Land Use Trail: Boardwalk Landing

A view from the boardwalk landing.

NPS/Sucena

Long before the Floyds arrived, this land has been home to the Unkechaug people. Today the Unkechaug Nation is centered nearby at the Poospatuck reservation. Poospatuck, meaning “where the waters meet,” is one of the oldest recognized sovereign Native American reservations in the United States. Over the centuries the Unkechaug have fished, farmed, hunted, lived and worked on this land.  

When European colonists arrived in the 17th century they utilized a complex legal system and foreign bureaucratic procedures to dispossess Indigenous Long Islanders of their land, conferring ownership to individuals and making claims to large areas such as the Manor of St. George, patented originally to William “Tangier” Smith. While the land that would become the William Floyd Estate was originally deeded to the Unkechaug in perpetuity from the Manor of St. George, it was later sold by the Smith family to William Floyd’s grandfather, Richard Floyd II. 

Soon after purchasing the more than 4,000 acres of land in 1718, laborers for the Floyd family began the back-breaking work of clearing fields, constructing ditches, planting and tending crops, and doing the innumerable agricultural and domestic jobs that were required to establish and operate a farm of this scale. This work was largely performed by indentured and enslaved people until slavery was abolished in New York in 1827 and indentured servitude was phased out by the Floyds in the mid 19th century. Immigrant wage labor entered the mix in the 1840s and continued into the 20th century. As you walk through the land, look for the ditches and mounds that continue to mark the edges of long abandoned fields, the “lopped” trees that were bent over to create living fences, and the cleared fields that once grew corn, rye, wheat, and clover.