Imagine it's a sun-drenched day in 2047 and patriotic Levittowners fly the orange-blue-white flag of the Paumanok Republic in anticipation of Long Island Day. Odd, indeed. Long Island's population, however, now exceeds the population of Ireland, Jamaica, Singapore, and half-dozen other United Nations member states. Its here-fancied national emblem festooned with the colors long associated with our Island, would have its origins in our area's founding nations: the English, Dutch, and Algonquin-speaking First People.
We forget that flags and nations have come and gone right here in Levittown. Until the Duke of York, representing the restored Stuarts, seized control of Long Island and melded it into a colony called "Yorkshire" - later "New York"- in September of 1664, Connecticut claimed legal jurisdiction over eastern Long Island by citing a 1630's charter from Charles I ambiguously including "islands adjacent.” The western half, extending to at least present-day Farmingdale, was ruled by the Dutch West India Company.
The future Levittown was thus part of New Netherland and our community's earliest English settlers required permission from Dutch authorities to purchase land from the Indians. This in February of 1664, 21 years after he was a co-proprietor in the Hempstead Purchase, did Capt. John Seaman undertake his Jerusalem Purchase which included most of Seaford, Wantagh, and southern Levittown and thus, too, did John Strickland in 1648 receive for hundred acres of land - most of it in the current Island Trees School District - in exchange for some favor rendered to Peter Stuyvesant. The first settlers in our area were Englishmen who might have flown the Cross of St. George (not the Union Jack as inaccurately shown in a WPA mural called "The Signing of the Duke's Law" hanging up in the old Mineola courthouse) but the orange-blue-white tricolor.
After 1688, Dutch and English crowns would merge under the House of Nassau-Orange and its potentate's coat-of-arms: the orange-and-blue with billets and rampant gold lion - which was later adopted as the Nassau County flag in 1898. The Act of Union later merged England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland into the United Kingdom and until the American Revolution, this empire's banner - the Union Jack - would fly over the future Levittown. The Revolution brought into being the Grand Union flag (the thirteen red-and-white stripes with Union Jack in upper left canton) which was quickly replaced by the stars-and-stripes and the "Long Island flag", a red banner inscribed with the word "Liberty" which flew over the battlefield in the swampy dale of the Gowanus on August 27, 1776.
Although our Algonquin-speaking First People, who called this isle "Paumanok" didn't have heraldic and vexological emblems like the Europeans, they did employ purple-and-white wampum belts as mediums of exchange and to symbolize diplomatic accords.
Long Island, were it to become a separate state or otherwise independent political entity - something I've long advocated - would doubtless employ the ubiquitous orange-blue-white as its flag.
Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org
