Second House to Be Reborn in Original Form

Montauk’s Second House, built in 1797 to house a shepherd overseeing the cattle, horses, and sheep that grazed on the area’s pasturelands, and now owned by East Hampton Town, is set for restoration — a “full steam ahead” plan, according to Supervisor Larry Cantwell, to give the old building on Fort Pond some much-needed care and return it to its original appearance.

According to a report prepared recently by Robert Hefner, a historic preservation consultant to the town, the building was remodeled in 1912 as a private summer cottage. The current project, Mr. Hefner has advised, should do away with the remodeling and hew to the original.

Since 1968, Second House has been operated as a museum by the Montauk Historical Society, but it has fallen into disrepair. An 1809 barn on the property has also “seriously deteriorated and needs repair,” Mr. Hefner said.

Members of the society attended a recent town board meeting at which Mr. Hefner presented his report, and lauded his work in outlining the history of the house and the Montauk pastureland. “The Montauk pasture was the engine of East Hampton’s agrarian economy, and supported its prosperity,” Mr. Hefner told the board. His entire report can be found online at MontaukHistoricalSociety.org. 

Town records from as early as 1661 document the use of Montauk land as grazing land for stock, after groups of East Hampton residents, called proprietors, acquired title from the Montaukett Indians to tracts from Napeague to Montauk. From the 1660s into the 1890s, the 9,000 acres of pastureland on Montauk were a primary resource for East Hampton farmers, Mr. Hefner wrote.

The beginning of the Montauk pasture was delineated by a fence running from Napeague Bay, and a keeper who lived at the First House, just east of the fence, was charged with the task of keeping a list of all cattle, horses, and sheep entering through his gate. A second major fence divided the peninsula from the next fenced-in area, and a keeper who lived at Second House was responsible for maintaining that fence. 

Houses for the shepherds to live in were built in the first years that Montauk land was used for pasture, Mr. Hefner writes, citing a reference in 1663 town records about men going to Montauk to build a “shelter for the keeper,” as well as references to house-building or repairs in Montauk in 1703, 1713, and 1739.

“A house built at Fort Pond in 1746 was the first at this location,” his report states. At an April 29th meeting, the trustees “agreed with Nathaniel Talmage to keep the sheep this side of the fort pond until the 15 day of October and for his service he is for to live in the house built for that purpose at the fort pond beach,” according to records cited by the historian.

While the keepers at First House and Third House kept track of whose livestock was using the grazing lands based on the animals’ earmarks, “the keeper at the Second House was in charge of sheep, and was required to ride through the sheep pasture two half days each week.”

The town trustees, on behalf of the proprietors of Montauk, began in 1797 replacing the three keepers’ houses with new buildings. Second House “had a form and floor plan typical of a medium-sized East Hampton farmhouse of the period,” Mr. Hefner writes. In 1837, a lean-to addition for a kitchen was added. 

From 1797 to 1879, eight keepers lived in Second House, with the familiar surnames of Hedges, Parsons, Miller, Fithian, Stratton, Lester, and Osborn, according to census records cited in the report.

The keepers’ dwellings also served as boarding houses for men hired to assist with herding the livestock, trustees inspecting the conditions at the pastureland, and so on. There were visitors also, who came from farther afield  — from New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., among other locations, according to guest registers of the times.

Mr. Hefner writes that a children’s school opened at Second House in 1896, according to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and in 1898 both Second and Third House were quarters for “officers and newspaper men,” according to that same newspaper, when soldiers returning from Cuba and Puerto Rico were bivouacked at Camp Wikoff. Second House was used as a staging area for food and supply distribution.

The area still served as pastureland even after Arthur Benson bought Montauk from the proprietors for $151,000 in 1879. Soon after, he had additions built onto both Second House and Third House to provide accommodations for family and friends, and for the designers and builders of the Montauk Association houses. An addition on the east side of Second House, and a porch, are believed to have been built circa 1880. 

Following Benson’s death, his heirs sold a large tract to Austin Corbin of the Long Island Rail Road and Charles M. Pratt of Standard Oil. Other parts of the Benson land, including the lot containing Second House, were subdivided. David E. Kennedy acquired three lots listed on the 1905 subdivision map, including the Second House lot, and in 1909 he and his wife, Claire, with their two young children, moved into Second House for the summer.

In 1912 he made major changes, adding a new porch and dormer windows and expanding the house to the east after removing the earlier kitchen lean-to, giving the structure, said Mr. Hefner, the appearance of a typical early 20th-century summer cottage. The family continued to summer at the house into the 1960s. 

In June 1968, the Town of East Hampton bought Second House for $75,000, with half the money coming from the New York State Historical Trust, to be operated as a museum by the Montauk Historical Society. The society opened the museum the following June, and has maintained it ever since.

Despite the 1912 changes, Mr. Hefner wrote in his report, “significant interior spaces remain intact from pre-1912.” The kitchen retains its early cooking hearth and bake oven, and the parlor retains early wide-board wainscoting. 

To restore the vista from the property to Fort Pond, which provided fresh water for grazing livestock, Mr. Hefner has recommended removing a privet hedge. The 1912 additions should also be removed, he said, as “the period of significance ends with the end of the use of the Montauk pasture.”