As Lighthouse Future Is Celebrated, Its Origin Is, Too, Via Historic Document Signed by Washington

Dozens of federal, state and local officials gathered on the bluffs of Montauk last week with much to celebrate.

There was the $30 million bolstering of the Montauk Point Lighthouse revetment that had just been completed, six months ahead of schedule, steeling the lighthouse’s tenuous positioning for another 50 years. There was the newly repainted lighthouse itself, fresh out of a three-year renovation. There was a platoon of top government officials, longtime supporters of the lighthouse and its future, and a visit by Governor Kathy Hochul.

But the star of the show was a piece of paper.

Joe Gaviola, who is the ceremonial “keeper” of the Montauk Point Lighthouse, was the third speaker at the August 16 dedication of the new revetment, held in the morning in Camp Hero, with the lighthouse and the revetment as the backdrop. But when he strode to the podium to speak to the dignitaries and army of press in the audience, he carried a browned slip of parchment with dark scribbling, in a Lucite protective sleeve.

At the bottom, an unmistakable signature: G. Washington.

The document was not a copy of one that the first president of the United States had actually held in hand. It was the original, a 1796 authorization by President George Washington for the purchase of Turtle Hill, as the promontory atop which the Montauk Point Lighthouse was built the following year is known.

The sale price was $250.

The document, in Gaviola’s eyes, was darn near priceless. But it came to Montauk for a price.

“In 2007, we got a call from Waverly Auctions in Virginia, the foremost dealer in historic documents, that a collector was going to sell the original authorization for the purchase of Turtle Hill,” Gaviola, who was on the board of directors of the Montauk Historical Society at the time, recalled this week. “They knew that it was something we’d be interested in, and we [the Historical Society] discussed and decided we had to have it, so I said I would go.”

Gaviola drove to Falls Church, Virginia, where the auction was held. He was taken to a room where the document was held for secure viewing by potential bidders. Taken by a moment of both boyhood mischievousness and adult awe at the momentousness of holding such a document in hand, he slipped a finger into the protective sleeve to feel the rough parchment.

“I thought to myself, this might be the only moment I’ll ever have to touch something that George Washington had held in hand,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what would happen at the auction — I might have never gotten to hold it again.”

He needn’t have worried.

“It was the 82nd item, so I had to sit there through all those other auctions, my heart was jumping out of my chest,” Gaviola recalled. “They started the bidding, and I started raising my paddle and raising my paddle — finally, the manager, I forget his name, tapped me on the shoulder and whispered to me that I was raising my own bid. I didn’t know, I was so nervous. I had never been to an auction before.”

As it turned out, his bidding competition, professional collectors who value original George Washington documents, knew well who the man from New York was and why he was there and had stood down to allow the Historical Society to purchase the document at the very root of its existence.

Gaviola paid $15,000, which was reimbursed by the Historical Society.

“I wasn’t going to let that get away,” Gaviola, who was chairman of Suffolk County National Bank at the time, and a surf fishermen who had spent countless nights on the rocks beneath the lighthouse, said. “I would have paid, I don’t know, anything. I was getting it.”

The document was flown back to New York by the auctioneers, greeted with fanfare at the Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum, where it is now on display. But it had a small tear and needed to be restored, so it was sent away again to be restored by historic document specialists.

“That’s when I had to come clean,” Gaviola said with a laugh. “I had to say, ‘Uh, if you find a fingerprint on 
there …’”