A child’s sleigh is on view as well as a photograph and a drawing showing sleighs as the basic form of winter transportation. Old ice skates complement charming photographs of people enjoying themselves on frozen ponds. A colorful painted sled is one of several in the collection. A photograph taken by William H. Vail well depicts just how cold the winters could be a century ago. The piles of ice floes along the shore seem extraordinary to us, but there are even stories of automobiles being driven across the frozen waters from Greenport to Shelter Island. One business that thrived only in winter was ice cutting at East Marion Lake. A series of photographs show men at work cutting the ice which would be stored in the ice houses at the lake’s edge for use in warm weather. Foot warmers and bed warmers and a muff show a few methods of staying warm in a cold season.

Artists and photographers eagerly captured both the fun and the drama of winter in Oysterponds, as can be seen in the selection of items on view. However it was not all fun. Roy Latham, New York State’s most important naturalist of the last century and lifelong Orient farmer, wrote a letter to his sister during the great Pandemic of 1918 which reached Orient in February of 1920. He writes of the many people who had died, and says that “the great snowstorm made it worse the doctors could not get down for two days….it took two whole days to dig out the road….we are snowed in and haven’t been out in nearly a week….This is the most terrible time Orient ever knew.”