Underwater mystery? One man’s search through the past

A former Islander is trying to unravel a mystery he’s been investigating for years: Who owns the creeks and inlets of Shelter Island?

Some say it’s a fool’s errand, a pointless quest, but Peter Wright said his research leads him to disagree. 

Mr. Wright owned property in the 1970s at the corner of North Ferry and Manwaring roads, where the White Oak Nursery is now, across from the IGA. Around that time his father-in-law was part of an investor group considering buying the Mashomack Preserve property from a real estate firm, which had left it untouched and ran it as a fishing and hunting club. The idea was to develop the 2,040-acre parcel with 11 miles of undeveloped shoreline into luxury estates.

“Fortunately, my father-in-law’s group didn’t buy it,” Mr. Wright said from his Manhattan home.

After the deal fell through, The Nature Conservancy purchased the property and has preserved it as one of the region’s natural treasures.

Looking into the history of the place, Mr. Wright began to consider the ownership of the bay bottoms and creeks. He said he learned that “the property had extra value because of a concept called ‘the Kings Bay Bottoms,’ apparently a concept in English law that gave shoreline property owners additional ownership of the underwater bay bottoms for 500 feet out.”

This squares with some recent investigations by Councilman Mike Bebon, who has drawn up legislation on access to the Island’s shoreline, which was inspired by problems of people congregating on beaches above the high tide lines of private property.

In a draft of legislation, Mr. Bebon began by stating that the town’s beaches are guided by “a public trust benefit,” which allows residents and visitors access to beaches, under certain conditions. The law on access is as ancient as it is vague in its particulars. The draft states: “The public trust doctrine is the principle that the sovereign [the government] holds in trust for public use some resources, such as shoreline between the high and low tide lines, regardless of private property ownership. The doctrine has its roots in Roman Law and English Common Law. There is not a directly applicable federal or state law; definition of various aspects of the doctrine having been understood mainly through evolving case law.”

In short, most municipalities agree that the public has a right of access and to be on beaches below the median high-tide line.

Mr. Wright said that a Long Island concept of an owner having possession of the bay bottoms 500 feet beyond the high tide line was apparently unique “following Crown Grants to the Duke of York, Governor Dongan, Governor Nicolls, and ultimately to Nathaniel Sylvester, who purchased Shelter Island in 1654. It was apparently affirmed in litigation after the Revolutionary War.”

Pursuing the idea of ownership, Mr. Wright said he made multiple contacts to research this concept and came up empty, including research into New York State Archives, the National Archives in Britain, University of Maine Law School Ocean and Coastal Law Center, East Hampton Historical Society and the Shelter Island Historical Society. He also visited the Suffolk County Courthouse archives in Riverhead before the pandemic struck.

There he found an intriguing path toward the ownership of the Island’s creeks and inlets.

In 1912, Mr. Wright said, the Town of Shelter Island filed a complaint in Riverhead Supreme Court, “To identify the then-living owners of underwater lands beneath tidal creeks and inlets within the boundaries of the town. The theory was that this ownership had been sliced and diced into such small slivers as to be worthless. But the complaint tacitly accepted the notion of private ownership of underwater tidal creeks and inlets, if not bay bottoms.”

The mystery took on a new complexity when, according to Mr. Wright, a few years later, in 1918, the ongoing legal complaint and attempt to find the current owners resulted in a court-appointed referee.

That court official “concluded that the best course of action was to gather all those land slivers together and to put them up to auction, which happened in March 1919,” Mr. Wright said. “The purchaser, for the price of $10,000, in 1919 dollars, was John S. Howe, vice president of the Suffolk County Trust in Riverhead. He was obviously fronting for the real buyer.”

Ten thousand dollars in 1916 is the equivalency of about a quarter of a million dollars today.

Mr. Wright has been in touch with Shelter Island Town Assessor Craig Wood. In an email to the Reporter, Mr. Wood stated that all bay bottoms and inlets are owned by the town and assessed as property. “I would like to see a copy of the 1919 lawsuit,” he wrote. “The bay bottom laws that I know all originate with the ‘Nicoll’s Patent.’ This was also tested in the early 2000s when the state tried to mandate saltwater fishing licenses and they were not allowed when fishing within this 500 feet of shore property. Except for Dering Harbor, which has multiple bay bottom owners, all of Shelter Island’s bays and inlets are owned by New York State, The Town of Shelter Island or The Nature Conservancy.  These three entities are Tax Exempt.”

Mr. Wright maintains that the private ownership of the saltwater and brackish (when salt and freshwaters mix) were never questioned in the lawsuit or in the referee’s recommendation. “They had to be private,” he said, “or else, why put them up for sale? Bay bottoms are public lands, but what about these brackish creeks?”

Mr. Wright said he was continuing his mission to find out who put up what was the equivalency of $250,000 to buy underwater property on Shelter Island 105 years ago.