,” Mr. Hefner said during early discussions of its preservation. The latter sites have been protected and preserved. 

Members of the Fowler family lived in the saltbox-style house from about 1885 through the late 1900s, according to Allison Manfra McGovern, an archaeologist who studied the Montauketts and gathered oral histories about Freetown.

Dr. McGovern, a member of the Friends group, cautioned in a recent letter to the town that any plans for shoring up, restoring, or renovating the property should be developed in consultation with remaining Montauketts and be undertaken in accordance with accepted historical preservation and archaeological standards. 

 The Fowler house property was acquired by Suffolk County in 2002 due to tax default and given to East Hampton Town with a stipulation  that if the town did not use it for affordable housing the ownership would revert to the county.  Determining the site to be historic, officials went back to the county to ask that the land transfer be finalized for historical purposes. The Suffolk Legislature approved its final transfer in March 2015 under an agreement calling for the town to designate the house a historical landmark and to develop a long-term plan for its preservation in coordination with the East Hampton Historical Society. 

“Preserving the Fowler house will help us tell the story of our past to future generations,” Jay Schneiderman, then a county legislator and now Southampton Town supervisor, said at the time. 

The story, said Prudence Carabine, a member of the Fowler house committee, is an extraordinary one of the Freetown community, which blended Montauketts, African-Americans, and Bonackers, East Hamptoners descended from settlers. 

“People worshipped together, worked together, partied together. . . ,” Ms. Carabine said. “There was a respect and interlocking support system between three cultures.” 

“History tends to record the wealthy and powerful. George Fowler was neither, and we have much less information about the ordinary and poor people in our history,” Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town planning director, wrote in a report on the house. “Yet the people who lived in Freetown were the workers who supported the wealthier households in East Hampton Village, Gardiner’s Island, and elsewhere in town.”

The Fowler house and property, she wrote, “have the potential to teach us about the life ways of the Montauketts after they were dispossessed of their homes in Montauk and detribalized by the New York State government. It is a potential interpretive tool for understanding the history of Freetown, which is minimally understood by historians,” her report notes.

Ms. Carabine was the driving force behind the restoration and preservation of the former Selah Lester farm at North Main and Cedar Streets in East Hampton as a museum of local farm life in early 1900. She is eager to see the Fowler site become another window into the past.

The immediate agenda, she said this week, is to make sure the house is solid enough to withstand the coming winter. Plans for restoration and historical interpretation would then proceed, along with archaeological studies. If organized as a nonprofit organization, the Friends of the Fowler House  would commence fund-raising.

Proposals for restoration have been prepared by Drew Bennett, an engineer, and Mr. Hefner, and the town’s capital budget will provide needed funding  for the restoration; $50,000 has already been allocated for initial planning and design. 

The potential for obtaining grants and other funds to preserve the house would be greatly enhanced, according to the Society for Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, by the official restoration of the Montaukett Indian Nation’s tribal status. Over a century ago, a New York State judge ruled that the Montaukett tribe was extinct even though Montauketts were in the courtroom, according to the society. 

A bill that would grant the tribe New York State recognition, sponsored by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, passed the Legislature in June and is awaiting the governor’s signature.