About a decade ago, I spent months talking to the men and women who lived in a farm labor camp that sat by the railroad tracks on Depot Lane in Cutchogue. There were once dozens of these labor camps at railroad crossings, in Riverhead, Mattituck, Cutchogue and Southold. When I began visiting this one, it was the very last of its kind.

I had seen a tall, painfully thin man riding his bike up Depot Lane one summer day and, curious, I followed him up the lane, over the tracks and around the huge barn that stood by the road. I began regularly visiting the camp building behind the barn, where a group of about a half-dozen men and women lived.

They were all southern born and black and had come north to work on eastern Long Island potato and cauliflower farms. They spent their days in the big barn putting potatoes in bags brought to them by just three potato farmers left in the area. They were mostly a sad lot — long separated from their families and unable to escape the lives they were living. They were poor, modern-day sharecroppers in a land of plenty.

And they were a lost people, unconnected to the larger community of the North Fork, in many cases oblivious to their own pasts and hometowns. Some had no birth certificates or even an idea what year they were born. They lived out their lives in a camp that, hidden behind the big barn, went unnoticed by most residents. Some of the camp residents knew where they were from and the names of family members they had not seen in decades; others knew nothing at all. Their bios were slim: They’d picked tomatoes in Florida and eastern Virginia, cotton in South Carolina and potatoes in Delaware, New Jersey and Long Island.

They were the residents of the very last farm labor camp of its kind on eastern Long Island. The camp was only a mile and a half from my house, and I went down that road hundreds of times and did not know it was there. They represented a time that had long ago vanished, when thousands of acres were planted in potatoes. I saw them as refugees, symbols of a vanished past, and soon they were telling me their stories, which I wrote as a reporter for Newsday.

Several of the residents died during the time I was talking to everyone. One, a soft-spoken woman named Bea Shaw, who always seemed to me to have some hidden-away story she could not bring herself to tell, was murdered in Riverhead by a man looking for drugs. Later, the big barn where they worked burned to the ground. The camp where they slept was shuttered. Their history in Cutchogue ended. Now they were homeless.

I bought one of the men a Greyhound ticket to Georgia. Because he had no form of identification — no scrap of paper with his name on it — I drove another man, Frank Singleton, to his family’s home in McClellanville, S.C., where he learned his name was actually Frank Snyder. Frank’s mother was waiting for him when we pulled up in front of the house. She had not seen him since the early 1960s. She wept and shouted, “My son is home! My son is home!” as we walked up to the house. As Frank greeted his mother, the congregants of a nearby church emptied out to greet him as if they were witnessing a great miracle, which it was.

I flew another man home to Savannah, Ga. His name was Oliver Burke. Everyone called him June, for Junior. His mother was waiting for us at the door where she lived. Soon after her son was born, some 60 years before his return on this momentous day, she had given him up to a cousin going north to New Jersey to pick blueberries. She knew she could not raise, house or feed him. She hoped for the best and kissed her newborn son goodbye, certain she would never see him again. I can still hear her cries as we got out of the car and she walked up to hug her son, in complete disbelief that he was really standing there in front of her.

These men and women were Cutchogue, too. They represented a past replaced by trendy wineries and roadside agri-entertainment businesses where people buy roasted corn and pose for a photograph by a tractor on a “rural” farm. I wrote about them because their stories were about here — the here that was gone. And because their stories were worth telling, their names and lives worth remembering. I wanted history to record they were here.

I recently drove into the Catholic cemetery on Depot Lane to look for the gravestone of a woman named Ellen Holland. She was a house servant to James and Frances Wickham in the early 1850s. She was in the house, asleep, on a night in 1854 when a recently fired farmhand named Nick Behan broke into the house and took an axe to the Wickhams, killing them both. News accounts of the horrific murders noted that a relative of James Wickham, John Wickham, who was born in Cutchogue, was Aaron Burr’s lawyer when the former vice president — and killer of Alexander Hamilton — was tried for and acquitted of treason in 1807.

Ellen, who had immigrated to the United States along with millions of other Irish men and women during the famine, later married an Irish immigrant who had a farm on the eastern end of Oregon Road in Cutchogue. She began a new life and likely had a hand in the new “Irish” Catholic church, Sacred Heart, that was built in Cutchogue in the 1870s — a church with beautiful stained-glass windows and a story to tell, which is now shuttered and for sale.

Standing by her gravestone one afternoon, I wondered how she could have moved on from something so horrific. Did she stay in touch with members of the Wickham family? After all, she was an immigrant, Irish and Catholic. They were old Cutchogue, English and Protestant.

The first Wickham, Joseph, arrived in Cutchogue from Bridgehampton in 1699. Several generations of the Wickham family lived in the old house that now sits on the Cutchogue Village Green. A grandson of Joseph, Parker Wickham, lost all of his holdings at the end of the Revolution — hundreds of acres in Cutchogue, Robins Island and in Riverhead — as punishment by New York State for supporting the British.

After the killings, James’ brother William Wickham moved into the Cutchogue house that sits at the top of Wickham Creek. The house is still there, largely unchanged from those days. William was the Suffolk County district attorney. Behan was hanged for his crime in what is now a parking lot in Riverhead. William later died of blood poisoning and the farm was taken over by his son, James, who also died of blood poisoning after digging a thorn out of his hand with a pocket knife. His son Parker took over. After he died on Main Road in Cutchogue April 5, 1930, in a car wreck while responding to a fire, his brother John — who was driving the car that fateful day — took over that handsome farm, which remains in the family today.

John Wickham was larger than life to me, a true Renaissance man. He was Jeffersonian in so many respects. He was devoted to his family’s North Fork history, dating back three centuries, and to the land he always said he was privileged to farm. My talks with him turned into a book, “Heaven and Earth: The Last Farmers of the North Fork.” In it, I told the stories of the Wickhams, the McBrides, the Tuthills, the black farmworkers and the Indians who lived on the North Fork for 10,000 years before being pushed out of the way by the English.

I write all of this because the North Fork is a place of remarkable people and remarkable stories. There are many more to be told. A final thought: The last resident of the old farm labor camp was an elderly man named Jimmy Wilson. To me, he too was larger than life, a true survivor. After the barn burned down, I told him I would drive him to the tiny hamlet of Barwick, Ga., where he was born in 1918, to live out his life. He refused to go, vowing he would never set foot in Georgia again. In reading news accounts of life in that part of southern Georgia after Mr. Wilson was born, it was easy to see why he refused to return.

When I told him I would go without him, he had one request: Would I please look for the grave of his mother, Ada Wilson, who died in 1925? I told him I would.

“If you find it, could you put flowers on her grave for me?” he asked.

I went and found the grave in an unmarked field behind a tiny rural church. The church held a service while I was there to honor a man born in Barwick and his request that his mother be remembered more than three-quarters of a century after her death.

Then the congregation emptied out and we all walked to that field. People sang; some prayed. A warm sun shone above us. None of the graves were marked. But I knew from a longtime Barwick resident where in the field Ada Wilson had been buried.

As we put flowers on the grave of a mother Mr. Wilson had lost when he was 6 years old but had never forgotten, I thought about his leaving this place and ending up in a farm labor camp by the railroad tracks in Cutchogue — and about how the wheel of history never stops turning.

Top photo credit: 1947 photo of the Cutchogue labor camp courtesy of the Southold Historical Society

The author is the executive editor of Times Review Media Group. He can be reached at swick@timesreview.com

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Not that long ago, many longtime residents and farmers rarely saw deer on their properties. Farmers could maintain their crops without the fear that herds of deer would devour their plants and destroy acres of produce and fruit trees.

Today, as it has been for several years, this is no longer the case. Farmers now routinely put up expensive eight-foot-high fencing to protect their crops. Even some North Fork homeowners have erected high fences to keep deer — and the ticks they carry — out of their yards.

Any North Fork farmer would say without this fencing he or she would not have crops to sell. If Southold Town inexplicably passed a law banning fences higher than, say, three feet, traditional farming here would come to an end. You can imagine the domino effect of that on tourism and, perhaps, even real estate prices.

Citing tick-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease — just one of the horrors ticks inflict on people — some officials have characterized the overpopulation of deer on eastern Long Island as a public health menace. The abundance of deer has also all but destroyed healthy undergrowth in our woods, and it is no exaggeration to say deer-related accidents just in the Town of Southold have caused perhaps $6 million or more in damage since 2010, according to one local group.

Southold Town has targeted this problem directly with expanded hunting on town-owned properties, which also includes issuing nuisance permits for hunting after the regular season. Homeowners on Nassau Point — as well as homeowners on Ram’s Island on Shelter Island — have effectively used hunters to reduce the deer population.

Hamilton Archers, the group that has reduced the deer population on Nassau Point, has been an effective tool and will likely grow as an organization in the coming years. Another group doing this kind of work is White Buffalo Inc., which has done field work in suburban areas like what the North Fork has evolved into. The group’s website says its members are “dedicated to the conservation of native species and ecosystems.” Certainly these are important goals.

But these groups and the recreational hunting community are not enough to reduce an estimated 3,000 deer in Southold Town — and probably twice that number in Riverhead, according to experts — to a number that the land can sustain. Seeing deer dead on the road — seeing a newborn fawn lying dead on the front yard of a neighbor’s house last weekend — should no longer be the norm here. There are simply too many deer in too small a space.

John Rasweiler, a physiologist who sits on the town’s deer management committee, said: “We are at significant risk of tick-borne diseases and illnesses. It’s been going on for quite some time and it is getting worse with the passage of time.”

He added, “The true experts out there, they uniformly agree that recreational hunting is incapable of solving a problem of this magnitude. The deer density is so high that recreational hunting won’t solve it.”

In March 2016, the Southold Tick Working Group issued a dramatic call to arms about tick-borne diseases. “Deer play a central role in the epidemiology of tick-borne diseases, because they provide a bountiful source of blood for ticks’ adult reproductive stage,” its report says. “Before the explosion of the deer population, black legged/deer and lone star ticks, as well the diseases they transmit, simply were not serious problems on most of eastern Long Island.

“Furthermore, several scientific reports have documented that a significant reduction or elimination of deer in study areas greatly reduced or eliminated Lyme disease in the human residents.”

The report lists the diseases ticks carry and points out that a white-tailed deer — in contrast to, say, a mouse — can carry large numbers of adult female ticks, which engorge themselves and then drop off to lay thousands of eggs. As the report makes clear, deer are “the heart of our current epidemic of tick-borne diseases.”

The report lists the life-changing health impacts of tick-borne diseases. Don’t read it while your children or grandchildren are playing in the backyard — the same backyard where the deer were eating your garden the night before.

Potential solutions like de-ticking stations, where deer would be treated as they walk by, are expensive and unworkable. In Riverhead and Southold towns, the number of such stations would be absurdly high. Nor would such stations reduce the continued degradation of woodlands, damage to crops and ornamentals or deer-car accidents.

Perhaps some can accept the serious damage to the woods that the high numbers of deer cause. Perhaps we can learn to live with fenced-in farms that direct the deer into your backyard. But the health impacts of tick-borne diseases must be aggressively addressed. They threaten residents and visitors alike.

The author is the executive editor of Times Review Media Group. He can be reached at swick@timesreview.com.

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Where was Camp Siegfried located? When did slavery officially end in New York State? Who was Benny Hooper?

These were some of the questions posed to an enthusiastic audience last Thursday during the East End Trivia Contest at the historic Jamesport Meeting House. Most questions were about local and regional history, some not so much, such as: How many stops are there on the Long Island Rail Road?

Answer: 124.

The event drew a large crowd and raised approximately $1,700 in team sponsorships that will go to the meeting house, which was built as a church in 1731 by early settlers and was bought in 2008 by a preservation fund.

For part of the two-hour event it looked as though the team from Peconic Landing in Greenport had all the correct answers, but when the final tally was made, it was the team of James Slezak, Linda Slezak, Jay Schondebare and Paul Hoffman that won the night.

There were plenty of laughter and loud cheers as questions were pulled from a bucket and read to the teams, which wrote their answers on slips of paper. Winning responses drew more cheers and fist pumps.

The first question was: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lists eight bays in the Peconic system on nautical charts. Name five of them. Most of the teams had no problem naming the five. The next question was multiple choice: In 1902, what was the population of Riverhead? A: 1000. B: 2,500. C: 4,000, D: 5,500.

Correct answer: B.

A small controversy arose when one question asked which North Fork hamlet is home to the oldest English house. The correct answer — Cutchogue, where the house was built in 1649 — was also the wrong answer. Richard Wines, whose fundraising work saved the meeting house, pointed out that recent tree ring tests on that house showed it was built closer to 1698, technically making the Halsey House in Southampton the oldest English house on Long Island.

Answers to other questions: Benny Hooper became famous when he fell into a well in Manorville; Camp Siegfried was a German-American camp in Yaphank; slavery in New York officially ended in 1827.

These questions were all local: Who owns the trademark to Robins Island Oysters, which were famous and on New York City hotel menus? Answer: George Braun. Where did Long Islanders loyal to the British during the Revolution escape to? Answer: Connecticut. Who was Cutchogue’s most famous son who won a Pulitzer Prize for music composition?

Answer: Douglas Moore.

For Mr. Wines, the night was a great success.

“The East End Trivia Contest was a perfect use for the area’s oldest public building,” he said in an email.

Photo caption: James Slezak (from left), Linda Slezak and Jay Schondebare were the winning team last Thursday at Jamesport Meeting House’s East End Trivia Night. Not pictured: Paul Hoffman. (Courtesy photo)

swick@timesreview.com

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The letters and drawings date to 1944 and 1945, when the writer and artist was stationed in Europe during World War II. There are hundreds of letters and dozens of drawings and, together, they tell the remarkable story of a soldier at war writing home to a family in Florida.

Some of the letters begin ‘Hi, Honey,” and the writer asks about “the boys” and how everyone is doing. Some of the drawings are of cowboys and horses and a fence line. There are references to Montana. The name written on some of the drawings is “Billie Phelps.” Most of the letters are signed “Bill.”

This collection of documents and images is in the possession of Pat and John Kurpetski of Calverton. It was found by their son John in the attic of a house in Orlando, Fla. He gave it to them with the hope that, somehow, the family of the person who wrote the letters and made the drawings could be tracked down.

“We want someone in this person’s family to have them,” Ms. Kurpetski said. “That is our hope — that a daughter or a son or more likely a grandchild of this person can be located and this collection can go to them. It only seems right that it be given to the family.”

A Nov. 15, 1944, letter from France — five months after the D-Day invasion — starts off “Hi, Honey — Got two letters from you yesterday. They were written the same day and explained all about the storm you folks had. Until I got your letters I knew nothing of a storm in Fla.”

A series of letters written from Germany in early March 1945 are signed “lovingly yours, Bill.” He asks about “Ruth” and “Tom” and says he has received letters from “Sam, Jean and Vera Beth.” He goes on: “So you have a pig now?” He says he heard the house was being painted — “so glad you were able to have it done.” He writes he was glad to get a letter from “Edith and Buddy last week” and he asks for more stationery because “I’m using it up kind of fast.”

He signs it “Hello to my boys, love, Bill.”

There are hundreds of handwritten letters in the collection. Nearly all are on paper that is fading and beginning to crumble. If the family of this person can’t be found — could the writer still be alive? — they belong in a museum where they can be preserved from further deterioration. Dozens of names are mentioned in the letters — and some are addressed to a family named Lamb — but there is no firm clue as to the writer’s identity.

Where does one start to find the family of the letter writer?

The drawings that were found with the letters are inside a textbook called “A Laboratory Manual for General Science.” Inside the cover is handwritten: “Billy Phelps,” then what looks like “Vera Phelps” and under that “Castle Butte Montana.”

Inside are dozens of pencil and crayon drawings — of a cowboy holding a rope, a log cabin, a fence line, a corral, a cowboy holding a pistol titled ‘the outlaw’ and signed by Billie Phelps. There are numerous drawings of glamorous women in fancy gowns and dresses. A drawing of a cowboy sitting next to a tree is signed Billie E. Phelps.

Billie must have loved horses, as there are numerous horse drawings. The artist’s imagination seems to be in Montana, while his heart is with a family in Orlando, Fla. “Billie Phelps” seems to be the author of all the letters and the drawings.

Written in ink at the bottom of one page in the book are the words:

How can this heart be mine

yet yours, unless our hearts

are one.

by Cupid’s Arrow

Hopefully, this collection can be reunited with a family.

The author is the executive editor of the Riverhead News-Review and The Suffolk Times. He can be reached at 631-354-8048 or swick@timesreview.com.

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Last weekend, my wife and I saw “Dunkirk,” a movie about an extraordinary time in history when German armies pushed all the way to the English Channel in their conquest of France and the Low Countries. Hundreds of thousands of English and French troops were surrounded, their backs against the Channel.

To save them — and save Great Britain from what was believed to be a certain German invasion — tens of thousands of private fishing and pleasure boats ferried the troops from the port city of Dunkirk to safety on the English coast.

There have been few efforts in recent history more heroic this one, when ordinary citizens risked their own lives to save their troops and their country from a German juggernaut that had quickly conquered Europe.

Western democracy was crushed by the Nazis that spring of 1940. France surrendered in June of that year and would remain an occupied country until the summer of 1944. To celebrate his triumph, Hitler flew to Paris. A year later, German troops invaded Russia, and an industrialized, government-run extermination program began.

Fast-forward to last weekend, when black-shirted neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches purchased at the home supply store marched and rioted in Charlottesville, Va. An avowed admirer of Hitler was charged with murder for mowing down a counter-protester with his car.

From “Dunkirk” to Charlottesville. All in one weekend.

I suppose it would be easy to classify the neo-Nazis at the protest as naive and ignorant of history, even history as recent as the German war against civilization from 1939 to 1945. But that would be giving them a pass they don’t deserve. Stupidity may be a defense for some things, such as why you forgot to turn on the stove to cook dinner, but certainly not this.

If the gas chambers don’t stand out in your mind, if photographs of Jews — old people, women, children and babies — standing on train platforms at death camps don’t stand out in your mind, then somehow you are able to pretend those events never happened. You can live in your own truth.

Many thousands of Germans thought the Nazis when they first reared their ugly heads in the mid-1920s were nuts no one could possibly support. They would scream and shout and march down the boulevards and fade away. Then Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933. What seemed impossible at one time came to life at another time.

Parts of the American South have been roiling since a number of municipalities decided to remove statues of “heroes” of the war of 1861-1865 such as Robert E. Lee. A larger-than-life statue of Lee astride his horse is at the center of the chaos in Charlottesville.

Clearly, there is also confusion about American history and not just recent European history. The Civil War was fought over slavery. It was first about the westward expansion of slave states and then, with the war underway, about the institution of slavery existing at all in this green, clean land of America.

Near downtown Memphis there is a statue to a Confederate cavalry officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest. The statue was erected in 1905 as an “enduring monument” to Forrest. Before the war, Forrest was a slave trader. After the war was lost, he became an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, a group that was resurgent at the time the statue was erected. The Klan is now considered a domestic terror organization. Its members were also on display last weekend in Charlottesville.

We all have our heroes. In Memphis in 1905, Forrest was a hero to enough citizens to have a statue made in his honor. I was reminded of mine when we saw “Dunkirk,” with all the private citizens climbing aboard anything that would float to reach trapped soldiers in France and bring them to safety, so they could fight the menace of Nazism another day.

If you want to read about another group of heroes closer to home, study Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s successful stand on Little Round Top at Gettysburg on the second day of that epic battle. He and his men stopped wave after wave of Confederate troops who were trying to get behind Union lines.

Or take Main Road toward Southold hamlet. Just west of the business district, where the road curves at the American Legion post, stop and read the names on the Civil War statue there. Like Chamberlain, like the boat owners in the English Channel, those men saw a cause to fight for.

The World War II generation is fast dying off. I can imagine a 90-something-year-old man who maybe landed at Normandy, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped defeat the Nazis. I can imagine how he felt turning on the news last weekend and seeing Americans with their right arms stuck out in the Nazi salute.

Top photo credit: Warner Bros.

The author is the executive editor of the Times Review Media Group. He can be reached at 631-354-8048 or swick@timesreview.com

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A woman escaped a house fire in Jamesport with the help of a good Samaritan and a firefighter was injured battling the blaze Saturday.

Mike Gatto was enjoying the afternoon at Jason’s Vineyard on Main Road when he noticed smoke coming from a nearby house. Authorities received the emergency call around 2:45 p.m.

“Me and two friends went around the back of the house, grabbed a woman inside the house and walked her to the front and away from the fire,” he said.

Two dogs were also rescued from the home, according to witnesses. A cat didn’t survive the fire, authorities said.

Jamesport, Mattituck and Cutchogue fire departments responded to the scene and the Riverhead Fire Department remained on standby.

Jamesport Fire Department Chief John Andrejack said a Mattituck firefighter suffered minor injuries and the woman was taken to the hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.

“It was totally involved when we got here,” he said. “It is now contained. There are still hot spots, but it’s under control.”

He added: “There were walls inside that prevented the flow of water.”

A portion of Main Road remains closed as of 4 p.m. No other details about the investigation were immediately available. Check back for updates.

swick@timesreview.com

Photo credit: Steve Wick

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Last Saturday night a large group of men, women, children and babies filled all the pews at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church in Greenport for the 8 p.m. Spanish Mass. Benches at the rear of the church were filled, and the foyer by the doors that open onto Main Road was standing room only.

The Mass at St. Agnes attracts an enthusiastic congregation of Hispanic workers and families. Those who came this night were there to honor Sister Margaret Smyth, who 60 years ago this month took her first steps in professing final vows as a religious.

Father Ceasar Lara, who celebrated the Mass, extolled her work, and Sister Margaret spoke afterward in fluent Spanish, thanking everyone for coming. Then everyone walked across the street to the auditorium of the Catholic school, where a dinner of beef stew, rice, mashed potatoes and salad was served, followed by a cake and the singing of songs in Spanish.

Sister Margaret sat at a table at the front of the auditorium, surrounded by people who have a deep love for her, and who appreciate all she has done for them.

Margarito Gonzalez, who met Sister Margaret in 1999, said: “She is everything for someone who is here and has nothing — no family or friends. She works for everyone who needs help. She lives the Gospels. She is doing what God is telling her to do.”

Monsignor Joe Staudt, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Cutchogue, said: “For all the people whose lives have been enriched by Sister Margaret’s ministry, she has been our version of St. Mother Teresa.”

Father Cesar blesses Sister Margaret Smyth. (Credit: Elizabeth Wagner)

For Sister Margaret, the last 60 years have been a great gift. She was 17 years old and living in Woodside, Queens, when she decided to begin her journey as a nun.

“My family was a good, Irish Catholic family,” she said. “My father’s brother was a priest in Ireland. Three of my cousins entered the convent before me. I always had a desire to help people. As a teenage kid I used to go to what was then called Welfare Island, off Long Island City. There was a big hospital there and I’d go and help patients.

“One way I saw of doing good was to become a nun. So I made an appointment to go to the Mother House in Amityville, Queen of the Rosary. The day I entered, right after high school, 76 other women entered on that one day.”

She later taught in schools in Brooklyn and Queens, served as a principal at one school and at one point lived in a convent in East New York in Brooklyn, which had a high murder rate.

“We had a lot of rooms in that convent,” she said. “We took in girls over 18 to live with us because they had bad situations at home. We had women and children living with us. One was pregnant. I was present at the baby’s birth.”

She later worked in El Salvador and Guatemala, living in places without running water or access to bathrooms, where people cooked on the floor over open fires. When she returned to Long Island in the late 1990s, a nun suggested she look for work to do on the North Fork.

“The first place I went to was Mattituck,” she said. “I went to a farm at lunchtime. The guys invited me to share their tortillas. I was so touched. I said, ‘I will come here.’ ”

She moved into a convent in Cutchogue in January 1997. Five nuns were living in that convent then. There are none now, and the convent has been sold. Sister Margaret lives in an apartment in Mattituck.

“When I came out I had no work. My direction was to go out and help the Hispanic community. One priest in Riverhead took me around to meet people, but he left to work in prisons in Florida. I made up business cards and followed people in stores who I heard speaking Spanish. I introduced myself and asked where they lived. I went to every home of people I met.

“At St. Agnes in Greenport I put up signs urging people to come. I put out coffee and cookies and music on a CD player. People would show up for dances on Saturday night. There was no Spanish Mass then, but we said prayers. I just wanted people to know I was there.”

Sister Margaret poses for a photo with the Sanchez family of Greenport. (Credit: Elizabeth Wagner)

Today, Sister Margaret, 77, runs the North Fork Spanish Apostolate in Riverhead. She helps countless families and even goes to court — as she will on Friday — to help get workers properly paid by employers.

“These are people who are helping make good communities, who are working hard and sending their children to schools and colleges and medical schools,” she said. “The good Lord has shown me how to do this. I am very grateful. Whatever I can do to help, I want do that.”

Top photo caption: Sister Margaret blows kisses to the crowd in gratitude. (Credit: Elizabeth Wagner)

The author is the executive editor of Times Review Media Group. He can be reached at swick@timesreview.com or 631-354-8048.

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Last Sunday, Kathleen Grimmett of Austin, Texas, was on the Internet trying to find information about her parents, Bill and Billie Lamb. Billie was her mother’s nickname; her given name was Vera. Ms. Grimmett’s father was a World War II veteran who wrote hundreds of letters home from France and Germany to his wife in Orlando, Fla.

Her mom, who was born in Montana, loved to draw pictures of cowboys and bucking broncos and women in beautiful gowns.

In doing her Internet search, looking under her parents’ names, she found a story that ran July 27 in the Riverhead News-Review and The Suffolk Times about an extraordinary cache of hundreds of letters from “Bill,” written in Europe in 1944 and 1945 to his wife back home in Orlando. The thick folders of letters also contained dozens of drawings signed by “Billie Phelps.”

Ms. Grimmett did not know much about her dad, who died in 1956 when she was just 3. Her mom, whose maiden name was Phelps, died in 1997 at age 85. It was her desire to find out anything she could about them, and to flesh out their genealogy, that brought her to Google Sunday afternoon.

The documents were found two years ago in the crawl space of a house in Orlando. The owner of the house, John Kurpetski, was selling the house and when he cleaned it out he found the letters and drawings and didn’t know what to do with them. His mother, Pat Kurpetski of Calverton, was visiting her son when he was moving and, knowing they would mean something to a family somewhere, brought the material back. She had them in a closet until sharing with them with these newspapers, where a column headlined: “A WWII mystery: Who made drawings?” appeared over a story about the discovery.

Ms. Kurpetski knew the letters and drawings would be important to someone. She told the editor who called her, “I hope I can find the family they belong to.”

When Ms. Grimmett saw the story, she broke out crying. The letters were written by her father and the drawings were made by her mother, who was born Vera Phelps in Kansas. She moved to Castle Butte, Mont. at age 10 and then to Florida when she was 19. She could not fathom how they’d been left in a house her parents had not lived in for decades, nor could she comprehend how they stayed there, safe and untouched.

That after all this time her father’s letters home and her mom’s Montana drawings will be given to their daughter is, for Ms. Grimmett, fantastic.

“It was a miracle,” she said. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. I am so happy.”

Vera “Billie” Phelps was born in Montana in 1911 and moved with her parents to Florida as a teenager. She met her future husband, Bill Lamb, who went into the U.S. Army in 1944 and soon found himself in France. As a married couple, they owned the Orlando house and, over the years, Ms. Grimmett never saw a red folder of her mother’s drawings and a bound book of hundreds of her father’s letters home.

A typical letter is one her father wrote from Germany after the surrender, addressed to “Stick,” which was another nickname he had for his wife.

“That referred to ‘stick in the mud,’” Ms. Grimmett said. “My dad died when he was only 42. This will tell me so much more about him. I think it’s a miracle.”

For Ms. Kurpetski, the material being returned to the Lambs’ daughter is a stroke of good fortune.

“When I brought it back from Florida it sat in my house. I wasn’t sure what to do with it,” she said. “This is a very good ending. I’m glad the letters and drawings will find a good home.”

Top courtesy photo: Billie and Bill Lamb in an undated photo.

Correction: Bill Lamb was 42 when he died, not 45. Ms. Lamb died in 1997, not the early ’80s and she was born in Kansas before moving to Montana at age 10.

Steve Wick is the executive editor of the Times Review Media Group. He can be reached at swick@timesreview.com.

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Some of the region’s top energy and elected officials came together in Riverhead last Thursday to showcase a signature achievement on Long Island: the installation of a geothermal heating system that connects 10 residences in Glenwood Village.

Constructed by Miller Environmental Group Inc. of Calverton, the system taps into the earth’s natural warmth and, via underground tubes, connects residences in the village in a way whereby each can be heated in winter and cooled in summer with nearly no environmental consequences.

“This is the most efficient heating and cooling there is,” said Mark Miller, the firm’s president and CEO. “It is far cleaner and with far less of a carbon footprint.”

Attending a ribbon-cutting at Glenwood Village were officials from National Grid, PSEG Long Island and NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Before the event, Ken Daly, president of National Grid, Long Island’s natural gas delivery company, said the geothermal system at Glenwood Village demonstrates “the art of the possible with the earth’s energy.”

He said geothermal was “cleaner and greener,” typically offering homeowners who install such a systems savings of 30 percent a year on cooling costs and 70 percent on heating costs. He hailed it as part of New York’s clean energy initiative, which is part of a concerted effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions statewide.

Mr. Daly explained that the Miller Environmental Group bored holes 250 feet deep into the earth and inserted a loop in each bore. The loops are made of high-density polyethelene, the same as pipe that is used to transport natural gas.

The loops are connected to each of the 10 participating residences. In summer, the energy brought up from underground is used to cool residences and in winter to heat residences. No oil or natural gas is burned, and carbon emissions are all but eliminated.

“If you look into the future, wind, solar and geothermal are the future,” Mr. Daly said.

Speaking at a podium, Mr. Daly described the earth as “the ultimate battery.” He said geothermal comprises three things: a heat pump, the underground tubes and the earth itself. He said converting one house to geothermal was the equivalent of taking 20 cars off the road.

Alicia Barton, president and CEO of NYSERDA, said the project in the village “is the start of something great. We are making moves across the board on clean energy.” She said commercial buildings contribute one-third of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“That is one area where we need to make real progress,” she said.

Michael Voltz — the aptly named director of energy efficiency and renewables at PSEG Long Island — said geothermal was 400 percent more efficient than other energy systems. He said some 2,000 geothermal units have been installed on Long Island in the past 15 years, most in single-family homes.

In his comments at the podium, Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone hailed the system as “incredibly important” for the county. Noting that superstorm Sandy hit five years ago this month, he emphasized that the reality of climate change was already upon us, with a higher frequency of “very tough storms.”

He said New York State was “racing to the future” with clean energy.

swick@timesreview.com

File photo credit: Barbaraellen Koch

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Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, is to attend a fundraiser next month for Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley).

Newsday and Axios both reported that Bannon will attend the fundraiser in New York City scheduled for Dec. 14.

After Mr. Bannon left the White House staff he returned to his executive position at Breitbart News, a conservative media site.

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Albert J. Krupski Sr. was a very lucky man.

He grew up on a handsome Peconic farm as the son of Nettie and Julius Krupski. That farm was where the Lenz Winery is today. His grandparents lived on another Peconic farm walking distance away, on land that is now Pindar Vineyards.

In 1950, he married Helen Sidor, who was born in a farmhouse on Oregon Road in Mattituck. The couple bought a farm across the Main Road from where he grew up and established Krupski Farms, which was later managed by their son Al Jr. and is now run by their grandson Nick.

Nick is the third generation on the tract of land where the Krupski farm stand is now, and the fifth generation to farm in Peconic. Standing by the big barn behind the farm stand, Nick can see his family’s rich history all around him, and see the beauty of the land that drew the Krupski family to Peconic after the turn of the 20th century.

“It is definitely very humbling,” Nick said.

Albert Krupski Sr. died in his home Dec. 5. He was 89. Helen Krupski died last March at age 84. After his funeral at Our Lady of Ostrabrama R.C. Church Saturday, the family went back to the farmhouse and later showed old home movies shot years ago by Mr. Krupski.

“My parents had one of those old projectors,” Al Krupski Jr. said as he stood with his son, Nick, by the big barn on a cold, wet morning. “We played it and it was so good to see. All the family holidays. Kids jumping in the snowbank by the barn. Swimming lessons in the bay in the spring, when the water was so cold. Birthday parties.”

Mr. Krupski Sr. was born in Greenport hospital three days after Christmas in 1927. Growing up on his parents’ Peconic farm, he was a short walk from the farm of his Polish-born grandparents, Joseph and Elizabeth Krupski. His grandparents spoke Polish in the house and, in the afternoons when farm work was done, families would visit their neighbors and talk on the porch while the kids played outside.

Helen Sidor was born in her grandmother’s farmhouse on Oregon Road and grew up in a farmhouse around the corner, on Mill Lane. She heard Polish spoken as a child and was proud to be able to speak it in later life. The language anchored her to her past, but also to her family when she was a young girl and the lives they lived.

Our Lady of Ostrabrama, built by Polish farm workers in the mid-1920s, was the center of the world for these families. The Masses were in Polish, and most of the older congregants spoke Polish. It is where Mr. Krupski Sr. married Helen Sidor on Aug. 22, 1950.

Theirs was a culture and a history — of immigrants from eastern Europe who came to America, to the North Fork, and built new lives on some of the best farmland in the country — that Mr. Krupski Sr. and his wife cared about deeply, as they cared deeply about their church, their faith and their family. And, of course, their farm, the land they first came to, and working hard to keep it going for another generation.

For Al Krupski Jr., the North Fork’s current county legislator, and Nick Krupski, who is a town Trustee, being a steward of this land means more than just keeping family history going. It is about preserving something remarkable: first-class farmland, salt creeks and the Peconic Bay watershed.

Despite the passing of Helen and now Albert Krupski Sr., the family tradition will continue, on land that is deep in the couple’s history. Their children and grandchildren would not have it any other way.

“This land is all very precious,” said Al Krupski Jr. “My parents both understood that. And we understand it. If we don’t preserve it, it could all be lost in 10 years.”

swick@timesreview.com

Photo caption:  Albert J. Krupski Sr. pictured on his Peconic farm in an undated photo. (Credit: Courtesy photo) 

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Spooky!

The Riverhead armory sits alongside Route 58 in Riverhead in between car dealerships, shuttered and shabby. 

Built by New York State in 1957 to house the National Guard, the armory closed more than a decade ago and has been all but abandoned. Riverhead’s police department stores equipment in an cavernous room in the back.

Last week, a Times Review editor and photographer toured the armory. Inside, it has the look and feel of a set for a Stephen King movie. Or maybe a movie about zombies who take up residence in an abandoned psychiatric facility and then take over a small eastern Long Island town.

It’s dark and eerie. You wouldn’t want to be trapped inside the armory, waiting all night for help to arrive.

But the tour also revealed that it’s an incredible space, built like, you know, a brick outhouse. The structure is sound and certainly has the space for both a modern police department and a secure courthouse. The current Riverhead court facility is so unsafe that judges enter the building through the prisoner holding area. Not too smart.

In 2011, New York State turned the armory — 32,000 square feet on five acres — over to Riverhead Town with the provision that it be used for a new courthouse and police headquarters. Riverhead’s town justices, Allen Smith and Lori Hulse, have asked the town to sell bonds to cover the cost of converting the armory into just such a facility. The board has not been supportive of such a move in the past.

Ken Zahler of Greenport, 69, served in the National Guard and first arrived at the armory in the fall of 1968. He explained that the huge, high room in the rear of the building — big enough to store a few dozen tanks — was used for drills.

“We had to be there early in the morning, one weekend a month, and two full weeks over the summer in Virginia,” he said. The guardsmen did not stay overnight in the building. A lucky break. “It’s a good, solid structure,” he said. “It should have a new use. It would be a shame not to use it.”

swick@timesreview.com

Photos by Krysten Massa

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What do we know about our history?

Native people — who got the name “Indians” from Europeans — lived on the North Fork for perhaps 10,000 years, arriving from the west in search of new lives as the Ice Age retreated north. 

After English colonists arrived in the early 1600s, the Indians were all but gone within two generations. Here for thousands of years, gone in just a few. Why? What can we learn about them?

There are records showing that English settlers in Southold created a reservation at a place called Corchaug Pond — roughly where the Osprey’s Dominion winery is today. But the last pocket of Indians lived on a neck to the west, now called Indian Neck. They refused to move to the reservation.

Laws passed by the English government on the North Fork hemmed the Indians in, restricting where they could hunt and fish, and crippling their ability to sustain themselves and their ancient culture. The English wrote elaborate, fancy deeds, and got Indians they designated as leaders to scratch the bottom of them with a quill pen. Thus, the land was sold out from under the Indians.

It can also be learned by studying the history of this region that the English were only able to leapfrog across Long Island Sound after the mass slaughter of the Pequot people in 1637 in what is today Connecticut. The Pequots dominated eastern Long Island; once they were out of the way, in what is today called the Pequot War, were the English able to arrive in numbers on both the North and South forks and begin to build communities.

Which town came first — Southampton or Southold — has long been a silly competition. It doesn’t matter.

There is no formal monument anywhere on the North Fork to its first inhabitants. Nor is there a monument in Riverhead or Southold to the slaves who were here. What do we know about that institution here in the North? What should we know? Do we know their names?

Shelter Island has Sylvester Manor, perhaps the largest slave plantation north of Maryland. The history of slavery matters greatly at the Manor; it should matter everywhere.

All this is to say that, beginning Jan. 11, Times Review Media Group — the Shelter Island Reporter, The Suffolk Times and the Riverhead News-Review — will publish a series of stories we’re calling The North Fork History Project. Here, history will matter. It will be remembered.

Stories for the project will run every two weeks through the end of the summer 2018. We will begin with geology — explaining why the North Fork looks like a bony, arthritic finger — and proceed forward. We will write about people who, out West, call themselves the First Nations; we will write about the colonists who came and built lives here and about the Revolution that was, in a small way, fought right here even as British troops occupied the land.

We will write about slavery, with the goal of remembrance. Who were they? How did they live?

We will write about whaling, Irish immigration, the Civil War, Polish immigration, World War I, the 1938 hurricane and Greenport during World War II, when thousands lived and worked there building ships to fight the Germans and Japanese.

We will write about us. Who we are. What we were.

In years past, the study of history here was conducted as more of an exercise in genealogy, by people looking to trace their own roots back to what they called the “first families.” This isn’t to say genealogy isn’t interesting and even important; but it’s not our collective past. It doesn’t speak to the larger story. It’s not who we are.

We will answer this question as best we can: What do we know about our history?

Photo credit: Local businesses boomed on lower Main Street in downtownGreenport during the 1800s, when the port was a major hub for shipping and commerce. (Credit: Floyd Memorial Library Courtesy photo) 

swick@timesreview.com

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In the beginning, there was ice.

Eighteen thousand years ago, a massive wall of ice 300 feet thick extended south from the Arctic to what is now New Jersey. There was no Long Island then. There was no island at all, because the land was a solid mass covered by this enormous ice cap. 

Slowly — glaciers do not move quickly — this ice cap began to pull back, retreating north, inch by inch, and scraping the land at its base to such an extent that it ground up entire boulders and reduced them to sand. This would become the topsoil that today makes the North Fork the remarkable farmland that it is.

Then, perhaps around 11,000 years ago, as the earth began to warm slightly and this huge ice cap started to melt, what we now call Long Island began to take shape. That is to say, a meltwater channel formed by flowing water from the melting ice gradually filled up and became what we know today as Long Island Sound. The ancestral Hudson River was also formed by just such a channel of melting water.

Smaller meltwater streams helped form our bays and creeks. Kettle holes — deep, freshwater ponds created by large chunks of ice left behind as the glacier receded — emerged. Laurel Lake in Mattituck is a kettle hole pond.

So, why does the North Fork — which, on a big map spread across a wall, resembles a bony, arthritic finger sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean — look the way it does? It’s because of the ice. Long Island is a byproduct of a giant, grinding ice sheet — one so powerful that a very large boulder would be reduced to particles of sand after being dragged underneath it for just 20 miles.

“I love looking at the North Fork,” said Sean Tvelia, a professor of geology and physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College. Mr. Tvelia’s enthusiasm for the forces that shaped our island is contagious. With the eye of a skilled investigator looking over a crime scene, he sees what the ice left behind thousands of years ago when he looks at the layers of sand and silt on a high bluff overlooking Long Island Sound.

Ice during the recent cold wave forms on a Long Island Sound beach in Riverhead. (Credit: Rachel Siford)

“This is ground zero for the glacier,” he explained. “If you look at the coastline, if you are standing on the beach, you can understand that giant wall of ice. This was the toe of the ice.”

The birth of what we call Long Island 11,000 years ago is a mere blink in the 4-billion-year life of the planet, give or take a half-billion or so. Geologically speaking, we are too young to merit a birthday. And we are too old not to respect what brought us to this point in our long history.

But we could all gather on a Long Island Sound beach and look up at the bluff and see what the glacier left behind and raise a glass to it. On a broader scale, though, what makes the North Fork unique and worth protecting — its rich farm soil, creeks and bays — is because of the ice. You can’t know this land without knowing how ice shaped it.

Professor Tvelia makes clear what is well known among those who study the geology of this sandbar we live on:

Piecing together its earliest history and establishing a timeline of events is a difficult task. After all, the answers lie in rocks and sediment, which don’t give up their stories easily. This forces the professor to become an earth detective, sifting for clues.

“There is no real good data on how long the ice was here,” he said. “We know it was in Vermont 21,000 years ago. And then gone. How long it existed is hard to know. The ice retreated south to north.”

The ice was 300 feet thick here, and maybe a mile and half in depth to our north, over what’s now Connecticut.

While one of the many unanswered questions about the ice is how far south it reached, it appears as though what is now Long Island was pretty much its southernmost reach. We were the end — or the toe, as the professor calls it.
What geologists call the Ronkonkoma Moraine — essentially a ridge of sediment left by the glacier — runs across Long Island, with clear signs the ice continued across modern-day New Jersey and then west.

Perhaps even more fascinating than how the machinery of the ice formed our North Fork is this tantalizing question: When did people first arrive here?

The so-called Clovis people — named for perfecting the Clovis point, a highly engineered killing instrument — were farther west on the continent 20,000 years ago. They moved east, perhaps following giant game like the mammoths, hugging the southern edge of the wall of ice.

We know this because their distinctive Clovis points have been found on Long Island. It is a good guess that these people were here 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. That means these people, about whom we know so little, were on this land for perhaps 9,600 years all by themselves.

John Strong, a retired Southampton College professor and an expert on eastern Long Island Indian history, said the hunter-gatherers who came here followed food sources as the ice retreated north. They became established here when there was enough food — plants and animals — for them to live on and form extended family groups.

It is also not beyond the realm of possibility that people from what is now the European continent walked here from there — following the edge of the ice until they arrived on our land mass. There is no physical proof of that, but it is a fascinating question.

But first there was ice. And then an island. This is the beginning of our story.

swick@timesreview.com

About this series: The North Fork History Project is a 16-part series telling the stories of the place we call home. The second chapter will be published Jan. 25.

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They are a mystery in so many ways. Who were they? Where did they come from? What was the nature of their spoken language? Who were their ancestors? 

The people who came to what would become Long Island some 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, as the 300-foot-high wall of ice retreated north, have names given them by archeologists and anthropologists who have plumbed their secrets. They are the Paleo Indians. Or the Clovis people.

When they crossed from what is now Siberia, over a land bridge called Beringia, into modern day Alaska, they arrived in a new world where there were no human beings. Their descendants found their way south — by boat along the western coast or through gaps in the ice wall. And then east. All the way east. All the way to the ocean.

Following giant animals like the woolly mammoth, these people were the first human beings on what is now our Long Island and, at some point, on the bony finger that would become the North Fork. We know they were here because collectors have found their most beautiful legacy: the Clovis Point, a distinctive, fluted stone arrowhead or spear point that dates back around 10,000 years.

Hold one in your hand. See the fluting, or channels, cut on both sides of the point. Eye its beauty. Its ingeniousness.
Understand that a person created it. You are holding the ancient history of a long-gone people we know only by what they left behind.

“They are truly beautiful,” said John Pagliaro, a Shelter Island artist and an avid collector of arrowheads and other artifacts left behind by the people who lived here for so long before being evicted by incoming Europeans in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

He spends many weekends on beaches on the island and in Southold looking for points. Awed by them, Mr. Pagliaro has a collection of perhaps 1,000 points, many that bear the distinctive look of Clovis Points or their successor, the Fulsom Point. They speak
volumes to him about the people who made them, as their story is writ in stone.

“They tell us the story of the people who were here,” he said.

Some 14 Clovis Points are known to have been found on Long Island and authenticated by experts. One of them sits handsomely in a glass case at the Southold Indian Museum, home to a unique collection of artifacts of eastern Long Island’s first people.

Lucinda Hemmick, president of the museum, holds the Clovis Point in her hand. She hands it to a visitor. It is remarkably light, beautifully carved, a unique invention designed to kill the big animals. The visitor tries to picture the person who made it, and imagine how it must have felt to have lost something so precious — only to have it discovered in Greenport thousands of years later by Orient farmer Roy Latham.

“This is what we have that shows people were here then,” Ms. Hemmick said. “They were nomads who wandered here following the big animals. They didn’t stay to occupy the land because there was only tundra here, no trees, or anything that grew they could eat. That would come later. But these people were here first.”

Lucinda Hemmick, president of the Southold Indian Museum points to some of the archeological discoveries on display. (Credit: Rachel Siford)

She picks up another beautiful stone piece, a Fulsom Point, from the museum’s collection. It is probably 8,000 years old. It was found in Cutchogue by an amateur collector named Harrison Case. Like the Clovis Point, it is named after the place in what is now New Mexico where points of this style were first found.

“It was later when food could be planted here that people began to settle and occupy the land, to build villages along the creeks,” Ms. Hemmick said. “Societies were built along family lines. The population grew significantly. The creeks were filled with food. This was a rich place. They were here for thousands of years before anyone else came along, and there were many of them, particularly along the coast, when Europeans first arrived.”

John Strong, a historian of Long Island Indian history who taught at Southampton College and is a prolific author, said those first inhabitants arrived in small family groups of perhaps 25 to 40 people. Consider, he pointed out, how many people it would take to bring down a huge mammoth with spears.

“Once you had a food base here, maybe around 8,000 years ago, you saw human beings begin to settle down,” Mr. Strong said. “Then villages were established and the population grew and you begin to see permanence.”

Scientists divide time periods by name, such as the Paleo period, the Archaic period, the early and late Woodlands periods.

These periods were spread over thousands of years. During that time, Indian communities grew, their customs and languages became more sophisticated and they perfected trade routes with their neighbors that covered hundreds of miles. They became the Algonquian Indians we know of today.

Local Indians traded items such as the blue rims of clam shells or the center column of a conch shell that were cut up and used for decorative beads, and in return received stone from the west to be carved into points.

The North Fork and Shelter Island in the early and mid-twentieth century were noted for their amateur archeologists, like Latham, Case and Charles Goddard, a Mattituck lawyer. What they found — including a remarkable collection of clay pots, stone axe heads and thousands of points — became the core of the Southold Indian Museum, which was organized in 1925. Ground was broken for the museum on Main Bayview Road in 1962.

A clovis and folsom point at the Southold Indian Museum. (Credit: Rachel Siford)

What unites experts like Mr. Strong, Lisa Cordani-Stevenson, an archeology professor at Suffolk Community College, and Gaynell Stone, director of the Suffolk County Archeology Association, is their desire that these first people not be forgotten, that their history be studied and that residents today know who they were — and are aware that their descendants are still among us.

Mr. Pagliaro’s collecting is a way for him to honor these people.

“We need to understand what happened here,” Mr. Pagliaro said.

By the early 1600s, as Europeans began to arrive on eastern Long Island, the lives of the native people fundamentally changed for the worst. In terms of their longevity here, their demise as large, self-sustaining and intact communities happened in the wink of an eye. They went from a free people to a destitute and even enslaved people within two generations of the English settlers’ arrival.

“The Indian people here were in a very good place, and then all of a sudden that changed,” said Ms. Cordani-Stevenson.

About this series: The North Fork History Project is a 16-part series telling the stories of the place we call home. This is the second chapter. A third installment will be published Feb. 8.

swick@timesreview.com

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A standing room only crowd packed into a barn at Martha Clara Vineyards Thursday morning to celebrate the life of Lyle Wells, the iconic and enterprising Riverhead farmer and family man who died last week in a farming accident.

The Rev. Anton DeWet of Aquebogue’s Old Steeple Community Church hailed Mr. Wells, 62, as a farmer from a historic North Fork family who felt privileged to live on and farm the same land his ancestors came to in the 17th century. Referring to Mr. Wells’ devotion to the land, the Rev. DeWet said, “It’s hard to explain the connection between your land and your feelings.”

He quoted Mr. Wells as saying, “Our blood runs with this dirt.”

“Thank God for the life of Lyle Wells,” he said.

Frank Beyrodt, a past president of the Long Island Farm Bureau, spoke eloquently and emotionally about a man he described as a loyal friend. He described his friend as a natural leader who, after working at the Long Island Horticultural Research Center on Sound Avenue in Riverhead, decided to farm the family land full-time.

“He tried everything to make money,” Mr. Beyrodt said. “Chickens, pigs, a dairy cow. He was a bus driver for the school district and a baker at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

He recounted how a fire destroyed a barn and equipment and Mr. Wells and his wife had to start all over again. Mr. Beyrodt told of how their children — Jessica, Matthew and Logan — worked on the farm from a young age, as their father wanted them to love the land, too. He said Matthew was 11 days old when his dad first sat him up on a tractor.

An emotional Joe Gergela, former director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, said, simply, “Lyle was the best buddy anyone could ever have.”

Among the many who attended what was billed as a celebration and not a memorial was Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and county Legislator Al Krupski, whose family has farmed in Peconic for four generations.

“He personified the history of this place and the love of the land,” Mr. Krupki said.

After the celebration, Mr. Bellone said in an interview that he first met Mr. Wells in 2011, when he was running for county executive. “Joe and Frank set it up and we met at Lyle’s farm,” Mr. Bellone said. “He described me as an ‘up islander’ because I am from Babylon. It was the first time I heard that.

“I asked him, ‘How long have you been farming?’ He said, ‘Well, a long time.’ I was thinking of my grandparents. I am second generation in this country. So I said, ‘Fifty years?’ He said, ‘1661.’ I was knocked to the floor. They are on the same tract of land! Lyle, Frank and Joe gave me an education on how important this land is. They showed how special this place is and the need to protect it.”

swick@timesreview.com

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Her name was Sarah. She was 8 years old.

Old enough to be sold by her owner in Southold Town to a man named John Parker, who owned a mill on the Peconic River near what today is downtown Riverhead. 

On Oct. 7, 1689, for the “just sum of sixteen pounds current money of this province,” James Parshall sold Sarah, whom he had owned since her birth, to Parker. The bill of sale describes Sarah as an “Indian girle.”

The sale of this child came 49 years after English settlers arrived to colonize the North Fork and eastern Long Island. By then, slavery was a well-established institution. There are few records of Indian slaves in Southold, but they were here and part of the fabric of life on the North Fork, Shelter Island and the South Fork. African slaves were also here, and in larger numbers.

The story of Sarah is told in official records. Hers is a small part of the larger story of what became of the Indians who called eastern Long Island home for thousands of years and who barely survived as intact communities in the years immediately following the arrival of Europeans.

“Apart from the slavery issue, the Indians by then [1689] had become a marginalized segment of the population,” said John Strong, an acclaimed scholar of Long Island Indian history and a former professor at Southampton College. “They had become the domestic labor pool.

“Families were dispersed and children often left the home by age 7 to live as domestics,” Mr. Strong said. “These Indian communities were intact at first, but were quickly impacted after the English arrived. And their land went very quickly. They had nothing to exchange with the Europeans but their labor.”

Organized groups of English men, women and children first arrived on the North and South forks, and later Shelter Island, in 1640 or so. There is no known account on eastern Long Island of the very moment when the Indians, the first people to live on this land, encountered Europeans arriving in boats on beaches to begin new lives in what to them was a new world.

Historians say the large-scale English settlement of eastern Long Island was made possible by the extermination of the Pequot people during the 1637 Pequot War in Connecticut. Once they were out of the way, the English leapfrogged across Long Island Sound to eastern Long Island to take over land occupied by Indians who had long been subjugated by the Pequots.

Among the first Englishmen to come was Lion Gardiner, who had been a mercenary in the Pequot War. For a black dog and some trinkets, he “bought” what was first called the Isle of Wight and later Gardiners Island. On the South Fork lived people the English would call the Montauketts and the Shinnecocks. The Manhansetts live on Shelter Island and the Corchaugs on the North Fork.

Another mercenary in that war was John Underhill, who briefly lived in Southold on the site of today’s Southold Free Library. He was an accomplished Indian killer — more than 400 were slaughtered in the Pequot War and more than 100 in a later massacre in western Long Island. His life is celebrated by a large obelisk monument in the Oyster Bay cemetery where he was buried in 1672.

To the English, acquiring land they could own in their own names was paramount. Using English law and language, they wrote up formal deeds incomprehensible to the Indians, Mr. Strong said, describing a particular tract of land that would be transferred to the new owner. The English buyers signed at the bottom, and then wrote out the names as they understood them for the Indians who were — in the English view, not the Indian one — selling the land. The Indians then scratched a large X next to their names.

By this process, and over just a few years, the Indians “sold” off their land — and all for trinkets such as beads, sewing needles, cloth and some tools. Many, such as the Corchaug Indians, either left as laborers on whaling boats or on farms or relocated to so-called remnant communities of impoverished Indians living together anywhere they could, such as in Mastic or at Montauk Point.

It appears from Southold records that by the late 1680s, the last community of Corchaugs was living at Indian Neck in Peconic. That land was later sold out from under them. Records show the town set up a reservation for the Corchaugs at that time north and east of Indian Neck, at a place then called Corchaug Pond.

Ft. Corchaug Credit: Jeremy Dennis

In his years of research, Mr. Strong has found some 300 Indian names on dozens of documents. Names like Mammawetough, a Corchaug; Wyandanch, a Montaukett; Weenagaminin, a Shinnecock; and Poggattacut, a Manhansett from Shelter Island.

Bob Stanonis, a retired Suffolk County probation officer who lives in Southold, has done extensive work as an amateur historian on Sarah’s life and fate. His work has been supported by Dan McCarthy, an assistant in the local history section of Southold Free Library. Both men have worked to retrieve this Indian slave girl from being lost to history. Mr. Stanonis’ work confirms that Parshall sold Sarah to Parker, who later, when Sarah was in her 20s, sold her to John Wick, owner of the Bulls Head tavern in Bridgehampton. He has been identified in other research as being John Wickham, the brother of Joseph Wickham of Cutchogue. Sarah was then sold to a Robert Walter, who put her aboard the boat The Ambitious headed for the Portuguese island of Madeira.

Mr. Stanonis has shown that Sarah’s mother was named Dorcas; both mother and daughter were likely Pequots who survived the massacre and the hunting down of survivors after the fighting had ended. Sarah may have been born on Gardiners Island, where Lion Gardiner was a slave owner.

“We know that Sarah petitioned Albany asking for her freedom,” Mr. Stanonis said. “She argued that she should not have been enslaved. A Captain Peter Roland returned her to New York in 1713 from Madeira. This is the last trace we know of her.”

swick@timesreview.com

Part I: Before anything else, there was ice

Part II: Long before the ‘first families’

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This week, you’ll want to see “The Work We Do” videos on The Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review websites. Both showcase local people on the job, doing the work that gets them up in the morning. In so doing, they show the rest of us that working hard and loving what you do can be a celebration.

We started “The Work We Do” series last summer. The idea was to create a place in the newspapers to highlight people going about their work and talking about what they do here on the North Fork. Since then we have showcased people in a wide range of jobs who joyfully tell us their work stories. There is something fundamental and good and life-affirming in how they describe their work lives.

The stories have appeared both in print and in videos on the papers’ websites. The videos bring another dimension to these stories. One of the first videos we did for The Suffolk Times was about David Steele of Mattituck, one of the North Fork’s last potato farmers. But Mr. Steele does not see himself as the “last” of anything. His life is not about nostalgia. As the video shows, he loves the work he has done since he was very young. Residents of Mattituck and Cutchogue, where Mr. Steele raises potatoes and hay, are better off because he is caring for the land we all value so much.

Another “Work We Do” video showcased Keith Reda of Braun Seafood in Cutchogue. Mr. Reda is lucky to live and work in Cutchogue, but also to be around the extraordinary bounty we receive from our bay and ocean. His joy in working at Braun Seafood comes through. Watch him expertly filet a striped bass. He is a craftsman at work.

Watch the video on Cutchogue piano teacher Ann Welcome, too. She seems to have been born to teach music and piano to students over the generations. And how lucky those students have been to have her as their teacher.

These stories appear in our newspapers each week. But if you are inclined, also click the video category on The Suffolk Times and News-Review websites to watch this week’s video installments of “The Work We Do.” In The Suffolk Times you’ll meet Beth Ficner, security guard at Cutchogue East Elementary School. She’s worked there since 2004 and is on duty by 7:30 a.m. every school day. This is a person who loves her work.

See her on a typical morning as students are dropped off to begin their day. What parent wouldn’t want Ms. Ficner greeting a son or daughter at the curb? She is as vital to the school’s well-being as its teachers and staff. You can be certain that as those kids grow up and move on to high school and beyond, they will not forget Ms. Ficner’s greetings.

On the Riverhead News-Review site, you’ll meet Carolyn Keller, who has been a server at Cliff’s Elbow Room in Jamesport since 1970. Yes, you read that right — 38 years working at a popular North Fork restaurant, taking orders, saying hello to people she has seen for years, cleaning up and going home at the end of the evening.

She begins her video this way: “A normal day here is you come in, do your setup, make sure everything is done right. You come out and you greet your customers, you wait on your customers, and you go back to check on them to make sure everything is OK.”

She also talks about holding a customer’s baby so the mother or father can enjoy dinner. “I’ve held so many babies here,” she says. “I just love my job. I really do; I love my job.”

To many people, work is, well, just work. Something to get through, to endure. For the people showcased in “The Work We Do” series, however, work is a joy. Something to be mastered and done well each and every day. They are an inspiration.

Steve Wick is executive editor of Times Review Media Group. He can be reached at swick@timesreview.com.

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This is an imaginary conversation with a member of a ‘first’ family whose roots in Southold Town — which originally included present-day Riverhead — date back to the town’s founding in 1640. The history reflected in the answers comes from Southold and Shelter Island town archives, records and other sources. 

Q: For generations, Southold and Southampton have been going back and forth in a debate over which town was settled first. What is the answer?

A: Well, let’s be clear: The Indians were here for thousands of years all by themselves. End of story.

Q: OK, fine. But who was first?
A: See previous answer.

Q: Can you perhaps offer a bit more? It’s important to me. My family line here goes back to the 1600s.

A: There are clues as to whether the North Fork or South Fork was settled first by white people. An educated guess based on available clues can be arrived at. But the difference between a formal white settlement in one town versus the other is probably just a matter of weeks. It is meaningless to keep up this discussion. And keep in mind that some things long thought to be true have, on closer inspection, turned out to not be true.

Q: Surprise me.

A: The Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council had the beams in the Old House on the Village Green tested and the wood cores came back to 1699. Not within a few years of the supposed date in 1640 when English people came over from Connecticut — but well past that. Its long billing as the oldest English-built house in New York State is not true. That’s not town history, of course, and it’s just one house, but the importance of this discovery is not to be downplayed. That house was probably first occupied in 1699 by one Joseph Wickham, who had come to Cutchogue from Southampton.

As for which town was settled by Europeans first, does it really matter? If you can’t go to sleep tonight until you know the answer, consider this: There is some evidence that in 1636-37 a group of some sort was at Hashamomuck tapping pine trees for resin used in boat caulking. They surely weren’t the only such crews on eastern Long Island, nor were they a formal settlement. European fishermen — Portuguese, Basque and probably others — were fishing the northeast Atlantic coastline for cod well back into the 1500s and perhaps before Columbus, whose “discovery” in 1492 has been overblown. And, of course, there were Vikings in Canada in the year 1000. You don’t think they ventured south?

Q: Hold on! I’ve read for years the saga of Southold’s settlement and the story of the Old House. I’ve read the brochure! I saw the historical marker! I took my kids there! You’re telling me that story is not true?

A: Indeed. Some of the early history written here was little more than cheerleading. There is a big difference between cheerleading and patting yourself on the back because someone from your line was here “first,” and real history based on archives, primary sources and, for that matter, science. Dendrochronology — wood core testing and dating — is real science.

Q: I will continue to believe what I want to believe. My people were here first!

A: Good luck with that. But while I have your attention, this is the settlement story line as it is accepted today: A group from the Massachusetts Bay Colony sailed south in February 1639. They went to Oyster Bay first, where they were expelled. They then turned east and sailed into Peconic Bay around June 1640. (This was the Julian calendar, with the new year starting in March.) They landed at North Sea and headed south to a site where Southampton Hospital is today. They were likely the first formal English settlement in either town. Another point to keep in mind: Lion Gardiner was already living on his island in the bay to the east when these folks arrived. In terms of English settlement on the East End, he was first.

Q: What about Southold?

A:  Well, first, don’t read anything by a certain early Southold “historian” who shall remain nameless here. The words “invented out of whole cloth” describe his work. But a good guess is that a religious-inspired group came here from Connecticut as part of a venture called the New Haven Colony. It would have been in 1640, too, perhaps just after the Lynn, Mass., group. Logic says they would have come early in the growing season so they could get a crop in the ground and thus have something to eat.

Amy Folk, the accomplished Southold Town historian, points out that records show the Rev. John Youngs, the group’s minister and organizer, was still in Massachusetts as of May 1640. That would move the group he brought to Southold to weeks or months after that and probably into the fall. Those first settlers here lived in makeshift houses. The time difference between when either group landed is insignificant. History isn’t a competition.

Back to the Old House in Cutchogue: It is too fancy for a first-generation house. That house was built in the second or third generation by people who were settled and successful and had money and slaves — and after the Indians had been herded onto smaller tracts of land and were out of the way. But don’t weep for the Old House. It’s still a grand home and a wonderful part of Southold history.

Q: What was the relationship between those first English settlers and the Indians, in New England and here?

A: See: history of Ireland.

Q: Oh. OK. Not good.

A: Indeed. To the English, the Indians were in the way of their dreams of landowning gentility and being lords of their own manor — something they couldn’t possibly be in Old England, where they didn’t want to be because this or that person was Catholic or the wrong kind of Protestant. And where some of the locals didn’t want them around either, or they were just the wrong class in a class-saturated society. Think Downton Abbey rolled back a few centuries. So they came here, where they could be in charge and make everyone around them be just like them. Exactly what they didn’t like in the Old Country.

Q: What about Shelter Island?

A: Shelter Island was included in a 1620 land grant by England’s King James I, but no Europeans were formally living there until after William Alexander took possession in the late 1630s. From Alexander the island went to one James Farret and from him to Stephen Goodyear of the New Haven Colony.

Goodyear sold the island in 1641 to some Barbados sugar merchants, one of whom was Nathaniel Sylvester, who was likely the island’s first white settler. In 1652 he made the purchase legal, in his eyes, through an agreement with a Manhanset Indian named Youghco. That year he built a house on the island and a fully developed plantation was soon up and running, complete with scores of enslaved Africans and American Indians. The Sylvesters also gave shelter to Quakers.

swick@timesreview.com

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For Sandi Brewster-Walker, connecting names and histories to the men who worked on whale boats in the 19th century is a passion.

In particular, her interest is in making visible those men of color — Indian and well as black, freed slaves and runaway slaves — who worked on whale boats that set sail from eastern Long Island to work the world’s oceans and who brought back the oil that lighted homes and cities and powered the Industrial Revolution.

“I want to put names next to faces,” she said. “To make these whalers real people. They had lives. I do their genealogy so I can know who they were and where they came from. They were invisible and I want to correct that.”

Ms. Brewster-Walker has long been interested in this history. Growing up in Amityville, she heard stories from both her mother’s and father’s sides about their Indian ancestors, the Montauketts, who lived at the eastern end of the South Fork.

“There were Fowlers on both my mother’s and father’s sides, and that is an old Montaukett name,” she said.

Last Saturday, Ms. Brewster-Walker spoke about her work at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead. Her talk was a Black History Month feature event and part of the society’s “Book and Bottle” series of author lectures. Ms. Brewster-Walker’s talk was called “Long Island Whalers of Color.”

“There were men of color and native men from Long Island who traveled all the world’s seas looking for whales,” she said. “They had amazing adventures, only to come home to segregated lives here.”

She mentioned black Long Islanders like Pyrrus Concer from Southampton, born the son of a slave in 1814, who sailed aboard the Manhattan, the first American ship to visit Tokyo in 1845. She spoke about Shinnecock and Montaukett men like Warren Cuffee and Stephen Talkhouse Pharaoh, who worked on whaling boats out of Sag Harbor.

Nomi Dayan, executive director of the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, said the major Long Island whaling harbors were Sag Harbor, Greenport and Cold Spring Harbor, with a smaller operation in New Suffolk.

“It was rare to find any whaling ship that didn’t have a person of color on it,” she said. “Whale ships were kind of floating U.N.s, especially during the height of whaling. There was an incredible amount of diversity on ships from around the world.”

Jennifer Anderson, an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, said at least 25 percent of the men who shipped out on whaling boats from Long Island and New England were people of color.

“There were native populations living in the region, and they had experience,” she said. “The sea was where they could find employment. Captains needed skilled whalers. They acquired a level of social status on board ship that they didn’t have back home. At sea, it was most important how good your skills were.”

For many black men who worked on whaling boats, the elevated social status and the money they earned allowed them to buy land and homes back on eastern Long Island. The community of Eastville in Sag Harbor was established by such men.

The individual stories of some of these whalers are what keeps Ms. Brewster-Walker up at night doing her research. Ms. Anderson has the same keen interest. In interviews, both recount the story of the five Lee brothers. They were born on Shinnecock land to an Indian mother and a black father, who was likely a runaway slave from Maryland.

The five sons were part of an illustrious Indian whaling family. One was named Garrison, who was likely named after the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Milton Lee served aboard the Panama, which shipped out of Sag Harbor with a total of 10 Shinnecock men aboard out of a crew of 26. Notley Lee sailed on the Philip the First out of Greenport.

Historians say Notley jumped ship in the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific. He never returned to Long Island. Robert Lee returned to Long Island aboard the California, according to a paper prepared for a conference held last year at Stony Brook University.

A year after his return, Robert Lee was among 10 Shinnecock men who died while trying the salvage cargo from the freighter Circassian in Bridgehampton. Nearly all the Indian men who died on that ship had been whalers, including Warren Cuffee.

The ship ran aground on a bitter December day in 1876 during a storm. The men volunteered to rescue the cargo. The ship broke apart. The men fell into the freezing water; none survived. The deaths devastated the Shinnecock community, with 25 Indian children losing their fathers.

It was reported later that people on shore could hear the men singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” before they died.

Photo credit: The Whaling Museum & Education Center of Cold Spring Harbor

Steve Wick is the executive editor of the Riverhead News-Review and The Suffolk Times. He can be reached at swick@timesreview.com.

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