Bloodgood Haviland Cutter was the descendant on both sides of his family from some of Queens County’s earliest European settlers, granted land in the region in the 1600s by Dutch governor Willem Kieft. When the English government formally incorporated Queens County in 1683, it was home to five small townships: Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica, Hempstead, and Oyster Bay. Like the rest of Long Island, Queens was sparsely populated and its economy centered on farming and agriculture driven by enslaved workers. In 1790, less than 5,400 people lived in Queens, including 1,095 enslaved people.

Queens remained largely rural well into the 1800s, but the introduction of railroads jump-started its transformation. The first tracks of the Long Island Railroad were laid in 1836 and connected Brooklyn to Jamaica, Queens. In the next decades, competing railroad corporations pushed rail lines farther east onto Long Island.

Cutter’s poetic musings provide evidence of his avid interest in railroads. He invested in several, including the Long Island Rail Road Company and the North Shore Railroad Company, the latter organized in 1863 to build tracks east from Flushing towards Great Neck. In his poem “North Side Railroad,” Cutter enthusiastically cried out: 

Come out, my friends, and now subscribe
To build a road on the North Side,
If each will only do his part,
We soon will see the railroad start.

Improved transportation options in the second half of the 1800s led to a boom in land speculation in Queens and the construction of new communities. Many new residents were attracted to Queens because they were searching for a suburban retreat from the growing congestion of New York City.

While Bloodgood Cutter’s quaint “Long Island Farmer Poet” image contradicts his status as a shrewd venture capitalist who increased his wealth by investing strategically. In his poem “North Side Railroad,” Cutter summed up the risk and rewards of investing in Long Island’s railroads. 

Our land will then take such a rise,
‘Twill us agreeably surprise…

Then citizens will out remove,
And then the North Side will improve;
How much better that will pay,
Then raising either corn or hay. 

Then if you wish to sell your land,
Can get the chink right in your hand;
And then if you desire more ease;
Can work or play, just as you please.

From his Little Neck farm sixteen miles northeast of Manhattan, Bloodgood Cutter witnessed the great debate over the consolidation of Greater New York, which was decades in the making but at its fever pitch in the 1890s. Cutter seems to have left no poetic remembrance related to it despite the enormity of the event. Nevertheless, his likely perspective on consolidation becomes clear through his political and personal interests and provides insight from the region that eventually became the far eastern edge of Greater New York City.

Following the Civil War, the region around New York Bay experienced unprecedented economic and population growth. For many area entrepreneurs, the financial benefits were stymied by internal competition and clashing municipal governments. With promises that consolidation could increase tax revenue, improve land values, and end boundary disputes, boosters rigorously campaigned to consolidate the region under a united municipal government, one to oversee New York City, Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens County, parts of Westchester County, and Staten Island. After decades of petitioning and a public vote in 1894 that passed but was squashed in Albany, the state approved consolidation in 1897. The City of Greater New York, more than 300 square miles and 3 million residents strong, came into existence on January 1, 1898.

Following consolidation, newspaper publishers around the country described Bloodgood Cutter, “the farmer poet of Long Island,” as “much pleased over the fact that he is now a citizen of New York.” As an extensive property holder and a supporter of modernization efforts like laying new railroad tracks that connected eastern Queens County to New York, Cutter saw great potential personal reward in consolidation.

Cutter’s property, encompassing the southern tip of Little Neck Bay between Flushing and North Hempstead, was very close to the city’s new borders. Consolidation tore Queen’s County in half. The towns closest to Manhattan—Long Island City, Newtown, Flushing, and Jamaica—joined Greater New York. The eastern towns of Hempstead, North Hempstead, and Oyster Bay did not. On January 22, 1898, the citizens of the latter towns met to discuss their future.

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[E09 tombstone]
Nassau County, New York, 1906
L.I.-[19–?].Fl
Brooklyn Historical Society

Residents of the farther, disputed areas in Queens debated joining either New York City or Suffolk County. Ultimately, they decided to become a new county, Nassau County, “for the simple reason that they could govern themselves, and their interests were identical.” Nassau County was born January 1, 1899. As the 1906 map of Nassau County shows, New York City annexed Cutter’s property into Flushing, creating a cut into North Hempstead in an effort to control the ports on the Bay. Bloodgood Cutter became a New Yorker.

In his characteristic quirky style, Bloodgood Cutter frequently meditated on his birthplace in his poetry:

Long Island is a famous place,
The grand resort of our city race;
They leave hot streets and dwellings there,
To come on it to breathe pure air. 

In many countries I have been,
And many grant resorts I’ve seen;
But take Long Island all around, Shores by the Sea and on the Sound,
With the privileges of the same,
Of many kinds that I can name

Not a household name today, Bloodgood Cutter was nevertheless part of a wave of artists—painters, writers, and poets—who were inspired by Long Island. As life in great urban centers like New York City and Brooklyn grew increasingly chaotic, polluted, and loud, these artists sought refuge in rural Long Island to the east, where the picturesque beauty of America survived and offered a haven for some.

In the 1800s and 1900s, artists including Winslow Homer, Frederick Church, Thomas Moran, and Jackson Pollock worked on and drew inspiration from Long Island. As author Elizabeth Champney wrote, they were attracted to towns like East Hampton because they provided “rural hooks for the landscape painter delightfully English in sentiment, [with] beach and sea panoramas, stormy cloud-battles or shimmering calm for the marine painter.”

Some of America’s greatest wordsmiths lived on Long Island, including: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), who owned a house in Great Neck, Nassau County, in the 1920s that inspired his literary masterpiece, The Great Gatsby; John Steinbeck (1902–1968), who owned a home in Sag Harbor and wrote several books while living on Long Island, including his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, which takes a line from Shakespeare as its title; newspaper editor and acclaimed poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), who purchased extensive property in the village of Roslyn Harbor in 1843 and settled there in a grand country house he called Cedarmere, which is still standing today and is on the register of National Historic Places Register.

Even in this company, Walt Whitman (1818–1892) is still considered one of Long Island’s (and America’s) greatest poets. Born in Suffolk County, Whitman moved to Brooklyn when he was just four years old. He returned to the East End throughout his life. Known for his brief two-year stint in the 1840s as an editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a decade earlier he had founded Huntington’s first newspaper, The Long Islander. In his writing Whitman referred to Long Island as “Paumanok,” the American Indian term for the island meaning “land of tribute.”

This portrait arrived at the Long Island Historical Society without much recorded information. It likely joined the LIHS collection after Cutter died in 1906, when the contents of his Little Neck, Queens, estate sold at auction. The identity of the portraitist, “S. Henderson,” documented on the lower right corner of the canvas, has long been a mystery. We now know that the portrait’s painter was related to Bloodgood Cutter, and a woman.

Cutter had no children of his own, but he did have many nephews and nieces, including Sarah Purchase Henderson. In 1900, Sarah was staying with her uncle and appeared in the federal census with “oil paint artist” listed as her profession. Following this trail revealed Henderson to be the painter of this portrait, as evidenced by a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from 1888 announcing that she had “presented Bloodgood Cutter, the farmer poet, with an oil portrait of himself.”

Like many female artists in the 1700s and 1800s, Henderson likely struggled to find a place for herself within the male-dominated profession. Although women artists did join professional organizations like the National Academy of Design and Brooklyn Art League and exhibited their works, all too often they were dismissed as “accomplished” amateurs.

Despite this, women artists like Henderson pursued their passions, seeking training and opportunity domestically and abroad. Today, the lives and talents of female artists are being rediscovered. Like Sarah Henderson’s portrait of her uncle, other paintings at BHS previously unattributed are being rediscovered as the work of local female artists, including Brooklynite Eleanor C. Bannister (1858-1939) and portraitist Susan Mary (S.M.) Norton (1855-1922).

When Henderson painted this portrait of her Uncle Bloodgood in 1888, he was seventy-one years old, far older than he appears in her idealized representation of him. Evidence shows that Henderson likely based her painting on a photograph of her uncle taken in the 1860s, immortalizing him in his prime. The portrait then reflects Bloodgood Cutter’s ideas about his legacy, which he recorded in a poem, “On Seeing His Own Likeness.” 

My friends, this likeness of my mortal form,
Preserve as a keep-sake when I am gone;
That is, when death lays low my weary head,
And consigns me to mansions of the dead. 

Then my lines, though they may be rude in kind,
Will represent the inner man, or mind
And by using my simple pen—
Indite those for myself, and fellow-men.

In 1867, Bloodgood Cutter traveled with the “Quaker City Expedition,” a five-month tourist cruise throughout the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. The trip quickly became known around the world because of a young journalist on the trip named Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain). Clemens wrote about the journey and his fellow travelers first in a series of newspaper articles and then, in 1869, in his best-selling novel Innocents Abroad. The novel immortalized Bloodgood as the “Poet Lariat” of the Quaker City Expedition. While Twain bestowed the title with his characteristic sardonicism, Cutter nevertheless embraced it.

Several Brooklynites from Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church congregation organized the 1867 Quaker City Expedition. Beecher himself was originally slated to attend but withdrew before the steamer set sail in June 1867. Although some prospective passengers also withdrew when Beecher did, ultimately 75 excursionists—including Bloodgood Cutter and Mark Twain—set out to explore the Old World for the hefty price of $1,250 each. According to Twain, the group included “three ministers of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military and naval chieftains with sounding titles, an ample crop of ‘professors’ of various kinds, and a gentleman who had ‘Commissioner of the United States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa’ thundering after his name in one awful blast!”

Traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to destinations including Gibraltar, Paris, Florence, Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Cairo, the pilgrims spent a great deal of time together, and the quirks of some travelers became the subject of Twain’s sharp pen. Of Bloodgood Cutter, the ship’s unwanted Poet Lariat, Twain recorded another passenger exclaiming, “I never seen one of them poets that yet knowed anything. He’ll go down and grind out about four reams of the awfellest slush about that old rock and give it to…anybody he comes across first which he can impose on. Pity but somebody’d take that poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out of him.”

Twain’s remarks, whether good-humored or mean-spirited, did not affect Cutter’s fondness for expressing himself in prose. He continued to write and share his poems—sometimes irreverent “musings on a wheel-barrow,” sometimes commentaries on friends’ weddings or deaths, sometimes reactions to major events like the Civil War. In 1886, Cutter finally collected hundreds of his pieces into a book, The Long Island Farmer’s Poems. At least half of the book was made up of poems inspired by the Quaker City Expedition, with one that included a gentle gibe at the young man who made him “famous.” 

One droll person there was on board,
The passengers called him “Mark Twain;”
He’d talk and write all sort of stuff,
In his queer way, would it explain.