Dan's Papers - June 22, 2007 - Fireworks September 1

The fourth of July fireworks scheduled for East Hampton Main Beach this year has been cancelled. This is one of the major events of the summer season here, with crowds often exceeding 10,000 people. Instead the fireworks will be set off on Main Beach on September 1. The reason is piping plovers. In May, two piping plover couples settled on Main Beach and built nests right where the fireworks are set off every Fourth of July. The law says you cannot go near piping plovers during the nesting season because they are an endangered species. Since the piping plover nests usually are not abandoned by these birds until the chicks are hatched and raised, something that usually does not take place until the second or third week in July, the Town Board, with just two weeks to go, had to make a decision. Environmentalists were sent down to evaluate the situation. They said it doesn't look like the plovers are going to be leaving anytime soon. And so the fireworks are cancelled.

This is only the second time in 100 years that the fireworks have been cancelled. They were cancelled in 2005 for the same reason. And then they were held on Labor Day Weekend two months later, but hardly anybody came. There didn't appear to be any patriotic or historic reason to attend a fireworks display on Labor Day Weekend.

It would be important, therefore, to have a good reason to have fireworks on September 1. It can be done. For many years, an enormous display of fireworks was set off every July 14 in Three Mile Harbor by George Plimpton and Tony Duke to celebrate Bastille Day, the anniversary of French Independence.

And so, being the public service person that I am, I have set out to determine what patriotic thing did happen on September 1, 1776. Surely there was something that happened on that day. Those were patriotic times. The Declaration of Independence had been written just one month before. There had to be something.

Well, unfortunately, there isn't. A lot DID happen on August 2, however. After the document was written on July 4 and presented that day to the Continental Congress, the Congress allowed about a month to take copies of the document around to all thirteen colonies by horseback so that people could see it up close. The Congress would hold another meeting on August 2 in Philadelphia. At that time, they wanted all the states to have delegates there to sign it. So it was important that they send it around for people to see.

On August 2, the document, after its long journey, was placed on a table in a hall in Philadelphia and all those present were asked to sign it, the first, as we all know, being John Hancock. And then the others, 56 in all, signed as well.

For a while, I did think that September 1 would come into play involving the Declaration, because there were five delegates who did not make the meeting on August 2, and who therefore would be asked to sign at a later date. One of them, Robert R. Livingston, was a Delegate from New York.

Aha, I thought. Perhaps they caught up with him on September 1. Come to Main Beach in East Hampton to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the New York delegate on that day in 1776. I looked and looked. It has turned out that, in the confusion after the signing of the document on August 2, only four of the five non-signers were rounded up and got to sign. The one who NEVER signed was Robert R. Livingston of New York. Oops.

Could we hold the fireworks on August 2? That's a Thursday. No?

My next thought about September 1 was that if we couldn't find anything going on with the Declaration of Independence, maybe we could find something important that happened in some other year on that date in the 1600s or 1700s. One patriotic thing about the founding of our country might be as good as another.

I found two things. On September 1, 1639, the colony of New Hampshire petitioned the King of England and asked that they be allowed to secede from the Colony of Massachusetts.

"Whereas it hath pleased the Lord to move the Heart of our dread Sovereign Charles, by the Grace of God King &c., to grant Licence and Liberty to sundry of his subjects to plant themselves in the Westerlle parts of America, we his loyal Subjects, Brethern of the Church in Exeter, situate and lying upon the River Pascataqua with the other inhabitants there, blah blah blah blah."

Come watch the fireworks over Main Beach to celebrate the Independence of New Hampshire from the Colony of Massachusetts? That's not going to work.

And then I realized there was more significance to the year of 1639. That was the year that Lion Gardiner first set foot on the island off Amagansett to become the Proprietor of Gardiner's Island and therefore the first English settler of what would later become the State of New York.

Now that was something. It would make sense to set off fireworks on Main Beach in East Hampton in celebration of that seminal act. But did it take place on September 1?

Actually, looking up the documents in East Hampton Library, I have found that he signed the paper purchasing Gardiner's Island from the Indian Chief Wyandanch on March 3, 1639.

So, by September 1, he had already been here for six months. Doesn't work. And so I turn this matter over to you, dear reader. Here are the things that have happened throughout history on various Septmeber Firsts. Vote for one. Or find something else and write it in. And as you consider which one to vote for, consider that the advertising poster inviting people to the event will say COME

1. The Battle of Tippermuir, at which Montrose defeated Elcho's Covenanters, reviving the Royalist cause in England in 1644.

2. The Battle of Chantilly in 1862, where Confederate Forces attacked retreating Union soldiers in northern Virginia.

3. The Declaration by Ahmet Zogu in 1928 declaring himself king of Albania.

4. The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

5. The last original episode of the TV show "Gunsmoke" on CBS, completing a 20-year run, from 1955 to 1975.

6. The Declaration in 1991 in which Uzbekistan declares itself to be independent of the Soviet Union.

Well, that's it. You decide. Oh, there WAS something that happened on September 1, 1776 and I guess it was so important that it just blotted out any other news of that day in the public's consciousness. Unfortunately, there is nothing patriotic about what happened.

Come to East Hampton Main Beach on September 1, 2007 to celebrate the decision by the British General Howe to land his redcoats at Kip's Bay in Manhattan, which he did on September 15, to prepare himself for the invasion of Brooklyn. Your ideas? Post them on Dan's Blog at www.danshamptons.com, where you will see the place to do so.

Do we have a prize for the winner? No. But if we get some nice posts, we will publish them in a follow up story in this newspaper next week and you will get full credit.