Jean Held: Exploring The Mysteries Of Home

Though all roads are said to lead to Rome, the reverse may be more precise — all roads lead out of Rome, out from the center of the empire into meandering countrysides, quaint villages and growing cities.

That is how the life of Jean Held has run its course: each thought, each mystery, each question leading out from an inquisitive mind to a place of meeting new people, taking on new missions and solving age-old secrets.

Quite surreptitiously, Jean has carved her path, and it has led to the core of the history of Sag Harbor, the importance of protecting its natural beauty and the friendships accrued along the way.

Jean sits in her warm home surrounded by books, artifacts, paintings, files and newspaper clippings. Images from a photography assignment are aglow on her desktop; her life is full of interests and creativity.

“The word ‘reminisce’ is what everyone my age seems to be doing right now,” muses Jean. “I’m 85, and that’s not something I hide — I kind of like it! People think I know a lot, and I really don’t. Who could live up to what they think? I don’t know the things they know!”

In the late 1960s, Jean was working at a job she loved, in the art department of Time Life Books, but left it for a time. “I was thinking I needed to experience something else, and that was theater set design. I took classes for two years and worked behind the scenes before going back to Time Life Books and, later, Fortune magazine.

“In 1971, when I was working at the Gateway Theater in Bellport, my ex-husband, George, picked me up and brought me to his house on Meadowlark Lane, where it was unplanned but I found what I was looking for. Thank you, George.”

And that is how Jean first found her way to Sag Harbor.

“We were so welcomed in the neighborhood that soon we were sitting on Jack and Josie Guerin’s screened-in porch, sipping their homemade dandelion wine, while the Cilli’s farm cows crossed the street to graze in the yard. Meanwhile, Dominic or John was on the tractor playing a butting game with their dwarf bull. That bull’s best friend was a cat, and they hung out and slept together. The Horn families lived up the street, and they all loved talking Sag Harbor history and got me interested in the Fire Museum right away.

“Those are the beginning times I reminisce over and more,” remarked Jean. “Some old friends are gone, but we can still tell stories about them.”

Jean’s love of Sag Harbor has come directly from the people she has met along the way.

After leaving Meadowlark and hunting for a place to buy, Jean moved into the neighborhood of Franklin Avenue in 1974. It was there she was welcomed by the Kings, the Youngs, the Winchell families, and Alice DeCastro, and Mary Biddis.

“They loved telling their history in Sag Harbor, and I laugh when remembering Mary Biddis, born in East Hampton, and Alice DeCastro, born in Southampton. They told how they were forbidden to date Sag Harbor boys — those wild boys! — and they each married one.

“Mary snuck here on the Long Island Railroad — she called it “the stink buggy” — to visit her Sag Harbor boyfriend, and one day she didn’t return to East Hampton. They had gone to the priest and were married.

“Alice called Sag Harbor ‘God’s Country’ and made sure that I and all the visitors to the Windmill Information Center knew it.”

After three years, Jean decided that this was the place she wanted to plant her flag. “Out here, there were opportunities to do the things I love, like bird-watching. I had been part of the Brooklyn Bird Club, which was quite a lively group,” professed Jean.

“And then things started to unfold in all different ways. I met Helen Braem who was a bird rehabilitator, and on regular visits I met her patients. Each meeting led to another adventure, and that is what my story here is really about. Thank you, Sag Harbor.”

Recalled Jean: “I’d leave my bike in the care of Pete Ross, who ran the old dump in the Greenbelt, while I explored the Greenbelt. Pete had water out for the birds and told stories of his boyhood adventures in the Greenbelt, including catching turrr… I’m still laughing from that moment when he couldn’t finish the word turtle for fear of upsetting me!”

Jean met Larry Penny, who at the time was writing nature notes for The Sag Harbor Express. “He also led extremely popular nature walks. After some time, we worked together with Andy Sabin and others to create SoFo [the South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center]. I began producing and researching for their newsletter.

“The newsletters led me to the John Jermain Memorial Library, and I became interested in how, why and by whom our landscape had been transformed both by nature and humans. That’s where I met Dorothy Zaykowski, who ran the History Room. Dorothy presented me with the Southampton Town records and directed me to the pleasures of finding things out.

“The records held all kinds of unexpected nature items in those books. Bounties were placed on wolves, deer were rare and protected, dogs were always in trouble, and humans trespassed and were charged with blasphemy. I can’t remember reading that permission was ever denied to fill in wetlands, and our ancients fought over seaweed (eelgrass) piled on the bay beaches. I learned to bring it home, too, for mulching tomato plants to grow the best tomatoes ever.”

Soon Jean met Pamela Lawson, who was a historian for the Old Whalers’ Church. “Pam, Dorothy and I became friends and religiously went to the library on Thursdays. Though each of us researched a different topic, if we found something that would interest one of the others, we passed it on.”

Jean became interested in the Annie Cooper Boyd House and the Sag Harbor Historical Society when she met Annie Cooper Boyd’s daughter, Nancy Willey, on a bus going to protest the Shoreham-Wading River Nuclear Power Plant. “It was a pouring, bone-chilling day,” recalled Jean. “I got off the bus carrying a square plastic rain poncho. Nancy Willey, myself, and two other women each grabbed a corner of the poncho and held it over us for the day.”

Another gift in Jean’s life was meeting Liz Bowser. “The Sag Harbor Historical Society now has on loan from Robert Pharaoh the sewing machine of Liz’s Native American grandmother Carrie Smiley Fortune. Carrie was a freed slave who came here from Florida as a seamstress for a captain’s family near Eastville. When I was at SoFo researching and studying native plants and their use, I was directed to Liz Bowser — and a lasting friendship.

“Liz was knowledgeable concerning Native American uses of our local plants for basket making and for diet. So, when she volunteered at Lamont Smith’s Shinnecock garden in Springs, I went too. Lamont’s garden was grown in a circle and divided into four quarters, each representing one of the four directions. In each quarter, Lamont grew plants of that direction’s symbolic color. In the center he grew teosinte, the original corn. Gardening there was heaven in all directions.”

The Annie Cooper Boyd House, which is home to the Sag Harbor Historical Society, has been Jean’s second home for many decades now. She has authored and created more than a dozen exhibits for the society, working tirelessly, researching and creating the graphic designs to accompany each one.

“I start with knowing nothing and then learn and enjoy the adventure,” she said. “It’s the discovery. Start by asking questions. If you’re not driving the car, you can’t remember how you got to a destination. What you have to do is drive the car, and you’ll see, and you’ll learn.”

Some of the very popular exhibits that Jean curated were about the Long Island Railroad hub that came into the village, Long Beach, Trout Pond, Long Wharf, and, most recently, the artifacts collected after the dredging of Long Wharf.

“There was a time when the exhibits were very popular,” remembered Jean. “I’d meet people in Sag Harbor who loved what we were doing. They would come and tell related stories of their memories, such as washing their hair in the falls at Trout Pond. By the way, there was a password: ‘Got soap?’”

In deciding upon a new yearly exhibit, Jean and Dorothy Zaykowski worked together. “We always started an exhibit with something we didn’t know — often a question we had with a painting by Annie Cooper Boyd — and when we solved a quest, we announced to one another, ‘It’s goosebumps.’ We had lots of goosebumps times.

“When, after finding the Eldridge House foundation at Trout Pond, we called Chaddy Worden and were told, ‘You’ve hit the jackpot,’ — we had found the descendants of Henry Chadwick (father of American Baseball), Thomas Eldridge (the miller at Trout Pond) and the Wordens, and made lasting friendships.

“I keep finding unanswered questions about the history of Sag Harbor,” stated Jean. “I solved two of them.

“The 1707 date you see on signs, signifying our founding date, is wrong. The founding date was based on the first time the word ‘Sag Harbor’ was used in the Southampton Town records, and that date is actually 1709.

“I also sought to find where the name Ligonee Brook originated. After 10 years of research, I had gathered enough evidence to support that our Ligonee Brook, important because it is the village’s western border, is named after an area on the island of Jamaica at Kingston Harbor named Liguanea and a river there named Liguania.”

Jean has never been one to enjoy the spotlight: “I like to be backstage, behind the scenes.” And yet her mind is always at work, never resting, alive with a love of life, a quest for knowledge and an affection for a village that rests deeply in her heart. It is this fervor for learning that is so inspiring: a mind always creating, one that wants to know more, uncover more, explore more.

Her dedication to the history of Sag Harbor will live on long beyond our years. There is no couch potato here — in fact, if Jean had a couch, it would be covered with books and articles and newspaper clippings, vestiges of the past and pathways to the future.

Underneath it all is a five-star recipe for an amazing life. We are grateful that Jean Held has helped preserve the history of the place she calls HOME.