Skip to main content

The Montauks at Guild Hall, 1991

Thu, 10/14/2021 - 10:37

Item of the Week From the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection

The second Monday in October is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, an event honoring the cultures and histories of native peoples, which was first observed by a local school district in 2018. In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day this week, we are showcasing this photograph from a section of the exhibit created by Gaynell Stone, an archaeologist and guest curator. Titled “The Montauks: Native Americans of Eastern Long Island,” it opened at Guild Hall on Feb. 2, 1991, and ran until March 10. This image, part of the Local Artists Database, was taken by Noel Rowe for Guild Hall.

Stone’s exhibit included examples of Montauk artisans’ baskets and bowls, along with historical laws and events restricting the movement and economic sources of the Montauk people. To show this handiwork, she arranged loans from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Sections of the exhibit focused on the Montauks in the 19th and 20th centuries. This period saw the Montauks displaced from the lands European settlers restricted them to in the early-18th century.

Throughout the show, Stone focused on the Montauks’ employment opportunities. She contrasted the work options for those who remained on the reservation and those who relocated pursuing more lucrative work, like whaling. The show delved into the many economic forces that drove many Montauk people to follow Samson Occom (1723-1792) to resettle on Oneida lands in upstate New York in 1775, and again in 1784. Occom, a Mohegan-born classically educated English-speaking minister who arrived as a preacher for the Montauk in 1750, played a starring role in the presentation. 

Also important to the exhibit were the Cuffee, Pharaoh, and Fowler families, including Stephen Taukus Pharaoh (1821-1879), better known as Stephen Talkhouse, whose artistically carved and painted paddle was included with whaling tools. The exhibit concluded with Maria Pharaoh’s autobiographical account of losing the legal fight for the Montauks’ lands from 1896 -1917, which resulted in bankruptcy after a judge declared that the tribe had ceased to exist. 


Andrea Meyer is the head of the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.

Villages

Owl's Death Prompts Call for Bird-Friendly Building

Window strikes kill up to a billion birds annually and rank up there with cats and habitat destruction as the leading causes of recent steep declines. After the recent death of a much-watched Eurasian eagle-owl that was set loose from the Central Park Zoo, a bill calling for bird-friendly building measures has been revived in the New York Assembly and Senate.

Mar 28, 2024

Architect’s Descendants Visit East Hampton Gem

Michele L’Hommedieu Hofmann had no idea until retiring last fall and starting to research her family history how prominent a role her great-great-grandfather James H. L’Hommedieu had played in Long Island’s late-19th-century architecture. On a trip to New York that included a stop at an East Hampton house he designed for Robert Southgate Bowne, a founder of the Maidstone Club and first president of the Long Island Rail Road, she and her family got a crash course in L’Hommedieu’s work.

Mar 28, 2024

Item of the Week: Gardiner Family Gossip From 1889

On July 16, 1889, while staying in Lenox, Mass., Sarah Diodati Gardiner Thompson wrote to her daughter Sarah Thompson Gardiner, who was vacationing at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Family news was top of mind.

Mar 28, 2024

Your support for The East Hampton Star helps us deliver the news, arts, and community information you need. Whether you are an online subscriber, get the paper in the mail, delivered to your door in Manhattan, or are just passing through, every reader counts. We value you for being part of The Star family.

Your subscription to The Star does more than get you great arts, news, sports, and outdoors stories. It makes everything we do possible.