A look at Brooklyn, then and now.

As Brooklyn developed as a city, in the 1800s, communities began to spread out from the ferry and the Heights in a concentric wave. Led by improved transportation facilities, the city grew, as areas once thought remote farming areas then became suburbs, then city. That was just in the old town of Brooklyn. Six towns, as we know, became the city of Brooklyn, and by the late 1800’s, there were people living just about everywhere within the borders of Kings County. Brooklyn, Bushwick and the Williamsburg areas developed first and fastest, due to location, transportation, the piers and shoreline, subsequent industries, and proximity to Manhattan,. The more remote towns, like New Utrecht, Gravesend, and Flatbush, stayed rural farmland much longer. But in the southern parts of Brooklyn, a smart man knew that change would be coming, and wealth and prosperity were tied to the land.

Stewart McDougall was one of those smart men who was there at the right time, with money in his pocket, and the ability to see what the future would hold. He had been born upstate, in Washington County, and came to Manhattan as a young man, and was a successful wholesale poultry and game merchant at the Washington Market, in Greenwich Village. In 1864, he bought his first farm in the southwestern corner of Kings County, in the town of New Utrecht. At the time, there was nothing but farmland in the area as far as the eye could see.

Over the period of the next twenty-five years, he bought more and more land around his original farmstead, eventually becoming the largest landowner of farmland and pasture in Brooklyn. There were certainly other huge landowners, the Bedford branch of the Lefferts family most immediately come to mind, but they sold most of their property back in the 1850s, as the city of Brooklyn grew. Stewart McDougall was just getting started. (more…)