When historian Richard Wines told his wife Nancy he planned to write a book about the sprawl of Hallock farming families that once blanketed Sound Avenue—from Doctor’s Path eastward to the Riverhead/Southold town line—she had her doubts.

“Why do we want to read a book about a family that’s not famous, about a little community that no one’s heard of — that barely exists anymore?” Wines recalled her asking.

On Saturday, at the opening of a new exhibit at Hallockville Family Farm, based on his 2024 book A Farm Family on Long Island’s North Fork: The Lost World of the Hallocks and Their Sound Ave. Community, Wines offered his answer—with a question of his own.

“When you look at it from this very detailed, micro level, what can you see that we don’t see at the macro level?”

As it turns out, quite a lot.

“This is history from the ground up, observed through a microscope, not a telescope,” Wines writes in his deeply-researched tome. “We can see life from an individual’s perspective.”

Because so many members of the Hallockville community kept diaries, Wines was able to stitch together a vibrant tapestry of overlapping voices—sometimes harmonious, sometimes at odds. War, religion, and whiskey sparked no shortage of strife.

For more than 200 years, nearly all of Hallockville’s residents traced their lineage to a tight circle of 17th-century Puritan settlers from eastern England. The area bore many names through time—Northville, King’s Road, North Road, Hallockville, the Village of Sound Ave.—but its heart beat to a single rhythm: kinship.

Wines spent years teasing out truth from legend.

‘Illiterate’

Among the most persistent tales was that of Peter Hallock, long hailed in family lore as the first settler to step ashore in Southold.

“The family story was that he was the first one to get off the boat in Southold — and that’s in the genealogy — but there’s not a shred of evidence that he actually ever came to America. The name doesn’t show up in anything, but it’s an old family story,” Wines said.

Instead, Wines discovered that it was William Hallock—recipient of land in the 1661 First Aquebogue Land Division—who was the true ancestor of “all Hallocks in the [U.S.].” Ironically, in a community where literacy was sacred, William appears to have been illiterate, signing all documents with a simple “H.”

Conflict was not confined to myth. Local churches fractured over modern touches—steeples, melodeons, new ministers.

“They were always dividing, always splitting up,” Wines said. “It wasn’t just the Civil War that split them in half.”

In one instance, a congregation’s embrace of progress triggered mass walkouts.

“They built a steeple, and they hired a new minister, and a third of the congregation walked out. They thought the church was becoming too modern.

“So these are the conservatives, the traditionalists. And what they did is they republished their 1759 covenant … and then they went down the street and built a new church, where Route 58 and Route 25 branch off.”

Even instruments stirred ire: a melodeon, viewed by some as blasphemous, was hurled from a church balcony and smashed on the floor below.

‘Liberty poles’

William’s descendant David “Halsey” Hallock (whose middle and preferred name indicates he was also descended from the Halsey family on the South Fork) —was a mirror image of Abraham Lincoln, and took pride in backing the Great Emancipator.

“When he was an old man, his daughter was giving music lessons, and he’d be in the sitting room [while] the students would wait there have their lessons, and he’d start telling them about how his first vote for president was for Mr. Abraham Lincoln,” Wines said. “He was a proud Republican, a proud abolitionist.”

Yet Halsey never breathed a word about the enslaved people once held by his ancestors.

“He never mentioned that at this family home … all these ancestors were slave-owners. He just talked about their support for the Union.”

The contradictions ran deep. While the Hallocks championed temperance, their neighbors trafficked in rum, slipping through moonlit waters of Long Island Sound.

“Did they ever say anything? Not a word.”

By the eve of the Civil War, Sound Avenue was a battlefield of loyalties. Union supporters erected “Liberty Poles”—tall flagstaffs flying the 33-starred banner of the United States.

“The majority of the people of Sound Ave. … were supporters of the war, so [the Hallocks] went to Greenport, bought a [Liberty] pole and started transporting it back this way. They got it about as far as Hallockville and they left it there for the night. Vandals stole it and destroyed it. They had to go back to Greenport to get another one.

“Well, it turns out that probably the vandals were Hallocks. There were two next door neighbors who were also Hallocks. This was an inter family feud. Some were on one side, some were on the other.”

Civil War ‘substitutes’

When Lincoln instituted the draft in spring 1863, Halsey Hallock and his older brother Daniel journeyed to Jamaica, Queens to register. Daniel was later drafted—becoming the sole Hallock of 27 draft-age men in the family to serve.

Wines unearthed a “certificate of non-eligibility” showing that Halsey—like many others in Riverhead—got a stand-in. His substitute, a German immigrant named Erich Bartels, was mortally wounded in March 1865, just two weeks before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Wines found a record showing the Riverhead town treasurer had arranged it.

“The town had this program where you could do that. The reason for the program was that the Republicans were in the majority, but they knew that they could lose political support if their sons got drafted.

“So instead, the town raised the money, they borrowed the money, and anyone that didn’t want to go fight, the town could hire a substitute, and they did that for 20 or 30 people. It was the biggest debt the town had probably ever taken on in proportion. And so Halsey ends up not going to war.”

Only about 80 Riverhead men served in the entire Civil War, according to Wines, about 2.5% of the population, compared with about 11% of the North as a whole that served.

“You see published histories of the Civil War and they talk about the ones that did serve, but it turns out that a lot of them — certainly a majority — did not serve from this area.”