When Duck was King: Part II

While some would argue that Suffolk County’s first executive, H. Lee Dennison, was largely responsible for the decline of duck farming here, the story is more nuanced.  Despite his expressed dream of a county without duck farms, other factors—asphalt, environmental activism and population growth—are largely responsible for snuffing them out.

From 1900, when many duck farms originated, until 1960, Suffolk County’s population grew at an average rate of 100,000 people per year, or 28.4 percent. By 1960, that rate had increased to 666,784, or 141.5 percent, over the previous decade. Much of the increase was a result of access and affordability.

Prior to 1957, Sunrise Highway ended at Phyllis Drive, in Patchogue.  Drivers took Montauk Highway farther east, through small towns and villages that lined the road.

According to NYRoads.com: “When the NYSDPW announced the proposal [to extend Sunrise Highway], new suburban developments were replacing duck farms along the South Shore of LI… work began in 1958, on the initial limited access segments, the first one from Phyllis Drive to Exit 61 (County Road 51) in Eastport.”

The popularity of suburban living and cars made home ownership farther out from NYC desirable. Meanwhile, duck farmers, especially those in Eastport, had grown prosperous. As reported in “Historical Profiles of Eastport and Speonk/Remsenberg and Westhampton,” by Ronald A. Michner, and his son, many of the grandest homes lining Eastport’s Main Street were owned by duck farmers. Auxiliary income derived from feed, feathers, and processing gave them an edge.

Tuttle Brothers, Henry Baker, Gordon’s Duck farm, Hallock’s Atlantic Duck Farm, and Chester Massey were among the most prominent.  Several farmers formed a co-op to improve business.

Then came the 1960s. Five factors were at work, according to Michner: increasing population and tourism; high costs for pollution management required by the government; higher property taxes and costs for utilities; loss of local sources of grain production; competition from duck farms outside NYS; and population expansion that made it more profitable to sell their land than continue farming.

Adding to their challenges was a reframing of what constituted acceptable farming practices, and with it, an outcry over those who labored on them.

In 1957, Newsday writers Jack Erhlich and Francis Wood published a series of articles on LI slums, focusing first on the squalid conditions on the Hollis-Warner duck farm in Riverhead.

Workers, many of them Black and poor, endured life in tin shanties without running water, plumbing or heat, other than a coal stove or portable kerosene heater in unvented spaces.

Two documentaries, “Harvest of Shame” (1960) and “Got to Move” (1964), showed the country how migrant laborers worked as “rented slaves,” following crops over the growing season from Florida to New York, including 300 of them on Cutchogue’s Potato Growers of Long Island’s farm. Edward R. Murrow, a trusted and familiar face of news since World War II, narrated “Harvest of Shame” for CBS, which aired the day after Thanksgiving. “Got to Move,” David Hoffman’s first film, was underwritten by CORE and appeared on PBS. In it, the plight of Warner duck farm tenants was laid bare.

Federal and county governments got involved, but it took a fire and the death of 11 people, including infants and children, to force Warner to close. Legal segregation was part of the equation. Black families had few options for housing on Long Island. Once Suffolk County acquired the Warner property, it began the process of finding tenants “suitable housing” in North Bellport and Huntington.

Thus began the period of “blockbusting,” where real estate agent Gerald Kutler used scare tactics to buy homes in white neighborhoods, offering as little as $300 to $500 to “take over the mortgage,” later selling the  house for much higher amounts and profiting off the proceeds.

Using flyers and letters announcing “They Are Coming,” a reference to the soon-to-be relocated farm tenants, he offered appraisals to owners far under the actual value of their home, claiming the house couldn’t be sold for more because of the stain of the racial integration.

Eventually, his tactics caught up with Kutler: he was stripped of his real estate license after a legal battle against real estate bias in North Bellport, but not before he’d sold over 50 houses and helped create another slum.

The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” helped raise concerns about chemical pollution and the toll it takes on the environment, leading many to demand better control of animal waste being deposited in local creeks and the bay. These demands found a willing ally in H. Lee Dennison.

Suffolk County acquired the Hollis-Warner duck farm, turning it into Indian Island, a recreational park and golf course.  Over time, more farms closed or moved farther west to states with lower costs. By 1986, only 17 were left. Too many closed and left the Eastport co-op to make its existence feasible; of the 40 members of the Eastport LI Duck Farmers Co-operative, only 15 remained. Soon it would dwindle to eight.

A 1994 report in the New York Times observed the opening of Harts Cove, a 75-unit condominium development on a former duck farm off Woodlawn Avenue, in East Moriches, as farmers sold out to developers paying $50,000 to $100,000 an acre for the space. The Waterways graced another in Moriches.

Jurgielewicz, one of the last to close, was sold off in bankruptcy in 2011, under claims that required effluent remediation had not occurred, leaving Save The Forge River to clean up the damage. The previous year saw the opening of a county dog run park on the Robinson Duck Farm, in Southaven.

Finally, one of the last two remaining farms, and the last in Eastport, Chester Massey and Sons, closed in 2014, leaving the Corwin family’s Crescent Duck Farm the last remaining duck farm on Long Island.