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Huntington, New York

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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A township of Suffolk county, New York, U.S.A., in the central part of the N. side of Long Island, bounded on the N. by Huntington Bay, a part of Long Island Sound. Pop. (1905, state census) 10,236; (1910) 12,004. The S. part of the township is largely taken up with market-gardening; but along the Sound are the villages of Huntington, Cold Spring Harbor, Centreport and Northport, which are famous for the fine residences owned by New York business men; they are served by the Wading river branch of the Long Island Railroad. Northport - pop., (1910 census) 2096 - incorporateu in 1894, is the most easterly of these; it has a large law-publishing house, shipbuilding yards and valuable oyster-fisheries. Cold Spring Harbor, 3 2 m. E. of Brooklyn, is a small unincorporated village, once famous for its whale-fisheries, and now best known for the presence here of the New York State Fish Hatchery, and of the Biological Laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and of the laboratory of the Department of Experimental Evolution of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The village of Huntington, 31. m. E. of Cold Spring, is unincorporated, but is the most important of the three and has the largest summer colony. There is a public park on the water-front. The Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Building is occupied by the public library, which faces a monument to Nathan Hale on Main Street. A big boulder on the shore of the bay marks the place of Hale's capture by the British on the 21st of September 1776. Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) occupied the village and built a British fort here near the close of the American War of Independence. Huntington's inhabitants were mostly strong patriots, notably Ebenezer Prime (1700-1779), pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, which the British used as a barracks, and his son Benjamin Young Prime (1733-1791), a physician, linguist and patriot poet, who was the father of Samuel Irenaeus Prime (1812-1885), editor of the New York Observer. Walt Whitman was born near the village of Huntington, and established there in 1836, and for three years edited, the weekly newspaper the Long Islander. The first settlement in the township was made in 1653; in1662-1664Huntington was under the government of Connecticut. The township until 1872 included the present township of Babylon to the S., along the Great South Bay.