The Daily Grind

In the town that will become Glen Cove, grain and lumber are grist for the mills

By Bill Bleyer | Staff Writer

'Ship's biscuit" -- a slow-to-spoil wheat concoction with the consistency of concrete -- was a staple of the 18th-Century sailor's diet. And sailors embarking from New York in the mid-1700s often tested their teeth on biscuit baked on Long Island.

Specifically, biscuit baked in a thriving, one-industry town called Musketa Cove. That industry was milling grain.

Like many other Long Island waterfront communities that could trap the tides or harness streams, Musketa Cove -- which would become Glen Cove in the next century -- symbolized commercial development in colonial Long Island. The magic word was gristmills. These served as economic generators for waterfront communities, providing business opportunities that rippled through the entire region.

Musketa Cove's gristmills were literally big business. One mill was so large that it contained 26 pairs of grinding stones. And another mill operated by the Walton family was big enough to spin off its own bakery to manufacture ship's biscuits on an export scale.

Mills were the reason the community was founded. In the 1660s, a building boom was under way in Manhattan and lumber was in short supply. A young Rhode Islander named Joseph Carpenter glimpsed a solution. He noticed that northwestern Oyster Bay not only had plenty of trees but a creek that could accommodate vessels. So he purchased 2,000 acres along Hempstead Harbor from the Matinecock Indians on May 24, 1668.

Carpenter and his partners, brothers Robert, Daniel and Nathaniel Coles and Nicholas Simkins, all of Oyster Bay, established the Musketa Cove Plantation. They retained the name the Matinecocks had given the area: Musketa (also spelled "musquito"), which had nothing to do with bugs but translated roughly as "the place of rushes."

"The Five Proprietors of Musketa Cove Plantation," as they called themselves, dammed a small stream that ran through a valley roughly parallel to today's Glen Street. Carpenter built a sawmill for the partners and a gristmill for himself by the dam located near the foot of Mill Hill northeast of where the fire department is today. He agreed to grind the grain of the other proprietors "tolle free for ever." Everybody else paid the miller with a one-twelfth portion of the final product.

By 1679, the sawmill was producing nine types of boards and lumber as well as wainscott, "feather-edged" boards for paneling, and custom-cut walnut for cabinets. The mills made the community such an important economic center that workers migrated out from the city, sleeping in mills or staying with friends. Mention of the sawmill ceases in the 1690s, probably because all easily accessible trees had been harvested.

But the grain-milling business was still going strong, so much so that just after the turn of the century, a family of wealthy New York City merchants decided to invest in waterfront land and purchase several of the mills. The acquisitions by three brothers -- Jacob, Abraham and Isaac Walton -- included a second gristmill near what is now Pulaski Street. They also set up the bakehouse to turn out ship's biscuit. Besides making a profit for themselves, the Waltons generated income for independent craftsmen. For example, the records of a local blacksmith named Mudge show that he did many jobs for them, fabricating and fixing equipment for their mills and ships.

The earliest mills were built on two ponds -- Upper and Lower Mill Pond. Upper Mill Pond, which ran from what is now Pulaski Street to St. Patrick's Church, and part of Lower Mill Pond were eventually filled in. What's left is known today as Pratt Pond.

By the 1740s, the Waltons had competition. A second milling center developed when the Woolsey family set up shop in the Dosoris area of town near Long Island Sound. Benjamin Woolsey II and his brother Melancthon built tidal mills powered by saltwater that flowed in at high tide and ran out through the mill. John Butler and his family took over the mills or built their own in the 1750s. A painting of one of Butler's mills shows 26 pairs of grinding stones. "This was clearly a major export operation," Glen Cove city historian Dan Russell said. The mills were ultimately taken over by Butler's son-in-law, Nathaniel Coles. One survived until it burned down in 1867.

The mills provided local farmers with a convenient market for their grains. "The local mills before the Revolutionary War were turning out a fairly diverse range of flours," Russell said. "It's not just wheat, it's not just corn, it's rye and even a minimal production of pea flour. It must have tasted awful. There was barley, and a lot of that probably went into making booze."