Before the Patents

The Secatogue and the Dark Colored Land

Long before anyone cast a fly on the Connetquot, the river ran through the homeland of the Secatogue, an Algonquian-speaking people whose territory stretched along Long Island’s south shore from present-day Babylon east to Brookhaven. The name is generally translated as “the black or dark colored land” — a plain description of the rich, dark marsh soils that edge the Great South Bay.

Secatogue settlements were built around the bay and its tidal creeks. Shellfish were both food and industry: by the 1620s, wampum worked from local whelk and quahog shells had become a currency of the fur trade, and the beaches of the south shore were among its most productive sources. Three village names survive close to our story — Secatogue at present-day West Islip, Penataquit at Bay Shore, and Connetquot at Oakdale, the village of the sachem Winnequaheagh, standing on the very ground where the clubhouse would later rise.

How deep that occupation ran was made vivid in 1960, when excavation for a model airplane strip at the Oak Neck site on Beach Drive in West Islip uncovered eleven sets of human remains estimated at 800 to 1,200 years old. Archaeologists from the American Museum of Natural History recovered stone hammers, arrowheads, broken pottery, debris from wigwam dwellings, and caches of wampum alongside them.

Dispossession came quickly and by several routes at once: epidemic disease, colonial courts, and the collapse of wider indigenous alliances after the Pequot War of the 1630s, which cut Long Island’s nations off from their mainland partners and opened a scramble for their land. In 1683, William Nicoll began purchasing enormous tracts from Winnequaheagh; in 1687 the sachem also sold him five islands in the Great South Bay, among them the island later known as Hollins Island. Town of Islip manumission records show Native people held in bondage by prominent local families and leased out as laborers. By 1792, what remained of tribal land had been placed under a colonial trustee system, and Secatogue autonomy in the Connetquot watershed was finished.

1820–1866

Obe Snedecor’s: The Most Famous Tavern on the South Shore

An estate the size of Islip Grange could afford to monetize its edges. In 1820, the Nicolls leased a portion of their land along the South Country Road — today’s Sunrise Highway corridor — to a local entrepreneur named Eliphalet “Liff” Snedecor. A man named Jackson had already run a rough inn and managed the adjoining mill there, but it was under Snedecor, and later his son Obadiah, that the place became famous. “Obe Snedecor’s,” as everyone called it, grew into the most celebrated stagecoach stop on the south shore.

Getting there was no small undertaking. In the 1820s and 1830s a New Yorker bound for the “wilds of Islip” took a ferry to Brooklyn, crossed the Hempstead Plains, and then ground his way east down a dusty South Country Road, stopping at every roadhouse and trout pond along the route. What waited at the end justified the trip: wild brook trout in the Connetquot, deer in the pine barrens behind it, and a table that had no business being that good so far from the city.

The best surviving portrait of the tavern is an account titled “Three Days at Lif Sneidecker’s,” published in the New York Mirror in late 1837 by a writer signing himself “I.V.W.” He describes a fall deer-hunting party guided by a Native man named John Murray, and a lodging that was half rough hunting camp and half bachelor’s sanctum — deerskin rugs on the floor, imported Cuban cigars and vintage champagne on the table. The tavern generated its own folklore, too, including the durable local legend of Alonzo Delmonico, said to have died of a rattlesnake bite on the property after ignoring old Liff’s warnings.

The fishing was the real draw, and it was extraordinary in a way that is now hard to picture. Before industrial and agricultural pollution degraded them, Long Island’s south-shore rivers supported anadromous “salter” brook trout, which fed in the salt bay and ran up into fresh water to spawn — and grew enormous doing it. The most famous tale belongs to nearby Carman’s millpond, where, according to lore of the 1820s, the statesman Daniel Webster fought a twenty-minute battle on a fifteen-foot hickory rod he called “Old Killall” and landed a 14.5-pound brook trout. The fish was weighed on the gristmill scales, packed in ice and sawdust, and shipped to Delmonico’s in Manhattan, where Webster and his friends ate it. Historians still argue over whether Webster or the miller Samuel Carman actually landed it. Nobody argues about the underlying point: these were world-class waters.

The Members

Presidents, Generals, and Gilded Age Magnates

The membership rolls and guest registers read like a directory of nineteenth-century American power. Membership was capped at one hundred, and by 1907 that hundred included William K. Vanderbilt, William Bayard Cutting, H. B. Hollins, Frederic Rhinelander, Daniel Fearing, George Slade, John Cochrane, and Alfred Wagstaff Jr. Vanderbilts, Belmonts, Cuttings, Whitneys, Carnegies, and Tiffanys all spent time on the property.

Some treated it as a second home. H. B. Hollins, a financier and close partner of J.P. Morgan, kept a permanent suite through the sporting seasons, with his monogram and the club’s initials — SSSC — on everything down to the bed linens. The club also worked as a machine for philanthropy and influence: member George W. Perkins used connections formed in these rooms to secure Morgan money to buy and preserve the Palisades along the Hudson, the act that led to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission.

More remarkable still was the procession of presidential guests. According to historical records compiled by the Friends of Connetquot, U.S. presidents Martin Van Buren, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover all fished or hunted here, as did Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Van Buren, who died in 1862, would have known the place in its tavern years; Cleveland, an avid angler, worked the Connetquot’s trout water repeatedly. In the twentieth century the club’s reputation as a discreet sanctuary continued to attract notable visitors, reportedly including the German statesman Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany and Nobel Peace laureate.

This was the unwritten purpose of the place: a private, almost feudal calm where the country’s most powerful men could fish a chalkstream, share a brandy, and quietly compare notes far from reporters and rivals.

Inside the House

Billiard Rooms, Ice Houses, and the Machinery of Leisure

Inside, the clubhouse was organized along strict Victorian lines — divided by gender and by sporting function. There was a Ladies’ Sitting Room and, added in 1889, a separate Ladies’ Dining Room. Liff Snedecor’s old barroom survived, absorbed into an emphatically masculine Billiard Room where Andrew Carnegie and William K. Vanderbilt passed evenings. It held a Ben Franklin stove salvaged from the Astor House in Manhattan and a wall of small customized lockers where members kept their own reserves of liquor under their own keys.

Behind the sociability sat a surprising amount of infrastructure. A cavernous locker room — where men like the railroad executive S. K. Farrington kept bespoke rods and guns — opened into a dedicated fish preparation room, fitted with an operable skylight for ventilation, a genuine luxury in the 1880s, and a half-wall that kept the tidy club world cleanly separated from the business of butchery. Staff cleaned trout and dressed game here, packed it in ice, and readied it for the members’ journey back to Manhattan.

The ice itself came from an on-site ice house built before electricity reached the property, insulated heavily enough to hold sub-freezing temperatures through a Long Island summer. Ice was stacked in deep layers and worked downward from the highest door — a reminder of how much labor was required to sustain urban comfort in a wilderness setting. And even within this rarefied company, stratification found a way: in 1899, twenty-three members pooled their money to build a separate structure known as “the New Annex,” securing private quarters for themselves and their families away from the social pressures of the main house.

1890 · Conservation

The Hatchery and a Useful Paradox

The woods supplied the adrenaline, but the soul of the club was the river. Its members understood early that a hundred determined anglers could strip a wild brook trout population in a season. Their solution, built in 1890 about a mile upstream from the clubhouse, was a state-of-the-art trout hatchery.

It changed the river permanently. The club supplemented the native brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) with heavy stockings of introduced brown and rainbow trout, converting a volatile wild fishery into a predictable, managed one. The hatchery still operates under the state today, raising and distributing up to 600,000 trout a year across New York waters — a working legacy of a decision made to guarantee good sport for a hundred wealthy men.

The club’s influence reached well past its own fence line. Because unregulated market hunting, timber cutting, and agricultural runoff threatened what they had bought, its patrons spent their considerable political capital pressing Albany for strict game-protection laws. Those efforts fed a national current. Club members moved in the same circles and shared the same convictions as Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, whose Boone and Crockett Club was founded in 1887; the ideas circulating in rooms like these underwrote the early anti-poaching statutes, the Lacey Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the legal scaffolding of the National Park System. Members were also involved in the founding of Ducks Unlimited in 1937.

Here is the paradox of the Gilded Age sportsman, and it is not a small one: the men who consumed natural resources most aggressively, and who reshaped whole ecosystems to suit their own recreation, became the architects of American environmental law — motivated, at first, by nothing nobler than the wish to keep the wild to themselves.