Huntington History

A valuable resource for researching the history of a particular area is a historic map or atlas. For Long Island, there are several available including the coastal survey of 1836/37; the 1858 Chace wall map, the 1873 Beers, Comstock & Cline atlas; the 1909 and 1917 E. Belcher Hyde atlases, and the 1931 and 1941 Hagstrom atlases. These maps and atlases are often the first place to start researching. I find that no matter how many times I have stared at these maps, I always notice something new.

For instance, while researching the history of West Hills, I came across the name Mrs. L.K. Elmhirst on the 1931 map of the West Hills/Melville area. Who was she?

The name was not a familiar one, unlike her neighbors Robert DeForest (who owned a large estate in Cold Spring Harbor) and Henry L. Stimpson (who served in virtually every presidential cabinet of the first half of the twentieth century). She owned a large parcel of property. Usually property is listed in the name of the husband. Perhaps she was a widow. Was her husband a local farmer? Were they city residents who acquired a large property for a country home as many others did in the early twentieth century?

By the time of the 1941 atlas, the property was owned by the Straight Improvement Company, Inc.

Whoever Mrs. L.K. Elmhisrt was, it seemed she had sold her property to a development company. For the most part, the property was never developed–most of it is now part of West Hills County Park.

Going back to earlier atlases, we see that the property had previously been part of Robert DeForest’s extensive land holdings in the area (most of which also became part of West Hills County Park).

The answer to the question, who was Mrs. L.K. Elmhirst, proved interesting, although not necessarily of great significance to Huntington’s history.

It turns out Mrs. L.K. Elmhirst was one of the wealthiest women in the country. Her maiden name was Dorothy Payne Whitney. She was the daughter of William C. Whitney, a financier and Secretary of the Navy under President Grover Cleveland. She was born in 1887 while her father was serving in the Cleveland administration. (Her older brother Harry Payne Whitney married Gertrude Vanderbilt, the daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art). When Dorothy was 17, she inherited $15,000,000, equivalent to about half a billion dollars today. She felt that “wealth entailed social responsibility.” Therefore, she supported numerous philanthropic causes throughout her life.

During a trip around the world in 1906, Dorothy Whitney met Willard Straight in Mukden (now Shenyang), China. Straight, whose parents had been missionaries in Japan and China, was fluent in Japanese and Chinese. He graduated from Cornell and worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, then as a journalist during the Russo-Japanese War., before joining the State Department. Dorothy and Willard married in Geneva in 1911. They lived for a few months in China where Straight represented American business interests.

During her lifetime, Dorothy supported and established many charities. In her younger years, she led marches for women’s suffrage. She led the campaign to build a community home for working women through the Working Women’s Trade Union League. She led the effort to can fruits and vegetables that would have spoiled on the docks during World War I and was in charge of the Women’s Emergency Committee of the European Relief Council.

In 1914, she and her husband started The New Republic magazine to promote the ideas expressed by Herbert Croly in his book, “The Promise of American Life.” Croly advocated for a new political consensus based on nationalism with a sense of social responsibility and care for the less fortunate.

Discussions organized by Croly at the offices of The New Republic with a variety of progressive thinkers led to a proposal to establish an independent social science institute. The proposal became a reality when Dorothy Straight pledged $10,00 a year for ten years. The New School for Social Research opened in 1919 and operates today as The New School.

When the pledge for the New School was made, Willard Straight was in Europe. He had enlisted in the army as soon as the United States entered World War I. He died from the influenza pandemic in December 1918 while in Paris. He was two months shy of his 39th birthday. In 1925, Dorothy donated the student union building at Cornell in honor of her late husband. Willard Straight Hall continues to serve as a center of campus life at Cornell.

In 1920, the young widow met Leonard Knight Elmhirst. The son of an English rector who was studying agriculture at Cornell, Elmhirst was president of Cornell’s Cosmopolitan Club, which served foreign students. The two met during his fund raising activities for the Club. After completing his studies, Elmhirst worked on rural reconstruction projects in India.

The couple married in September 1925 and moved to England where they purchased the derelict fourteenth century estate, Dartington Hall. They restored the medieval buildings and established the Dartington Trust, which continues to operate various programs to foster progressive learning in arts, ecology and social justice.

Mrs. Elmhirst made headlines in 1935 when she renounced her United States citizenship. Since she was married to an Englishman, she was considered a British citizen. And since she was also an American citizen, even though she lived in England, her estate would be subject to American estate taxes. Her lawyer explained that the combined U.S. and British taxes would amount to more than 100% of the value of the estate. Therefore, she reluctantly gave up her American citizenship. Estate taxes did not become an issue for another three decades. She died in 1968–almost exactly 50 years after her first husband had died.

But what does all this have to do with Huntington?

Very little, other than the fact that between funding The New Republic and The New School, Willard Straight purchased land in West Hills from Robert DeForest. Although the purchase was reported to be of about 250 acres, the tract was actually 179 acres. (In a 1929 letter, DeForest identified Mrs. Elmhirst as “my friend.” Whether that friendship predated the sale is unknown.) A year earlier, in 1916, Straight had purchased the adjoining 41 acre Ezra Smith farm on Round Swamp Road. After the 1917 purchase, it was reported that Straight had no plans to build on the land. Instead there would be a limited amount of planting and farming of the available fields on the two tracts. Three months after she married Elmhirst, Dorothy Straight transferred her land in West Hills to the Straight Improvement Co., Inc.

In 1928, Mrs. Elmhirst dedicated to the State land at the north side of her property for the Northern State Parkway, which was not completed through this section until 1949. It is interesting to note that in his landmark profile of State Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, The Power Broker, Robert Caro describes the accommodations Moses made to the wealthy landowners in West Hills, men such as Otto Kahn, Henry Stimpson and Robert DeForest. Caro goes on to show that Moses made no concessions at all for the farmers–men with “neither wealth nor influence”–whose land was eventually seized for the parkway. Men like James Roth, whose farm on the west side of Round Swamp Road was cut in two by the parkway. Caro does not mention that Mrs. Elmhirst, who most certainly had wealth and influence, donated some of her land for the parkway, as did Robert DeForest, who donated a total of 50 acres in West Hills and other land he owned in Dix Hills near Deer Park Road (The New York Times, May 7, 1928, page 9).

In 1957, the Straight Improvement Company applied to the Town of Huntington to rezone its West Hills property on the south side of the parkway from two acres to one acre. In exchange, the company would donate to the State strips of land 150′ to 200′ wide along the parkway to “insure the preservation of the woodlands which border this beautiful stretch of parkway . . . and would serve as an additional buffer zone.” (The Long-Islander, July 4, 1957, page 1). The Town did not grant the rezoning. Moses said the state would find the money to buy the land “in order to preserve these fine woodlands which, because of their unique and rugged character, should not be stripped and bulldozed for building lots.”

In the 1970s, the Straight Improvement Company’s property east of Mount Misery Road was acquired for incorporation into West Hills County Park. The old Ezra Smith farm property at the southeast corner of the Parkway and Round Swamp Road is now the Thomas School of Horsemanship, which opened there in 1951, and Driftwood Day Camp, which opened on that property ten years later.

Post Script: While writing this, I noticed, for the first time, that Mrs. Elmhirst is shown on the 1931 map owning additional land on Hartmann Hill Road, south of Kingsley Road. There is always something new to see.