Along the eastward shore of Napeague Harbor a length of rusted pipe pokes out of a dune. Someone just out for a walk with a dog would probably not even notice. Yet this pipe has an interesting history.
Lately, I have been investigating aspects of the area’s long-gone infrastructure, including the toll road that operated between Sag Harbor and Bridgehampton and, later, a rail spur that crossed much of the same ground. The road remains, now owned by the state and free to travel along; the railroad is no more even in living memory.
There was a time when a thriving commercial menhaden industry here employed a lot of mostly men, some seasonal workers up from the South. “Fish factories” dotted the shore along the bayside at Napeague, where pot-works were set up to render oil and meal from menhaden, which we locally call bunker for some reason. Processing the fish required water. The proprietors of a fish factory on Hicks Island were desperate enough for a reliable supply that they ran a two-mile-long pipeline east to Fresh Pond, Montauk. It is the remnant of this line that you can see if you take a walk north along the beach from the end of Napeague Harbor Road.
A few steel buildings are all that remain of the later Smith Meal fish factory at Promised Land in Gardiner’s Bay to the west, but at one time the processing plant there was among the largest on the coast. In fact, it was busy enough to support a freight spur off the Long Island Rail Road main line to Montauk. Spikes and rotted ties still can be seen running more or less directly south in the state park where my siblings and I ran wild as children. In my memory, hopper cars full of railbed stone were parked there during a long period of trackwork in the 1970s.
Now industry in East Hampton is mostly synonymous with landscaping and building, but there was a time when people made things here other than money.