Villages

Death on bicycle, death by telephone pole, death by drowning: Star dispatches from the past take a dark turn this week.

There were no surprises in the East Hampton Village election on Tuesday. Mayor Jerry Larsen, Chris Minardi, the deputy mayor, and Sandra Melendez, another village trustee, all ran unopposed and were re-elected to four-year terms.

This tintype photo from the Fowler family photographs shows young Dorothy Horton seated in front of what is likely the Fowler House in East Hampton.

A beaver that likely arrived at Hither Hills State Park in the ocean surf last April and then built a lodge in a secluded part of Fresh Pond in Hither Woods was found dead on the side of Montauk Highway Tuesday morning. 

A corpse, well advanced in its decomposition, mysteriously washed up off Gardiner’s Island in 1899. And more ghastly stories ripped from the pages of Ye Olde Star.

The Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee had a surprise guest Monday night, Natalie Mongan, a junior at East Hampton High School. Ms. Mongan presented her own independent research, done through an A.P. research seminar, showing the level of erosion at Atlantic Avenue Beach that can not only affect shoreline defense, but shift the coastline itself.

The peripatetic American flamingo, first spotted in Georgica Pond in East Hampton on May 31 before leaving the next day, has returned to the pond. In the past 10 days, it is suspected the same bird has visited Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Cedar and Oak Beaches in western Suffolk.

The usually with-it Star was a little behind the curve with its 1924 comment on jazz music and musicians. And don’t miss the 1974 nudity-on-the-beach case.

If you’ve been to a high school basketball game, a tennis match, or a 5K on the South Fork any time in the last 45 years, you’ve probably seen The East Hampton Star’s sports editor, Jack Graves, on the sidelines, faithfully scribbling notes. But before Graves took over the sports desk back in 1979, he was The Star’s sole full-time reporter for about a decade and had begun his long-running column,“Point of View.”

The Rev. Samson Occom, one of the first Indigenous ministers to be ordained, was an educator and minister to the Montauketts and Shinnecocks and a proponent of land rights. 

An old elm tree thought to be lost after an intense storm roared through East Hampton two weeks ago is still standing thanks to the efforts of the village Highway Department and Jackson Dodds & Co., a tree care business.

“It’s the first in a very long time” to visit New York State, “if not the first ever,” said Shai Mitra, an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, said of the American flamingo that visited Georgica Pond in East Hampton last week. The bird was last seen there Saturday at dusk.