In the late 1800s, before Nassau County was even created and before it was a village, Floral Park was known as simply as “land of flowers” or “park of flowers.” For more than 100 years, Floral Park has retained its massive appeal for generations as a community-oriented village. As part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, lifelong resident Walter Gosden has authored Floral Park, Nassau County, a collection of images and stories that celebrate Floral Park’s rich and diverse history.
Gosden, who was approached by Arcadia Publishing to write the book, seemed destined to be an authority on Floral Park. In 1924, he and his family moved to the village where he currently resides in his grandfather’s home. After 28 years, he recently retired as an art teacher at Floral Park Bellerose Elementary School where he attended as a child. As Floral Park Village’s official historian for the past 10 years, Gosden has been fascinated with local history since he was a young boy in the early 1960s. “I remember when I was kid riding a bike in town… I saw them tear down the [John Lewis] Child’s seed house and I came home and asked my father, I said ‘Why did they do that?’ and he [Gosden’s father] said, ‘well, progress,’ and I never understood that.”
Fulfilling a dream to pay homage to his hometown, Gosden took a year and a half to complete the book while teaching. He took up the large task of gathering photographs from the archives of the Village of Floral Park, the Floral Park library and from donations of period photographs and newspapers to the Floral Park Historical Society. Gosden, also a founding member of the Floral Park Historical Society, was determined to also offer new and interesting stories to accompany the vintage photographs for the book. “I wanted to make it a good read…I wanted it to mean something,” he said.
In the introduction to the book, Gosden explains that “the western edge of the Hempstead Plains is where Floral Park is located and the soil proved to be fertile for farmers to cultivate crops, which would then be harvested and brought to the market to sell,” he wrote. Flowers were also cultivated and there were a number of florists and seed and bulb growers in Floral Park. Gosden credits John Lewis Childs as one of the first to develop the cultivation of bulbs, seeds and plants into a major business and gave the name ‘Floral Park’ to the town he lived in.
While conducting original research, Gosden says he discovered information about a florist named Mary E. Martins who had a mail-order seed business on Jericho Road for more than 25 years and never received any credit for her efforts. He stumbled upon a catalog of hers and decided to delve deeper into who she was. “Women at the turn of the last century, you were either a housewife, a midwife, or you worked in the fields and picked seeds for John Lewis Childs. That was it, you had no right to vote, you had no rights at all and here she was in business for herself…that was pretty bold at the time,” he said. Her catalog even stated that she personally handled all her own orders herself, while being in competition with Childs, the nation’s largest seeds supplier at the time for mail orders. “She is the kind of hero that came out of the whole thing. Nobody ever knew about her. I was in a small way able to say, ‘this happened here,’” he said.
The book has only been out a few short months and Gosden says that feedback from Floral Park residents has been overwhelming and the book has been well received. “To me it is heartwarming. Somebody had to do that. I don’t care if my name is on the cover or anybody else’s,” he said. “For years, people have always been proud to be in the village growing up and moving back…but there never was anything. You go up in town and you couldn’t even buy a postcard and send it to someone. Now they can have something that they can look at, and the kids can look at it. Just seeing and talking to the kids and talking to the parents, who are younger than I am, who said this is really neat and now we understand more about what it is and some of the things that do exist and here it is 100 years ago,” he said. “That’s what was the icing on the cake, for me anyway, that people are really pleased and happy to read about where they live,” he said.
For more information, or to purchase a copy of the book, visit www.arcadiapublishing.com or www.amazon.com.
