Coastal Cultural Experience: Greenport

Rumrunners in Greenport
by Sarah Stromski

Today we visited my old stomping grounds of Greenport. As we sat on the grass-covered steps of Mitchell Park, I learned something I never knew before: Greenport Harbor played a big part in the 1920’s during Prohibition. Since the neighboring town, Southold was for the prohibition of alcohol (as were many of rural towns during this time), many ships carrying liquor and other types of alcohol had to go into Greenport Harbor. I had known that Greenport was a big whaling town, however I had absolutely no idea this little town had even more history hidden within.

There is one bar in Greenport Village called Brix and Rye, which is a speakeasy-type bar, however it was not an official speakeasy. They do make excellent drinks, though, I highly recommend (for those of you who are over 21, of course). Claudio’s, one of the oldest family-owned restaurants in the country (until recently), was an official speakeasy. Claudio’s actually has a “trap door” leading to a secret passage to hide the liquor. This is very fitting since Claudio’s Clam Bar has a very fun party atmosphere. Supposedly, speakeasies were not how they are portrayed in the movies, with a secret passcode and doorway. They were actually quite like normal bars, just with hidden passageways to hide the liquor.

Even though I have lived out on the North Fork, and going into Greenport Village basically every day, there are so many things I have yet to learn about my own town. It makes me want to go out and explore, maybe even convince someone from Claudio’s to let me go down the trap door behind the bar.

Greenport Blacksmith
by Diana Beckenhaupt
During our trip to Greenport, we visited a smithery near the museum. The blacksmith was historically an essential part of the local economy, responsible for manufacturing things like iron nails, metal parts of buildings, wagons, horseshoes – all crucial to transportation and daily life. In addition, items like clam rakes, anchors, and dredges are equally important to life in a coastal town. Greenport had a blacksmith named Paul during the 1920s to 70s, a German man who supplied the town with necessities, including his own specially reinforced scallop dredges, which are locally prized today. And during WWII, Greenport Village was the largest builder of defense vessels, all with iron parts that could only be made by a blacksmith.

What exactly does a blacksmith do? First, he needs a place to work. The current smithery in Greenport is a repurposed onion drying shed. In the past, smitheries were also cheap wood buildings. As the danger of being burnt down is quite high, no blacksmith would have put much effort into the building. This building must have a chimney and a place to heat up the metal.

The Greenport Smithery’s interior, showing the blacksmith at work. Source: Brad McGuire

Blacksmiths gained their name because unlike other metalsmiths they work with black iron. Different grades of iron exist, depending mostly on the carbon content. As today’s blacksmiths are largely artisans, the strength of the iron matters less than it would have for Paul. One historic type of iron is “bog iron” gathered from the Peconic Bay, then purified in a foundry.

To shape the metal, the blacksmith must heat it up to just under 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. To get such high heat, anthracite coal was used. Anthracite coal is rare, and only found in 2 locations in the US. It is unearthed as “green coal” and must be burnt initially to purified it into a hard, glassy substance (coke) that burns without any smoke.

The iconic anvil is still used to shape the metal. And there are even different minds of anvils – the blacksmith we watched was using a London Anvil, invented by Peter Wright a long time ago.

An article from 1914 detailed the history of the anvil, including this illustration of the various shapes used by metalsmiths for different purposes. Source: http://www.metalsmith.org/pub/mtlsmith/V05.3/Hist-anvil.htm

Each blacksmith customizes his anvil edge as needed; the anvil we saw was reportedly Paul’s original one. Another tool used is the hammer with a flat side (used, unsurprisingly, to flatten metal) and a rounded side (used to draw out surface area).

Blacksmithing is a rare hobby today, and it’s hard to imagine how dependent the world was on black iron for just about everything. The Greenport Museum’s working blacksmith shop is a good way to show visitors how the process would have worked, despite being a recent addition to the town. The original is long gone.

Long Island and Maritime Artifacts
by Christian Iniguez-Ulloa

This picture is on display at the Maritime Museum in Greenport. The picture shows a man surrounded by piles of oyster shells. Seeing this picture gives people an idea of how important shellfish were to settlers in areas like Long Island. These oysters were not only used for consuming and selling but also their shells were grinded up and used as chicken feed.

This artifact is called a signal projector and it can be seen at the Maritime Museum in Greenport. This equipment uses shutters to created flashes of the light by opening and closing the shutters. This provides almost like a visual Morris code for ships to communicate with each other. It was mostly used during WWII to send out messages without the risk of enemy ships intercepting the messages.

This might look like a normal rock at first, but it is actually a tool used by Native Americans and it is on display at the Southold Indian Museum. This native American tool is called a stone mortar. Stone mortars can have two wells in them like the one shown in the picture or one or three wells which they also had displaying along with this one. These mortars had multiple uses for the Native American. They were used to grind corn, beans, nuts, used to prepare clay so they can be turned into pots and also used to grind materials that were used to make paints.

Trip to the Greenport Maritime Museum
by Ana Shore

This Friday, 9/7, our Coastal Culture Experience class took a trip to the Greenport Maritime Museum on Greenport Harbor. The museum had tons of interesting artifacts and several models set up to show how ships from the past few centuries looked. One of the models I found interesting was the one pictured below of a ship on a marine railway. Marine railways, or patent slips, were used for ship repair and construction in the 19th century.

The slips were built from the water and extended inland following a slight incline. The ships would be steered onto a cradle which was placed on the railway and then hauled up the incline onto land. Once on land, the ships could be repaired and then easily moved back into the water by being brought back down the slip. This method was a relatively inexpensive way to bring ships out of water at the time.

A model of a ship on a patent slip at the Greenport Maritime Museum. This device was used to assist with boat repairs in the 19th century.

Here is another picture I took at the museum that features the work of Chris Hamilton. This display at the museum showed several photographs of life at sea from Chris’s collection. I liked this image a lot due to how bright and colorful it was.

An image from Chris Hamilton’s portfolio at the Greenport Museum. This picture shows the life of a fisherman aboard a trawling boat.

East End Seaport Museum Sailmakers Exhibit
by Jennifer Repp

One of the exhibits in the East End Seaport Museum is a Sailmaker’s studio. There is a sign above the exhibit that reads: “ W. J. Mills & Co. Sailmakers”. Starting in 1880 making canvas sails, this company is based in Greenport, NY and is still around today! (source) This photo shows the whole exhibit, arranged as a typical New England sailmaker’s workspace of the time.

This photograph shows the main materials necessary for making sails in the late 1800s and early 1900s: canvas cloth and rope. Although only these few materials were needed, sail making was still profitable as many large vessels for exploration and trading were sail powered before the invention of the motor. Additionally, sails would wear down in the weather and could tear.

Here you see a close-up of the workbench. Like materials, few tools were needed, especially when compared to other trades. The main tools are needles and thread to sew the canvas. Metal eyelets were added to reinforce the holes the line runs through, as you can see in the partially complete sail at the top end of the bench.

Blog Post #1
by Brad McGuire

True to form, the Friday Costal Cultural Experiences class trip to Greenport included the discussion of several topics which had been broached on Wednesday night in Professor Rider’s Maritime Traditions of Long Island session. Of these topics, one which drew my interest in particular was the discussion of who the first European settlers of Long Island were and what combination of forces brought them to the new world. Such driving forces included imperialist forces by the larger European nations to stake out colonies which could produce wealth for the mother countries as well as changes in the structure and dynamics of religion and worship throughout Europe as a whole.

One of the greatest differences between those Europeans who settled on Long Island, let alone throughout the whole of the New England area, and those who settled places such as Cuba or Brazil, was that the men and women who settled along the Northern Atlantic coastline did so to escape persecution. Following years of religious turmoil in England through the years of Henry VIII’s split with the Catholic Church, the differing opinions of his children with regard to the Church of England, and the final introduction of the grandiose taste of the FOP Scot rulers, many believers in England longed for simplicity of worship and practice. Out of this thinking came the movement to “purify the English Church” which resulted in the creation of the Puritans: a sect of the Protestant Church which believed in a simplicity of worship and the ability for one to interpret the teachings of the Bible by oneself.

These Puritans ultimately were the first Englishmen to settle the rocky Northern Atlantic coast and had direct effects upon the physical and cultural composition of the New England and Long Island areas. A desire to take control over one’s own fate and religious destiny ingrained the traits such as active participation in representative government and a fierce disdain for misuse of power and authority, which are commonly recognized to be ingrained in the New England area as a whole and ultimately brought the voices of New Englanders to the forefront of tensions with England preceding the American Revolution. As the initial colony of Massachusetts became more and more crowded with independent worshippers, Puritans continued to expand into the newly created adjacent colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Following this same tendency, the first English settlers of Long Island came from the colony of Connecticut, founding the first settlements of Southampton and Southold in 1640. The eastern end of Long Island ultimately came to be settled by these sort of New England-esq communities, giving the area its distinctly New England flavor despite its eventual inclusion into the colony of New York by the English crown after the acquisition of the previously Dutch territory. Although these forces do not entirely encompass the reasons for why Long Island developed the way it did, they do explain where a number of distinct aspects and traditions of Long Island culture derive from and greatly interest me as a progression of historic events.