USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 31
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume II > Part 31
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At that time the Long Island State Park Commission was seeking means of acquiring 1368 acres of land, partly in Nassau and partly in Suffolk County, lying north of the Village of Farmingdale and east of the Village of Central Park. These lands, which were part of the original Bethpage Purchase, were controlled by the heirs of Benjamin Yoakum, a Texas railway magnate who died in 1930. Jesse Merritt, Nassau County Historian and a direct descendant of Thomas Powell, suggested to Commissioner Moses that the land when acquired for park purposes be called "Bethpage State Park".
Commissioner Moses accepted the county historian's suggestion but the actual acquisition of the area for park purposes came about in as unusual a manner as did the establishing of its name in 1695.
The Yoakum tract was ideally situated for state park purposes. It was hilly, well wooded, had one complete 18 hole golf course, another partially completed, and other advantages nowhere else available for developing a complete recreation center for golf, tennis, polo, riding,
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picnicking, baseball and in fact practically every form of recreation except swimming. The Yoakum heirs offered the property to the State for $1,100,000 including improvements. This price of about $850 an acre was considered reasonable but there were no funds available to the Commission to acquire the property or even to secure an option to hold it intact until funds could be raised.
With no possible means available to the State to acquire the property or to purchase an option to hold it, Commissioner Moses sought the aid of the local counties and towns which would be most
The old Lenox Hills Golf Clubhouse
Used as a caddy house and quarters for workers, until destroyed by fire on Novem- ber 12, 1945. During the winter of 1942 this building was temporarily used to house men of the U. S. Army Air Corps.
benefited by the development of the area as a public park. A special act of the legislature was obtained authorizing counties and other local municipalities in Nassau and Suffolk County to purchase options in aid of the State park and parkway program. Pursuant to this authorization, the Town of Oyster Bay and the County of Suffolk agreed to contribute $20,000 and $10,000 respectively to secure an option to hold the property for a term of one year, ending on June 21, 1932.
The one golf course on the property was being operated as a private club under the name of "Lenox Hills Country Club" which held a lease from the owners. The Country Club started an action against the park commission, the County of Suffolk and the Town of Oyster Bay seeking an injunction to prevent the sale of the prop- erty for park purposes on the grounds that the proposed sale violated the terms of their lease. The Club's motion for an injunction was denied by the Nassau County Supreme Court on November 6, 1931. This cleared the way for the Park Commission to take over the operation of the golf course under a lease from the owners.
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HISTORY OF LONG ISLAND STATE PARKS
A special non-profit corporation called the Bethpage Corporation was formed to operate the clubhouse and golf course which were opened to the public in the spring of 1932. All moneys collected by the Corporation were used for maintenance and operation with all balances devoted to making improvements.
In the meantime ways and means of financing the purchase of . the land were being studied. The help of numerous philanthropic organizations and foundations was solicited but because of the depres- sion and other demands, no financial aid from these sources was available and it became necessary to extend the option for an addi- tional year. This was done without cost and the Commission con- tinued to operate the clubhouse and golf course throughout the year 1932. Large picnic areas were established and the riding stables, bridle paths and tennis courts were improved and opened for public use.
No means were found during the winter and spring of 1933 to purchase the property, so for the third time an option was given for an additional year. The "Park" became more and more popular with visitors and was now considered an important part of the Long Island state park system. No one seemed to realize how small the chances were that it would long remain in the park system.
During the summer of 1933 Governor Lehman called a special session of the legislature to consider legislation for relieving unem- ployment. Among the measures submitted to this special session by Commissioner Moses was a proposed act to establish a public benefit corporation to be known as the "Bethpage Park Authority" to consist of the members of the Long Island State Park Commission with powers to issue bonds for the acquisition, improvement and opera- tion of Bethpage State Park. This act was passed by the Legislature and became Chapter 801 of the Laws of 1933 after the signature of the Governor was affixed on August 20, 1933.
Application was immediately made to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation requesting the purchase of Authority bonds on the basis of a self-liquidating project. The Reconstruction Finance Corpora- tion, at that time flooded with requests for loans, refused to consider the project because too large a part of the requested loan was needed for the acquisition of land in comparison with the amount for con- struction which would require the use of unemployed labor. It was indicated at Washington that construction funds would be available through the Civil Works Administration for a project of this kind if public ownership of the land could be obtained.
The owners of the property agreed to accept $100,000 cash and $900,000 in Park Authority bonds secured by a mortgage and revenues from the operation of the park. This total amount of cash and bonds was considerably less than the original option price. The State Comp- troller purchased $100,000 in bonds which made available the neces- sary cash and title was finally closed on May 18, 1934. It was remarked after the closing that "Mr. Moses had pulled another rabbit out of the hat" which pretty well summed up the thoughts of most of the officials concerned with the problem of acquiring the park for
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nearly four years and who had come to believe that it would take a miracle to solve it.
Work on the construction of a new clubhouse, three additional golf courses, polo field and other improvements was progressed during 1934 and 1935 as a Work Relief Project. At the peak of this con- struction 1800 men were taken from the relief rolls and given employ- ment. In addition an idle furniture factory was taken over and with work relief men all the furniture for the new clubhouse was made.
Bethpage State Park's Newest Facility
The Bethpage Stadium, opened May 3, 1942, showing inaugural game in which the Grumman Bombers defeated Barton's Night Hawks.
The clubhouse and three of the four 18-hole golf courses were opened to the public on August 10, 1935. The fourth golf course was opened the following spring. This building is an outstanding example of a 100% work relief project, properly planned and supervised. The golf courses were designed and constructed under the direction of Joseph H. Burbeck, the Superintendent of the park, with A. W. Tillinghast, internationally known golf architect, as consultant. The four courses are designated as the Blue Course, 6695 yards; the Red Course 6468 yards; the Green Course 6242 yards; and the Black Course 6783 yards. The Black Course, also known as the Champion- ship Course, is the most difficult. All courses are hilly and tricky but all have their own distinctive features. It is a far from settled ques- tion which one is the easiest but even the "pros" agree that the Black Course is one of the toughest in the country. Among the prominent golf professionals who have played in exhibition matches at Bethpage are Gene Sarazen, Jimmy Hines, Lawson Little, Paul
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Runyon, Sammy Snead, Horton Smith, Craig Wood, Jimmy Thomp- son, Willie Klein, Byron Nelson and Al Brosch, the Bethpage pro who started his golfing career as a caddy for B. F. Yoakum.
Bethpage State Park is an all-year-round park. At least one golf course is kept open for play all through the winter. When snow con- ditions and cold weather make golfing impossible, the park attracts thousands of winter sports enthusiasts to its hills for skiing and coast- ing. The only ski tow on Long Island is operated here.
In 1942 a new outdoor stadium was added to the recreation facili- ties at Bethpage State Park. This stadium, constructed in a natural valley just east of the parking field in front of the clubhouse, makes this park one of the most complete sports centers on Long Island.
A Sunday afternoon polo game at Bethpage State Park
One of the purposes of the stadium is to provide an athletic field near the clubhouse for the playing of softball and other games by outing groups, but in addition organized semi-professional baseball and foot- ball games are played here.
Even with a variety of sports facilities available in this park, it is expected that golf will always remain as the most prominent feature. In normal times more than 115,000 rounds of golf are played each year with single days sometimes reaching as high as 1300 players. Other sports rise and fall in public favor but golf, which was first played 400 years ago in Holland and for a long time considered only a wealthy man's game, is now firmly established as a popular form of recreation for all. Even the constant bombing of England during the war did not dampen enthusiasm for the game in that country as is evidenced by the following excerpt from a letter received from a former Bethpage golfer who was in London at the time:
I've seen no bomb craters that I've studied as anxiously as I have that bunker guarding number 2 of the Black Course. They do come bigger. When the ruins are cleared away plenty of them look more like the 3rd hole from tee to green. Day before yesterday I played golf-about my 10th game over here-and twice nicked the clubhead on jagged frag-
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ments of anti-aircraft shells. It's to guard against these- averaging the size of your finger-that people are supposed to wear tin hats. My first games on this course were embel- lished by a couple of unexploded bombs sticking in fairways. Walking past these is sort of like edging past a vicious dog who doesn't know whether to bite you or let you go. It's permissible to lift out of a crater without penalty-but not nearer the hole. Most craters are small-not bigger than an upright piano on end.
From the revenues derived from the operation of the golf courses, tennis courts, riding stables, winter sports and other facilities, Beth- page State Park is entirely self-supporting.
Although Bethpage State Park is officially recognized as the newest of Long Island's twelve state parks, actual title to the area will not rest in the State of New York until all bonds have been retired. This status, however, is only technical and the name "Beth- page" which had almost been lost through the two and a half centuries since the time of Thomas Powell, has been revived and become well known because of Bethpage State Park.
CHAPTER XXXIII Education in Nassau and Suffolk Counties EDMUND W. CASE Instructor, Freeport High School
O N FEBRUARY 22, 1656, Governor Stuyvesant and the Com- missioners of the New England Colonies agreed that "a line drawn from the westermost part of Oyster Bay and thence in a direct course of the sea-shore shall be the line of division between the Dutch and the English on Long Island. . . . " This settlement brought the eastern portion of the island under the government of the colony of Connecticut. There a common school system had already been established, and since many of our schoolteachers came from there, the early educational ideas of Suffolk County were copied from those of the New Englanders. There has been discovered ample verifi- cation of the statement that the English discouraged, if they did not neglect, the diffusion of knowledge. They offered, therefore, only the barest essentials in the pioneer schools, being afraid, evidently, that the colonists might learn too much. Educated folk become imbued with ideas that lead to heresy, disobedience, and revolution; people are less difficult to control if they are kept in ignorance of politics, government, and history. They did believe in educating a few leaders to an understanding of the tenets of the state church, and enough of politics that they might learn to agree with the beliefs of the English aristocracy.
The Dutch, living on the western half of Long Island, took just the opposite view of learning. They realized that the youths of the present become the citizens of the future; the better educated they are today, the better equipped they will be tomorrow, for these individuals shape the destiny of community life and spirit. At the same time, long before the first course in psychology, the Dutch also believed that lawlessness and unhappiness were outgrowths of igno- rance. For these two reasons, especially, then, the Dutch set up public schools in every community to train their children at the elementary level.
Suffolk County-"where government by the people originated"- is "the oldest county of purely English settlements within the limits of New York State". It was originally populated with families from New England who banded together to form independent colonies, each comprised of from eight to fifteen families. They were completely independent: took orders from no one, made their own laws, chose their own executives.
These were the determined-chinned pioneers who established the very first school on Long Island of which we have record. It was set up in Southampton in 1642, only two years after settlement. In 1657,
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Huntington, according to its town records, got its first schoolmaster. In 1675, Hempstead established its first school.
Illiteracy ran high throughout these early precarious years. The letters and manuscripts of the 17th and 18th centuries give us a decided clue as to the quantity and quality of the people's education. It is obvious that no dictionaries were available in those days and
-
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(Paul T. Wohlsen)
Central High School, Valley Stream
there was little agreement in pronunciation and spelling; no rules for punctuation and grammar were followed.
All education was superficial, spasmodic, and completely unorgan- ized. School sessions were long or short, dependent on getting and keeping a schoolmaster. Daily hours were uncertain, dependent upon the seasons. Teachers would come and go. They taught little and were paid little. The enrollment was always small, and never con- stant, because of duties at home. In 1707, Hempstead had built a school with some enthusiasm, but ."lett" it to a townsman for other uses in 1709 for lack of a schoolmaster.
At the outset, the establishment of schools did not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that there were any school buildings. At first children had gotten together at a neighboring house to be taught by some learned member of the settlement. Later the church and the
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clergyman became the forerunners of the school and the schoolmaster. The two interacted in more than one way. There was usually a meetinghouse of some kind that was used as a church and a school; the school teacher often found himself in the role of assistant to the clergyman, whose existence was even more nomadic than his own. Again, the earliest textbook was the Bible, from which the youngsters read and copied, and learned of God and the Ten Commandments.
Once the colonists had started the construction of school buildings, there still seemed little of which one might be proud. As late as 1838 schools consisted of one dingy, cold, uncomfortable room of drafty, wooden construction containing a few small windows. The room and walls were barren except for several crude desks of inclined tables, made of pine boards and fastened to the sides of the room, some board benches without backs in front of the desks, a teacher's desk (the only one with a drawer in it) and either a fireplace or a cast- iron box stove. The children furnished the wood for the fire. Some- times there would be some smaller benches in the center of the room for the younger group. Nails along the wall behind the door, a broom in the corner, and a bucket of water along with a tin dipper on the floor completed the furnishings. Paint and plaster, of course, were unheard of.
Accredited by competence and piety, teachers were selected for their jobs by the governor or by the community fathers, and their individual agreements and contracts were included in the body of laws and regulations of the towns. The teacher was "to demean him- self patiently and friendly towards the children in their instruction and be active and attentive to their improvement". He was paid in kind for the most part, the "kind" depending on the locality in which he taught. Certain specified amounts of butter, "merchantable wam- pum", clothing, grains, young cattle, pasturage, or (especially in eastern Suffolk County) whale oil, actually approximated a salary from five to seven dollars a month. In addition, the teacher was usually provided with room and "diet"; sometimes, a "suitable house". When dollars and cents were forthcoming, the money was raised by a tax placed on the inhabitants.
But school teachers are eternally busy, often at jobs other than the teaching assignment, making ends meet. Perhaps it was these pioneers of primitive days who set the precedent for ages to come, for at this time the teacher's duties other than his school work re- quired general service and assistance to the clergyman, substituting for him in his absence, ringing the church bells, furnishing water for baptisms, giving out funeral invitations, and even digging graves upon occasion. Participation in these and other menial tasks lent nothing to his status as a professional man. In the summer, he worked in the fields where he could make more money, being replaced at the school's summer session by some young lady. With little respect from the community folk, the teacher could hardly hope to be highly re- garded by his students. On the other hand, perhaps he, too, was at fault from time to time, for it has been recorded that now and then a teacher was not above sending students to a nearby tavern for beer
High School, Patchogue
EDUCATION IN NASSAU AND SUFFOLK COUNTIES 301
with which to quench the former's thirst during his teaching hours; sometimes teachers were guilty of drunkenness on the job.
The school week was usually six days long, but on Saturdays children were dismissed by twelve or one o'clock. Hours for the remaining days varied considerably. Starting at eight o'clock in the morning, classes in the summer time would continue until five or six o'clock in the late afternoon; in winter, until they could no longer see. Lunch periods were one to two hours long. These rigorous schedules were not the fault of the teachers, but of tax-paying parents who wanted to be sure they were getting their money's worth.
The studies stressed were the four R's; readin', 'ritin', 'rithme- tic, and, most important, religion. In the beginning, "the Bible, the bench, and the birch were most important". Instruction in common prayer and catechism was paramount. Supposedly, this curriculum helped these settlers to become "God-fearing, honest, moral, and reliable", if not educated. They did learn how to make good ink- early documents are still well preserved after two hundred and fifty years-and one grand accomplishment, how to write beautifully and legibly.
We find a few instances where some geography, a little ancient history, and brief outlines of English and Dutch history were pre- sented to school pupils, but these were rare at first. It is not to be wondered at. People of those days, living on the doorstep of the New World, isolated from each other as well as from foreign lands, had the more immediate concerns of individual survival uppermost in their minds, and felt little the need to worry about social responsibil- ity outside their own settlements. The world was much larger then; living was less complex; events outside one's own province mattered not at all. The problems of group living in a world community are only now being imperatively forced upon us. The days of American isolation, only one war ago, are still vivid in our memories. In those colonial days, American history had yet to be made before it could be written.
Gradually a few textbooks appeared under the arms of school children. There were Thomas Dilworth's Speller, Peter Parley's Geography, Lindsley Murray's Grammar. In 1818 Herman Daggett of Brookhaven published the American Reader. Around 1938, schools in Freeport used Daboll's Arithmetic, the Old English Reader, Hale's History of the United States, and Webster's Elementary Speller. A writing or copying book was an essential part of each student's equip- ment. One early writer, with a twinkle in his eye, observed that wood carving became an early art. This, of course, is still practiced to the present day.
The Young Man's Best Companion was the most useful textbook. Some three hundred and fifty pages long, it contained the whole cur- riculum : arithmetic, spelling, pronunciation, bookkeeping, history, and so on. The incorrect spellings of words were given as well as the correct spellings. It included advice on the proper methods of study, and the correct mental attitude for learning, as well as "philosophical sentiments in the art of living".
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The slow progress of early education was due to a combination of many causes, but I doubt that it was as much from the dearth of books as from the poor teaching methods employed. These included rigid discipline, memorization (sometimes of a whole book), and a completely automatic learning process where there were no questions asked. There was no attempt to help the student understand the use- fulness of studying or the correlation of subject matter.
In 1732 the legislature passed "an act to encourage a Public School in the City of New York for teaching Latin, Greek, and All
Roslyn High School
the parts of Mathematicks". The school was supported largely through funds derived from hawkers' and peddlers' licenses collected on a colony-wide basis. Under the act twenty free scholarships were provided to the surrounding cities and counties, including Suffolk and Queens (now Nassau), each of which was allowed to send one good student. This youth could not be under fourteen years of age; he must know well reading, writing, and English; he was to be selected by the "Justices at the General Sessions of the Peace".
The various steps that brought us our independence in 1783 awakened and aroused the spirited colonists to the need for more and better education. Now, it was realized, we must develop our own men for competent leadership of a still un-unified country; now, to preserve the newly-won freedom, every individual would have to take an active intelligent part in the shaping of its destiny. An under- standing of various forms of government and different political sys- tems, a knowledge of world history, and a fuller, more complete con- ception of our own small but important place in the sun, became immediately imperative. The rise of the academies was indicative of this new trend.
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From 1784 on, as if seeds of learning had been broadcast over the whole of Long Island, new institutions of higher education sprang up, to be nurtured by people of means, and these flourished for the next hundred years; some until as late as 1907. Most of them became famous for their improved and diversified curricula, the scholarship of their fine instructors, and the guidance of capable administrators.
One of the very first of these was Clinton Academy which was founded in Easthampton in 1784 by Dr. Samuel Buell and General
Great Neck High School
William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Its char- ter was granted by the newly created Board of Regents of the Uni- versity of the State of New York in 1787. The school was named for George Clinton, at that time governor of New York State, and ever an indefatigable subscriber to the cause of public education. Clinton Academy was a large good-looking building, two and one-half stories high. Its two major departments were classics, and English and writing. William Payne, father of the author of Home, Sweet Home, was the school's first principal who also taught classes in English. It was he who maintained the high level of scholarship that brought fame to Clinton. Students from all over the country were in attend- ance from time to time, and the academy prospered for seventy-five years. It provided an invaluable influence on the moral and intellec- tual progress of eastern Long Island.
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