Workwear & Footwear For Lindenhurst

The Village of Lindenhurst traces its beginning back to the Indians, when Secatogue and Massapequa tribes roamed the “Lindenhurst” woods in search of food. The area was then called Neguntatogue, which means, “forsaken land.” The Huntington farmers of English origin were the first white people to discover the territory. They came in search of salt hay. It was found growing abundantly in our marshland. In 1657 Jonas Wood, a Huntington farmer, and his neighbors signed a treaty with the Secatogues for five necks of land, including Santapogue Neck (now Venetian Shores). Little Neck, which is the land west of the Lindenhurst Canal, was acquired a short time later. Although the Huntington farmers came here in the 1600s, there was no settlement established at the time. In the 1780s Jesse Ketcham and his wife, the former Temperance Brush, built a home on what is now Montauk Highway just east of Washington Avenue. Other early settlers in “Huntington South” (as this area was then called) were the Strongs, the Bartos, the Smiths, the Van Nostrands and the Fleets. They lived quiet, farm lives until 1867 when the South Side Rail Road laid a single track to Babylon. The area was then opened, with travel to New York City being quicker and easier. Thomas Wellwood, an Irishman, and his wife Abby, had bought some acreage as early as 1861. After the arrival of the railroad, they purchased vast amounts of land. By 1870 they owned so much land that the railroad’s timetable listed a “Wellwood Station.” Around this time Thomas Wellwood met Charles S. Schleier, a native of Breslau, Germany. He had come to America in 1850 and settled in Brooklyn. Schleier has a great dream to build a “place where German immigrants can live and work.” Charles Schleier had soon sold Thomas Wellwood on the idea of establishing a “City of Breslau.”