Babylon (village), New York

New York

A Bible-reading grandmother named this village after the most sinful city she could think of.

historicalmilitaryculture

Around eighteen oh three, the people here decided their growing settlement needed a name. A woman named Mrs. Conklin had grown up inland and was uneasy about the place where her grandchildren would be raised. It was a stop-over for travelers along Long Island's south shore, and it had a rowdy reputation. So she read her Bible and picked the city that came to mind. Babylon. Her son Nat was appalled at an unholy name for his hometown. Family legend says she answered him in seven words. But it will be a new Babylon. The name stuck. Before that, the place was called Huntington South, and its Presbyterian church went up in seventeen thirty. British soldiers pulled that wooden church down in seventeen seventy-eight and hauled the lumber west to Hempstead to build barracks for their troops.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The bible-reading Mrs. Conklin compared the new hamlet to the biblical city of Babylon and proposed that name due to the area's rather bawdy reputation as a stop-over place for travelers on Long Island's south shore.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Amityville, New York 4.8 mi Amityville got its name because a town meeting fell apart into shouting, and somebody yelled that what the room needed was some amity.
  • Islip Speedway 7.3 mi The demolition derby was invented here, by a track promoter who noticed the crowd liked the crashes more than the racing.
  • Jones Beach State Park 11.9 mi The most visited beach on the East Coast is standing on sand that engineers pumped up from the bottom of a bay.
  • 1955 MacArthur Airport United Air Lines crash 13.9 mi A crew practicing an engine failure pushed the throttle forward to save themselves, and it drove the plane into the ground.
  • Rockville Centre train crash 17.1 mi Two trains ran head-on into each other because construction had squeezed both directions onto a single shared rail bed.
  • Swan River (New York) 17.8 mi A stream barely fifteen feet wide holds one of only about six wild brook trout populations left on Long Island.