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Manhasset

Home of Wealth and Power

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

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Neither town nor village, Manhasset is four square miles of suburbia. It contains three villages and parts of three others, and shares a peninsula with Port Washington. Once considered an ideal cow pasture, it has been home to some of the nation's richest and most powerful people.

The Matinecocks, who had a village on Manhasset Bay, made wampum from oyster shells, which they prized more than real estate because land was plentiful. Eventually, they lost it all. The Dutch West India Co. claimed it in 1623 and drove off the first English settlers in 1640. Three years later, however, the peninsula was gobbled up by English colonists in a purchase that extended all the way to Long Island's South Shore.

By 1659 there were 309 cows grazing on the peninsula known as Cow Neck. The settlers closed off the area with a five-mile fence, and each farmer could graze as many cows as the number of ``gattes,'' or fence sections he had built. When the fence came down in 1677, the pasturage was divided among the settlers. The Manhasset area became Little Cow Neck. North of it was Upper Cow Neck, now Port Washington.

One of the largest landowners was Matthias Nicoll, who was elected mayor of New York in 1674 and speaker of the Colonial Assembly in 1683. Nicoll's son William commissioned shipwright Joseph Latham to build a gristmill on the Nicoll property, now Plandome Manor. The 1693 Plandome Mill, which remained in service until 1908, is now a private residence.

For most of the 18th Century, Dutch and English families - Onderdonks, Mitchells, Hewletts, Schencks - operated large farms. The Schencks owned all of present-day Munsey Park and a large part of Strathmore-Vanderbilt and North Hills.

Little Cow Neck, like most of the northern necks, was committed to independence during the Revolution and suffered heavy damage during a seven-year British occupation. British forces burned the 1719 Quaker Meeting House, seized the Plandome Mill, and damaged houses, barns and churches.

Manhasset, gradually recovering, adopted its present name in 1840, a derivation of the Indian term Manhansett, which means ``island neighborhood.'' It was still dairy country but with a burgeoning oyster industry. Community life changed with the coming of the Long Island Rail Road in 1898. Wealthy New Yorkers eyed Manhasset's lush countryside for country homes close to their offices. Estate owner Mary Travers donated land for a Manhasset railroad station if the LIRR agreed to provide one train a day in both directions - or else pay for the land.

Meanwhile, commerce was developing along North Hempstead Turnpike, now Northern Boulevard, particularly in the area called Spinney Hill, where the road from Great Neck climbs steeply. The area still known as Manhasset Valley developed as a business center with five blacksmiths, wheelwrights, hotels and restaurants. The upscale Jaffe's Department Store opened in 1903. The less affluent also settled in the Manhasset Valley-Spinney Hill area, including Polish and Italian families and later black families from the South, recruited to work on the big estates.

North Hempstead Town, which had been created in 1784, opened a town hall on Plandome Road in 1907, making Manhasset the town seat. But, as in other parts of the town, village fever spread across Manhasset. Plandome Village was the first to incorporate in 1911, on 90 acres originally developed by the Plandome Land Co. and later expanded as an upscale community. Then came the Great Sewer Revolt of 1929, which followed the creation of the Manhasset Sewer District. Residents of Plandome Heights, Plandome Manor and Munsey Park voted to incorporate rather than pay taxes for sewers they didn't want. (Histories of Flower Hill and North Hills, two other villages partly in Manhasset and incorporated about the same time, are featured elsewhere in this section.)

Plandome Heights was built on property once owned by Bloodgood Haviland Cutter, who was called the ``Long Island farmer poet.'' He died in 1906, leaving his land to the American Bible Society. One portion became a sand-mining operation, while the ``heights'' was purchased in 1909 by Benjamin Duke, a founder of the American Tobacco Co., who envisioned a colony of tobacco executives rivaling Tuxedo Park. Duke died in 1929, the year Plandome Heights incorporated, his plan unrealized.

Munsey Park owes its beginnings to conservative newspaper publisher Frank A. Munsey. After purchasing the Louis Sherry mansion (now the Strathmore-Vanderbilt Country Club) in 1922, Munsey amassed 663 acres that he willed in 1925 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. A model community was developed on the Munson property, with all the houses authentic American Colonial reproductions and the streets named for American artists.

Plandome Manor, a half-square-mile village, includes within its boundaries the Plandome railroad station, a post office, golf course, beaches, pond and the Science Museum of Long Island. Its history dates to the 17th-Century Nicolls who originated the name Plandome, from the Latin for ``pleasant'' or ``peaceful.''

Among the best-known residents of the Manhasset area were industrialists Warner M. Leeds, known as the Tin-Plate King, who gave his name to Leeds Pond; socialite Payne Whitney, and Leroy Grumman, founder of the Grumman Aircraft Corp. But perhaps the most famous of all is Manhasset High School athlete Jim Brown, one of the greatest fullbacks in National Football League history.

Where to Find More: ``Manhasset the First 300 Years,'' at the Manhasset Library.