Home to sea captains and a diocese

From the Long Island: Our Story archives 

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

The community, at the southern end of what was then a swamp, was in the approximate area where Rockville Centre stands now. About 500 people lived there, led by the one-eyed sachem Tackapousha, and some suspect that Shellbank Avenue in the village took its name from enormous piles of shells the Rockaways had amassed to make wampum.

The visitors were John Carman and Robert Fordham, representatives of a group of Englishmen who were unhappy where they lived at the time, in Stamford, Conn. Carman and Fordham forged south from Hempstead Harbor to Tackapousha, and negotiated the purchase of the southern half of modern-day Nassau County.

Indians coexisted peacefully with the new residents, but European diseases - smallpox and measles - wiped out almost the entire population in less than 50 years. The last of the Indians moved to Barnums Island, leaving little trace behind. The area remained largely uninhabited until 1710, when Michael DeMott constructed a dam for a mill across the stream at the southern end of what was then Long Swamp.

The isolated settlers in the area wanted nothing to do with the rebellion against the British 60 years later. They became a nuisance to the rebels, and Gen. George Washington ordered them arrested. Several hid out in the swamp north of DeMott's mill, at a spot near modern-day Peninsula Boulevard. Rebel soldiers persuaded the Tories to surrender with a single shot, which injured George Smith in the shoulder. It was the first blood of the Revolution spilled on Long Island.

The area became known as Near Rockaway, and by 1849 there were enough people to warrant a post office. Residents wanted to honor the current mill owner and civic leader, Mordecai Rock Smith, but the name Smithtown was already in use in Suffolk County. So, they used his middle name and dubbed their community Rockville Centre. The mill disappeared a few years later when the Brooklyn Water Supply Co. tried to build a massive reservoir there. Its failure resulted in what is now Hempstead Lake.

The combination of water company activity and a new plank road to Jamaica spurred development in Rockville Centre and elsewhere on the South Shore. Sea captains came to favor Rockville Centre, because it was close to the sea and to the port of New York. Indeed, Maine Avenue was named for the many captains who came from that state. (And some became eternal residents: When the winter of 1836-37 brought two horrifying shipwrecks on the South Shore, residents collected money to bury the victims in the Mariners' Lot at the Sandhole cemetery in the village.)

The 1860s marked the arrival of the Wallace brothers, men who would shape Rockville Centre's development for decades. George Wallace owned the South Side Observer, an influential Freeport newspaper, but in 1873 he moved it and himself to Rockville Centre.

Wallace, a former teacher who became a state assemblyman, soon began campaigning for the formal incorporation of Rockville Centre. Residents debated the issue for more than two decades before voting to do so in 1893. (Wallace also introduced the bill in the legislature that established Nassau County in 1898.)

Within months of Rockville Centre's incorporation, the board of trustees began to set up its electric and water supply service - utilities that remain to this day. Indeed, it was thanks to Rockville Centre's own electric utility that the village escaped the blackout that crippled the Northeast in 1965.

In 1927, the new Sunrise Highway reached Rockville Centre on its way to the Suffolk County line and beyond, and the village's population doubled during that decade. Twenty years later, during Long Island's seminal postwar boom, the Roman Catholic Church decided to split the Brooklyn Diocese in two. The eastern half, serving Nassau and Suffolk Counties, became the Diocese of Rockville Centre in 1956, and St. Agnes Church in the village became the new cathedral. Where to Find More: "The History of Rockville Centre," by Preston Bassett and Arthur Hodges, Rockville Centre Library.