Two Oyster Projects on Accabonac Harbor, and the Fall Calendar Around Them

Walk the end of Gerard Drive most Sundays this month and you'll find someone crouched at the edge of a dock, hauling up a mesh bag heavier than it looks, checking on oysters that have spent the summer growing off the very piling that holds up their stairs. A quarter mile away, near the mouth of the harbor off Landing Lane, a different kind of oyster sits fused into a reef that nobody will ever eat. Both projects live in the same water. Almost nobody who isn't running one of them could tell you they're not the same thing.

That distinction is worth untangling before the harbor's fall calendar fills in around it, because the two projects say something different about who's doing what here, and why.

Your Oysters, or Everyone's Water

The oysters at the end of a private dock belong to the East Hampton Town Trustees' community oyster garden program, which put its first Accabonac Harbor site on Gerard Drive back in 2018. This year marks the program's tenth anniversary town-wide, and the mechanics haven't changed much since the pilot started on Three Mile Harbor in 2016: residents pay a modest fee, get training and gear from the town's shellfish hatchery, and are allowed to grow up to a thousand oysters for their own table. A share goes back to public grounds when the season ends. The rest is dinner.

The hatchery's director, Barley Dunne, has spent decades building the infrastructure behind that arrangement, moving oysters through spawning, a land-based nursery, and finally a field grow-out phase in a harbor or bay. This year the hatchery also experimented with sugar kelp in Accabonac Harbor as a winter crop, planted in November and harvested by May, timed so it doesn't compete with the oyster season for tank space or staff attention.

The oysters near Landing Lane answer to a different name and a different purpose. South Fork Sea Farmers, working with the East Hampton Town Trustees and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, has built restoration reefs in Accabonac Harbor that exist purely to filter water and rebuild habitat. Nobody harvests them. A single adult oyster filters up to 50 gallons of water a day, and a functioning reef stacks that math into something that can measurably improve a harbor with a documented E. coli and eutrophication problem. According to The East Hampton Star, the first reef went in with 58 sixth graders from Springs School and ten students from East Hampton High School, working off a skiff piloted by Dunne himself, stacking bags of shell by hand in a shallow, closed section of the harbor picked specifically because boat traffic wouldn't disturb it.

Two East Hampton High School students who interned on that project, Skye Tanzmann and Nick Cooper, later pitched the town trustees on building two more reefs nearby, this time positioned to help slow erosion in front of houses along the shoreline. The logic was direct: a soft bottom lets a reef sink and suffocate, so the students spent time on kayaks searching for hard-bottom spots that could hold. Three years on, South Fork Sea Farmers' Bob Tymann was still guiding the work, and by the summer of 2025 oyster reefs built under his direction had multiplied across Accabonac Harbor, not just the one off Landing Lane.

So the harbor is running two oyster economies at once. One returns a private benefit, seeded and tended by the household that grows it, timed to a calendar that opens with new seedlings each spring and closes as the water cools each fall. The other returns a public one, built by students and never touched again once it's in place. If you've heard your neighbors talk about "the oyster thing," it helps to ask which one they mean.

The Week the Water Work Hands Off to the Hall

Right as the private gardens are coming in for the season, the harbor's other fall rhythm starts at Ashawagh Hall, a building with more history behind it than its plain shingled exterior suggests. It began as a schoolhouse. The Springs Improvement Society acquired it for essentially a dollar in the early twentieth century, and its national reputation traces back to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, who used the hall for exhibitions in a connection that eventually helped fund its renovation.

As James Lane Post reported, this year's Watercolor+ show opens there on Friday, September 25, and runs through Sunday, September 27, with an opening reception the first night from 5 to 7:30 p.m. It's the group's tenth year showing together, and this time the six artists, Kirsten Benfield, Nancy Brody, Barbara DiLorenzo, Laurie Hall, Beth Meredith, and Janet Rojas, are hanging the work salon style, tightly clustered rather than spaced apart, with a dedicated wall honoring founding member Jerry Schwabe, who died this past spring.

According to 27East, the following weekend, on Saturday, October 3, from 4 to 7 p.m., Heart of Springs runs its third annual SpringsFest on the grounds of the Parsons Blacksmith Shop at 1 Parson Place, with a rain date the following afternoon. The lineup is local straight through: M takes the Mic opens at 4, Real East End Brass follows at 5, and Mamalee Rose & Paul Gene close at 6. Town crier Hugh King gives a history talk on the land around the Springs Triangle, fifteen local craft vendors set up tables, and Springs Brewery and Springs Wines & Liquors pour for anyone over 21. The blacksmith shop itself, once the last working forge in East Hampton, gets a live demonstration during the festival, a nod to a trade that shaped daily life here for close to a century and a half.

Proceeds from both the festival and its sponsors go toward maintaining the buildings that make up what locals call the Springs Triangle: Ashawagh Hall, the Parsons Blacksmith Shop, the Springs Library, and the Springs Community Presbyterian Church. It's the same organization, Heart of Springs, that has spent recent years arguing these buildings are worth preserving. The buildings remain in daily use, not sealed off as a museum piece.

Why the Timing Isn't a Coincidence

Here's what ties the oyster gardens and the festival calendar together, even though nobody planned it that way on purpose. Both threads run on the same seasonal clock that has always governed this hamlet: warm months for growing something in or near the water, cooling months for gathering indoors, or at least under a tent, to talk about what the harbor and the land around it mean.

The baymen who worked Accabonac Harbor for generations called themselves Bonackers, a name the whole area still carries. That identity was built on water work first and community gathering second, and the fall handoff from private oyster cages to a hall full of watercolors and a blacksmith shop full of music is the same handoff those baymen would have recognized, just with different tools.

None of this requires a resident to do anything differently this week beyond showing up. The oyster farmers pulling cages off Gerard Drive aren't performing for anyone. The reef built off Landing Lane isn't going anywhere, and won't need attention again until the next round of student interns pitches a new one. Watercolor+ closes September 27. SpringsFest happens rain or shine on October 3 or 4. What's worth knowing, if you live here, is that the harbor runs two separate systems for taking care of its water, and the same ten days each fall happen to be when both of them quiet down at once, right as the hall next door gets loud.

If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the East End and want a clearer read on what life here actually looks like beyond a listing sheet, the Burns Team grew up on this water and can walk you through it directly.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.