Hilda Lindley House

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.

Set in the middle of more than 1,000 acres 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, little more than 100 miles 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. After several years of legal and political negotiation, Lindley and Suffolk County agreed to a lease, by which she and her family were 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.

Indian Field is important not only as a place of great natural beauty and environmental purity but as a priceless site of cultural and natural history on the East End of Long Island. It 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. 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. 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.

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