History, Natural History & the Arts
On July 30, NYS Environmental Conversation Officer (ECO) Perkins responded to the Bay Shore Marina in Islip, in Suffolk County on Long Island for a report of an injured osprey observed in a parking lot for hours.
Officer Perkins arrived and discovered the bird moving slowly and unable to fly. [Read more…] about Wildlife Rescuers Save Ducks, Osprey, Alligator & Rattlesnake
An obscure bit of early 20th century technology embroiled Dr. Woody Register in a murder mystery. Register, a professor of history at the University of the South (Sewanee), became intrigued by the detective dictograph and followed its trail to the 1914 murder of Louise Bailey in Freeport, in the town of Hempstead, in Nassau County on the South Shore of Long Island. [Read more…] about A 1914 Freeport, Long Island Murder Mystery
Greig Stewart “Chubby” Jackson was a swinging sensation in his day. A child of vaudevillians, he was raised in an enclave of actors, musicians, and performers in Freeport, Long Island against the backdrop of Prohibition and a burgeoning club scene. Exposed to music at an early age, he jumped from high school to playing bass in swing bands in New York City and on the road, most notably with bandleader Woody Herman. [Read more…] about Chubby Jackson, Jazz and Freeport, Long Island
Two Black men were shot and killed by a police officer in Freeport on a cold winter morning in 1946. Another was wounded. All three were brothers, two were World War II veterans dressed in their military uniforms. The ensuing outcry and investigations would spread far beyond the south shore of Long Island and bring the story of racial tensions on Long Island to the national level. [Read more…] about The Ferguson Brothers Lynching on Long Island (Podcast)
In a book dedicated to Wilfred Ferguson, the son of Charles Ferguson, teacher and historian Christopher Verga resurrects the story of two Roosevelt, New York brothers killed by a Freeport police officer in 1946.
Verga opens The Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island: A Civil Rights Catalyst (History Press, 2022) with an account of the long history of racism on Long Island and in the Freeport area including Ku Klux Klan activity. The background to the 1946 killings takes up the first third of the book. The book is well researched and referenced with extended quotes from official court documents and newspaper accounts. [Read more…] about Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island: A Civil Rights Catalyst
One of the most horrific anti-Semitic events in United States history happened in Marietta, Georgia. On August 17, 1915, Leo Frank, former director of the local National Pencil Company factory who was falsely convicted of murdering a teenage female factory worker, was dragged out of a state prison cell, taken to Marietta, and lynched.
A decade later, while Congress was sharply restricting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and a revitalized Ku Klux Klan was attracting adherents nationwide, Ernest Louis, a Jewish pharmacist living and working in Freeport, NY, on Long Island, was falsely accused of molesting a local teenage girl and forced to flee the Long Island town with his family. [Read more…] about When The Klan Ruled In Freeport, Long Island
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