Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/98

82 was the largest in the world; it had eight stories, six above ground, and two below ground, and employed 2,000 persons. Stewart's volume from his wholesale and retail business ran to $33 million per annum. In 1833 Stewart was already worth one and a half million; in 1860, twenty million.

In his personal life Stewart was pleasant and sociable. He patronized art and built a mansion at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street to display it. Despite all his wealth and success, Stewart suffered one great deprivation—both his children had died in infancy and there was no one to inherit his fortune or to carry on his career. After he passed sixty, he began to look about for some worthwhile way of using his vast fortune. In 1869 that means at last presented itself.

Out on Long Island to the north and east of the old colonial village of Hempstead lay a vast tract, loosely referred to as the Hempstead Plains. Few roads crossed the area and only a handful of farmhouses interrupted the vast level treeless plain that extended mile on mile as far as Wantagh. The Town of Hempstead which had owned this vast virgin tract since the Revolution was approached in the spring of 1869 by a resident of Tarrytown with an offer to buy the entire area outright at $42 an acre. Stewart heard of the project, and there gradually formed in his mind a grandiose scheme. This was no less than to build on the plains a model city, carefully laid out according to a preconceived plan, and carefully supervised so as to insure the ultimate in beautiful environment, fine homes and desirable inhabitants. The city would be a modern form of feudal domain, wholly owned and operated by the lord of the manor, an idea suggested to Stewart by the great feudal estates of Northern Ireland familiar to him in his youth.

Once the idea was fixed in his mind, Stewart acted swiftly. A Town referendum on the sale of the plains was scheduled for July 17, 1869. Stewart sent in a bid to the astonished Town board of $55 an acre, with the promise of the investment of additional millions in roads, parks, houses, etc., all of which would give employment to armies of local residents for years to come. Agents were dispatched to Hempstead to do a little electioneering, but it was hardly necessary; the residents voted overwhelmingly to accept Stewart's bid. The decisive vote pleased everyone. The Town of Hempstead received the then unheard-of sum of