Sag Harbor is an incorporated village in Suffolk County, New York, United States, in the towns of Southampton and East Hampton on eastern Long Island.

Sag Harbor is about three-fifths in Southampton and two-fifths in East Hampton (the Town boundary being Division Street).

[6] During the American Revolutionary War, New York Patriots fled from the advancing British and Loyalist forces and departed from Sag Harbor by boat and ship for Connecticut.

After the Second Session of Congress on July 31, 1789, Sag Harbor was declared as the first official port of entry to the United States.

The United States government placed a customs house in the town, the first on Long Island, to collect duties and other fees.

Several open British boats entered the harbor at night, without any advance planning; the young commanding midshipman, C. Claxton R.N., was curious about the village.

Most of the defining 19th-century landmarks of the village — including its Main Street, Old Whaler's Church, John Jermain Memorial Library, Whaling Museum, Custom House, the Old Burying Ground, Oakland Cemetery, Mashashimuet Park, and Otter Pond are in Southampton.

Also there are the village's high school, the Sag Harbor State Golf Course, and the historic freedmen's community of Eastville, first developed in the early 1800s.

[12] Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.

Whaling merchant Benjamin Huntting II commissioned a grand, 1845 Greek Revival home designed by American architect Minard Lafever.

Many of the ships based in Sag Harbor carried erstwhile miners around South America to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, where the vessels were abandoned.

At the time, the wharf was owned by the Long Island Rail Road, which handled the transport of torpedoes to Sag Harbor.

Steinbeck did some of his writings in a little house on the edge of his property,[17] including The Winter of Our Discontent, which was set in a fictionalized version of Sag Harbor and whose main character works at a grocery store modelled after Schiavoni's.

Every fellow and writer-in-residence interacts with the community during their time at the residency, through readings from novels, film screenings and discussions, or read-throughs of plays.

The Church is a nonprofit arts center in Sag Harbor was founded by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik.

[25] Poet and educator Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1869–1944) was born in Sag Harbour on February 27, 1869, to parents of African and Montauk descent.

As of the 2010s, there is pressure from investors who, consolidating lots and planning to build larger houses than is customary, pose a threat to the character of the neighborhoods.

[27] In 2016, a collective group was formed to study these impacts on the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah Subdivisions, known by the acronym SANS.

On July 10, 2019 (NP ref#100004217) was listed as the Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah Beach Subdivisions Historic District.

[28][29] In the village of Sag Harbor, fresh drinking water was obtained from digging wells to support the town's population.

“The original source of water supply was secured from four dug wells in the southern part of the village of Sag Harbor”.

[30] As Sag Harbor's population has increased, the village has had to start bringing in fresh water from pipe lines.

As in many areas, the village practice of running sewage and storm water into the bays of Sag Harbor had to change.

Sewage from the village of Sag Harbor is processed by the Department of Public Works, Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Frothingham was sued and found guilty of slander by Alexander Hamilton for an article published in the Brooklyn newspaper, The Argus.

Mammals found in these areas include white-tailed deer, red fox, eastern coyote, long-tailed weasel, mink, muskrat, woodchuck, and several bat species.

There may be river otters, which are close to local extinction in Long Island, but an estimated eight animals are thought to have recently migrated from Connecticut.

Kazimierz Wierzyński, an exiled Polish poet and a writer, who lived in Sag Harbor for almost twenty years with his wife Halina, devoted large parts of his collection of essays My Private America to the animals he saw there, especially the birds, and an American "attraction to nature.

Fully-funded by Simon Harrison Real Estate from its inception, the effort follows on from the Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery, an "oyster garden" under the Sag Harbor village docks funded and maintained by real estate broker and clean water advocate, Simon Harrison.

New York State prohibits cultivation of shellfish in uncertified waters – where harvesting of oysters for human consumption is banned.