Henry Hilton and His West Hempstead Connection - a Matter of Poetic Justice

When Garden City founder A. T. Stewart died childless in 1876, he left his enormous estate (estimated to be the third largest in the US behind the Astors' and Vanderbilts') in control of his private counsel, Henry Hilton. Hilton (after whom Hilton Ave. in Garden City is named) carries three big stains on his legacy.

First, he was one of the most notorious anti-Semites in 19th century America. Stewart left one of the most opulent hotels of its day, the Grand Union in Saratoga Springs, in the hands of Hilton, and when Jewish financier Joseph Seligman took his family up there in 1877 for a vacation, Hilton caused a national sensation when he infamously denied them entry. Hilton's hatred of Jews was rivaled by future LIRR President Austin Corbin, who followed Hilton's lead by barring Jews from his magnificent Manhattan Hotel in Coney Island. Together with Corbin, Hilton formed the Society for the Suppression of Jews where, at the inaugural meeting, it was proclaimed, "If this is a free country, why can't we be free of Jews?".

Second, Hilton had a purported close association with the corrupt Tweed ring, which was likely the cause that prevented Stewart from being approved as Treasury Secretary after the latter's nomination to that post by President U. S. Grant.

And the third blemish of Hilton's lasting legacy was his squandering of Stewart's almost limitless fortune. (One study estimated Stewart's net worth in today's dollars to be $70 billion, making him the seventh richest American ever when measuring his private wealth as a percentage of the economy). In the 1870s, A. T. Stewart & Co., the nation's largest dry goods business and first mega department store, was left to Hilton's management. But by the 1890s Hilton ran the business into the ground. A young, up and coming Jewish attorney named Henry Morgenthau (father of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and grandfather of Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau) was hired as legal advisor to Hilton's brother-in-law and business partner just before the store's assets were sold for pennies on the dollar. Morgenthau later recalled the poetic justice involved with Hilton being driven out of business principally by competition from the Jewish firms B. Altman and Stern's.

Perhaps another modicum of poetic justice is the fact that Hilton is a great candidate for the "separated at birth" files with his twin - Jewish author and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman.



But I digress.

The bottom line from all this is that Hilton was not a very good guy. What is not well known, however, is that Hilton had a conspicuous albeit inadvertent hand in shaping West Hempstead into what it is today. Allow me to explain.

The first railroad to roll through WH was the New York & Hempstead RR, completed in 1870, which ran from Valley Stream to a terminus in Hempstead Village. A station was built just south of Hall's Pond and was named Norwood, and a small settlement sprouted up there. Mismanagement and a couple terrible accidents eventually forced the South Side Railroad (which by then bought out the NY & Hempstead) into bankruptcy in 1880. With the rails yet in place, Hempstead residents had always hoped that the line would soon be reopened by a new concern. When the South Side RR's assets went up for auction in 1882, including the right of way leading to Hempstead Village, Henry Hilton emerged as the highest bidder, and it soon became clear that he had no intention to do anything with the line. Hilton's sole interest in purchasing the NY & Hempstead franchise was to ensure that no one would move in to compete against his Garden City rail line for which he had an ongoing lease agreement with the LIRR. He feared that a new buyer would persuade the LIRR to build a station near Hempstead Village that would serve both Hempstead and Garden City, and thus hinder the Stewart Line. Hilton was perfectly content to seeing that future West Hempstead remained as rural and undeveloped as possible so as not to disturb the growth of Garden City. For the next dozen years, residents of the south side between Valley Stream and Hempstead were left without rail service until 1893 when LIRR president Austin Corbin completed the line that currently exists, with the help of the new manager of the Garden City Co. (and later its first village president) George L. Hubbell. By that time, Hilton was out of the picture while Corbin envisioned developing West Hempstead and Hempstead Gardens into a village in the style of Garden City.

How differently would have West Hempstead evolved had someone besides Hilton purchased that road and had actually kept it operational? Well, for one thing, the current LIRR line would not have been built if the original line was left in service. The neighborhood then would probably not have been called "West Hempstead" since that name was acquired from Corbin's new LIRR station. More likely, the name Norwood would have had a better chance of sticking. (Norwood eventually faded from the landscape, probably because of the confusion caused by the existence of a town in upstate NY of the same name. But had Long Island's Norwood been given a chance to grow, it might have prevailed in keeping its name in spite of the upstate Norwood). Also, the natural growth of the neighborhood's commercial district would probably have centered around and spread out from the area just south of Halls Pond, rather than from the area west of Hempstead Village, southward. So does that mean we can blame Hilton for the existence of the Courtesy Hotel? Okay, that's a bit of a stretch. Truthfully, any such exercise in historic second-guessing leads to dangerously speculative territory....But what the heck? It's still fun to think about.

Perhaps one last measure of poetic justice remains to be pointed out. West Hempstead - the neighborhood that Hilton once endeavored to leave as undeveloped as possible and later which Austin Corbin wanted to establish as a grand development has now become home to one of Long Island's most sizable Jewish populations.

Oldest House in West Hempstead

Ever wonder where the oldest house in West Hempstead is located? According to the Nassau County property records, an unassuming little white house at 419 Woodfield Rd (shown below) owns that distinction, having been built in 1838. That's older than all but 9 of the 28 buildings that have achieved landmark status with the Town of Hempstead, and over 30 years before the first house in Garden City was even built.



So what is the story behind West Hempstead's oldest landmark? Who owned it? How was it able to survive so long? How far did the property extend when it was first built? Here's what I've been able to dig up so far.


My starting point was the 1873 Beers Map of Long Island, where (as can be seen below) the house is labeled as one of three that was part of a larger farm owned by the Rhodes family. On the map is listed W. L. Rhodes, J. Rhodes and I. Rhodes. The solid line running diagonally down the image is Woodfield Rd., and the rail line labeled Hempstead belonged to the defunct New York and Hempstead Railroad (not to be confused with the existing rail line).

From census records, it can be determined that all three were brothers - W. L. Rhodes was William Lawrence Rhodes, I. Rhodes was Isaac Rhodes and J. Rhodes was Jacob Rhodes - whose father, William Rhodes is found in the 1868/69 Curtin's Directory as owning a country store in Hempstead Village. The elder Rhodes was also a 7th generation direct descendant of Richard Gildersleeve, one of the original settlers and patentees of Hempstead. This raises the possibility that his farm was inherited from Gildersleeve's original patent. By the 1800s the farm comprised over 50 acres and extended eastward, well into what is now Hempstead Gardens, before the streets of that section were platted and before the LIRR track was laid.

Then in 1891, a man named Frank M. Kelly started buying up hundreds of acres of property in the area, and the $200 per acre he offered was too good to turn down for many local farmers. Mr. Kelly's motives were initially puzzling to observers, but it was soon revealed that he was merely acting as a surrogate of LIRR president Austin Corbin (Kelly turned out to be the brother of Corbin's private council), who planned on using the newly acquired property to lay a new rail line between Valley Stream and Mineola.

Among the farmers who sold their property were William L. Rhodes and Jane (wife of Isaac) Rhodes. Jacob Rhodes' house, however, was not sold to Corbin. Instead, Jacob's wife, Amietta, sold the house with 2 acres to a man named James S. Wright, who had sold his own farm located further south, to Corbin. Corbin ended up with 500-600 acres of property, instantly making him by far the largest land owner in West Hempstead.

Of all the homes the already enormously wealthy Corbin acquired with his purchase, he took a particular liking to one of the homesteads on the Rhodes farm which had dated back to 1798. (I'm unsure whether it was the one that belonged to William L. or Isaac Rhodes, but it's age indicates that it was the original home owned by their father). He had it remodeled and redecorated to be used as a retreat for his youngest daughter, Anna Corbin. Corbin's ultimate plan for his newly acquired property (beyond laying the new rail line) will be the topic of a later post. But meanwhile, the fact that our subject house was not sold to Corbin and therefore wasn't included in his redevelopment plan may have been what saved it from being lost to history.

The County property record card (which I believe dates to the 1940s) lists J. S. Wright as an early owner of the house, so an unbroken chain of all the owners of this house can be established. I didn't find out much about James S. Wright other than the fact that he owned a few properties in the area. The two other owners listed on the card are Lawrence Stainsen and W. G. O'Donnell, but I don't know too much about them either. I'd love to find out more about any of these people if anyone has information.