The Mast-Head: The Montauk Papers

It was difficult last week for me not to go down into a historical rat hole while working on a story about how the East Hampton Library had recently completed the digitization and cataloging of a long-sought collection of papers from Montauk’s early days.

I encourage anyone interested in such things to take a look at the library’s website, under the Long Island History-Digital Long Island tab. From there, one can find a link to the Proprietors of Montauk Collection (Arthur W. Benson Papers) and on to thumbnail images of the remarkable holdings.

In an account that appeared on The Star’s front page last week, I outlined some of the papers’ history: how Arthur Benson spirited them away in about 1885 and how his granddaughters eventually deposited them with what would become the Brooklyn Historical Society. Then, how East Hampton Town officials and, later, representatives of the library, had for decades sought their return.

This is a provocative tale in which one can find plenty of similarities among Benson and any number of today’s urban sophisticates who are bent on bending the locals to their will. Just consider the seemingly unending string of out-of-town investors and developers whose designs on Montauk and desire to influence the outcome of regulatory decisions by whatever means possible have continued to the present day.

Contemporary speculators have nothing on those who came before them, whose record of deliberate dispossession of the native Montaukett people is deeply unsettling. The oldest item among the papers now on view via the library is a 1702 agreement in which Ungomont put his mark on a document relinquishing any claim to his ancestral land, saving for himself the right to continue planting crops. Almost 200 years later, promises that the Montauketts could continue to grow food and pasture livestock there were among assurances that Benson and his subordinates aggressively sought to eliminate.

While working on the story last week, I took down a copy of my grandmother’s “East Hampton History and Genealogies” on the chance that there might be something in it about George Fowler, a Montaukett whose story figures prominently in the Benson papers. To my chagrin, though I was not surprised, there was no lineage provided for the Fowlers, nor for the Pharaohs, another Montaukett family. This seems an oversight clearly in need of correction.