Long Island

Natalie A. Naylor

Long Island stretches 118 miles east of Manhattan island with its North and South "Forks" terminating at Orient and Montauk Points, respectively. Brooklyn and Queens are part of geographical Long Island, but joined New York City in 1898. Conventional usage today is to refer to only the counties of Nassau and Suffolk as Long Island. The three eastern towns of Queens created Nassau County in 1899 after New York City annexed the western towns. Today, the population of Nassau is 1.4 million and Suffolk, which has more than three times as much area, 1.5 million.

The Native American Indians on the island were Algonquian-speaking groups. In the seventeenth century, disease carried by Europeans, land "sales," and migration drastically reduced their numbers, but two state-recognized reservations are in eastern Suffolk County: Shinnecock, which has a museum, and Poosepatuck. Garvies Point Museum also interprets the history of the original inhabitants. New Englanders first came across Long Island Sound in 1640 to settle Southold and Southampton on the eastern forks. Within a few years, other English settled Hempstead with   the permission of the Dutch, who claimed western Long Island until 1664 when England took control.

William Floyd of Mastic was one of New York's four signers of the Declaration of Independence (his home is now a National Park Site). After the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn in August 1776, British and Hessian soldiers occupied the island for the duration of the Revolutionary War. Many patriots left the island and became refugees in Connecticut. Several Long Islanders were members of the Culper Spy Ring, which brought intelligence from occupied New York City via Long Island to General Washington on the mainland. Throughout the war, raiders came across the sound to attack British forts and encampments and sometimes plundered residents. At the end of the war, many Long Island loyalists left the U.S. for Canada and other British possessions.

For many years, Long Island was predominantly rural. Farming and fishing--oysters, clams, scallops, and fin fish--provided a livelihood. When water was the most efficient means of transportation, coastal trade was important and cord wood was a cash crop for many years. After the mid-1830s, as transportation improved with the railroad, farmers supplied food for New York City and Brooklyn. They raised fruits, potatoes, cauliflower, and other vegetables as well as cattle, sheep, and pigs. Blue Point oysters became world famous in the late nineteenth century and Long Island ducks in the twentieth century. The iconic Big Duck in Flanders, built in the early 1930s to sell ducks, is now a museum. Old Bethpage Village Restoration and the Long Island Maritime Museum interpret nineteenth-century Long Island life.

Whaling was an important activity for Sag Harbor and several smaller ports including Cold Spring Harbor, peaking in the 1840s. Whaling museums in these communities preserve this history. Shipbuilding and other maritime trades were important in North Shore ports in the nineteenth century. Ferries and steamboats connected the island to the mainland and New York City.

The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) was initially built to be a short cut to Boston (1834-1844). To serve Long Island, it developed and extended branch lines and absorbed competing railroads. The LIRR promoted farming, settlement, and tourism. In 1910, a tunnel under the East River enabled direct rail access to Manhattan, which shortened commuting time to New York City. The result was a suburban boom in Nassau County (the county's population more than tripled from 1910 to 1930). Although the LIRR is still the busiest commuting rail line in the country, most Long Island residents today work in Nassau or Suffolk Counties rather than in New York City.

America's foremost genre painter, William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), was born in Setauket and studied in New York City. He did most of his painting in Stony Brook and depicted life in rural Long Island. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History & Carriages in Stony Brook owns most of his paintings and always has some on exhibit. One of its current exhibitions--on display until July 13--is of David Burliuk, Nicolai Cikovsky, and other Russian immigrant artists who had a summer art colony in the Hampton Bays area.  

Long Island attracted many artists in the late nineteenth century, beginning with excursions of the Tile Club in the late 1870s. William Merritt Chase conducted the Shinnecock School of Art in Southampton from 1891 to 1902. Among the many other artists who lived and painted on the East End are Irving Wiles, Thomas and Mary Moran, Childe Hassam, Willem de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. The Pollock-Krasner House is now a museum. Exhibits in other art museums also often feature Long Island artists.

Large hotels and boarding houses near the ocean on the South Shore or Long Island Sound on the North Shore attracted summer visitors. Long Island became popular for country homes for the wealthy in the late nineteenth century. Most built their mansions near the water, whether on the sound or the Great South Bay. William K. Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Louis Comfort Tiffany, F. W. Woolworth, Walter P. Chrysler, and Charles Pratt were among the millionaires on the North Shore Gold Coast. Besides the water, the attractions were sport hunting, fishing, yachting, and, by the end of the century, polo, and golf. The leading architectural firm for country houses was McKim, Mead & White, which had some forty commissions on Long Island (Stanford White had a country home in St. James). Although many of the largest mansions no longer survive, a few are preserved as historic house museums. Some are still private residences. Other estates have become state parks, colleges, schools, country clubs, religious institutions, or other adaptive reuse.

When he was young, Theodore Roosevelt's family summered in Oyster Bay. In the 1880s, Roosevelt bought land nearby on Cove Neck and built Sagamore Hill. Now a National Park Site, more than 95 percent of the furnishings in the house are original. Museum exhibits are in his son's home on the property.

The flat, treeless Hempstead Plains in the middle of today's Nassau County was a training area for militia and military units from colonial times, including Camp Winfield Scott (1861), Camp Black (1898), and Camp Mills (1917). The Rough Riders and other returning troops from Cuba in 1898 came to Camp Wikoff in Montauk. During World War I, several airfields on the Plains trained army aviators, including Hazelhurst (renamed Roosevelt) and Mitchel Fields. Camp Upton in Yaphank was a large training and embarkation camp in 1917. In World War II, Camp Upton was reactivated and Mitchel Field was an Army Air Corps base.

Long Island was the Cradle of Aviation in the early twentieth century with many pioneering flights occurring on the Hempstead Plains, beginning in 1909. Charles Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on his historic solo, nonstop flight to Paris in 1927. Many flying schools on the Plains trained civilian aviators. By the early 1930s, Roosevelt Field was the largest and busiest civilian airfield in the country. From the early twentieth century, and especially during World War II, the island had a booming aviation industry. Grumman Aircraft--for many years the largest employer on the island--produced planes for the Navy; Republic Aircraft, planes for the Army; and Sperry Gyroscope, navigation instruments. Many smaller firms were also involved in the defense industry. Grumman built the lunar module that landed on the moon in 1969. The Cradle of Aviation Museum on Mitchel Field preserves this aviation history.

Under the presidency of Robert Moses, the Long Island State Park Commission built thirteen parks on Long Island in the 1920s, as well as parkways to reach the parks. By the end of Moses's tenure in 1963, Long Island had nineteen state parks and ten parkways; today there are twenty-five state parks and historic sites. Jones Beach, Moses's preeminent state park, has an exhibition on the history of these parks in its East Bathhouse. The parkways are now major commuting roads.

After World War II, Levittown became the prototypical postwar suburb with the Levitts constructing more than 17,000 houses in the late 1940s. Other developers built smaller subdivisions making Nassau the fastest growing county in the nation. Nassau's population more than tripled from 1940 to 1960 and peaked in 1970. Now a "mature suburb," it has limited land for development. Suburbanization spread to western Suffolk in the post-World War II years and in recent decades has proceeded farther east. Suffolk's population quadrupled from 1950 to 1970. Suffolk County is still the number one agricultural county in the state in terms of the value of its products, thanks to vineyards on the east end, horticulture, and fisheries, as well as truck farming. The Environmental Defense Fund was organized in Suffolk in 1967 and led to Suffolk being the first county to ban DDT. Suffolk has taken a lead in land preservation and purchasing development rights to preserve its farm land.

Famous Long Islanders include several poets. Jupiter Hammon (1712-1800), the first published African American poet, was enslaved by the Lloyd family on Lloyd Neck. The Joseph Lloyd Manor House interprets Hammon as well as the Lloyd family. Poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) had a country home in Roslyn ("Cedarmere"), which is now a Nassau County museum. Walt Whitman (1819-1892), was born in West Hills (now Huntington Station); his birthplace is now a State Historic Site and Interpretive Center.

Two other Long Islanders deserve mention. F. Scott Fitzgerald started writing his novel The Great Gatsby when he lived in Great Neck (1922-1924); he immortalized an image of Long Island's North Shore in the 1920s. Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) worked at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for fifty years and won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her work on genetic elements ("jumping genes"). A building at the Lab now bears her name.

Long Island's many historic house museums date from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Several lighthouses, windmills, and other early mills are also museums. Some of the museums are open seasonally during the warmer months. For additional information on museums mentioned and many others, visit <http://discoverlongisland.com>, <http://www.limamuseums.org>, or the individual museums' websites.