The cover story of Newsday’s March 17, 2024 edition of LI Life highlights the history of Montauk’s Camp Wikoff. The interesting account of the camp where Theodore Roosevelt, his Rough Riders, and other soldiers were quarantined after the Spanish American War did not include the very small role Huntington played in this story.
The first soldiers arrived in Camp Wikoff on August 15, 1898. Within days, the owners of the Mountain Mist Company, which bottled spring water from West Hills, proposed sending their product to the soldiers as a cure for any cases of yellow fever imported to Montauk from Cuba. The Surgeon General accepted the company’s offer of 100 five-gallon bottles of water. The chief surgeon at the Camp Wikoff hospital said the water was “grand” and “thoroughly appreciated by the soldiers.”
The Mountain Mist Company had been formed earlier that summer to bottle the cool, fresh spring water that had been enjoyed for years by locals. Doctors from Huntington as well as New York City endorsed the curative powers of the water to treat various conditions. The company controlled all the land adjacent to the spring and erected a bottling plant on the northwest corner of Sweet Hollow and Chichester Roads. The water was shipped to New York City and Brooklyn for sale as well as to Camp Wikoff.
It is unclear when the company stopped bottling the water. It is still shown on the 1909 E. Belcher Hyde Atlas of Suffolk County. David Wood, who had been in charge of the bottling plant for several years, died in 1907. It appears that he was no longer working for the company when he died, perhaps indicating that the plant was idle before his death.
According to former Huntington Town Historian Rufus Langhans, the bottling plant building was moved to another location and converted into a residence.
Huntington History 
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