East Hampton / Amagansett — A 1648 Puritan Common, a 1680 Hamlet Called "Place of Good Water," and One Resolved Night in 1942

Two Foundings, Two Kinds of Money, and One Resolved Night on Amagansett's Beach

East Hampton / Amagansett is this site's third and final market of this current batch, priority 86, built immediately after Montauk and covered under a single combined destination slug in this site's records. That slug must not be read as one uniform place: East Hampton Village and the neighboring hamlet of Amagansett have genuinely distinct founding stories, distinct wealth identities, and one historically significant episode that belongs to Amagansett specifically. This page addresses both honestly rather than folding one into the other, and it does not reuse Montauk's lighthouse-and-surf-culture spine or Red Bank's Navesink River material -- this market stands on its own documented history.

East Hampton Village was established in 1648, when Puritan settlers laid out plantations in New England fashion around a wide common -- the plain that is today's Main Street area -- on the land north of Hook Pond. Home lots of 8 to 12 acres flanked that common, and the surrounding farmland was divided into three named plains: the Eastern Plain, running from Egypt Lane to Cross Highway; the Great Plain, running from Hook Pond to Lily Pond; and the Little Plain, running from Lily Pond to Georgica Pond. Several structures from this era of the village's development still stand today, including Hook Mill, Gardiner Windmill, and the Home Sweet Home house, restored under the direction of Historic District Consultant Robert J. Hefner.

In the final quarter of the 1800s, artists discovered East Hampton's agrarian landscape, and a summer-colony boom followed. Modest shingled cottages rose near Ocean Avenue and Lily Pond Lane on the Great Plain, while the Eastern Plain came to host sizable estates by the early 1900s. That sequence -- farmland, then artists, then estates -- is the real origin of East Hampton Village's long-running identity as a wealthy summer colony, and it is a visible, publicly documented identity: cottages and estates that were built to be seen, in a landscape that had recently been agricultural.

Amagansett's founding runs on its own separate timeline. It was settled in 1680, and its name derives from a Montaukett-language phrase meaning "place of good water." Its early settlers included the Baker, Conklin, and Barnes families, along with Dutch brothers Abraham and Jacob Schellinger, who arrived sometime between 1680 and 1690. That is thirty-two years after East Hampton Village's own 1648 founding -- two separate communities with two separate origin dates, not one town with one history.

Amagansett's wealth identity also runs in a different direction than East Hampton Village's visible artist-colony estates. In the late 19th century, Procter & Gamble executives established the Devon Colony, an exclusive enclave built around generational legacy and understated wealth rather than public display. Devon Colony properties rarely enter the public real estate market at all, and the enclave maintains a real, documented reputation for price discretion. No specific Devon Colony property count, current price, or named family beyond "Procter & Gamble executives" was confirmed in the research behind this page, and none is invented here -- but the contrast itself is real: East Hampton Village's wealth was built to be photographed, and Amagansett's Devon Colony was built to avoid it.

Amagansett's single most dramatic chapter belongs to neither the artist colony nor the Devon Colony, and it is a fully resolved matter of historical record, not an open mystery. Shortly after midnight on June 13, 1942, four Nazi saboteurs -- George John Dasch (39, the group's leader), Ernest Peter Burger (36), Heinrich Harm Heinck (35), and Richard Quirin (34) -- landed by German U-boat on Amagansett's beach, carrying explosives and incendiaries as part of a mission code-named Operation Pastorius. They buried their equipment and uniforms in the sand. An unarmed Coast Guard patrolman came upon the group; they offered him a bribe, he accepted it, and then reported the encounter to his superiors anyway. The four saboteurs escaped by train to New York City.

Dasch had second thoughts about the mission. On June 14 he contacted the FBI, identifying himself as "Pastorius," and was taken into custody on June 19 after meeting with agents in Washington. His cooperation led directly to the arrest of the other three Long Island team members by June 20. All eight saboteurs who had come ashore that summer -- this four-man Amagansett team plus a separate four-man team that had landed in Florida -- faced a military tribunal. Six were executed at the District of Columbia Jail on August 8, 1942. Dasch's sentence was commuted to 30 years, and Burger's was commuted to life imprisonment. That outcome is decided historical fact: the trial concluded, the sentences were carried out or commuted, and nothing about this episode remains open or unresolved today.

Population here has to be read at two different levels, and the two should not be blended into one figure. The Town of East Hampton -- which encompasses both East Hampton Village and Amagansett hamlet, among other communities -- recorded a 2020 census population of 28,385, up from 21,457 in the 2010 census, with a July 2025 estimate of roughly 29,400 (a 3.7% increase from April 2020). Town-wide population density in 2020 was 381.9 people per square mile. No official US Census Bureau hamlet-level population figure specific to Amagansett was found in this research pass at all -- only the town-wide figures above are Census-confirmed at that level.

East Hampton Village specifically has its own set of third-party population and economic estimates, distinct from the Town of East Hampton's Census-confirmed figures above. The village's population is estimated at 1,297 for 2024, projected to reach 1,553 by 2026, with the same source reporting a 49.3% population change from 2019 to 2024 -- an annual rate of change of 9.9%. That source also puts the village's 2024 estimated median household income at $106,250, its poverty rate at 3.4% of families, its median age at 57.5 years, and its race and ethnicity breakdown at 68.5% White, 25.8% Hispanic, and 2.6% two or more races. These are third-party estimates, not confirmed Census Bureau releases for those specific years at the village level, and that distinction matters for anyone using them to plan a purchase.

No exact current (2026) median home price, property-tax rate, or flood-insurance premium specific to East Hampton Village or Amagansett hamlet was confirmed in this research pass, and none is invented on this page -- treat any cost content here as illustrative only, and confirm current figures directly with the Town of East Hampton, Suffolk County, the State of New York, FEMA, and a licensed local insurance agent before making a decision. This page is independent research, not legal, tax, insurance, or financial advice.