What's In A Name?: Fireplace
If you follow Fireplace Road in Springs to its end at Gardiner's Bay, you've reached Fireplace. Fires were built there centuries ago to signal across the water to the inhabitants of Gardiner's Island, when people or goods were ready to be transported.
The first fireplace stood at Old Fireplace Road (now Gerard Drive). The landing spot was changed for convenience when the King, Parsons, and Miller families established homesteads farther up the beach.
As of the mid-1980s, a warehouse built there by John Lion Gardiner in about 1791 was still standing, though it had been converted to a summer cottage.
Trade and services went on at Fireplace for many generations; for a time it was considered the busiest spot in East Hampton. Jonathan King (who lived at King's Point) "was the forerunner of the barterers and traders at Fire Place," according to the Springs Improvement Society's "Springs: A Celebration."
David Gardiner, sixth proprietor of Gardiner's Island, noted in his ledger in 1737 that Jonathan King owed him for wheat, wool, hogs, fat, corn, and butter, but David Gardiner owed Jonathan King for, among other things, "bringing me to ye island."
The earliest reference to Fireplace in Town Trustee records dates to 1655. In 1678, the Trustees allotted some meadow there to Richard Brooks and Willyam Mulford. Trustee records note in 1697 that Samuel Brooks sold land at Fireplace to John Gardner.
In 1739, Daniel Miller and Jonathan King purchased four lots lying "at a place called the Fireplace, lying between the Flaggy hole and Hog Creek." In March 1770, the Trustees "sold the Fireplace beach to Benjamin Leek," reserving the public's right to "pass and repass, to fish, fowl and hunt, and to go to their meadows, and to do any business they shall have occasion to do on said beach as they used to do before this conveyance. . . ."
The bay between Fireplace and Gardiner's Island has occasionally frozen over. In March 1934, The Star reported that Clarence King had set a record that winter by walking across the ice to the island three times in three weeks, bringing food and supplies on sleds. On one occasion it took an hour and three-quarters to get across, but two hours and 10 minutes on the return journey after the travelers ran into a snowstorm.