Supposedly, before it was called Easthampton or East Hampton, the tiny colonial town way out on the eastern part of Long Island was known as Maidstone. I say supposedly because, in my opinion, proof is scant.
My East Hampton grandmother, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, wrote in at least one of her many books that Maidstone was the first name that the tiny polity was known by and appeared in official documents at least until 1663.
Henry P. Hedges, a lay historian writing around 1897, reported, “As many of the inhabitants came from Maidstone, in the county of Kent, in England, they first called their plantation by that name.” For readers not familiar with 17th-century English colonial terms, the word “plantation” may be jarring, bringing to mind the Deep South before the Civil War. Plantation had more or less the same meaning as “settlement.” This usage lasted until about the end of the 18th century.
Andrea Meyer at the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection quickly confirmed the 1663 reference, which was in an original record dealing with horses left within a fenced common land. Horse owners had a month to get their hungry beasts out. Repeat offenders were warned, ominously, that the town’s leading men would be “Constrayned to doe that we are not willinge.” But that date was an outlier; well before 1663 this place was called Easthampton. I suspect this was because Southampton — to the west, more or less — was established in 1640, at least eight years before the Easthampton group, and by that the name was the obvious choice.
Antiquarians are similarly vague about the source of the name Southampton as they are about Maidstone, claiming that it was because many of the English came originally from Southampton, England. It is difficult to say. For example, among the first inhabitants of Southampton on Long Island was Josiah Stanborough, whose father, according to an online genealogy, lived in or near Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire, England, which is more than 100 miles inland from Southampton, U.K. The Rev. Abraham Pierson’s parents on both sides came from age-old Yorkshire stock.
George Rogers Howell, in his 1869 history of Long Island’s Southampton, observed dryly that “experience has taught us that little reliance is to be placed on traditions unsupported by other evidence,” which is good, all-purpose advice for life as much as it is for the study of history.