Place:Wantagh, Nassau, New York, United States

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the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Wantagh is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County, on Long Island, New York, United States. The population was 18,871 at the time of the 2010 census.

Wantagh is known as "The Gateway to Jones Beach".

The following history and Earliest Settlers info was copied and slightly edited from wikipedia.

History

The Wantagh area was inhabited by the Merokee (or Merikoke) tribe of Algonquin Native Americans prior to the first wave of European settlement in the mid-1600s. The Dutch settlers came west from their New Amsterdam colony, and English settlers came south from Connecticut and Massachusetts settlements. When the English and Dutch settled their competing claims to Long Island in the 1650 treaty conducted in Hartford, the Dutch partition included all lands west of Oyster Bay and thus the Wantagh area. Long Island then was ceded to the Duke of York in 1663-64, but then fell back into Dutch hands after the Dutch regained New York in 1673. The Treaty of Westminster in 1674 settled the land claims once and for all, incorporating Long Island into the now-British colony of New York.

Wantagh was originally known as Jerusalem, although some early accounts do refer to the area as "Wantagh." The creek running north/south through Wantagh, and which has been covered up in many places but is still visible between Wantagh Parkway and the housing developments west of Wantagh Avenue, was originally the Jerusalem River. The original post office was built in 1837, for Jerusalem, but mail service from Brooklyn began around 1780. The town's first school was established in 1790. At some time around the 1880s, Jerusalem was renamed Ridgewood, and the town's original LIRR station was for "Ridgewood Station". Later, Ridgewood was renamed Wantagh to avoid confusion with another town in New York State with the same name.

Earliest Settlers

The oldest original settlers of the Wantagh/Jerusalem area were the Jackson, and Seaman families, and their marks are still visible today. For example, the Cherrywood shopping center (at the corner of Jerusalem and Wantagh Avenues) was the site of prominent settler Capt. John Seaman's estate, which was named Cherrywood. Wantagh is home to a number of New York State Historical Markers (9 of Nassau County's 25), including:

• Cherrywood, Capt. John Seaman's 300-acre estate and home, from 1644, on the corner of Wantagh and Jerusalem Avenues;
• The 1644 home of Robert Jackson, Jerusalem's pioneer settler, on Wantagh Avenue south of Hempstead Avenue;
• North Jerusalem Road, originally constructed in 1644 between Hempstead and Jerusalem;
• 1666 Jackson House, the home of Col. John Jackson, Brig. Gen. Jacob Shearman Jackson, and Samuel Jackson Jones (in 1923), on Merrick Road east of Riverside Drive;
• The Grist Mill Site, granted to Col. John Jackson on the Jerusalem River in 1704, on Merrick Road east of Riverside Drive;
• The Cornbury Patent, given by Queen Anne conferring the present-day site of Jones Beach to Major Thomas Jones, whose family would later provide the land that would become Jones Beach State Park in 1929;
• The 1777 home of Richard Jackson, Capt. in the Queens County Militia in the Revolutionary War, and where his daughter, Jane, lived with her husband, ex-Hessian soldier Lt. John Althause, on Wantagh Avenue and Island Road;
• The oldest cemetery in Wantagh is the Jackson Cemetery, located just north of the St. Frances de Chantal Roman Catholic Church on Wantagh Avenue. There are 63 confirmed graves that include descendants from the Seaman and Jackson families, with the most notable including Thomas Jackson, who served in the Revolutionary War in the Second New York Regiment and participated in the Battle of Long Island and the storming of Fort St. George under Major Talmadge in 1780, and who was the original landowner of the site of land around the Wantagh Public Library, and General Jacob Seaman Jackson, a Brigadier General in the War of 1812 and senior warden of Long Island's first chartered Masonic lodge in 1797.

Research Tips

History of Friends Meeting House and Burial Grounds at Jerusalem/Wantah with transcription of burials:
http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Cemetery/Jerusalem.Friends.html