The Church Charity Foundation of Long Island was founded in 1851 and was a charitable organization collectively supported by Episcopal churches in Brooklyn. In its first few years of existence, the Foundation operated from two houses on Carlton Avenue, which served as shelters for orphans and the elderly. In 1856, the Foundation purchased 25 lots at Albany Avenue and Herkimer Street in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, on which its first building was opened in 1860 as the Home for Aged and Orphans. In the ensuing decades, the Foundation expanded its services to include a medical center called St. John's Hospital, a school for nurses, and a home for the blind, which were housed at various locations to accommodate growing numbers of people in need.
In a promotion to raise funds in late 1901 for its "mid-winter fete",, the foundation published the 1902 Long Island Calendar. The 168-page booklet featured monthly calendars and "legends, myths, stories and historical sketches of Long Island." The May 1902 section of the publication featured a profile of Roslyn. PDFs of the May section and the entire 102 Long Island Calendar are provided below .
Highlights from the 1902 Long Island Calendar
Roslyn
Roslyn, at the head of Hempstead Harbor, on the north shore of Long Island, is one of the villages fortunate enough to have kept inviolate many of its interesting landmarks of the past. Hidden away in the back lots of the Skillman farm, not far from the railroad, and a short distance from the marble palace on Harbor Hill, is a rude pile of stones, the remains of a fire-place the Hessians used while encamped here. The old Skillman house, beautifully kept, standing on a bit of a hill overlooking the cross roads of the village center, is as finely sentinelled by gigantic box as its older neighbor across the dam,, the Bogart house; this latter brought periodically forward in the newspaper world, as the halting place where General Washington breakfasted on the way to New York when he made his famous trip over the island in a quaint old barouche drawn by four white horses.
People
Long Island air must have wonderful preservative qualities, for there are so many old residents in all of its villages. It is no unusual thing to meet active men and women from eighty to ninety years of age, and probably more would live to be centenarians, if they could be persuaded to take better care of themselves when they reach the nineties.
Home of a Literary Circle
Forty years ago Roslyn was the home of a clever literary circle. The poet Bryant at Cedarmere, Parke Godwin at Clover Croft, Richard Storrs Willis at Willowmere, the present home of his daughter, Mrs. Aaron Ward. Chas. A. Dana had a cottage in Roslyn, and there drew to them from the outside world many brilliant men and women, artists, writers, brilliant and versa tile literary persons, so that the life here was most charming.
The Gifts of Ellen Ward
The Water Fountain was a memorial gift of Mrs. Ellen Ward, a prominent church woman, whose gifts in New York and Roslyn were numerous and of a noteworthy character. After her death , her children, remembering her interest in and love for Roslyn, gave in her memory the handsome stone clock tower in the triangle facing the Bogart homestead, and with a fine outlook over the Sound.
A Poem from William Cullen Bryant
Map of Long Island showing the Long Island Railroad System
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