Huntington History

Little has been written about the earliest English settlers of Huntington. Although the deed for the First Purchase is dated April 2, 1653, it is believed settlers may have arrived before that date. Initially the population would have been small. In his history of Long Island, Silas Wood states the initial population of the town amounted to eleven families. But a review of the published Town Records reveals that between 1653 and 1663, some seventy names appear in the Huntington Town Records. If each named man were a head of household with an average of five members that would mean a population of a few hundred at even this early time period.

However many there were, all were English. Based on preliminary research it seems the settlers came from a variety of counties in southern England. Most settled first in Massachusetts (especially Salem) and Connecticut before arriving in Huntington. None appear to hail from Huntingdon, the Long Island town’s English namesake. One, however, was born in Huntingdonshire, the small county of which Huntingdon was the principle town.[i]

Robert Seeley was born in  Bluntisham-cum-Earith, Huntingdonshire in 1602. As a teenager he went to London where he joined the cordswainers or shoemakers guild and attended the puritan church of John Davenport. In 1630 he joined John Winthrop on his voyage to Massachusetts as part of the Great Migration. He was one of the first settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts and a few years later was one of the founders of Wethersfield, the first English settlement in Connecticut.

Seeley served as second in command to John Mason during the Pequot War of 1637 and helped lead the attack on a Pequot village at Mystic that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Pequots. During the war he was shot in the eyebrow with a flat headed arrow. After the war, Seeley joined his minister from London, John Davenport, and merchant Theopilus Eaton when they established the Colony of New Haven. Eaton was the first Governor of the Colony of New Haven.

In 1659, Seeley returned to England for a few years. He came back to the new world in 1662 and that is when we find him in Huntington. In February 1662, at a town meeting in Huntington, it was ordered that the boat should be sent to the mouth of the Connecticut River (presumably Saybrook) to fetch Captain Seeley.

In December 1662, Seeley purchased Eatons Neck from William Jones. The neck was first acquired from the native inhabitants by Theopilus Eaton in 1646. Jones acquired title to the neck by virtue of his marriage to Eaton’s daughter Hannah. The following August, Seeley asked that a confirmation of the deed bearing the marks of five natives, witnessed by two Englishmen, be recorded.

Seeley appears to have quickly become an integral part of the Huntington community. In April 1663 he was nominated as one of three magistrates for the town. The names were sent to the court in Hartford for confirmation. Connecticut records show that the next month he was appointed magistrate as well as the chief military officer for Huntington charged with training soldiers.[ii]  He was also one of the men chosen to review “all lands allredy layd out in filedes and to record the ownar and quantity he has taken up in the town Booke.” The men were also empowered to lay out new fields or home lots at a rate of six pence per acre. Seeley had been assigned similar responsibilities to lay out lots and roads in Watertown Massachusetts in 1634. He also was asked to measure the Huntington Town Common to determine how much fencing was needed to enclose it.

But within a few years, the town sued Seeley over title to Eatons Neck. In all, there were three such suits by the town against the owner of Eatons Neck. It is unclear who the defendants were in the first two cases, but they were found to have good title to the Neck. In 1666, the final suit was heard at the Court of Assizes in New York. The Court found in favor of Seeley, who had already sold the Neck to George Baldwin in July 1663. That sale was confirmed in June 1667 by Richard Nicholls, Governor of the New York Colony.

It is interesting to note that Robert Seeley was one of the eight men named in the Nicholls Patent of October 1666. Those same eight names appear in the Dongan Charter of 1688. By the time of the Nichols Patent, Seeley was no longer in Huntington. In 1665, Seeley helped found the town of Elizabeth, NJ. By the time of the Dongan Charter, 22 years later, he was long dead having died in Manhattan in 1667.[iii]

[i] Huntingdonshire was abolished in the 1970s and the territory it encompassed was made a part of Cambridgeshire.

[ii] The information about Seeley being appointed Huntington’s chief military officer comes from a genealogy website, http://www.seeley-society.net/nathaniel/sgs1.html. I have not consulted the Connecticut records, which is something Charles R. Street, who compiled and annotated the Huntington Town Records in 1880s suggested would be helpful in understanding Huntington’s earliest history.

[iii] Mysteriously, Robert Seeley also appears as a witness on a deed recorded in 1669.  It may be that the deed was made a few years earlier and not recorded until 1669.