Backstory: Sag Harbor's Old Whalers Church & Its Lost Steeple
By Dan Rattiner
Sag Harbor has an amazing history. Founded a few years after the Revolution, it quickly became one of the busiest ports in the country. Its custom house, in its first year, brought in more money than the custom house in the City of New York. The Long Island Herald, its first newspaper, was also the first in the state. Bankrolled by a Mr. Deering who, you guessed it, was also the customs tax collector — its first editor, hired by Deering, was a young Bostonian named David Frothingham. Sag Harbor become one of this country’s four whaling ports, the others being Nantucket, New Bedford and Lahaina, Hawaii. Over 100 whaling ships tied up at Sag Harbor in the 1840s.
Also in the 1840s, the congregants of the First Presbyterian Church of Sag Harbor built a new house of worship. The goal was to make it taller than any other structure on Long Island. They succeeded.
The church fathers hired one of America’s greatest architects, Minard LaFever, to design it in the Egyptian style popular at the time. It’s interior soared 40 feet. Its steeple, on a platform atop the nave added an additional 185 feet. A clockmaker named Ephriam Byram built a six-foot-diameter brass clock halfway up the tower. Near the top, a seven-foot-tall brass bell sat in an alcove, and so, when rung, would call the congregants to services. And way up top sat a movable iron weathervane, a silhouette of a whale. All together, the hill, nave and steeple rose to over 300 feet to dominate the Sag Harbor skyline. It could be seen from the horizon from any direction. And for the next 30 years, it stood unchallenged as the tallest building on Long Island.
Many paintings were subsequently made of Sag Harbor that featured the ships at Long Wharf at one end of town and the church with the high steeple at the other. Beginning about 1860, black and white glass plate photographs were made of this amazing building. And though by the 1880s taller buildings were constructed in Brooklyn, the church in Sag Harbor continued as the iconic structure on eastern Long Island, along with the Montauk Lighthouse.
Problems with this magnificent building began to crop up in the 1870s. In high winds, the steeple was seen to sway a little, causing the heavy brass clock to fail to keep accurate time. It soon got removed and placed on the more modest steeple of the First Presbyterian Church in East Hampton.
Around 1905, it was seen that the steeple was leaning a few inches. A fundraiser raised money to straighten and strengthen it.
Then, in September of 1938, a great hurricane roared through. The eye of this hurricane passed over Westhampton Beach, with winds at only 65 miles an hour. But because hurricanes turn counter clockwise, and because this hurricane came through at an astonishingly fast 80 miles an hour, the wind to the east of the eye in Southampton and Sag Harbor was a disastrous 145-miles an hour. At the church, the steeple, was lifted off in one piece from its platform, and thrown to the ground 50 yards away where it broke.
Over the years since, efforts have been made to put it back up where it belongs. The most recent was in 2008 where $1.5 million was raised to restore the exterior, basement and first floor. With another $1.5 million it would be possible to rebuild the steeple back up there, with steel beams providing invisible inside support. But that second $1.5 million never materialized. So far.
Have an East End real estate story? Want to share? Text us at 516-527-3566. We’ll call you back, and then write it up for this weekly column. –Dan
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