​​Welcome to the Kids’ Walking Tour of Sag Harbor! On this tour your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take photos of certain things at each stop, and after you’ve collected them, you will get a free prize at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum! To win it, just show your photos — and you need at least 6 of the photos to win a prize — to the person who works there. You’ll be seeing a lot of amazing things along the way, and sampling a little bit of the history of this very old Village we call home.

Be sure to go to Sag Harbor Kids online for a very full list of the wonderful things you can do here all year round!

JOHN JERMAIN MEMORIAL LIBRARY

YOUR MISSION: If you choose to accept it, is to take a picture of a book called “Moby Dick”, by Herman Melville, which is a great story about a sea captain who is obsessed with killing a huge, pure white whale that bit off his leg when he first encountered it. It’s a very famous story and if all the copies of Moby Dick are checked out of the Library when you visit, take a photo of another book about the ocean.

The John Jermain Library is back at 201 Main Street, after a very exciting renovation that lasted several years!

The Library features a big crack in the terrazzo floor of the main entrance filled with real bronze. That crack happened in the Hurricane of 1938 on September 21st, when the hurricane (nicknamed the “Long Island Express”) wiped out 57,000 homes. Nobody even predicted it except for one weatherman, and no one believed him. It’s lucky that the Library is still standing!

The Library has fantastic books and many, many activities and clubs for kids. It even has a ping pong table! And you can play online games on their website!

The Library is open Mon - Wed: 10am - 7pm, Thurs: 10am - 9pm,

Fri and Sat: 10am - 5pm, and Sun: 1pm - 5pm

​FIREMEN’S MUSEUM AT 46 CHURCH STREET

YOUR MISSION: take a picture of one of the old leather fire buckets, but if the Museum is closed, instead go right around the corner to the left and take a picture of the heavy metal door and the barred window that was the village jail! It was closed because it was considered too cruel and a new Sag Harbor Jail House was built that's now a museum.

This authentic firehouse dates back to the year 1803, when the Sag Harbor Fire Department came into being. It is the oldest volunteer fire department in New York State!

When you come into the Firemen’s Museum, which is a treasure trove of objects old and new, be sure check out the amazing collection of fire truck toys, and look for the leather fire buckets, which were something every house in Sag Harbor had to have by law in case of fire. People who didn’t have a leather bucket to help the bucket brigade, in which townspeople were supposed to line up with water in their buckets to help put out a fire, were fined 50 cents.

One very special thing in this museum is that you can touch everything! You can even climb into the old fire truck and pull the rope for the fire bell at the top of the stairs. Be sure to take a look at the big mural on the back wall downstairs that depicts the great fires of 1915 and 1925, which could have destroyed the Village!

The Firemen's Museum is open July 4th till Labor Day 11am - 4pm, closed Wednesdays.

​ANNIE COOPER BOYD'S HOUSE

Otherwise known as the Sag Harbor Historical Society (Annie Cooper Boyd House), 174 Main Street

Annie Cooper Boyd was a painter who lived over 100 years ago who loved painting pictures of Sag Harbor and the landscapes around it. She would go out to paint on a boat, and sometimes on horseback!

The house is REALLY old (dating back to 1796, which is shortly after the Declaration of Independence made America the country it is today), and it’s now the home of the Sag Harbor Historical Society.

There's also a very cool new William Cooper Boat Shop in the back where you can see how whaleboats were built, with all the old tools they used. Annie's father had a whale boat building shop like this.

It’s open every Saturday and Sunday from May through October, and your task here is to take a picture of one of Annie Cooper Boyd’s paintings*, but if it’s closed when you’re there take a photo of the big silver bell right in front, which is made by the famous Meneeley Bell Company. The bell that replaced the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia after it was cracked is a Meneeley bell!

The Sag Harbor Historical Society is open Sat and Sun, May through Sept: 1 - 4pm and by appointment Memorial Day through Columbus day by calling 631-725-5092.

* If you take photos, please don't use flash photography anywhere in the house

​​​SAG HARBOR WHALING MUSEUM AT 200 MAIN STREET

YOUR MISSION: TAKE A PICTURE OF THE BRAIN CORAL.

This is one of our favorite places in Sag Harbor! It is full of many wonderful and bizarre objects. that relate not only to the whaling industry but also to the beauty of the waters that surround Sag Harbor and the sea creatures that live in the ocean. Don’t miss the gigantic whale jaw bone you have to walk under to enter!

In the 19th Century people killed whales in the hundreds of thousands, mostly for oil for lighting lamps, much like we use electricity today, and they greatly reduced the number of whales. It was an extremely dangerous job, and many boats and sailors were lost. The whalers would sail all the way to the other side of the world, and one of the objects you’ll see here is a big brain coral, which looks just like a brain, but when it was alive it was an animal (not a plant!) that lives in tropical waters and feeds on tiny plankton in the ocean.

Now the Whaling Museum is dedicated to protecting animals like whales, and they have frequent interesting shows about sea creatures as well as historical shows that tell you about how people lived at the time when the Whaling Museum was a residence for a famous whaling captain named Benjamin Huntting II (what’s in a name!), who made a fortune in this trade.

The Whaling Museum is open Mon through Sun: 10am - 5pm

​THE OLD WHALERS’ CHURCH

YOUR MISSIon: Take a photo of the top of the church where the steeple used to be.​

The First Presbyterian (Old Whalers’) Church from 1844 is one of the greatest buildings in Sag Harbor. It was made to look kind of like an Egyptian temple, and it’s a very unusual style of architecture, called “Egyptian Revival”.

The Church used to have an enormous steeple, 185 feet tall, that was the first thing that sailors out at sea would spot when they were coming back home to Sag Harbor. But when the great Hurricane of 1938 came along (remember the “Long Island Express” from before?), the wind was so powerful that it blew the steeple right off the top of the church and it was never reconstructed.

Take a look at the picture of how tall it used to be with it. There was a famous poet named George Sterling who lived nearby who, when he was a kid, got into big trouble by climbing the steeple with some friends and putting a pirate flag up there. He’s kind of lucky he lived to get punished for it.

When you go in the Church, check out the curved wall all the way at the back behind the altar. And guess what? It’s actually totally flat! It looks curved because of a clever painting trick called trompe l’oeil (which means “fool the eye” in French – you say it like "tromp lay") to make it look curved and to make the Church look bigger than it is.

Men With Their Pants Down!

YOur mission: here is to take a photo of one of the graves of someone who has a flag and a little metal sign that says “1776” on it, meaning that they are veterans of the American Revolution. If you feel ambitious, see if you can find the engraved metal plaque that commemorates Meigs Raid, too, that's right on Union Street

Old Burying Ground: Men With Their Pants Down! at 44 Union Street

Walk right next to the Church into one of the oldest graveyards of Sag Harbor—probably haunted—which used to be a campground for British soldiers at the time of the American Revolution. This is where a really clever battle, Meigs’ Raid, or the Battle of Sag Harbor, happened on May 23, 1777, which was a turning point in the Revolutionary War!

That night 234 American soldiers snuck here in the dead of night, led by Lt. Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs (his real name), coming all the way from Connecticut in whaleboats. A soldier who was there, Christopher Vail, wrote about it like this:

“We proceed down to their quarters where we completely succeeded in capturing the whole force except one man. We burnt all the coasting vessels, which were all loaded and laid alongside the wharf, and a store that was 60 feet long that stood on the wharf.

“The British soldiers had just gotten their pay and many had been eating and drinking heavily. They remained, went drinking etc., and all got pretty well boozy. When we arrived we took 99 Tories. Some had nothing but his shirt on, some a pair of trowsers, others perhaps 1 stocking and one shoe and in fact they were carried off in their situation to New Haven."

So the British were literally caught with their pants down! No one was killed, but the explosion and fire wiped out the whole British encampment.

other great things to do!

While you are in Sag Harbor, don’t miss some of the great things you can do and see besides what’s on this tour. We recommend the Goat on a Boat Puppet Theater, where they have great puppet plays all year round; Bay Street Theater, which has great kids' summer theater camps; Breakwater Yacht Club, which has junior sailing programs; Mashashimuet Park, a really fun and big park that has swings and tennis courts and baseball games in the summer, and Otter Pond, which is right across from the park on Jermain Street. Otter Pond is a really pretty spot where you can usually see ducks with their ducklings and look for frogs.

Be sure to go to Sag Harbor Kids online for a very full list of the wonderful things you can do here all year round!