From tank farm to salt marsh
On the ground where six oil tanks once stood, the Peconic Land Trust built the Peconic Estuary’s first living shoreline — and gave the cove’s story its best chapter yet.
The gift
When ExxonMobil donated the old terminal parcel to the Peconic Land Trust in December 2012 — 1.67 acres of former terminal upland and 0.64 acres of beachfront, valued at $1.4 million — the land came with a conservation easement held by the Town of Southold that prohibits development forever. It also came freshly wounded: Superstorm Sandy had just torn away roughly half an acre of shoreline. The Trust spent its first years here on patient work — volunteer cleanups, invasive removal, native plantings — while planning something more ambitious with Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Marine Program.
Phase I · 2019
Instead of a wall, a beach. A living shoreline defends the land the way nature does — with graded sand, buried stone and thousands of plants whose roots knit the shore together. Funded with $150,000 through the Peconic Estuary Program (federal Clean Water Act funds) and permitted by the DEC, the Army Corps and the Village, the project was built in April 2019: some 900 cubic yards of clean sand on the upland and 1,100 on the shore, graded gently to the water over a buried 130-foot rock toe and a band of cobble.
Then came the planting. About 4,500 culms of American beachgrass went into the dune in late April; more than 5,000 plugs of Spartina alterniflora — salt-marsh cordgrass, every one locally sourced and propagated at Cornell’s marine center — went into the intertidal zone in June. Nearly ten thousand plants in all. And on June 10, 2019, the planting crew was Greenport Elementary’s fourth grade: local children set roughly two thousand marsh plugs into the mud of their own village’s shore.
The result: more than 4,000 square feet of brand-new intertidal salt marsh and some 4,500 square feet of dune and coastal upland, monitored for five years under DEC permit conditions.
A shoreline that had been tanks, pipes and bulkhead for most of a century went back to grass, sand and fiddler crabs — planted partly by nine-year-olds.
Phase II and beyond
In December 2021, a $250,000 state Regional Economic Development Council grant was announced for Phase II: an expanded living shoreline, upland habitat work, better beach accessibility, and bilingual English/Spanish interpretive signage. In October 2024 the DEC noticed a completed application for dredging about 1,000 cubic yards from the cove’s entrance channel — to restore navigation for small vessels and aquaculture, with the clean spoil reused to replenish the preserve beach.
The Trust tells the preserve’s story in its own “Widow’s Hole Story Map,” and its stewardship staff manage the land day to day. Kayaks still winter on the beach — the preserve was designed for the neighborhood, not just for the view.
Founded in 1983 by John v.H. Halsey and headquartered in Southampton, the Peconic Land Trust conserves Long Island’s working farms, natural lands and heritage — roughly 14,000 acres across the East End as of its fortieth anniversary. Widow’s Hole Preserve is one of its smallest holdings, and one of its most visible: a block from the village, in front of everyone.
The preserve sits at the foot of Fourth Street at Clark Street, Greenport — open to the public, dawn to dusk. Walk softly on the young marsh; it was planted by children.