Memorials of the North End | Part One

49 No. Main Street | 1833-1940 | Southampton | Abigail Fithian Halsey

by Lizbeth Halsey White

Paper read before a meeting of Southampton Colony Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, on March 19, by Mrs. Edward (Lizbeth) P. White, 1929

In the earliest days of the village the triangle of land bounded by Main Street, Bowden Square and North Sea Road was common land, for some time after that on every side had been occupied.

Early in 1700 this was bought by Abner Howell, son of Col Josiah, who lived on he Bowden property. Abner Howell divided it between his two sons. To David he gave the south portion which included the plot where in the early 1840s Capt. Daniel Jagger built his home. This is now the home of Wm. L. Donnelly. To Phineas Howell was given the north portion of the Triangle. On the west half of his lot he built a tan-yard, which he afterwards sold to Ebenezer Jagger and removed from the village.

The Main Street part of the lot was purchased in 1788 by Annanias Halsey, whose son Urah lived across the street in the Wilman Halsey house and whose daughter, Susan, lived to very old age in the little house which stood on the front of the lot now owned by Abigail Halsey. This house and also the Nancy Sayre house is now in Tuckahoe.

On the Seven Ponds road to the Water Mill, on the edge of the Piggery Golf Links, is a very charming little old house which about the year 1800 stood beside the mill stream just opposite to the old Water Mill. Into it came a young bride Phebe Rogers and her husband Charles Fithian Halsey. They purchased a farm and he was miller in the windmill, (still standing) not far from their home. Three boys and three girls came to them and the father died. Desiring to give her boys a trade Phebe sold the farm and moved her family to New York City—then a three-days journey by stage-coach. She apprenticed the boys for four years to learn the mason’s trade. At that time (1820) New York City had begun its phenomenal growth, thought it was still a country village as compared with the city of today. Wall and Canal Streets were being built up, and Greenwich Village was a residential suburb.

There in Grove Street in 1827 the youthful masons built a home for their family use, and when Henry, the eldest son, returned to Water Mill for his bride, it was in the Grove Street house that they made their first home. But eastern Long Island beckoned and the family returned.

“Capt. Harry” Halsey in 1831 bought the plot on the triangle owned by Annanias Halsey and built his home thereon. The house in Grove Street is still standing and the wooden mantels and paneled and reeded casings of doors and windows were exactly copied in the little parlor of their home in the North End. In a room, now a part of the kitchen, “Miss Amanda” kept her Dame school and there are a few still with us who remember her as their first teacher. Opening out from the school room was a dark stairway where her pupils were banished by way of punishment. While she was having recitations they would pull off their shoes and steal to the kitchen chamber above and have no end of fun, as children do, when they can find an attic to play in.

“Miss Amanda” loved poetry and flowers and the perennials she planted still bloom in the little old garden. Some of her punishments, after she had tried them out on herself, she abandoned. A big pewter horn hung high in its place on the wall and nothing was allowed to break the routine of the little schoolroom except when a whale-rally was on at the beach and “Capt. Harry,” without ceremony, rushed in for the horn that he might do his part in passing the signal which meant “Whale off shore! All hands to the beach!”

Both of Capt. Harry’s brothers became whaling captains but he bought a farm and worked on at his mason’s trade. His title of “Captain” came to him as wrecking master. Before the Life-Saving Service was established (1876) and nearly all ships were sailing vessels, wrecks along the shore were not infrequent and the wrecking crews were a necessary and important organization.

For so many years when Sag Harbor was a prominent whaling port and her harbor was busy with ships it became the Mecca of every man, and especially of every boy, to go to the Harbor and see the ships.

Capt. Harry Halsey, when a boy of twelve years, had been permitted to pay a visit to his cousins living there. A ship came in bringing the news of the signing of the Peace between England and the United States, after the War of 1812-14. His first impulse was to carry home the good news as quickly as possible. So, in his boyish enthusiasm, he ran all the way to this home crying “Peace! Peace!” and this is the way the news was brought to Water Mill. The boy had been named for his great-uncle Henry Halsey who was Capt. of a Privateer during the Revolution and who lost his life in the Battle of Groton Heights. His name with other patriots who fell at that time is engraved on the monument there. He with his brother Jesse, after hearing the news of the Battle of Lexington, rowed across Long Island Sound in a row-boat and enlisted in the Continental Army. Jesse Halsey served throughout the war and won the rank of Captain.

In the April number of the Scribner’s magazine (1929) is an article written by Thomas Boyd entitled, “How Mad Was Anthony Wayne?” The article describes the evacuation of the City of Philadelphia by the British Forces and the Battle of Monmouth Court-house. The incident described on page 436 verifies a tradition cherished by the numerous descendants of Jesse Halsey, the Patriot, who at the time was near Gen. Washington and heard his reprimand of Gen. Charles Lee for his disobedience of orders and his cowardly retreat. He felt the reprimand, though severe, was just and well deserved.

He told also of the severe heat of that eventful day and said that more men die from the intense heat than from the guns. This favored the Americans for though many had frozen in their homespun garments during the previous severe winter at Valley Forge, on this hottest of July days the homespun-clad army had the advantage over the enemy. In their heavy and much-decorated cloth uniforms.

Capt. Jesse Halsey, brother of Capt. Harry, built the house which is now the home of Dr. David Hallock. The sister, Elizabeth, married Capt. William Fowler and settled just north of the Burying Ground. Her husband was a whaling Captain and he also spent several years in California during the gold-rush. Three of their sons went on whaling voyages and never returned. Dear Aunt Libbie Fowler! Who never heard the click of the gate without a throb! She had an overwhelming sympathy for others in time of need. In sorrow and in illness she became the neighborhood mother, and there are many who remember her for her kindly deeds.

To return to the Triangle, the southern half of which had been given to David Howell. It was he who about 1750 built the well-preserved old house which long since became the home of the Herricks. David Howell was a silversmith and just when he left Southampton we have no record. It is certain that his house was occupied by the British officers during the Revolution, and it is safe to assume that he was one of the many refugees to Conn. So many of the homes of the villagers changed ownership after the Revolution. This, in 1772, was purchased by Col. Josiah Smith of Moriches for his daughter, Hannah, who had married Elias Pelletreau. He was a merchant and the store which he built remained for many years attached to the house on the south. His wife, Hannah, was very deaf, caused by the effects of cold and exposure when endeavoring to relieve her father who for some time was imprisoned by the enemy in the Provost Prison in New York City.

She made very possible effort to relieve his distress, for imagination would fail to reveal the miseries of an enemy prison during those bitter years.

Courtesy Lizbeth Halsey White Files, Southampton Historical Museum Archives and Research Center 

Schools of Old Southampton

by Mrs. Edward P. White | 1932

 

from Southampton Magazine | c 1913

EARLY SCHOOLS—The settlers established a school soon after they moved from Old Town to the present village. Richard Mills was Schoolmaster in 1651. He was also town clerk and hotelkeeper. He earned many an extra penny writing wills and deeds and letters for people. The first schoolhouse that we know about was built in 1664, and the Town meeting that year orders that there “shall be a schoolhouse 20 ft. long and 15 ft. wide at the town’s charge and finished fit for use before winter.” This schoolhouse stood on Jagger Lane and probably had a fireplace at each end. Like the church, it was swept once a week and sometimes scrubbed by the girls of the school. In these days, no law compelled a parent to send a child to school. Few girls attended. They often learned to read and write at home, making letters in tiny cross-stitch on the beautiful samplers, which we have from our great grandmothers. One lies before me worked by a little girl of twelve years. The letters, small and capital, are carefully formed, and the motto worked in dainty stitches,

“!Tis education forms the tender mind,

Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”

Girls in those days learned their domestic science and domestic art from their mothers at home and left the “book learnin’” largely to the boys. The teacher in the new school was paid $175.00 (thirty-five pounds a year) and he was allowed only “12 days in ye year for his own particular occasions.” The hours were eight A.M. to eleven A.M., and one P.M. to five P.M. The three R’s—Readin’, Writin’, and ‘Rithmetic—were, as the old rhyme goes, “Taught to the tune of a hickory stick.” One of the first rules of education in the school, as in the home, was “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

The schoolhouse was unpainted with board seats fastened to wooden benches. Each pupil brought his daily stick of wood, and the fire was started each morning by live coals from the nearest house. Just before the recess in the morning, two boys were sent next door to get a pail of water, and the gourd dipper passed from mouth to mouth with no one fearing germs from that ancient drinking fountain.

EARLY SCHOOL BOOKS—The earliest books used in the school were hornbooks. A hornbook was a thin piece of wood with a printed piece of paper on it. On the paper were the alphabet and simple sound combinations: a-b=ab, e-b=eb, etc.—a book of only one page with a thin sheet of yellow horn across it. A hole in the wooden handle made a place for a string, and the book was often carried around the neck. There were few books in the school. The New England Primer with its alphabet rhymes served the purpose of all the readers we have today. The A B Cs were taught first to rhymes like these:

            A – In ADAM’S fall we sinn-ed all.

            B – Thy life to mend this BOOK attend.

            C – The CAT doth prey and after slay.

A tiny picture followed each rhyme. A was a man; B was the Bible; C was a cat ready to catch a mouse. The children always liked Z—“Zaccheus he did climb a tree His lord to see.” In the back of the book was the Lord’s prayer and rhymes like this:

            Birds in their little nests agree

            And ‘tis a shameful sight

            When children on one family

            Fall and quarrel and fight.

All wrote with quill pens. Each child had to take his own goose quill to school, and it was the teacher’s duty to keep the quill sharp. They used homemade ink. Do you remember the mottos George Washington used to write in his copybook? “Labor to keep alive in your breast that divine spark called conscience” was one of them. Then they did their sums; addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Here is an old rhyme the children used to say:

            Multiplication is vexation,

            Division is as bad,

            The rule of Three it puzzles me

            And fractions make me mad.

NORTH AND SOUTH END SCHOOLS—The next schoolhouse stood on the corner of Main Street and Nugent Street, only there was no Nugent Street then. The schoolhouse was a long one-story building with a fireplace at each end. Here, our great grandfathers and grandmothers studied the queer old schoolbooks, which we find in our attics today. This schoolhouse must have been a large one, for we read that when the district was divided into North and South End, the schoolhouse was cut in two and made into two buildings. The South End School stood on Job’s Lane where the old firehouse is, and the North End School stood on Windmill Lane, south of the place where the Bethel Church is now. These were called district schools and were free to all children under twenty-one, living in either district.

The littlest children went to the Dame School. This was a private school kept by a woman. Miss Sayre kept a Dame School in a little house that stood on the triangle in Bowden Square, and in later years Mrs. Jane Proud kept one in a low house on the hill where the Grammar School has stood in recent years. One of her puils has told us much about Mrs. Proud. She was “a widow lady and always wore a black dress and steel spectacles and was always knitting a blue stocking. She had a stick that weighed seventy-five pounds. At least, that is the way it felt to me. I always wondered how she could knit that blue stocking and also see us whisper at the same time.” To the New England Primer, this later generation of children added “The Child’s Guide” and “Peter Parley’s Geography,” with its wonderful poetry:

            The world is round and like a ball

            Is swinging in the air,

            The atmosphere is round it all

            And stars are shining there.

Mrs. Proud’s low one-story house has long since made way for the Grammar School, and of all the little girls and boys who sat on the low benches and studied Peter Parley’s Geography and read The Child’s Guide and wrote in the copybooks and played at recess on the hill—not one remains. Their names are in the stones in the old North End graveyard across the street.

After Mrs. Proud’s day, Miss Amanda Halsey kept a private school for little girls in her home. Her father, Captain Harry, had an apple orchard, which grew south of the house. The girls were forbidden to pick the apples from the trees. They obeyed very carefully the letter of the law, but found a way to get the fruit by climbing the trees and eating the apples from the stem.

The Southampton Academy was built in 1831, when the town had grown so large that a high school seemed necessary. East Hampton had built Clinton Academy in 1795, the first high school in New York State. These were private schools, where boys and girls had to pay for their schooling. There was no graduating from the district school. One day your father said, “Thomas, take your books and go down to the Academy,” and willy-nilly you went. No Regent’s Examination to pass for entrance! Peter Parley’s Geography and Saunder’s Fourth Reader and Smith’s Arithmetic were left behind; you studied History and Grammar and Algebra and maybe Latin and became a proud “Academy Shoat.” A few of the boys went to college and became ministers or doctors or lawyers. The old Academy stood on the corner of Main Street and Job’s Lane, where Rogers Memorial Library stands today. It was moved to make a place for the Library and is standing, The Elks’ Clubhouse on Monument Square.

UNION FREE SCHOOLS—In 1891, the North and South End Schools joined and formed a union school. The new schoolhouse on Windmill Lane, housing all grades and the new high school, was considered a very large building then, and people forty years ago little dreamed that we should ever need the large schoolhouse that became necessary in 1913. And what would the first schoolmaster, Richard Mills, say to the still larger schoolhouse now ready for use in 1933?

FATE OF RICHARD MILLS—FIRST SCHOOLMASTER—Poor Richard Mills, our first schoolmaster in Southampton—probably the first English schoolmaster in the Province of New York. He left Southampton in 1657, and went to the Dutch settlements where he was declared by Peter Stuyvesant to be the “Ringleader of the English.” He was thrown into prison. From prison he wrote a piteous letter to the Dutch Governor, saying he “had been tenderly brought up,” and that “the prison fare endangered [his] health and life.” This was true, for the old English account tells us that, “His imprisonment caused his death, which happened soon after his release.” Such was the sad fate of the first schoolmaster of the Town of Southampton.