East Hampton Village officials are to be congratulated for following through on a long-sought goal of recognizing the work of the Dominy family of craftsmen. There was a moment when an effort to open a new museum stalled. We are extremely pleased that the momentum has returned.
It has always seemed a sort of affront that it was in rural Delaware, of all places, that the three important generations of Dominys — Nathaniel IV, Nathaniel V, and Felix — got their due; a huge collection of about 800 of their tools and patterns ended up at the Winterthur Museum in 1957. A pair of workshops, where they expertly made clocks and worked in wood, however, fell into private hands and stayed there from 1946 until recently.
The restoration and replica draw on detailed specifications of about every inch of the structures done by the Historical American Buildings Survey. In the 1940s, just before the house was torn down and the workshops taken away, two architects working for the government arrived in East Hampton to document the Dominy compound for posterity. They filled four field books with measurements; these are at the National Archives and are a valuable resource to preservationists.
The shops are now back essentially on their original site and, with a replica of the house that connected them, are to be focal points of a new museum and learning center on North Main Street, run by the East Hampton Historical Society. The village board voted on a lease agreement with the society last week.
This welcome news was not a sure thing. After Mayor Jerry Larsen’s NewTown Party swept in on a message of “change,” the fate of the entire Dominy project came under a shadow of doubt. Just $5,000 for utilities there ended up in the 2022 budget. When it came to spending, the new village board majority had its own priorities and historic preservation, sadly, was not on top of the list. That fear was put aside Friday. The society’s lease begins next winter; Mayor Larsen was named to the society board as an honorary trustee as a sign of his anticipated cooperation.
Steve Long, its recently hired director, speaking during the meeting, called the Dominy House a jewel and the family’s work “the glue of East Hampton.” One of the most valuable parts of the Dominy story is that they kept extremely detailed records. These not only include what they made or repaired and for whom, but the weather that day, as well as who they hired for labor, what they were paid, and even who was responsible for their workers’ meals.
There were Montauketts and African-Americans frequently involved with the Dominy projects — in 1806, Shem, a Black man, and two Indigenous men, whose names do not appear in surviving account books, felled the trees that were used to make the timbers for Hook Mill. There is evidence that Shem had been enslaved here in East Hampton earlier in his life. In this one story, all three of the key pieces of the town’s evolution can be found in one place and it is high time that we as a community paid attention to our multiracial past. For 18th and 19th-century East Hampton, Dominy furniture, houses, and windmills were facts of life, now, the stories of the people who made them can be honored as well.