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    Oakdale
    Oakdale
    Oakdale
    Ebook166 pages49 minutes

    Oakdale

    By Diane Holliday and Chris Kretz

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    About this ebook

    When Oakdale began in the 1680s, it was a woodland wilderness. Following the American Revolution, farmers cleared and worked the land. "Oyster King" Jacob Ockers and his men followed, working the bay. The railroad ushered in wealthy sportsmen to the South Side Sportsmen's Club. Some of these men, like William K. Vanderbilt and William Bayard Cutting, stayed and built palaces for their families. The scene changed starting in the 1920s, bringing flappers, artists, bootleggers, and Broncho Charlie, the last living Pony Express rider. The former mansions of the well-to-do now served as homes to a military academy and a religious cult, while still retaining their turn-of-the-century style.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439638491
    Oakdale
    Author

    Diane Holliday

    Chris Kretz and Diane Holliday are faculty members at Dowling College in Oakdale. Kretz is the digital resources librarian, and Holliday is the archivist and creator of the Long Island South Shore History Wiki. The photographs in Oakdale have been culled from the Dowling College Library Archives and Special Collections. Others were generously loaned by historical societies and local residents. All of the authors� proceeds from book sales will go towards the creation of the Long Island South Shore History Center.

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      Book preview

      Oakdale - Diane Holliday

      respectively.

      INTRODUCTION

      Along the shore of Great South Bay, on Long Island, hidden in dense scrub oak, is a colony of exiles. So begins Alexander Kidd’s article Country Homes on the Connecquot River published in Outing: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Recreation in April 1901. The colonists in question were millionaires seeking a retreat from the hectic demands of life in New York City, and the verdant fastness they had discovered was called Oakdale.

      Oakdale is located in the town of Islip, some 60 miles east of New York City. As Kidd goes on to relate, the forest was not all that dense, as much of the original timber on the island had long since been chopped down and sold for cordwood. For much of its early history, however, the area was fairly remote and sparsely settled. The modern origins of Oakdale date to the late 1600s with William Nicoll, an Englishman well-connected in the new British colony. He began acquiring land in the vicinity, first from the local Secatogue Indians in 1683 and later through grants from the government. The Nicoll Patent, as it was finally configured, contained much (but not all) of the town of Islip, including the area along the bay that became known as Oakdale.

      It is hard to say when exactly the name Oakdale was first applied (around 1870), but the honor is usually given to William H. Ludlow, a Civil War veteran and New York state assemblyman. He married into the Nicoll family in 1846 and subsequently inherited the remaining Nicolls lands east of the Connetquot River. Early maps show a strong diffusion of forest, primarily the above-mentioned scrub oak, so it is not hard to see how the name arose.

      Even before Oakdale had a name, however, New Yorkers were finding their way to it along South Country Road (the current Montauk Highway, one of the three main thoroughfares the English laid out to traverse the island from east to west). What these early travelers were seeking was not so different from Kidd’s colonists. They wanted to get out of the city and enjoy the pleasures of nature. More specifically, they wanted to hunt and fish. Despite the South Country Road, the area in the early 1800s before the coming of the Long Island Rail Road was sparsely settled and overgrown. Numerous small streams ran south to the bay, forming marshes and inlets that made travel difficult. Making it to Oakdale was an exercise that involved many changes of horse and the hazarding of mud, swamps, and thickets. Another periodical account, this one from the New York Mirror dated November 15, 1837, recounts what awaited the intrepid traveler when he did make it to Oakdale: "The Connetquut [sic] Hotel is a good old-fashioned Dutch inn, of a corpulent form, with an open space around it partly covered with turf. An immense elm stands on the west side, which is a marked object, famous for having had more fat bucks tied up to it than any other tree in the country. This hotel, established in 1820, was run by Eliphalet Liff" Snedecor and his hospitality, as well as the quality of the hunting and fishing in the surrounding forests, made a name for the area among the cognoscenti. It was such wealthy outdoorsmen from New York, appreciative of the relative uniqueness of an unspoiled preserve within a day’s journey from the city, who would purchase Snedecor’s establishment and its environs, forming the South Side Sportsmen’s Club in 1866.

      The sportsmen’s club serves as the well spring for much of the next 50 years of Oakdale’s history. Even though the South Side Railroad finally reached Oakdale in 1869, it was the sportsmen’s club that attracted the men who would build the great estates for which the village became known. It was the Gilded Age, so-named by Mark Twain to denote an era when great fortunes were made and spent on ostentation and extravagant exteriors. New families of wealth came to prominence in New York City, with fortunes derived not from inheritance but built from transportation, trade, and industrialization. This new class of aristocracy found many ways to spend their money but perhaps the most enduring was the creation of ever larger and more lavish estates.

      And so, in quick succession, Kidd’s colony of millionaires filled in along the south shore of Oakdale. William Bayard Cutting built his Westbrook estate on the west bank of the Connetquot in 1886. Although this places him in what is now known as Great River, Cutting and Westbrook are inextricably linked to the history of Oakdale and the neighboring estates. Christopher Robert occupied the land on which he would build his Pepperidge Hall as early as 1882. Establishing himself between the two was William K. Vanderbilt, who built his first mansion in Oakdale in 1882. The last major landholder would be Frederick Bourne, who began acquiring land in the area in earnest around 1889.

      Although among the four of them these

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