Huntington History

Painters and photographers who recorded our community in years past allow us to see the community as they saw it.  Often the view is very different today: some houses no long stand, roads have been widened and paved, whaling ships no longer lie at anchor in the harbor, vistas are now obscured.  It is with these images created long ago that we can get a better understanding of the past.

For a view of late nineteenth century Long Island, one painter is indispensable—Edward Lange.  The artist was an immigrant from Germany who lived in Elwood from 1871 to 1889.  During those two decades, he painted at least fifty locales in Huntington alone; he produced dozens more across Long Island.  Often proud farmers would commission Lange to paint their tidy farmsteads.  Sometimes, local entrepreneurs would hire him to paint their businesses to serve as advertising and help attract customers.  Lange also painted vignettes of town scenes.  He would then photograph the painting and offer to sell prints to the public.

Preservation Long Island has almost thirty of his works in its collection, representing about one sixth of Lange’s known oeuvre on Long Island.  PLI is currently conducting an in-depth investigation into Lange and his work.  Once completed, there will be an exhibit at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook and a new book about the artist and his work.

Lange’s paintings are a treasured part of many local historical society and museum collections.  An untold number of others are in private hands, including a Cold Spring Harbor scene that was recently discovered in South Carolina.  The 1881 painting depicts a mansard roofed house on Shore Road that disappeared decades ago and had not been known to local historians.  It is an exciting and confounding discovery.

The painting was discovered thanks to an internet request for Lange paintings posted by Preservation Long Island.  The owner had purchased the painting at a tag sale in South Carolina.  The painting does not identify the house or location, presenting local historians with a mystery to solve.

Peter Fedoryk, who is the Edward Lange Curatorial Fellow at Preservation Long Island, surmised the painting may be of a house on Shore Road in Cold Spring Harbor.  However, there are no mansard roof houses on Shore Road and local historians were not aware of any such house ever existing on Shore Road.  Not wanting to let a good mystery go unsolved, Toby Kissam and I spent the next month obsessing over this painting.

To start the hunt, Toby searched the term mansard roof in the online archives of The Long-Islander newspaper, which produced an intriguing clue from the August 11, 1876 edition.  The item reported that a worker installing a mansard roof for Mr. Neale had fallen from the roof.  He was not expected to live.  This sad news was our first clue.

The following month the paper reported that Mr. Neale was soon to move into his new house, “one of the handsomest houses on Ocean avenue.”  Roads usually did not have official names in the nineteenth century; and it is conceivable that Shore Road could have been called Ocean Avenue.  The only other item found referring to the elusive Mr. Neale was a probate notice posted by his wife on April 13, 1883.

While researching the photograph collection at the Huntington Historical Society on another topic, I found apanoramic photograph of the outer cove of Cold Spring Harbor taken from what is now the driveway to Eagle Dock Community Beach.  Partially hidden behind trees is a glimpse of a mansard roof house along Shore Road.  The supposition that the house was in Cold Spring Harbor appeared to be correct.

A search of deeds on file with the Suffolk County Clerk revealed that William Neale purchased a three-quarter acre lot on the east side of Cold Spring Harbor from Susan Titus in 1872.  Without tracing deeds for the neighboring properties, it was unclear exactly where on the east side of the harbor this land was.  It was thought that it was perhaps the property identified as the Titus estate on an 1873 atlas.  

 Tracing the deeds for this property as well as neighboring properties confirmed that Neale had purchased the “Titus Est.” property.  But where exactly was that house.  Perhaps it was on the property now occupied by a house built in 1941—the only “modern” house along Shore Road (that house was built by Johnston de Forest as a wedding gift for his daughter Priscilla and her husband Doug Williams).  What happened to the house?  It was assumed that the house must have burnt down because there are no mansard roof houses on Shore Road.  Yet no article about a fire or other calamity could be found.

After a month of sleuthing, the answer suddenly became clear, especially after reading the early twentieth century deeds in Riverhead.  The house had not burnt down.  It was still standing at 72 Shore Road.  

William Neale’s widow sold the property in 1886.  Over the next five years, it changed hands five times.  Finally, in 1891, John P. Dole, who lived three doors down on Shore Road, purchased the property.  Dole died in 1902 and the next year his widow sold the property to their son Edward Everett Dole.  He in turn sold the property in 1916 to William A.W. Stewart, whose wife was the daughter of Robert W. de Forest.  Everett Dole continued to live on Shore Road; presumably he moved back to his parents’ house at 48 Shore Road, which he called Tide Crest (his mother died in 1925).

According to a historic structure inventory for the Titus House completed in 1979, for which Priscilla de Forest Williams (Robert de Forest’s granddaughter) is listed as the source, “The house was remodelled by Mrs. W.A.W. Stewart, Jr. about 1920, to more closely resemble a Southern plantation house.”  The date of the remodeling must be off by a few years because William A. W. Stewart, Jr. didn’t marry until 1933.  The family of his wife, Margaret Wetmore, was from New York City and Santiago, Cuba, which may or may not explain the decision to remodel the house as a southern plantation.

The inventory also cited a survey dated September 9, 1871 made for George Mowbray, who at that time owned 60 acres along Shore Road.  The survey included a sketch of the Titus House showing it to have been “a 3-bay 1 ½ story house with small eaves windows, sidehall entrance, and an interior end chimney on the north.”

 It seems that William Neale remodeled the Titus House in 1876 by adding a mansard roof and that half a century later Mrs. Stewart had it removed.  Mystery solved.  

The research also shed light on the other two nineteenth century houses at this end of Shore Road.  The one and half acre property immediately to the north (at 76 Shore Road) was purchased in 1828 by Eliphalet Rogers from the estate of John Lefferts.  The property stayed in the Rogers family for the next 80 years.  There had been two houses on the property into the twentieth century.   The first house built on the property was southwest of the existing house.  The panoramic photograph of the cove shows it to have been a modest house.  It was demolished some time after 1916.  The surviving house may have been added after Eliphalet Rogers died in 1862–or Eliphalet could have built it.  

The last Rogers family members to live there were Eliphalet’s son Charles and daughter Catharine.  But they didn’t own the house, their brother Henry did.  

Henry Rogers lived in Brooklyn and was well-off, although it is unclear what he did for a living.  In an obituary, Henry is identified as a manufacturer.  Later articles say he was a sea captain.  The 1880 census lists him living on Shore Road in Cold Spring Harbor, and gives his occupation as an architect/house builder.  In 1900, he is identified as a carpenter.  In any event, Henry Rogers seems to have been well off–his estate was valued at $65,650, which is equivalent of $1.8 million today.  His brother and sister, neither of whom ever married, were not so well off.  They were described as indigent and relied on their brother for financial support.

When Henry died in 1906, there was a dispute about his will, which had been drawn up shortly before he died.  The will left everything to his wife, leaving nothing to Charles and Catharine, who had been dependent on Henry’s support.  The will was disallowed.  During the administration of the estate, the property was auctioned off.   Edward Everett Dole, who had grown up down the street and whose summer house was next door in the Titus-Neale House (he also lived in Brooklyn), purchased the property from the estate.  He sold it a few months after Catharine Rogers died in 1916.  I suspect Dole let Charles, who died in 1914, and Catharine live out their lives in the homestead.  In the same deed, Dole also sold the Titus-Neale House to the south to Stewart.

The house to the north of the Rogers’ house was at one time a hotel.  Robert H. Bold, who appears to have immigrated from England in 1834, purchased the southern half of that property in two transactions in 1838.  He was identified on one of the deeds as a merchant.  On the 1850 census, he is identified as a Hotel Keeper.  Bold must have died sometime between 1850 and 1856 because by 1860, his wife Sarah had married a Portuguese immigrant, with whom she had a three-year-old daughter.  The two younger daughters of Robert Bold are listed in the household.  The oldest daughter would have been 18 by this time. 

Sarah Bold’s new husband’s name was given as Joseph Prayer on the 1860 census; Joseph Prairie on the 1870 census; and Joseph Perry on the 1880 census.  No telling how his name was really spelled.  He is identified in the census records as a boatman in 1860 and 1880 and as a watchman in a shipyard in 1870.  The Abrams boatyard was located across the street.

In 1884, the three daughters of Robert Bold sold the property to Elwood Abrams, who operated the shipyard across the street.  One could assume that their mother had probably died shortly before the land was sold.  According to the book Clamtown, written by Leslie Peckham, who lived nearby, Elwood Abrams operated an ice cream, soda, candy and tobacco store as well as a boarding house in the home.  After he died in 1917, his daughter Ella and her husband William Wright continued to run the boarding house.  William White also worked as a painter at his brother-in-law’s shipyard and Ella White was also a dressmaker. 

According to Maggie Norton, who was born in 1910 and grew up on Shore Road (and was the granddaughter of John & Jane Dole), the house was known as “Dirty Dick’s boarding house” and it was run by a widow and her son Raymond, whose erratic behavior the children of the neighborhood found scary—he would “spent the day walking back and forth on the porch tearing up tin cans.”  In the census records, no occupation is ever listed for Raymond, who died at age 42 in 1925.  Raymond’s father also died in 1925, so the boarding house was not operated by a widow.   William White must have stayed out of sight. 

Ella White died in 1930.  She spent the last year or so of her life with her daughter in Glen Cove.  In 1929, her brother Walter Abrams sold the house to Julia Fairchild, who added an addition to the north.