DAN’S PAPERS
December 7, 2012 Page 19
Dan Rattiner
danshamptons.com
The Montauk Fishing village circa 1912 as reproduced as a model at the east Hampton Marine Museum
Village Destroyed A Hurricane Really Did Wipe a Village Off the Map...in Montauk By DAN RATTINeR
S
uperstorm Sandy was perhaps the worst storm to hit the east coast in recorded history. Entire villages were wiped out—some of them on the barrier island off New Jersey, others on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens or the southern shores of western Long Island. Tens of thousands of homes are uninhabitable or worse. We here on the East End look around at the damage done and compare it to what we hear on the news reports and we just thank our lucky stars things were not worse here. Our power was out for a few days. We had flooding, some trees down, some houses damaged, but we got through it. Our villages of Westhampton Beach, Quogue, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Water Mill, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, East Hampton, Amagansett and Montauk have survived with minor damage, but they are intact. There is some talk about not entirely building back some of the villages to our west and south that have been destroyed. And it brings to mind the fact that in the list above of villages on eastern Long Island, there could have been another village mentioned. But there isn’t. And that’s because this local village was wiped out many years ago, in another violent storm, the Hurricane of 1938, and it was never rebuilt. I refer to the community known as the Montauk Fishing Village on Fort Pond Bay. There are lessons to be learned from it. Here is the biography of that village. Until 1895, all of Montauk was uninhabited except for the Lighthouse keeper, people in six or seven scattered homes down by the ocean and, in some woods, a few remaining Montauk Indians. In that year, however, the owners of the Long Island Railroad extended the tracks
from Bridgehampton to a site at the edge of Fort Pond Bay, a deepwater bay, in Montauk. There were plans to bring ocean liners and freighters into that bay. A huge port city was to be built there. The plan flopped, however, and so all that got built at Fort Pond Bay was the great railroad yard with its half dozen parallel tracks built for all the expected railroad freight cars, a wharf with railroad tracks on it and several wooden warehouse buildings. In 1898, however, President William McKinley chose Montauk as the site where members of the American army—over 21,000 soldiers strong—could return to our shores after the conclusion of the successful Spanish-American war in Cuba. Here, they would recover from the yellow fever and other tropical diseases they had encountered in the Cuban campaign. After that, they would be mustered out to their homes around the country. The Army built its own wharf on Fort Pond Bay, to the west of the railroad wharf, and that’s where Teddy Roosevelt, among other members of that campaign, disembarked from their transport ships. Teddy Roosevelt’s political career was launched while he rested up in Montauk. A few years after that, fishermen from Nova Scotia, who had begun bringing their catch to the numerous fish factories on the bay 10 miles to the west in Napeague, came ashore for the first time at those now abandoned wharves. They noticed, among other things, giant leftover wooden crates that, during the Army’s time there, had been inserted in railroad boxcars to transport the Army’s horses. The fishermen could build shelters and houses out of those crates and some of the other stuff lying around. And they could tie up their boats at these wharves. Perhaps these (Cont’d on next page)
Dan Rattiner’s third memoir, STILL IN THE HAMPTONS, is now online and at all bookstores. His first two memoirs, IN THE HAMPTONS and IN THE HAMPTONS, TOO, are also available online and in bookstores.