Three Mile Harbor Road and Local Mail Mistakes

Today, I live in East Hampton at 28 Three Mile Harbor Hog Creek Road. On occasion, mail to us, particularly from FedEx or U.S. Postal Service, gets delivered by mistake to 28 Three Mile Drive, a street in Northwest annoyingly 5 miles from here. It happens because the national computer system that enters addresses on envelopes sometimes is baffled by the long name of my road. It then looks for the name of a different road that it decides was where the mail was supposed to go. And then delivers it there.

Over the years, we’ve gotten to know the nice people 5 miles away as a result. But it is a pain in the butt taking the time chasing down mail this way.

It is interesting comparing the problems of how we get our mail now with how I got my mail years ago.

When I was 15 my dad moved our family to Montauk. Before that, the residential neighborhood in New Jersey where I was raised had roads with simpler names: Locust Avenue, Maple Lane, Greenwood Drive, or our road, Ridgewood Road. Here on the East End were all these crazy names.

As for problems about the street name I encountered when I bought this house later as a grownup, there weren’t any. Letters to me were written out by hand with my road properly named on the envelope. These letters were delivered by a mailman.

Soon afterwards, I discovered that across the street and down about 300 yards was a swamp called Soak Hides Dreen. That’s where, in the olden days, the members of the Montaukett Indian Nation, along with the local folks, known as Bonackers, soaked and softened hides so they could be crafted into leather boots, belts, saddles and buckskin clothes.

The Bonackers were descendants of working-class people who had emigrated from England in Colonial times. They were baymen and farmers, and spoke with an accent. The word “dreen,” I decided, after not finding this word in a dictionary, was how they pronounced “drain.” The swamp drained into the harbor when the tide went out.

I had stationery made. My name was at the top. Next was the street address, which, for fun, I wrote as “28 Three Mile Harbor Hog Creek Road by Soak Hides Dreen.”

I sent letters out that way for many years. Responses, often written longhand in those days, came back with all those words for my street name on the envelope. One day, Stuart, our mailman, arrived as I was down putting outgoing letters into our mailbox on the side of the road. He handed me the incoming.

“Love how you renamed the street, Bub,” he said.

Recently I read an account which gave the location where the first known human remains in New York State were found. Archaeologists had dug up bones, and had carbon dated them. It is a special place.

The excavation is at Soak Hides Dreen.