East Hampton Village news

The Art of the Empire State. ‘Gardiner’s Island lies nine miles off the coast of East Hampton-Long Island New York; A primeval gem, nearly 3,500 acres of lush Eden with twenty seven miles of pebble beaches and towering cliffs. ‘Treasure Island’ they call it ‘the sandbar of sorrow’. It is the never-never land of private estates in America… it is blessed with the finest untouched white oak forest in America, plus dense thickets of cedar and chestnut trees, from which no wood has been cut for three centuries. Four freshwater streams provide abundant water for herds of white tailed deer and wild turkeys scatter through it’s fields and grape marshes. The island has historical buildings that date to the 1600s… Captain Kydd buried treasure there and an accused witch lived on the island many years. If going to Gardiner’s island is like stepping through a time warp very few ever get invited to take the step except for academics, historians, anthropologists, or the occasional visiting dignitaries… Prince Phillip who visited in 1974. The Gardiner family stopped hosting benefits on the island thirty years ago and no one dares drop by unannounced either….. the Caretaker with his shotguns and a pack of hunting dogs is less polite. Perhaps the island’s best protection are the estimated one million ticks that inhabit the brush, carriers of the debilitating Lyme disease…..’taking people to the island (Said then eighty five year old David Gardiner) but then as the sixteenth lord of the manor, it’s my responsibility. I bothered to learn the family history. I have a mission in life… I am the product of four hundred years of American history…. Gardiners are the oldest English family in New York State. It’s a dynasty. Gardiner’s island is the first English settlement in the state of New York. Elizabeth Gardiner daughter of Lion Gardiner was the first English child born in the state of New York. We founded the town of East Hampton…p50/51 Philistines at the Hedgerow. Gardiner had locked up the mansion and clambered into his lumbering eight year old Cadillac, which he was driving erratically down main street… oblivious to the August heat as he was to people rollerblading or to the Range rovers sharing the street with him. Coming around the Town Pond he took his huge automobile up a sloping knoll… He hoisted himself out of the car and made his way past an old iron gate into the cemetery. He pointed out the graves of his ancestors…..Ahead is Lion Gardiner’s unusual grave. He lies in a neo gothic sepulcher under an tomb designed by James Renwick…. Eight pillars support a rectangular stone roof under which is the craved relief of Lion Gardiner clad in the accoutrements of knighthood …. He dropped dead unexpectedly in the summer of 1663 at the age of sixty four and before the towns folk could get him back to the island his stomach began to swell with natural gasses- it was decided to bury him quick in the town… The heavy traffic on Main Street seemed to fade from view… Gardiner pushed himself to his feet and began to scratch away at the carved inscription on the tomb… ‘Here it is’ he said, ‘Here is what it says!’ He breathlessly recited fragments of the long inscription ‘’ an officer…English army… and engineer …why he was sent… Fortifications, you see. He was fighting in Holland in the thirty years war…. Born 1599… Look! Lord of the island… The man at whose grave he dug, Lion Gardiner, was the town’s first de facto mayor, fixer, real estate broker, and probably the first case of a white man succumbing to Hampton’s land lust. Gardiner was huge for the time, six foot two, wiry tough and with a silky red beard and mustache upturned at the ends… In 1635 when he was thirty six years old, not a you8ng man in the 1600s he hired out his services to Lord Saye and Lord Brook to build a palisaded fort and moat in Connecticut to protect the English from the rancorous Pequot. He was a respect but controversial commander. He married the enemy- a Dutch woman Mary Duercant… The Dutch New Amsterdam threatened English expansion to the south…. The Pequots were the greatest obstacle to the British in appropriating more land in Connecticut and so in 1637 despite Lion Gardiner’s protests the British sent a regiment of soldiers to exterminate the entire tribe. The soldiers set upon them at their encampment at Mystic and turned it into an inferno. They torched the huts and incinerated the braves who stated inside or shot and hacked to death the old men, women and children who ran screaming from the burning village. By the day’s end the entire Mystic tribe had been murdered and only a handful of survivors were scattered across Connecticut and Long Island. So shocking and stupidly unnecessary was the obliteration of the tribe according to Gardiner, that he later wrote a book about it ‘On Relation of the Pequot Warres. ….. When Gardiner turned forty he wanted to settle down and build his fortune. He toured several potential homesteads with Wyandanch –the local Indian chief, settling on the island between the arms of North and South forks at the end of Long Island –called Manchonake ‘the island of death’ after a battle so between Montauks and Pequots so fierce that not a man was left standing on either side. The island was virtually prehistoric, a world untouched be civilization except for a tobacco crop that the Montauks had planted which still grew wild. Gardiner said he wanted to buy the island but Wyandanch didn’t understand what selling the land meant. The land was the Indian universe like the strs in the heaven- it couldn’t be transferred…. P61-66 Steven Gaines –Hodder 1998. If reproduced part of this excellent village history of the somewhat elite Long Island place of East Hampton ‘Philistines at the Hedgerow’ Steven Gaines: Because it says very easily and naturally things which I already had discovered deep within the foundation of New York and the American Empire. But says it so strongly! Previously I had been informed by the internationally popular Bible Teacher Professor Derek Prince of the critical differences between Pilgrims and described here –English Puritans of Connecticut – With in New England three Calvinist pioneering settlements. In the South Dutch Calvinists. In the center Church of England Calvinists and in the North the more primitive- Brethren Pilgrim Calvinists. But united in their White Racist view that –Chosen by God in the New World they could down grade and despise –use and abuse Indians and black slaves. And then I had read of this 1637 slaughter which was for and still is unrepented of defining foundation for emerging North American Empire. –Predictably it was a Marxist historian Howard Zinn ‘A People’s History of the United States’ who told me. But on the inability of North American Indians to actually understand or to agree to land sale- Phillip Shorto ‘The island at the center of the world’ has chapters on this showing that the 1624 Manhattan purchase by Peter Minuit was rather an ongoing agreement by the local Indians to let the new arrival share the land. Treaty. But the reason why I suspect this story is here for us- Is the depth of the curses to be actually seen both in Connecticut and at the end of Long Island because of what happened four hundred and more years ago. The curse on Gardiner’s Island as a result of the Indian tribes who fought has –killed- made the island currently unusable and virtually unlivable. But what I suspect is happening here is that Lion Gardiner while dying in summer of 1663- is actually wanting to tell us now how deadly serious this all is! As a starting place for American Empire the burning to death of women old people and children and the cowardly treacherous behavior of the English- That curse- The fire …. Well my Pentecostal Preachers told me long ago: what so ever ye shall sow- USA; Ye shall indeed reap! New York will burn! East Hampton listen to your ancient ancestor!