A blasphemous melodeon organ and feuding church factions. Bitter political divisions over the Civil War and scandalous headlines about a minister's wife running off with a deacon.

Historian Richard Wines recounted these tales of rural melodrama to a rapt audience of about 50 people at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead Saturday.

All were plucked from his recently released book, "A Farm Family on Long Island's North Fork: The Lost World of the Hallocks and Their Sound Avenue Community."

Wines, a descendent of the Hallock family, relied on personal diaries, newspaper clips, captioned black and white photographs and family trees to tell the stories that often get lost in the wider historical narrative.

"The tendency is to sanitize things, to not talk about things you don't

See Full Page