In 1920, Rosella "Zella" de Milhau sponsored a pageant Babbie produced with the people of the Shinnecock Nation to raise money for an emergency fund on the reservation, and in 1939, Zella de Milhau she helped create the costumes for a second pageant. Always unconventional, also in August 1920, she was sworn in as a motorcycle policewoman in Southampton. A friend of the irrepressible Zella once said, “[She] came to Shinnecock to be with friends and to make life merry for others in her own absurd and lovable way. . .”
De Milhau originally came to Shinnecock Hills in 1896, to study at William Merritt Chase's Summer Art School. In 1924, she represented Southampton as a judge for the Boston Terrier Club of Philadelphia. She had a lodge in Montauk, a house in New York City, and an eccentric cottage in the Art Village, called "Laffalot," a two-story cottage built 1891, by architect Katherine Budd, which she shared with Mollie Lawton, where she worked primarily in printmaking.
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| Bird Houses, Southampton |
About Laffalot, the Autumn 1912 issue of Southampton Magazine, wrote, “This bare little hut under her magic ownership has grown from time to time by repeated accretions, like the native rambling vines on the neighboring hillsides, until the resultant structure is one of the most picturesque and pleasing hereabout and is as integral a part of the landscape as the brambles, bayberry bushes and furze of the fields beyond.”
Sand Spit, Shinnecock Hills, N. Y.
Lawton, an Engllishwoman of Lawton Hall, was an author and playwright. She wrote a thinly-disguised autobiography about her life with De Milhau called "Thank God for Laughter," under the pen name Mel Erskine, in 1936. Before the war, Vanity reported that Lawton's red Chow, was a champion in England, and at the 1914 Southampton Kennel Club.
The two served together in the English Ambulance Corp in the south of France in 1914-1916, receiving five decorations and citations, including the gold Medaille de la Reconnaisance and the Croix de Guerre with stars, from the French government, for their "bravery and devotion to duty." The two had turned their own car into an ambulance. Later, the Town of Southampton would donate an ambulance to their unit.
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| Hampton Dunes |
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| 6 August 1920 | Ironwood Daily Globe (MI) |
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| 10 September 1919 | Tampa Bay Times |
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