Sagaponack Yard Sales

The name comes from a Shinnecock word generally understood to refer to the ground nut, Apios americana, rather than to the potatoes that later became the area's dominant crop. The Sagaponack Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000, covers about 307 acres along Sagg Main Street and takes in 131 contributing buildings, among them farm complexes, the general store and post office building, and the village school. That school, whose history reaches back to a first Sagg schoolhouse opened in 1776, still operates out of an 1885 building and is one of the few remaining public one-room schoolhouses in the country.

The Madoo Conservancy on Sagg Main Street preserves the garden the painter Robert Dash established there in 1967, and the village drew writers as well: Peter Matthiessen bought a six-acre property here around 1960, and Truman Capote commissioned a saltbox house near the ocean in 1961.

With a small year-round population and a housing mix that runs from eighteenth-century farmhouses in the historic district to recently built estates on the ocean side, the village tends to produce fewer sales than its larger neighbors, with the older properties supplying much of what does come up.