Crossing the Sound: The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeenth-Century Eastern Long Island

6. Atlantic American Communities Take Root on the East End

Atlantic American Communities Take Root on the East End By 1640, after the Pequot War, Atlantic American communities began to take root on the East End, reshaping the land and all people ’s relationship to it. This transformation was as much predicated in the parties’ precontact traditions and heritage as in the new circumstances created by the close and constant proximity of natives and settlers. Groups were forced to search out innovative ways to accommodate the other and to rework their own intracommunity dynamics. Particularly for the emerging settler towns, it brought about an intertwining of old, new, and reworked practices. As a result, the East End settler towns grew into genuine Atlantic American communities founded on principles and expectations that could only have come out of their sojourn in southern New England; because of their singular situation, they were forced to consider closely the interests of other European groups, such as the Dutch, and particularly those of their Indian neighbors. In similar fashion , the East End native communities began to feel the pull of the transatlantic world and adjusted their traditional expectations and way of life to accommodate the Atlantic world that was rapidly enveloping the entire region. Many of the outward expressions of these Atlantic American towns seemed to closely mirror the Ninnimissinuok, particularly in their formulation of community membership, which was closely linked to the individual ’s or family’s right to use or own land, along with other economic privileges. These new towns did not permit just anyone to engage the land or make use of local resources but required town “admission.” This prerequisite transformed land ownership, and with it the right to access economic opportunities, into more than a mere material condition; land 6 130 ownership signified community membership, much the same way it did among the Ninnimissinuok. Simultaneously, these settlers adopted a highly individualistic manner of holding land, the freehold, in seeming contradiction to the more communal patterns of life just described. Yet, the apparent contradictions between voluntary, individual action and communal obligations was not as unsolvable as might appear; in fact, over time these became complementary and mutually reinforcing. It was in this liminal space, where these seeming contradictions between the interests of the individual and those of the community and among the old, the new, and the adapted were negotiated; it was in this space that towns, such as those founded on the East End, began to take shape. In Atlantic America, the individual found that access to land and resources depended on one’s status as a community member and on fulfillment of community obligations. In turn, this status and the accompanying obligations triggered the community’s obligation to provide the member the opportunity to use assets, mostly land and its associated resources. Life in these Atlantic American towns became a circle of mutually reinforcing, voluntarily assumed obligations and benefits, best exemplified in the individuals’ and communities’ relationship to, use of, and conceptualization of land. The Voluntary Community The East End settler villages were typical examples of seventeenth-century towns in southern New England; houses and home lots were settled in close proximity, and there existed a common street, village green, or home pasture, augmented by common fields individually allotted outside the town for mowing and tillage. Any undivided town lands were held in reserve to allocate or sell at a later date. During the time these vast surrounding tracts remained undivided, they were used for pasture and woodland purposes and regulated by guidelines promulgated by the town.1 In many respects, the outward appearance of these towns and villages was not unlike that of similar towns in the rural English countryside . Yet, despite any outward similarities, these corporate communities, created through private compacts, embodied Atlantic America’s reconfigured reality and shifting identities. The growth of this distinctive transatlantic spirit was commonly expressed through the settlers’ treatment of and relationship to land. On the East End, as elsewhere in southern New England, this distinctive Atlantic American spirit, which rejected Atlantic American Communities Take Root | 131 much of the traditional English landholding patterns, where baronial estates were tilled and managed by a variety of tenants and copyholders, instead turned to fee-simple holdings that were tempered by a spirit of volunteerism .2 These settlers also veered away from the prevalent trend in England of enclosing the common fields and converting these into private lands, which benefited the few, leaving most...