The Hilda Lindley House is a former U.S. Army fire control station in Indian Field in Montauk, New York. The house is named for the woman who lived there and saved Indian Field from development in the 1970s, but who had her house taken from her by Suffolk County as a result.
Location and overview of the Hilda Lindley House Set in the middle of more than of rolling hills, moors, ponds, wetlands, and grasslands called Indian Field, the Hilda Lindley House sits at the eastern tip of Long Island, between Shagwong Point and Montauk Point, and overlooks Block Island Sound and parts of the Connecticut and Rhode Island coast. The house was built in 1944 by the U.S. Army as a fire control station. It was constructed as part of a national fire-control system along the coasts of the United States to spot enemy ships and aircraft. Made of reinforced concrete but designed to look like a simple cottage, it is named for Hilda Lindley, who, with her husband, Francis Vinton Lindley, bought the house in 1950 after it was made surplus by the Army. In the 1970s, after Indian Field was threatened by developers who proposed to build a large housing development, Hilda Lindley organized resistance and saved the land. Forming Montauk's first environmental group, she started a movement that went on to preserve much of Montauk as open space, despite heavy development pressure from the suburbs and New York City, a little more than 100 miles (160 km) away.
In 1970, Hilda Lindley founded an environmental group called the Concerned Citizens of Montauk (CCOM) to save Indian Field's unique natural and cultural history after developers proposed to build up to 1,800 houses on its 1,000 windswept, pristine acres. After a long and bitter political fight, Lindley and the CCOM succeeded in convincing the Suffolk County Legislature to buy much of Indian Field for parkland. County officials insisted on taking Lindley's house and land via eminent domain, however.
Many saw the county's move to take Lindley's house as an act of political revenge, because she had angered powerful business and political interests by saving the land from development.Porco 2005, p. 33. After several years of legal and political negotiation, Lindley and Suffolk County agreed to a lease, by which she and her family were allowed to stay in the house for 35 years. Hida Lindley died of breast cancer in December 1980, but her three children and their families continued to live in the house. In 2010, the Suffolk County Parks Commissioner, Joseph D. Montuori, ordered the family that had saved Indian Field to leave it.
Early history of Indian Field Indian Field was the last home of the Montaukett, or Montauk, Indians, whose lands in Montauk were gradually taken over by the European settlers, mostly English, who began arriving on the South Fork of Long Island in the late 1640s. An initial purchase of much of the Montauketts’ land was made in 1648 by Thomas Stanton, sent to negotiate with the Indians by Governors Eaton of New Haven and Hopkins of Connecticut, though scholars believe that the Indians did not share the English settlers’ concept of private property and thought they were merely selling the right to hunt there.Strong 2001, p. 15. Despite some Indian resistance, often feeble due to a Montaukett population weakened by disease and their new-found dependence on an exotic and different way of living established by the European settlers, the English colonists kept expanding their use and purchase of the Montauketts’ lands to the east. In 1702, the Trustees of the Town of East Hampton made an agreement with the Montauketts for their land in Montauk, with the promise of principal and yearly payments and that the Indians could “plant and improve” Indian Field, the fertile area east of Great Pond (now called Lake Montauk) and northwest of Oyster Pond.Strong 2001, p. 131. Montauketts continued to live, hunt, fish, and gather in Indian Field into the late 19th century, and some of the remains of their houses and root cellars there have been the subjects of archaeological digs.
It is estimated that somewhere between 12 and 30 Montauketts were living in Indian Field in 1879, the year that Arthur Benson, a Brooklyn businessman and the developer of Brooklyn's Bensonhurst section, bought most of Montauk at auction from the East Hampton Town Trustees for $151,000. Benson, who liked to hunt and fish in Montauk, soon began building houses designed by the noted architect Stanford White for rich friends to enjoy near the ocean. Though he originally denied any commercial plans for Montauk, Benson, in association with another wealthy businessman named Austin Corbin, hoped to extend the Long Island Railroad east to Montauk and to turn the little fishing hamlet into a major hub for transatlantic shipping. The concept was that freight and passengers could be transferred from ships arriving at Montauk to the Long Island Railroad for transportation to New York City, thus cutting a day off the transatlantic trip between European ports and New York. The plan never came to fruition due to economic and political circumstances, however.
The East Hampton Town Trustees sold Benson the land, including Indian Field, “subject to the rights and privileges of the Montauk Tribe of Indians.”Navigating Difference: The Archaeology of Identities in an American Whaling Port By Emily Button, A.M. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:419477/EXTRACTED_TEXT/ pg.88 Attempting to clear title, Benson hired Nathaniel Dominy VII, East Hampton's assessor, to convince the few Montauketts remaining in Indian Field to move to East Hampton. The Montauketts were mostly illiterate and were made false promises that they could return to Montauk whenever they pleased. They signed an agreement, in exchange for a small amount of money and having their modest dwellings in Indian Field moved to Freetown, in East Hampton.Strong 2001, pp. 110-111.
The change troubled other Montauketts living elsewhere. They had not been approached by Dominy, on the theory that they had relinquished any claim to the land by moving away. After meeting as a group, the Montauketts began a series of legal and political efforts to regain Indian Field. These continued through 1924, but were unsuccessful.Strong 2001, pp. 109-140.
Construction as a fire control station by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers The Hilda Lindley House was built as a fire control station and completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the spring of 1944. It was one of 10 fire control stations built in Montauk and hundreds erected along the US coastline throughout World War II. The primary purpose of the fire-control system was to look for enemy shipping. If a ship or aircraft were sighted, it was the duty of the soldiers manning the fire-control station to determine coordinates of its position and direction, and relay them to the nearest battery to fire at and destroy the invader.McGovern 2006, pp. 55-56.
Some fire control stations, like the Hilda Lindley House and five others built in Montauk during World War II, were disguised to look like cottages, while others were constructed as simple, reinforced dugouts or as towers. One, on Gardiner's Island, northwest of Montauk, was even built to look like a windmill in an attempt to fool German mariners. Fire control stations were manned by members of the Army's Coast Artillery Corps.The Coast Defense Study Group,
Like the other fire control stations in Montauk, the Hilda Lindley House was meant to safeguard an important shipping approach to New York and southern New England, including Narragansett Bay. These Army lookouts, containing observation instruments and constructed mainly of reinforced concrete, were built to serve as eyes for the batteries of big guns located at Camp Hero, just west of the Montauk Lighthouse. The fire control stations built during World War II were some of the last of a long line of U.S. coastal defense lookouts dating to the turn of the century, after the Spanish–American War and the public's mounting fears of invasion gave rise to increased fortification of America's coasts. Technological improvements in fire control that began in the early 20th century made fire-control stations important for improving the accuracy of batteries' guns and seacoast defense through World War II.
After World War II, coastal defense strategy shifted to preventing air and missile attacks. With the development and improvement of radar, radar stations assumed the task of spotting potential threats. Other changes in modern warfare, including the invention of cruise missiles and atomic bombs, also made the fire-control system obsolete.McGovern 2006, pp. 12-13; 30-21.
The Hilda Lindley House was built by the Army at a cost of about $22,000. The two-story structure, standing on a hill about above mean low tide and approximately a half-mile (800 m) back from the beach, contained two instrument rooms on the ground floor and another instrument room on the second floor, where soldiers used azimuth telescopes to look for enemy shipping on Block Island Sound. The soldiers looked through the fire control station's characteristic mullioned observation slots — long, narrow windows with vertical supports.
The ground floor also contained a kitchen, mess hall with an mess table, latrine complete with urinals, duckwalk, and showers and barracks equipped with six double-decker bunk beds and a drinking fountain for the soldiers stationed there. Five space heaters, fed with coal, provided heat, and a 5-kilowatt gasoline generator in the basement supplied electric power. A coal-fired hot water heater supplied hot water for the troops. Soldiers climbed to the second floor via iron rungs.War Department, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army (1944) Report of Completed Works, Harbor Defenses of Long Island Sound, Shagwong Point, L.I., New York. Fire Control Station; Battalion #216 at Camp Hero, pp. 1-9
The Lindley family As World War II wound to a close, the Army troops withdrew from the Hilda Lindley House. Fire control stations had become obsolete, and the Hilda Lindley House was eventually transferred to the ownership of the Montauk Beach Company, a legacy of Carl Fisher, the real estate speculator and developer who had tried and failed in the 1920s to make Montauk the Miami Beach of the North. His plans had been ruined by hurricanes in Florida and the economic fallout of the Great Depression, leaving him bankrupt and Montauk largely the bucolic backwater and fishing village it had been for many years.
Hilda and Francis Lindley offered $5,000 for the house and two acres in 1950, closing on the property in January 1951. The house was in bad shape, and was littered with beer bottles and other trash from vandals and squatters who had broken into it during the five years it stood empty.
After purchasing the house, the Lindleys cleaned up the place, adding a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom in unfinished attic space on the second floor and replacing the iron rungs from the first floor to the second with a staircase. The house remained close to its original and distinctive Army design, however, retaining the narrow slot windows, or mullioned observation slots, that had been installed in its three instrument rooms for spotting enemy activity.
Today, iron rungs still lead up an interior wall to a crow's nest, once disguised as a fake brick chimney on the roof. The remote house, accessible only by a mile-long dirt road, depended on a generator for intermittent electricity, mainly to run a pump that brought up water from an artesian well designed and built by the Army. The Lindleys used kerosene lamps and candles for light, and propane gas to fuel a stove, refrigerator, and hot water heater. Indoor heating came from several Army space heaters and pot-belly stoves, and later from a fireplace and wood-burning stove.
The fight to save Indian Field and the Hilda Lindley House