It’s all fun and games until someone gets arrested. For residents of Sag Harbor, an offense of sufficient seriousness could land a person in the village jail.
Many small towns and villages did not have official jails until the latter half of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th. In a post-Civil War America, an effort to rebuild and shore up the country’s institutions gained traction, leading to the repair of old penitentiaries and the construction of many new ones.
The jail pictured here was built in Sag Harbor in 1916. The contractor, George Garypie, was paid a tidy sum of $1,259.90, or about $36,600 today. Garypie was in charge of the carpentry, and the steel prison cells were handled by the E.T. Barnum Wire and Iron Works of Detroit for $555.90, about $16,000 now. The building was used from 1916 all the way until 1983, when a new holding cell was built inside the adjacent Sag Harbor Police Department headquarters.
Cells in the building were used to hold prisoners only temporarily, but it never took long for the occupants to engage in skullduggery. According to research by Jean Held, a former Sag Harbor Historical Society board member, many people recalled smuggling alcohol to friends imprisoned in the cells using rubber tubing or simply by handing containers through the windows.
Four years after closing, the jailhouse had fallen into disrepair, as can be seen in this Firth Calhoun photograph from The East Hampton Star’s archive. In an effort to save the building, Sag Harbor Village officials offered it to the newly formed historical society as a potential headquarters. The society agreed to restore the jail, although the group now has a separate headquarters building and runs the jail as a small museum.
Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
