Huntington History

Today the name Crab Meadow is generally considered to encompass the town beach, marshes and golf course by that name and the residential area to the immediate west of those public lands.  But historically, the area extended as far south as Route 25A.  In fact, the post office that was established in 1820 at the Scudder store located on the corner of Waterside Avenue and Route 25A was known as Crabmeadow until the name was changed to Northport in 1840.

This larger area is bisected by Waterside Avenue, which runs from the Long Island Sound to the historic settlement of Red Hook at the five corners intersection of Waterside, Route 25A, and Main Street.

About a mile south of the Sound, Eaton’s Neck Road runs from Waterside Avenue up the hill to Eaton’s Neck.  This road was dug out before 1723 and for centuries was known as the Dug Way.   The Crab Meadow Burying Ground lies just south of Dug Way and had been used as a burial place for local residents for two centuries.[1]

To the west of Waterside Avenue north of the Dug Way is a fresh water lake.  This essay concerns the properties surrounding the lake.

Before Europeans arrived here in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Crab Meadow area was home to a Native American settlement.  Extensive archeological records of the native presence, including burials, were unearthed over the years mostly by amateur archeologists.   The area was—and is—an ideal place to live.  The area was a plateau with an elevation of 80 to 100 feet above the Sound with steep slopes down to the fresh water lake.  The forests were home to a variety of animals as well as berries.  The lake provided fresh water.  The Long Island Sound provided shell and fin fish as well as transportation.  Before the land was extensively disturbed, amateur archeologists discovered numerous shell heaps or middens, some measuring as much as six feet deep and up to 75 feet in diameter.  Potsherds, and stone tool fragments were also found throughout the area.  Eight native graves were also discovered.[2]   The Native American presence is now noted by a historical marker on Eaton’s Neck Road.

The lake may have originally been open to the Sound and was for years known as the Cove.  According to a book published in connection with the celebration of the Town’s 250^th anniversary in 1903, Captain Kidd, the pirate, may have sailed into the Cove seeking a safe anchorage.  He also supposedly used the occasion to hide some treasure on the shores of the Cove—if so, it has never been found.  Over time the tides closed the outlet to the Sound.  Spring fed fresh water replaced the salt water and the Cove became a fresh water lake.  In the nineteenth century it was known as Sweetwater Lake.  The current name, Blanchard Lake, derives from the name of a bordering property owner.  A glowing description of the beauty of the area in 1893 includes a reference to the estate of Mr. Blanchard.[3]  Interestingly, the name Blanchard does not appear on any of the historic maps of the Crab Meadow area, but, unlike other prominent property owners, Blanchard’s name lives on in connection with the lake.

In the seventeenth century, Huntington and Smithtown were involved in a legal dispute over the boundary line between the towns because the deeds each secured from the native inhabitants covered overlapping territories.  In order to strengthen its claim, the Town of Huntington in 1672 laid out ten farms along the disputed territory.  Farms 7 through 10 were located in Crabmeadow Neck.  One of the men to whom farm 7 was assigned was a Mr. Bryan—some family members spelled the name with a “T” at the end.

The Bryant family remained in Crabmeadow into the nineteenth century.  Melancthon Bryant, 1810-1884, had a large farm on the west side of Waterside Avenue.  His home, which stood about a half mile from the beach, was destroyed by fire in 1919.  Melancthon Bryant was an agent for the Lodi Manufacturing Co., which had exclusive control of “all the night soil from the great city of New York.”  In the days before sewers, night soil was dried then mixed with charcoal, gypsum or some other material and then sold as “the cheapest and very best fertilizer on the market.”[4]

The Bryants’ neighbor on the west side of the lake starting in about 1820 was Eliphalet Arthur whose two hundred acre farm stretched from the cliffs on Long Island Sound to the Dug Way.  The farm was eventually inherited by his grandson Elbert, who was born in 1829.  In 1855 Elbert married Margaret Skidmore, who had grown up on an adjoining farm to the east of the Arthur property.  Five years later, Elbert Arthur went into the sand mining business with David Carll, Jesse Carll and William Gardiner.  The four men had secured a lease from the Town of Huntington to mine sand on town-owned land known as East Beach—today known as Asharoken Beach—and located just west of the Arthur property.  In 1866, Arthur began mining the 60-foot cliffs on his own property.  Arthur, who built what was described as “one of the finest homes in Suffolk County” overlooking the Sound and Northport Bay, was elected Town Supervisor in the 1880s.  He retired in 1900 and died six years later.  His son, John W. Arthur, inherited the estate but apparently did not continue in the sand mining business—although he did follow in his father’s political footsteps by serving a two-year term as Town Supervisor in 1903.[5]

John W. Arthur sold the 177 acre estate in 1910 to William Henry Hall, president of Hall & Ruckel a wholesale Manhattan druggist.[6]  The estate of Hall’s widow sold the property in 1927 to the Goodwin-Gallagher Company, which resumed sand and gravel mining through its subsidiary Metropolitan Sand and Gravel.

The reintroduction of mining to the area was met with much opposition.  Lawsuits were filed, and zoning restrictions suggested.  Eventually a three way agreement among the Town of Huntington, the Village of Asharoken and the sand mining company was reached pursuant to which the company agreed to maintain a buffer along Eaton’s Neck Road.  The company demolished the Arthur home in the 1940s and eventually excavated the entire property except for the buffer.[7]

In 1956 the mining operation was acquired by Colonial Sand and Stone Corporation, which also acquired the old Skidmore farm which was located between the Arthur property and Waterside Avenue, south of Blanchard Lake and which Metropolitan had acquired earlier that year.[8]

The Skidmore family was among the earliest settlers of Huntington. The Skidmore’s extensive holdings straddled both sides of the Dug Way.  Thirty-one acres of the Skidmore land north of the Dug Way was sold to Waterside Holding Corp. in 1928, which in turn sold the land to W.N. Beach.[9]  As noted above, Colonial Corp. acquired the Skidmore lands in 1956.[10]  The Revolutionary War era homestead is gone, but the Skidmore burying ground, on Eaton’s Neck Road just west of the intersection with Ocean Avenue, is still maintained by the family.

H.C.S. Blanchard owned about 120 acres on the east side of the lake that bears his name.  In 1889, he had the property subdivided into 18 lots of 4 to 6 acres each plus the Home Farm of 27 acres (identified as Cedarholm on the 1909 Atlas of Suffolk County, Sound Shore).[11]   The subdivision created West Avenue and North Avenue.

To the northeast of Blanchard’s holdings (on the northwest corner of what is now Soundview Terrace and Waterside Avenue) was the property of William Chesebrough, which was acquired by Willis Burt in 1900.  Over the next three years, Burt acquired the land on the south side of Soundview Terrace (lots 8 through 13 of Blanchard’s subdivision).  Burt, who had a wheelwright and blacksmith shop in Northport village, and his son Henry, subdivided the land in 1908 as Waterside Park.  In 1925, they developed the property south of West Street as Waterview Terrace.

Building in Waterside Park was controlled by several restrictions imposed privately in the days before Huntington adopted its zoning code.   Only one building per lot was allowed; no building could be erected within 30’ of the street; no ale house, brewery, distillery, saloon, liquor store, hotel or inn, or manufacturing plant was allowed; dwellings north of Soundview Terrace had to cost at least $1,500; those south of Soundview Terrace for a distance of 700’ had to cost at least $1,200, those south of that as far as West Street had to cost at least $1,000.  Initially, homes in the area were used as summer homes by Brooklynites, but soon became year round residences.

The land to the west of Burt’s new development and north of the lake had been owned by Bartley T. Horner, a retired representative for the Lorrillard Tobacco Company throughout the South.[12]  Horner, who had “a fine residence near the sound shore,”[13] sold His 17½ acres with 720 feet of shoreline to Messrs. Frank of New York City in 1905.[14]  Later that year, Horner was fatally shot by his son-in-law at his house in Northport village.  That story can be found in Vernon Valley Violence, posted on February 25, 2012.

Isaiah Frank intended to manufacture bricks on the property.  He spent a great deal of money building a plant and unsuccessfully sought permission to construct a dock into the Sound.  The brick-making venture did not work out because the clay was not of the right sort.  Frank sold the property to Rudolph Oelsner in 1908. [15]  Oelsner also acquired lots 5, 6 and 7 of the Blanchard subdivision.[16]  Oelsner had previously acquired land in the area in 1906.[17]  By 1909, Oelsner owned all the land on the shorefront between North Avenue and the Arthur property.  He acquired the Cedarholm parcel (i.e. Blanchard’s “Home Farm”) in May 1909.[18]

Oelsner, who had emigrated from Prussia in 1863 when he was 11 years old, was a beer importer with offices on West Broadway in Manhattan.  He had owned a 300-acre estate in Roslyn, but was forced to allow a right of way for a trolley across his estate in 1907.[19]  Perhaps that episode is what led him to Crab Meadow.  His main residence was in Yonkers.  After he died in 1925, his daughter Martha inherited the Crab Meadow property.

In 1935, Oelsenr’s superintendent John R. Leslie advertised camping sites available for rent on the “beautiful shore of Long Island Sound, or woods bordering on fresh water lake.”[20]

Oelsner’s daughter Martha sold the 20-acre Cedarholm tract to Jean Arabo in 1946.[21]  This was the old “Home Farm” parcel identified on the Blanchard map of 1889.  The mid-nineteenth century home on the property remains.  The property is identified as belonging to E.G. Lewis on the 1858 map of the area and G. W. Kelsey in 1873.  Blanchard purchased it sometime between 1873 and 1889.

Arabo was the proprietor of Colony Wine and Spirits Co., a Madison Avenue liquor shop that was often featured in The New York Times dining section.  Arabo was originally from Italy but lived in Nice.  His son, also named Jean, was born in the United States in 1927 and graduated from Lycee Francais de New York in 1946.  The son eventually inherited the property.

Martha Oelsner sold the rest of the property in 1949.  Paul Kirchbaum purchased 14.5 acres for $40,000 and Walter C. Hewitt and Stephen Cavagnaro purchased almost 82 acres for $60,883.  Both purchasers filed subdivision maps with lots of less than an acre, which generated some controversy.  The Sound Shore Bluffs subdivision, located west of North Avenue, was filed in 1949 by Walter C. Hewitt and Stephen Cavagnaro.

The land that Kirchbaum purchased had been used as a summer colony since the 1930s.  Visitors would rent tents or trailers.  There were also ten cottages on the bluff overlooking the Sound.  Despite neighbors’ complaints, the property passed sanitary inspections (The Long-Islander, June 16, 1955, page 1).   Kirchbaum filed a subdivision, known as Hillsboro Beach, but the property was never developed.  The Town of Huntington acquired the property from Kirchbaum in 1974.

The most significant feature of this area is, of course, the Northport power plant, whose smoke stacks can be seen from miles away.  In 1956, Metropolitan Sand and Gravel Corporation agreed to sell 175 acres of the former Arthur property and 77 acres of the former Skidmore property—which it had been mining for three decades—to the Long Island Lighting Company.[22]  The company’s application to re-zone the property was not favorably received by the resident’s of Crab Meadow, Asharoken or Northport.

A proposal to fill in a large portion of Blanchard Lake sent opponents back to the Town’s colonial deeds to assert that the lake was owned by the Town’s Board of Trustees and not Metropolitan or LILCO.  The argument rested on the claim that in the colonial period the lake was open to the Sound and thus fell within the colonial patent’s grant to the Trustees of all “havens and harbors.”  LILCO offered to exchange whatever rights the Trustees may have had in the western half of the lake for 600 feet of beach front in the northwest corner of its property.  The Trustees, arguing they were getting valuable beachfront in exchange for property in which they had no interest, accepted the offer.[23]

The Town Board granted the re-zoning and a subsequent lawsuit by residents of Sound Shore Bluffs—part of the former Oelsner property—was denied.[24]  LILCO began construction of the power plant in 1964.