Starting tomorrow, the Shinnecock Indian Nation will host this year’s powwow on the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton. The powwow has been held every year in the same location since 1946, with Shinnecock powwows dating to at least 1912. Today, it features dance competitions and draws crowds of more than 30,000 people every year.

The photograph above shows members of the Beaman, Butler, and Pharaoh families at a joint powwow of the Shinnecock and Montaukett people in East Hampton in 1944. The gathering of 30 took place near Three Mile Harbor, which was unusual. 

As part of the event, a ceremonial signing of a peace treaty took place between the Montauketts and the Narragansetts, related to a dispute from 1658. Narragansett Chief Night Hawk (Philip H. Peckham) and Montaukett Chief Backskin (Charles Butler) led their delegations in signing the treaty, followed by a symbolic tomahawk burying and traditional dances. The East Hampton Star described a Cherokee, known as Chief Rising Sun, acting as master of ceremonies.

Among the 1944 powwow’s organizers was a controversial figure known as Carlos Westez, or Red Thunder Cloud. He lived in East Hampton and documented local indigenous people, passing himself off as a member of the Catawba tribe, which has since been disputed. He later donated his photographs to the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection, with biased descriptions that many would consider offensive today. 

One of the occasionally awkward aspects of being the steward of an archival collection is handling the way language, perspectives, and academic practices have changed in the years since certain materials were written or analyzed. The Red Thunder Cloud collection of photographs frequently leads to many such uncomfortable attempts to provide context or explanation for photo captions.

Despite the challenges of addressing Red Thunder Cloud’s choices, without his efforts we would not have access to a collection of photographs like this one, or the identifications of specific individuals.

Andrea Meyer is a librarian and archivist in the Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Liz Soroka practically grew up at the Hampton Classic Horse Show. 

Shortly after moving from New Jersey to Springs at the age of 13, her mother, who sold ads for the horse show’s program and oversaw the children’s tent for a decade, took her and her sister, Kate, along with her to the Classic. For the teenager, the sting of moving was eased by the chance to hang around the children’s exhibition tent and serve on the Hampton Classic’s junior committee. 

The girls had a menagerie of their own in Springs, and later Sag Harbor, and looked after the nonequine animals at the Classic like the llamas and goats. 

“Coming here was the best thing that ever happened,” Liz Soroka told a visitor this week of her family’s long ago move to the South Fork. Her sister is the Hampton Classic’s assistant site manager, helping to oversee the landscaping with a crew of three or four who take only January and February off. Maintenance of the property is a year-round deal. 

Liz Soroka is now the Hamp­ton Classic’s event coordinator. “Horse shows are my career now,” she said, but she wears many hats, so her title doesn’t adequately describe the actual nuts and bolts of the job.

What she does sounds more like a director or stage manager. She is in charge of the jump order, which is the list of who is competing and in what order. Since 1997, when she graduated from East Hampton High School, Liz Soroka has been with the international horse show circuit, Fédération Equestre Internationale (F.E.I.). She travels all over, mostly on the East Coast, for much of the year with her partner, Craig Bergmann, the other event coordinator at the Classic, in their R.V. The two met at the Classic. “We kind of call ourselves carnies,” she joked. “It’s a learn-as-you-go job.” 

He handles the logistical things: 80-plus vendors, 12 food vendors, including the grooms kitchen. “We take down our city and put it up at the next place,” she said, of the tent people, the horse show staff, and the in-gate staff, announcers, and judges, who are the crew traveling on the East Coast circuit. The F.E.I., which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the international governing body of the sport, and, while independent, works congruently with the United States Equestrian Federation, the U.S. governing body.

She spends 14 weeks in the exhibitors office at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington, Fla., then at the Global Champions Tour in Miami, the Lake Placid Horse Shows, the Pennsylvania National Horse Show in Harrisburg, Pa., the National Horse Show in Kentucky, and the Las Vegas National Horse Show. In her downtime, she works for Stephens Designs, designing and building jumps that are rented to shows all over the country, including the Classic.

Of the 1,300 horses at the Classic, only about 100 are part of the F.E.I. They are, she said, “the top level of horses here.”

“It is an elite club” for which she does a lot of organizing and paperwork, “getting them where they’re supposed to go.” She has a protective attitude toward the horses. With the F.E.I. there are a lot of rules wherever its horses are competing, among them a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to animals competing with any medications in their bodies. They are kept in a secure stabling area, with strict rules about who comes and goes — and anyone entering must show photo ID. 

“I have a bit of a babysitter reputation. People come to me . . . someone says, ‘I don’t know,’ they say, ‘Go ask Liz. She’ll figure it out.’ “ 

She comes home from Florida in early May, starts to design and build jumps, goes to Lake Placid, is back by mid-July, and is here with the Classic for the five-week setup and until October. It takes the crew 10 days from the Monday after the show to get the whole 65 acres “pretty flat,” she said. 

“Life on the road is not for everyone,” she said, but “I like every part of my life, actually. This show is home for me.”

After growing up only 10 blocks from each other in Manhattan, Francesca Holland Crane and Noah Raimi Drapacz “had countless close encounters over the years,” Ms. Crane wrote, before “they finally found each other on Christmas Day 2015,” thanks to the dating and social networking app Bumble. 

“With their shared appreciation of family and friends, sushi, goldendoodles, sunshine, and never wanting to leave Manhattan, they knew it was meant to be,” she continued. “Shortly after dating, Noah received the unanimous approval of the family doodle, Paddington, as well as Francesca’s two nephews, Teddy and Oliver. Noah proposed at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., in August 2017.”

Ms. Crane and Mr. Drapacz were married on Saturday at Tappan Hill Mansion in Tarrytown, N.Y. Cantor Nancy Bach of the Metropolitan Synagogue in Manhattan officiated. 

The bride is a daughter of Claudia and Richard Crane of East Hampton of Manhattan. The groom’s parents are Nina Drapacz of Manhattan and Daniel Drapacz of Lake Hopatcong, N.J.

A graduate of Hamilton College, with a master’s degree in early childhood education from the Bank Street College of Education, Ms. Crane is a head nursery school teacher at Merricat’s Castle School, an inclusive private preschool in Manhattan. She is also a private swim instructor, having been a member of the Asphalt Green Unified Aquatics Swim Team from 1995 to 2006 and serving as captain her senior year of high school. She was also the captain of the Dalton School’s varsity swim team from 2005 to 2006 and a member of the varsity swim team at Hamilton College all four years.

Her husband is an associate in the capital strategy group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a bachelor’s degree in history. While there, he was a member of the R.O.T.C. program, and upon graduating commissioned as an infantry officer in the Army. He served in the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division and in 2013 deployed to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, where he served as a heavy-weapons platoon leader. He also served as the executive officer of the 2nd Brigade Headquarters and Headquarters Company in 2014.

On Saturday, the bride wore a whimsical beaded and fishnet wedding dress designed by Theia and carried a bouquet of dahlias, garden roses, ranunculus, lisianthus, sweet pea, and astilbe accented with seasonal greens and wrapped in ribbon.

Her sister, Angelica Crane Dosik of New York City, was her maid of honor, and wore a navy beaded chiffon dress with floral appliqués by the same designer. Her bridesmaids were Katie Dilyard of New Jersey, Lindsay Sable of New York City, Kriti Dave of Boston, and her cousin, Sally Rinehart of New York City. They wore navy ML by Monique Lhuillier dresses and carried smaller versions of the bride’s bouquet.

Mr. Drapacz’s best man was Zach Finkelstein of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His groomsmen were Daniel Osborn of Tacoma, Wash., Marcus Broeder of Tampa, Fla., and Kevin Woodcheke and Ben Kind, his cousin, of New York City. 

The couple live in New York, but spend summers and weekends in East Hampton with Ms. Crane’s family.

In a move long anticipated by its supporters, the Amagansett Life-Saving and Coast Guard Station on Atlantic Avenue has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 1902 station, which is now a museum, was one of 30 such stations on Long Island’s South Shore, where crews  kept watch for ships in distress in the first half of the 20th century, and patrolled the beaches in wartime.

Now owned by East Hampton Town and overseen by the Amagansett Life-Saving and Coast Guard Station Society, it had been moved from its original site in 1966, saved from imminent demolition, and turned into a private residence on Bluff Road by the Carmichael family. The family donated it to the town in 2007, and it was moved back to its original site and restored over the following decade.

The station was listed in June on the New York State Register of Historic Places. Such listings make properties eligible for a range of public preservation programs and services, among them state matching grants and federal historic rehabilitation tax credits, according to Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.’s office.

The new designation makes the station one of more than 120,000 structures and sites in the state that are listed on the National Register.

As time passes, the landscape often changes. While there are certainly places in East Hampton that seem frozen in time, most would argue that much is different, and it’s fascinating to look back at what’s come and gone. Take, for example, the history of a simple storefront.

Toward Pondview Lane, on property occupied at present by Guild Hall, stood McCann’s Meat & Fish Market. Originally meat dealers, David A. Fithian and Frederick (Fred) McCann opened their shop on Main Street in 1888, with Fithian eventually selling his share in the business to McCann in 1899.

Fred McCann was born in East Hampton in 1860 to John and Annie Hodder McCann. Growing up, he had a number of jobs before opening his store — at a general store, fishing for bunker and cod, and working for the United States Lighthouse Service on Little Gull Island.

Designed by Tom Babcock, an architect, and built by George Eldredge, McCann’s market was strictly a meat market for 30 years, before changing tastes prevailed, bringing fish, fruit, and vegetables into rotation. Before the telephone became commonplace, the market sent a horse-drawn wagon door to door, and customers could choose their meats from the back of it. The store also frequently delivered fish and clams to the Maidstone Inn and lobsters to the Maidstone Club.

In 1940, Fred McCann retired after 52 years at the market, and the business was subsequently closed. He died in Florida at the age of 87. 

Myrtle Shepard eventually bought the McCann Meat & Fish Market building and used it as a summer home for several years. It was acquired by Guild Hall in 1964. The structure was razed, and Guild Hall has since expanded.

Gina Piastuck is the department head of the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the incorporation of East Hampton Village, a series of celebrations will take place in the summer of 2020, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. announced at Friday’s board meeting.

In a statement recounting the history of the village’s formation, Mr. Rickenbach noted that on Sept. 25, 1920, residents voted, by a margin of 166 to 57, to break away from East Hampton Town. “Needless to say, we have all reaped the benefits of this vote,” he said. 

To plan the commemorative festivities, the mayor said he had appointed a centennial anniversary committee, with Barbara Borsack, a trustee, as co-chair.

In another cause for celebration, Mayor Rickenbach said that “we’re in the final throes of construction at the new Five Corners roundabout,” referring to the intersection of Route 114 with Buell and Toilsome Lanes. On Tuesday, Becky Molinaro Hansen, the village administrator, confirmed that asphalt and striping work as well as the installation of signs will be finished by the end of this week. A guardrail, she said, will be installed after Labor Day. 

“It will be much improved over the previous condition that existed there,” the mayor said, before offering some driving advice to his fellow citizens. “Just remember to follow the signage and keep to the right.”

The Very Rev. Denis C. Brunelle, the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, introduced the Rev. Leandra Lambert to board members at the meeting. Ms. Lambert began serving as an assistant to Mr. Brunelle on Aug. 1. “I’m very delighted to be here in East Hampton, and to see how my gifts can contribute to this community,” she said. 

The board gave notice that public hearings will be held on Sept. 21 regarding proposed laws to regulate the distribution of magazines and other “handbills,” prohibit smoking and vaping on village property, and prevent businesses from providing single-use plastic straws unless specifically requested.

At the July 31 board meeting, during which the plastic straw regulation was introduced, Mayor Rickenbach pointed out that juice boxes, which often come with a plastic straw attached, might complicate the law’s enactment. On Friday, Linda Riley, the village attorney, said that juice boxes would be exempt from the legislation.

In other business, the board signed off on a request from the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce to use Herrick Park as the site of a fall festival on Oct. 20, and milling and paving work was approved for Maidstone Avenue, Medway, Gingerbread Lane, Race Lane, Conklin Terrace, and the Main Beach upper parking lot. 

The donation by John Moss of 100 hand-colored postcards of Home, Sweet Home was accepted into the Home, Sweet Home Museum collection. 

The board accepted the resignation of Richard Balance as a member of the Ambulance Association. “I’d just like to mention that Rich was a member when I joined the association in 1990,” said Ms. Borsack. “We appreciate his service for all these years.”

The resignations of Karen Lockard Collins from the planning board and Carolyn Preische, who has been a member of the Design Review Board since 1992 and served as chairperson for nine years, were also accepted. 

In hiring news, the board accepted Kenneth Pinillos and Jason Redlus as new members of the Ambulance Association on a probationary status. Jonathan E. Pharaoh was accepted as a new member of the Fire Department’s Hook and Ladder Company No. 1, and Nicholas J. Arkinson was accepted to Engine Company No. 5.

The Amagansett Farmers Market was a buzzing hangout for decades, from the 1970s through the 1990s, but after closing for a few years and then bouncing from owner to owner for a while (Zabar’s, then the Amagansett Food Institute), it lost its mojo. The lines of customers’ parked cars disappeared. Last year, however, Amber Waves Farm, which grows and markets local produce, took over its management and it started buzzing again. At the same time, family-friendly activities began and became what may be an even greater draw. 

Every day this summer, as customers sit or sprawl on the lawn drinking coffee and eating organic foods from the on-site kitchen, Amber Waves has offered activities for children and adults, including farm chores, story time, and cook-your-own-pizza nights. As autumn arrives, the programs will continue with kitchen-skills seminars and themed dinners. 

On Saturdays and Sundays this summer activities started in the morning. Amber Waves cultivates 10 farmland acres north of Main Street, growing hundreds of vegetables and herbs, plus more than 75 kinds of flowers. Families who sign up to pitch in on farm chores are guided into the fields for light tasks, perhaps stopping to visit the chickens and taste a few vegetables. Then, Ann Jones Levine, the farm’s education coordinator (favorite vegetable: Sungold tomatoes), reads stories to the children, who are then let loose on the grounds. 

The flour for the pizza dough comes from wheat grown on site, and during pizza nights participants of all ages roll and shape the dough, customizing their pies with toppings from the fields and watching them go into and come out of the wood-burning oven.

Weekday programs are more structured. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Amber Waves partnered this summer with the Children’s Museum of the East End to create a farm club; it will continue after school in the fall. Other attractions that may keep the energy hopping once summer is over will be a dinner for Community Sponsored Agriculture participants on Sept. 16 and a fund-raiser for the Amagansett School on Oct. 6. Autumn-weekend workshops are planned on topics such as fermentation, canning, pickling, and flower  arranging. 

“We are a nonprofit educational farm,” said Katie Baldwin, a co-founder of Amber Waves (favorite vegetable: Chioggia beets). “Everything the farm produces and the market sells funds and supports the farm’s educational programming.”

Of the estimated 9 billion tons of plastic generated since 1950, some 6.3 billion tons exist in the form of plastic waste, a volume that has  overwhelmed our waste management and infrastructure capabilities, with a result of about 8 million tons of plastic waste entering the oceans every year.

These grim statistics were relayed to an audience at the first Hamptons Institute discussion of 2018, held on Aug. 6 at Guild Hall in East Hampton. The majority of the plastic waste in the oceans, said Barbara Hendrie, the newly appointed regional director for the United Nations Environment North America Office, is “the plastic that we use for 15 minutes and then throw away.” Water bottles and single-use bags “are the things that have value for 10, 15 minutes,” she said. “That’s why they stay in the environment, because they don’t have another value beyond that.” 

Media reports in recent months include an account of a dead sperm whale that washed ashore in Spain, 64 pounds of mostly plastic, but also ropes, pieces of net, and other debris, lodged in its stomach; a rare sea turtle that starved to death shortly after it washed up on a beach in Thailand, its stomach clogged by pieces of plastic waste and rubber bands, and a pilot whale stranded on a beach near the Thai-Malay border, 80 plastic bags in its stomach. 

But the problem is not just large items made of plastic, said Tierney Thys, a biologist and documentary filmmaker for National Geographic Explorer and research associate at the California Academy of Sciences. “The pieces break down into microplastics,” Ms. Thys said, and do more than impede digestion. As it breaks down, plastic can release its additives, including bisphenol A, “known endocrine disrupters, which can affect your hormone system, your metabolism, your fertility, and immune responses,” she said. “They also can attract and adhere persistent organic pollutants — PCBs and DDT. When an animal ingests those, all the way down to the tiniest little zooplankton, they’re not only getting physical obstruction, but a poison-packed pill as well that can then pervade the system.”

It gets worse. Lovers of seafood “are probably eating about 11,000 particles of plastic every single year,” said Dune Ives, the director of the Lonely Whale, which leads ocean conservation initiatives to combat environmental degradation and species decline. Every sample of sea salt tested has shown plastic microfibers, she said, and globally, 83 percent of tap water and 94 percent of bottled water has plastic microfibers. “We’re just starting to learn what the health effects are of plastic waste in our ocean, in our marine ecosystem,” she said. “To animals, it’s becoming more and more clear, but to humans, we’re only starting to better understand how much plastic is showing up in some of the things we eat and drink.” 

And even worse: “The projection is that plastic production will double in 20 years and quadruple by 2050,” Ms. Hendrie told the panel’s moderator, the actor Alec Baldwin. 

Only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled, Ms. Hendrie said, and around 12 percent incinerated. The rest goes into landfills or is dumped as litter in coastal areas or rivers. “They all find their way into the ocean environment,” she said. To address the problem, the U.N.’s environment program is focusing its efforts on single-use disposable plastics, like packaging, bags, and straws. 

Governments and individuals can take action to reduce the scourge of plastic waste, the panelists said, but corporations have a responsibility for the life cycle of their products. “You can make yourself known with the corporations you care about,” Ms. Ives said, and those holding portfolios invested in fast foods and consumer goods can make it known that “their brand being associated with packaging that might end up in the belly of a sea turtle, or a whale, or a bird” will hurt business. 

“Recycling is not going to save us,” she said. Corporations associated with marine litter and plastic pollution, most of them based in the United States, must ensure that their packaging is not only recyclable but also recycled. “We have a situation now where a lot of the goods that are coming out of these U.S. and [European Union] companies are being sold in parts of the world that have zero waste management infrastructure. That seems a little egregious to me.” 

“Extended producer responsibility,” Ms. Hendrie said, posits that corporations are responsible for the entire life cycle of their products. Countries including Norway and Sweden have enacted legislation mandating that responsibility, she said, but in the United States, “it’s much more at the state 

level. There are a number of different states that have enacted bans on single-use plastic, but there are also, unfortunately, some state legislatures that have actually adopted bans on bans.” Nine states have moved to prevent municipalities from enacting single-use plastic bans, with similar legislation pending in others. 

On a brighter note, the panelists spoke of alternatives to plastic and efforts to rid the oceans of it. Mr. Ives spoke of a company making packing filler from hemp and another making straws from kelp, for example. Ms. Thys works with Think Beyond Plastic, a hub for entrepreneurs, industry, scientists, engineers, and consumer advocates to kick-start innovation and collaboration toward safe alternatives to plastic. Venture capitalists, she said, are “gathering funds to help catalyze this kind of innovation.” 

“The six worst offending countries in Asia have actually started to step up and recognize the problem,” Ms. Hendrie said, while Ireland’s tax on single-use plastics has brought a 90-percent reduction. Suffolk County’s ban on single-use bags, which took effect on Jan. 1, has resulted in a surge in the use of reusable shopping bags, she said. 

Ms. Thys referred to Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization that has developed a passive drifting system that it estimates can remove half of the Pacific garbage patch in five years and is to deploy next month, and to National Geographic’s Geochallenge competition for middle school students, this year’s topic being plastic pollution. 

The U.N.’s Clean Seas campaign, Ms. Hendrie said, is urging nations to “turn the tide on plastic,” an initiative “specifically aimed at dramatically reducing the consumption and production of single-use plastics.” More than 60 governments have made significant commitments, she said, including India, which has committed to completely eliminate single-use plastics by 2025. “We are very forward-leaning on this,” she said. 

This week, Mr. Baldwin moderated the second discussion in the Hamptons Institute’s 2018 series, focused on the #MeToo movement. The last of the series will be on Monday at 7 p.m. and will focus on the opioid epidemic.

This weekend is Ellen’s Run, a fund-raiser benefiting the Ellen Hermanson Foundation, which is credited with bringing new medical imaging technology to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. 

Imaging technology, beginning with the X-ray, completely revolutionized health care over the last century. Can you imagine trying to figure out if a bone was broken before X-rays? East Hampton’s Dr. David Edwards began his career doing just that: witnessing the dawn of medical imaging technology from his private practice in East Hampton and later at Southampton Hospital, where he specialized in “bones and babies,” beginning a decade before X-rays became mainstream.

Dr. Edwards was born in Amagansett in 1877 to Capt. Joshua B. Edwards, who was a legendary whaler, and Adelia Conkling Edwards. He attended New York University and Medical College in the city, working first at Bellevue Hospital in 1899, then at New York Foundling Hospital, and finally Seaside Hospital on Staten Island before returning to East Hampton.

As a country doctor, Dr. Edwards made house calls on horseback, motorcycle, and car in all sorts of weather. He also took sick children into his home when there were no hospitals available and was responsible for building an early small hospital at the Neighborhood House on Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton.

Between opening his private practice on Dec. 16, 1901, and his death on May 7, 1964, Dr. Edwards served East Hampton for over 50 years. He delivered over 3,000 local babies without ultrasound imaging. His medical accomplishments included treating a smallpox outbreak among 11 Promised Land menhaden boat crew members, and diagnosing the first known local case of tick fever on Gardiner’s Island in 1913. The same year Southampton Hospital opened, Dr. Edwards joined its staff in 1916, becoming president of the medical board and chief of surgery from 1941 to 1947. He continued to work at Southampton Hospital until his death.

—

Andrea Meyer is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.

The East Hampton Town Trustees have closed Georgica Pond to the harvesting of crabs or any other marine life due to a bloom of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, confirmed in the pond's southwest corner.

On Friday, the trustees issued an advisory to the public and posted signs around the pond warning against swimming or wading near the blooms or surface scum, or drinking the water. Children and pets should be kept away from the area, and anyone exposed to it should rinse with clean water. Anyone experiencing nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, skin, eye or throat irritation, allergic reactions, or breathing difficulties after contact with the water should seek medical attention. 

Cyanobacteria have also bloomed this summer in Wainscott Pond, Lake Agawam in Southampton, Mill Pond in Water Mill, Roth Pond in Stony Brook, Laurel Lake in Laurel, Maratooka Lake in Mattituck, and Fresh Pond on Shelter Island.

Though blue-green algae are naturally present in lakes and streams in low numbers, they can become abundant, forming blooms in shades of green, blue-green, yellow, brown, or red. They may produce floating scums on the surface of the water or may cause the water to take on paint-like appearance. 

To report a suspected blue-green algae bloom at a body of water that contains a Suffolk County-permitted bathing beach, residents have been asked to contact the County Health Department's office of ecology at 631-852-5760 between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. or by email at [email protected]. 

To report a suspected blue-green algae bloom that is in a body of water that does not contain a county-permitted bathing beach, residents have been asked to contact the division of water at the State Department of Environmental Conservation at 518-402-8179 between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. or via email at [email protected].

The D.E.C.'s harmful-algal bloom notification page offers a comprehensive list of affected water bodies in the state.