Tercentenary Pageant of Southampton Town

Alma E. Bishop, knocking on door; Abbie Halsey, seated on left

The Book of the Tercentenary Pageant of Southampton Town

“Founded For Freedom”

August 14-15, 1940

By Abigail Fithian Halsey

Episode One

The XVIIth Century

Scene 1

The Founding

The Commentator:

Behold an Indian village at the head of North Sea Harbor. The wigwam of Nowedanah, chief of the Shinnecocks, is in the foreground. In front of it the young women of the tribe are engaged in a corn planting ceremony while the elder ones go about their daily tasks. Soon the warriors return from the hunt. They lay their spoils before the fires and commence a dance of Happy Hunting.

During the dance we perceive a sloop coming up the harbor. A brave runs in bringing the news and hard on his arrival we see a band of English Puritans land Conscience Point. The first woman on shore exclaims, “For conscience sake we’re on dry and once more.”

The Puritans approach the Indians. They signify their desire for land. Some men of the party come forward with a chest containing sixteen coats. At the sight of the splendor the Indians agree to sell.

They draw up an agreement. “We do absolutely and forever grant to the parties above the mentioned, to them and their heirs and successors forever, all lands, woods and waters from the place where the Indians hayle their canoes out of the north Bay to the south side of the Island, from thence to possess all lands lying eastwood, to have an to hold forever.”

But the Indians also demand corn to be paid after the second harvest and the Puritans promise to give the Indians protection from their enemies.

They then smoke the pipe of peace and guide the colonists to Old Towne where the settlement is made.

Original Undertakers:

Edward Howell

Edmund Needham

George Welbe

John Cooper

William Harker

Thomas Newell

Thomas Terry

Josiah Stanborough (who came later)

Daniel Howe, Captain of the vessel

Edmond and John Farrington

Thomas and Job Sayre

Hentry Walton

Allen Bread

Thomas Halsey

Richard Odel

Philip and Nathaniel Kyrtland

Thomas Farrington

Episode One

Scene III

Early Days and Early Ways

The Narrator:

The new Towne Street in 1649.

The Colony has grow ad prospered. Each freeholder owns his three acres of land on the street but farms and woodland are still common. Incomers must buy on the Great Plains. We see two fence-viewers “perambulating the bounds” nd with them a small boy who will be spanked at the bound, the better to impress his memory. The chimney viewers and cow keepers are busy. A group of young women are quilting a bride quilt for Margaret Howell whose banns are up. Next month she will marry Rev. John Moore of Southold. The unhappy Edmund Shaw sits despondent in the stocks ffor his excessive indulgence at John Cooper’s Tavern. Young Peregrine Stanborough takes his stripes for stealing green apples from Thomas Sayre’s orchard. Sarah Veale, attended by her faithful husband, Thomas, sits with a cleft stick on her tongue, while the Constable recites publicly “exhorbitant words of imprecation” she ahs used to the village reprobate, George Wood.

The Commentator:

Into this peaceful scene break two Pequot Indians. Phoebe Halsey (wife of Thomas) is coming from her home with her little daughter, Elizabeth. The Indians drag phoebe into the house and scalp her. The child escapes. Thomas Halsey, his three sons, and the nearby men puruse the murderers. They are met by Wyandanch, Chief of the Montauks, friend of the white man, who has caught the murderers. He delivers them to the Magistrates, who put them into the pillory until they can be sent to Hartford.

First Interlude

Children Play In The Olden Way

Their Games:

Farmer in the Dell

Looby Lou

London Bridge

Bull in the Ring

Once there was a Lassie

Episode Two

The XVIIth Century

Scene I

Town Meeting Day During the American Revolution

The Narrator:

Our great day of the year has come again. The street is filled with men, women and children from the length and breadth of the town of Southampton. Peddlers crying their wares and visiting Indians scurry about. The Town crier calls the meeting. The election is interrupted by a rider brining news of Lexington. Jesse and Elias Halsey and a friend set off by row boat to Connecticut. Scarcely are they out of sight when the post rider gallops in with news that Fort Ticonderoga has fallen to the Americans.

At once Captain John Hulburt assembles his Company of Minute Men. The first Stars and Stripes made by the women of Southampton Town is presented to the departing company.

Col. William Erskine of his Britannic Majesty’s Army rides in with his Aides coming to demand provender, to be refused at the Town’s peril.

When he has ridden away the dejected people return to their homes while Captain Elias Pelletreau, the old silversmith, organizes a home defense.

SECOND INTERLUDE

An Anthem to Liberty Sung by the United Choirs of Southampton, Hampton Bays, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor

The House at 88 Grove Street

This house in the West Village was built in 1827, by my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Henry Halsey, a mason, and his brothers Jesse and Edward.

According to a letter written by my Great-Great Aunt Babbie in 1936 to the then owner of 88 Grove Street, Henry's father, Charles Fithian Halsey, had died in 1814 and his mother, Phoebe Rogers (daughter of Capt. William Rogers of Bridgehampton), "unable to give her boys a college education although she owned much land here, [left Watermill and] took them to New York and apprenticed them to a master mason. They built 88 Grove Street for themselves, buying Lot No. 52 from Thomas R. Mercein at the time, I think, when Greenwich Village was taken into the city. Henry brought his bride [Eliza Halsey] there, and his mother, brothers and two sisters [Elizabeth and Mary] lived on one floor, he and his wife on the other."

Aunt Babbie goes on to say that her father, my Great-Great Grandfather--the first Charles Henry Halsey--was born in the Grove Street home in 1830, as were his siblings Amanda in 1833, Wilman in 1836, Mary in 1839. A third son, Jesse, was born in Southampton in 1845. In an interview I conducted in December 2005, Aunt Abigail, however, contended that 49 North Main was built in 1832 and Amanda was the first child born in that home.

(A note on the progression of Jesse Halseys.)

In 1843, Jesse and Edward Halsey would become whaling captains and go to sea, while Henry (known as Capt. Harry of North End) would return with Eliza and their children to Southampton in 1832 and build the family home on North Main, employing many of the same architectural devices (including interior cornices and trim) that are found in the house at 88 Grove Street.

After the Halseys had returned to Long Island, the house at 88 Grove Street played a notable role in the history of 20th century social change.

In 1902, 88 Grove Street was owned by Ferruccio Vitale, a landscape architect, and rented to 5 staff members of the nearby Greenwich House settlement, serving as the colony's men's annex. The 5 residents were deemed "only the first among many well-to-do social progressives to occupy either 88 or 90 Grove Street over the next decade."

In 1903, former headworker of the University Settlement Robert Hunter and his wife, Caroline Stokes, moved in. They purchased the home in 1907. The house next door, No. 90, was purchased by Caroline's unmarried sister, the painter and social activist Helen Stokes, and let to various friends in her upper-middle-class socially progressive circle.

Starting in 1907, Grove Street housed various members of the A Club, a "more or less radical" writers' collective and "residential community in which gender roles did not divide along the conventional lines of men doing the 'real' work and women taking care of the the kids, meals, and the laundry." A Club member, social reformer, novelist, and journalist Ernest Poole took up residence in the house for a year, along with his family. In 1910, following the death of her first husband, another A Clubber--suffragist, writer, labor activist, witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and single mother of three who was written out of her own wealthy mother's will for her bohemian ways--Mary Heaton Vorse moved into the home with her aged father and small children.

In 1915, Helen Stokes's brother, James Graham Phelps Stokes, bought 88 Grove Street and moved in with his wife. J.G., and sisters Harriet and Caroline, were the scions of New York merchant and banker Anson Phelps Stokes. After a short but successful stint with the railroads, J.G. made headlines in 1902 when he left his parents' Madison Avenue mansion to become a settlement worker in the East Village. A frequent name on the city's Socialist ticket, Stokes would make headlines again in 1905, when we became engaged to Rose Harriet Pastor, "a young Jewess, who until two weeks ago was a special writer on The Jewish Daily News, and prior to that worked in a Cleveland cigar factory."

Quite the rabble-rouser, Rose Stokes would garner significant press attention for her presence at the 1918 trial of Eugene Debs and, according to the New York Times: "While the Stokeses lived at 88 Grove Rose Stokes risked arrest by passing out birth-control literature at Carnegie Hall in 1916 and was convicted in 1918 of Federal espionage charges for antiwar statements, although her 10-year sentence was set aside." The charges ultimately would be dropped, but on the night of November 3, 1918, police raided 88 Grove Street and arrested Rose for registering to vote in New York while under bail in Kansas for seditious utterances.