When the American Revolution came to Cutchogue, the war was not some distant contest between George Washington and King George III.

It emptied houses, split families and neighbors between Patriot and Loyalist and sent much of Southold Town fleeing across Long Island Sound. It left those who remained living under British occupation and turned two prominent local men, Jared Landon and Parker Wickham, into bitter adversaries whose feud would outlast the war. When it was all over, one of those men ended up living in the other man’s house.

Mark MacNish of the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council & Museums told that story Thursday evening during a Cutchogue Civic Association presentation. The talk, at the Cutchogue New Suffolk Free Library, traced the hamlet’s history through the Revolution and its aftermath. Local history librarian Mariella Ostroski then picked up the story in the 19th century, explaining how land donated by Landon’s son eventually became the site of the library — and how the properties surrounding it evolved into today’s Village Green.

The Revolutionary War story begins, MacNish said, before the Revolution itself.

About 150 Southold men fought at Fort Ticonderoga during the French and Indian War and returned home with stories of contemptuous treatment by British officers, including beatings and whippings for relatively minor infractions.

Then came Britain’s attempts to raise revenue from its colonies.

By the summer of 1776, whatever political argument had been unfolding suddenly became a military crisis on Long Island. Washington’s army suffered a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn in August, effectively surrendering Long Island to British occupation for most of the war.

The New York Provincial Congress urged Long Islanders to the flee to the mainland, taking as much of their livestock and grain as possible. In Southold, Jared Landon helped organize the evacuation of roughly three-quarters of the town’s population to Connecticut aboard the Polly, a sloop belonging to his brother, Capt. David Landon.

Jared Landon himself stayed behind. Like others who remained, MacNish said, he had property and family interests to protect. What followed was a strange and dangerous existence in an occupied community.

The refugees did not necessarily fare better. Food became scarce in Connecticut, smallpox spread and some families suffered devastating losses. Joseph Hallock of Cutchogue lost three children. Back on the North Fork, British and Hessian troops occupied the region and stripped farms and homes for supplies.

Churches in Cutchogue and Southold were dismantled for firewood, MacNish said, both for their timber and as a means of demoralizing residents.

British Gen. William Tryon also imposed an oath of allegiance to the king on local men, with punishment threatened for those who refused. Mark MacNish

Much of what survives about everyday life in Cutchogue during those years comes from Landon himself. He secretly corresponded with his father, Samuel, who had gone to Connecticut. The letters mostly concern the practical necessities of surviving a war — crops, food and supplies — but also reveal Landon’s loneliness following the death of his wife and his growing fury over British treatment of the population.

In November 1778, Landon described a summer of repeated robberies.

“We have been so harassed this summer with the enemy,” he wrote. “They have attacked my house once. We drove them off.”

But another man looms over Landon’s wartime correspondence: Parker Wickham.

Wickham was among the most powerful men in pre-Revolutionary Southold. The eldest son of Joseph Wickham II and Abigail Parker, he inherited an enormous estate at 22, including property stretching from King’s Highway — today’s Main Road — south to Peconic Bay and encompassing Robins Island. Through his mother’s family, MacNish said, Wickham also inherited much of what became Riverhead.

He had repeatedly served as Southold Town supervisor and had been a respected member of the community. Then came the Revolution.

Wickham refused to sign the Patriot association and publicly called the movement “a folly.” His brother Thomas Wickham, meanwhile, became a Patriot leader. Some of Parker Wickham’s own children supported the Patriot cause.

Somewhere along the way, MacNish said, Parker Wickham and Jared Landon came to despise each other.

The historian cautioned that some of the more colorful stories about their feud are local legend rather than documented history. One holds that Wickham repeatedly had Landon jailed for minor offenses. Another says Landon was captured while serving as a lookout during a Patriot raid.

While neither story is supported by primary-source evidence, MacNish said, there is evidence of a very real dispute.

Wickham sued Samuel Landon, Jared’s father, in the Supreme Court and won. The episode was particularly inflammatory because the men involved were prominent lawyers and judges who ordinarily would have been expected to settle such a dispute among themselves.

Jared Landon had to travel to New York City to pay the judgment and associated fines.

His reaction survives in a letter.

“As to Parker Wickham, he must not live here,” Landon wrote. “I don’t think Southold can hold us both.”

A war fought from the Sound

Connecticut became a base for Patriot whaleboat raids across Long Island Sound.

The small boats were armed and used to strike British supply operations on Long Island. During one raid on the North Fork, sailors from the HMS Swan were surprised while at a local tavern. As they fled back toward their ship, the vessel’s commander was shot in the leg, an injury that ultimately resulted in the limb being amputated.

The raiders also took an unusual prize: Parker Wickham. Wickham and several other Loyalists were carried to Connecticut as prisoners. There his enemies took an extraordinary step.

In December 1777, while Wickham was being held in Connecticut, Patriot leader Ezra L’Hommedieu helped secure an act of attainder against him — an ancient legal mechanism used to strip a person of property and inheritance rights.

Wickham was eventually paroled and returned to British-controlled Long Island, where he broke the terms of his parole, further infuriating his Patriot opponents. MacNish noted that the measure was controversial even among American leaders and was not repeated. Centuries later, its legality would resurface in litigation known as the Wickham Claim, which ultimately failed but helped prevent development of Robins Island.

Landon, meanwhile, had problems of his own. In December 1777, he was thrown into the notorious Provost Jail in New York City.

‘As to Parker Wickham, he must not live here. I don’t think Southold can hold us both.’
Revolutionary War-era Cutchogue Patriot Jared Landon

Local legend later blamed Wickham for arranging Landon’s imprisonment, but MacNish said the chronology makes that extremely unlikely: Wickham himself was being held by the Patriots at the time.

Conditions at the Provost were brutal. Landon remained there for months and eventually appealed for help to the commander of the HMS Swan, with whom he had developed what MacNish described as a tenuous relationship.

In an April 1778 letter, Landon insisted that nothing had been alleged against him and portrayed himself as having worked on behalf of the king. He appealed to something more immediate than politics: planting season was approaching, he wrote, and it was time “to put seeds in the earth” to provide food for people and livestock. Whether the letter secured his release or not, Landon eventually got out.

When the war ended, the fortunes of the two rivals diverged dramatically.

The final turn of the screw

The Southold refugees began returning from Connecticut. Jared Landon’s father did not. After seven years of correspondence between father and son, Samuel Landon’s remains came home in a pine box.

Parker Wickham lost almost everything. He was banished after the war, although poor health spared him exile to Nova Scotia or England. Instead, he was sent to Connecticut. His son delivered him there, MacNish said, and Wickham never saw another member of his family.

He died about a year later and was buried in an obscure grave, miles from Cutchogue’s Old Burying Ground, where his wife Mary lay.

The new government seized Wickham’s estate and sold it to help pay war debts, a move that produced the final, almost novelistic turn in the Landon-Wickham feud.

Among the people who bought Wickham’s confiscated property was Jared Landon. His purchase included the Old House — the Wickham family home.

“Ironically, and more than likely deliberately,” MacNish said, Landon acquired the property of the man he had once declared could not remain in Southold with him.

Landon and his descendants would live there for generations.

Robins Island went to Ezra L’Hommedieu, who had helped draft the act that stripped Wickham of his property. Landon, meanwhile, helped rebuild Cutchogue after the devastation of occupation, organizing a lottery to raise money for materials to reconstruct the Presbyterian church and personally overseeing the work.

Despite his hatred of Parker Wickham, MacNish said, Landon remained friendly with members of the Wickham family who had supported the Patriot cause.

From the Landons to the library

The Landon story also provides a bridge from Revolutionary-era Cutchogue to the land surrounding today’s library and Village Green.

Jared Landon’s son, Judge Henry Landon, donated the property on which the building that now houses the Cutchogue New Suffolk Free Library was constructed. Mariella Ostroski, the library’s local history librarian, picked up the story there.

Cutchogue’s first library association was established in 1841, with residents able to buy subscriptions for 50 cents a share. But the present library building began its life as a church.

In 1861, a group of residents broke with the local Presbyterian church to establish the Independent Congregational Church and Society. The split involved both church governance and slavery: Ostroski said members of the new congregation believed abolition required greater activism, while the Presbyterian congregation did not want to enter the political debate.

Henry Landon donated the land, and the new church was incorporated and built in 1862. The congregation lasted about half a century. By 1913, unable to sustain itself, its members returned to the Presbyterian church and agreed that the building could be used as a village library. The library received its New York State charter in 1915. Electricity and a furnace were added several years later.

The building also served other community needs. When the Cutchogue Methodist Church burned in 1927, the former church-turned-library was made available to the Methodist congregation.

Ostroski said that in 1929, a member of the old Congregational society who believed one of its stock holdings was overvalued persuaded the organization to sell it — fortunately, just before the stock market crash. The money helped maintain the library building and purchase the property that became the Village Green. Mariela Ostroski

Beginning in the 1960s, local preservationists began assembling the historic buildings now found there. A barn was moved from behind the Presbyterian manse and an old schoolhouse was brought over from across the street. When widening of North Road threatened the Wickham House, it too was moved to the Green.

The Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council was established in 1965, continuing a tradition of local civic involvement that Ostroski said connected many of the same families and organizations involved with the church, library and preservation of the hamlet’s history.

The library itself eventually outgrew the old church. By the 1980s, Ostroski recalled, the building was so cramped that when children’s movies were being shown, adults sometimes navigated the stacks with flashlights to avoid interrupting them. An expansion followed, and a Local History Room was later established.

Today, the library and Village Green remain closely linked. Across from a library standing on land donated by Jared Landon’s son is a Village Green where a Wickham house was preserved. And nearby stands the Old House that Jared Landon acquired after the Revolution from the confiscated estate of the man he once declared Southold was not big enough to hold alongside him: Parker Wickham.