55th Annual Delaware Show

The Dominy Shops at Winterthur By Joshua Lane Perched on the south fork of the eastern end of Long Island, East Hampton today is best known as one of the towns comprising “the Hamptons,” a wealthy summer resort. In the eighteenth century, however, it was an isolated and largely self-sufficient community of small farming and fishing villages scattered over 70 square miles and connected to distant markets by sea. When families from those communities needed a clock, a set of chairs, a hay rake, or a cart wheel, they turned to the Dominy family of craftsmen. When the township voted to build a wind-powered gristmill, the elders commissioned a Dominy. Between the early 1760s and 1840s, three generations of this local craft dynasty—grandfather, Nathaniel IV (1737−1812); father, Nathaniel V (1770−1852); and son, Felix (1800−1868)—made and repaired clocks and watches and provided general woodworking, cabinetmaking, and carpentry to thousands of families in eastern Long Island and the Connecticut coast. They filled a critical need for multi-skilled woodworkers and metalworkers (fig. 1). Remarkably, the nearly complete contents of the Dominy woodworking and clockmaking shops survived in situ until 1946 (fig. 2). Acquired by Winterthur in 1957, the Dominy tool collection, comprising more than 1,000 hand tools and larger pieces of equipment, has been on display since 1960 in timber-frame structures that closely replicate the original shop buildings (fig. 3). The tools, clocks, furniture, and farm equipment as well as the original shop buildings, now under restoration by the town of East Hampton, and the shop accounts and family papers housed in Winterthur Library tell a more complete story about a family of craftsmen and their pivotal role in the community than any other grouping of tools, documents, and Fig. 1. Smoothing plane inscribed “Nathaniel Dominy/Ye 3d [Joyner/owner?] Decembr/Ye 25th AD 1763.” Maple, satinwood. Gift of Robert M. Dominy 1959.42 — 115 —