The Savannah - first steamship to cross the Atlantic to Liverpool, England. Built in NY/NJ. US National Maritime Day commemorates the day it left Savannah, Georgia for England. It sank off Fire Island, NY in a storm, reconfigured for sail only.
Great Gull Island, NY off Orient Point, where the ferry leaves for the CT casinos, once a fortress of large guns. One of the first scientific studies of the effects of DDT on bird shell thickness were researched by a woman scientist. I read the island belongs to the Museum of Natural History in NYC today. Once part of a shore defense system that stretched from Fishers Island (off Connecticut but in Suffolk County) to Gardiners Island, to Montauk Point to Miller Field on Staten Island and to Sandy Hook in New Jersey and probably more, as was the west coast of the USA.
BMW motorcycle "Montauk" after the easternmost point of Long Island, NY the largest island in the U.S. A ferry still leaves there for Block Island, part of Rhode Island, a US state, not an island. Why, one might ask? Just a marketing strategy?
Close-up of Great Gull Island, NY showing former gun emplacements, one a 15" cannon, It's said a duck swims in the large former emplacement today. Little Gull Island east of it is a well known lighthouse.
One of the Holland Torpedo Company's submarines, pre-1903, probably in the vicinity of New Suffolk, NY where the company was. Thirty some odd years after it moved to Connecticut, Albert Einstein posted a letter to FDR, post marked from New Suffolk, warning him of fission experiments in Europe (Time, Inc.) A monument to its origin of the "Silent Service" (US naval submarine service) was recently placed there.
Map showing Third House, Montauk, NY and Theodore Roosevelt (Suffolk) County Park. East of here and east of Camp Hero, now in part a state park, torpedo testing was said to be conducted in WWII. The "Rough Riders" were in quarantine here and its said the American "ranch system" first started here. A steer is the emblem of Suffolk County government and cattle brands were recorded from the 1600s century up until the 1960s.
Eel fishing in Setauket. William Syndey Mount painting of an historic Long Island harbor, settled in the 1650s by settlers formerly on the Charles River in today's US state of Massachusetts.
Aerial practice target range on Long Island from a USGS map. Some of the smaller "white" outlines are to scale aircraft carrier and other vessels outlines, created in the Pine Barrens probably for WWII said out of painted rocks. Anyone seen them? Large stones are in such short supply there early formal gravestones had to come from Connecticut across the Long Island Sound, it once part of that jurisdiction.
