Brookholt

Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont (1858 to 1908), a son of the banker August Belmont, was a partner in the family firm of August Belmont and Company and served one term in Congress. In 1896 he married Alva Erskine Smith, who had divorced William Kissam Vanderbilt. About 1897 the couple built Brookholt on Front Street in East Meadow, on the open Hempstead Plains. Richard Howland Hunt designed the Colonial Revival house, which had nine master bedrooms, nine bathrooms and thirteen bedrooms for servants. In 1906 John Russell Pope designed a Georgian-style farmhouse for the estate, and Hicks Nursery supplied plantings. The Belmonts divided their time among Brookholt and their Newport houses, Belcourt and Marble House.

Belmont died at Brookholt in 1908 after an operation for appendicitis, leaving Alva his fortune. According to the historian Raymond E. Spinzia, she then had a new master bedroom built at Brookholt because she could not bear to sleep in a room where someone had died. In 1911 she opened the Brookholt School of Agriculture for Women on 200 acres of the estate, hoping to endow it as a permanent farm run by women. About 25 young women enrolled. Within a year it was clear that the students were not suited to farm life, and Alva closed the school at the end of its first year. She then turned her full attention to the woman suffrage movement and later moved her base to Beacon Towers at Sands Point.

Alexander Smith Cochran later owned the estate; accounts date his purchase to 1915. In 1923 he sold it to the Cold Stream Golf Club, which planned a country club on the land. Fire destroyed the main house in 1934, and the 1906 farmhouse was also demolished. According to the local historian Howard Kroplick, the federal government bought the former golf land around 1941 as part of the expansion of Mitchel Field, and the site was later occupied by the Mitchel Manor housing complex.

The Nassau County Museum collection holds photographs of the estate, and photographs of the house, gates and stables were published in Architectural Record in 1902. Nothing of Brookholt is known to survive. The site lies off Front Street in East Meadow, east of the Meadowbrook Parkway and west of Merrick Avenue, and there is nothing to visit.