History

East Hampton was first settled in 1648, by a group of English Puritans who had migrated from England to the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the first half of the seventeenth century. The first settlers of East Hampton purchased some 31,000 acres from the colonial governors of both Massachusetts and Connecticut who had previously secured the land from the Montaukets, the indigenous people who inhabited eastern Long Island at the time.

For the eight years of its existence, "Maidstone" (as East Hampton was first called, after Maidstone in Kent, England, the original home of some of the first settlers) was an independent "plantation." The settlement attempted to unite with the colony of Connecticut, but after the Dutch surrendered New Netherlands to the English in 1664, East Hampton reluctantly bacame part of the province of New York, later to become known as New York State.

East Hampton still looks a bit broken off of New England with the broad Main Street with towering elms, grey-shingled sloping roofed eighteenth century houses, and beautiful dunes overlooking the open sea which have inspired artists for more than a hundred years.