Wainscott is in the southwest corner of the town of East Hampton. Wainscott is home to the only public one-room school house operating in New York State. The one-room schoolhouse (19 students, grades 1-3) on Main Street is one of two in use on Long Island. The other’s in adjacent Sagaponack.The hamlet was named after a village north of Maidstone, England, an area immortalized in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.
Of all surrounding hamlets, Wainscott, in the town’s southwest corner, has probably best kept its rural charm, despite new, expensive housing that has eaten away some of the potato fields next to the ocean. The ‘boom’ of the 1980s and 1990s increased the year-round population by nearly a third, according to LILCO.
