What's In A Name?: Buell Lane

The Rev. Samuel Buell arrived in East Hampton in 1746 with a degree from Yale and a reputation as a traveling revival preacher. He took over a split congregation and re-energized it, converting many a soul over the next 50 years. In the year 1764 alone, according to Jeannette Edwards Rattray's "East Hampton History and Genealogies," "he had the happiness of admitting into his church 99 persons."

Mr. Buell must have been quite a thunderer in the pulpit. His style is apparent in a letter to a Groton, Conn., friend: "The whole town of East Hampton has bowed as one man," he rejoices. "Every day the church is filled with worshipers by nine in the morning. Such a praying for mercy is heard; the piercing cries of sinners fill the air. The arrows of conviction have been fastened upon guilty hearts. There are shouts of holy joy and unutterable groanings."

Not only the church (the second of East Hampton's three Presbyterian church buildings, torn down in 1871) but his house as well "is filled constantly," he wrote, "with sinners and their cries for mercy. Children have come out of Hell's horrors; young people eight, ten, twelve years old have been converted; among the rest a Jew." (That was Aaron Isaacs, grandfather of John Howard Payne.)

The church, which featured massive oak beams brought over from Gardiner's Island, was a short walk across Main Street from the minister's house on the corner of Buell Lane, where the East Hampton Library is today. A fine portrait of Mr. Buell, incidentally, can be seen in the library.

East Hampton's third minister was "an orator, but no scholar," Mrs. Rattray wrote. "He was hospitable, and the best of company. He was a good teacher," too, although not much of a speller, and "physically tireless," riding "14 miles on horseback the day he was 80, to preach, returning in the evening."

He married three times, outliving his first two wives. The third, Mary Miller, was about 50 years his junior. Their courtship was the basis of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "The Minister's Wooing."

Mr. Buell's patriotism during the Revolution was apparently questionable, and in Connecticut he was reputed to be a Tory. He was known to dine aboard British ships anchored in Gardiner's Bay during the British occupation of Long Island, and "kept on good terms with the invaders," according to Mrs. Rattray. Some, however, said he was protecting his congregation.

He was 81 when he died, on July 19, 1798.