Brecknock Hall

David Gelston Floyd (1802 to 1893) was a grandson of General William Floyd, the Long Island signer of the Declaration of Independence. Accounts differ on where he grew up: the 2005 National Register nomination places his boyhood on the family estate in Oneida County, New York, while Friends for Brecknock Hall say it was his grandfather's estate at Mastic. He settled in Greenport in 1845 and built a business that began with the ship chandlery of Floyd and Skillman and grew into whaling and shipping. He had his own whaling fleet from 1845 to 1859, served as president of the National Bank of Greenport, as Southold Town supervisor and as a member of the State Legislature in 1856.

Ground was broken for his house north of the village, with a view of the harbor, in 1851, and the building was finished in 1857. Floyd named it for Brecknock in Wales, the ancestral home of the Floyd family. Some of the stone was cut on the property, and larger pieces for lintels, sills and steps came by schooner from Connecticut. According to the nomination, Scottish masons did the stonework and Italian craftsmen much of the interior woodwork, and the cost was estimated at $30,000. In 1857 it was the only stone mansion of its size on eastern Long Island. The Italianate design has wide eaves, large brackets, round-arched windows, quoins and porches, and the house had speaking tubes, indoor bathrooms, central heating and gas lighting. No architect is recorded for the original house.

Floyd died in 1893 and his wife, Lydia Smith Floyd, in 1898. The estate passed to their daughter Julia and her husband Albert Delafield, and in 1929 to Julia's daughter Grace Delafield Robinson. Her husband, the architect Francis DeLancey Robinson (1872 to 1938), is believed to have made the early twentieth-century alterations, including new floors and updated bathrooms. In 1949 Frederica Prentiss Haneman inherited the house. Under her husband, the architect John Theodore Haneman Sr., it became a working farm raising horses and, from 1955, Aberdeen Angus cattle.

After Haneman died in 1960, the house left the family; Friends for Brecknock Hall date the sale to 1965, to William Pollert. A series of absentee owners followed. A developer acquired the property in 1971 with plans for condominiums, later changed to 74 houses and apartments, and the formal gardens were lost. In the mid-1990s the land was bought for the Peconic Landing retirement community on condition that the house be preserved. The Peconic Landing Foundation was formed in 2004, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and volunteers restored it; Peconic Landing gives the completion as 2008 and the Friends give 2008 to 2010.

Today the house stands at the entrance to the Peconic Landing campus at 1500 Brecknock Road. It serves as a community center and a rental site for weddings and events, and the Brecknock Hall Foundation holds public programs there. It has no regular public hours. Volunteer tours, limited to 10 people, are arranged for members of Friends for Brecknock Hall and for nonprofit groups.