125 Years Ago — 1898
From The East Hampton Star, November 18
Among the paintings in the Fall Exhibition of the National Academy of Design which opened to the public last week are “A Long Island Landscape,” by Thomas Moran, N.A., the subject of which was found at North West; and “Willows — East Hampton,” by Wm. St. J. Harper, A.N.A., an evening effect on the meadows near Egypt lane.
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On Wednesday morning Charles Mott broke ground for the Maidstone Inn, on the property recently purchased of Mr. and Mrs. Henry D. Hedges, on Maidstone Lane. Rogers & Blydenburgh, of Babylon, have the contract. Lumber, brick and other materials are now on the way and the work will be pushed right along. Between thirty and forty men will be put to work upon the building. The plans call for a building which will be the largest ever built in East Hampton, and the inn when completed will probably be one of the best appointed and most elaborately finished structures of the kind on Long Island.
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F. Diodati Thompson, of New York, was a guest at the Osborne House last Friday and Saturday. While here he presented to the library two pretty framed views of Maidstone, England, and a book of his travels, handsomely illustrated, and called “In the Path of the Sun.”
100 Years Ago — 1923
From The East Hampton Star, November 16
In 1921 there were 107,000 deaths from tuberculosis in the United States and according to very good authority, about 963,000 cases. Tuberculosis cuts off two and one-half years of the life from the complete expectation of every individual in the U.S., under present mortality conditions. If each individual can add $100 to the community wealth per year, tuberculosis costs the community $250 per person.
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Suffolk County has six representatives in the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, William L. Bennett, Gould Street, this village; John S. Edwards, Springs; Albert C. Purdy, Amityville; William Schorse, Southampton; John F. Shanklin, Fishers Island and Fred A. Fitch, Ft. Michie, Gull Island.
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The wharf in the East Hampton part of Sag Harbor was the mooring place of all vessels touching at the Hampton settlements, after abandonment of the North West Harbor and North Sea Harbor landings.
At this port were entered the vessels of East Hampton, Southampton, Riverhead, Southold, Shelter Island and Brookhaven. In those days Orient was Oyster Ponds and Greenport was Stirling. Some of the old ship’s manifests allude to East Hampton as Maidstone showing that the first name of the settlement was still used by some.
75 Years Ago — 1948
From The East Hampton Star, November 18
W. Wallace Benjamin of East Hampton, who is a director and a vice-president of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York, reported Monday that he saw the new southern comet at 5 a.m. Sunday from East Hampton, according to a story in the New York Sun.
In the clear morning sky he could see the faint celestial visitor with the naked eye, he said. He estimated that the head would coincide with the position of the star cluster Messier 68, and that the fairly long tail extended westward almost parallel with the lower stars of the constellation of Corvus.
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Members of the Cosmopolitan Club, dressed in a wide variety of costumes which were considered the height of fashion in the 1920’s and early ’30’s, met last Wednesday evening at the home of Mrs. Edward Cook at Springs.
The program, “Fashions” was directed by Mrs. N.N. Tiffany, Jr., and Mrs. Fred Urlacher, Jr. and touched on some of the causes for the many changes in women’s styles.
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“Amagansett — Lore and Legend”, one of the most unusual and attractive publications to come out in connection with the East Hampton Tercentenary came off the press this week. Advance orders are being delivered and copies will be on sale at various places in the village.
This book brings together a comprehensive collection of material from various out-of-print sources, as well as original material, on the early settling in the village, quaint Indian legends, Revolutionary War anecdotes, early shore whaling and fishing, the coming of the first summer residents, the history of the Coast Guard in this area, and many other fascinating facts and stories.
50 Years Ago — 1973
From The East Hampton Star, November 15
A white and red glimmering thing hovered over the ocean for an hour and a half last Wednesday evening; “it grew darker and lighter; sometimes it almost disappeared, and came back again;” about 35 degrees above the horizon, it was “smaller than the moon but much brighter than a star”; it was quite silent; and at least three people saw it from Main Beach, East Hampton, one witness reported Friday.
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A consciousness-raising statistic showing the Town of East Hampton with an exceptionally high percentage of houses that are used as second or as “leisure” homes, in a housing inventory prepared by the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board in August of 1972, surfaced in East Hampton this week as a fitting backdrop to two charges by Suffolk’s Republican Commissioner of Elections, Everett McNab, just before election, that there was something illegal about the number of persons who had applied for absentee ballots here.
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The energy crisis and Christmas were on the minds of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce’s Board of Directors as they held a special meeting early this week to mobilize for both.
According to Sue Perry, president of the Chamber, the directors agreed to continue the traditional lighting of Christmas trees on Main Street and Newtown Lane, but to limit the hours that lights will be on to the hours from 5 to 9:30 p.m.
25 Years Ago — 1998
From The East Hampton Star, November 19
New York State, Suffolk County, and local emergency-preparedness officials came to Monday night’s meeting on the Millstone nuclear power station to discuss the evacuation of Long Island in case of an accident at the Waterford, Conn., plant, but ended up serving as a little more than window dressing.
The event turned out to be more of a protest rally, with speaker after speaker calling for the permanent closure of Millstone’s three reactors.
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Hundreds of acres of undeveloped oak and pitch pine forest off Route 114 and Stephen Hand’s Path will remain untouched thanks to the joint efforts of the town, the county, and the Nature Conservancy.
At a press conference in the Buckskill woods on Tuesday, County Executive Robert J. Gaffney and East Hampton Town Supervisor Cathy Lester uploaded the joint purchase of 365 acres for open space and groundwater protection.
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The latest episode in the saga of Ira Rennert’s effort to build his personal Xanadu in Sagaponack unfolded Nov. 10 in a Manhattan courtroom.
There, State Supreme Court Justice Lorraine S. Miller granted Mr. Rennert a temporary restraining order prohibiting the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, Mr. Moore’s employees, and Albert Bialek, an ardent opponent of Mr. Rennert’s building plans, from entering his property on Daniel’s Lane in Sagaponack, coming within 150 feet of his Park Avenue apartment building, or entering his office in Rockefeller Plaza.