FROM THE ARCHIVES · NORTH BABYLON

On Saturday the Cerebral Palsy Family 5K runs at Belmont Lake State Park. On Sunday the Walk to End Alzheimer’s fills the same paths. Several thousand people will spend the weekend circling a body of water that exists because of one man’s opinion about horses.

Beginning in 1867, the financier August Belmont bought 1,300 acres here, according to the Town’s own history of North Babylon, and built a horse-breeding farm and “a spacious 24-room mansion.” He called the operation Nursery Stud. Royal Phelps, the Town’s profile notes, is credited with introducing Belmont to the rural community in the first place.

Belmont was not dabbling. The aim was to breed the best racehorse in America, and the place was built to be self-sufficient while he tried: fields and silos for corn, hay, wheat and rye, pasture for cows and horses, a trout pond, a thirty-acre lake, and a private one-mile racetrack with grandstands so he could watch his own stock work. There was also, in a detail that tells you everything about the scale of the thing, a bowling alley.

The name on the Belmont Stakes is his. The race was first run in 1867 — the same year the farm began — and in 1869 it was won by Belmont’s own colt, Fenian. He bought the great racer Kentucky outright and stood him at Nursery Stud until the horse died in 1875.

Belmont died in 1890 and the estate passed to his son, August Belmont II, who eventually moved the breeding business to Kentucky. The Kentucky farm took the same name, and it is the one that produced Man o’ War. The best horse in the bloodline, in other words, was foaled after the family left Babylon.

Then the land did what large private land does. During the First World War the estate’s racetrack became Camp Damm, an Army Air Corps training facility, from 1918 to 1919. After the war the camp was disbanded.

The mansion was photographed around 1925, the Town notes, “just before the house was demolished.” A portion of it is said to have been moved to Straight Path and Little East Neck Road and turned into a church — a story that is repeated locally and that we have not been able to confirm. If you know the building, write to us.

Belmont Lake State Park was established in 1926. Robert Moses, then running the Long Island park commission, helped secure the purchase; in 1935 he made it the regional headquarters for every state park on Long Island, which it still is. Region-wide permits are sold there, and the New York State Park Police keep their headquarters on the grounds. The park today covers 463 acres — roughly a third of what Belmont bought.

The lake itself is spring-fed. How big it is depends on who you ask: the state’s own page says 26 acres in one paragraph and 42 in another, and the historical accounts of the estate say thirty. We mention it because somebody always asks, and because the honest answer is that nobody has settled it.

None of which you need to know to walk it on Sunday. But the next time you are standing on that shore wondering why there is a lake in the middle of North Babylon, the answer is that a man in Manhattan wanted somewhere to watch his horses run.

Sources: Town of Babylon, North Babylon Community Profile · New York State Parks, Belmont Lake State Park