Farnsworth

Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings (1861 to 1937), chairman of the Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company of Chicago and a breeder of trotting horses, had already built Tryon Hall in Manhattan when he commissioned a Long Island country house from the architect Guy Lowell. He named it Farnsworth for his mother's family.

The American Architect published the estate in September 1915 and stated that its photographs were made exactly nine months after ground was broken. The magazine described a house in the Georgian tradition, planned like the large houses of southern countries around a central patio lit from above, with marble floors in the patio and loggia, a long living room hung with tapestries, and a trophy room for the prizes Billings had won as a breeder. The Brickbuilder added in June 1916 that the house followed the slope of its site on six levels while appearing three stories high, and it illustrated brick farm buildings and servants' cottages. A blog that gathers period sources reports a construction cost of $1,550,000, 11 master bedrooms and 19 servants' bedrooms, and grounds by the Boston landscape architect Andrew Robeson Sargent. A 1997 survey of Long Island country houses and a 2007 book on North Shore houses date the house to 1914; the blog says it was erected in 1915.

Billings did not stay long. The blog reports that he traded the estate for a Manhattan office building as he prepared to move to Santa Barbara, and that the house served as a temporary hospital during World War I. Wallace Clinton Bird, an heir to a Standard Oil fortune, and his wife, Marjorie, then lived there until he was killed in a plane crash in 1941. Mrs. Bird kept a staff on the estate but rarely used the main house. After her death in 1961, the household contents and Mr. Bird's automobiles were auctioned on the grounds in May 1962.

Vandals and weather damaged the empty buildings, and the main house was demolished in 1966, a date given both by the blog and by a 2006 reference on North Shore estate owners. The superintendent's house, servants' quarters, greenhouses and power house were later razed. The stable and garage survive and have been converted to private residences.

Period journals placed the estate at Locust Valley, its post office address; later surveys place it in Matinecock, and one reference places it in Upper Brookville. Nothing on the property is open to visitors.