Cutchogue, NY — Crash Data, Roads, History & Law

History

Cutchogue is one of the ten hamlets that make up the Town of Southold on Long Island's North Fork.^[30] The Town's hamlet history says the Native people of the North Fork called the area Cutchogue, "the principal place" in Algonquian, and that settlers came to use the word for the local people, the Corchaug.^[1] The Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council describes the Corchaugs as an Algonquian-speaking group living in Cutchogue and around the North Fork when the English arrived, one of four East End groups along with the Montauks, the Shinnecocks and the Manhansets of Shelter Island.^[2]

Less than a mile west of the Village Green, on what is now the Downs Farm Preserve, is the site of Fort Corchaug, a palisaded fortification that the Historical Council says the Corchaug built in the 1630s and abandoned in the 1660s.^[2] Archaeologist Ralph Solecki, who grew up near the site, began excavating it in 1946.^[2] In July 1997 state, county and town officials and the Peconic Land Trust reached an arrangement worth more than one million dollars to preserve the site, and on January 20, 1999 the Fort Corchaug Archeological Site was designated a National Historic Landmark.^[1][7]

The Town of Southold dates its founding to 1640, by thirteen families from the New Haven Colony, and describes itself as the first English settlement in the State of New York.^[24] Southold's first town historian called Cutchogue "Southold's first colony"; the Town's hamlet history explains that it was never a separate colony but was one of the first areas into which the colonists expanded.^[1]

The hamlet's best-known building, the Old House on the Village Green, was designated a National Historic Landmark on November 5, 1961.^[6] It was long presented as built in 1649 in Southold by John Budd and later moved to Cutchogue as a wedding gift to his daughter and Benjamin Horton, an account the Historical Council, which owns the house, now says is in dispute for lack of documentation.^[4] Two dendrochronology studies, one in 2008 and a second by William Flynt of Historic Deerfield, both concluded that the timbers were felled in 1698, so that the house was built in or after that year; the earliest surviving document is a 1699 deed from Benjamin Horton to Joseph Wickham that makes no mention of a house.^[3][5] Sources differ on when Flynt took his samples: the Suffolk Times, writing in April 2018, placed the work in the previous August, while the Council's page dates it 2018.^[5][3] The Suffolk Times also reported that some local historians reject the tree-ring dating and hold to the 1640s date on the strength of family and oral histories.^[5] The Town's hamlet history now says only that the house "was probably built in the late 1600s, early 1700s".^[1]

Cutchogue's first district school, built about 1840, served until 1903 and now stands on the Village Green.^[10] The Suffolk County special grand jury that examined the 2015 limousine crash found that as the local potato industry declined in the 1970s and 1980s, wineries came to the North Fork, buying land and opening tasting rooms, and it counted more than 35 wineries in the Town of Southold.^[15] Cutchogue has the earliest of them: Alex and Louisa Hargrave planted their first Vitis vinifera vines there in 1973; the Historical Council calls Hargrave Vineyard Long Island's first successful commercial vineyard and records its sale in 1999.^[12]

How the roads got here

Main Road, now New York State Route 25, was known as the King's Highway in the pre-Revolutionary period, the Historical Council notes.^[9] NYSDOT's official description runs NY 25 through "Riverhead, Mattituck, Cutchogue, Southold, Greenport" to the Orient Point ferry landing.^[14] In 1828, complying with a state mandate to measure and mark its main thoroughfare, the Town of Southold set stone mile markers along the Main Road from the town line at Laurel to Orient Point; the Council reports that all but one of the twenty-four survive and that they are designated town landmarks.^[8]

County Road 48 (Middle Road), the hamlet's other east-west highway, is a Suffolk County road.^[16] A county public works official told the grand jury that it was designed and built between the late 1960s and the mid-to-late 1970s as a divided highway to pull traffic off Route 25, on the expectation that the North Fork would eventually be built out as western Suffolk had been; because intersections were far apart in farm country, the county hung flashing signals to help drivers notice them.^[16] A county study memorandum of 2013-14 quoted in the report classifies CR 48 as an urban principal arterial with two lanes in each direction and a grass median 20 to 30 feet wide, and the posted limit at Depot Lane is 55 miles per hour.^[15]

Depot Lane, the north-south road that crosses both highways, is a Town of Southold road, according to town testimony quoted by the grand jury.^[16] The same report notes that the Town must obtain the state's permission to post signs on Route 25 and the county's permission on County Road 48.^[16]

The grand jury traced a long crash record at County Road 48 and Depot Lane, including 42 crashes in the vicinity between 1999 and 2006.^[15] Suffolk County's public works department had decided earlier in 2015 to replace the flashing signal, at a cost the report puts at about $75,000, and the new three-phase traffic light was activated on October 14, 2015; the report states there was no connection between that timing and the July crash, and that the light was installed without the green turn arrows some Southold officials had expected.^[16]

Law and legal history

On July 18, 2015, at about 5:10 p.m., a stretch limousine that had just picked up eight passengers at a winery on County Road 48 attempted a U-turn from the eastbound side at Depot Lane and was struck broadside by a westbound pickup truck; four passengers were killed and the four others were injured.^[15][18] The only signal then facing County Road 48 traffic was a blinking yellow light.^[15]

A Suffolk County grand jury indicted the limousine driver on four counts of criminally negligent homicide, four counts of third-degree assault, one count of reckless driving and four other Vehicle and Traffic Law violations.^[18] Supreme Court, Suffolk County, dismissed the indictment against him on October 26, 2016, and on June 20, 2018 the Appellate Division, Second Department, affirmed in People v. Pino, 162 A.D.3d 910.^[18] The appellate court held that the grand jury evidence, viewed most favorably to the prosecution, did not establish criminal negligence or reckless driving, noting evidence that the driver had stopped and that his view of oncoming traffic was partially obstructed by a vehicle waiting in the opposite turning lane.^[18]

Separately, a special grand jury empaneled on October 8, 2015 heard 47 witnesses and issued a report dated September 20, 2016 under Criminal Procedure Law § 190.85(1)(c).^[15] The report attributed the crash to failures by the limousine driver rather than to any equipment defect, and devoted most of its length to the intersection's history, the regulation of limousine drivers and the way stretch limousines are built.^[15] Its first legislative recommendation was that New York prohibit modified or stretch limousines with a capacity of nine or more, including the driver, from making U-turns on any road in the state; it also called for U-turn bans by Suffolk County and the Town of Southold, mandatory seat-belt use by rear passengers, and bringing such vehicles and their drivers under the state's bus inspection and Article 19-A driver-certification rules.^[17]

New York first banned stretch-limousine U-turns in the 2019 state budget: section 14 of part III of chapter 59 of the Laws of 2019 added subdivision (c) to Vehicle and Traffic Law § 1161, covering limousines seating ten or more.^[19] Chapter 4 of the Laws of 2020 (A.8172-B, same as S.6188-B), signed on February 3, 2020, lowered the threshold to nine or more including the driver and set penalties of $250 to $400 or up to 15 days in jail for a first conviction, rising to $750 to $1,000 or up to 180 days when the limousine is carrying a passenger.^[19] When the Assembly first passed the bill in June 2019, its announcement cited the Cutchogue crash by name; the sponsor's later statement describes the wider 2020 limousine package as a response to the October 2018 Schoharie crash that killed 20 people.^[20][21]

Cutchogue also appears in the New York Reports for a nineteenth-century church dispute.^[22] A testator who died in 1864 left land at Wading River and bank stock to any "new religious society in Cutchogue, organized as an Independent Congregational Church"; when the society's trustees claimed the legacy after the life beneficiary died in 1886, the estate argued that the society's 1862 certificate of incorporation was defective and that the corporation had lapsed once regular services ended.^[22] In Matter of Trustees of the Congregational Church & Society of Cutchogue, 131 N.Y. 1, decided January 20, 1892, the Court of Appeals affirmed for the trustees, holding that a month's delay in making the certificate did not void it and that forfeiture of a corporate charter for non-use can be raised only by the state.^[22] The Historical Council records that an Independent Congregational Church was built in Cutchogue in 1862 after a split with the Presbyterian church across the road, that the congregations reunited by 1913, and that the building has served as the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Free Library since 1914.^[11]

Government, courts and policing

Cutchogue has no government of its own; it is a hamlet of the Town of Southold, and the Census Bureau tabulates it as the Cutchogue census-designated place.^[30][31] The Southold Town Police Department, headquartered at 41405 Route 25 in Peconic, patrols the town, and its officers were the first police at the 2015 crash, arriving about three minutes after it occurred.^[23][15]

Traffic tickets and criminal charges arising in Cutchogue go to the Southold Town Justice Court at Town Hall, 53095 Route 25, Southold, which handles vehicle and traffic violations, penal law offenses, parking and code violations, landlord-tenant cases and civil and small claims arising in the Town of Southold or the Village of Greenport, and holds its traffic session on Wednesdays at 1:00 p.m.^[25] Suffolk County's Traffic and Parking Violations Agency, by the county's own description, adjudicates moving violations only "in the five western towns of Suffolk County".^[34]

Road ownership is split three ways: Main Road is a state highway (NY 25), County Road 48 belongs to Suffolk County, and Depot Lane is a Town of Southold road.^[14][16] Fire protection comes from the Cutchogue Fire District and its volunteer department, and public schools from the Mattituck-Cutchogue Union Free School District, which operates Cutchogue East Elementary School and Mattituck Junior-Senior High School.^[32][33]

Railroad and transit

The Long Island Rail Road's line to Greenport carried its first train to that village on Saturday, July 27, 1844.^[13] The Historical Council's transportation exhibit on the Village Green is built around a 1927 Ford Model T truck from a nearby farm, the kind of vehicle that let farmers carry produce to the train depot for shipment to city markets.^[35]