Buried in the woods off of Oyster Bay Road is what I believe to be the entrance to the Mill Neck Club, which sat on what is today 'Frost Mill Lodge', the Irving Brokaw estate in Mill Neck. The ponds in this area were heavily used for ice skating in the winter months (Brokaw was a very serious ice skater, most likely why he bought this property) though the Mill Neck Club was used for shooting and or hunting (and probably skating in the winter). Courtesy of An Aesthete's Lament: "On 3 May 1916, The New York Times ran an article stating that the Mill Neck Club's club house was the property of Irving Brokaw. However, the building was then being physically moved from Oyster Bay to Glen Cove. An earlier article about Brokaw's purchase of the building and its land (27 September 1914) called it the Mill Neck Gun Club, "one of the oldest organizations at Oyster Bay"—so it was a shooting club rather than a skating organization, though arguably that could have happened there too. The property was stated as being 105 acres in size, and that Arthur D Weekes was the president of the club."
You can still make out what looks like the driveway running along the pond when you look at it from google earth. Above is the view looking into the property, below is the view looking out towards Oyster Bay Road.
Lower Francis Pond, which is now a nature preserve.
Lower Francis Pond, which is now a nature preserve. Update: Arthur Delano Weeks, the president of the Mill Neck Gun Club, lived just east of Lower Francis Pond at the intersection of Beaver Brook and Oyster Bay Glen Cove Roads. He was an attorney and mayor of the Village of Oyster Bay.
5 comments:
On 3 May 1916, The New York Times ran an article stating that the Mill Neck Club's club house was the property of Irving Brokaw. However, he was moving the building was then being physically moved from Oyster Bay to Glen Cove. An earlier article about Brokaw's purchase of the building and its land (27 September 1914) called it the Mill Neck Gun Club, "one of the oldest organizations at Oyster Bay"—so it was a shooting club rather than a skating organization, though arguably that could have happened there too. The property was stated as being 105 acres in size, and that Arthur D Weekes was the president of the club. Also Brokaw wasn't just a skating enthusiast; he was a US national champion.
Thanks! The only article I was able to find was about how Brokaw agreed to move the Mill Neck Clubhouse after he purchased the property and they were supposed to do it in the middle of the night but things got screwed up and the house was stuck in the middle of Oyster Bay Road right at the morning rush hour, which caused some sort of commotion.
If memory serves me right Brokaw skated in the 1908 Olympics, I think he won a medal.
Kind of ironic that it used to be a shooting club and now it is a nature and wildlife preserve.
I thought the same thing
do you know how many acres mill neck preserve is??
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