HENRY E. COE (1856-1933) AND HIS COACHING SCRAPBOOKS

Recently, the Southampton History Museum acquired two remarkable scrapbooks in which a Southampton summer resident recorded the activities—in Southampton and beyond--of participants in one of the most fashionable sports of the Gilded Age. The photos and yellowed newspaper clippings filling the pages of this generous donation—for which we have Richard (Dick) Nilsson to thank—are not devoted to tennis, golfing or polo contests as you might expect. They are rather devoted to “coaching.”  A demanding, expensive, and very social sport, it requires the driver of a horse-drawn carriage to control a team of horses carrying him and sometimes as many as 10 passengers seated outside behind the driver.

Henry Coe kept photographs and clippings related to coaching and other equestrian activities in four scrapbooks covering the years from 1889 into the early 1930s.

Coaching as an upper-crust social and leisure activity as well as a competitive sport is nearly forgotten today, but in the late 19^th- and early 20^th- century, though it was only the privileged class that was rich enough to participate, there was apparently wide interest in what they were up to. Press coverage of the rarefied world of equestrian activities was extensive then and included detailed accounts of the popular horse shows and the impressive performances of the dashing stars who took home the blue ribbons.

                Southampton was no exception to the general enthusiasm. Smartly dressed throngs attended the Suffolk Hunt Club Horse show and later the Southampton Riding and Hunt Club’s annual horse shows, highlights of the social season and major sporting events. Not least among the “horsemen” who displayed their equestrian skills at the shows was Henry E. Coe, a recognized leader of the coaching set in Southampton and beyond and the creator of the donated scrapbooks. Coe’s demonstrations of his coaching prowess were always crowd-pleasers.

Henry Coe, the driver here, brings his horses and gentlemen friends to their destination after “work well done,” as he scribbled in his scrapbook entry.

   A summer resident of Southampton for more than 20 years, Coe arrived from his Manhattan mansion each spring at “The Appletrees,” his grand estate off Hill Street, traveling in his special “English Brake” [or “Break”]  (a type of coaching carriage, apparently outdated even circa 1910). Once when he made his habitual stop in Patchogue en route to Southampton, the local newspaper headlined his arrival: “HORSE RIG STILL HAS CLASS: Brake with fine Trotters, Liveried Driver and Bugle Tooter Reminds Village of the Ante-Auto Days.”  Profiled as a gentleman of the old school, he was said to be driving what may have been the last rig of its kind. “Painted dark red, it had two seats. Large brass carriage lamps adorned the sides and a long wicker basket was attached to the left side near the rear seat to carry ‘golf sticks.’” 

                A lawyer and “widely known horseman,” Coe was remembered in his 1933 obituary as “one of the better known drivers of four-in-hands in past days and a picturesque figure in Southampton where he passed many seasons.” He was to be found nearly every pleasant day “driving his coach through the roads and paths of the countryside.” (Another Southampton coaching enthusiast, the spirited artist Zella de Milhau, chose a less leisurely path, preferring to barrel down Main Street at breakneck speed yelling Tally-Ho!)

Not everyone at the Horse Show Grounds at the north end of Halsey Street came for the racing, jumping or even the coaching displays. The show was a huge fiesta attracting costumed riders and other attractions.

                Coe was also known to attend every sporting event—hunt meets and horse shows, tennis week, polo matches and swimming meets--and to treat them all as a signal for his four-in-hand driving. His horse show dinner, given at “Appletrees” in honor of the judges on the eve of the Riding and Hunt Club show, became a traditional event of that organization. A member of the Meadow Club, the Bathing Corporation and the National Links of America, Coe’s civic activities in Southampton included joining three other horsemen in raising money for good roads, a cause of particular interest in coaching circles. During the winter season, when he was in residence at his East 10^th Street townhouse, Coe was a prominent exhibitor of four-in-hands at the National Horse show at Madison Square Garden.

                When Coe died in 1933, his funeral was held at the Dune Church. Several years later his widow arranged for a window to be dedicated in his honor at the church. It is located on the north wall and represents St. Hubert, Patron Saint of the Chase and Sportsmen.

The two recently received volumes, which cover coaching, not just in Southampton but on both sides of the Atlantic, join two that were previously acquired, giving the museum what appears to be a full set—a treasure for the archives.

The Henry E. Coe window at St. Andrew’s Dune Church attributed to Helen Maitland Armstrong, as it appears in Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen’s book “The Stained-Glass Windows of St. Andrew’s Dune Church” with photographs by Joseph Coscia jr. and Tria Giovan. It depicts St. Hubert, patron saint of the hunt.