Home Delivery

Woodbury

Corporate Giants Roam the Land

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

Beginnings: Woodbury was part of the large land purchase that Welsh settler Robert Williams made in 1648 from the Matinecock Indians. Woodbury and Syosset were an area known generally as East Woods, used initially the way the Indians did, for hunting. By the mid-1700s a small number of farmers began to cultivate land in the area. The center of the community was a tiny schoolhouse, notable mainly because poet Walt Whitman taught there for the 1837-38 school year. The tiny community remained isolated, connected only by old Indian paths to Cold Spring Harbor and Jericho, until the railroad arrived in nearby Syosset in 1854. In time, that attracted more farmers to the area, who saw that the Syosset train station opened up the large markets of western Queens, Brooklyn and New York.

Turning Point: Some of the farms were converted to estates a century ago, when wealthy New Yorkers built grand mansions across the North Shore. In Woodbury, Andrew Mellon owned Woodlands on South Woods Road. He gave the estate to his daughter as a wedding gift. It is now the Town of Oyster Bay's public golf course. Other farms were eaten up during the real estate boom after World War II. Although Woodbury was less densely developed than the rest of Nassau, most of the farms became either residential neighborhoods, office parks near Jericho Turnpike or the Long Island Expressway, or shopping centers. Meyer's Farm is the largest that remains.

Claims to Fame: Woodbury's corporate residents include entertainment giant Cablevision Systems Corp. and dieting company Weight Watchers.

Where to Find More: In the Woodbury files at the Syosset Public Library and the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University.