Pequot Inn History on Fishers Island, New York

The Pequot Inn on Fishers Island, photographed here by the Long Island Daily Press on March 18, 1970, had already been around for nearly 70 years when this picture was taken.

Fishers Island sits at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, only a couple of miles off the southeastern Connecticut coast near New London. It is roughly seven miles long, and its regular ferry connection is from New London, Connecticut.

Politically, though, Fishers Island is part of the Town of Southold in Suffolk County, New York. That jurisdiction was formally settled in 1879 after a boundary dispute between New York and Connecticut.

The inn traces its history to 1902, when the building opened as the Canonicus House. It was later known as the Elliott House before becoming the Pequot Inn. A 1916 photograph in the Henry L. Ferguson Museum collection shows Fishers Island students and their teacher posing on its steps.

That longevity is especially notable because Fishers Island once had a much larger resort industry. By the mid-1910s, the island had three grand hotels with associated cottages, along with a smaller hotel and a boarding house serving summer visitors.

Most of that hotel era disappeared over the following decades. By the late 1940s, the Henry L. Ferguson Museum says only the boarding house and the smaller hotel that became today’s Pequot Inn were still operating.

The Pequot also turns up in some unexpected corners of the historical record.

In the summer of 1963, writer Morton M. Hunt visited Fishers Island during a sailing trip around Long Island Sound that he chronicled the following year in The New Yorker.

After arriving in West Harbor, Hunt and his companions rowed ashore and walked to the Pequot Inn. He described it as a pleasant old hostelry with a garden, cocktail lounge and restaurant. A waitress told Hunt that yachts sometimes arrived in West Harbor by the dozen on summer weekends, occasionally packing the Pequot with visitors.

Less than two decades after this photograph was taken, Fishers Island became a movie set.

In 1981, Robin Williams, Glenn Close and others came to the island to film “The World According to Garp.” A contemporary Suffolk Times account reported that Pequot Inn owner Ann “Denson” Morel said Williams had stopped into the inn a couple of times, where he drank a Coke and watched television.

The Pequot also has a connection to something Long Islanders may recognize from a completely different setting: Fishers Island Lemonade.

The Shillo family took over the inn in the 1990s, with Forbes reporting the year as 1996. Bronya Shillo later worked behind the bar, where the Pequot served a vodka-and-whiskey lemonade that became the inspiration for a canned cocktail.

Shillo launched Fishers Island Lemonade in 2014. Spirit of Gallo acquired the brand in 2023 and specifically traced its origins back to the Pequot Inn’s house cocktail.

So this 1970 photograph captures much more than an old inn overlooking West Harbor. The building had already survived the decline of Fishers Island’s old hotel era, would later see Robin Williams stop in during a Hollywood film shoot, and eventually help inspire a nationally marketed canned cocktail.

Photo: Long Island Daily Press, March 18, 1970. Long Island Daily Press Photograph Morgue Collection, Queens Public Library.

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