Potato Fields Into Mansions: The Gilded Age Colony
Near The Hamptons, New York
For most of two centuries, the land along the Southampton oceanfront grew potatoes and sweet corn. The change began in the eighteen sixties, when a Manhattan physician named Doctor Theodore Gaillard Thomas rode out here by horse and wagon and decided this windswept coast would make a perfect summer retreat. When the Long Island Rail Road reached Southampton in eighteen seventy one, the trickle became a flood of wealthy New Yorkers.
By the eighteen eighties there were dozens of summer cottages, and the old farm fields along Gin Lane and Meadow Lane began sprouting enormous shingled and Tudor style estates instead of crops. Families named Ford, Du Pont, and Morgan built here. Meadow Lane, a narrow ribbon of sand between the ocean and Shinnecock Bay, became known as Billionaire Lane, home to some of the most expensive residential real estate in America.
To screen the driveways and property lines from the road and from each other, the new gentry planted dense walls of privet, and those towering green hedgerows are still the signature look of the Hamptons today. Behind them, the potato is nearly gone, but the money never left.
