Sources & Further Reading

Official documents & project reports

• Peconic Estuary Partnership — Widow’s Hole Preserve Living Shoreline Project, Final Report (2019) — construction, planting and monitoring detail for Phase I.
• Peconic Estuary Partnership — Quality Assurance Project Plan, Widow’s Hole Preserve Shoreline Restoration — site history, including the oil terminal’s facilities and the DEC spill-program cleanup record.
• Village of Greenport — Harbor Management Plan — the stake moorings in “the basin known as Widows Hole,” and the basin’s bulkheads, breakwater, dock and spit.
• NYS Department of State — Village of Greenport Local Waterfront Revitalization Program, Section II — Greenport’s maritime history and harbor conditions.
• NYSDEC — Environmental Notice Bulletin, Oct 9, 2024 — completed application for dredging the Widow’s Hole entrance channel.

Newspapers & periodicals

• The Suffolk Times — coverage of the ExxonMobil donation (March 2012), shoreline debris removal (April 2012), the salt-marsh workshop (July 2018), the Phase II grant (December 2021), and related editorials.
• Patch (North Fork) — “Residents Question Conservation Easement” (April 2012) — the village hearing on the donation.
• Dan’s Papers — “Widow’s Hole Preservation” (July 2019).

Local history & archives

• Peconic Land Trust — Widow’s Hole Preserve, and the Trust’s “Widow’s Hole Story Map.”
• Historic Greenport Walking Tour — the village’s maritime streetscape.
• Stirling Historical Society of Greenport — the best local repository for primary material on the Leverich family and the cove’s name.
• New York Public Library — Beers’ 1873 Atlas of Long Island (Greenport inset); Library of Congress — Sanborn maps of Greenport (1890–); NOAA historical chart archive (Chart 12358); USGS historical topographic quadrangles.
• AAQ / East End — Peconic Land Trust preserve spotlights (2019, 2022).

The postcard & photograph collection

• Vintage postcards of Widow’s Hole (c. 1905–1960s) from a private Greenport collection, including examples postmarked at Greenport in 1908, 1913, 1923, 1937, 1942 and the 1950s, by publishers including the Eagle Post Card View Co. (New York), J. S. Hochheiser (Greenport), Tomlin Art Co. (Northport), and Louis Dormand (Riverhead), with Kodachromes by Milt Price.
• Modern photographs of the cove and the 2026 jetty stone work by the site’s contributors; dates from camera metadata.
• 1887 bottom-land grant map detail and a late-19th-century village atlas sheet, from the same collection.

Standards of this site

We distinguish three kinds of statement, and label them: documented fact (traceable to the sources above), oral tradition (the Leverich story — told consistently, not yet confirmed in a primary document), and recollection (such as the construction chronology of the bulkheads and jetty). Where sources disagree — the preserve’s acreage appears variously as 2.3 to 2.6 acres — we use the surveyed figure in the official project documents (2.31). Corrections are welcome and will be made promptly.