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Historic preservationists appear to have saved another house from demolition in Sagaponack, this time by finding a historical-minded buyer to dismantle a rundown former residence and whisk it away to a Sag Harbor property.
The house at 79 Parsonage Lane was purportedly the first owned by an African-American resident of Sagaponack, a chauffeur and gardener named Bevery Stewart. It is believed that Mr. Stewart built the house in about 1912 and owned about 11 acres of farmland in the area.
The land on which the approximately 1,100-square-foot house is currently located is slated for redevelopment with a much larger modern structure to be built by Sagaponack developer Michael Davis. He had applied for a permit to demolish the existing house, when its history was discovered.
With the help of NAACP Eastern Long Island Branch President Lucius Ware, a property owner in the historically black Azurest neighborhood of Sag Harbor has agreed to have the house transported to a vacant property there.
The house will be dismantled into five sections and transported by truck to Sag Harbor and reassembled. The woman who is funding the move and providing the property for the house to be reassembled on declined to discuss the details and asked not to be named.
“Many of the African-Americans who came to this area first landed in Sagaponack as farm workers—part of the Great Migration filling the need for cheap labor,” Mr. Ware said during an interview last week. “In the early 1900s, pictures from the Sagaponack School show a number of African-American children. Many of those families eventually moved to Southampton, Bridgehampton and East Hampton; but this fellow, just 50 years after the end of the Civil War, settled in Sagaponack.”
The move will take place sometime in the fall. Mr. Stewart’s house will be taking a much longer journey than another historically significant house that had been slated for demolition to make way for one of Mr. Davis’s new homes. A 1930s-era “four-square” house on a Hedges Lane property was donated by Mr. Davis to the Peconic Land Trust last year and moved to a vacant lot, where it is to be sold to the highest bidder to raise money for the trust’s farmland preservation efforts. That house is expected to sell for upward of $2 million.
Mr. Ware said it was a shame that Mr. Stewart’s house could not be preserved in its original location and said he hoped some form of commemoration of the role black workers and residents played in the history of Sagaponack could be found, either at the site of Mr. Stewart’s former house or elsewhere in the hamlet.
“My wish would be that the house be retained somewhere in Sagaponack on public property, but that is a distant possibility,” Mr. Ware said. “We have this African-American legacy in Sagaponack farming, but as we drive through it today, there is nothing that says that blacks once did the work there.”
27east on Mar 28, 2011