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 Reprinted
from the Farmingdale,
NY Chamber of Commerce site.
Nassau County, birthplace of American
suburbia, celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1999, but its
colonial roots go back 355 years, to when almost half of it
was acquired by two Englishmen in one of Long Island's most
prodigious land deals.
The saga began inauspiciously in 1640
when a small band from Massachusetts landed on the North Shore,
only to be driven off by the Dutch, who claimed territory
as far east as Oyster Bay. The English went east to settle
Southampton. But three years later, John Carman and Robert
Fordham crossed Long Island Sound from Stamford, Conn.; they
negotiated with the Indians for a deed to a 10-mile-wide swath
from Long Island Sound to the Atlantic Ocean and founded the
first English settlement on the Hempstead Plains. The colonists
who followed negotiated a patent from the Dutch, who hoped
more Englishmen would come to help control the Indians. The
English obliged. By 1653 they were colonizing the present-day
Oyster Bay, Westbury, Jericho and Hicksville. In 1664 they
drove out the Dutch.
The independent colonists were no more
eager to pay taxes to the duke of York than they were to pay
the Dutch. Their chafing brought about the colonial assembly
of 1683, which created the counties of Suffolk and Queens.
Queens included the Towns of Oyster Bay and Hempstead. North
Hempstead seceded from Hempstead during the Revolution, when
Patriots in the north broke from the Loyalists in the south.
But in the next century they shared a growing desire to split
off from Queens County.
The planting of the Queens County Courthouse
on the Hempstead Plains in 1785 sowed the seeds of resentment,
and secessionist talk increased after the Civil War, when
western Queens became increasingly urbanized and Democratic,
the eastern towns rural and Republican. Finally, in 1898,
when Queens joined Greater New York City, the eastern towns
found themselves still part of Queens but not of the city.
Community leaders met in Allen's Hotel in Mineola and resolved
that the Towns of Oyster Bay, Hempstead and North Hempstead
form a new county.
Suggested names -- Matinecock, Norfolk,
Bryant, Sagamore -- lost out to Nassau, once the legal name
for all Long Island. It honored the late 17th-Century King
William III, who came from the House of Nassau. Nassau County
came into being on Jan. 1, 1899. On July 13, 1900, then-New
York Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay laid the cornerstone
for the first Nassau County Courthouse on land purchased in
1869 by Alexander T. Stewart, founder of Garden City.
The 20th Century brought rapid change,
accelerated by two world wars. In the early years the Hempstead
Plains became the site of pioneer aviation feats, motorcar
and horse racing. On the northern Gold Coast, rich New Yorkers
played polo and chased the fox. South Shore communities became
popular beach resorts. Robert Moses, New York's master builder,
turned a barren shore into famed Jones Beach. After World
War II, communities of subdivisions spread across Nassau at
a dizzying pace, creating the tightly packed suburbia, populated
by nearly 1.3 million people, that is Nassau County today.
But the sprawl still left room for pockets of opulence: According
to Worth magazine, 11 of the nation's 30 most expensive communities
are in Nassau County, all but one (Hewlett) on the North Shore.
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About Nassau County
For more information about Nassau
County, visit the following links:
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