Southampton and the Shinnecock: The First English Village

In June of sixteen forty, a party of English Puritans stepped ashore at a quiet inlet on the north side of what is now Southampton. They had sailed from Lynn, Massachusetts, families named Howell and Sayre and Farrington among them, and they had been granted eight miles square of land by an agent of the Earl of Stirling. That landing spot is still called Conscience Point, and Southampton celebrates the twelfth of June as Founder's Day.

The village claims to be the first English settlement in the State of New York, though the town of Southold makes the same claim about its own landing later that same year. The record is thin enough that the argument has never been fully settled, so both towns still wear the crown. But the English did not arrive on empty ground.

This was the homeland of the Shinnecock, an Algonquian speaking people who had lived and fished these bays for thousands of years. Within a few years of the settlers arriving, the Shinnecock were doing something that would shape the whole East End. They knew the ocean, and they became the labor and the skill behind colonial whaling, going out after right whales that drifted along the shore, hired under contracts with Southampton men.

That seamanship built the region's first real economy. For centuries the Shinnecock held onto a core of land at the neck of the bay. In eighteen fifty nine the New York State Legislature authorized the transfer of roughly thirty five hundred acres, breaking an earlier long term lease, and that land opened the way for the railroad to push east.

The tribe never accepted the loss, and generations kept the community and its ceremonies alive. Their Sunrise Powwow, held over Labor Day weekend, has run since the nineteen forties and now draws tens of thousands. And after a fight that stretched across decades and a petition first filed in nineteen seventy eight, the federal government formally recognized the Shinnecock Indian Nation on the first of October, two thousand ten.

So when you drive the flat farm roads and the hedge lined lanes of Southampton, remember that under the mansions and the potato fields is a much older map, drawn by the people who taught the newcomers how to read the sea.