The mild winter has made walking on the beach a very pleasant experience this year. During January several storm fronts passed causing a lot of changes on the beach. The gravel, while it lasted, yielded quite a few early colonial pottery pieces and several indian artifacts. This got me motivated to go to the library to start digging for information. These early descriptions got me interested in the general history of human occupation of the region.
Old accounts recorded in books describe a very transient shoreline in the region.
The barrier islands on the south shore of Long Island were constantly changing. Hurricanes and noreasters in the last few centuries changed the location of inlets and caused the barriers to migrate a significant distance landward. Islands even vanished, Hog Island in the vicinity of offshore East Rockaway was destroyed in a storm in the last century. But Neptune, like his father Kronos, devours his offspring. In certain areas the back beach area had stands of dwarfed American Cedar that were harvested to make fence posts.