The Mast-Head: Happy Anniversary, Ivy
Perhaps you have wondered while making your way around why there appears to be next to no poison ivy in our fair village. That is not likely to be an accident, as this marks the 68th anniversary of the first annual Poison Ivy Eradication Week, declared for the first seven days of June in 1947 and each year thereafter by representatives of both the Town and Village of East Hampton.
Above the names of Supervisor Herbert Mulford Jr. and Mayor Judson L. Banister, as well as the town justices and village trustees and the respective clerks, officials issued a call to each landowner to “make a concerted effort to destroy poison ivy on his own property and to report to the Town or Village Clerk the location of ivy which is not being eradicated.”
It went on, “We also urge everyone to take the greatest precautions to protect himself from the poison ivy while spraying or destroying the ivy.”
My source for this, by the way, is the remarkable online archive of The East Hampton Star for the years between 1918 and 1968. Issues are searchable any which way from a link on the East Hampton Library’s website. There were some 180 references to poison ivy when I checked.
Poison Ivy Eradication Week in 1947 got off to a running start, The Star reported, with an objective to eliminate “this nuisance to summer vacationists.” The Ladies Village Improvement Society led the charge, with help from the Boy Scouts, American Red Cross, two garden clubs, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary. Details about how they all went about the task were not provided, but the L.V.I.S. ran advertisements in several May 1948 issues of The Star reminding readers that it was time once again to spray for poison ivy and recommending the use of 2,4-D, a weed killer that is still on the market, although we now know it is more ecologically sensitive to avoid chemicals and pull it out by hand.
The effort begun in 1947 appears to have worked, at least in the village. I can think of no obvious patches of poison ivy along Main Street or any of the places my friends and I explored here as a teenager. Get north of the bridge, however, and it pops up in the hedgerows and can be seen climbing trees. Our family’s place, down by the beach near Promised Land, is nearly overrun with the stuff. That and ticks, which are a subject for another day.