Shelter Island Yacht Club - A Centennial History

The Shelter Island Yacht Club

A Centennial History

1886-1986
A book written in 1986 to commemorate
the 100th anniversary of the founding of the club.

Chapter 1 - The Time, The Place

First some words about the woodsy, hilly, gingerbready, eminently photogenic part of Shelter Island known as The Heights. Here on a spit of land at the entrance to Dering Harbor is where the Shelter Island Yacht Club makes its home.

Readers who are impatiently eager to plunge directly into the Yacht Club story may prefer to skip these few pages. Still other readers, hoping for an ex tended panorama of the whole Island and its history, will have to look elsewhere.

This volume contains neither a description of the prehistoric glaciers which deposited a fringe of boulders on our beaches ten thousand years ago nor legendary tales of Indians who canoed these pre-Columbian waterways, pausing perchance to indulge in birchbark regattas.

Shelter Island does indeed possess a long-standing and rather romantic relationship with its surrounding waters, including the venturesome landing of the first white settlers in 1652, by boat of course. Shortly thereafter Nathaniel Sylvester and Grissel, his sixteen year old bride, found themselves harboring Quaker refugees from Boston. During the American Revolution British men-of-war stationed off Hay Beach Point besieged the inhabitants.

Early in the 19th century Lord's Shipyard in West Neck Creek produced the schooner Paragon which successfully penetrated Napoleon's blockade of Europe. Closer home a primitive form of commercial ferry service began to take shape. All such stories and many more belong to the history of this waterwashed island but, strictly speaking, none of it belongs here.

Discovering the Seashore

Islands being what they are, boats inevitably form part of their history but the origins of the Shelter Island Yacht Club per se go no deeper into the Island's past than the year
1872. That is the year when pioneer developers, seeking an ideal location for a new summer resort, were attracted to three hundred acres of largely unspoiled woodland and bought up the Squire Chase estate.

The primary purpose of these 19th century entrepreneurs was to establish, under Methodist auspices, the kind of spiritual and recreational summer community that was springing up all along the Atlantic seaboard from Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts to Ocean Grove on the Jersey shore. They were responding to a popular impulse to meld the old-fashioned religious camp meeting with a growing demand for family-type vacation centers.

The physical heart and hub of the new seaside resort, complete with camp meeting ground, was to be a large, comfortable wooden hotel closely surrounded by dozens of private cottages. In the case of Shelter Island the hotel would front on the Greenport Channel, rising majestically over a sandy bathing beach only a stone's throw from the steamer dock and ferry slip. Up the hill, behind the hotel, stretched a pleasant wood, ideal for outdoor revival meetings.

Built in a matter of months, the handsome Prospect House cordially welcomed its first guests in July 1872 and for nearly seventy years - until consumed by fire in 1942 - served as the social nexus of a flourishing summer community. Scores of summer cottages soon fanned out across the Association's acreage.

Meanwhile, just across the harbor, a rival consortium of speculators from the Boston area launched a similar enterprise. Their hotel was slightly more pretentious with, at first, only a handful of satellite cottages. This Manhanset community - now the Village of Dering Harbor - merits mention here because it too played a significant role, both directly and indirectly, in the history of Shelter Island yachting. Unfortunately its great hostelry perished in less than forty years. . . a prey to the flames which sooner or later devoured almost all of America's frame hotels.

Gaiety Galore

Publicity of the early days compared Dering Harbor to the legendary Bay of Naples and described at great length "ample means of amusement" consisting primarily of bathing facilities, boats for rowing and sailing, croquet on the hotel lawns, bowling and billiards. Convenience of access was stressed. There was regular steamer service from Saybrook and New London in Connecticut in addition to twice-weekly steamship service to and from New York City. Trains, of course, traveled daily from Brooklyn to the Greenport ferry slip in exactly two hours.

Shelter Island's two ambitious resort enterprises of the 1870's stand squarely in the middle of one of our nation's most ebullient eras, the chief focal point being the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. Generally speaking, it was a period of unrestrained optimism and escalating prosperity. Affluent people by the thousands vigorously indulged a new appetite for both travel abroad and prolonged summer vacations at home. Happy families seeking respite from the city's heat, noise and dirt thronged the huge wooden hotels up in the mountains or down by the seaside.

Despite occasional financial panics, especially severe in 1873 and 1884, the Shelter Island summer communities multiplied and prospered. The hotels rivaled each other in adding annexes and attractive inducements, soon to include both electricity and "heating with radiators". Instead of building small, unplastered cottages on tiny lots, new arrivals began erecting "spacious residences with wide lawns".

Changing Course

As the year 1886 dawned - the year in which the Yacht Club was founded - what had been launched as the Shelter Island Grove and Camp Meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church became simply the Shelter Island Heights Association. Obviously, the original name of the corporation was impossibly long and cumbersome, even misleading. But, what happened? Precise reasons for such a significant change can only be surmised.

Some explanation may be found in the fact that camp meetings were rapidly and irreversibly declining in popularity, not only locally but nationally. A new breed of evangelists, with Billy Sunday in the van, was carrying religious revival directly from the small towns and open country into the metropolitan centers. It is also a fact that an official link to the Methodist denomination had never been formally established. From its inception the Island resort had warmly welcomed Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and others into its fellowship.

City newspapers now carried long columns of seasonal arrivals and departures as well as detailed accounts of scintillating social events and alluring allusions to the "gaiety" prevailing on both sides of Deering (sic) Harbor. By 1892 the Brooklyn Eagle reported that "the camp meeting idea was entirely vanished". Religion, of course, had by no means beaten a retreat. Prospect Chapel, for example, drew summer residents to services two or three times on Sunday as well as to various weekday events.

What About Yachting?

Without any apparent resistance, but also without any overt encouragement, the idea of a yacht club somehow took root in this burgeoning community, over whose development the founding fathers retained a firm control. The trustees of the Heights Association were divided equally among clergy and laymen, the latter being predominantly affluent business men from Brooklyn who seem to have been more interested in inhaling the good country air while resting from their labors than in sailing the bright blue waters.

Among these influential founders, for example, was John E. Searles, Jr., who by 1887 - still in his thirties - had put together a sugar trust valued at fifty million dollars, which he later reorganized into the American Sugar Refineries Company. He was described as "one of the wealthiest men in the United States". Another founder was "Honest John" French, a building contractor who in a day of excessive graft was noted as a man "who mixed mortar with conscience" in the erection of numerous public buildings in Brooklyn. He also put up three identical cottages along the channel shore.

One outstanding founder was Frederick A. Schroeder, owner of a twenty-five foot launch, who became a member of the new Yacht Club in 1887, just a year after it was
founded. His family occupied one of the larger cottages along the broad walk leading from the hotel past the tennis courts to the harbor. For years, as President of the Heights Association, he kept careful and affectionate watch, usually from horseback, over the summer community and its affairs.

As a teen-ager, the young German had come to America with his father who, like Carl Schurz and many others, left the Vaterland in the unhappy aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. First he established a thriving tobacco business, then the Germania Bank, and later became active in civic reform. He served a term as mayor of Brooklyn. subsequently was elected state senator. From all accounts he was a person of impressive stature and superior ability.

Now we are ready for the Yacht Club story.

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