Huntington History

On a sunny summer day, a visitor to Heckscher Park will find children climbing on the playground sets, adults strolling around the pond, art lovers visiting the Fine Arts Museum, teenagers learning to play tennis, picnickers enjoying the shade of a stately old tree, and perhaps a softball game.  It is hard to imagine a time when this plot of land wasn’t used by Huntingtonians as a place for recreation and relaxation, especially since it has been a park for over a century.

Before it was a park, this area was an active industrial and agricultural venue.  If we begin, not quite at the beginning, but at the time of the American Revolution, the land was the home and farm of Zophar Platt, the wealthiest man in town.[1]  His home stood near what is now the southwest corner of the park.  Platt, who built the tide mill on the west side of Huntington Harbor in 1752, saw his orchards and fencing destroyed by the British when they built Fort Golgotha at the top of the Old Burying Ground in 1782.  A supporter of the Revolution, Platt was mistreated by the British, but survived the war and, as noted on his grave, died “in peace” in 1791.

By the 1840s, the land was owned by Albert W. Hendrickson, who sold it to Thomas C. Hendrickson in 1843.[2]  He, in turn sold the 27-acre farm to Ezra C. Prime in 1846.[3]  A few years earlier, the Commissioners of Highways had laid out a road through the farm and neighboring property from Main Street north to Mill Lane, which had been the dam for Huntington’s first mill in the seventeenth century.[4]  Prime moved from the nearby Prime family homestead on Spring Road to Zophar Platt’s old house.

Six years earlier, Prime had established a thimble factory in what is now the second house west of Prime Avenue on the north side of Main Street.  Ezra Prime was the great grandson of Ebenezer Prime, who served as the third minister of Old First Church from 1719 until he died in 1779.  Ezra was born in Manhattan in 1810.  His family returned to Huntington when he was four years old.  At sixteen, he became an apprentice in the silversmith shop of his second cousin George Platt.  After his apprenticeship, Prime entered into a partnership with John Roshore, who had also worked in Platt’s shop.  The new partnership did well operating at the head of Chatham Square in lower Manhattan.

In 1836, Prime, suffering from ill health, returned to Huntington and established a thimble factory.[5]  According to most sources the factory was on the north side of Main Street, two doors west of the highway laid out in 1839 (now known as Prime Avenue).  That property was owned by Ezra’s brother Claudius, who was also a silversmith.  It is possible the two brothers began the factory as partners.  While silversmiths had been making thimbles as part of their regular business for years, Prime’s factory is often referred to as the first thimble factory in the country.  However, this may be a bit of local boosterism.  The first thimble manufacturer in this country appears to have been Benjamin Halstead, who founded the first American thimble factory in 1794.[6]  “Another well known American thimble-making firm was Ketcham and McDougall of Brooklyn, New York, which produced nearly two-thirds of all the marked American thimbles at present in the hands of collectors.  The company began in 1832 and in various guises continued to make thimbles until 1932.”[7]  Even if Prime’s thimble factory was not the first, it was among the first.

Shortly after establishing the thimble factory, Ezra traveled to Oberlin, Ohio where he studied Greek and Latin.  In light of later mental health issues, his trip may have been motivated by more than the pursuit of academics.  Prime was described as having “an active, nervous temperament, doing with all his might whatever he undertakes.”[8]  The stay in Ohio may have been necessitated by mental exhaustion as well.

After two years at Oberlin, Prime returned to Huntington.  He married in 1842, but his wife died just two months later.  As noted above, in 1846, he purchased the land north of Main Street from Thomas Hendrickson.  He purchased the half acre of land on the northwest corner of Main Street and Prime Avenue from his brother in 1850.

In addition to his thimble factory, in the 1850s Prime had a jewelry store on the north side of Main Street, east of Wall Street.  According to the 1860 Gazetteer of the State of New York (Published by R. Pearsall Smith, Syracuse), Prime’s thimble factory employed 10-12 men and produced 5 to 6 gross of gold and silver thimbles a day.

In 1863, a second factory building was constructed at the southwest corner of Main Street and Spring Road.[9]  This factory utilized steam power, using water from the Meeting House Brook, which ran alongside the building. Five years later, he had the first factory building moved back from the road and converted to a residence. [10]

In addition to his thimble factory, Prime farmed his extensive lands on the north side of Main Street.  In 1850, he purchased from Jonathan Weeks an additional 19 acres to the west of the land he purchased in 1846.[11]  By 1860 he owned almost all of the land on the north side of Main Street from Sabbath Day Path on the east to Mill Lane on the north and as far as Carlos Stuart’s land on the west (i.e. Prime owned land as far west as the municipal lot behind the Elks Club).

He married for the second time in 1858 to Martha Smith Morrell.  The couple had four children, one of whom died when he was two years old.  After his marriage, he built a palatial 26 room house north of the old Zophar Platt house.  The living room in his new house was large enough to serve as a grand ballroom.[12]

The Prime Mansion

In 1864, Prime had a dam built north of his new house to create a pond in the swampy area that stretched from his property up to the harbor.[13]  The pond was stocked with trout. Perhaps inspired by the State fish hatchery in Cold Spring Harbor, which opened in 1883, Prime also had a hatchery.[14]  The pond became a primary source for ice locally.  The ice was 5 to 8 inches thick and clear as crystal.[15]  It also provided a place for skating.  Prime continued to enlarge and improve the pond over the years until it became “a perfect gem of beauty.”[16]

Prime’s third factory building.

The next year, Prime built a building adjoining the pond for E.C. Lefferts who planned to use the building for a sash and blind factory.  In 1871, Lefferts moved to a factory on Wall Street and the building became the third thimble factory operated by Prime.  Fayette Gould leased the building in January 1879 for the manufacture of his patented rowlocks.[17]  By the end of that year, however, thimbles were being made there and Prime added a story to the building in 1879 because business was so brisk.[18]  The various manufacturing uses in this building appear to have utilized steam power.  The nearby pond would have the source of water for the steam engines, but the pond’s spillway does not seem to have been used to provide water power.

The frantic pace with which Prime pursued his thimble business, his farming, and improvements to his property led to some sort of a breakdown.  In 1871, he was forcibly taken to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.  There was some disagreement about whether his confinement there was justified.  Nonetheless, despite one successful escape, he spent 63 days there.[19]

He continued his endeavors back in Huntington.  But in 1883, he was admitted to the Brunswick Home in Amityville, where he would spend the last 15 years of his life.[20]  The Brunswick Home had been set up to care for the “feeble-minded.”[21]

During his time at Brunswick, he left the thimble factory in the care of his sons, but they soon gave up the business.[22]

After Ezra Prime died in 1898, his children sold the ten northernmost acres of the farm between New York Avenue and Park Avenue to Henry C. Platt.[23]  The land west of Prime Avenue was subdivided into 49 lots in February 1906.  That same year, they sold the bulk of the farm, the land north of Main Street and east of Prime Avenue, to August Heckscher.[24]  Thus begins another interesting story.

[1] The Long-Islander, August 16, 1973, page 20.

[2] Suffolk County Clerk’s Office Deed Liber 38, page 43.

[3] Suffolk County Clerk’s Office Deed Liber 44, page 140.

[4] Town of Huntington Highway Book A 1724-1851, page 288.

[5] Some accounts give the date as 1837.

[6] Finding: The Material Cultural of Needlework and Sewing, by Mary C. Beaudry (Yale University Press 2006), page 99.

[7] Ibid, page 107.

[8] History of Suffolk County, New York, with Illustrations, Portraits, & Sketches of Prominent Families and Individuals  (W.W. Munsell & Company 1882), page 61

[9] This building was converted to a steam laundry by L.C. Gordon in 1883 (The Long-Islander, May 4, 1883) and later converted into a residence by Henry Saylor.

[10] New York Thimble Makers from Huntington, Long Island, by Elizabeth Galbraith Sickels (Antiques Journal, October 1964), page 21. Copies can be found in the archives of the Huntington Historical Society.

[11] Suffolk County Clerk’s Office Deed Liber 54, page 246.

[12] Ezra Conklin Prime 1810-1898, by T. Ford Prime (1958-59), unpublished manuscript in the archives of the Huntington Historical Society, page 8.

[13] The Long-Islander, December 22, 1865.  Slater’s 1860 map of Huntington village shows a pond marked “Proposed.”

[14] The Long-Islander, November 7, 1884, page 2.  The short piece is about a dog that died in one of Prime’s trout hatching boxes.

[15] The Long-Islander, January 6, 1871.

[16] The Long-Islander, July 12, 1878.

[17] The Long-Islander, January 24, 1879.

[18] The Long-Islander, December 5, 1879.

[19] Munsell, pages 61-62.

[20] The Long-Islander, February 19 & 26, 1898.

[21] American Journal of Insanity, Vol 49, Issue 3, January 1893, page 556. Found at http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.49.3.556

[22] The Long-Islander, February 26, 1898.

[23] The Long-Islander, January 23, 1903.

[24] Suffolk County Clerk’s Office Deed Liber 589, page 14.