Community and Lifestyle in East Hampton and Amagansett
East Hampton Village and the neighboring hamlet of Amagansett share a destination page on this site, but they did not grow into the same kind of community, and a lifestyle page that flattens them into one generic "wealthy Hamptons town" story would miss the more interesting, more honest picture. East Hampton Village's community identity traces to a 1648 Puritan settlement that turned, over two and a half centuries, into a publicly visible artist colony and then a summer estate destination. Amagansett, settled in 1680, carries a different texture entirely: a hamlet whose most exclusive corner, the Devon Colony, was built by Procter & Gamble executives on generational, understated wealth that deliberately avoids public display. This page walks through both community identities plainly, marks the Village-level demographic figures below as third-party 2024 estimates rather than confirmed Census counts, and does not borrow Montauk's lighthouse-and-Carl-Fisher story or Red Bank, New Jersey's Navesink River material to fill in gaps that this market's own history already answers.
A Puritan Common Becomes a Village: East Hampton's Founding Community
East Hampton Village's community life began in 1648, when Puritan settlers laid out plantations in classic New England fashion around a wide common, roughly today's Main Street area, on the plain just north of Hook Pond. Home lots of 8 to 12 acres flanked that common, and the farmland beyond it was divided into three named plains that structured the young settlement's daily life and land use for generations. That founding pattern, a shared common ringed by working farmland, is the root of the Village's community identity: a place organized first around agriculture and shared civic space, not around resort amenities or a single wealthy patron.
Structures from that founding era and the centuries after still stand in the Village today, including Hook Mill, the Gardiner Windmill, and the Home Sweet Home house, restored under the direction of Historic District Consultant Robert J. Hefner. A community that still maintains its 17th-century mills and common land alongside modern life has a genuinely different daily texture than a town built from scratch as a resort, and that inherited, working-farm-to-common layout is part of what any resident or prospective buyer is joining.
The Artist Colony That Reshaped Village Life
East Hampton's community identity did not stay agrarian. In the final quarter of the 1800s, artists discovered the area's agrarian landscape and its light, and a genuine summer-colony boom followed: modest shingled cottages rose near Ocean Avenue and Lily Pond Lane, while other parts of the Village's original farmland came to host sizable estates by the early 1900s. That shift, from working plantation land to an artist's summer retreat to, eventually, a wealthy seasonal community, is the actual documented arc behind the Village's long-running reputation as an upscale summer destination, rather than a reputation invented out of nothing by modern marketing.
That history still shapes community life today in a specific way: East Hampton Village's identity has always been at least partly public and visible, built by artists who came for the landscape and stayed to be seen, and later by estate owners whose properties, unlike Amagansett's most private enclave discussed below, sit within a Village whose historic core, common, and mills remain open to residents and visitors alike.
Who Lives in the Village Today: A Small, Older, Higher-Income Population — Flagged as 2024 Estimates
A community's lifestyle is also a matter of who actually lives there day to day, and the available figures paint a specific, if narrow, picture of East Hampton Village. A third-party source put the Village's 2024 population at an estimated 1,297 residents, projecting 1,553 by 2026, and reported a 49.3 percent population change from 2019 to 2024, an annual rate of change of 9.9 percent. That same 2024 estimate put median household income at $106,250, a poverty rate of 3.4 percent of families, a median age of 57.5 years, and a race and ethnicity breakdown of 68.5 percent White, 25.8 percent Hispanic, and 2.6 percent two or more races. None of these village-level figures is a confirmed U.S. Census Bureau count for these specific years; they are third-party estimates, and this page treats them as such rather than as settled Census data.
Read together, that estimated profile describes a small, comfortably affluent, and notably older year-round population, with low measured family poverty and a meaningful Hispanic community alongside the White majority. The Town of East Hampton, which contains both the Village and Amagansett along with other areas, is the level at which harder Census numbers exist: a confirmed 2010 population of 21,457, a confirmed 2020 population of 28,385, a July 2025 estimate of 29,400 (up 3.7 percent from April 2020), and a town-wide 2020 population density of 381.9 people per square mile. No official Census Bureau hamlet-level population figure specific to Amagansett was found in the research behind this page, so this page states only the Town-wide, Census-confirmed numbers and the separately flagged Village-level estimates, without blending the two into a single unqualified figure.
Amagansett's Devon Colony: A Community Identity Built on Discretion, Not Display
Amagansett was settled in 1680, three decades after the Village, by families including Baker, Conklin, and Barnes, along with Dutch brothers Abraham and Jacob Schellinger, who arrived between 1680 and 1690; the hamlet's name derives from a Montaukett-language phrase meaning "place of good water." That founding produced a working hamlet community distinct from the Village's plantation-and-common layout, and its most distinctive later chapter arrived in the late 19th century, when Procter & Gamble executives established the Devon Colony, an exclusive enclave built around generational legacy and understated wealth rather than public display.
The Devon Colony's community texture is the clearest counterpoint to the Village's publicly visible artist-colony-and-estate history: its properties rarely enter the public real estate market at all and maintain real price discretion as a matter of longstanding practice. No specific current Devon Colony property count, sale price, or named owning family beyond the general description "Procter & Gamble executives" was confirmed in the research behind this page, and none is invented here. That is a genuinely different old-money posture than the more performative wealth associated with parts of the wider Hamptons, and it is worth naming plainly rather than folding into a generic "Hamptons wealth" description that does not actually describe how Devon Colony residents live.
Two Community Textures Under One Destination Name
Put side by side, East Hampton Village and Amagansett's Devon Colony represent two honestly different ways that old money and long history show up in a community. The Village's identity grew publicly, from a 1648 Puritan common through a documented artist-colony boom that anyone could see happening, into a resident population that today skews older, comfortably affluent, and measurably low in family poverty, at least according to the flagged 2024 village-level estimates. Amagansett's Devon Colony grew the opposite way: privately, around Procter & Gamble executives who built a community that deliberately does not put its wealth, its property transactions, or arguably its residents, on public display.
Neither identity is the generic "wealth doesn't perform, it simply exists" marketing language that circulates broadly about Hamptons towns; both are specific, documented outcomes of how each place's founders and later residents actually chose to live. A buyer or renter weighing this combined destination should understand which of the two textures they are actually drawn to, since a house a short walk from the Village's historic common and mills offers a genuinely different day-to-day community experience than a property near the deliberately quiet Devon Colony.
Weighing Community Life in East Hampton and Amagansett
This page has described two real, documented community identities rather than one flattened "wealthy Hamptons town" story: East Hampton Village's arc from a 1648 Puritan common through a late-19th-century artist colony to a small, older, affluent year-round population as described in flagged 2024 village-level estimates, and Amagansett's 1680 founding alongside its Devon Colony's late-19th-century, discretion-first old-money identity. Both are worth taking seriously on their own terms, and neither should be assumed to describe the other.
No exact current 2026 home price, property tax rate, or flood insurance premium specific to either East Hampton Village or Amagansett is stated here, and none should be assumed from anything in this community profile; income, poverty, age, and race figures describe a population, not a price. Anyone weighing a purchase or a move to either the Village or Amagansett should independently verify current costs and community specifics with a local real estate agent familiar with these two distinct places, and, where relevant, a tax or legal professional, before making any decision.
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Get a Free Agent Referral →Independent research. No ads. No sponsored listings. Data drawn from research on East Hampton Village and the hamlet of Amagansett, New York: East Hampton Village's establishment in 1648, when Puritan settlers laid out plantations around a wide common (today's Main Street area) on the plain north of Hook Pond, with home lots of 8 to 12 acres flanking the common and surrounding farmland divided into three named plains; historic structures still standing including Hook Mill, the Gardiner Windmill, and the Home Sweet Home house, restored under Historic District Consultant Robert J. Hefner's direction; the final-quarter-of-the-1800s artist-colony boom that produced modest shingled cottages near Ocean Avenue and Lily Pond Lane and sizable estates elsewhere in the Village's original farmland by the early 1900s; Amagansett's 1680 settlement by families including Baker, Conklin, and Barnes and Dutch brothers Abraham and Jacob Schellinger (arrived 1680-1690), with the hamlet's name derived from a Montaukett-language phrase meaning "place of good water"; the late-19th-century establishment of Amagansett's Devon Colony by Procter & Gamble executives as an exclusive enclave built on generational legacy and understated wealth, with properties that rarely enter public markets and maintain price discretion, and no specific current property count, price, or named family beyond "Procter & Gamble executives" confirmed; Town of East Hampton census population of 21,457 (2010) and 28,385 (2020), a July 2025 estimate of 29,400 (up 3.7 percent from April 2020), and town-wide population density of 381.9 per square mile (2020); and East Hampton Village-specific third-party estimates of 1,297 population in 2024 and a 2026 projection of 1,553 (a reported 49.3 percent change from 2019 to 2024, a 9.9 percent annual rate), 2024 estimated median household income of $106,250, poverty rate of 3.4 percent of families, median age of 57.5 years, and race/ethnicity of 68.5 percent White, 25.8 percent Hispanic, and 2.6 percent two or more races, all explicitly flagged as third-party village-level estimates rather than confirmed Census figures for those specific years. No official U.S. Census Bureau hamlet-level population figure specific to Amagansett was found; only Town-wide Census-confirmed figures and the flagged third-party village-level estimate are used above. No exact current (2026) home price, property tax rate, or flood insurance premium specific to East Hampton Village or Amagansett hamlet was independently confirmed this research pass, and none is invented here. This page does not reuse Montauk's lighthouse, Carl Fisher, or Camp Hero material, nor Red Bank, New Jersey's Navesink River material — this is East Hampton and Amagansett's own documented community history. Confirm current prices, community specifics, and availability with a local real estate agent familiar with these two distinct places, and, where relevant, a tax or legal professional, before making any purchase decision. Nothing on this page is legal, tax, insurance, or financial advice.