Rev. Samuel Buell was a Force in East Hampton for 52 Years

Every age has its celebrities.

Before there were movie stars, rock idols and super-models, there were charismatic preachers whose ringing oratory from the pulpit filled the pews every Sunday. Their fame was a phenomenon of the 18th century when an intense religious revival, led by fiery preachers like Jonathan Edwards, was rekindling spiritual passions. The “Great Awakening,” as it was called, peaked circa 1745, which happens to be the very moment when the East Hampton church, soon to be officially Presbyterian, was looking for a new minister.

Enter Samuel Buell, a dynamic figure who looms large and colorfully in East Hampton history. Born in Connecticut in 1716 and a 1741 graduate of Yale, Buell was “an excellent choice as the third minister in East Hampton,” as the Rev. John Turner Ames observed in a lecture delivered on the occasion of the village’s 350th anniversary in 1998. Ames ranks Buell among the best of the revival preachers, fervent but mercifully free of the fanaticism that characterized evangelical Calvinism’s extremists.

Buell’s ordination on September 19, 1746, brought the man Ames describes as “the greatest and most renowned minister in America,” Jonathan Edwards himself, to East Hampton to preach the sermon.

For the next half century Buell exercised considerable influence not only over the spiritual lives of his flock but in public affairs as well. During the French and Indian War, Buell used the pulpit to exhort men who were about to enter combat to leave their scruples behind and fight fiercely “in defense of our own people, and the cities of our God…”

When the British occupied Long Island during the Revolution and scores of townspeople fled to Connecticut, Buell stayed behind and managed to maintain cordial relations with both the rebels and the British, gaining every advantage he could for his flock.

As a pillar of the East Hampton community, Buell established East Hampton’s first library and raised the money for the where he also taught. When it opened in 1785, it was the first private school to be chartered by the New York Board of Regents (edging out Erasmus Hall by a hair) and certainly unusual in admitting female pupils. Students came from the East End and beyond, including New England, New York City and even the West Indies. They paid a fee, took their instruction in Latin with some Greek and French, and started each day with a prayer.

Dedicated and tireless as he certainly was (he is said to have ridden 14 miles on horseback on his 80th birthday), there were no hair shirts in Buell’s closet. A gentleman of considerable wealth and refinement, he owned property, slaves, livestock and a home filled with fine furnishings. Whether it was status, personal magnetism or money that gave him an edge, he also was attractive enough to women to have had three wives, the last of whom was some 50 years his junior and outlived him by another 50.

Judging from the grimly hatchet-faced clergyman of Abraham Tuthill’s 1798 portrait of Buell, it was probably not physical allure that accounted for his success with the opposite sex. Hugh King, East Hampton’s inimitable Town Crier, once offered an alternative explanation. “I don’t think you said ‘no’ to Samuel Buell,” he suggested.

Sources: “Awakening the Past: The East Hampton 350th Anniversary Lecture Series,” 1998 (John Turner Ames lecture, “Leading the Way”); “East Hampton History,” by Jeannette Edwards Rattray; The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin (ND), “The Reverend Samuel Buell of East Hampton,” by Sherrill Foster;  “Colonial East Hampton,” Guild Hall exhibition catalog, Donna Stein curator; Hugh King’s Cemetery Tour. Photograph of Buell portrait courtesy of the .