Land Surveyor in Old Westbury, Nassau County, NY

Westbury was founded by Edmond Titus, and was later joined by Henry Willis, one of the first English settlers. Westbury had been a Quaker community of isolated farms until the railroad came in 1836. After the Civil War, the New York elite discovered that the rich, well-wooded flat countryside of the Hempstead Plains was a place to raise horses, and to hunt foxes and play polo at the Meadow Brook Polo Club.

The Village of Old Westbury was incorporated in 1924, separating itself from Westbury, the adjacent area that housed many of the families of the construction and building staffs for the Old Westbury mansions. The “Old” part of Old Westbury’s name reflects the community’s need for its postal address to be different from the Westbury in Cayuga County, as per postal requirements (it had been using a postal address of North Hempstead for this reason); residents did this when they wanted a local post office ca. 1841, and when they incorporated Old Westbury as a village, they felt that it would be confusing for the village name and post office name to be different from one another. The Village of Westbury, located adjacent to Old Westbury, adopted that designation when it incorporated in 1932 as Cayuga County’s Westbury’s name was no longer being used.

The area was originally known as Wallage, which is related to a Native American term roughly meaning “ditch” or “hole.” By February 1663, it was known as Wood Edge, and by October 1675 it was known as “the Plains edge” or simply Plainedge. The name Westbury began to be used for the area around 1683. The name Westbury was chosen by Henry Willis, who named it after Westbury, Wiltshire, his hometown in England.