Bohemia Historical Society
A Playground for the Powerful
The South Side Sportsmen’s Club of Long Island, 1866–1973
Few buildings on Long Island carry as much quiet history as the rambling Shingle Style clubhouse that stands today inside the Connetquot River State Park Preserve in Oakdale. Visitors who tour it now wander through what was once one of the most exclusive private retreats in nineteenth-century America — a place where presidents, financiers, and railroad barons came to fish for trout, hunt deer, and escape the pressures of New York City. Before it was a park, it was a playground for the powerful.
1820–1866
From Country Tavern to Gilded Age Retreat
The story begins in 1820, when the Nicoll family — landowners since the original 1684 and 1697 royal patents — leased a portion of their estate along the old stage road to Eliphalet “Liff” Snedecor. There Snedecor opened the tavern that would carry his name. Strategically positioned on what is today the Sunrise Highway corridor, “Obe Snedecor’s,” as it was popularly known, became a celebrated stagecoach stop. As early as 1839, a visiting magazine writer joked that “Liff’s food is as good as his creek… and the two are only second to his mint juleps and champagne punch.”
The “creek” was the Connetquot River, and its abundance of trout drew a growing clientele of well-heeled New York sportsmen. When the property came up for sale, a group of these regulars decided to buy it for themselves. On April 6, 1866, they incorporated “The South Side Sportsmen’s Club of Long Island.”
This club is established for the protection of game birds and fish and for the promotion of social intercourse among its members.
Article One, club constitution, 1866
The club grew rapidly. By 1908 it owned 2,324 acres outright and leased an additional 1,147 acres from the Breeze family — eventually controlling roughly 3,473 acres of pristine river, woodland, and meadow. The Long Island Rail Road even maintained a private stop called “Clubhouse” between Great River and Oakdale to ferry members directly to the door.
The Members
Presidents, Generals, and Gilded Age Magnates
The membership rolls and guest registers read like a directory of nineteenth-century American power. By 1907 the club’s hundred members included William K. Vanderbilt, William Bayard Cutting, H. B. Hollins, Frederic Rhinelander, Daniel Fearing, George Slade, John Cochrane, and Alfred Wagstaff Jr., among others. Vanderbilts, Belmonts, Cuttings, Whitneys, Carnegies, and Tiffanys all spent time on the property.
Even more remarkable was the procession of presidential guests. According to historical records compiled by the Friends of Connetquot, U.S. presidents Martin Van Buren, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover all fished or hunted at the club at various times, as did the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. In the twentieth century, the club’s reputation as a discreet sanctuary continued to attract notable visitors, reportedly including the German statesman Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany and Nobel Peace laureate.
This was the unwritten purpose of the place: a private, almost feudal calm where the country’s most powerful men could fish a chalkstream, share a brandy, and quietly compare notes far from reporters and rivals.
The Architect · 1886
Bradford Lee Gilbert and the Clubhouse We See Today
The original 1820 tavern still forms the heart of the Main House, but the building’s distinctive appearance — its Shingle Style massing, generous gables, deep overhangs, and rambling wings — is largely the work of Bradford Lee Gilbert (1853–1911), the New York architect the club retained to remodel and expand its quarters in 1886. Gilbert was a natural choice: many of the club’s most prominent members were railroad executives, and Gilbert had built his early career designing for the railroads.
A native of Watertown, New York, Gilbert trained in the office of J. Cleveland Cady and was appointed official architect of the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad at the remarkable age of just twenty-three. Over his career he designed stations for at least twenty-five railroads across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, among them three on Long Island that remain standing or remembered: the Oyster Bay station (1889), famously associated with Theodore Roosevelt and listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the Southampton station, distinguished alongside Oyster Bay by its unusual oyster-shell stucco; and the Bayport station (1903) on the Montauk Branch. He also remodeled the original Grand Central Depot in 1898.
But Gilbert’s most consequential building was neither a station nor a clubhouse. In 1889, on a sliver of land at 50 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, he completed the Tower Building — an eleven-story office structure whose iron-and-steel skeleton, adapted from railroad-bridge engineering, is widely considered the first skyscraper in New York City and the first steel-frame building in the East. Skeptics at the time predicted it would topple in the first stiff wind. It stood for twenty-five years before being demolished in 1914 to make way for a taller successor — by which time Gilbert’s structural innovation had already transformed the New York skyline.
Beyond the Tower Building, Gilbert designed Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition (1895), the original Flatiron Building in Atlanta, churches, firehouses, and the Illinois Central Station in Chicago (1892–93). His country lodge at the South Side Sportsmen’s Club thus represents a quieter, less heralded side of his work: not bold structural invention, but the careful, sensitive expansion of a humble country tavern into a sprawling Gilded Age retreat — and in this gentler discipline, his hand was just as sure.
1963–1978
A New Life as Public Land
The club survived the Great Depression and two world wars, but the social world that sustained it did not. In 1963, facing rising costs and a dwindling membership, the club sold its land to New York State for $6.2 million, retaining the right to lease the property back as a private club for another decade. That lease expired in August 1973, when the gates opened to the public for the first time in more than a century.
In the same year — July 23, 1973 — the Southside Sportsmens Club District was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1978, the New York State Legislature formally designated the property a State Park Preserve, the only such preserve in the state park system. Today the 3,473-acre Connetquot River State Park Preserve continues much of the club’s original conservation mission, protecting the river, its native brook trout fishery, and the rare ecological habitats that drew sportsmen here for more than 150 years.
The clubhouse itself still stands, lovingly maintained, its Shingle Style profile barely changed since Bradford Gilbert finished his work in the 1880s. Inside, the gift shop occupies what was once Liff Snedecor’s barroom. Upstairs, the bedrooms — including the room kept by financier and J.P. Morgan partner H. B. Hollins, whose monogram SSSC appeared on everything down to the bed linens — are preserved much as members left them.
A Century and a Half at a Glance
1820
Snedecor’s Tavern Opens
Eliphalet “Liff” Snedecor leases Nicoll land along the stage road and opens the tavern that becomes a celebrated stagecoach stop.
1866
The Club Is Incorporated
On April 6, regular sportsmen buy the property and found The South Side Sportsmen’s Club of Long Island.
1886
Gilbert Remodels the Clubhouse
Architect Bradford Lee Gilbert expands the old tavern into the rambling Shingle Style retreat that still stands today.
1908
3,473 Acres at Its Peak
The club controls thousands of acres of river, woodland, and meadow, served by its own private LIRR “Clubhouse” stop.
1963
Sold to New York State
Facing rising costs, the club sells its land to the state for $6.2 million while leasing it back for another decade.
1973
Opened to the Public
The lease expires in August and the gates open for the first time in a century; the district joins the National Register on July 23.
1978
Designated a State Park Preserve
New York’s only State Park Preserve, the 3,473-acre Connetquot River preserve carries on the club’s conservation mission.
Research provided by Thomas McMahon.