Out (Again) on Long Island

This blog post is the second in a series, that is part of a project funded by The Robert David Lion Gardiner foundation to assess and improve access to archival collections in our holdings that relate to Long Island. It was written by Cecilia Wright, an assessment archivist working on the project. 

With the publishing of works like Treasure Island (1883), the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and, soon after, the advent of the Boy Scouts in 1910, the turn of the 20th century marked not only a rise in advertising meant to entice urbanites to vacation in nearby, but more verdant, locations, as explored in the previous “Out on Long Island” post, but, as well, a moment which marked a specific cultural understanding of the relationship between young men and the natural world. Expanses of nature, imagined to be unruly and untouched, acted as the backdrop in which coming-of-age adventure tales occurred. Against and within this environment, young men encountered new versions of self. However, it seems appropriate to note that these expanses of land were open to being imagined as wild and un-peopled only through the genocide and dispossession of the indigenous people who had a previous relationship to that land. In fact, this period, the turn-of-the-century, was directly preceded by the beginning of the reservation system, with the Indian Appropriations Act having passed through Congress in 1851. 

It is in this context, this confluence of contexts, that a group of college aged men, William H. Reeves, J. Howland Gardner, Charles C. Gardner, S. Lester Fuller, and the “Scribe,” who chose to be referred to by this moniker alone in the account he wrote, set out to Plum Island in late July of 1892. Plum Island is located off the eastern end of the North Fork coast of Long Island. As one looks from the mainland of Long Island across the water to Plum Island, one might wonder if Long Island would be more aptly named Long Islands. The Scribe aptly noted: “Strangely like a hand is this Eastern end, Montauk the forefinger pointing silently to Block Island while Orient forms the thumb, and Gardiners Island the other fingers in curling upon Shelter Island.”1 As the group navigated through these curling fingers off the North Fork coast of Long Island and into Gardiner’s Bay, they would have encountered rough sailing. As John Lyon Gardiner, the proprietor of the neighboring Gardiners Island, wrote in a letter to Reverend Samuel Miller two hundred years before the group began their summer trip, “the tide” as one drew close to Plum Island, “was very rapid it being about a mile wide & the bottom very rocky.”2 

Having braved this journey in their boat, the Nydia, the group of men would be greeted by the Plum Island Lighthouse and rocky beaches.3 The group would make their way farther inland to the cabin surrounded by oak trees where they would stay for several weeks. Here, separated from their homes and the familiar grooves of their everyday lives by the rushing water of Gardiner’s Bay, the cabin the boys were staying in became a “clubhouse,” and the group themselves transformed into the “Smoke-Pipe Club,” a club complete with a “totem."4

The Smoke-Pipe Club was joined, at some point, by Steve Gardner, seemingly a younger brother of the older Gardners, and fell into a certain rhythm. Each morning the boys would race to the sea and plunge into the water, which was “so like ice” that the group could “hardly blame Steve when he refuses to duck his head.” They would cook, the chef of each meal determined by who had complained the most about the quality of cooking at the previous meal. Steve Gardner, the cook of one dinner, prepared a multi-dish affair of “tomato and corn soup, bluefish chowder, roast beef, boiled and fried potatoes.” A dinner “fit for a king,” besides, the Scribe noted pointedly, Steve’s liberal use of pepper, one meant to induce the Scribe into complaining, due to the Scribe’s well known dislike of the spice. They would fish, an activity which Steve Gardner, while significantly younger and shorter than the rest of the Smoke-Pipe Club, stood head and shoulders above the others at, pictured and described as holding a great number of fish. There were many excursions to nearby islands upon the Nydia, one more perilous than the rest as the boat sprung a leak, and the group were forced to bail water as they paddled furiously to shore. The “Smoke-pipe Club” would explore the island. They would become acquainted with the rocky caverns by the beach, the nests of native ospreys, and, on one occasion, the Scribe would startle a resting hawk, describing its “two great wild yellow eyes” blinking out from its “black and white feathers.” 

Beyond the geography and animal life of the island, the members of the “Smoke-Pipe Club” also became acquainted with residents of the island. They conversed with Dr. Graves, a botanist, Captain Frank, and Richard Jerome, a resident on Plum Island. As they did so, the landscape became marked with narratives not crafted by their own experience. The group learned of Split Rock, a massive boulder split in two, which once hovered as the overhang of a cave, before getting struck by lightning and falling; of Lover’s Lane; of the hilly landscape of Plum Island, which was once covered by grazing cattle and sheep. 

The Scribe documented these stories and photographed the people who told them. He, in fact, photographed many things — from funny posed pictures taken out of the depths of boredom, to the landscape of the island and the creatures who lived on it. Because of this, the chronicle “Two Weeks on Plum Island” acts as an especially interesting capsule of Plum Island, one allowed for by the happenstance of its timing. The field of amateur photography blossomed with the introduction of the Kodak camera to the market in 1888, the first camera intended for use by the non-professional photographer. 1892, the year which produced this chronicle and its photographs, was also one marked by the increasing use of cyanotypes, a style of printing immediately recognizable for its blue hue. Together, these two developments opened the world of photography to the amateur, with the craft no longer being prohibitively expensive, thanks to the Kodak camera, or requiring a dark room for photo development, owing to the photographic printing formulation of cyanotypes. 

The collection of photographs contained within the chronicle is marked by the specific joy of experimenting with a new medium — the processes of taking photographs often described by the Scribe, and the limitations of the craft plumbed through trying to take photographs in new, exciting ways. One such attempt can be found in the Scribe’s endeavor to take a photograph lit by lightning alone. The Scribe describes this process of, on a night with lightning but no rain, having “the Kodak is set up in one of the windows, trained on the lighthouse, and left for half an hour,” an amount of time intended to allow adequate light exposure. While this specific photographic experiment was not entirely successful, the larger experiment posed by products like the Kodak camera, as well as inventive photo printing methods, were. Their presence allows for a better record of, and human understanding of, the past. Beyond their historical usefulness, these sorts of early amateur photographs are also often aesthetically quite striking, with the distinctive circular shape associated with Kodak prints, especially when paired with the blue of cyanotype printing, offering quite avant-garde-appearing images. 

The collection of photographs contained within the chronicle is marked by the specific joy of experimenting with a new medium — the processes of taking photographs often described by the Scribe, and the limitations of the craft plumbed through trying to take photographs in new, exciting ways. One such attempt can be found in the Scribe’s endeavor to take a photograph lit by lightning alone. The Scribe describes this process of, on a night with lightning but no rain, having “the Kodak is set up in one of the windows, trained on the lighthouse, and left for half an hour,” an amount of time intended to allow adequate light exposure. While this specific photographic experiment was not entirely successful, the larger experiment posed by products like the Kodak camera, as well as inventive photo printing methods, were. Their presence allows for a better record of, and human understanding of, the past. Beyond their historical usefulness, these sorts of early amateur photographs are also often aesthetically quite striking, with the distinctive circular shape associated with Kodak prints, especially when paired with the blue of cyanotype printing, offering quite avant-garde appearing images. 

After hosting a bonfire party and inviting their new friends and acquaintances, the “Smoke-Pipe Club” would leave Plum Island. It is clear, though, that the island had a lasting impact on them, on their relationships with one another — strengthened by the strangeness of, together, being away from the places which they had spent most of their lives. The epigraph of the chronicle signals as much— an allusion to Homer’s Odyssey. “Haec olim meminisse juvabit,” it reads, translating to “a joy it will be one day to remember this,” removing any doubt from the original phrase Odysseus told his crew at the beginning of their journey, “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”

Groups of boys and young men would continue to come to Plum Island for several years. The Boy Scouts would hold an excursion there in 1918, and rows of conical tents were raised around Fort Terry, a conspicuously absent from the chronicle. The fort was established five years after the Smoke-Pipe Club’s visit to the island and was used throughout the Spanish-American War (1898) as well as both World Wars, providing fortification for the entrance to Long Island Sound.

From an eastern lookout, the island transformed in 1952 into a military animal and biological warfare research facility and remains the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The island’s proximity to New York, the type of research done, as well as the lack of access that civilians have to the physical location of Plum Island, with entry tightly controlled, have led the island to be a site of speculation and conspiracy. By far the most popular of these theories is that Lyme disease was created on the island. While thoroughly debunked, with the Borrelia bacteria, which causes Lyme disease, having been found present in a 5,300 year old mummy, the mystique surrounding Plum Island has led it to be a location often referenced within the horror genre — with mentions of the island appearing in The Silence of the Lambs (1988), an episode in Season 3 of TV show "What We Do in the Shadows" and the cooperative board game “The Plum Island Horror.”

There is, clearly, much conjecture spun around the island. Its future remains, nevertheless, uncertain. The research done in the facility is imminently slated to move to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility located in Manhattan, Kansas. While the island has been on the brink of a public auction by the Department of Homeland Security, the reversal of this decision has led to questions concerning the future of the island. There have been efforts by conservationists and government officials to protect the island. As it has been largely undisturbed by the activity of humans since the 1950s, it has become home to not only one of the largest fish habitats in the mid-Atlantic region, but also acts as a key breeding and stop-over site for countless species of birds. Several bills currently pending in Congress may determine Plum Island’s future — S.5099, Plum Island Preservation Act, and H.R.1584, the Plum Island National Monument Act.

While no longer the background to coming-of-age stories of groups like the “Smoke-Pipe club” or the boy scouts brought to the island by the S.S. Montauk, Plum Island remains crucial to the coming-of-age of many other living beings. The ospreys, which the Scribe once photographed, continue to lay eggs and build large, complex nests. Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles and Atlantic Sturgeon continue to rely upon the cool, oxygen-rich water which the boys would throw themselves into in the mornings and sail upon in their trusty, if occasionally leaky, Nydia. 

This blog post and research was made possible thanks to the generosity of The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation.