The Rowehls: Levittown Potato Farmers

The death of August Rowehl in 1992 marked the end of five generations of Rowehls, who lived in the Hicksville/East Meadow/Levittown area where they owned and farmed consider-able acreage before World War II. It also marked the end of the predominance of ethnic German families who first appeared in our area with the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road to Hicksville in 1837.    

Diedrich Gerhard Rowehl (1824-97), son of Frederick Rowehl of Lower Saxony, arrived in our neighborhood around 1850 and established his farm southwest of the current intersection of Hempstead Turnpike and Wantagh Parkway. His son Henry was seven years old when Alexander Stewart's Central Line of the LIRR came by a few hundred yards north of their farm and established a depot and coal yard at Newbridge Road where the East Meadow firehouse is today. This is significant because Stewart and this rail road - and latter the landholding Merillon Estate and Hempstead Plains companies - would come to own at least 80% of the 5000 or so acres that encompass modern Levittown.

Most of the potato, cucumber, and dairy farmers of the Island Trees/Jerusalem area (as Levittown was previously known) rented their land, but the Rowehl family owned their fields until 1947, when they realized that homes were a more profitable cash crop and sold to Levitt & Sons.    

There are three buildings in Levittown today that had originally be the farmhouses of the Rowehl clan. The first, built in 1929 by Theodore Rowehl, was moved to its present site on Hempstead Turnpike in 1936 and is now used by the Thomas F. Dalton Funeral Homes. Shortly after Theodore's death in 1943, his widow, Addie Dengler Rowehl, sold the house and moved out of the Island Trees/Jerusalem area. (She remained on Long Island until her own death in 2009 at the age of 104.)

The second is at 250 Jerusalem Avenue and was owned by Frederich Rowehl, whose son Dick lived there and raised his family until his passing in 1969. Frederich's other two sons lived and worked the land along Jerusalem Avenue and Bloomingdale Road and the latter, August, dwelled at 315 Jerusalem Avenue until 1992.    

Prominent in our community for so many years, the Rowehls and some of their neighbors - the Seligmans, Bergs, Kiessels, Gellweilers, and Bartels - faded into obscurity after October 1, 1947 when three hundred families, led my Mr. and Mrs Theodore Bladykas, became the first residents to dwell in Levitt & Sons' brand-new mass-produced houses. If the Rowehls' were the epitome of the old rural agrarian America, the Bladykas' were clearly pioneers in a radically new vision - and version - of America called suburbia.

My friend, the late Richard Evers, was speaking of such people in our community when he wrote of citizens whose "business abilities, love of community, and solid middle class views build 19th Century Hicksville and similar communities." They formed the bedrock upon which the subsequent evolution of the community rests and we forget their lives and contributions.    

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org.