Saturday Is Heritage Day
The first-ever Sag Harbor Cultural Heritage Day will bring to the village a plethora of programs and events related to its history, culture, community, and music on Saturday starting at 10 a.m. and continuing throughout the day and evening.
Marathon readings will take place at Canio’s Books and the Custom House. In honor of Walt Whitman’s birthday, Canio’s will hold a reading of “Leaves of Grass” from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. In advance of that, William T. Walter, the president of the board of the Walt Whitman Birthplace in Huntington Station, will give a talk tomorrow at 6 p.m., and a party will follow the marathon reading at the shop from 6 to 7:30 on Saturday.
The letters of Henry Packer Dering, Sag Harbor’s first customs collector, will provide the material for a daylong reading in different rooms throughout the Custom House. The letters, the subjects of which range from debt and money problems to health issues and the weather, offer a candid view of his life during the early 1800s.
Music lovers can visit Christ Episcopal Church for a free solo performance by Alfredo Merat from 4 to 5 p.m. Mr. Merat will focus on the music of Jacques Brel, but with a flamenco guitar twist. Jazz will be offered at Bay Street Theater Saturday evening at 8, when Judy Carmichael, the renowned jazz pianist, will be joined by Billy Stritch, a Grammy Award-winning composer and musician.
The Eastville Community Historical Society will conduct a folklore walking tour through the section of Eastville that is believed to have been part of the Underground Railroad. Starting at 11 Saturday morning at the Heritage House on Hampton Street, which was ordered in 1920 from a Sears and Roebuck catalog, the tour will visit St. David A.M.E. Zion Church, built in 1840, and the St. David Zion Cemetery, which dates from 1857.
Village architecture will figure in several other programs. Jason Crowley, preservation director at the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, will discuss the village’s architectural history in the lobby of Bay Street Theater from 11 a.m. to noon. Christ Episcopal Church, which was built in 1894, will open its doors at 12:30 p.m. for a tour of its architecture and historic Tiffany windows. At 12:45, Daniel Koontz will give a demonstration of the Moller pipe organ.
The Whaling Museum’s first exhibition of 2016, “Every Village Has a Story,” organized by Elise Goodheart, will feature work by 10 Sag Harbor artists focused on the village’s working-class roots, with an emphasis on architecture and locales.
For those interested in medical history, the Sag Harbor Historical Society will present “Plants, Pills, and Poultices,” an exhibition of artifacts from the career of Dr. Edgar Miles, a 19th-century physician in the village. The show at the Annie Cooper Boyd House and Museum will open at 2.
The John Jermain Memorial Library will take advantage of Cultural Heritage Day to augment its collections by inviting residents to contribute oral histories, photographs, and any other memorabilia or artifacts relevant to the village’s history. A recording booth where visitors can discuss their lives in Sag Harbor will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. During the same hours, residents can drop off their memorabilia, which will become part of the newly expanded local history collection, and photographs of the village taken during 2016 will be on display digitally.