Getting Here and There

The year 1870 saw the completion of rail service from Eastport to Sag Harbor. Prior to that time, a steamboat service from New York City to Sag Harbor, via Greenport, had been in operation. From Sag Harbor eastward, Jeremiah Baker of Amagansett had established a stage line in 1858 to transport passengers and mail.

In 1895, the Long Island Rail Road completed a two-year project to extend the railroad from Bridgehampton to Montauk. After the line was completed, rail spurs were laid in lumber yards, coal yards, beside buildings where mason contractors stored their supplies.

Building contractors no longer had to transport lumber and building materials from the Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor lumberyards.

Shortly after the beginning of this century, the L.I.R.R. established a daily train service from Amagansett to Greenport. It was called the Scott, and it operated for nearly 30 years, making its final run in 1931.

It left Amagansett each morning except Sunday at 10 o'clock and arrived back in Amagansett at 5 o'clock. It was noted for stopping on time at each station, and each September, during county fair time, it provided an excellent means of transportation for those living on the South Fork.

During the years before school bus transportation began in the Town of East Hampton, some Montauk students attending high school traveled by train, arriving in East Hampton at 8:30 a.m. For the convenience of the students, the train stopped at the Osborne Lane crossing to let them off.

Other students who had to travel long distances to high school came by bicycle in the spring and fall, and in winter by a horse-drawn vehicle capable of carrying a number of people, owned by one of the students' fathers.

Usually, during school hours, the horse and rig was left at the home of a family friend.

Although the automobile had made its appearance, people depended upon railroads, steamboats, barges, and horse-drawn vehicles to transport themselves and their goods from one place to another. Motorized vehicles had a long way to go before they created a major change in the mode of travel and transportation.

In later years, when cars became more numerous, students rode to school with workmen.

Clara Purinton, a neighbor of ours in Springs, rode with my father, and after the end of the school day, she walked with school friends to Amagansett. From there she proceeded alone along the Springs-Amagansett Road to her home in East Side.

Sometimes she would be fortunate and be given a lift by someone she knew. Once in a while, when on patrol in the Springs area, Harry Steele, the sole town policeman, gave her a ride on the back of his motorcycle.

In those days, to obtain a high school education, students who lived long distances from school had to endure many hardships, but a great number of them, over the years, thought it worth the austere means it entailed.

During the years when large summer homes were being constructed in what today is known as the Summer Colony, lumber, building materials, and the craftsmen's tool boxes were transported to job sites by horse and wagon.

Workmen either rode bicycles or walked to their job sites, which at times were fair distances from home.

In later years, when those old mechanics aged, some of them referred to that era as the Good Old Days, but to Charles (Peebo) Bennett, a master carpenter with a dry sense of humor, those days "were for the birds."

In 1947 Charlie said to me, "Norton, as far as I am concerned, these days are the good old days. Back in those so-called Good Old Days, I made $2 a day and lived out of a pork barrel, with a few beans thrown in."

"We had to ride bicycles or walk to work in cold, snow, rain, and blow," he said. "Today, we have cars, radios, chain stores, hospitals, and are making a decent wage."

"Soon we'll be watching baseball games in our living rooms. If anyone tells you about the Good Old Days, you tell them that old Charlie says they are nuts."

In the years before World War I, sloops loaded with boxes of fish and bags of shellfish left local waters bound for the fish markets of New London, where cargoes of clams, oysters, scallops, eels, and other fish were sold.

In the fall, after seasonal work was finished, some of the Springs residents who had accumulated savings from seasonal work went on the sloops to purchase food supplies that would last them through the winter.

In New London, Conn., they bought hundredweight bags of flour, sugar, beans, coffee, and hardtack. With home-raised fowl and pigs, supplemented by fish and shellfish, they were able to sustain themselves rather well.

It was a way of life now long past. Most of those ordinary and unassuming folks were content with what Providence had bestowed. They lived a simple life, and looked forward to attending a dance or going uptown to watch the silent picture shows at the Majestic on Saturday nights.

To attend the movie house or dances, they either walked, rode bicycles, or went by horse and rig.

Norton (Bucket) Daniels was born in Amagansett in 1919. A former Republican Suffolk County Legislator and East Hampton Town Assessor, he now lives in Boynton Beach, Fla.