Chicken Hill : A Community Lost to Time
Admission: $5 Children and Students, $10 Adults. Members Free.
(Includes both Chicken Hill and SPIES Exhibits)
​
Visit the society’s History Center located at 93 North Country Road, Setauket to view the exhibit Chicken Hill: A Community Lost to Time. Through photographs, artifacts, and recorded interviews, the memory of this neighborhood has been preserved.
​
The residents of this former industrial and residential community included African Americans, Native Americans, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Rumanians, Irish, and Italians. This ethnically diverse close knit community called Chicken Hill home.
Today the community of Chicken Hill is far from its original housing and cultural form, and the people who lived there have lost their personal, cultural and social past. At present, as a consequence of all this, they also risk losing even that important and precious heritage that one cannot and should not renounce: the memory and collective history of Chicken Hill.
The exhibit is a 2015 recipient of a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH).
Irving Hart Post, American Legion
(photo courtesy of Hub Edwards)
AT THE EXHIBIT:
Of Pianos and Rubber Boots:
Chicken Hill encompassed a half mile area surrounding the present Setauket Methodist Church. It had its roots in mid-nineteenth century industrial American with the Nunns and Clark Piano Factory and its primarily German work force. Nine years after the bankruptcy of Nunns and Clark, the Long Island Rubber Company occupied the premises. The initial Irish and African American work force was replaced by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in 1888.
We Came Together:
The exhibit examines Chicken Hill’s religious, social, and cultural development.
Our Families and Our Play:
See how family life and the passion that surrounded Setauket’s baseball teams shaped the community.
I Remember:
A touch screen computer station featuring interviews with former residents of Chicken Hill, who relate their personal stories and recollections of the events that engaged the entire community.
Why Exhibit Chicken Hill?
A presentation of the underlying importance of this community to the present day Three Villages.