Preamble
As the community may recall, the importance of Long Island modern history can be traced back to the Dutch colonizers of the area of New Netherland, where Breukelen (now Brooklyn) would be a fairly significant powerhouse on the western end of the island. However, on the eastern side of Long Island, largely associated with present-day Suffolk County, was chiefly New England settlements, Southold from across the Long Island Sound, Southampton from nearer the Massachusetts Bay.
The Four Counties of Long Island
While Long Island is the principle island of New York, located at the very southeast of the State and containing Brooklyn at the westernmost end and Queens just to the east, the traditional boundaries of New York had once included areas as far east as Dukes and Nantucket Counties in present-day Massachusetts. Today, the counties are (from west to east) as follows: Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk. Each county provides unique perspectives on the Long Island experience, with only Suffolk County containing any sense of notable rurality, in which case the rural areas are often comparable in scope to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey further down the Atlantic coast. Today’s Suffolk County is centered around the county seat, Riverhead, with additional notable settlements existing throughout the region, such as Hauppauge further west and the Patchogue area further south. The easternmost edges of Long Island are Orient in the north, Montauk in the south, and both contain quite unique identities based strictly on geographical locations and proximity. Nassau County, which contains community names such as Hempstead and Oyster Bay, is actually associated with Mineola as the county seat, but the county had not been formed until the annexation of Queens into the City of New York, when only the western forty percent of the county would be annexed into the city. Nassau County would literally be formed in 1899 from the balance of Queens County that would not become part of the City of New York. At the very western end of Long Island is Kings County, again associated with the Borough of Brooklyn (initially settled by the Dutch as Breukelen of Nieuw Nederland).
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