FROM THE ARCHIVES

On the north side of Colonial Springs Road in Wheatley Heights there is a roadside marker that chooses its words very carefully. It says: “Legend Says After Sailing with Pirate Captain Kidd in 1690s, Conklin Built Home Here in 1710. House Destroyed by Fire in 1918.”

The word doing the work is “legend.” It is a good word for late October.

Jacob Conklin built the first home in what is now the Town of Babylon, according to the Town’s own history. How he paid for it is the question. Conklin, the Town’s history says, sailed with the pirate Captain Kidd, and afterward he had a large sum of money and used it to buy vast tracts of land.

There are two versions of how he came ashore. In one, he was pressed into Kidd’s service and escaped while the ship lay at Cold Spring Harbor, hiding among the Native Americans and later buying land from them. In the other, he was a full member of the crew who simply decided to get off when the ship reached Long Island.

The family’s own telling is the better Halloween story. In 1907 a descendant wrote to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to set it down, according to the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, which funded the marker. In that version Conklin, sent ashore for water, slipped away and hid inside a hollowed-out tree. A search party came looking for him. According to the legend, the men sat down on the very log he was hiding in, and never found him. The ship sailed on to Boston, where Kidd was arrested. Kidd was later hanged in London.

Conklin stayed. The Pomeroy Foundation’s account says he married Hannah Platt in 1701 and raised seven children on land that some estimated at 3,500 acres. A 1937 town history called their house “unquestionably the finest.” It stood for more than 200 years, the Town says, until it burned in 1918.

Here is the part most people do not know. Jacob’s son, Colonel Platt Conklin, was the father of Nathaniel Conklin. In 1803 Nathaniel and his mother, Phebe, moved to the south side of what was then Huntington, found that their new house sat next to a tavern, and Phebe declared the place another Babylon. Nathaniel carved “New Babylon” on a stone tablet in his chimney.

So, if you believe the legend, the Town of Babylon was named by the grandson of a man who once ran from Captain Kidd.

Nathaniel’s 1803 house still stands, on Deer Park Avenue just south of the railroad tracks in Babylon Village, moved there in 1871. Jacob’s is gone. The marker is what is left.

Sources: Town of Babylon, “Town History” · Town of Babylon, “Wheatley Heights History” · Town of Babylon, “Historical Markers within the Hamlet of Wheatley Heights” · William G. Pomeroy Foundation, “Jacob Conklin”