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.  

Marian M. Delaney (Eagle Avenue) School

The picture above comes from the front page of the Hempstead Sentinel from February 28, 1929 and is a front view of a newly built school on Eagle Avenue.  The building was District 27's second school to be built, following the Chestnut Street School in 1912.  During its first decade, the WH school district experienced a steady increase in its student population and by 1924, a four-room addition was built at Chestnut to accommodate the influx of students.  But very shortly, even that proved inadequate. A series of meetings was then organized with the purpose of selecting two additional sites for schools, one in the southern section of the district, and another in the northern section.   A 3-4 acre parcel was chosen on Oak(ford) St. with a purchase price of $15,000 and its acquisition would be decided by a voter referendum on March 1, 1926.  In one of the most closely contested votes in District 27 history, residents rejected the proposal 113 to 110.  Owing to the closeness of the vote, the school board decided to resubmit the proposal again the following month.  Again, voters rejected it, this time by a count of 92 to 73.

The following year, on March 31, a vote was passed to acquire a $25K parcel on Eagle Avenue near the corner of Woodfield Rd.  After a heated meeting, on April 26th, 1927, two bond proposals were floated, one for a $400K 16-room school house and the other for a $260K eight-room school to be built at that site.  Both were soundly rejected.  Finally on August 16, a $200,000 bond issue was approved and work commenced on the new school in the fall.  A local firm from Hempstead, Kirwin Estabrook Construction Corp. was awarded the contract for the work.  The firm specialized in school construction and had just recently completed the Fulton Ave School and Garden City School, among others.  Ground was broken on Nov. 14. In a rare example of public works efficiency, construction of the eight-room building came in under budget at $185,000 and on Monday, November 5, 1928, nearly a year after work had started, students moved into their new school.  The date for a formal dedication ceremony was chosen to coincide with Washington's Birthday and on February 21, 1929, the new building was dedicated amid much fanfare.

Among the faculty that first year was a sixth-grade teacher named Marian Delaney, who soon worked her way up to assistant principal and eventually principal of the school.  In 1963, she retired and the following year, in appreciation of her 35 years at the school, the district decided to rededicate the Eagle Avenue School by renaming it the Marian M. Delaney school.  Below is a photo of district officials conferring the naming of the school after Ms. Delaney (right), who is visibly moved by the gesture.

On November 6, 1949, an east wing addition to the building was dedicated, but by the 1970s, a declining enrollment forced the district to consolidate the student body of the southern section with the Cornwell Ave School. Parents petitioned the State Supreme Court unsuccessfully to keep the school open and by the 1981-82 school year, the district vacated Eagle Ave.  For a time thereafter, the building was rented out by Adelphi University to run adult education programs.  After that, Nassau County has since utilized the school for its BOCES program, but it was announced this past year that the County would not extend its lease beyond 2013, leaving the building's future in doubt.

Below is a "now" shot of the Eagle Ave "Marian M. Delaney" School.

Old School District 17 Schoolhouse

The old schoolhouse of school district 17 was the first school in our neighborhood and is perhaps best known for the brief stint that a young Walt Whitman spent there as schoolmaster in 1840. Located at the south corner of Nassau Blvd and Dogwood Ave, the school served a large area west of Hempstead Village including all of current West Hempstead and Franklin Square until SD27 split off from it in 1911 and a schoolhouse was built at Chestnut St. A wonderful essay which can be found here, by Adelphi University professor Thomas Heffernan, reconstructs Walt Whitman's time spent at the school.

Back then, the neighborhood was called Trimming Square. How did the place get its name? One plausible theory is that the entire Hempstead Plains, roughly the area where Garden City is now located, was once a treeless common area used by residents of Hempstead for grazing their sheep and cattle. A spot just south of the plains along the Hempstead-Jamaica road was designated where residents could round up their sheep to be sheared, a place which thereafter became known as "Trimming Square". At some point in the mid 1800s Washington Square became the preferred name for the location. After that, in 1895 a NYC businessman and Civil War vet named Harry Munson moved out to the neighborhood and thereafter the place became known as Munson. More about Harry Munson will come in a future post.

Back to the old schoolhouse. While the exact date it was built is unclear, the school dates back no earlier than 1813 and no later than 1831. No earlier than 1813 because when the NY state legislature created school districts in 1812, the school was not enumerated among the 13 districts of Hempstead. And no later than 1831 because of the testimonial of one Ezekiel Frost, born in 1816, of having attended the school in Trimming Square as a child.

The aforementioned essay contains the photo below of the old school as it appeared in the 20th century. The photo comes via Dr. Paul van Wie, president of the Franklin Square Historical Society. Originally a one room schoolhouse, an addition was built around the year 1894. The schoolhouse was eventually replaced in the 1930s by the John Street School a little further north, John St. being the former name of Nassau Blvd.

The 1914 E. Belcher Hyde map gives us a hint that the entrance to the school faced Nassau Blvd., so the then shot was taken looking west. The now shot below comes from Google Maps and shows what the scene looks like today. No evidence remains of what used to stand at the corner of Dogwood Ave.