Farm Museum Opening Saturday
When the East Hampton Farm Museum opens on Saturday, visitors will be transported back to 1900, a time when the North Main Street locale of the Selah Lester house, which is now the museum, was a bustling nexus serving the Freetown neighborhood, populated by African-Americans, some of whom were former slaves, and Native Americans. The Lester house reflects the life of a farm family of the time, when barters of eggs and other farm goods could raise needed cash.
“This is what my grandfather used to call God’s country,” Prudence Carabine said during a recent tour. Ms. Carabine, a key member of the volunteer group that has created the museum, said she hopes it will imbue visitors with a sense of community life in Bonac, a “rich place” dominated by the land and the sea where families cared for one another.
The grand opening on Saturday will include period banjo and fiddle music, doughnuts and apple cider, and an opportunity to help Alex Balsam of Balsam Farms plant garlic on the two-and-a-half-acre property, where a period garden is planned.
In 1900, the Lester family was raising seven children in the two-bedroom house at the corner of North Main and Cedar Streets, Ms. Carabine said. It was built as a replica of Miss Amelia’s Cottage in Amagansett, she said, and moved to the site around the turn of the century by sled. It is now filled with early 20th century objects from a number of East Hampton’s old families.
Numerous pieces of furniture and a cast iron cook stove from 1915, which is now in the kitchen, were salvaged from the Tillinghast barn in East Hampton after that property was sold and before the buildings were demolished.
A copper sink was donated by Stuyvesant Wainwright, Ms. Carabine said, and her own aunt hand-painted, with a bee design, a collection of small dishes that line the wall above the kitchen sink. Ms. Carabine added that beehives will be kept at the site, if feasible.
A table in the kitchen holds cast-iron baking tins, tintype portraits, and a rug beater. There are eyeglasses dating from about 1920 donated by the family of Dr. William G. Abel, who recently died at age 92, and a rattrap from the old Dune Alpin dairy farm in East Hampton owned by the late Abe Katz.
In the parlor a table is set with silver made by the Alvin Silver Company in Sag Harbor and a cabinet contains pewter pieces from Mr. Katz’s family. A circa-1840 clock came from the Talmage family house at Willow Hill in Springs.
Several pieces, such as a blanket chest made by someone in the Dominy family and a quilt, are on loan from the East Hampton Historical Society, which has helped the museum and is accepting donations until the museum obtains its own nonprofit status.
The organizing committee is continuing to seek objects dating from 1890 through 1920; its specific wish list includes period clothing, a copper wash pot, a hand pump, and a china cabinet that can be locked to protect valuable items.
A letter just donated to the museum is displayed on a wall. Dated September, 1932, it was sent to Miss Marge E. Lester, a young woman living in Millerton, N.Y., presumably to attend school, by Sineus Conklin Miller Talmage, a man who was her senior by decades. “I like you,” he wrote her. “Will you be my wife?”
Another room has been designated a media room, where films about East Hampton history that include interviews with local farming and fishing families and one about three wind-powered sawmills once on the site, will be shown.
A Dominy family mill was once on the property, and its foundation is believed to be just under the surface in an area close to North Main Street. Gaynell Stone, an archeologist, with Robert Hefner, a historic preservation consultant, plan a dig to unearth it. A possible grant would enable Ms. Stone to assemble a team of archeology students to continue the work next year.
Ms. Carabine said the group hopes the museum will have 50 to 70 docents so it can be open at least one day a week with two on hand at all times. That way, volunteers would have to work only one day a year, she said. A training session is to be offered next month.
The museum will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays through Dec. 6, when holiday activities will take place following the East Hampton Santa parade. It will reopen in April.
On coming weekends, there will be a pumpkin pie-eating contest, and talks designed to illuminate “what 1900 was like on North Main Street,” according to Ms. Carabine. Diane McNally, the clerk of the East Hampton Town Trustees, will give one of the talks, on East Hampton’s government of that time.
East Hampton Town, which owns the property, spent $200,000 to restore the house and a restoration of the barn is planned.
“What we have here is a gem,” Ms. Carabine said. “We see this as a beautiful property, and something that can teach a lot of Bonac values.”