Eastport

Eastport is the western gate of the South Fork / Southampton Town — the “Gateway to the Hamptons” by the merchants’ own phrase. Uniquely among the six western communities it is literally split between two towns at the West Pond, which makes its governance and identity genuinely divided.

Founding & origin

• 1772 — Col. Josiah Smith (b. 1723 East Moriches, great-grandson of Richard “Bull” Smith, founder of Smithtown; commander of all American soldiers in Suffolk County in the Revolution) and his brother-in-law David Howell of Moriches built the dam — now the roadbed of Montauk Highway — that formed the West Pond. That pond and stream were the dividing line between the townships of Brookhaven and Southampton. They built a sawmill and a gristmill south of the dam. (Source: Southampton Town survey.)
• Early place-names: the Brookhaven side was “Seatuck,” the Southampton side “Speonk” (as far east as Speonk River / Brushy Neck). By 1845 the land between West Pond and East Pond was called “Waterville.”
• 1860 — the U.S. Postal Department, standardizing hamlet names by railroad station, asked the two hamlets to merge under one name. Residents chose “Seatuck,” but it was rejected as too close to Setauket. Their second choice, “Eastport,” was accepted (and absorbed a little more land east of the East Pond). CONFLICT with popular/Wikipedia accounts that say the merger happened “around 1850” — the town survey’s 1860 USPS date is the better-sourced figure; flag the discrepancy.
• Mills: owned in turn by Joseph Raynor (1817), William C. Pye (added a sorghum/molasses mill 1865, then sold and moved to Kansas 1870), and the Howell father/son (Nathaniel and Edgar F. Howell). The gristmill ran until 1882; all mills were torn down in 1898 by the last owner, the Long Island Country Club, which still holds title to the west half of West Pond (east half controlled by the Southampton Town Trustees).

Governance (village? town? school district)

• Not incorporated. A hamlet/CDP split between Brookhaven and Southampton towns at the West Pond. Day-to-day land-use authority is therefore divided between two town governments — a structural oddity for a community of its size.
• School: the Eastport school district (brick school opened Oct 5 1928; an earlier 1912 wood school burned April 27 1931) eventually merged with South Manor to form the Eastport-South Manor Central School District, building an ~$81M high school in the Manorville woods; the Eastport brick building now serves K–6.
• Services: Eastport Fire District; Remsenburg Fire District line forms the eastern edge. ZIP 11941.

Deep history

• “Duck Capital of the World.” While Speonk and Remsenburg phased out of agriculture, Eastport farmers filled “practically every square inch of every river, creek or bayfront” with Pekin duck farms. By 1919 the new Suffolk Feed and Supply fed sixteen Eastport duck farms; at peak “no less than thirty duck farms” operated. The Eastport Duck Packing Plant opened ~1937 (by 1941, 85 employees processing 3,000 ducks/day); the Long Island Duck Farmers Co-Op (eight farmers) modernized in 1962 to 20,000 ducks/day with 200 workers. A feather factory in nearby Speonk made the feathers “pure profit.”
• Cornell Duck Research Laboratory operated out of duck farmer Harry Baker’s 1892 house (SW corner of Bay Avenue) from 1949 until 1953, before moving to Old Country Road.
• U.S. government sanitation regulations plus water-pollution rules, taxes and costs killed all but one farm. The Gordon Farm (453 Montauk Highway, home of Wilson/Phil Gordon) is the last operating duck farm in Southampton Town.
• Resort era: the 1930 Official Automobile Blue Book listed Eastport as “a popular summer resort on the Merrick Road, 77 miles from New York. Duck farms are a feature of this town.” John Duck’s Inn drew NYC elite off the LIRR for roast-duck dinners (turn of the century–1940s); the 22-room Lakeside House (George W. Tuthill) and the Bayside served Hampton-bound travelers. Lakeside was burned down by the fire department Jan 6 1957.
• Transport milestones: two 1755 milestones still stand (one each side of the town line); the LIRR trestle; East Pond sawmill (~1775, Silas Schellinger) and gristmill (1873).

Native ground

• Eastport lies at the far-western edge of the Quogue Purchase zone and in the historic territory of the Unkechaug (Poospatuck) to the west/southwest (around the Moriches/Mastic bays) and the Shinnecock to the east. The reservation of the Unkechaug at Poospatuck (Mastic) is only a few miles west.
• Place-names are Algonquian: Seatuck and Speonk are Native names the survey explicitly notes “had meaning and were part of their culture.” (Seatuck ≈ a tidal-creek/“black duck” locale; Speonk of contested meaning — see Remsenburg-Speonk dossier.)
• See ../../../native/unkechaug-poospatuck and ../../../native/shinnecock.

Key people & families (estates, notable residents)

• The dominant surname is Tuttle/Tuthill — John Tuttle built the Wells Tuttle House (1775), the oldest house in Eastport, for his son Daniel (Wells Tuttle b. 1803 in the house, d. 1887). Brothers Ray and Vernon Tuttle ran the Tuttle Brothers Duck Farm (matching 1924/1925 houses on South Bay Ave).
• Other duck/farm families: Gordon (last farm), Pye (W.H. Pye had the largest duck farm), Raynor, Howell, Griffing, Sperling (Otto Sperling poultry).
• Theophilus Brouwer of Westhampton sculpted the Soldiers Memorial (1922) on the Eastport school lawn; his son Roger modeled the WWI soldier. (Brouwer was a noted art-pottery/ceramics figure — flag for cross-reference.)
• Pickford Robinson authored a 1920s pictorial promotional history of Eastport.
• Unlike neighboring Remsenburg, few wealthy NYC families built estates in Eastport after 1910 — “the entire landscape was lined with duck farms.” This is the key class fact: Eastport stayed a working farm-and-trade town, not an estate colony.

NARA records

• naId 5856007 / 5856006 — 1940 Census Enumeration District Descriptions — New York — Suffolk County (the EDs covering Eastport/Speonk) — item, Unrestricted.
• naId 308245682 — 1950 Census Population Schedules — NY — Suffolk County — ED 52-46 — item, Unrestricted (the Speonk/Eastport enumeration).
• naId 5835823 — 1940 Census Enumeration District Maps — NY — Suffolk County — ED 52-1–52-209 — item, Unrestricted.
• naId 138927835 / 138927841 / 138927851 — Index to Aerial Photography of Suffolk County, New York (sheets 1, 4, 9) — item, Unrestricted (locate the aerial frames over the Eastport duck-farm shoreline).
• Tangential: naId 75322037 / 75322039 — NY SP Big Duck / Big Duck Ranch (the roadside “Big Duck,” now Flanders, originally Riverhead) — item, Unrestricted — the surviving monument of the Long Island duck industry Eastport led. NOT in Eastport; cite as industry context only.
• No Eastport-specific NRHP nomination was found in NARA; the duck-farm vernacular houses are documented in the Southampton Town survey, not the National Register.

Money & real estate

• The cheapest of the six western communities by a wide margin. Redfin: median sale price ≈ $735,000, Oct 2025 (down 3.6% YoY), ZIP 11941. ATTOM modeled values $695K–$744K. (Zillow’s Eastport median was blank at time of search.) FLAG: aggregator figures only; no Douglas Elliman/Corcoran year-end report for Eastport specifically.
• Who buys: year-round Long Islanders, working families, and buyers priced out of the villages to the east — a “value entry point to the Hamptons,” not a second-home estate market. The Brookhaven half skews even more affordable.
• Commercial / CPC character: Montauk Highway (“Main Street”) is lined with antique shops and small retail — the hamlet rebranded from “Duck Capital” to “Gateway to the Hamptons.” No luxury commercial core. Not within a Community Preservation Fund–driven estate zone the way Southampton/East Hampton villages are.
• Brokerages: dominated by Long Island / general-market firms (Douglas Elliman, local LI brokerages) rather than the ultra-luxury Hamptons desks; reflects the price tier.

Culture & character (the elite-money read; how it differs from neighbors)

• Eastport is the anti-estate town of the western South Fork — a former agro-industrial duck community that never converted to an old-money colony, in direct contrast to Remsenburg immediately east (bayside estates) and the Westhampton villages beyond. Its “elite-money read” is essentially the absence of elite money: it is where the labor, feed, rail freight, and processing of the Hamptons’ agricultural past were concentrated.
• Its split-town identity (Brookhaven + Southampton) keeps it psychologically on the threshold — in the Hamptons’ driveway rather than its parlor. The antique-shop strip and the surviving Gordon duck farm are the living museum of that transition.

Four-layer notes (time/water/earth/sky)

• Time: 1772 dam → 1860 naming → c.1900–1962 duck empire → one farm left. The clearest single-industry rise-and-fall arc on the western fork.
• Water: the West Pond/East Pond mill dams; the tidal creeks and bayfront that every duck farm needed — water as the literal substrate of the economy.
• Earth: reclaimed mill land and creek-mouth farms; the town line runs through the water, not the land.
• Sky: downwind of Gabreski Airport; the WWII gunnery targets to the north (see Westhampton); modest, un-floodlit — a quiet hamlet by design.