Residents of Freetown, some decades ago, may never have thought we’d see the day when a history of that neighborhood was the topic of the moment in the elegant vaulted party room at the Maidstone Club, but that day has come. On Saturday, Oct. 18, the landmarks committee of the Ladies Village Improvement Society will host its annual fund-raising lunch at the storied club off Further Lane, and the guest speaker will be Allison McGovern, Ph.D., an anthropological archaeologist who will share insights from the Mapping Memories of Freetown Project and the Freetown Neighborhood Cultural Resources Survey.
For those who haven’t gotten the memo yet, Freetown is East Hampton’s “other side of the tracks.” The L.V.I.S.’s invitation describes it this way: “Just north of East Hampton Village, across the Long Island Rail Road tracks on the road toward Springs, lies Freetown — a historic neighborhood shaped by Native Montaukett survivance, African American community building, and the working-class Bonac spirit.”
This is the 32nd annual L.V.I.S. landmarks committee “luncheon.” (The first was actually held more than 32 years ago, as the ladies have skipped a few years.) It was this powerful committee that, back in the 1970s, first agitated for historic preservation in the Village of East Hampton, getting an initial 250 buildings brought under the protective umbrella of the National Register and sparking the creation of the historic districts and today’s design-review guidelines that have preserved forever the beauty of our streetscapes. Past lectures at these luncheons included subjects such as the “Seven Sisters” houses of Montauk; the Devon colony; the Dominy craftsmen, and the artists Thomas Moran and Mary Nimmo Moran.
On Oct. 18, by contrast, the conversation will shift to George Fowler, the Morans’ gardener. The talk will be of Stephen Talkhouse, servants’ wages, and how marginalized peoples — Black, Indigenous, and poor white — forged community in the area around Three Mile Harbor Road (sometimes called “the Freetown Road” 100 years ago) and Fireplace. The names associated with Freetown will be familiar to those who grew up in East Hampton or who have read up on its history (Cooper, Lester, Payne, Pharaoh, Chapman, Collum). Not a few of these families live in the neighborhood still, even as it is being gentrified out of all recognition.
It is both fascinating and moving that, as a town obsessed with its own past, our mutual understanding of what our heritage is and what our written histories should embrace has expanded and broadened in this way. East Hampton heritage isn’t just Home, Sweet Home. It’s the Fowler house and Modernist residences by Jaffe or Gwathmey, too. Tickets for the Oct. 18 luncheon are on sale at lvis.org.