Rediscovering Long Island’s Vanished Land: The Hempstead Plains

Long before the suburban sprawl, shopping centers and expressways, central Long Island was a fertile and thriving sea of grass. The Hempstead Plains, a rare prairie ecosystem stretching for tens of thousands of acres, once defined Nassau County's common land.

On October 17, an array of students, faculty, and staff gathered at Stony Brook University's Humanities Institute to hear historian Jennifer L. Anderson outline how this landscape, and the communities that so arduously fought for it, disappeared.

Anderson's talk, "Transforming Hempstead Plains: The Demise of the 'Public Commons' on Long Island," combined environmental history, archival research, and social critique. Her presentation, part of the Humanities Institute's faculty lecture series, drew mostly professors and staff from across the College of Arts and Sciences. What began as a local history became a story of land, race, and belonging, one that continue to shape Long Island today.

"It was this amazing resource… Everyone who lived in the community had access to it. Whether you were a wealthy landowner with 30 cows or a poor family with one mangy cow," Anderson said early in her talk, standing before a map of the island from 1802. "What remains, I guess I would say, is priceless."

She began with the plains as they existed in the 17th and 18th centuries: open, treeless grassland shared as common land among settlers in the town of Hempstead. The "defenders of the common," as they were called, maintained access to the plains for grazing and hay-cutting. Black and Native Long Islanders, often excluded from formal land ownership, nonetheless depended on the commons for subsistence: grazing livestock, harvesting resources, and asserting informal claims to land.

By the early 19th century, Anderson explained, the communal system began to fracture. Pressure from private development, new agricultural science, and a shifting moral logic of "improvement" transformed the plains from shared resource into real estate. "There's a cultural turn," she said, "where land that was once understood as valuable because it was common begins to be called 'waste.'"

That rebranding, from "treasure" to "wasteland," was not just semantic. It justified enclosure, sale, and eventually displacement. Anderson traced the process through maps, deeds, and newspaper clippings: excursions organized by the Farmers Club of New York and the Long Island Rail Road to promote agricultural settlement; experiments in fertilizer production that linked Long Island farms to Manhattan's waste; and booster campaigns that cast the island's "barren" center as fertile ground for improvement.

The decisive break came during the Civil War, when the Town of Hempstead voted to sell the commons to cover poor relief and education costs. Developer Alexander Stewart, founder of A.T. Stewart & Co. and one of the wealthiest men in America, purchased vast tracts of land to create what became Garden City. Evictions followed almost immediately.

"Within a generation, the land that had sustained people for centuries was gone," Anderson said.

Only a fragment of the Hempstead Plains survives today, 19 fenced acres behind Nassau Community College, preserved thanks to a biologist who recognized its rare ecology. Controlled burns now mimic Indigenous fire practices to maintain what remains of the native grasses.

Anderson suggested that the story of Hempstead Plains reframes Long Island's modern identity not as a product of mid-century suburbia, but as the outcome of centuries-old patterns of exclusion and enclosure. "We think of segregation as starting with redlining," she said during the Q&A. But she argues it began with access of land defining who could belong to a place.

Audience questions ranged from property law to personal genealogy. Rita Langdon, assistant vice president for communications, even traced her 12th-generation ancestor to the original settlers who grazed cattle on the plains. Others asked about the environmental management of the preserve and Anderson's plans for a book-length study.

"Hempstead is trying to take over my book, and I haven't decided yet," she explained. But she added that she has "way more juicy material than I shared today."

What lingered after the talk was a sense of continuity, an ongoing conversation about understanding the deep roots of the place we live.

-Lily Miller