Back on Breezy Island -Oakdale, NY

Along the shore of Great South Bay, on Long Island, hidden in dense scrub oak, is a colony of exiles. So wrote Alexander Kidd, in "Country Homes on the Connetquot River," April 1901. These colonists in question were millionaires, seeking a retreat from the hectic demands of life in New York City. And the verdant fastness they had discovered was called Oakdale.

Oakdale is located in the town of Islip, some 60 miles east of New York City. As Kidd goes on to relate, the forest was not all that dense, as much of the original timber on the island had long since been chopped down and sold for cordwood. For much of its early history, however, the area was fairly remote and sparsely settled.

The modern origins of Oakdale date to the late 1600s, with William Nicoll, an Englishman well connected in the new British colony. He began acquiring land in the vicinity, first from the local Secatogue Indians in 1683, and later through grants from the government. The Nicoll Patent, as it was finally configured, contained much, but not all, of the town of Islip, including the area along the bay that became known as Oakdale.

It's hard to say when exactly the name Oakdale was first applied, though it appears to have arisen around 1870, and the honor is usually given to William H. Ludlow, a Civil War veteran and New York State Assemblyman. He married into the Nicoll family in 1846 and subsequently inherited the remaining Nicoll lands east of the Connetquot River. Early maps show a strong diffusion of forest, primarily the above-mentioned scrub oak, so it is not hard to see how the name arose.

Even before Oakdale had a name, however, New Yorkers were finding their way to it along South Country Road, the present-day Montauk Highway, one of the three main thoroughfares the English laid out to traverse the island from east to west. What these early travelers were seeking was no different from Kidd's colonists: they wanted to get out of the city and enjoy the pleasures of nature. More specifically, they wanted to hunt and fish.

Despite the South Country Road, the area in the early 1800s, before the coming of the Long Island Rail Road, was sparsely settled and overgrown. Numerous small streams ran south to the bay, forming marshes and inlets that made travel difficult. Making it to Oakdale was an exercise that involved many changes of horse and the hazarding of mud, swamps, and thickets.

Another periodical account, this one from the New York Mirror, dated November 15, 1837, recounts what awaited the intrepid traveler when he did make Oakdale: "The Connetquot Hotel is a good old-fashioned Dutch inn of a corpulent form, with an open space around it partly covered with turf. An immense elm stands on the west side, which is a marked object, famous for having had more fat bucks tied up to it than any other tree in the country."

This hotel, established in 1820, was run by Elihu "Lige" Snedecor, and his hospitality, as well as the quality of the hunting and fishing in the surrounding forests, made a name for the area among the cognoscenti. It was such wealthy outdoorsmen from New York, appreciative of the relative uniqueness of an unspoiled preserve within a day's journey from the city, who would purchase Snedecor's establishment and its environs, forming the South Side Sportsmen's Club in 1866.