Memories of Montauketts and Freetown
A house believed to be the only surviving 19th century dwelling of a member of the Montaukett tribe is slated for designation as a historic landmark, after a public hearing on the proposal next Thursday.
The 1.7-acre property, near the intersection of Springs-Fireplace Road and North Main Street in East Hampton, is believed to hold the broken-down remains of a residence that was moved from Indian Field in Montauk to the area then known as Freetown. In the late 19th century, Arthur Benson, who owned and developed much of Montauk, offered deeds to plots of land in Freetown to Montauketts, to entice them to vacate their traditional tribal lands.
A number of houses were apparently moved. The saltbox-style house in question, now owned by East Hampton Town, once belonged to George Lewis Fowler and his wife, Sarah Melissa Horton.
Freetown was so called because it was settled by former slaves of wealthy local families. The Fowler house is the only one that remains.
George Fowler worked as a gondolier and gardener for the artist Thomas Moran, whose Main Street, East Hampton, house and studio, a national historic landmark, is being restored. Fowler was also a caretaker at Home, Sweet Home.
His house was moved to Freetown around 1890 and “is possibly one of the most historically significant structures in the Town of East Hampton,” according to town documents.
The history of the area will be the subject of an oral history project, “Mapping Memories of Freetown,” for which those with connections to and memories of the Freetown neighborhood have been invited to the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum, at Cedar and North Main Streets, on Sunday between noon and 5 p.m. A program at 1 p.m. will include comments by researchers and others.
Allison McGovern, an archeologist and professor at the State University at Farmingdale who has been surveying the museum property (the former Selah Lester farm) for the possible remains of a wind-powered sawmill that was once used by the Dominy family of craftsmen, will be on hand, along with anthropologists, to collect oral histories about the neighborhood, as well as ideas about restoring and interpreting the Fowler house and lot.
A 1790 census reportedly recorded East Hampton’s residents as 1,299 whites, 99 slaves, and 99 people classified as “all other free people,” according to the Center for Public Archeology at Hofstra University.
“The Fowler house completes the picture of the Moran house and Home, Sweet Home,” Robert Hefner, a history consultant to the town, said in a report. “This puts Main Street and Freetown together.”
With its connection to the former Indian Field site in Montauk (now Montauk County Park), and its archeological resources, the Fowler house is also likely eligible for a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, wrote Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town planning director, in a report delivered recently to the town board.
“The house and its property are a valued part of the cultural, historic, economic, and social history of the town,” she wrote. “History tends to record the wealthy and powerful. George Fowler was neither, and we have much less information about the ordinary and poor people in our history. Yet the people who lived in Freetown were the workers who supported the wealthier households in East Hampton Village, Gardiner’s Island, and elsewhere in town. His house and property have the potential to teach us about the lifeways of the Montauketts after they were dispossessed of their homes in Montauk and detribalized by the New York State government. It is a potential interpretive tool for understanding the history of Freetown, which is minimally understood by historians.”
The public hearing on the historic landmark proposal will begin at 6:30 p.m. next Thursday at Town Hall.