Wickham Sayre Havens (December 27, 1874 - November 25, 1934) was a real estate developer, and the son Frank C. Havens, real estate developer, and one-time partner of "Borax" Smith.

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George Sterling by Benediktsson, Thomas E, Publication date 1980:

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(George Sterling) was born on December 1, 1869, into one of the community’s leading families. His mother’s ancestors had lived in the Shelter Island Sound area since 1698, and his maternal grandfather, Wickham Havens, was one of the last of the great American whaling captains. Sag Harbor’s past had its greatest impact on the child in the person of this patriarch, who had spent three decades at sea, first before the mast, finally as captain. Retiring to become a custom-house official and banker, Wickham Havens was a highly respected man in the community, as staunch a representative of Puritan virtues as Sag Harbor could produce. Sterling wrote of him admiringly that “he could cast the harpoon farther than anyone in the combined whaling fleets. As boyhood memory recalls him, he was built along the lines of an upright piano.” Wickham Havens and his whaling became the subjects of several poems, in which the central idea is much the same: the grandfather is symbolic of a masculine strength and a Yankee capability that are lacking in the poet and in general are lost to the world. These poems are evidence of an often overlooked aspect of Sterling’s temperament; at times he felt that the raptures he learned to affect as a poet were inferior to the straightforward mastery of men and elements which his grandfather possessed unfeigningly.

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(book coming in mail)

The Long Island Courant 1965

George Sterling, his grandson, wrote he was a "Grizzled whale-killer" 

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