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Islip

Introduction

In the early years of its existence, Islip Town was owned entirely by a handful of wealthy men who ran it like feudal lords and didn't even bother to call a town meeting for a decade after the town was established.

William Nicoll, a wealthy and well connected New Yorker, became the father of Islip Town on Nov. 29, 1683, when he bought the tract of land that is now East Islip from the Secatogue Indians. Nicoll (not to be confused with Richard Nicolls, the first deputy governor of New York) made four other purchases in the next four years and in 1687 received a royal patent for all his buys: 51,000 acres covering the eastern half of present Islip Town. He did not get what became Islip hamlet, which went to his friend, fellow politician and business partner Andrew Gibb.

Meanwhile, the land that is now historic Sagtikos Manor in West Bay Shore was granted to Stephan Van Courtlandt]] in 1693, West Islip was patented to brothers Richard and Thomas Willett, friends of Nicoll, in 1695, and Bay Shore to John Mowbray in 1708, after a friend of Nicoll passed up the opportunity.

The colonial legislature in 1710 created Islip Town, in roughly its present-day configuration, but Nicoll was in no hurry to get Islip rolling. He was a veteran politician whose career included service as the New York colony's attorney general, and who was the legislature's speaker at the time that body created Islip. ``The patentees, led by Nicoll ... knew that establishing a town would mean electing an assessor and paying taxes, so the law was not carried out,'' historian Patrick J. Curran wrote in ``A Brief History of the Town of Islip'' in 1983.

[vr.22] When Nicoll retired as speaker in 1718, the legislature ordered the town to begin functions. The first meeting was finally held in April, 1720. Its records fail to say where it was held, but historians say it probably was at Nicoll's farm estate on Great South Bay at what is now Heckscher State Park. Benjamin Nicoll, son of the owner, was elected first town supervisor at that meeting.

Because of its manorial nature, Islip developed slowly. One reason cited by Curran was its ``almost complete lack of identity. Most of the other towns on Long Island were established by one family or a group with a common background and a church that became the center of community life. This was not true of Islip.''

[vr.15] Early concerns in the record included pig control and prohibiting fishing in town waters ``to any forrienor'' - a harbinger of what would become a searing issue through generations in the town: bay rights, which only began to fade as an issue after World War II. It was almost a century before Nicoll family control started to crack. In 1786, the state legislature opened the Nicoll holdings in the eastern half of the town for sale to the public to pay off the family's creditors for debts incurred in the Revolution.