Early Aviation History – the Tales of Two Harrowing Plane Crashes in WH

The following article appeared in the Fall 2013 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter

The “cradle of aviation” is a term ascribed to Long Island that highlights the important role that our island played in the history of early human flight. At the turn of the 20th century, the treeless, flat terrain of the Hempstead Plains, just a short distance from the country’s largest metropolis, made for an ideal location for the frenetic aviation activity that would take place in the region for the ensuing half-century. During those years, many triumphant and celebrated milestones in human flight would be marked on Long Island, most notably Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight from Roosevelt Field to Paris in 1927. As well, numerous but lesser known avionic tragedies and mishaps occurred in those early days. The following paragraphs recount the stories of two such plane crashes that occurred in the immediate West Hempstead vicinity.

The first incident involved a machine dubbed the “Christmas Bullet”, after its eccentric inventor, Dr. William W. Christmas. By 1918, in the aftermath of WWI, numerous enterprising manufacturers from across the country offered up radical designs for airplanes that they hoped would produce improved speed and efficiency and win lucrative government contracts to produce their planes for the US Army Air Service. Dr. Christmas theorized that the struts that supported the wings of the standard bi-plane design of that era generated a lot of wind resistance, and as a result, he pioneered a “strutless” design of the type pictured in the photograph below. Critics allegedly warned that without struts, the wings were liable to break apart during flight, and indeed, history proved these critics right; the Christmas Bullet was among the worst planes ever designed.

1918 photo of the Christmas Bullet.  (photo from http://www.aviastar.org/air/usa/christmas_bullet.php  via Wikipedia)

Nevertheless, Christmas went ahead with his plans and got his prototype ready at his plant in Copiague, NY. A 27 year-old Army Air Service aviator named Cuthbert Mills was hired for the Bullet’s initial test flights and her maiden voyage to Hazelhurst (later Roosevelt) Field was indeed spectacular, with unofficial reports of her breaking the existing air speed records of the time. (Reports varied from anywhere between 160mph and 197mph). Shortly after the Christmas of 1918, Dr. Christmas announced that the Bullet would shortly give a demonstration by encircling the Woolworth Building in Manhattan (the tallest building in the world at the time) before returning to Long Island.

On a crisp and clear late afternoon on Monday, December 30th, Mills took off from Hazelhurst heading due south before turning west toward Manhattan. The plane reached about 3,000ft as it headed over the Hempstead reservoir when it encountered immediate problems. Reports conflict as to what exactly went wrong, but Lakeview resident E. J Jennings who was an eyewitness to the incident claimed that one of the plane’s wings had collapsed, causing her to spiral out of control. For an instant, Mills managed to stabilize the machine by bringing her down in small concentric circles, but the area surrounding Hempstead Lake was heavily wooded and offered no good place for a crash landing. The plane came down right around the present location of Exit 18 of the Southern State Parkway (before the parkway was built), into a chestnut tree while narrowly missing the home of a man named Quinn Porsert, before dropping to the ground. Porsert, his son Frank, and EJ Jennings were on a hunting excursion in the wooded property and were the first to respond to the scene, and they cheered wildly when for an instant, it had seemed that Mills had miraculously survived the crash. But as they raced toward the wreckage, they were greeted with a loud boom that lit up the purple dusk sky, as it became evident that the fuel tank had exploded and quickly consumed the wooden fuselage. Without a water supply, all the hopeless group could do was to futilely throw gravel upon the mangled aircraft and watch her unfortunate pilot burn beyond recognition. Incredibly, in the wake of this tragedy, the undaunted Dr. Christmas produced a second “Bullet” and three months later, her initial test flight similarly went awry and claimed the life of the pilot. Such were the risks and realities of early aviation.

About three-and-a-half years later, a second incident occurred that was not quite as tragic and produced a somewhat comical unplanned meeting between a Manhattan aristocrat and a hardened Long Island farmer.

Photo taken from the DH6 wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airco_DH.6.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, June 10, 1922, a Madison Ave. socialite named Oscar Jay was soaring over central Long Island in his DeHavilland DH6 monoplane (after WWI, the Royal Air Force had decommissioned and sold off hundreds of these DH6s and many ended up in the hands of leisure pilots throughout the world) when he abruptly realized he had ran out of gas and frantically looked for the nearest clearing to bring the plane down. That clearing happened to be upon the potato field of John Jacob Rasweiler, a local farmer who owned a homestead along Dogwood Ave. (Today, the small side street off Dogwood that bears the original owner’s name along with his adjacent farmhouse is a surviving testament to this farm). Jay successfully glided his plane down upon the patch while leaving a divot of tens of dollars of torn-up potatoes in his wake. The pilot brushed himself off, nonchalantly walked over to the farmhouse, knocked on the door and introduced himself as a wealthy merchant. He asked the owner if he could borrow some gasoline and be on his way, all the while pledging that he would reimburse the farmer for his gas and for his ruined potatoes once he returned home. Rasweiler obliged and refueled the plane with some automotive gasoline he had siphoned from his car. Jay started up the machine, and after a 500ft taxi barely managed to get her off the ground before she sputtered and fell back to earth in a dive, dragging along another long divot of ruined potato crops. The apparent hard lesson learned was that automotive-grade gasoline was incompatible with the DeHavilland engine.

Shaken and exasperated but otherwise unhurt, Jay walked away from the wreckage and began looking for the closest train station to get back to Manhattan. Rasweiler caught up to Jay and yelled, “Hey, what about your plane!?!?”.

 “You can go ahead and keep it!”, was the response.

 “Well, what in tarnation will I have any use for a wrecked plane!?”, the old farmer quizzed, “And besides, how can I be so sure that you’re gonna repay me?”

Jay then gave the farmer his coat as a pledge along with his calling card, and headed off to the train station for Manhattan. Rasweiler went home, but then became suspicious of his uninvited visitor’s story, thinking instead that the plane might have been stolen, and he promptly called the local sheriff. The police made inquiries and found out that Jay’s story was completely legitimate. But the aftermath of this mangled heap of metal, with its nose firmly planted in the ground and its tail up in the air,made for a curious sight that Summer for passersby along Dogwood Ave before Rasweiler was finally able to extricate it from his farm.

A Lakeview Gem - One More on EJ Jennings

As stated in my blog description above, one of the purposes of this website is to provide "then and now" visual perspectives of West Hempstead subjects. Old photos of West Hempstead are not easy to come by, but the ones that do exist and are accessible give us a glimpse of our rural beginnings and how different WH used to look like in the old days.

Thus far, all the subjects we have studied reveal "now" shots that show completely different landscapes from what once existed in the "then" shot. What was once a beautiful Victorian home is now a gas station. What used to be a hospital campus is now a housing development, etc. The unfortunate result is that either the subject in an old photo no longer exists today, or that the few old structures that are still around in WH don't have old photos readily available with which to compare the "now" shot. On rare occasions, the same subject exists in both the "then" and "now" photos, showing how the subject evolved over time.

In the piece below, we have found one such subject.

The following photo below comes from a 1904 Brooklyn Eagle article about the up and coming community of Lakeview. Entitled "A Typical Lakeview Home", this photo accompanying the article depicts a modest home built on an embankment, with a man and a woman posing on the front porch.


Delightfully, the house still stands today at 715 Woodfield Rd, albeit with some considerable modifications (see below). The exterior has been converted from clapboard to stucco, the porch has been enclosed, and the rear has been extended, leaving little resemblance to the original structure.

Who owned the house? None other than our own E J Jennings. Unfortunately the property record card is missing for this home at the Nassau County Dept of Assessment website. So how am I so sure that this was the Jennings home? A few reasons:

1) Much of the Brooklyn Eagle article dwelled on Jennings, so it's fair to assume that the reporter used his home for the photo.

2) Both photos show the home was built on a deep embankment. On the bottom right of the "then" shot is what appears to be a pond, consistent with the location of the home in the contemporary shot.

3) The shapes of the homes in both photos are identical (except for the modifications done over the years shown in the "now" shot) including a unique five window arrangement affronting the house on the second floor. Before the era of big housing developments on Long Island, it was rare to have two homes built exactly alike.

4) Most convincing of all are the two images below comparing the 1914 Belcher Hype map with the Google sattelite image. Jennings' property was eventually sold and developed as Lake View Park, sometimes also referred to as Birdhaven because of the names of the streets of that section. But as the 1914 map indicates, he still lived on a small piece of that property in a house on Woodfield Rd right on the pond, until he died in 1925. I have labeled the image on the right to show where that home is located today.

Thomas Donlon and Schodack Trout Pond

In the 1880s, a group of businessmen from Brooklyn who shared an enthusiasm for fishing formed an organization they called the Unit Fishing Club wherein they would arrange expeditions to take part in their favorite pastime. Their preferred destination was Mombasha Lake in Orange County, upstate NY - an ideal location with a reputation of being an angler's heaven. There was only one problem - it was a major schlep. At the time, there were no crossings over the lower Hudson River, which meant the trip required taking a ferry and the better part of a whole day just to get there.

Some members began looking eastward for a good freshwater fishing spot on Long Island. They found an opportunity in an area called Lakeview, which, although did not yet have train service until 1892, was a not too distant walk from the Hempstead or Pearsall's Corner train stations. Aside from the large lakes of the Brooklyn Water Works, a smaller lake bordered Woodfield Rd., just south of Eagle Ave. Sometime between 1887 and the early 1890s, a club member named Thomas Donlon purchased the fishing hole and 30 acres surrounding this lake from Hendrick B. Ryder, a deacon of the Rockville Centre Baptist Church and superintendent of its Sunday school, and one time Hempstead Town highway commissioner. The 1914 Belcher-Hyde map below displays the lake and land owned by Donlon. (The road labeled Brooklyn Ave. is Woodfield Rd.)

Donlon was a contractor who built many structures in Brooklyn. One of his works remains as among the oldest standing firehouses in Brooklyn (and probably the oldest still in operation), having been built in 1883, located on 11th Ave in Park Slope as the headquarters of Ladder Co. 122. (Photo below taken from the http://www.nyc-architecture.com website).

The pond that Donlon purchased was part of a stream called Schodack Brook that once extended much further north and ran its course through Lakeview into Smith's Pond, at one time a tributary of the Brooklyn water system. Though the small size of Donlon's pond did not seem like it was much to get excited about, a story reported in the Brooklyn Eagle in 1910 illustrates the prodigious quality of marine life that was sustained by the pond at that time. On July 4th that year, Donlon threw an Independence Day party for many friends, where he held a contest for who could catch the biggest fish. One of the guests was almost pulled into the water by the force of the creature pulling on the other side of the line. When a couple spectators helped the man reel in his prize, they were amazed to find it was a twenty pound turtle that gave the man such trouble.

Referring back to the map above, there was a man named Thomas Rhodes who lived across the street from Donlon (Rhodes' home is labeled and can be seen at bottom center). When Donlon bought land in Lakeview, he hired Rhodes to work on his farm earning a modest $50/month for the 8 months a year during planting and harvesting season, and $35/month for the remaining 4 months. Notwithstanding his meager salary, Donlon had always promised Rhodes that he would be "well taken care of", without ever specifying the meaning of that pledge. In 1917, Rhodes found out what his old boss meant when Donlon passed away and willed to Rhodes 1/2 an acre of his property for every year he worked (totalling 15 acres), a tribute to his old farmhand's loyalty. The remaining 15 acres was left to his wife, which Rhodes later purchased from her from the proceeds made from working the farm.

The aerial photo below (from the Fairchild Aerial Survey) gives an amazing perspective of the old Donlon farm. Taken in 1949 soon after the Southern State Parkway was widened and rerouted at exit 18, the photo looks westward toward New York City. I have included some labels to help the visualization. The original route of the Parkway wound around Hempstead Lake along Eagle Ave through Hempstead Lake State Park (a fact which helps understand the origin of the word "parkway"). At the left center of the photo, one can make out the cutoff of the old Parkway. In 1947, a new interchange at exit 18 was created and the Southern State was routed through Hempstead Lake, upon landfill, effectively cutting the lake into two parts. The road running horizontally at the top is Woodfield Rd, and the road running vertically at the right is Eagle Ave. The open farm fields on both sides of the Parkway at the top left corner is what was left of the Donlon Farm after the Parkway bisected it.

This high resolution image below comes from the same photo and is a close-up of Schodack pond as it looked in 1949.


Not long after this photo was taken, the farm was sold and carved up for a housing development. Like E J Jennings, Donlon also had a local street named after him, which can be found to the west of Woodfield Rd., just south of Eagle Ave.

E J Jennings, Pioneer of the Chain Store Concept

Last year I published an article in the West Hempstead Civic newsletter about prominent Lakeview resident Ephraim J. Jennings (the entire article can be read here). This post is a follow up to that article, based on new information I recently came across from two sources.

The first is a piece from the Feb. 22, 1908 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle that discussed early pioneer bakers in Brooklyn. E J Jennings was prominently featured in that piece which also included the photo below of our subject:

The claim in my article that Jennings ran the second biggest bakery business in Brooklyn came from "The civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history and commercial and industrial record of the county of Kings and the city of Brooklyn, N.Y. : from 1683 to 1884" by Henry Stiles Reed (published in 1884). The Brooklyn Eagle piece of 1908, in fact, claimed that the E J Jennings Bakery was the largest bread, cake and cracker bakery business in Brooklyn, and had been the exclusive supplier of such giant accounts as the White Star Ocean Line Co. and the Barnum Circus. The article goes on to list the locations of Jennings stores across Brooklyn and Manhattan - 17 in all in Bklyn and another 6 in Manhattan, a staggering total for that era.

That brings us to the second source - Jennings' obit from the Oct 29, 1925 Brooklyn Eagle. There it states that Jennings was the innovator of the chain store system, and judging from the number of stores listed, that claim seems pretty accurate.

The obit also stated that Jennings tried to reenlist in the Army during WWI, but he was rejected because of his age, not surprising since he would have been 68 years old in 1917. But it does speak to his unswerving patriotism. Had the army given him a commission, he would have become the only soldier to have served both during the Civil War and WWI, and would have beat out Johnny Clem, the "drummer Boy of Chickamauga", as the last Civil War veteran to leave the army. (Clem retired in August 1915).

E J Jennings and West Hempstead’s Original Civic Association

The following originally appeared in the Summer 2008 edition of the West Hempstead Civic Association News & Views newsletter -

The history of West Hempstead & Lakeview’s first civic association and the driving force behind its efforts tells a fascinating story that incidentally provides a local tie-in to the 90th anniversary of Veterans Day, the 100th anniversary of Eagle Avenue as a Town road, and casts light upon a legendary local figure, war veteran, and civic advocate extraordinaire, Ephraim J. Jennings.

E. J. Jennings was born August 1849 in Brooklyn to parents who emigrated from England[1]. At a young age, he volunteered during Civil War in the NY State Militia’s 13th Regiment - the fabled ‘National Grays’ - as a drummer boy[2]. (The 13th made news in June 1861 when 12 year-old cadet Clarence D. McKenzie, the famed “Little Drummer Boy”, became one of the earliest and youngest casualties of the Civil War after a comrade’s gun accidentally discharged and killed him. Jennings quite likely served in the same drum corps as did McKenzie)[3]. After the war he settled down, got married in 1873, and had eight children (five of whom survived to adulthood)[4]. Starting as a young clerk in a bakery, Jennings staked out on his own and eventually built what one source estimated was to become the second largest bakery business in Brooklyn[5]. By 1884 he had eight stores, employed 30 wagons and 50 men, used 120 barrels of flour per week and grossed $190K per year in sales[6]. All the while, he served as a volunteer in the Brooklyn Fire Dept.[7], a distinction that would serve him well years later when he became a trustee for the fledgling Lakeview Hook & Ladder Co.[8]. When military duty called once again in 1898 during the Spanish American War, he reenlisted and received a commission as Lieutenant[9] and was sent to Camp Black in Hempstead for drilling[10].

Around the turn of the century (perhaps having been drawn to the area during his Camp Black days) Jennings purchased a property at the corner of Woodfield Rd and Eagle Avenue near the no-longer-existent Schodack Brook and trout pond[11], and began summering there, eventually moving there permanently. Jennings considered his bucolic neck of the woods the ‘Pride of Hempstead Prairie’[12], but soon found an array of civic issues that the Town lacked initiative to address on its own. As a result, he founded the West Hempstead, Hempstead Gardens and Lakeview Association and with what a newspaper reporter called his ‘cosmic urge and personal magnetism’[13], he set out to tackle a laundry list of issues that troubled area locals of the day. When Woodfield Rd was found in dangerous condition with deep embankments on either side of the road the result of years of neglect, he obtained releases from adjacent property owners to have the road widened and then petitioned the Town to resurface the highway[14]. When a new road was needed to connect Hempstead Ave with Eagle Ave, he successfully convinced the LIRR to deed land along the railroad tracks to build Railroad Avenue (later called Hempstead Gardens Drive). When in 1911 the NY & Long Island Traction Co. proposed a fare increase to 15¢ for the Hempstead-Queens trolley, he successfully took his complaint to the NY State Public Service Commission to have it lowered to 10¢[15]. And when electric streetlamps were being installed all over the county in the 1910’s, he appealed to the Lighting District to have a lamp installed on Eagle Ave[16].

But perhaps his greatest achievement of all was the reopening of Eagle Avenue at Hempstead Reservoir, a feat which he accomplished singlehandedly. Eagle Ave was a road that dated back to the 1850’s[17]. The thoroughfare took its name from a grist mill operated by William Oliver called ‘Oliver’s Eagle Flour Mill’. Soon after the City of Brooklyn purchased surrounding land and created the reservoir as part of their water supply system in 1873, its storage basin soon flooded the surrounding land and completely inundated Eagle Ave. In 1898, Brooklyn became part of New York City and soon thereafter Hempstead Reservoir was no longer used as a primary water source for Brooklyn. As the waters receded, Jennings got right to work, petitioning the Town of Hempstead to resurvey and rebuild the road so that travelers would no longer have to wind around the reservoir. The process was a long one which ultimately took over seven years of numerous appearances before skeptical members of the Town Board and the Highway Commission. When Jennings finally procured the modest sum of $5,000 from New York City to build the road, the Town Board balked, saying it could not be done for that little money. Jennings pledged that he could build it himself for $5,000 – and that’s just what he did, to the ultimate satisfaction of the Town. On December 14th, 1908, the Town formally received Eagle Avenue and gave Jennings his final payment[18].

Jennings also played a central role in another local suburban legend which claims him as the first person in Nassau County to herald news of the end of WWI. On November 9, 1918, German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated his rule and signed an armistice ending hostilities that would go into effect “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”. In an era when many people did not yet have telephones, Jennings ushered in the good news by rushing to the old Lakeview fire house and sounding the fire alarm bell which initially caused tremendous confusion for all those within earshot of the commotion. Jennings had good reason to jubilate – both his sons had served in WWI[19]. The scene became such a local hit that it was reenacted two years later (albeit this time with the fair warning and eager participation of area residents), an early forerunner to the commemoration which would later become known as Veterans Day[20].

Perhaps Jennings’ most ambitious goal was to have a park built around Hempstead Reservoir. Jennings urged the City of New York to fulfill a pledge originally made by the City of Brooklyn to build a beautiful park when the reservoir was constructed, but his pleas fell upon the deaf ears of NY City officials[21]. Sadly, Jennings died on October 28th, 1925, never having a chance to realize his dream. But as a bittersweet postscript to his assiduous life, on November 29th, just one month after Jennings’ death, the deal was announced between NYC and Robert Moses’ Long Island Parks Commission to acquire the land surrounding Hempstead Reservoir and create Hempstead Lake State Park[22].

This year, on the 100th anniversary of the reopening of Eagle Avenue, it seems fitting that the Town would undertake to repair a road that owes its existence to E. J. Jennings. Next time you drive along its newly paved surface you’ll come across a little side-street called Jennings Avenue, a lasting tribute to a local hero who paved our way to a better community.

[1] Federal census of 1900 Series: T623 Roll: 1062 Page: 35.
[2] “Funeral of Ephraim J. Jennings,” New York Times 1 Nov. 1925 E9. As to Jennings service in the 13th Regiment, see “The National Grays,” Brooklyn Eagle 24 Jun 1894 22.
[3] See Luther Goodyear Bingham, The Little Drummer Boy, Clarence D. McKenzie, the Child of the Thirteenth Regiment, N.Y.S.M. and the Child of the Mission Sunday School, 1861 (New York: Board of Publication of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, 1861).
[4] Federal census of 1900 Series: T623 Roll: 1062 Page: 35.
[5] Henry Reed Stiles, The civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history and commercial and industrial record of the county of Kings and the city of Brooklyn, N.Y. : from 1683 to 1884 (New York: Munsell, 1884) 768.
[6] ibid.
[7] “Old Time Fire Fighters,” Brooklyn Eagle 8 Dec 1896 9.
[8] “Lynbrook,” South Side Messenger [Freeport] 13 Sept 1912 6.
[9] “Roster of Twenty-Second,” New York Times 5 May 1898 9.
[10] New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center. Unit History Project: 22nd Regiment Infantry, New York Volunteers, Spanish-American War http://www.dmna.state.ny.us/historic/reghist/spanAm/infantry/22ndInf/22ndInfMain.htm.
[11] Atlas of Nassau County, Long Island, NY (Brooklyn: E. Belcher & Hyde, 1906) 10.
[12] “Lakeview’s Mayor Very Much on Duty,” Nassau County Review [Freeport] 19 Nov 1920 13.
[13] ibid.
[14] “Town Board,” Nassau County Review 1 May 1903 2. “Deep gullies existed on the side of the road, especially near Eagle Avenue”.
[15] Annual Report of the Public Service Commission, Second District, New York State (Albany, NY 1912) 253.
[16] “Town Board,” South Side Messenger 5 Sept 1913 1.
[17] “Eagle Avenue, Norwood, Cannot Be Reopened Now,” Brooklyn Eagle 2 Dec 1902 6.
[18] “To Open Eagle Avenue,” Nassau County Review 18 Aug 1905 2.
“Town Board Proceedings,” Nassau County Review 21 Dec 1906 4.
“Town Board,” Nassau County Review 6 Apr 1907 4.
“Town Board,” Nassau County Review 3 Apr 1908 4.
“Town Board,” Nassau County Review 18 Dec 1908 6.
[19] World War One Honor Roll of St. George’s Parish 1917-1918 http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nynassa2/rectors.htm.
[20] “Repeats Armistice Joy,” Nassau County Review 12 Nov 1920 20.
[21] “Town Board,” Nassau County Review 7 Feb 1913 5.
“Town Board,” Nassau County Review 21 Feb 1913 4.
[22] “To Add 2,000 Acres To State’s Parks,” New York Times 30 Nov 1925 5