Kamala Harris and Donald Trump might be spending a sleepless election night, but they won’t be the first. One of Bridgehampton’s own summer residents had a nail-biter right on Ocean Road.
Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), the governor of New York from 1907 to 1910, ran for the highest office in the land back in 1916. Hughes and his family summered in Bridgehampton at Tremedden, the estate of the Esterbrooks, to whom he was related by marriage.
Hughes, the Republican nominee, went to bed that election night thinking he was to be the next president, only to find that he had lost to the incumbent Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, by one of the closest electoral margins in history. Hughes went on to be Secretary of State from 1921 to 1925 in the William Harding administration, and he was later nominated by President Herbert Hoover as the eleventh Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, serving from 1930 to 1941.
Woodrow Wilson was also a summer visitor, spending August of 1890 in Sagaponack while he was the newly appointed Chair of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at the College of New Jersey (Princeton) before becoming the university’s president in 1902 and getting into politics.
Tremedden was the vacation home of the Richard Esterbrook family of the Esterbrook Pen fortune. The house, which was on the northeastern corner of Ocean and Sagaponack Roads, was torn down in 1939.
