1875 Woodfield Train Disaster

The following article first appeared in the Fall 2012 edition of the WH Community Support Association newsletter.

Wreckage of the South Side Railroad disaster at Woodfield, purportedly the oldest surviving image of a train wreck on LI.  The Wreck occurred on the David Bedell farm, currently the site of the former Stop & Shop on Woodfield Rd. From the WH Historical Society archives.

Here’s a pop question: name the worst ever human disaster in the history of West Hempstead?  One would have to go all the way back over 137 years for the answer -  the South Side Railroad train wreck at Woodfield on February 3, 1875. (Update: Ironically at the same time this article went to print, West Hempstead learned about an awful car crash on the Southern State Parkway that killed four teenagers, matching the human life toll suffered in the Woodfield train disaster).   The following is a brief recap of that calamitous incident and the events that lead up to it.  But in order to understand what happened, some background information is necessary involving two important geographical features of West Hempstead that have long since disappeared – the headwaters of Schodack Brook and the path of the Hempstead-Valley Stream branch of the Southern Railroad.

Schodack Brook and the David Bedell Farm

Schodack Brook is a small rivulet which runs southward through Lakeview and empties into Schodack Pond in Hempstead Lakes State Park.  The brook can still be viewed today running though the residential section of Lakeview, just east of Woodfield Rd., but years ago it extended further north through what is now the site of the former Stop & Shop property.  In the late 1800’s that property was part of a large farm owned by David Bedell, who moved there with his wife Ruth (Rhodes) Bedell shortly after their marriage in 1843.  (That marriage brought together two of the more prominent families of West Hempstead whose roots in the local community date back to the very founding of Hempstead Village. David was a son of Hiram K. Bedell who had lived on a farm on the north side of Hempstead Turnpike.  Ruth was the daughter of William Rhodes whose large homestead sprawled along the east side of Woodfield Road and occupied much of the land that would become known as Hempstead Gardens.  The sole remaining visible legacy of the Rhodes estate is what is purported to be the oldest standing house in West Hempstead in its original location, the modest home at 419 Woodfield Rd, circa 1839).

The above map, circa 1873, shows the route of the South Side RR's Hempstead line through Woodfield at the bottom, with David & Ruth (Rhodes) Bedell's home just north of the tracks.  Further north along Woodfield Rd. are the homes of three of Ruth Bedell's Brothers, William L., Jacob and Isaac Rhodes.

Southern Railroad

In the mid-nineteenth century, Hempstead Village was displeased with being bypassed by the Long Island Railroad’s main line which ran three miles to the north, despite being one of the largest villages in western Long Island. Though since 1839 Hempstead was provided a shuttle train that connected to the LIRR’s main line at a depot called Hempstead Branch (later Mineola), villagers were looking for a more direct and reliable connection to points west.  By 1868, they found their answer in the South Side Railroad, a competing line to the LIRR that targeted the growing but underserved communities of Long Island’s South shore.  The South Side RR laid a single-track route from Valley Stream to Hempstead which was completed in 1870 and service began in September of that year.  (The branch should not be confused with the path of the existing WH branch of the LIRR built some 23 years later).  The route spurred off at Valley Stream and ran northeast, paralleling Cornwell Ave. until it crossed at Franklin Ave. in present-day Malverne where a station called Bridgeport was located.  Thereafter, it headed on a virtual straight path to Norwood station, located just south of Hall’s Pond (site of the St. Thomas Chapel parking lot).  Proceeding northeastward, the track passed Woodfield Depot at the intersection of Woodfield Rd. and Oakford St., and then over an embankment and culvert at Schodak Brook (at the present site of the old Stop & Shop).  The line then turned slightly northward where it ran through the woods and finally terminated in Hempstead Village.  No trace of this old line exists any longer, with the possible exception of a small access road that runs behind the WH Water District’s Birch St. Plant.

On January 31^st, 1875, the area experienced unusually strong rains that swelled the ponds and brooks of Long Island. At Woodfield Depot, the water backed up behind the culvert, and flooded David Bedell farm.  Bedell’s house was located just 70 yards north of the railroad bridge over the brook, and when the water level came within inches of the top step of his porch, he directed his family to roll up the rugs on the main floor so they wouldn’t get ruined.  On the evening of February 3, the managers of the South Side RR instructed an eight man crew to run a single engine and passenger car to Hempstead to verify the safety of the road and make any necessary repairs.  The crew proceeded slowly over Schodack Brook without incident and reached the terminal in Hempstead.  At around 8 PM, on the return train, the weight of the engine undermined the bridge, sending it backwards into the flooded creek and causing an enormous explosion that could be clearly heard as far away as Garden City.  The engineer, James Scott of Hempstead, was killed instantly.  Benjamin Carman, the brakeman and Eli Thorpe, trackmaster, were also killed.  Bernard Callahan, the fireman, survived the blast but was pinned down by the debris and drowned to death in the water.  Three of the four others on the train were severely injured.  The dead bodies were brought to David Bedell’s barn where the Hempstead coroner examined their cause of death.  A photo of the incident remains as the oldest surviving image of a train wreck on Long Island.

In the following months, an investigation of the incident revealed that the South Side Railroad was responsible for the shoddy construction of the Hempstead Branch and they were ordered to make repairs and pay for damages.  A couple of other fatal incidents sealed the fate of the South Side.  On April 30, 1879, less than ten years from when the line was opened, the last train rode the Hempstead - Valley Stream branch.  The South Side went bankrupt and its assets were sold at auction.  Locals had always hoped that another concern would purchase the Hempstead line and reopen it.  Instead, the buyer tuned out to be Henry Hilton, manager of the Garden City Company, who had no intention of reopening the line.  In all likelihood, his purchase was an attempt to protect his Garden City line from nearby competition.  West Hempstead would have to wait 1893 before it regained rail service, when the LIRR built the existing branch.

David Bedell continued to live at Woodfield until 1896 when he sold his farm to Edwin C. Duryea.  The Bedells lived to celebrate their 63rd wedding anniversary in 1906.  That year, Ruth passed away at age 90 and David was called to Heaven a few weeks later on July 4th, at age 93.

David and Ruth (Rhodes) Bedell at their 60th wedding anniversary- owners of the farm where the 1875 Woodfield train wreck occurred.

Hempstead Lake Park Homes II

As a follow up to the previous post, the view above is another photo of the Hempstead Lake Park Homes development and highlights one of its most beautiful and attractive features - its private lake, located just off Colonial Drive near the Woodfield Road entrance. Developer Reuben Hillman took advantage of the fact that Schodack Brook, a rivulet fed by a natural spring, ran through his property. As a result, he carved out of it a man-made lake with a 50 foot beach for private recreation of the homeowners. The wooden bridge above was built by Hillman and a newspaper reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle was so struck by the beauty of the scene that he called it "a slice of old Connecticut transplanted to Long Island" and "suggestive of Shakespeare's Garden of Arden".

Schodack Brook, like its sister rivulets Pine Brook to the west and Horse Brook to the east, was once a continuously flowing stream that originated somewhere in the Hempstead Plains - a sandy barren at the center of the Island. It then meandered its way through West Hempstead before forming a series of small ponds in Lakeview. In the 1960s, the installation of sewers across Nassau County caused a dramatic drop in groundwater levels and thereafter our local streams no longer flowed continuously without the help of rainwater runoff, and many of the lovely ponds that once graced our landscape are now mere shells of what they once were. In some cases, such as with Pine's Pond in Malverne and Johnson's Pond in West Hempstead, the body of water was deliberately drained to make way for development. In other cases, such as with the ponds formed along Schodack Brook, the ponds are dying a slow death by asphyxiation. Below is a "now" view of Hempstead Lake Park Homes' private pond as it looks today.

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.