This Place, the Three Villages
John L. Turner

This Place, the Three Villages, underlain by a basement of bedrock and a sandwich veneer of sand, gravel, and clay that was a gift from the northern glacier 20,000 years ago, which shaped her surface contours – her hills and dales and her bluffs as high as 100 feet in some places rising highabove Long Island Sound which in the winter hosts loons, grebes, and sea ducks hailing allfrom the Arctic;

This Place, the Three Villages, bounded to the north by water with its convoluted interdigitating shoreline – the productive, sheltered embayments that so nourished Native Americans and the first residents of the Three Villages and which today help underpin the quality of life of the area – the expansive Stony Brook Harbor and the Port Jefferson Harbor complex with the main harbor and its sisters: Conscience Bay, Setauket Harbor, and Little Bay; and the once fresh but now salty Flax Pond; all places where many species of waterfowl overwinter, where night herons and egrets gracefully feed, ospreys soar above, and diamondback terrapins brumate in the mud and whose bobbing heads can be seen in the summer months as they float on the surface soaking up the warmth of the sun;

This Place, the Three Villages, with its large boulders, formally known as glacial erratics, although there’s nothing erratic about their distribution here, having been plucked from exposed bedrock at the bottom of Long Island Sound by the strength and force of the continental ice sheet; they grace us here and there in fields, forests, and along our roadsides, with their 450 million year old presence; each one is a classroom and a window to learning about the forces that created our planet;

This Place, the Three Villages, home to one famous boulder known as Patriot’s Rock, having been in the center of a skirmish between the British and Continental Armies, one of the few Revolutionary War engagements that took place in Suffolk County; and home to another boulder recently excavated during theconstruction of the new Setauket Fire Department and Station;

This Place, the Three Villages,a place of patriot espionage through the work and intrigue of the Setauket-based Culper Spy Ring that made such a difference in winning American Independence;

This Place, the Three Villages, home to true American heroes, who risked death, before there was an America – Abraham Woodhull (aka Samuel Culper, Sr.) and his Dad Richard, a founder of the town, Major Benjamin Tallmadge the leader of the Spy Ring, Lieutenant Caleb Brewster and Anna Strong with her advanced communication system of signaling with petticoats and handkerchiefs hanging from a clothes line (and who cares if there’s some creative license at work here and not fully true – its such a great story), Captain Austin Roe, and many others;

This Place, the Three Villages, so rich in historical homes that connect us to our colorful and deeply consequential past – the Brewster House where today tall visitors bump heads on door beams and which has an interesting small, off-to-the-side window on the south side of the house that I puzzle about every time I drive by, wondering what might have been its purpose; the classic “saltbox farmhouse” ofthe Thompson House, the “Neighborhood House” where we would have likely gathered tonight but for COVID, the Timothy Smith – Robert DeZafra House, “the house on the hill” and if I recall correctly Brookhaven Town’s first town hall, the Stony Brook Grist Mill, the David Eato House and Laurel Hill Cemetery, the Gamecock Cottage, the Hawkins Homestead and the William Sidney Mount House, the Sherwood-Jayne house with its majestic black walnut tree on the front lawn, the Caroline Church built 50 years before the Revolutionary War with its famous lodged bullet(s?) from the Battle of Setauket, and the Roe Tavern where George Washington slept on the evening of April 22, 1790, coming to Setauket to thank those who spied for the cause of American Independence, Washington writing in his diary about the tavern: “thence to Setakit . . . to the House of a Captn. Roe which is tolerably dect. [decent] with obliging people in it”;

This Place, the Three Villages, with so many cultural institutions and organizations -Ward Melville Heritage Organization, Three Village Historical Society, Three Village Civic Association and the Long Island Museum, the Reboli Center, Benner’s Farm, Gallery North, and the Jazz Loft and, of course, the Three Village Community Trust which has done so much to protect and restore special buildings and places and whose work we honor and recognize tonight and whose assetsinclude the Rubber Factory houses and the Tyler House, which is a simple joy to look at every time I pass it;

This Place, the Three Villages, so rich in parks and preserves too.The thickly wooded Avalon Preserve filled with Oak, Hickory, and Beech trees, the ribbonlike Greenbelt trail snaking east to Port Jefferson, the less well-known parks named in honor of former County Legislator Nora Bredes and Suffolk County Planner Lee Koppelman, the Stephen D. Matthews Preserve in Poquott, the newly acquired Patriot’s Hollow parcel providing visual green space along State Route 25A, the aforementioned Flax Pond property furnished with a new boardwalk, and, of course, the diamond in the Town of Brookhaven’s park system – West Meadow Beach, a mile-long peninsula with Smithtown Bay flanking to the west and the creek-fringing salt marshes to the east, and where in the sandy places in late Spring we watch the renewal of life with the blossoms of beach plum and the four inch wide bright buttery yellow flowers of prickly pear cactus and the female terrapins that crawl from the creek to lay their eggs in the sand near these plants;

This Place, the Three Villages, with the Frank Melville Memorial Park, in somemeasure the “Central Park of the Three Villages”, with the picturesque pond and stone bridges, the focus of so many bride and groom wedding pictures, the Grist Mill, the Bates House, the pond with its collection of winter waterfowl and brazen kingfishers, and where from August 27th through October 6th each year enthusiasts of the Common Nighthawk, a bird related to the Eastern Whip-poor-will, stand on the southern stone bridge with eyes skyward to count them, mesmerized by their beauty in flight, as these birds with white blazes in their wingsleave Canada and New England in North America and migrate to the Amazon Basin in South America where they’ll spend our winter, true hemispheric globetrotters, and at this one spot on the stone bridge we see the Three Villages tie together two continents; and lastly

This Place, the Three Villages, such a blend of natural, historical, architectural, and scenic threads seamlessly woven into one rich and distinctive tapestry, creating an unparalleled sense of community and place.