Browns Hills, Orient — named for a founding family.
Orient sits at the easternmost tip of the North Fork — first settled around 1646 as “Oysterponds,” for the shellfish-rich ponds that still produce some of the East Coast's finest. Among its founding families were the Browns, who give Browns Hills its name; Brown's Hill Burying Ground, set aside not long after the community took root, remains one of the hamlet's oldest landmarks.
By the late nineteenth century the same water, light and quiet had made Orient a summer destination — it claims the oldest summer resort on Long Island. In the mid-twentieth century the bluff-front high ground along Browns Hill Road and North View Drive was subdivided as Brown's Hills Estates, and in 1959 this Sound-front cottage was built among them.
Today Orient and Browns Hills are among the North Fork's most prized addresses — low-density, historically protected, framed by farmland and Sound bluffs, and minutes from Orient Beach State Park. A near-acre on this bluff rarely comes to market.
