Sewing Society cares for chapel and community
Four generations of Wainscott citizens, including Wainscott Sewing Society members and their families, celebrated the group’s 150th anniversary this month.
Durell Godfrey
By Christine Sampson East Hampton Star
November 27, 2019
The Wainscott Chapel has been many things, among them a community center, a schoolhouse, a venue for school plays, a meetinghouse for support groups, the longtime headquarters of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee, an Election Day polling site, and a wartime Red Cross unit. It has hosted religious services, and in the tower there’s a bell on a long rope that can be pulled to ring it.
The chapel, however, was never blessed as a proper church for a particular denomination. For the last 150 years, it has been the charge of the Wainscott Sewing Society to manage and care for the building — from the war memorial out front to the privvy out back, and everything inside the walls in between. Founded in 1869, the Wainscott Sewing Society today is a social organization that brings the community together for festivals, history talks, and dinner parties, and raises money for scholarships and for the upkeep of the chapel.
“Our love of Wainscott is one of the things that connects us,” said Hilary Osborn Malecki, the group’s president. “A love of the chapel, a love of Wainscott community. It’s hard to socialize with people these days. We get together and enjoy seeing people that we don’t see on a daily basis.”
A poem written in 1927 by Mrs. Howard Hand described the founding of the Sewing Society: “In the year of 1869 / That seems to us a long long time / The ladies met a dozen or so / To organize a society to sew . . . These ladies worked from year to year / And helped with their gifts far and near.”
There are between 35 and 40 members now, from ages 24 to 87, but very little sewing happens these days.
“I was a member when we were doing sewing,” recalled Pat D’Andrea, the society’s secretary. “As older members passed away or moved on, newer members were not inclined to take up sewing, so we lost all the wonderful people that knew how to do these crafts.”
And, as Barbara D’Andrea, a third-generation member who is the society’s treasurer and Pat D’Andrea’s cousin, observed, “Women are now in the work force. They’re not home.”
Nancy McCaffrey, who served two terms as an East Hampton Town Board member and is on the board of the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center, remembered making a patch for a quilt that the Wainscott Sewing Society created together to raffle off many years ago, a frequent practice that raised money for the upkeep of the chapel.
“It couldn’t have been very fancy,” Ms. McCaffrey said, smiling. “I don’t have the patience.”
The society helped the Home for the Friendless, a New York-based mission, by sewing clothes and packing a barrel with supplies to send off to the city. During World War I and World War II, a Red Cross unit was established and the women of the sewing society wrapped bandages to be sent to the front lines.
“The high-society women at the time were into the Red Cross, so when these ladies called on you, you never said no,” Ms. Malecki said. “You wouldn’t say no to Bob Osborn’s grandmother! They donated money to the Red Cross and sent bags to their soldiers going off to war — the Wainscott boys. There were a lot of patriotic things around here.”
This photo of members of the Wainscott Sewing Society and the quilt they made together appeared in The Star in 1981.