Surf Club History
Geologists tell us the exceptional beaches on the south shore of Long Island were formed by the outwash plain of the Ronkonkoma moraine, the southernmost limit of the Wisconsin glaciation, on the order of 20,000 years ago. Archeologists tell us the first humans may have arrived on Long Island as much as 9,000 years ago. So, people have presumably been enjoying the sand and sun on the beach at Quogue, New York, for close to that amount of time.
In the years before the first European settlers appeared in the area, the Montaukett and Shinnecock tribes would have been well acquainted with the pleasures of swimming in the waters off “Quaquanantuck.” The site of today’s Surf Club would have been particularly well known because, for centuries, it was the first ocean beach accessible by foot anywhere on Long Island east of the Rockaways. Before the Quogue Canal was built in the 1890s, the ocean could be easily reached by walking to the end of what is now Beach Lane.
The town of Southampton was formed in 1640 by English settlers from Massachusetts, and in 1659, the town’s boundaries were expanded through the Quogue Purchase. In this transaction, Chief Wyandanch conveyed the land from Canoe Place (in present-day Hampton Bays) to Beaverdam Pond (in Westhampton) to John Ogden and other settlers, apparently to resolve claims resulting from a violent clash between the Shinnecocks and the English two years earlier. Just to be certain, the settlers bought more or less the same land again from the Indians in the 1662 Topping Purchase. The legitimacy of these sales has been contested from time to time, but was reaffirmed by U.S. courts as recently as 2007, in New York v. Shinnecock Indian Nation.
For more than a century after its founding, Quogue was a sleepy farming village, where some clamming and fishing also took place. In the 18th and 19th centuries, whaling played a small part in the local economy; for lack of a harbor, this seems mostly to have consisted of processing whales that beached themselves on the shore.
In 1825, the Erie Canal was completed, and New York City began to grow rapidly into a major metropolis. Recreational tourism made its first appearance in eastern Long Island, and some of Quogue’s farmers began to open boarding houses along what is now Quogue Street. At that time, Quogue was a stop on the stagecoach line to Southampton, a three-day expedition from Brooklyn. Southampton Village was itself an insignificant place through the first half of the 19th century, in spite of its historical pedigree. Sag Harbor, in contrast, had emerged as an important port town by the time of the American Revolution. And Quogue began to build a reputation as an excellent place for a summer beach getaway. Luminaries including Daniel Webster and DeWitt Clinton are said to have frolicked in the waters at the end of Beach Lane in the early years of the republic. Hunting and fishing would also have been on the agenda for many visitors.
The “boarding house era” began in earnest once the Long Island Rail Road arrived in Riverhead in 1844, putting Quogue within reach of a comparatively short coach ride from the train station. Homeowners along Quogue Street began to add wing after wing to their houses to accommodate paying guests in the summer months. In 1849, the Quogue Life-Saving Station was erected near the end of Beach Lane – one of a series of similar structures built along the northeastern seaboard to serve as a base for volunteers willing to help rescue ship wrecked mariners. The station was at the center of a number of dramatic rescue efforts over the years. Among the best known was the tragic wreck of the Nahum Chapin, a three-masted freighter that went aground at Quogue in a winter storm in 1897. The entire crew was lost, but the anchor remains as a memorial in front of the Quogue Library.
When the railroad was extended in 1870 to Westhampton, Quogue, Southampton and Sag Harbor, the development of the South Fork as a resort area shifted into high gear. Because it had the jump on Southampton in rooms available to rent, Quogue in the 1870s was for a time the best-known destination in the Hamptons. In 1874, the village’s population of 150 would increase to “four or five times that number” for the summer. LIRR brochures trumpeted Quogue as the “Queen of the Hamptons” and heartily recommended its “numerous first-class hotels.” In the summer of 1875, the New-York Tribune’s society page reported that an Edmund C. Stedman came down to Quogue from the city for some rest and relaxation. Yet “when he appeared upon the beach,” he soon discovered “there were as many friends around him in Quogue as in Wall-St.” In spite of being quick to poke fun, the same reporter could not help noting that “the surf bathing is unsurpassed.”
Predictably enough, the beach at the end of Beach Lane was developed into a commercial enterprise during this era. The local Stephens (sometimes “Stevens”) family of farmers acquired part of the current Surf Club site shortly after the Civil War and developed facilities to serve the growing flood of tourists from the city. By 1880, Hiram Stephens had taken on the title of “bathing master.” Multiple newspaper articles of the period described his operations, consisting of several hundred small “bathhouses,” or changing sheds, and an “arbor,” a long, seasonal gazebo constructed along the beach, under which visitors could rent benches by the hour, day or week. The arbor was alleged to have held great appeal to young couples seeking a bit of privacy after finishing supper over at one of the boarding houses.
The Gilded Age brought at least two more capitalist ventures to the beach in Quogue. In the1870s, a factory was built on the beach to extract iodine from sea water. It didn’t last long. In the1870s and ’80s, several efforts were made to extract iron ore from the sand on the beach, one of them launched by none other than Thomas Edison. A facility erected to the west of the bathing station employed 32 men in 1881. Steam-driven magnetic separators were used to collect “seven or eight tons of iron oxide” per day, which was then “sent to New Jersey in sailing vessels.” It never turned much of a profit, and vast deposits of iron ore were discovered in Minnesota soon afterwards.
One of the wealthiest men in America, John G. Wendel II, was among the regular visitors to the beach at Quogue during this period. Wendel, reportedly the largest owner of Manhattan real estate at the turn of the century, was known for his eccentric approach to investing: “buy and hold … forever.” He also bought up considerable real estate in Quogue, including one of the boarding houses. Wendel was known locally for bringing an old Fifth Avenue horse carriage to Quogue, employing it to haul visitors to and fro, betwixt village and beach.
By 1897, the beach had been separated from the mainland by the construction of the Quogue Canal (aka the “Quogue Ditch”). This necessitated the building of a simple wooden bridge at the end of Beach Lane. Nearly a decade earlier, local landowner A.S. Post had built his own bridge across the western end of Shinnecock Bay at Ocean Avenue. This allowed him to open a competing bathing station further east – a site that later became the Quogue Beach Club.
Hiram Stephens’ career as bathing master had taken a bit of a turn by 1899, when he signed over a large portfolio of properties in the area to his nephew, including the bathing station. Soon after, he sued to recover the properties, arguing he “was so addicted to drink that his mind was greatly enfeebled.” The courts returned the assets to Stephens … and promptly appointed a trustee to manage it all for him.
In 1906, there was still no road to speak of along the beach, even just between the two bathing facilities in Quogue. With the rise of the automobile, that was about to change. By 1916, Dune Road connected Quogue to Westhampton Beach, and by 1929 – in the days before the modern Shinnecock Inlet came to be – the road had been extended all the way east to Southampton.
In a series of transactions between 1902 and 1912, the club site was acquired and expanded by Selden Hallock, proprietor of the successful Quogue House hotel at the corner of Beach Lane and Quogue Street. During this time, the facility was described officially as the Quogue Bathing Station but was widely referred to as Hallock’s Beach. Hallock ran the station until his death in 1934. His wife Emma kept the business going for several more years, but the great New England Hurricane of 1938, the “Long Island Express,” washed out the Beach Lane bridge, damaged the buildings and put the business under serious financial pressure. She mortgaged the property to the federal government’s Disaster Loan Corporation in 1939, sold part of it in 1941, and turned over the rest to the DLC in 1943.
Harvey Cooley, the principal of the Quogue School at that time, had been managing the bathing station with his wife Helen for the previous two summers. When the government sold off the property in 1944, the Cooley's formed the Surf Club of Quogue, purchased some of the land themselves, and then worked with a few partners to consolidate ownership of several adjacent plots under the new corporation.
Functioning for the first time as a membership club, the Surf Club thrived in the years after World War II. Novelist John O’Hara does not seem to have been a member but reputedly visited often to enjoy Helen Cooley’s clam chowder at the refreshment stand. In addition to good soup, the Cooley's have been credited with reviving the use of wooden benches as an old-fashioned way to stake out the club’s turf down on the sand.
The club appeared in the news in August 1948 when an experimental F-84 Thunder jet crashed into the ocean a mile or two off the beach and several employees and members participated in the pilot’s rescue. A more pertinent disaster struck in the form of a fire in July 1957, when every structure other than the laundry building – now the manager’s cottage – was destroyed. The club was rebuilt, largely in its current configuration, by the following summer.
Declining membership and advancing age convinced the Cooley's and their partners to sell the club to a group of 25 members in 1968, and the Surf Club was reorganized as a not-for-profit corporation. The swimming pool was added in 1969, and a subsequent membership drive restored the club to long-term financial health.
Today, the increasingly diverse club serves nearly 400 families and is at the center of a lively summer beach scene, with an active swim team, numerous recreational activities, daily lunch service and a busy calendar of social events. The club is particularly proud of its employee scholarship fund, which has raised more than $900,000 for the college expenses of eligible employees since its founding in 2006. – Anthony Deckoff