Dering Harbor’s Discovery Changes Shelter Island Forever Part 9 of 9 Compiled by Patricia Shillingburg

Entertainments      Stewart Herman concludes about the dramatic changes about Shelter Island that began in the early 1870s:     Regardless of greater freedom of movement provided by improved roads, the social life of summer visitors still centered in and around the two big hotels. By day one could saunter in the groves or go for a swim—which, for the ladies at least, amounted to little more than getting wet while standing in the water decorously clad from head to toe. Manhanset House maintained a long string of bath houses—not in front of the hotel where the vessels came and went, but on the Dering Harbor side away from the strong tidal current.   Prospect House maintained its bathing facilities where the peppermint striped beach club still stands.     According to contemporary newspaper accounts the most popular pastime for young people on warm summer evenings was to congregate m rowboats out on the water. Large fleets of them known as ‘sharpies,’ were available for hire. A reporter saw as many as fifty such boats being rowed around, heartily endorsed the custom as being 'the best exercise' for the chest muscles, thus warding off the danger of consumption.  The scene is evoked in the following paragraph:    Boats decorated with flags, with parties of singers, who make ‘music upon the waters’; boats filled with quiet couples, who row and woo; boats filled with children who make the 'welkin ring' with their gleeful laughter; boats with rollicking and boisterous boys, whose vociferous shouts echo from hill to hill; the boat with the patent screw propeller, owned by a gentleman from Elizabeth, who quietly sits and plays his flute, while he easily turns the crank that propels him, these are scenes and sounds upon Deerings’ Harbor every pleasant evening, and now when the moon adds her lustre to the scene, the sport continues late into the night.      Were there no complaints?     To enliven things still more, Friday nights at Manhanset were usually given over to performances, largely by amateurs. Fulsome reports of these events appeared in the ensuing edition of the local news. The Prospect Chapel, incidentally, had a somewhat different idea for Friday evenings. A 'series of select entertainments' -- including organ, male glee club and readings—'will be chaste and thoroughly enjoyable.' On August 3, 1878, for instance, the program featured Miss Abrota S. North of Brooklyn with the assistance of Miss Zilpa I. Hazlet and Miss Lizzie M. Figgis. The names alone are chaste and enjoyable.     Both hotels had their orchestras for dinner music every evening and for the Saturday night hop. It is said that the Manhanset House ensemble also played at teatime in the pavilion overlooking the bathing beach.     Sundays were quite another matter. A decorous quiet prevailed. Services of worship 'for those who wish to attend' were frequently held in the Manhanset grove, weather permitting. If not, they were conducted in the parlor. When there was no 'Reverend Gentleman' among the guests -- which happened rarely -- a layman would conduct the service. In the evening the orchestra turned its talents to sacred music. Prospect soon had its attractive frame chapel built about 1875. which is still in use each summer. Back in 1879, three services were scheduled each Sunday:     Sabbath School at 11 A.M., Preaching at 3:30 and Praise Service at 8 P.M. There was never any lack of vacationing ministers to man the Prospect pulpit; usually they were sufficiently numerous to supply the old Presbyterian and new Episcopal pulpits as well, and the Manhanset parlor too.     Of much greater concern to some people were the changes in standards and values which Shelter Island’s new career as a vacation resort tended to introduce. A local reporter summed up the situation in an end-of-the- season dispatch: ‘Our summer visitors have nearly all left and our Island people are now busily engaged in ridding themselves of the demoralizing influences which have been so sure to follow in the footsteps of those who make their home in the country during the warm weather. We sincerely hope it will not require a work of nine months this time before our people become church-going and law-abiding citizens.      By the end of the 1870s Shelter Island, whether it liked it or not, was well on its way to becoming an established summer resort to which thousands of vacationers were flocking. After all, it possessed every attraction that distinguishes Newport or Long Branch.  Even the menhaden cooperated by moving farther south along the Jersey coast, taking the fishing fleet and factories with them. Indeed, within twenty years the arrival of boatloads of manure from the streets of New York City at Mr. Artemas Ward’s dock near the South Ferry would be a newsworthy item! He and certain other gentlemen farmers joined the Islanders in promoting agriculture with emphasis on potatoes, tomatoes, cauliflower, turnips and lima beans—not just for local consumption but for export. Eventually farming went the way of fishing as a dominant occupation, but its decline was gradual.       The era of grand family hotels was at its prime from just after the Civil War until the First World War. For instance, when the  first Manhanset House burned in 1896, there was no reason not to rebuild. But, when it burned down again, just before the beginning of the season in 1910, its owners found it not economically feasible to rebuilt. When the Prospect House burned in 1921, it was rebuilt and renamed The Pogatticut. When the tower burned in 1924, it was again rebuilt and renamed the New Prospect.  It’s brochures advertise a magnificent family hotel environment. However, when it burned down on June 26, 1942, the Board of the Shelter Island Heights Association determined that it had not been holding its own for some years and agreed, sadly, not to rebuild. The era of large family hotels had come to an end on Shelter Island, and would soon also across the land. What remained of this era on the Island were two small communities, The Heights and the Village of Dering Harbor. The glittering social life afforded by the grand hotels has been replaced, on a different scale, at the Shelter Island Yacht Club and Gardiner’s Bay County Club. Instead of the visiting populations centered in two central locations facing each other across Dering Harbor, the Island had a landscape, forever transformed, by houses first filling up every lot along the water and later every interior plot of land as well. 1872 augered an extraordinary turning point in Shelter Island's history.