The idea
of a Greater New York had been considered since the 1840s. Manhattan and
Brooklyn, then locked in civic rivalry, had little interest in adopting the
expenses of rural parts of Queens. And those rural areas had long since made
their animosity toward the cities known. The map of the proposed Greater New
York that came out of the Legislature in 1894 embraced only the western towns
of Queens, with just a small wedge of western Hempstead, including Inwood,
Lawrence, Bellerose, Elmont and all of the Rockaways. North Hempstead, Oyster
Bay and the rest of Hempstead were excluded from the vote.
A
Republican boss, Thomas C. Platt, pushed a consolidation bill through the
Legislature in the spring of 1896, and Governor Levi P. Morton, also a
Republican, signed it in May. New York, as it is now known, would come into
existence on Jan. 1, 1898.
What was
left was a strange political creature, unique in the country, and on untested
constitutional ground. A Board of Supervisors still ruled all of Queens, but
could not levy taxes on the part that was in New York City. And that was the
part that held the majority of votes on the board.
A tax
revolt brewed. On Dec. 17, 1897, a group of the old secessionists gathered to
form the Tax-Payers' Non-partisan Association of Queens county. Among them were
Hicks and former Assemblyman James Pearsall, who had pushed the secession bill
of 1876 and lost. A relative newcomer, P. Halstead Scudder, descendant of the
Scudder family of Northport, made a lengthy speech that earned him a leadership
position next to Hicks, some 30 years his elder.
The
possibility of annexation to Greater New York was quickly dismissed. Another
idea of creating a new county by combining Queens County’s eastern towns with
different towns of western Suffolk seemed unlikely to happen. He rejected all
except that of forming Nassau only from the non-city remnants of Queens.
Charles E. Shepard, the editor of the "Long Islander," in Huntington,
tried to convince delegates to include his hometown, but others prevailed,
among them Pearsall, who had seen his bill go down in flames 20 years earlier. A
north Hempstead resident favored annexation to Suffolk while another wanted to
join New York City. James Ludlam of Oyster Bay offered a motion that it would
be the best interest of the citizens of Hempstead, North Hempstead, and Oyster
Bay to withdraw from the county of Queens.
J.B. Coles
Tappan of Oyster Bay offered the resolution to create Nassau, which passed. The
delegates chose Halstead to head a contingent to Albany. It would bring him
face to face in opposition to his younger brother, Townsend Scudder, a Democrat
and hired counsel for the Queens Board of Supervisors, which was dead-set
against dividing their county.
Assemblyman
George Wallace -- former editor of the Southside
Observer in Rockville Centre -- introduced the county bill on Feb. 17,
1898. It passed the Assembly and Senate the following month.
On April
27, a large delegation went to see Republican Governor Frank S. Black, who
allotted very little time for discussion. Black was a friend of Hicks.
Hicks
waited patiently as Townsend Scudder took most of the allotted time. Townsend
began by saying the Board of Supervisors of the more-populous part of the
county did not want the division, that it would be expensive, and that the new
county would have no public property except Barnum Island off the South Shore
-- worth about $25,000. He argued that with the nation at war -- Teddy
Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were fighting the Spanish in Cuba -- it was an
inopportune time to create a new county.
When
Townsend finished, Hicks politely assured the governor that the Republican
taxpayers of the eastern towns favored the measure. Black signed the bill into
law and Nassau County would be created as of January 1, 1899. At the first
meeting of the new Board of Supervisors, the truck house of the Mineola Hook
& Ladder Company was chosen as the temporary house of the county court. The
colors of orange and blue were adopted for use in the official flag. The seal
chosen was a crest with the golden rampant lion of the House of Nassau on an
azure blue field, encircled by seven gold bars.
The first
order of business for the new board included erecting a much-contested
courthouse, on land owned by A.T. Stewart's Garden City Co. On July 13, 1900, a
slim Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican governor of New York, and recently
named vice presidential candidate, stepped to the podium at Mineola to lay the
cornerstone of the new courthouse.
Sources:
“Philemon
Halstead Scudder.” Philemon Halstead Scudder b. 22 Jul 1861 Oyster Bay,
Queens, New York d. 3 Apr 1909 New York:
Scudder Association,
tng.scudder.org/getperson.php?personID=I16700&tree=tree1.
Smits,
Edward J. Nassau Suburbia, U.S.A.: The
First Seventy-Five Years of Nassau County, New York 1899 to 1974. Doubleday
& Company, 1974.
