Cold Spring Harbor

Tourists Replaced the Whales

By Bill Bleyer | Staff Writer

Cold Spring Harbor developed as a company town. And the company was run by the Jones family.

The descendants of Maj. Thomas Jones, a prominent Massapequa landowner for whom Jones Beach was named, not only established Long Island's largest whaling company, they also built mills and launched other ventures, including an attempt at railroading.

Before the Joneses arrived, Matinecock Indians lived in the area they called Wawapex, meaning ``place of good water.'' An Indian village was on the stream on the east side of the harbor in an area white settlers called Wigwam Swamp. On April 1 and 2, 1653, the Matinecocks sold land around the harbor to three Englishmen from Oyster Bay. Because of the freshwater springs, the English called the area Cold Spring.

In 1682, John Adams erected the community's first mills, a sawmill and gristmill, after damming the stream running north into the harbor. Eventually, two more dams were built across the stream to power additional mills. Benjamin Hawxhurst in 1700 built the first of several woolen mills. Another industry developed by 1713 when Jonas Wood began making bricks near Wigwam Swamp. Eventually, the Crossman family bought out several brickyards, and by the 1880s it would employ up to 400 men before closing down just before the turn of the century because the locally available firewood was depleted.

On April 23, 1790, residents gathered to build their first schoolhouse when a coach carrying President George Washington arrived. He contributed a silver dollar before departing for Oyster Bay. It was an apt symbol. Because of its growing commerce, Congress in 1799 declared Cold Spring a port of entry with its own surveyor of customs, a designation maintained until 1913. Cold Spring was also the site of some shipbuilding. John Jones operated a shipyard about 1812 and many schooners and sloops were built there and at two other shipyards.

Cold Spring's first post office was established in 1825, and that July the post office and the community were renamed Cold Spring Harbor. The first church, St. John's Episcopal, is a Long Island landmark. It was erected in 1836 in what is now the village of Laurel Hollow, across the county line in Nassau.

John Jones was the first member of the Jones family to come to the Cold Spring Harbor area in the early 1800s. He married into the prominent Hewlett family that had built a gristmill in 1791. His sons, John H. and Walter R., were ambitious businessmen who created Cold Spring Harbor's industrial boom. They started out running a gristmill south of the harbor, adding woolen mills later. The younger John built a general store on the east side of the harbor.

With foreign competition undercutting their woolen mills, the Jones brothers decided to branch out into whaling. In 1836, they invested $20,000 to buy the old bark Monmouth. The next year they purchased the Tuscarora. The two ships did so well that in 1839 the brothers and their partners formed the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Co., built docks and enlarged the fleet. Most whaling-support operations and the homes of employees were located on the west side of the harbor in Bungtown, named after the bungs, or plugs, used to seal the openings of barrels. By 1852, the whaling company owned nine vessels, including the Sheffield, the largest whaler to sail from Long Island.

Walter Jones died in 1855, followed by John four years later, leaving the local industry without a leader. When the last of the ships returned in 1862, the hamlet's whaling era was over after 37 voyages. The demise of whaling led to an economic slump that persisted for more than two decades. The history of the industry is recalled at the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, which opened in 1942.

Because the nearest Long Island Rail Road station was in Hicksville, the Jones brothers had shipped their mill products to New York by schooner. Now they pursued a rail connection. The Long Island Rail Road did not have the funds to develop branch lines, so the brothers organized the Hicksville & Cold Spring Branch Rail Road to build a 9-mile line. Work began in 1854 and tracks were laid from Hicksville to Syosset. A right-of-way was graded most of the way to Cold Spring Harbor, but because of logistical problems, tracks did not reach town until 1867 and were routed farther south than the Joneses had planned.

Cold Spring Harbor developed into a resort in the 1880s, ending the slump. Tourists came by rail or on excursion boats to stay at large hotels such as the Glenada on the eastern shore of the harbor. When the hotel closed, the property was purchased by millionaire Walter Jennings, who razed the building but retained its annex for use by residents. Today it is the Cold Spring Harbor Beach Club.

The economic revival was also buoyed by the opening in 1883 of the state's second permanent fish hatchery in one of the old whaling buildings and the founding of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Biological Laboratory in 1890 at the hatchery. In 1904, the Carnegie Institute of Washington established a Station for Experimental Evolution adjacent to the lab. This became Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a leading molecular biology research and conference center that is actually located in the village of Laurel Hollow, which incorporated in 1926. Three researchers at the 107-acre center have won Nobel prizes for their genetic work: Barbara McClintock, Alfred Hershey and Richard Roberts.

Where to Find More: The Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum.