Place:Nassau, New York, United States

Watchers
NameNassau
Alt namesNassausource: Getty Vocabulary Program
TypeCounty
Coordinates40.75°N 73.583°W
Located inNew York, United States     (1899 - )
Also located inLong Island, New York, United States    
Contained Places
Unknown
Cowneck
Cemetery
Fort Hill Cemetery
Roslyn Cemetery
Westbury Friends Cemetery
Census-designated place
Albertson
Barnum Island
Bay Park
Bellerose Terrace
Bellmore
Bethpage
Carle Place
East Atlantic Beach
East Garden City
East Massapequa
East Meadow
East Norwich
Franklin Square
Garden City Park
Garden City South
Glen Head
Glenwood Landing
Greenvale
Harbor Hills
Harbor Isle
Herricks
Hewlett
Hicksville
Inwood
Jericho
Lakeview
Levittown
Lido Beach
Malverne Park Oaks
Manhasset Hills
Manhasset ( 1898 - )
Merrick
New Cassel
North Bellmore
North Lynbrook
North Massapequa
North Merrick
North New Hyde Park
North Valley Stream
North Wantagh
Old Bethpage
Plainedge
Plainview
Point Lookout
Port Washington
Roosevelt
Roslyn Heights
Saddle Rock Estates
Seaford
Searingtown
South Hempstead
South Valley Stream
University Gardens
Wantagh
West Hempstead
Woodmere
Former community
Motts Point
Hamlet
Baldwin
Locust Valley ( 1899 - present )
Oyster Bay ( 1899 - )
Inhabited place
Atlantic Beach
Baldwin Harbor
Baxter Estates
Bay Colony
Bayville
Bellerose
Bird Grove
Brookville
Cedarhurst
Centre Island
Cove Neck
East Hills
East Rockaway
East Williston
Elmont
Farmingdale
Floral Park
Flower Hill
Freeport
Garden City
Glen Cove Landing
Glen Cove
Great Neck Estates
Great Neck Gardens
Great Neck Plaza
Great Neck
Harbor Green
Hempstead (town)
Hempstead
Hewlett Bay Park
Hewlett Harbor
Hewlett Neck
Hillside Manor
Island Park
Kensington
Kings Point
Lake Success
Lattingtown
Lattingtown ( 1894 - )
Laurel Hollow
Lawrence
Locust Grove
Long Beach
Lynbrook
Malverne
Manorhaven
Massapequa Park
Massapequa
Matinecock
Mill Neck
Mineola
Munsey Park
Muttontown
Nassau Shores
New Hyde Park
North Hempstead
North Hills
Ocean Point
Oceanside ( 1899 - )
Old Brookville
Old Westbury
Oyster Bay (town) ( 1899 - )
Oyster Bay Cove
Oyster Bay
Plandome Heights
Plandome Manor
Plandome
Port Washington North
Rockville Centre
Roslyn Estates
Roslyn Harbor
Roslyn
Russell Gardens
Saddle Rock
Salisbury
Sands Point
Sea Cliff
South Farmingdale
South Floral Park
South Glenwood Landing
Stewart Manor
Syosset
Thomaston
Uniondale
Upper Brookville
Valley Stream
Westbury South
Westbury
Williston Park
Woodbury
Woodsburgh
Inhabited region
Cedar Swamp
Town and constituency
Hempstead ( 1899 - present )
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Nassau County is a county in the U.S. state of New York. At the 2020 U.S. census, Nassau County's population is 1,395,774. The county seat is Mineola and the largest town is Hempstead.

Nassau County is situated on western Long Island, bordering New York City's borough of Queens to the west, and Suffolk County to the east. It is the most densely populated and second-most populous county in the State of New York outside of New York City, with which it maintains extensive rail and highway connectivity, and is considered one of the central counties within the New York metropolitan area. Nassau County contains two cities, three towns, 64 incorporated villages, and more than 60 unincorporated hamlets. Nassau County has a designated police department, fire commission, and elected executive and legislative bodies.

A 2012 Forbes article based on the American Community Survey reported Nassau County as the most expensive county and one of the highest income counties in the United States, and the most affluent in the state of New York, with four of the nation's top ten towns by median income located in the county. Nassau County high school students often feature prominently as winners of the International Science and Engineering Fair and similar STEM-based academic awards. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the Town of Oyster Bay and the Old Westbury campus of New York Institute of Technology are both globally prominent life sciences research institutions in Nassau County.

Contents

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The area now designated Nassau County was originally the eastern 70% of Queens County, one of the original 12 counties formed in 1683, and was then contained within two towns: Hempstead and Oyster Bay. In 1784, the Town of North Hempstead, was formed through secession by the northern portions of the Town of Hempstead. Nassau County was formed in 1899 by the division of Queens County, after the western portion of Queens had become a borough of New York City in 1898, as the three easternmost towns seceded from the county.

When the first European settlers arrived, among the Native Americans to occupy the present area of Nassau County were the Marsapeque, Matinecoc, and Sacatogue. Dutch settlers in New Netherland predominated in the western portion of Long Island, while English settlers from Connecticut occupied the eastern portion. Until 1664, Long Island was split, roughly at the present border between Nassau and Suffolk counties, between the Dutch in the west and Connecticut claiming the east. The Dutch did grant an English settlement in Hempstead (now in western Nassau), but drove settlers from the present-day eastern Nassau hamlet of Oyster Bay as part of a boundary dispute. In 1664, all of Long Island became part of the English Province of New York within the Shire of York. Present-day Queens and Nassau were then just part of a larger North Riding. In 1683, the colonial territory of Yorkshire was dissolved, Suffolk County and Queens County were established, and the local seat of government was moved west from Hempstead to Jamaica (now in New York City).

By 1700, very little of Long Island had not been purchased from the native Indians by the English colonists, and townships controlled whatever land had not already been distributed. The courthouse in Jamaica was torn down by the British during the American Revolution to use the materials to build barracks.

In 1784, following the American Revolutionary War, the Town of Hempstead was split in two, when Patriots in the northern part formed the new Town of North Hempstead, leaving Loyalist majorities in the Town of Hempstead. About 1787, a new Queens County Courthouse was erected (and later completed) in the new Town of North Hempstead, near present-day Mineola (now in Nassau County), known then as Clowesville.

The Long Island Rail Road reached as far east as Hicksville in 1837, but did not proceed to Farmingdale until 1841 due to the Panic of 1837. The 1850 census was the first in which the population of the three western towns (Flushing, Jamaica, and Newtown) exceeded that of the three eastern towns that are now part of Nassau County. Concerns were raised about the condition of the old courthouse and the inconvenience of travel and accommodations, with the three eastern and three western towns divided on the location for the construction of a new one. Around 1874, the seat of county government was moved to Long Island City from Mineola.[1] As early as 1875, representatives of the three eastern towns began advocating the separation of the three eastern towns from Queens, with some proposals also including the towns of Huntington and Babylon (in Suffolk County).[2][3][4]

In 1898, the western portion of Queens County became a borough of the City of Greater New York, leaving the eastern portion a part of Queens County but not part of the Borough of Queens. As part of the city consolidation plan, all town, village, and city (other than NYC) governments within the borough were dissolved, as well as the county government with its seat in Jamaica. The areas excluded from the consolidation included all of the Town of North Hempstead, all of the Town of Oyster Bay, and most of the Town of Hempstead (excluding the Rockaway Peninsula, which was separated from the Town of Hempstead and became part of the city borough). In 1899, following approval from the New York State Legislature, the three towns were separated from Queens County, and the new county of Nassau was constituted.

In preparation for the new county, in November 1898, voters had selected Mineola to become the county seat for the new county (before Mineola incorporated as a village in 1906 and set its boundaries almost entirely within the Town of North Hempstead), winning out over Hicksville and Hempstead. The Garden City Company (founded in 1893 by the heirs of Alexander Turney Stewart) donated four acres of land for the county buildings in the Town of Hempstead, just south of the Mineola train station and the present day village of Mineola. The land and the buildings have a Mineola postal address, but are within the present day Village of Garden City, which did not incorporate, nor set its boundaries, until 1919.

In 1917, the village of Glen Cove was granted a city charter, making it independent from the Town of Oyster Bay. In 1918, the village of Long Beach was incorporated in the Town of Hempstead. In 1922, it became a city, making it independent of the town. These are the only two administrative divisions in Nassau County identified as cities.

From the early 1900s until the Depression and the early 1930s, many hilly farmlands on the North Shore were transformed into luxurious country estates for wealthy New Yorkers, with the area receiving the "Gold Coast" moniker and becoming the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. One summer resident of the Gold Coast was President Theodore Roosevelt, at Sagamore Hill. In 1908, William Kissam Vanderbilt constructed the Long Island Motor Parkway as a toll road through Nassau County. With overpasses and bridges to remove intersections, it was among the first limited access motor highways in the world, and was also used as a racecourse to test the capabilities of the fledgling automobile industry.

Nassau County, with its extensive flat land, was the site of many aviation firsts.[5] Military aviators for both World Wars were trained on the Hempstead Plains at installations such as Mitchel Air Force Base, and a number of successful aircraft companies were established. Charles Lindberg took off for Paris from Roosevelt Field in 1927, completing the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight from the United States. Grumman (which in 1986 employed 23,000 people on Long Island) built many planes for World War II, and later contributed the Apollo Lunar Module to the Space program.

The United Nations Security Council was temporarily located in Nassau County from 1946 to 1951. Council meetings were held at the Sperry Gyroscope headquarters in the village of Lake Success near the border with Queens County. It was here on June 27, 1950, that the Security Council voted to back U.S. President Harry S Truman and send a coalition of forces to the Korean Peninsula, leading to the Korean War.

Until World War II, most of Nassau County was still farmland, particularly in the eastern portion. Following the war, the county saw an influx of people from the five boroughs of New York City, especially from Brooklyn and Queens, who left their urban dwellings for a more suburban setting. This led to a massive population boom in the county. In 1947, William Levitt built his first planned community in Nassau County, in the Island Trees section (later renamed Levittown; this should not be confused with the county's first planned community, in general, which is Garden City). While in the 1930s, Robert Moses had engineered curving parkways and parks such as Jones Beach State Park and Bethpage State Park for the enjoyment of city-dwellers, in the 1950s and 1960s the focus turned to alleviating commuter traffic.

In 1994, Federal Judge Arthur Spatt declared the Nassau County Board of Supervisors unconstitutional and directed that a 19-member legislature be formed. Republicans won 13 seats in the election and chose Bruce Blakeman as the first Presiding Officer (Speaker). Among the first class of Legislators were Peter J. Schmitt (R-Massapequa), Judith Jacobs (D-Woodbury), John Ciotti (R-North Valley Stream), Dennis Dunne Sr. (R-Levittown), Francis X. Becker (R-Lynbrook), Vincent T. Muscarella (R-West Hempstead), Ed Mangano (R-Bethpage), Michael Fiechter (C-North Bellmore), Roger Corbin (D-Westbury), Salvatore Pontillo (R-Farmingdale), Bruce Nyman (D-Long Beach), Edward Ward (R-Wantagh), Darlene Harris (R-Uniondale), Ed Oppenheimer (D-Rockville Centre), John Canning (R-Sea Cliff), Bruce Blakeman (R-Woodmere), Lisanne Altmann (D-Great Neck), Richard Nicolello (R-New Hyde Park), Barbara Johnson (D-Port Washington).

According to a Forbes magazine 2012 survey, residents of Nassau County have the 12th highest median household annual income in the country and the highest in the state.[6] In the 1990s, however, Nassau County experienced substantial budget problems, forcing the county to near bankruptcy. Thus, the county government increased taxes to prevent a takeover by the state of New York, leading to the county having high property taxes. Nevertheless, on January 27, 2011, a State of New York oversight board seized control of Nassau County's finances, saying the wealthy and heavily taxed county had failed to balance its $2.6 billion budgets.

Timeline

Date Event Source
1899 County formed Source:Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources
1899 Land records recorded Source:Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources
1900 First census Source:Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790-1990
1900 No significant boundary changes after this year Source:Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790-1990

Population History

source: Source:Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790-1990
Census Year Population
1900 55,448
1910 83,930
1920 126,120
1930 303,053
1940 406,748
1950 672,765
1960 1,300,171
1970 1,428,080
1980 1,321,582
1990 1,287,348

Note: In 1898 Nassau County was formed from Queens, the rest of which remained a county while becoming part of New York city (as Queens Borough). According to the 1900 census, the estimated population of Queens' present-day area at earlier censuses was: 1790, 15,014; 1800, 16,916; 1810, 19,336; 1820, 21,519; 1830, 22,460; 1840, 30,324; 1850, 36,833; 1860, 57,391; 1870, 73.803; 1880, 90,574; 1890, 128,059. Estimates consistent with these for the present-day area of Nassau are: 1790, 9,855; 1800, 10,274; 1810, 11,892; 1820, 13,273; 1830, 13,411; 1840, 15,844; 1850, 18,240; 1860, 24,488; 1870, 28,335; 1880, 34,015; 1890, 41,009.

Research Tips

External links

  • Outstanding guide to Nassau County family history and genealogy resources (FamilySearch Research Wiki). Birth, marriage, and death records, censuses, naturalizations, wills, deeds, county and town histories, cemeteries, churches, newspapers, libraries, and genealogical societies.


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Nassau County, New York. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.