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Legacy: Silas Wood

Staff Writer

The man who created the tribal myth was born on his family's farm in West Hills, in Huntington, in 1769, when Long Island was part of a British colony. A hilly, wooded place in the southern part of the town, West Hills was where Walt Whitman was born in 1819. A portrait of Silas Wood shows a dark-haired man with a narrow, unhappy face. He was a child during the Revolution, when British troops occupied portions of Long Island. He attended Princeton College, and, in 1795, was elected to the New York State Assembly from Huntington. After leaving the Legislature, he practiced law in Huntington. It was while as an attorney, and later district attorney of Suffolk County, that he began to research his book.

He died in 1847, and is buried in Huntington. A 1970 article in a Long Island historical journal described Wood as Long Island's ``first great historian.''