Sometimes, history hides in plain sight.
You probably have driven down Purdy, Haviland, or the many other streets named for early Rye families without giving it a second thought.
Many of the community’s roadways carry the names of community founders and families that helped make Rye a wealthy farming town, and played important roles in the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the 20th century.
Though rebellion spread throughout the colonies during the Revolution, Rye was more of a Loyalist stronghold, points out Lear Beyer, a board member of the Rye Historical Society. Rye had many well-settled families that accumulated wealth through farming, and had a more complacent attitude toward the British.
As a result, for many of those families, there are few documents, paintings, or other historical artifacts that commemorate their legacies. “I don’t think you’ll find any monuments to the Revolution in Rye,” Beyer said. “And I don’t think that’s by accident.”
But you can find history on nearly every street corner. Here are some of their stories.
Halsted Place
Ezekiel Halsted II, born and raised in Westchester, served in the Revolutionary War in the Second (Middle) Regiment, Mamaroneck and Rye Company. Many members of his family, however, did not share his level of revolutionary fervor, with a large section of the clan remaining Loyalists.
According to Beyer, the Halsteds are not of “founding family” status, arriving in the early 1700s as opposed to the 1600s. But their descendants played a large role in shaping present-day Rye. Augustus Merwin Halstead (1836-1912) ended up inheriting Ezekiel’s farm, which grew into a sprawling subdivision along the Long Island Sound and encompassed present day Rye Town Park, which was taken by the state of New York in 1909.
Haviland Lane
It’s only fitting that the small side street by the Square House is named after the Haviland family. The Havilands’ roots in Rye trace back to the 1600s with the arrival of four brothers, Joseph, John, Jacob, and Joseph. Notably, Tamar Haviland, descendant of Rye founder John Budd and widow of Dr. Ebenezer Haviland (John’s son), operated the tavern and inn from around 1779 to 1799, and was the proprietor who George Washington famously commended in his diary for keeping “a very neat and decent Inn.” Other famous guests at the property included John and Samuel Adams and Marquis de Lafayette. The family also maintained a foothold in the area until at least the 1950s, owning a large swath of land in Harrison.
Purdy Avenue
The Purdys, a largely Loyalist family, were some of the first settlers in Rye, and soon became involved in “every conceivable civic role” according to Beyer. Brothers John, Joseph, and Francis all arrived by 1680, and their descendants carried the family name all throughout Westchester County, with Joseph’s son going on to co-found White Plains. The hamlet south of Croton Falls called Purdys is named after the same clan.
John Purdy served as town supervisor, and was a member of the Colonial Assembly, authoring legislation in pre-Revolutionary America.
The family also owned the most enslaved people of any household in Rye. Slave ownership was common practice among the New York elite, and according to Beyer’s notes, there were 123 total slaves recorded in the 1790 census. All those mentioned here, with the exception of Haviland, were slave owners.
Rye “was an agrarian community,” Beyer said, “there was a sizable number of families that had at least one slave.”
Park Avenue
The Parks had no strong civic or religious role within colonial Rye, and Beyer said he didn’t think they participated in the Revolution one way or another. But they were a powerful farming family that married into other families of similar status — Mary Park married Joshua Purdy, who was once the biggest landowner in Rye, for example. The street itself is named after a Park much further down the line, Joseph, who owned Whitby Castle during the Gilded Age.
Roosevelt Avenue
Roosevelt and Brown avenues are a mere two blocks apart, though the real Brown and Roosevelt families were far closer than that. Maria Roosevelt, who was born in 1783, married Hackaliah Brown, and their son, James Christopher, went on to be town supervisor. At his death, he left all his land in Manhattan and Rye to his uncle James Roosevelt, who founded Roosevelt Hospital (now Mount Sinai West). Eventually, two members of the Roosevelt family, far removed from this branch, would later go on to achieve fame in the White House.
Theall Road
The wealthy Theall family originally bought their land in the 1600s for “8 cotes, 7 shirts, and 15 fathoms of wampum,” and maintained a strong, Loyalist presence in Rye for much of the Revolutionary period. According to Beyer, that fits the standard profile of the wealthy and powerful families in Rye.
“The longer you’d been here and the more land you had, the more likely it was that you were a Loyalist,” Beyer said. “Life was very comfortable here for those families.”
The Theall claim — named Theall Hill — was centered where the Osborn now resides. The land was bought and repurposed for the Osborn in 1900.
