Foundation The land on which the Village of Hempstead stands was under Dutch control from the early 1620s. In the fall of 1643, two followers of the Presbyterian minister Richard Denton, Robert Fordham and John Carman, crossed
Long Island Sound by rowboat to negotiate with the local Native Americans for a tract of land upon which to establish a new community. Representatives of the
Marsapeague (Massapequa),
Mericock (Merrick),
Matinecock and
Rekowake (Rockaway) tribes met with the two men at a site slightly west of the current Denton Green in Hempstead Village. Tackapousha, who was the
sachem (chief spokesman) of the Marsapeague, was the acknowledged spokesman for conducting the transaction. The Indians sold approximately 64,000 acres (260 km2), the present day towns of
Hempstead and
North Hempstead, for an unknown quantity of items; a 1657 revisit of this agreement names large and small cattle, stockings, wampum, hatchets, knives, trading cloth, powder, and lead given as payment by the English. Some items may have been valuable to the Native Americans in terms of the contemporary markets for European "trinkets," which may have held symbolic and spiritual importance to Native America peoples in the Northeast. In the spring of 1644, thirty to forty families left
Stamford, Connecticut, crossed Long Island Sound, landed in
Hempstead Harbor and eventually made their way to the present site of the village of Hempstead where they began their English settlement within Dutch-controlled
New Netherland. The settling of Hempstead marked the beginnings of the oldest English settlement in what is now Nassau County. Subsequent trips across the Sound brought more settlers who prepared a fort here for their mutual protection. These original Hempstead settlers were
Puritans in search of a place where they could more freely express their particular brand of
Protestantism. They established a Presbyterian church that is the oldest continually active Presbyterian congregation in the nation. The British attempted to occupy Hempstead after the
Battle of Long Island, In March 1898, Camp Black was formed on the
Hempstead Plains (roughly the shared location of Hempstead and
Garden City), in support of the impending
Spanish–American War. Camp Black was bounded on the north by
Old Country Road, on the west by Clinton Road, and on the south by the
Central Line rail. Camp Black was opened on April 29, 1898, as a training facility and a point of embarkation for troops. Early Long Islanders made their living in agriculture or from the sea. Hempstead, with its central location, became the marketplace for the outlying rural farming communities. It was a natural progression, as the surrounding areas developed from small farms into today's
suburbia, that Hempstead Village would remain as the marketplace.
Chain department stores such as
Arnold Constable and
Abraham & Straus called Hempstead home for many years. Hempstead's Abraham & Straus was the largest grossing suburban department store in the country during the late 1960s. Hempstead was Nassau's retail center during the 1940s through the 1960s. The advent of regional
shopping malls such as the one at nearby
Roosevelt Field, the demise of nearby
Mitchel Air Force Base in 1961 as well as the changing
demographics put the retail trade in the village into a downward spiral that it was unable to recover from during the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. A plethora of businesses left the village in the 1980s and early 1990s, including Abraham & Straus.
Recent years In the course of the 1990s the village saw redevelopment as a government center as well as business center. There are more government employees from all levels of government in the village than there are in
Mineola, the county seat. According to James York, the municipal historian, writing in 1998, the population during the day might rise to nearly 200,000, from a normal census of 50,000. and a four-story, 112-unit building for senior housing, with retail on the ground level was completed at Main and West Columbia Streets in January 1998. Thirty-two units of affordable townhouses known as Patterson Mews at Henry Street and Baldwin Road was completed and fully occupied in 1997. In 1989, Hempstead residents elected
James A. Garner as their mayor. The first African-American male judge, Lance Clarke, was elected in 2001. Cynthia Diaz-Wilson was the first female justice in the Village of Hempstead and first African American village justice in the state of New York. In recent years, there has been concern regarding ongoing gang activity in certain neighborhoods, notably the "Heights", in addition to the issue of illegal rentals (homes/apartments that are illegally-subdivided by slumlords) and racial steering. Hempstead was also one of the first Long Island communities to contend with the
Salvadoran gang,
MS-13. The continual intra-violence this gang has exhibited has led to the formation of their arch-rivals, "SWP" or "Salvadorans with Pride". These issues have contributed to Hempstead's high crime rate as compared to other communities in the area. ==Geography==