Setauket, NY real estate market

Setauket got its start in 1655, when a group of colonists bought the land from the local Setalcott people and put down the first settlement in what became the town of Brookhaven. The name comes from that Setalcott name. For a stretch in the 1660s a land speculator named Captain John Scott renamed the place Ashford after his home turf in Kent, and even built a house called Egerton, but the older name stuck. During the Revolutionary War the town saw real action. The 1777 Battle of Setauket was fought right on the village green, and Patriots' Rock is still there with a plaque marking where soldiers took cover. Setauket residents also ran the Culper Spy Ring from 1778 to 1781, feeding Washington information out of British occupied New York.

Shipbuilding took hold here as early as 1662 and carried into the 1800s at Dyers Neck, turning out vessels like the Adorna in 1870 and the schooner Wanderer in 1857. A rubber factory ran in East Setauket from 1876 to 1904. Once the railroad reached Port Jefferson in 1873, Setauket turned into a summer retreat, and after World War II the old farmland filled in with houses. That is why a good share of what you see now is pre-war construction, including the 1709 Thompson House and the 1830 Sherwood Jayne place, both preserved through what locals call the Old Setauket Historic area. Frank Melville Memorial Park, set up in 1937, still wraps around the Setauket Mill Pond.

Setauket sits in the Town of Brookhaven, in the northwest corner, along Setauket Harbor and Conscience Bay off Long Island Sound. It stays mostly residential, leaving the storefronts to neighboring Stony Brook and Port Jefferson, with Stony Brook University right on its western edge. Route 25A runs through and there has been talk since 2012 of making that stretch more walkable. For anyone weighing daily use, the Greenway Trail opened in May 2014, a 3.5 mile bike path linking Setauket straight to Port Jefferson Station.