Past and Present: The Stewart McDougall Farm

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.

McDougall’s friends encouraged him to start selling, but he stood firm, saying the time was not yet right. The center of his farmstead was a large wood framed farmhouse on a hill, built in the Italianate style. It could have easily been located in upstate NY, or in any farming community in the Northeast. When the street grid was laid out, his farmhouse was on 10th Avenue, between 44th and 45th Street. A good place to sit and watch the world come to you. And that is exactly what happened.

In 1887, Electus B.Litchfield, a railroad man and land developer, began developing in the area of McDougall’s farmland, establishing a small cottage community called Blythebourne. This coincided with the establishment, the year before, of the Brooklyn, Bath, and Coney Island West End Line, a steam railroad line that began at Green-Wood Cemetery, and ran through the farmland and meadows of New Utrecht to the upscale resorts of Coney Island. The time was right to start selling off some of the McDougall land.

Senator William Reynolds, one of the great characters of the late 19th century, was a developer extraordinaire. He was only a state senator for a year; most of his career was spent in real estate sales and development. He was one of the major developers of Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights, and almost singlehandedly developed Prospect Heights. He was looking for his next big conquest and found it in New Utrecht. He began buying up land, much of it probably from McDougall, and started building suburban style single family housing. He called his new neighborhood Borough Park. His Borough Park was more like Victorian Flatbush than like the overbuilt community there today. The streets were lined with freestanding houses with lawns. One of the more famous architects to build, and eventually live there, was Albert Parfitt, of the Parfitt Brothers, one of Brooklyn’s finest firms.

Borough Park took off, and soon Reynolds’s original land tracts were surrounded by other development, with row houses, stores and other buildings, and Borough Park grew. Stewart McDougall, who had provided much of the land, was now extremely rich. By 1900, he had retired from the poultry business, and was concentrating solely on real estate. He never married, but years ago had brought in his nephew, Winfield S. McDougall, to manage his fields and pastureland. Winfield found himself in the heady game of real estate, helping his uncle, and no doubt profited greatly himself. New Utrecht had been annexed to the City of Brooklyn in 1894, which of course, became part of Greater New York in 1898.

As the 20th century progressed, millions of immigrants came to this city, and moved out of the tenements of Manhattan to settle in Brooklyn, and Borough Park became home to a large Italian and Jewish population. Catholic Churches and Jewish synagogues and temples soon filled the streets, which were now full of people. More and more land was needed, and Stewart McDougall was there to provide it. William Reynolds had long moved on, and was now busy with his new toy called Dreamland, in Coney Island, and in developing Laurelton, in Queens.

In 1914, the city was in the process of creating a new Fourth Avenue subway line, which would partially follow the path of the old Green-wood/Coney Island line, only underground. With the pleased approval of Stewart McDougall, the planners placed the Fort Hamilton Parkway station right smack in the middle of McDougall’s remaining land. If anyone had thought McDougall had been crazy to hold onto his land before, they weren’t talking now. He immediately began selling off the rest of his parcels, and reaped a huge fortune. Stewart McDougall died two years later, of Bright’s disease, but he died a happy man. He left his estate to his nephew Winfield, and a slew of other nieces and nephews, the descendants of his two sisters and five brothers who had been dead long before.

Borough (usually Boro) Park became Brooklyn’s largest Orthodox Jewish community, with a very large population of Hasidic Jews who came here after World War II. The original houses of William Reynolds’s Borough Park are long gone, replaced by apartment buildings and newer housing. The photograph of Stewart McDougall’s farm dates from 1910. McDougall moved soon after this photo was taken, to a row house at 1114 44th Street, where he died in 1918. The immediate neighborhood around the house was now called Linden Hills, and the name remains today, but the lindens and the hills are long gone. No doubt, as soon as he sold it, the farmhouse, windmill and barns were razed, the land graded down, and today, there is nothing left on this block of apartment buildings to tell anyone that Steward McDougall, the smartest man in South Brooklyn, ever lived here. GMAP