East Hampton Library Adds Two Historical Documents To Long Island Collection

The East Hampton Library has purchased two significant historical artifacts at an auction for $17,800, and brought them back to the community. The first is a letter East Hampton's Samuel Mulford penned in 1717  and the other is a whaling logbook from the Iris which was kept by its Capt. Willam Haynes of Bridgehampton in 1844.

The two documents will be added to the library's Long Island Collection that already houses a trove of approximately 50,000 historical items. "I was very excited to bring home these wonderful documents in the face of so many other bidders." said the library director Dennis Fabiszak, who made a special trip with library board member Ann Chapman to Swann Galleries in New York City for the auction last month.

The letter, which cost $800 and is nearly 300 years old, is a draft copy of the letter Mulford sent to New York's Governor Robert Hunter who had enforced a whale-oil tax. Mulford, a very well-known and popular character in East Hampton history, made his life's purpose to have the whale-oil tax repealed.

He was a state assemblyman representing Suffolk County and a justice of the peace, and lived on Mulford Farm, the historic site now owned by the East Hampton Historical Society. In the letter, Mulford writes of the trip he took to England in 1716 to go before King George to argue against the tax. That trip earned him the nickname, "Fishhook," because fearing London's rampant pickpockets, Mulford lined the inside of his pockets with fishhooks.

The logbook, which the library bought for $17,000, was an important acquisition for the library, Fabiszak said, as it already houses an incomplete log book for the Iris kept by a different captain. The logbook purchased at auction is very extensive; it is two volumes and traces a four year journey on the Pacific Ocean.

Fabiszak explained that the bidding for the logbook was very active and slightly "annoying" because half of the bidders weren't even in the auction house. After everyone else had dropped out, the one person he was bidding against was using a proxy by phone. "It was only after the fact that I found out that person wasn't in New York State. As far as the auction house knew, they didn't want the log for any kind of local research. If we didn't get it, it would have left and we wouldn't have had any access to it."

The library has one of the largest collection of whaling logs in the world according to Fabiszak. The Long Island Collection brings in researchers and historians from all over the world, as far as Australia and parts of Africa, he added. Most often, when researchers come from such distances, he said, it's for access to whaling logs since these ships anchored at ports all over the world.  

The library is devoted to growing its Long Island Collection as a service to its community and promoting local history, Chapman said. She asked that anyone with documents or photos that have historical significance to contact the library. "We are always on the lookout for documents which local families may have in their attic to add to our collection." said Chapman.

She noted that all of these acquisitions were made possible because of generous library donors.

The library has a museum-quality scanner, Fabiszak added, and is in the process of making many of the rare documents in the collection viewable online in the Digital Long Island Collection at: http://www.easthamptonlibrary.org/history/digitalli.html.