August 26, 2014 — Montauk’s early fishing village had its beginnings in the early 1880s when the first fishermen, who came down from Nova Scotia and from Scandinavia, set up shop, so to speak, according to local historian Henry Osmers.
Sitting inside the senior center at the Montauk Playhouse on Saturday, 89-year-old Eugene Beckwith pointed to a framed copy of the old fishing village on Fort Pond Bay.
His family had lived on plot 90, in a small fishing shack that had one bedroom, a pot-belly stove and an outhouse. While his sister slept on a small cot in the kitchen, he slept on the living room couch.
But it was a good life, a close-knit life, that Mr. Beckwith remembers and is eager to reminisce about. And he is adamant that others know about how Montauk’s early fishing village came to be moved made from Fort Pond Bay toward the ocean in the first half of the 20th century. While many attribute that move—both of the modest residences that lined the bay, and the restaurants and post office that served residents—to the Hurricane of 1938, Mr. Beckwith says that the hurricane was merely the first blow.
It was the U.S. Navy that wiped out the village in 1942, Mr. Beckwith said.
Montauk’s early fishing village had its beginnings in the early 1880s when the first fishermen, who came down from Nova Scotia and from Scandinavia, set up shop, so to speak, according to local historian Henry Osmers. When Edwin Baker Tuthill set up his fishing shack and ice house in 1888, the village began to grow. Eventually other fishermen from the Greenport and Southold area came to the Montauk village in season to fish.
The Long Island Rail Road finally reached Montauk in 1895, building a pier into Fort Pond Bay so that fishermen could dump their catch onto cargo cars to be shipped to New York City’s Fulton Market. At that point, Montauk started to become a year-round village, according to Mr. Osmers.
Vincent E. Grimes, another Montauk resident who grew up in the old fishing village, said it was a thriving town.
“There was everything down there: a post office, meat and groceries stores, a barber shop,” he said on Thursday. “Jake Wells had a store and a dock, Perry Duryea and E.B. Tuthill had a small store and a dock,” Mr. Grimes said. “It was a happy place to be. Everybody got along. Everybody was close knit. Every house was close together and everyone played and argued with each other.”
Read the full story from The East Hampton Press & The Southampton Press