Local history

To the Editor: Couldn’t let another day go by without commending you on this incredible piece of writing ("Tin...

To the Editor: Regarding "Tin City: Riverhead's forgotten slums" (Feb. 29): Great article. As a life-long Black American...

To the Editor: I came across this piece on Facebook via an old friend who lives in Riverhead. ...

Sixty years ago, there were no playgrounds, picnic tables, hiking trails or campsites on the property we know today as Indian Island County Park. In 1964, bulldozers leveled the tin-roofed sheds at what was once one of the largest and worst rural slums in the state.

After local preservation advocates pressed the Riverhead Town Board to try to delay PSEG-Long Island demolition plans for a historic building that once housed one of the island’s first electric power plants, the utility company has shelved its plans — at least temporarily.

The former power plant was built in 1897 by a Riverhead company founded just six years after Thomas Edison built the country’s first electric generating plant in New York City. It was the second power company on Long Island. PSEG-LI plans to raze the building next month.

In 2002, after buying a postcard that caught his eye on e-Bay Ron Schmitt of Jamesport began collecting vintage postcards depicting places and buildings in Riverhead Town going back to the late 19th century.

A photo and video retrospective on 'superstorm' Sandy's local impacts when it barreled into New York as a post-tropical cyclone on Oct. 29, 2012.

The Rev. Mary Cooper at a ceremony Saturday marking the dedication of Riverhead's first heritage area, Bell Town, a community founded by Cooper's father Mansfield Bell and his three brothers, grandsons of slaves who migrated from Powhatan County, Virginia during the Great Migration in the 1930s, a historical period marking the movement of approximately 6 million Black Americans away from the Jim Crow South to escape racial discrimination, violence, segregation and poor economic conditions.

On "donation day" Saturday morning, residents brought the town historian a varied collection of "stuff" saved from the trash bin— everything from dozens of hand-written letters dating back to the 1850s, written to one of Riverhead's most prominent citizens, to pictures and memorabilia from Riverhead High School in the 1940s and a photo of West Main Street after the 1938 hurricane struck.