For over 20 years, Pamela Lanier's East Hampton, New York Travel Guide has been your connection to East Hampton's tourism community with invaluable details on local attractions, restaurants, shopping, museums, history, outdoor recreation and more.
East Hampton History
East Hampton's earliest inhabitants were Algonquin-speaking natives of which the Montaukett were the most notable. Their chief, named Wyandanch sold much of the land to European settlers. Lion Gardiner made the first purchase in 1639 and Gardiner Island, which is under the jurisdiction of the town of East Hampton, remains the largest privately held island in the United States.
The early settlers of East Hampton came from New England settlements to farm and fish in the rich Atlantic waters. Their reasons were economic not religious freedom. Some of the families of East Hampton can trace their ancestry back twelve generations. It was soon discovered that whales would drift onto the beaches and when the East Hampton residents realized this phenomena, there was a huge demand for whale products. Residents began harvesting the whales before they washed up on the beaches. At the peak of the whaling industry in 1847, there were sixty whaling ships based in East Hampton. This is where Herman Melville writes of in his novel Moby Dick. It was at Montauk, an unincorporated hamlet of East Hampton, that the slave ship Amistad, as popularized by East Hampton director Steven Spielberg in 1997, came ashore.
As whaling began to decline, East Hampton began to attract wealthy families, artists and writers who were looking for a place to escape from the city. The Gardiner family had married into many of the wealthy families of New York. First ladies Julia Gardiner Tyler and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Clintons, top the list of the political figures associated with East Hampton while Jackson Pollock, Thomas Moran and Andy Warhol are notable figures of East Hampton's artistic community. More recently, East Hampton has become a playground for the rich and famous of the Hollywood and New York scenes. The faces are ever changing and so are the scandals that involve the East Hampton residents, but don't let this dissuade you from the true beauty of an East Hampton bed and breakfast getaway.
