Table of Contents | Introduction |
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History |
Introduction
The Fresh Pond Fort is located on Montaukett territory on the east end of Long Island.
The fort had already been in decay by the time of the English settlement in the area. No trace of this fort was found in a 1947 survey of the area by archaeologists Smith and Gaynell Stone. The setting of the locale is in a dense brush with scrub oaks, in a comparatively deserted section of Long Island near the Hither (Nominick) Hills.
History
An old Montauk fort was reportedly situated on the eastern extremity of Montauk Point near Fresh Pond; the pond is near the Hither (Nominick) Hills. The fort had supposedly fallen into decay by the time the English arrived in 1640.
According to David Gardiner, who describes the old for in 1841, there stood an Indian fort near a pond called “Quannontowunk” by the natives and Fresh Pond by the English. In 1911, William Wallace Tooker corrects 1 Gardiner by claiming Quannontowunk actually belongs to Fort Pond to the east, and another fort site;
Owing to a mistake made by the late David Gardiner, in his Chronicles of East Hampton, and quoted by nearly every historian since, this name has been applied to the “Fresh Pond” in the “Hither Woods,” when it really belonged to “Fort Pond” (“Muntaukut land westward to a freshpond in a beach”).
Smith and Solecki visited the area on a survey in 1947, but no trace of the fort could be seen. 2