Archive for the ‘Cows and Cattle Stories’ Category

This story features a wealthy miser who lived frugally despite her wealth, about a dozen cats that lived with her in a dingy apartment, an ottoman stuffed with cash, and a few cows that made the Goelet family one of the richest landowners in midtown Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th century.

Most farmers of old Flushing, Queens, kept their chickens and cows outside in barns and pens. But the cows and chickens that lived at the Sprong-Duryea homestead lived in the former drawing room and bedrooms of the old house.

When New York City Policeman James Breen joined the Leonard Street Station in the late 19th century, he probably never dreamed that one day he’d have to play the role of a Wild West cowboy in Manhattan on West Street, at the Chambers Street Ferry Terminal. In the late 19th century, West Street was always crowded […]

On May 1, 1857, the Quarantine Commissioners purchased 50 acres of the Wolfe Farm on Staten Island for $23,000 for use as a quarantine for sick immigrants.

On December 15, 1857, 42 llamas arrived in New York City on the Panama Railroad Company’s brig E. Drummond under the command of Captain Crippen Chapman (try saying that fast). The llamas (they were probably alpacas, but the New York press called them llamas) were owned by French naturalist Eugene Roehn and consigned to James I. Fisher & Son of Baltimore.