In 1792, Abraham Sherrill bought a farm at the foot of Fireplace Road in East Hampton, where it meets North Main Street, “to move out of town where it’s quiet,” according to one of his descendants, Jonathan Foster, who still lives there.
The house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was made over in 1858 in a late Greek Revival style, but elements dating from 1760 or earlier remain.
In 1910, A.E. Sherrill founded the Sherrill Dairy at the family farm, which once extended all along North Main Street’s east side from Cedar Street to what is now Floyd Street.
With some of the original farmland still intact — acreage that remains in the Sherrill family, as well as 16 adjacent acres that the town has preserved by buying the development rights — a committee advocating for the site’s public purchase using East Hampton Town’s community preservation fund sees it as the perfect place for a historical institute melding the agricultural past with modern-day farming and providing a place for students of history to soak in the past.
The group includes members of several of East Hampton’s founding families — Sherrills, Daytons, Fosters, and Talmages — along with historians and active farmers.
To generate interest in their idea, they have invited visitors to an open house on Friday, April 6, at 3 p.m. East Hampton Town Board members have specifically been invited in hopes that they will move to buy the site.
“The family, the house, the dairy . . . all the things that transpired on that property. I just can’t imagine not fighting for that house,” said Prudence Carabine, an East Hamptoner of Talmage lineage who has twice gone to the town board to ask that members consider preserving the house and land. “To me, it’s worth keeping intact,” Ms. Carabine said Tuesday.
A member also of a committee working to create a farm museum on the former Lester (and later Labrozzi) farm at the corner of North Main and Cedar Streets nearby, which the town bought with the preservation fund, Ms. Carabine said she pictures rooms on the upper floors of the Sherrill house occupied by visiting researchers and scholars and an active farming operation, perhaps incorporating the newest organic methods with traditional techniques, on the land out back.
A small house on a separate lot next to the one holding the historic house, which was built by the late Sherrill Foster, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the property’s original owner, would be donated to the town by her heirs, Mr. Foster and his sister, Mary Foster Morgan, and could be used by a “young farmer,” Ms. Carabine said, charged with caring for the historic house and gardens and helping organize community events, like pumpkin picking.
While the Lester site farm museum down the street will exemplify the living quarters and lifestyle of a typical farming family circa 1810, the Sherrill house could serve as an example of “a farmhouse of some prosperity” circa 1850, Ms. Carabine said. “People could actually come in the front door and feel they were in the 1850s, prior to the Civil War.”
Together, Ms. Carabine said, the two facilities could “make North Main Street a focal point,” portraying “the farmers and the fishermen who kept this place going.” It would provide “a sense of East Hampton’s early look and feel,” Mr. Foster wrote yesterday in an e-mail.
Maintaining an open vista, Mr. Foster wrote — the view across plains to the ocean that produced “that magical light which drew out the artists in the 19th century” — in an area where trees have grown up over the years, will help preserve “that sense of grandeur and closeness to our natural-historical world.”
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