Thursday, April 25, 2024
The area surrounding St. Matthias Church, located on the corner of Jerusalem and Oakfield avenues, became a safe haven for African-American residents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They lived among Quakers, a community that favored the abolishment of slavery, according to a report independently compiled by Gary Hammond, a retired registrar of Nassau County Museum Services.
In Jerusalem — the original name for the area that is now part of Bellmore and Wantagh — blacks and whites lived and worked side-by-side. Named “the Brush,” residents of both races tended the same fields and brought grain to the same millhouse. Black children had their own school, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church served black neighbors as early as 1845.
Although removed from Merrick and Bellmore’s border, the construction of St. Matthias was made possible through real estate broker Hermann Henry Cammann, a member of the wealthy Merrick family. He donated the money to build the church in name of his son, Robert, who “took a great interest in the colored people residing in this section of Nassau County,” according to a 1905 Episcopal Diocese report. Residents might recognize the name from Cammanns Pond in Merrick, which was part of the family’s estate.
The community that bordered by Oakfield Avenue, Pea Pond and Saw Mill roads was “mixed,” according to the 1900 U.S. federal census. By 1915, 44 black families lived there, according to the New York state census. Fifteen years later, the 1930 federal census showed the same area was comprised entirely of black families.
“Today, St. Matthias stands as the only surviving original building from the first attempts by the Episcopal Diocese to include ‘colored’ [people] from Queens and Nassau into the church,” Hammond wrote.
Sources: Gary Hammond, Preservation Long Island Director Lisa Kautz and Landmark Preservation Commissioner Josh Soren
St. Matthias Church — a small building with brown shingles and white clapboard on the border of Bellmore and Wantagh — was granted landmark status at the Oct. 2 Hempstead Town Council meeting. The site will now be protected against demolition, preserving a 100-year-plus legacy of the area’s African-American history.
The building is one of the only remnants of the Brush, a historic, predominantly black community that comprised freed slaves and their descendants.
Josh Soren, a commissioner of the Landmark Preservation Commission, said he had long wanted to see the site landmarked, but was moved to fill out the application by a more urgent dilemma. A recent court ruling gave the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island ownership of the property’s land rights, concluding a decade-long legal battle with St. Matthias congregants led by the Rev. Lawton Bryant, and subsequent for-sale signs signaled a potentially imminent demolition.
“Once I saw the for-sale sign, it became an emergency,” Soren told the Herald Life after the meeting, at which he advocated for landmark status. His application “flagged” the property in the town’s building department, preventing any future physical construction at the site.
The church’s most recent congregation, an independent Christian group considered “squatters” by the diocese, was evicted from the church in April 2018. St. Matthias was under the Episcopal Diocese’s jurisdiction from the building’s construction in 1904 until 2009, when it ended services due to a lack of attendees.
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