Norwood Chapel - First Church in West Hempstead

The article below appeared in the Spring 2015 edition of the WHCSA News & Views newsletter.

From the 1906 Belcher Hyde map of West Hempstead.  Woods (Halls) Pond is in the middle of the image and the Norwood Chapel, just to the north, is labeled

The following is a brief history of the first church in West Hempstead, the Norwood Chapel.  

As with so many early communities in the United States, the one feature that gave our neighborhood its unique identity and distinguished it from being a mere loose collection of farms and homes was the establishment of a community church.  The church was much more than merely a house of worship.  It served as a central meeting house for neighbors and was where all important social and civic gatherings would take place.

Until the 1880s, farmers and residents of the area the would come to be known as West Hempstead were served by the various parishes located in Hempstead Village.  Beginning in 1885, a series of meetings were held in the old District 17 schoolhouse on John St (Nassau Blvd.) for the purpose of establishing a local church.  The meetings were well received and well attended.  Shortly thereafter, an organization called the Young People’s Christian Association was created, with James H. Rhodes voted as president and Henry H. DuBois as vice president.  James Rhodes was a member of the prominent Rhodes family who owned a large farm along the east side of Woodfield Road that comprised most of what became known as Hempstead Gardens. Henry DuBois was a well known grocer who ran a store on Hempstead Ave. near the current location of Exit 17 of the SSP.  

In 1886, it was decided that the YPCA would start a fundraising campaign to build a church edifice, but a debate ensued as to where this building would be located.  Two factions emerged from this debate, each favoring either of the two tiny local commercial districts that existed in our area at the time, Washington Square and Norwood.  (Washington Square was located at the intersection of Hempstead Turnpike and Nassau Blvd, and Norwood was located at the south end of Halls Pond).  A vote was taken and the Washington Square faction overwhelmingly won out with 60 out of a total of 72 votes cast.  However, after Hempstead Town Supervisor Martin V. Wood agreed to donate some of his land at the north end of Wood’s (Halls) Pond for the project, it was decided that the church would be built there.  (The exact location was along Hempstead Avenue, opposite the intersection with Oak(ford) St.)

Fundraising continued for the next couple years, and in 1890, the church was built.  Opening exercises were held on Sunday, February 2.  By then, James Rhodes had moved to New Jersey and Henry DuBois took over as president.  The new non-denominational church, named Norwood Chapel, was a tremendous source of pride for the community, as the funds and actual construction of the building were almost exclusively the results of local efforts.

In 1892, the building was enlarged to accommodate a Sunday School.  For the ensuing decade, the pastorship of the church was given to a roving group of guest preachers who were invited to address the congregation.  It’s worthy to note that at times some local women also took turns to preach, including Viola DuBois (Henry H DuBois’ daughter and Josie Hull, daughter of John P Hull, a local carpenter who lived across the street from the chapel).  By 1898, it seems that Rev. Joseph McCoun from Floral Park became the regular preacher for the next number of years.

The chapel also became the default location for social and civic activity in WH. Before the Chestnut Street schoolhouse was built in 1912, it was literally the only viable public place of assembly in West Hempstead.  In fact, it was was where School District 27 was conceived and voted for.  The chapel played host to the civic meetings of the West Hempstead, Lakeview and Hempstead Gardens Association and WH gas and lighting district was also formed from a series of meetings there.

Some time in the late 1910s, the Norwood Chapel disbanded and West Hempstead was once again left without a church, until the establishment of the Church of the Good Shepherd in 1925.  The Church of the Good Shepherd currently resides in its second location on Donlon Ave. after it moved from its original location on Maple Street in Hempstead Gardens.  (The original building burned down in the 1960s, however, the WH Historical Society has a nice photo of the original church in its archives.) Thereafter, in a very short period, WH gained three more churches in short succession.  Starting with Union Gospel Tabernacle on Morton Ave. in 1926 (currently a Haitian church); Trinity Lutheran Church in 1927, and St. Thomas the Apostle in 1931.  

Martin V. Wood – West Hempstead’s Most Accomplished Local Politician

The following article appeared in the Winter 2010 edition of the WH Community Support Association newsletter (I have since added minor modifications).

In West Hempstead in 1881, there lived a tall, demure, middle-aged farmer named Martin V. Wood, who resided on a modest farm with his wife and two daughters, directly across from where Hall’s Pond Park is currently located. Born on January 23, 1838, Martin grew up on a homestead located a stone’s throw from where he eventually settled, and spent his boyhood years helping his father, Valentine Wood, with farm work and at his general store, and attending local schools¹. Martin likely spent some years of his schooling at the old ’Trimming Square’ School (at the corner of Dogwood Ave & Nassau Blvd) where a young Walt Whitman once held a job as schoolmaster². Shortly after getting married in 1861, Martin purchased a farm adjacent to his father’s and for the next twenty years quietly busied his time in agricultural pursuits and raising his family³.

All that would quickly change in July, 1881. Martin had an uncle named William L. Wood, a grocer from New York City, who died childless in July of that year. Aside from his day job, William was also a Tammany politician who held various public offices including assistant alderman, police justice and member of the NYC Board of Education, and had amassed a small fortune from his business dealings. (William L. Wood was also a principle investor in the New York & Hempstead railroad, West Hempstead’s first rail line, which began service in 1870. The engine that served that line was named the ‘WL Wood’. The local train depot, at the north end of Valentine Wood’s property, currently where the St. Thomas parking lot is located, was given the name “Norwood”. With this investment, Wood was probably serving the dual purpose of helping provide rail service near the homes of his brother and nephew and perhaps also creating a faster and cheaper way to transport produce from Long Island to his grocery business in NYC.) His estate was valued at $175,000, a small part of which he bequeathed to the children of his nephew, Col. Alfred M. Wood, a Civil War hero who was wounded and captured at the First Battle of Manassas and at one time was Mayor of Brooklyn. Martin V. Wood was shocked to learn, however, that the bulk of his uncle’s estate, $150,000 ($3.3 million in today‘s dollars), was willed to him. It was reported at the probate hearing that the deceased selected Martin as the primary beneficiary because “he was a staid, straightforward, honorable man who would not be disturbed by possession of wealth but use it as a sensible man”.⁴

With his new change of fortune, Wood tried his hand in local politics and ran for Town of Hempstead supervisor in 1882 as a Republican, a position which he won. The widely popular Wood then went on to serve a record eight consecutive terms as Town Supervisor (back then, terms lasted one year). He was finally narrowly defeated in 1890 by 43 votes, only because he even lost support of many admiring republicans who felt that, “they are opposed to any one man having a life mortgage on the highest office in town, no matter what his peculiar fitness may be⁵”. However in 1894, he again won the Town supervisorship and served another two terms in that position. During this span, the Town of Hempstead underwent a period of expansive growth, going from a population of a little over 18,000 in 1880 to over 27,000 just twenty years later⁶. (The latter figure would have comparably been higher, but no longer included the entire Rockaway peninsula, once part of the Town of Hempstead but later annexed by greater New York City in 1899. As an aside, the greater NYC annexation plan originally included all of Inwood and most of the Village of Lawrence, but angry residents of Inwood & Lawrence successfully fought off the attempt to be swallowed up by NYC. In April 1899, Governor Theodore Roosevelt signed the Doughty Bill, named after the bill's sponsor, Assembyman G. Wilbur Doughty, redrawing the Queens-Nassau border further west. [Doughty Blvd. in Inwood, along the new border, is a living testament to that effort. G. Wilbur Doughty went on become TOH Supervisor and then Nassau Co. Supervisor and helped establish a virtual Republican dynasty in Hempstead & Nassau that lasts to this day, largely from the benefit of the perception that the GOP was the best party to protect LI from the encroachment of the liberal political policies of New York City. His nephew, J. Russell Sprague created the position of Nassau County Executive and served in that capacity from 1938 to 1953]. A year into the annexation plan, many residents of the Rockaways were dissatisfied by the diminished level of services and representation once they became part of New York City. This compelled Doughty to advance another bill in the NYS Legislature in 1900 that would establish a new township and join Nassau County. Had the bill passed, a new jurisdiction would have been formed as the "Town of West Hempstead". That bill never came to the floor, however, because the Nassau County supervisors came out against the plan⁷). Martin V. Wood presided over Town government during this period of change, when numerous roads were macadamized, gas and lighting districts were formed, and new school districts were established.

One of the more interesting issues during Wood's tenure involved the establishment of School District 25 in Garden City in 1886. When the Town of Hempstead sold a large swath of the Hempstead Plains in 1870 to A.T. Stewart to create Garden City, Town citizens agreed to sell their common lands with the provision that the monies obtained from the sale should be placed into a trust fund and that two-thirds of the accruing interest from that fund should be devoted to support the public schools of the Town. However, the manner of distribution of those funds was left to the discretion of the board of town auditors. When SD 25 broke off from SD 1 (Hempstead) in 1886, it was discovered that the Garden City School District was not receiving their fair share of disbursements from this fund. At issue was whether the Laws of 1870 included newly established school districts or only the ones that existed at the time the law was written. SD 25 then sued the Town of Hempstead and the NY State Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the plaintiff, forcing the Town of Hempstead to compensate Garden City for missed payments⁸.

Martin V. Wood was also the founder and president of purportedly the oldest bank in Nassau County, the Hempstead Bank, est. 1887. Hempstead Bank was for years one of Nassau's premier financial institutions. (In fact, the name Hempstead Bank survived as late as 1983, until a series of mergers and acquisitions brought it to an end. Hempstead Bank became Northstar Bank in the ‘80s, and then Fleet Bank in the ‘90s, and was ultimately swallowed up by Bank of America in 2005⁹). For a time Wood was also president and director of the Hempstead and Nassau Gas Companies¹⁰.

Unfortunately, Wood was predeceased by his wife Harriett¹¹, and a daughter, Jeanette¹². He was survived by a younger daughter, Wilhelmina, who never married. Jeanette married William S. Hall, a prominent citizen who was a trustee of the Freeport Bank and at one time County treasurer. When Martin V. Wood died on Feb. 22, 1911, he bequeathed almost his entire half million dollar estate to his grandson, Martin V. W. Hall¹³.


Martin V. Wood standing
in front of the Hempstead
Bank

Upon his grandfather’s death, Hall became president of the Hempstead Bank and ably guided its continued progress for the next 30 years¹⁴. Hall inherited Wood’s beloved farm in West Hempstead and occupied the magnificent twenty room colonial home that Wood had built on the property. Hall died in 1944 and his widow, Elizabeth, continued to live in a cottage on the property at least until the mid 1950s, around the time Nassau County began to acquire land across Nassau Blvd to create a new park¹⁵. Thereafter, Hall’s Pond Park, as it came to be known, became a tribute to the local legacy of the Wood and Hall families.

(Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Hall’s Pond Park as a County Park¹⁶).

1 See Portrait and Biographical Record of Queens County (Long Island) (New York: 1896, Chapman Publishing Company) Valentine Wood owned a farm just south of Hall’s Pond. Martin V. Wood’s farm was located due east, across the street, from Hall’s Pond. See Atlas of Queens Co., Long Island New York (New York: 1891, Chester Wolverton) Plate 031.

2 For an overview of this school and the Walt Whitman connection, see the essay by Thomas F. Heffernan, Walt Whitman Here in Trimming Square (Garden City: Adelphi University Office of Publications) here - http://libraries.adelphi.edu/bar/Whitman/heffernan_essay.pdf.

3 Portrait and Biographical Record of Queens County (Long Island) (New York: 1896, Chapman Publishing Company).

4 “A Poor Man’s Sudden Rise to Wealth” Brooklyn Eagle 29 Jul 1881 4.

5 “On the Far Rockaway Branch” Brooklyn Eagle 31 Mar 1889 11.

6 Compare 10th Census of the United States Vol 1 (Washington, DC: 1883, Government Printing Office) 269, and 12th Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900, Part 1 (Washington, DC: 1901, US Census Office) 280.

7 “Fifth Ward Bill Dropped” Brooklyn Eagle 6 Feb 1900 1.

8 State of New York, Dept. of Public Instruction, 35th Annual Report of the State Superintendant (Albany: 1889, The Troy Press Co.) 148-152.

9 See http://www.scripophily.com/nybankhistoryh.htm.

10 “Nassau County Gas Company” Brooklyn Eagle 30 Jan 1903 10.

11 “Mrs. Wood Left Large Estate” Brooklyn Eagle 22 Jan 1910 1.

12 “Mrs. William S. Hall” Brooklyn Eagle 15 August 1908 2.

13 “Martin V. Wood’s Will Filed” Brooklyn Eagle 13 Mar 1911 5.

14 “Martin V. W. Hall” NYT 25 Mar 1946 19. Leadership of the Hempstead Bank remained in the family as Martin V. W. Hall’s son, Bruce, assumed the presidency into the 1980s. Bruce died in 1995.

15 See “Malverne Landmark Burns” NYT 4 Apr 1954 56. According to the Nassau County parks website http://www.nassaucountyny.gov/agencies/Parks/Wheretogo/passive.html, the County purchased Hall’s Pond Park in three parcel between 1956 and 1970. The large home that Martin V. Wood built on his estate at the southern approach to West Hempstead (where the Exxon gas station is now located) eventually fell into disrepair and was ultimately burned by vandals in 1954.

16 A placard at the southern end of Halls Pond commemorates the official opening of the County Park in 1961.

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.