Nassau

Community Profile

Nassau County, birthplace of American suburbia, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 1999, but its colonial roots go back 355 years, to when almost half of it was acquired by two Englishmen in one of Long Island's most prodigious land deals.

Albertson

Beginnings: Albertson sits just north of the great Hempstead Plains, and like the prairie itself, was first cultivated as farmland by early European settlers in the 1640s. John Seren, a member of the initial group of settlers to come from Connecticut in 1644, settled there first. His name, after a spelling change, is the source of the neighboring community of Searingtown. In the second group of settlers, this time from Virginia, was a man named Townsend Albertson. He ran a farm and a gristmill, leading it to be named Albertson Square. The community remained stubbornly rural for three centuries. Indeed, in 1850, when a road was cut through Isaac Underhill Willets' farm to Old Westbury, he protested that ``Long Island has more roads now than it will ever need.'' The road, I.U. Willets Road, was named in his honor and is still there. When the Long Island Rail Road built a branch to Glen Cove in 1864, it named the local station Albertson, and that designation stuck for the community.

Atlantic Beach

Beginnings: Atlantic Beach, in some respects, was created out of nothing a relatively short time ago. The village occupies the western end of the barrier island dominated by the city of Long Beach. But until about 100 years ago, the island didn't extend that far. It existed first as a sandbar around the turn of the last century, which then grew into an extension of the barrier island. Freeport developer Stephen Petit created Atlantic Beach, dredging tons of sand from the bottom of Reynolds Channel onto the sandbar during the 1920s. Petit's aim was to build a quiet ocean resort for New Yorkers. For a few years, beach clubs turned a profit, but most collapsed along with the stock market in 1929. By then, however, there was a bridge to the rest of Long Island and a handful of year-round homes.

Baldwin

Beginnings: Meroke Indians were the first human inhabitants of the South Shore between the Rockaway peninsula and the Seaford area. Piles of clam shells found alongside Milburn Creek indicate Indians lived in the Baldwin area at some time. Records of the first European settlement are unclear, but by 1660 the area was called Hick's Neck, in honor of English settler John Hicks. The community got its start in 1686, when the Town of Hempstead gave John Pine permission to build a mill. It soon became the focus of what was then called Milburn, but in 1855 the hamlet changed its name to Baldwinsville in honor of Francis P. Baldwin, a state assemblyman and Queens County treasurer. Because an upstate village was already named Baldwinsville, the post office shortened it first to Baldwins and then to Baldwin.

Bayville

Beginnings: In 1658 Daniel Whitehead of Oyster Bay purchased land from the Matinecock Indians. At the time, the eastern section of the peninsula was known as the Pines and the western section as Oak Neck. In 1674 the land was divided among 23 men who used it for pasture. Initial development centered near the western end of the village, the area now known as Friendly Corner.

Bellerose

Beginnings: Bellerose Village owes its development, and much of its charm, to a Massachusetts real estate developer who was years ahead of both Levittown and Betty Friedan. In the early 1900s, Helen M. Marsh had a dream of developing a model community of modestly priced houses. Moderately well-to-do and fiercely independent at a time when women were not expected to have business acumen, let alone clout, she visited Long Island and decided on the undeveloped grassy plains of western Nassau for carrying out her plan. Marsh sold her family home in Lynn, Mass., and formed the United Holding Co. in 1906 to raise the $155,000 needed to buy 77 acres of mostly gladioli fields. She had other enterprises, including a silver mine in Colorado, but during the financial panic of 1907 she sold more than $50,000 in personal securities to save the property.

Bellmore

Beginnings: The first settlers were Dutch from New Amsterdam and Quakers from New England. The community began to take shape in 1676 with the transfer of more than 100 acres by John Smith, an original Hempstead settler, to his son, Jeremiah. The resulting farming community was called Little Neck until 1818 when a bridge was built to allow Merrick Road to span a creek. At that point the community along Merrick Road, which was where the early residential growth took place, was named New Bridge. When the railroad arrived in 1867, it named the station Bellmore although the surrounding community retained the name New Bridge. Between 1870 and 1880, as businesses began to sprout around the station, more and more people began to call the community Bellmore. That name became official when the first post office was established with the name Bellmore in the general store near the station in 1883.

Bethpage

Beginnings: Unlike much of the vast Hempstead Plains, Indians used this area because a stream, the Massatayun, flowed through it, providing a source of fish. When Englishman Thomas Powell purchased the area from the Marsapeques, he noted the nearby hamlets of Jericho and Jerusalem (now Wantagh) and turned to the gospel of Matthew in naming his purchase: `` . . . as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed him, and when they drew night unto Jerusalem and were come to Bethphage . . . then sent Jesus two disciples.'' Powell changed the spelling, however, supposedly because he didn't like words with too many h's in them. When Powell died in 1721, the Bethpage purchase was divided among his 14 children. Quakers settled in the area, establishing a school in 1741.

Brookville

Beginnings: When Oyster Bay Town purchased what is now Brookville from the Matinecocks in the mid-1600s, the area was known as Suco's Wigwam. Most pioneers were English, many of them Quakers. They were soon joined by Dutch settlers from western Long Island, who called the surrounding area Wolver Hollow, apparently because wolves gathered at spring-fed Shoo Brook to drink. For most of the 19th Century, the village was called Tappentown after a prominent family. Brookville became the preferred name after the Civil War and was used on 1873 maps.

Carle Place

Beginnings: Carle Place, like the rest of modern-day central Nassau County, existed initially as a fragment of the Hempstead Plains. The prairie was viewed as largely worthless by the English settlers of 1644. One of those settlers was Capt. Thomas Carle, who purchased land in the area in 1656. He and his neighbors turned cattle and sheep loose on the plains to graze and thought little else of it. Not until 100 years later did farmers realize the land could be cultivated. One of Carle's descendants, Silas Carle, had become a successful pharmaceuticals merchant in New York City. Some time after 1800, he returned to Long Island to build a showy house on 220 acres for his family. Indeed, it became a local landmark, referred to by residents as ``the Carle place,'' a name that eventually came to be applied to the community that developed around it, replacing the name Frog Hollow.

Cedarhurst

Beginnings: What is now Cedarhurst was inhabited at the time of the Revolution by Indians, farmers and slaves or tenants at Rock Hall, a large plantation built nearby (in modern Lawrence) in 1767. The entire Five Towns area was occupied by British troops and was a Tory stronghold.

Centre Island

Beginnings: Formed by glaciers 25,000 years ago, Centre Island, actually a claw-shaped peninsula, hosted its first summer residents a mere 10,000 years ago, when the Matinecocks came in their dugout canoes to fish, hunt and gather shellfish. Apparently they were rewarded. The first Dutch explorer in Oyster Bay Harbor in 1639 reported ``oysters a foot long and broad in proportion.'' The island's sand dunes and wetlands are relatively unchanged, but its oysters are smaller.

Cove Neck

Beginnings: Theodore Roosevelt lived here. George Washington slept here. And now computer executive Charles B. Wang owns more than an eighth of this tiny, elite peninsula village jutting into Long Island Sound. It was settled by English farmers in the 1650s, and by 1682, the Cooper family, namesakes of Cooper's Bluff on its east end, farmed a large part of it. Mary Cooper, colonial farm wife, kept a diary from 1768-73, and hers was no limousine life. In all weather she walked the three miles to Oyster Bay, fording the Cove Brook which crossed the road. The brook is now piped underground. The Cooper house is still a private residence.

East Hills

Beginnings: Did George Washington visit East Hills? No one knows for sure, but the Father of Our Country is believed to have inspected the Onderdonk Paper Mill in Roslyn on his 1790 tour of Long Island, and from there he could have walked or ridden 100 yards to the future East Hills. What is known is that East Hills was part of the vast land purchase - including the Towns of Hempstead and North Hempstead - made by the Rev. Robert Fordham and John Carman after they crossed Long Island Sound from Stamford, Conn., in 1643. The first mention of an East Hills connection appears in 1661 records of ``a path alongside Harboure Hill,'' now Harbor Hill Road.

East Meadow

Beginnings: Although there is no meadow left in East Meadow, its name accurately describes what it once was - the portion of the Hempstead Plains east of the Meadow Brook, which ran through the plains before a parkway took its place. Surveyor Thomas Langdon reported to the 1655 Hempstead Town meeting that the east meadow was suitable for grazing, and three years later cattle took up residence there. Wolves prevented sheep-pasturing there until settlers exterminated them in the early 1700s. By the end of the century 14,000 sheep grazed on the plains, supplying much of the young nation's wool.

East Norwich

Beginnings: The Matinecock Indians were the first on the scene, about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. The first white settlers to remain in the Oyster Bay area arrived in 1644. After the land in Oyster Bay hamlet was all taken, later arrivals moved south, congregating around the intersection of two roads that are now Routes 106 and 25A. As early as 1680, James and George Townsend owned land in what became known as Norwich after the family's ancestral home in England.

East Rockaway

Beginnings: Once it was called Near Rockaway because it was the section of the Rockaway peninsula closest to Hempstead. English settlers migrating from New England in the 1640s bought the land from a tribe called Rockawanahaha, meaning ``People of a Sandy Place,'' as it surely was.

East Williston

Beginnings: The gently rolling land that became East Williston was located on the northern edge of the vast Hempstead Plains. Indeed, for about 200 years, the area was known simply as the North Side. One of the first settlers on the North Side was Englishman Henry Willis, who bought a farm in 1675 from John Seaman, himself one of the original settlers on Long Island's South Shore. The Willis family grew to substantial size over the years, and convinced relatives from England to immigrate as well. By the mid-1800s, the several hundred acres on both sides of Willis Avenue had acquired the name of Williston.

Elmont

Beginnings: Elmont's vast fields were largely uninhabited until 1647. That's when brothers Christopher and Thomas Foster were granted a large tract of land in western Hempstead, stretching from modern-day Elmont all the way to the South Shore. They called it Foster's Meadow and used it to raise sheep and cattle. Before long, they sold off much of their holdings to other farmers. Unlike most citizens of Hempstead Town, a majority of Foster's Meadow residents supported the Revolution - a stance that prompted the British to rip down the community's church. After the war, the area developed slowly, with farmers moving out from Brooklyn and western Queens in search of more land.

Farmingdale

Beginnings: Farmingdale sits near the eastern end of what was the Hempstead Plains, the vast, treeless prairie that covered central Nassau County. Englishman Thomas Powell purchased about 15 square miles, including the area that became Farmingdale, from the Marsapeque Indians for 140 pounds in 1695. He and his children divided the land into lots and began more than a dozen decades of agriculture in the area.

Floral Park

Beginnings: Before Europeans arrived, the area that is now Floral Park marked the western edge of the great Hempstead Plains. Indeed, it was initially known as Plainfield. Until the Civil War, the area consisted of widely scattered farms. The community began to develop in the early 1800s, thanks to the Long Island Rail Road and Jericho Turnpike, both of which came through what had then become known as Hinsdale and served farmers. Hinsdale boasted of more than two dozen fine flower farms in the years after the Civil War.

Flower Hill

Beginnings: The village, which now occupies parts of Manhasset, Roslyn and Port Washington, was farms and pastures in the 1600s, thanks to hardy pioneers who cleared away forest and brush. The early settlers - Hewletts, Kissams, Loves and Motts - operated farms so large and productive that the sons of one farm family, the Hewlett brothers, had their own canning factory, the largest in the Town of North Hempstead by the late 1800s, each season shipping 200,000 cans of fruits and vegetables and 150 barrels of ketchup. Only three of the early farmhouses remain. One of them, the Sands-Willets House, now the headquarters of the Cow Neck Peninsula Historical Society, was part of the inland farm of the Sands family (who also owned Sands Point). The farms extended to Manhasset Bay on the west and to Hempstead Harbor on the east.

Franklin Square

Beginnings: Like much of what was to become central Nassau, Franklin Square was part of the vast, grassy Hempstead Plains. It remained undisturbed by humans for thousands of years, by virtue of its position far inland. Its earliest use was as communal sheep grazing land for Hempstead farmers. After the Revolution, crops were planted. Except for a few families, there was little in Franklin Square until 1852, when Louis Schroerer built a hotel. It attracted two things that established Franklin Square as a community - travelers on the Hempstead-Jamaica Turnpike, and many other German settlers.

Freeport

Freeport began billing itself as the ``Boating and Fishing Capital of the East'' in the 1940s, but its shoreline has been attracting visitors for hundreds of years - and not always for legal purposes.

Garden City

Thousands of years before tree-lined streets stretched past graceful, formal homes, the place that would become Garden City sat in the heart of the Hempstead Plains, the only prairie east of the Mississippi River.

Glen Cove

In the 1660s, New York was undergoing a building boom and lumber was in great demand. A potential supply existed in northwestern Oyster Bay, where there was also a creek to accommodate vessels that could carry the lumber to the city.

Glen Head

Beginnings: Glen Head was once part of the large Cedar Swamp area east of Hempstead Harbor - but not the part 17th-Century Dutch and English pioneers cared about. They bypassed its 200-foot, hilly terrain for the more easily farmed land a few miles east, around the Brookvilles. What is now Glen Head waited about 100 years before farmhouses appeared in any number.

Glenwood Landing

Beginnings: When George LaTourette moved to Glenwood Landing in 1894, the 1-square-mile hamlet had one store and about a dozen homes linked by dirt roads. ``You would walk to the banks of the bay and if you called out your name it would echo and re-echo,'' LaTourette recalled in 1964.

Great Neck

Great Neck was prime real estate for centuries, long before theater stars, captains of industry and well-to-do commuting suburbanites made it the western anchor of the Gold Coast.

Greenvale

Beginnings: Beneath the quiet facade of the tiny, unincorporated community of Greenvale lies a sometimes exciting, though hazy, past. In the years before the Civil War, Greenvale went by the name Bull's Head, for the hotel-tavern that stood at the present-day Northern Boulevard and Glen Cove Road. Cattle traders on their way to New York City stopped at the tavern to socialize. Some reports tell of a dangerous crossroads described as an eastern Dodge City where shootings were not uncommon, though very little proof of Greenvale's history is available except for second-hand accounts from old-time residents. Wishing to dissociate from the tavern, residents moved to change their community's name. Beer's Map of 1873 shows the first trace of Greenvale, listing a post office a mile from where Greenvale stands today. The Long Island Rail Road from 1885 lists Green Vale as a stop.

Hempstead

In September, 1775, almost a year before the future nation declared its independence from George III, the people of Great Neck, Cow Neck and other areas north of Old Country Road signed their own Declaration of Independence.

Hempstead Village

It was called The Hub. Public transportation radiated from Hempstead Village like the spokes of a wheel. Pre-World War II homemakers would bus to Hempstead to shop. Everyone, in fact, shopped in Hempstead Village, the oldest community in Nassau County. While Mineola was the seat of county government, Hempstead was where you went for almost everything else.

The Hewletts

Beginnings: The patriarch of the family after whom the four Hewlett communities are named was George Hewlett, who came to America in the late 1600s from Buckinghamshire, England, and eventually owned most of the land that is now the Five Towns area of the Rockaway Peninsula.

Hicksville

Beginnings: For centuries, miles of prairie grass gently waving in the breeze spread across the spot that would become Hicksville. The community - and the rest of central Nassau County - is located on the Hempstead Plains. That made it unattractive to Long Island's Indians, who preferred to live in the forests near the seashore or by streams, where hunting and fishing were easy. When Welsh settler Robert Williams proposed in 1648 to buy a large portion of the eastern plains, including Hicksville, the Matinecock Indians didn't think they were giving up much. And most British settlers were just as uninterested in this part of the prairie, because it was so remote from Hempstead and other settlements. The land lay vacant for almost two centuries, until Jericho businessman Valentine Hicks - son-in-law of the nationally famous Quaker preacher Elias Hicks - turned his attention to the prairie land he had acquired.

Inwood

Beginnings: Cheek-by-jowl today with Kennedy International Airport, Inwood once was virgin forest rimmed by extensive marshes reaching west into Jamaica Bay. Tradition says Indians often gathered there because it was a cornucopia of oysters, clams and mussels, for making happy palates and wampum. The 1800s brought a few farming and fishing families descended from early Hempstead Town settlers, with names such as Cornell, Sprague, Doughty, Johnson, Rhinehart and Smith.

Island Park

Beginnings: Rockaway Indians raised pigs and cattle and made wampum from clam shells on the island until Europeans arrived in the mid-1600s and the Indians moved eastward.

Jericho

Beginnings: The rolling hills on which Jericho lies served as a sort of gateway between the Hempstead Plains and the forests of the North Shore before European settlers arrived. Although it once had an Indian name (Lusum, which may have meant ``the farms''), it was farther from the shore than most Indian settlements. Though it remains unclear if Indians lived there, the area was part of the large land purchase that Welsh settler Robert Williams made in 1648 from the Matinecock sachem Pugnipan. It was attractive to both Indians and Europeans because of a spring pond that supplied fresh water. Williams himself moved from Hempstead to Lusum in the 1670s. The small farming community became a center of the Quaker religion and by 1692 the Quakers had named the community Jericho. Jericho and Westbury Quakers were among the first New Yorkers to free their slaves as a matter of conscience in the 1770s.

Kings Point

Beginnings: It was through unlucky circumstances that former New York Gov. John Alsop King first built on the land that is now Kings Point. In the mid-1800s, after King and a relative inherited a strip of land north of Great Neck, a coin toss decided who would get the fertile farmland to the east and who would be stuck with the rocky shoreline and woods. King, who was also a congressman and a founder of the Republican Party, lost. He built a home on the craggy shore overlooking Long Island Sound - now among the most expensive real estate on Long Island. Kings Point became part of a loose group of associations that included Elm Point, Grenwolde, East Shore and Gracefield.

Lake Success

Beginnings: Now remembered for housing the United Nations after World War II, Lake Success is part of the remnants of the last glacier of the Ice Age. One of the largest ``kettle-hole'' lakes on Long Island, it abounded with rumors of an underground channel to Long Island Sound, though geologists dispelled that myth in the mid-19th Century. The Matinecocks, early inhabitants, called the lake Sucut after one of their chiefs, from which Dutch settlers derived the present name.

Lakeview

Beginnings: At first, there was no lake to view. The area was one of the few in central Nassau that was not part of the Hempstead Plains. It was, instead, covered with swamps and streams that fed Mill River. It wasn't until the mid-19th Century, when William Oliver built Long Island's largest gristmill, that a body of water was created. The mill was removed in 1873 to build a reservoir for the city of Brooklyn - a feat that failed, but left Hempstead Lake behind. The area first was named Skodic, for a farmer, and then more formally was called Woodfield. Later names were Norwood and Hempstead Gardens, but in 1910 the Long Island Rail Road established a Lakeview station, and, as often happened, the railroad's choice stuck.

Lattingtown

Beginnings: Known now for its stately estates and aura of manicured grandeur, Lattingtown was at first just a marsh, largely ignored by Matinecock Indians who chose to live in more accommodating spots nearby. Even though fish spawned in the tidal marsh, the Matinecocks apparently drove no hard bargain when they sold much of the area to Richard Latting and his son, Josiah, in 1660. For a while, Josiah Latting had a successful business selling the reeds from the marsh for thatched-roof houses. (His 20-acre site is now a wildlife preserve owned by Nassau County, though there is no public access to it.) For two and a half centuries, a small collection of farmers settled in the area, but with no train station or main road, the tiny community remained isolated and quiet.

Laurel Hollow

Beginnings: The craggy terrain on the west side of Cold Spring Harbor in Nassau County wasn't too attractive to farmers after English settlers bought it in l653 from the Matinecock Indians. Saw mills and gristmills were an early industry, but the pace of life quickened with the start in 1836 of a whaling center on the Suffolk County side of the harbor: Cold Spring Harbor. Most whaling-support operations and the homes of employees were located on the west side, in Bungtown, named after the bungs, or plugs, used to seal the opening of barrels. St. John's Episcopal Church was also erected in 1836, three years after the state had opened its second permanent fish hatchery, on present-day Route 25A. Both landmarks are in Laurel Hollow.

Lawrence

One of Long Island's showcase communities, and the most populous of the Five Towns area's six villages, Lawrence has been a bastion of quiet wealth and architectural elegance since its founding in the late 1800s.

Levittown

Beginnings: It seems fitting that the most famous community on Long Island - the subject of numerous books and articles - started out on a grand yet simple scale. Receding glaciers left behind the vast Hempstead Plains, the grassy prairie that covered much of modern central Nassau County. The Indians of Long Island lived along the coast, so the prairie was uninhabited until long after Europeans arrived. The first in the area were the English, who settled Hempstead in the 1640s. They used the plains as common pasture land for sheep and cattle. New York merchant Alexander T. Stewart purchased the plains in 1869, but he limited his development to Garden City. The first change was the conversion of the prairie to productive farmland, mostly by Dutch and German immigrants. Potatoes and other vegetables were grown there. A few houses were scattered throughout.. The Hempstead Turnpike to Bethpage cut through the area, but left no development in its wake. The real estate boom that developed western Nassau in the 1920s stopped well short of the farms east of Hempstead.

Lido Beach

Beginnings: Like the rest of the barrier island on which it sits, Lido Beach existed first as an uninhabited, barren sandbar. The island got its start when William Reynolds dredged the channel that bears his name to create the resort of Long Beach. The dredging made the island accessible to pleasure boats. In 1929, after Reynolds had been defeated for re-election as Long Beach mayor, he turned his attention to the unincorporated area just east of the city and built the Moorish-style Lido Beach Hotel, naming it for the resort villa in Italy. Reynolds envisioned the hotel as an anchor for another resort community, but the stock market crash that year and the subsequent Depression halted development for almost a decade.

Locust Valley

Beginnings: Oyster Bay Town's hamlet of Locust Valley originally was part of a larger region called Matinecock, settled in 1667, that covered what is now northern Nassau County. The mostly English farmers in 1730 changed the local name to Buckram, probably after Buckenham, a town in Norfolk County, England, from which some of the pioneers had come. At a public meeting In 1856, the name became Locust Valley because of the many locust trees in the area.

Long Beach - Riding the waves of a colorful history

A mayor assassinated by a cop assigned to protect him. Political scandals. Celebrity residents like Bogie and Cagney. And a boardwalk construction project hyped with a parade of elephants.

Lynbrook

Beginnings: Just as it does today, Lynbrook sat at the crossroads of major trading routes for hundreds of years. For most of that time, however, the routes were dirt paths used by Merikoke Indians. Colonists used those trails as well, and by 1785, a small community had been established where several trails met - a spot still known as Five Corners, at the intersection of Merrick Road, Hempstead Avenue, Broadway and Atlantic Avenue. Initially it was known as Bloomfield, but it soon became better known as Pearsalls Corners, after general store owner Wright Pearsall. The community began to grow in the years after 1853, when Merrick Road was covered with planks. A toll house stood on the road where the modern Toll Gate Court is now.

Malverne

Beginnings: Malverne emerged from a larger area of farms known collectively as Norwood. Rockaway Indians hunted and may have lived in the area. Originally it was heavily wooded, with several streams. These streams often overflowed their banks. That and a high water table helped form Grassy Pond, near the current intersection of Hempstead and Franklin avenues, a popular place to skate. Europeans arrived near the beginning of the 1800s. The same water table that made the land good for farming, however, also had a tendency to flood basements of new homes. Several companies attempted to maintain railroad service through Norwood to West Hempstead, but none succeeded until the consolidation of the Long Island Rail Road.

Manhasset

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.

Massapequa

Beginnings: ``Great Water Land'' was what the first inhabitants, the Massapequan Indians, called the place. When white settlers arrived, conflict ensued. In 1653, Capt. John Underhill, an Englishman working for the Dutch, led troops in an attack on a peaceful community of Indians at a site believed to be near the intersection of what is now Merrick and Cedar Shore Roads. Underhill's troops killed 120 Indians in the only Indian ``battle'' on Long Island.

Massapequa Park

Beginnings: The incorporated village shares the early Indian history of Massapequa. Then, in the 19th Century, families of German descent relocated from Brooklyn to what is now Massapequa Park, and the resulting community was known as Wurtenberg or Stadtwurtemburg. The main attraction and center of activity was the Woodcastle Hotel, a rooming house built in 1868 on Front Street next to the fire department as a summer resort. It was destroyed by fire in 1952 and replaced by houses.

Matinecock

Beginnings: The Village of Matinecock was once just a wooded wedge of northern Oyster Bay Town where in the mid-1600s English and Dutch farmers began displacing the Matinecock Indians. In those days, Matinecock referred to a large area extending from Flushing to Huntington and south almost midway through Long Island. Matinecock meant ``hill country'' or ``land that overlooks,'' because the gently rolling hills overlook Long Island Sound. As European settlement advanced, the region became notable for acceptance of the then-controversial Quaker religion. The historic 1725 Society of Friends Matinecock Meeting House, though in Glen Cove, is only a few feet from the modern village that took the name Matinecock.

Merrick

Beginnings: Named after its first inhabitants, the Meroke Indians, the land changed hands in 1643 when Sachem Tackapousha signed a treaty with Merrick's first colonists, English settlers who escaped the oppressive reign of King Charles I. During the colonial period, Merrick became a trading center because vessels could enter Jones Inlet and sail up deep channels to docks beside what is now Merrick Road. During the War of 1812 these channels, canals and coves made Merrick a haven for buccaneers who preyed on merchants. Pirates in whaleboats once robbed prominent landowner George Hewlett and two friends while they were duck hunting, ripping the silver buttons from their coats. At one point, residents armed with muskets captured one bandit leader and shipped him to New York in irons for trial.

Mill Neck

Beginnings: About 360 years ago, the Mohenes sold this prized real estate to English settlers for assorted coats, utensils and wampum. Then the Indians watched as the English drove out the Dutch in the battle for ownership in 1663. The name comes from the mill Henry Townsend built in 1661 with a grant from his fellow freeholders.

Mineola

Midway between the North and South Shore villages of western Long Island stretched a vast prairie called the Hempstead Plains. The area was populated mostly by farmers until 1787, when the opening of the Queens County Courthouse - Nassau was then part of Queens - brought a bumper crop of lawyers to what was then called Clowesville. Today there are 1,353 lawyers listing their business address in Mineola, now the seat of Nassau County government, law and politics.

Muttontown

Beginnings: This upscale village in northern Oyster Bay Town traces its name to the early English and Dutch settlers of the mid-1600s who found the rolling hills ideal for the thousands of sheep that grazed there, providing mutton and wool. First mention of Muttontown in town records occurred just after 1750, identifying it as a ``former great sheep district'' between Wolver Hollow (now Brookville) and Syosset.

New Cassel

Beginnings: In the century after Europeans turned the vast Hempstead Plains into a common pasture land, two groups helped settle the area that became New Cassel. The first was former slaves, freed in the mid-1700s by Westbury-area Quakers who came to reject ownership of fellow humans as a matter of conscience. These blacks established a small farming community called Grantsville, near the northern edge of modern-day New Cassel. The other group was Hessian mercenaries who fought for the British during the Revolution. When the war was over, they decided they liked the area and set up their own farming community. They named it New Cassel, after a town in Germany that many of them came from. Despite the presence of the Long Island Rail Road from the 1840s, descendants of the original blacks and Germans lived quietly for decades with little to do with the rest of the world. Poor immigrants from other parts of Europe - the Ukraine, Poland and Ireland - settled in New Cassel to farm in the early 1900s.

New Hyde Park

Beginnings: Irish Thomas Dongan, appointed New York's royal governor by King James II in 1682, was so popular a change from his predecessors that the Towns of Hempstead and Flushing decided to give him 900 acres in what is now the North New Hyde Park area for a summer home. Dongan built a mansion on what is now Lakeville Road in 1688, but didn't have long to enjoy it. James was toppled by anti-Catholic forces, and Dongan fled to New England and then to Ireland in 1691.

North Bellmore

Beginnings: The first settlers were Dutch from New Amsterdam and Quakers from New England. The community began to take shape in 1676 with the transfer of more than 100 acres by John Smith, an original Hempstead settler, to his son, Jeremiah. The resulting farming community was called Little Neck until 1818 when a bridge was built to allow Merrick Road to span a creek. At that point the community along Merrick Road, which was where the early residential growth took place, was named New Bridge. When the railroad arrived in 1867, it named the station Bellmore although the surrounding community retained the name New Bridge. Between 1870 and 1880, as businesses began to sprout around the station, more and more people began to call the community Bellmore. That name became official when the first post office was established with the name Bellmore in the general store near the station in 1883.

North Hempstead

In September, 1775, almost a year before the future nation declared its independence from George III, the people of Great Neck, Cow Neck and other areas north of Old Country Road signed their own Declaration of Independence.

North Hills

Beginnings: There really is a Shelter Rock, an 1,800-ton boulder, largest known on Long Island, deposited by a mighty glacier more than 11,000 years ago near what is now Shelter Rock Road in the village of North Hills. The Matinecocks, who had a village on the site, used its 30-foot overhang for shelter and weaved many legends around it, as did the European colonists who arrived in the 1600s. The stories range from runaway lovers riddled with arrows before they could reach the shelter to buried treasure (never found). The giant boulder is on the private estate of the late John Hay Whitney, publisher and ambassador to England. It's not visible from the road.

North Merrick

Beginnings: Named after its first inhabitants, the Meroke Indians, the land changed hands in 1643 when Sachem Tackapousha signed a treaty with Merrick's first colonists, English settlers who escaped the oppressive reign of King Charles I. During the colonial period, Merrick became a trading center because vessels could enter Jones Inlet and sail up deep channels to docks beside what is now Merrick Road. During the War of 1812 these channels, canals and coves made Merrick a haven for buccaneers who preyed on merchants. Pirates in whaleboats once robbed prominent landowner George Hewlett and two friends while they were duck hunting, ripping the silver buttons from their coats. At one point, residents armed with muskets captured one bandit leader and shipped him to New York in irons for trial.

Oceanside

Beginnings: Rockaway Indians were the first residents in what was to become Oceanside. Thanks to the diseases and cruelty of European settlers, they died out not long after Europeans arrived in the area at the end of the 1600s. In 1682, the Town of Hempstead granted 100 acres in the area to St. George's Church so it could support itself. The property was known for many years as the Parsonage Farm, even after the church sold it in 1826. The area's religious roots were apparent in Oceanside's original name of Christian Hook. Gristmills in nearby communities soon attracted settlers, and farmers, fishermen and baymen got the community going during the 1800s. Oyster harvesting, particularly, provided a solid living for residents.

Old Bethpage

Beginnings: The hills surrounding Old Bethpage mark the far eastern edge of the vast Hempstead Plains. Despite the nearby forest, Indians used this land sparingly, because it had no nearby streams. Indeed, after Englishman Thomas Powell acquired it as part of his 15-square-mile purchase in 1695, it was sparsely populated for the same reason. Powell named his purchase from the Marsapeque Indians after Bethphage, a place described in the Bible's gospel of Matthew as between Jericho and Jerusalem. Powell dropped one of the h's, but his purchase was between Long Island's Jericho and Jerusalem, now known as Wantagh. Powell's 14 children split up his purchase and it evolved into several farming communities. Old Bethpage, then known as Bethpage, was one of the smaller, quieter ones. It wasn't until the 1870s, after Alexander T. Stewart purchased the plains, that industry came to Bethpage in the form of a large brickworks located on the road to Farmingdale. The works supplied bricks for Stewart's Garden City and beyond until it closed in 1981.

Old Brookville

Beginnings: Like the rest of the Brookville area, what is now the Village of Old Brookville was part of mid-17th Century land purchases from the Matinecock Indians by Oyster Bay Town and early settlers in the Cedar Swamp territory east of Hempstead Harbor. English and Dutch farmers were the first white inhabitants. By the mid-1800s, their descendants were selling much of their corn to a starch factory in nearby Glen Cove, where the manufacturing residue was excellent cattle fodder coveted by farmers from miles around. Another occupation was the breeding of trolley car, brewery and delivery horses for New York City. The Rushmore house on Glen Cove Highway is the oldest house in the village. It dates in part to 1690 and retains its original handmade shingles and nails.

Old Westbury

Beginnings: Old Westbury's roots are far from the Gatsby-era Gold Coast mansions for which it is now famous. Such displays of extravagance would have been unfathomable to the humble English Quakers who settled this portion of the Hempstead Plains. Edmond Titus and Henry Willis were the first European settlers there, establishing farms in the 1670s. Willis named the area Westbury after a town in his home county of Wiltshire, England. The Religious Society of Friends was established early in what was to become Old Westbury. William Willis, Henry's son, donated land south of what is now Jericho Turnpike for a Quaker meeting house in 1700. Farmers were attracted because of its combination of plains, useful for farming, and forests, which supplied firewood. Indeed, it was known alternately as Plainedge or Wood edge. As the village of Westbury developed, the area to the north was known first as Westbury Station and then, since 1912, as Old Westbury.

Oyster Bay Cove

Beginnings: Tucked in between Oyster Bay and the Cove Neck peninsula, this village of 2,380 people spread over 2,654 acres of winding country roads and well-preserved colonial homes was settled in the early 1600s by English families who farmed the land for generations. The Fleet and Youngs families were the principal landholders in the area for many years. The Fleets farmed in the area of Cove Road and Yellow Cote Road, while the Youngs were located on the edge of Cove Neck.

Oyster Bay Hamlet

It was Dutch explorer Adrian Block who named Oyster Bay in 1615 for its abundance of shellfish. The well-protected, productive bay provided food for the Matinecock Indians and then became a magnet for traders, fishermen, shipbuilders and sailors. But it was a president who made Oyster Bay famous.

Oyster Bay

There's only been one president from Long Island, and he lived in the Town of Oyster Bay. Theodore Roosevelt built his only house, Sagamore Hill, in Cove Neck in 1885, and during his presidency, 1901-1909, the Victorian mansion served as the summer White House.

Plainedge

Beginnings: As its name implies, Plainedge is located at the edge of the former Hempstead Plains, the vast prairie left behind in central Nassau County after the glaciers retreated. The area was purchased in several sections from 1688 to 1699 from the Marsapeque Indians by English settlers Thomas Powell and William Frost. The land was used mostly as pasture for cattle at first, and later, by 1800, as hay farms. In the mid-1800s, as poultry-raising became profitable, thousands of turkeys covered the fields. The end of the century saw farmers planting cabbage for sauerkraut and cucumbers for pickles, but those crops were abandoned in the early 1900s because of blight. A similar fate awaited the replacement crop, potatoes, in the 1940s.

Plainview

Beginnings: A small kettle pond fed by a freshwater spring at the edge of the Hempstead Plains was the basis of Plainview's origins. It was an indentation in the ground left behind by retreating glaciers. The pond - just northeast of the modern-day intersection of Old Country and Manetto Hill Roads - became a holy site for Indians across Long Island, who valued rare sources of fresh water. They named the pond Moscopas, meaning ``hole of dirt and water,'' and the hill Manetto, a word for ``god.'' Indians hunted in the area, often after praying at the foot of Manetto Hill. Hempstead settler Robert Williams, originally of Wales, purchased land west of Moscopas from the Matinecocks in 1648. The major European land purchase, however, was in 1695, when Thomas Powell's Bethpage Purchase extended north to Moscopas. A tiny farming community formed near the pond, taking the name Manetto Hill. It remained isolated and insignificant for more than a century.

Point Lookout

Beginnings: Point Lookout sits on the eastern tip of what was for many years little more than a jumbo-sized sandbar off the South Shore. That changed at the turn of the last century after William Reynolds dredged the channel that bears his name and built the city of Long Beach. The eastern end of that island was occupied by a collection of shacks on wood pilings. Inhabited only during summer, it was known as Nassau-by-the-Sea and was accessible only by ferry from Freeport. The community burned to the dune some time before World War I, but gradually snug bungalows reappeared for summer residents, this time under the community name of Point Lookout, apparently because of its location at the end of a peninsula. Streets remained unpaved into the 1940s, and residents were happy to keep it that way. In 1936, they objected, in vain, to the Town of Hempstead establishing a public park there, complaining that it would attract people from elsewhere in the town.

Port Washington

Port Washington, named for a president who never slept there or even visited, is ``our town'' to its 32,000 residents, yet it's never been a town. More than most places, Port Washington is a study in contrasts. Though it's a model of modern suburbia, its Main Street is known as antiques row. Its average income ranges from $50,000 in its blue-collar neighborhoods to more than $185,000 on its Gold Coast.

Rockville Centre

More than 350 years ago, as the winter of 1643 arrived, so did some visitors to the ancient village established by the Rockaway Indians.

Roosevelt

Beginnings: In the centuries before European settlement, Roosevelt was a part of the great forest separating the Hempstead Plains from the meadows and marshes along the South Shore. Indians used the woods for hunting, and even after Europeans arrived it was decades before anyone lived in the area. After the colonists came, the stagecoach route from Hempstead to Babylon passed through the area, and in the late 1700s some entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of the potential business by building taverns. Thus, the community got its first name - Rum Point. The more genteel Greenwich Point became the community's name about 1830. In 1902, when a post office was established, residents renamed it in honor of the current president of the United States, fellow Nassau County resident Theodore Roosevelt.

Roslyn

In the rich drama of Roslyn history, two strong-willed men who lived 200 years apart played seminal roles.

Sands Point

Beginnings: The Sands brothers, James, Samuel and John, came in 1695 and bought 500 acres at the tip of a peninsula called Cow Neck from the Cornwalls, who had been there 20 years. The Sands and Cornwalls surely knew they had valuable real estate, though they never knew how valuable. By the 1900s, Sands Point was divided among 50 of the nation's wealthiest families. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald's East Egg, described in 1927's ``Great Gatsby'' as a place of ``white palaces glittering on the water.''