Huntington History

When she died in 1932, Mary Campbell Stuart Symonds became one of the last people to be buried at Huntington’s Old Burying Ground at Main Street and Nassau Road.  She and several generations of her family are buried at the top of the hill where the British built Fort Golgotha in the waning days of the American Revolution.  From this high point, visitors to the family plot could enjoy vistas across the countryside to the waters of Huntington Harbor and Long Island Sound and all the farms that surrounded Huntington village.  And there across the street from the graveyard was the family homestead, an oasis of gardens, greenhouses, ponds, and fresh water springs surrounding the family’s home.  Only now that bucolic view of home has been lost to the steady march of progress that has created the downtown Huntington we know today.

Even during her lifetime, Mrs. Symonds saw her family’s homestead replaced by storefronts, houses, the Opera House, Huntington’s first artificial ice factory, the Fire Department, Huntington’s first Town Hall and the Trade School.

Symonds was buried in the family plot along with her parents, her aunts (who died as young children), and her grandparents.  Her grandfather Zophar Oakley was a successful and well-respected merchant in town.  He was involved with many local ventures; he served as president of the Huntington Mutual Fire Insurance Co., he was stockholder of the Cold Spring Whaling Company, and chair of the Whig party in Huntington.  He was so well regarded that many of his neighbors appointed him as executor of their wills, including Congressman and Long Island’s first historian Silas Wood.  Shortly before he died, when Huntington established a new Union Free school, some expressed concern that the town’s poorer residents would not be able to pay their school taxes, Oakley contributed $1,000 to help pay those taxes for them.

Zophar Oakley was from West Hills.  As a young man he purchased land on the northwest corner of Main Street and Wall Street (where Starbuck’s is today) and opened a general store.  In 1828, he purchased from the estate of Timothy Williams 12 acres on the north side of Main Street stretching east from Wall Street.  Williams father Nathaniel operated an inn on the property.  The inn stood on the north side of Main Street where New York Avenue now is.  Timothy continued the inn and also operated a store and for a time the post office from the same building.  Oakley continued to operate the Williams store, which was a true general store offering a wide variety of merchandise—“almost every article called for in the country.”

Oakley built a house northeast of the store in 1845.  The property included a spring fed pond, greenhouses, gardens and orchards.  It was considered one of the garden spots of town.  At the southwest corner of his property—along Main Street near Wall Street, Oakley rented stores to other merchants such as Isaac Adams who had a tinsmith shop and Fayette Gould who had a jewelry store.  By the 1850s, this row of stores was known as the Empire Block.

It is unknown how Zophar’s daughter Catherine of Huntington came to meet and then marry Carlos D. Stuart, a poet and newspaper editor in New York City.  Stuart had grown up in Vermont and upstate New York in the mountains near Lake Champlain and Lake George.  As a teenager, he went to Fort Ann where he found work as a bookkeeper and salesman in a local store.  When he was twenty, he left for New York City where in addition to his working as a salesman, he wrote and published poetry.  He then traveled the world sending accounts of his travels back to the New York Tribune.  He eventually returned to New York and became editor of the New York Sun from 1840 to 1850.  He was considered second only to Horace Greeley among the editors of the numerous daily newspapers in mid-nineteenth century New York.  In 1843, he published Ianthe and Other Poems. His poems also appeared in newspapers across the country.

He married Catherine Oakley on May 22, 1850.  Just a few months later, The Long-Islander announced that Stuart would be establishing a new newspaper in New York to be known as The New Yorker.  While this paper does not appear to have taken off, it did attract the attention of another poet who wrote to Stuart asking for a job:

I take the liberty of writing to ask whether you have any sort of opening in your new enterprise for services I could render—I am out of regular employment and fond of the press—and, if you would be disposed to “try it on” I should like to have an interview with you for the purpose of seeing whether we could agree to something—My ideas of salary are very moderate.

The letter was signed “Walter Whitman” and is now in the archives of the Huntington Historical Society.

Stuart retired from the newspaper business because of tuberculosis in 1856 Later that year, he and a partner, William A. Conant, took over Oakley’s store and purchased the two acres in the southwest corner of his property—the land along Wall Street and Main Street—for $8,000.  The entire purchase price was covered by a mortgage held by Oakley.

The partners placed a notice in The Long-Islander in September 1856 (a month before the deed was actually signed):

The Undersigned (under the style of Conant & Stuart,) having purchased the mercantile establishment of Z.B. Oakley, and replenished the stock of the same, will endeavor to deserve the favor of the public, and maintain the reputation of the “old Stand.”  Their stock embraces a general assortment of Dry Goods, Groceries, Crockery, Hardware, Iron, Agricultural Implements, Carpenter’s Tools, Paints, Oils, Varnish, Dye Stuffs, Glass, Drugs and Medicines, Leather, Boots and Shoes, Carpeting, Oil Cloth, &c., &c.  Wood, and all marketable produce taken at current prices.

Less than two years after the sale, Zophar Oakley died.  Stuart then gave up his partnership with Conant and transferred his interest in the property to Conant, subject to the $8,000 mortgage.  A year later, Conant, who would later represent Huntington in the State Assembly, sold the property to William Miles of New York City for $10,500 and subject to the $8,000 mortgage.  Miles would sell the property to Timothy Baylis in 1865, but more about that later.

Stuart was active in the civic affairs of Huntington, especially the cause of free public education.  Perhaps it was Stuart’s influence that led to his father-in-law’s $1,000 gift.  But he died in 1862 at the age of 40.

In May 1884, Carlos Stuart’s daughter, Mary Campbell married Joseph White Symonds, who had been appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court of Maine in 1878 and served for six year. How they met is another mystery, but it appears that, initially at least, they settled in Huntington because their only son—Stuart Oakley Symonds—was born in August 1885 in Huntington.  According to a biographical sketch, the family moved to Maine while the boy was a very young child and Joseph Symonds resumed his private law practice there.

By 1900, the Symonds had divorced and Mary moved in with her mother in Huntington.   By then the old homestead would have been unrecognizable.  What had once been an outpost west of the Town Spot was becoming Huntington’s down town business district.

The old store, owned by William Miles of New York City, was operated by Baylis & Wells starting in 1862.  In 1865, Timothy Baylis purchased the property apparently for his son Hiram Vail Baylis, one of the partners operating the store.  Hiram gave up the store because of ill health and went into farming.  But he held onto the property and rented the store out.  Unfortunately, the store burnt to the ground and Baylis did not have enough insurance.  The land was sold off lot by lot, but Baylis kept the eastern most lot and built a house there.

The old homestead—and the village—underwent a tremendous change in the years after the Civil War.  In 1869, William Conant, at one time Carlos Stuart’s partner in the general store, was now a member of the New York State Assembly.  He introduced a controversial bill to extend New York Avenue north from Main Street to the east side of Huntington Harbor.  The legislation was controversial because of the route and because of the expense.  In fact, the extra taxes borne by the entire town (which at that time extended all the way to the south shore) for a road that would benefit only those in the village area led to the formation of the Town of Babylon just three years later.  Huntington’s south shore residents were upset that town meetings were always held in the northern part of town.  The added tax burden that they had to bear for a road they would likely never use was the impetus to finally form their own town on the south shore.

Concern was raised about laying out the road directly across from the existing road, which would put it through Hiram Baylis land and require the demolition of his barn.  An alternate route between the Baylis property and the Stuart property was proposed, but then the road would not line up with the existing road.  The more direct route was chosen—the new road was to begin in line with South Street, proceed north “to a point opposite the north side of the barn of Hiram Baylis” then run northeast in a straight line to the harbor—that is why today New York Avenue curves at the Canterbury Ales restaurant.

Hiram Baylis house was spared, but was now separated from the rest of the Empire Block.  Baylis sold the house in 1888 to Philip Pearsall who converted it into two stores after he extended the front wall on the east and west of the building to create a flat façade.  The house still stands today on the northeast corner of Main Street and New York Avenue.  The first floor was home for many years to The Bombay Company store, it is now the site of Ricky’s.  The second floor has been occupied for many years by Hirschfield Insurance.

Besides necessitating the demolition of the Baylis barn, the road bisected the Stuart property.  But that was minor compared to the changes that would come twenty years later.

In 1891, Catherine Stuart sold the family homestead for $20,000 to a syndicate of 22 prominent Huntingtonians under the name Huntington Real Estate Association.  Fifteen thousand dollars had been raised from the investors and a mortgage was given for the balance.  The lot with the house was sold for $7,000, while the 30 foot lot next to Hiram Baylis’ old house on Main Street sold for $3,000.  Within a year, the entire property had been resold for a total of $35,228.25—a 93% profit on the original $15,000 investment in one year!  Several of the lots were purchased by members of the syndicate in their individual capacities.

The subdivision included the creation of three new roads: Stewart Avenue (a misspelling of the former owner’s name), First Street (now Gerard Street) and Second Street (one block north of Gerard street; it no longer exists).  Dr. Oliver Jones, who was one of the members of the syndicate, purchased many of the lots on the east side of the property.  He proposed extending the new Stewart Avenue across Main Street to Myrtle Place.  His obituary in The Long-Islander noted that Dr. Jones’ “well-known hobby was the opening of new roads.”  The doctor claimed that the new road would improve traffic flow between the village and the train depot.  But this extension, which would have come within a few feet of the new library building, met stiff opposition and was never built.

In 1910, Dr. Jones had the old Oakley-Stuart house divided into three parts and moved; the main 2½-story section to Stewart Avenue and the two 1½-story side wings to First Street.  They were to be used as dwellings.  The plan may not have worked out the way Dr. Jones hoped:  by 1914, the two sections on First Street were identified on the Sanborn Insurance Map as “vacant wrecks.”

One of the first lots sold was a landlocked one that was sold to the Huntington Hall Association.  The lot in the middle of the block included a narrow walkway to Main Street.  In the year following the sale, the Hall Association erected a large opera house, which quickly became the center of Huntington’s social and entertainment functions.  The wood frame structure hosted regular plays, lectures, entertainments and even poultry shows.  The noted African American leader Booker T. Washington spoke to a large and admiring crowd in the Opera House in 1901, just two days after his groundbreaking—and controversial—dinner with Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.  Unfortunately, the building stood for only 18 years.  A mysterious fire at about 1:00 a.m. on March 15, 1910 quickly destroyed the building, but thanks to the diligence of the local fire departments, did not harm any other the adjoining buildings.

Despite the calls for a replacement venue, the Huntington Hall Association sold the land and the corporation was dissolved in 1911.  That same year, the voters of the Huntington Fire District approved the purchase of land on Main Street just east of where the opera house had been.  The new brick firehouse was dedicated on September 10, 1912 and housed the first mechanized fire fighting equipment, which had been purchased in 1910 to replace the old horse drawn—or more often, human drawn—apparatus.  The firehouse served the district until 1958, when the current firehouse was built on Leverich Pace.  The 1911 building is now a furniture store.

The construction of the firehouse rounded out Huntington’s civic core on or across the street from Zophar Oakley’s homestead.  As the homestead was being subdivided, the town’s first library building was erected across the street in front of the Old Burying Ground.  The Trade School building was constructed at the eastern end of the homestead in 1905 and Town Hall was built in 1910.

The Trade School dates back to 1881 when two women began to teach girls how to sew in the basement of St. John’s Church on Park Avenue.  The following year Emma Paulding, daughter of Admiral Hiram Paulding, took over the school and eventually expanded it to include boys as well as girls and to teach manual arts, such as chair caning and carpentry, as well as sewing.  As enrollment grew (by 1903 over 150 students were attending classes), classes were held in various locations in the village but it became clear that the school’s popularity required a permanent home.  In 1904, the school was formally organized as “The Huntington Sewing and Trades School.”  The next year, Cornelia Prime, a local philanthropist, purchased a lot at the southeastern corner of the Stuart homestead to erect a permanent home for the Trade School.  The architect’s had designed the town library across the street 14 years earlier.  The school was taken over by the Huntington school district in 1937.  The district eventually sold the building to the Town, which in turn sold it to the Huntington Historical Society, which uses the building to store it archives collection and for its administrative offices.

Symbolically, perhaps the most important building to be constructed on the old Stuart homestead was Huntington’s first Town Hall.  For its first two and a half centuries, Huntington’s town government met in local inns to conduct business.  Eventually space was rented for the Town Clerk to keep all of his files.  But no permanent seat of government existed until the beginning of the twentieth century.  As Huntington grew, there clearly was a need for a place where all of the Town’s official business could be done, with a substantial jail on the first floor, and a courtroom on the second floor.  Dr. Oliver L. Jones offered the town free of cost a site just west of the Trade School, across from the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Building, on the corner of Main Street and Stewart Avenue, and although there were other sites in consideration, this location was chosen.  Peabody & Wilson were chosen as the architects and Wanser & Lewis was awarded the contract for the erection of the new building, with a winning bid of $15,966.93.  The design called for all exposed work on the building face to be brick, and all stone work on the outside to be light marble.  All exterior woodwork would be cypress, and all interior work would be oak.  Miss Cornelia Prime, who donated the land for the Trade School building, donated the clock which sits atop the cupola built for this purpose.  Although it boasts an impressive façade, the building is rather small.  Less than 25 years after it was built, an article from The Long-Islander of June 17, 1932 reported a proposal to build a new Town Hall to help alleviate the unemployment situation in the Town, and as a result of complaints of overcrowding.  This issue was revisited in 1958, and in 1979 Town Hall finally moved into larger quarters, the old high school building—built coincidentally at the same time as Old Town Hall.

The wood frame building to the east of Old Town Hall, which once served as the headquarters for the Huntington Police Department and is known as the annex, actually pre-dates Town Hall.  It was built in 1894 as a bowling alley and ice cream parlor.  The bowling alley, which extended to the northeast, was vacant by 1914 and later demolished.

Dr. Jones’ bowling alley would have faced some competition from the lanes in the new Knights of Columbus building built in 1915 on Stewart Avenue across from Town Hall.  Those alleys were “said to be the best in this section of Long Island,” reported The Long-Islander when they were opened.  The local Knights of Columbus council, the first in Suffolk County, was organized in 1899 with 40 members.  When St. Patrick’s school was started in 1922, the first classes were held in the Knights of Columbus building.  Unfortunately, the building was destroyed by fire in March 1930.  The Knights apparently did not have the funds to rebuild and the burnt out hulk became a public safety concern.  In 1935, however, the building was renovated and completely changed to make it the Stewart Arms, which quickly became a social gathering place for many Huntington organizations.  Eventually, the Town took over the building for its growing staff.  Today the building houses a gym and offices.  The bowling alleys remained until just a few years ago.

Just up Stewart Avenue, the Consolidated Ice Company took advantage of the fresh water spring on the property.  The spring created a pool of clear, cold water, which supplied a steady year-round stream of water flowing north where it merged with other streams on the way to the harbor.  The company, also sometimes referred to as the Huntington Ice Company, was organized by Hewitt G. Sammis in 1902.  Huntington’s first artificial ice plant took advantage of the deep artesian well that produced water “as pure, sparkling and clear as Mother Nature can give.”  An assessment borne out by tests of the water and the ice produced from it.  The plant originally produced 12 tons of ice a day.  By 1906, the plant’s capacity was increased to 20 tons; five years later 40 tons; and by 1919 1,000 tons.  All this artificial ice—also called Hygeia ice after the Greek goddess of health, cleanliness and sanitation—supplemented the natural ice cut from local sources such as Prime’s Pond (now known as Heckscher Park Pond) and St. Join’s Lake in Cold Spring Harbor.  The natural ice was often 5 inches thick and sometimes even a foot thick.

In 1930, the company merged with several other ice companies to create the Long Island Ice Corporation.  In 1959, the local plant was acquired by the Losquadro Ice Group of Brooklyn.  Losquadro was acquired by Artic Glacier, Inc. of Canada in 2004.  The plant no longer produces ice and now serves as a distribution point.

Simon Hirschfeld, who built two houses on the old Stuart property, also took advantage of the natural spring there.  He marketed “Sparko-Crystal Water,” which he advertised as “pure, healthful [and] helpful.”  The water cost 50¢ a bottle delivered.

Of course, the stores along Main Street are the most familiar and oldest development of the old homestead.  Five buildings were erected east of the old Hiram Baylis house.  Now the site of upscale boutiques as well as a landmark diner, this row of stores over the years have also housed a meat market, drug store, barbershop, hardware store, grocery stores, and a harness shop that featured a large wooden horse that modeled horse blankets and netting used to keep flies off a horse’s back.

Hiram Baylis house had been converted to a grocery store operated by Henry Borchers, who owned a chain of 16 stores across the Island.  The headquarters were in Huntington and Borchers had a warehouse on Stewart Avenue.  In 1921, Borchers sold 15 of the stores to A.L. Beckmann & Co.

But the largest grocery business on the street was next to the fire department.  Sam Brumberg, who claimed to one of the pioneers of a new way of selling groceries known as the “supermarket,” in 1932 opened a store on New York Avenue in the building now occupied by Value Drugs.  Brumberg had opened a supermarket in Jamaica in 1919 and his chain of stores eventually grew to several stores throughout the Island.  He named the store “Stop ‘n’ Shop,” but was not affiliated with the current “Stop & Shop” chain that originated in Massachusetts in 1914.

This new concept was so successful that six year later, he moved to a larger store on Main Street next to the firehouse.  The new store boasted a modernistic orange and black sign with the name “Stop ‘n’ Shop” in raised letters.  The store’s name was also embedded in the new cement sidewalk in front of the store.  Until the recent installation of brick sidewalks, part of the store’s name remained in the sidewalk instructing children who reached that point to “hop.”  Parking was provided in the rear of the store on property leased from the estate of Dr. Jones.  Access to the parking lot was from First Street as well as a driveway from Main Street.

In 1952, Brumberg enlarged the store from 6,000 square feet to 20,000 square feet making it, he claimed, the largest supermarket on Long Island.  The store along with another in Huntington Station (now C-Town) was acquired by the Grand Union chain in 1959.  Within ten years, the store was empty.  Today the building has been integrated with the old firehouse and is home to Classic Galleries furniture store.

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By the time she died in 1932, Mary Campbell Stuart Symonds, who continued to live in the house on the corner of Main Street and Nassau Road, had seen the place where she grew up completely transformed from gardens surrounding the family home, to the center of Huntington’s business and civic life.  But she helped to preserve Huntington’s past by donating numerous items to the Huntington Historical Society.  She also set aside in her will $1,000 “for the care of my plot in the old cemetery at Huntington formerly belonging to Zophar B. Oakley.”  The money was to be used to keep the grass cut, “to keep the posts and chains surrounding the plot in good condition and to reset the headstones whenever they may get out of plumb and to do such other things as may be necessary in the premises.”

A visitor in 2007 would have found that none of the headstones in the plot was upright; many were broken.  But using the fund set aside 75 years earlier and held by the Trustees of the Old First Church, all the stones have now been repaired and reset, except for Zophar Oakley’s, which was too far gone to be repaired.