$394,350. That’s what Alexander Turney Stewart handed over in September 1869 for 7,170 acres of flat, treeless Nassau County scrubland that most Long Islanders wouldn’t have traded a good horse for. The price worked out to $55 an acre. What he built on it became Garden City.
Stewart’s story doesn’t start on Long Island. He was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1803 and made it to New York in 1818 with little more than nerve and a head for numbers. By the time he died, the New York Times put his net worth somewhere between $40 million and $50 million, a fortune assembled through retail methods that hadn’t existed before he invented them. According to the Long Island Press, the Times largely ignored what the land holdings were worth on top of that.
His department store, A.T. Stewart & Co., cut out the middleman before cutting out the middleman was a business strategy. Stewart shipped goods directly to his stores, set fixed minimum prices, and pushed hard for cash transactions over credit accounts. He advertised “great reduction in prices for cash” across his inventory, which was a genuine departure from how retail operated in the mid-1800s. It doesn’t sound radical now. It absolutely was then.
The model scaled. Stores opened in Philadelphia, Boston, Manchester, and Paris. A mail-order catalog reached rural Americans who couldn’t get to a city store, and that catalog operation laid the early framework that Sears would later turn into a national empire.
He also built backward into his own supply chain. Rather than depend on suppliers he didn’t control, Stewart opened a linen mill in Belfast, a silk mill in Lyons, a carpet mill in Connecticut, and a lace factory in Nottingham. That industrial network, combined with factories across New York City, gave him price control at nearly every step. The reach impressed Ulysses Grant enough that the president appointed Stewart Secretary of the Treasury in 1869.
Stewart declined the appointment.
What he took instead was acreage. The Hempstead Plains stretched across Nassau County as one of the only native grasslands east of the Allegheny Mountains, flat and largely treeless, used for cattle grazing for more than two centuries and considered by most local observers to be worth roughly nothing. “He saw its greatest value in its proximity to Manhattan,” as the Long Island Press reported, noting that Stewart tracked the expanding rail lines in neighboring areas and calculated that his empty acreage sat about 40 minutes from the city.
That calculation cost him $394,350 for 7,170 acres in September 1869. Critics weren’t quiet about their opinions. A man who’d rewired American retail was, in their view, making his first serious blunder.
He wasn’t.
Stewart’s plan was a designed community built from the ground up, one of the earliest attempts in the country to lay out infrastructure and standards before anyone moved in rather than scrambling to impose order on chaos after the fact. Streets, parks, and housing weren’t going to grow organically around the train stop. They’d be planned in advance, built to a consistent standard, and populated deliberately. The Garden City Hotel would eventually anchor the commercial center of what he was building.
The gap between that vision and the raw material he started with was enormous. Ten thousand acres of open Nassau County flatland, no shade trees, no roads worth mentioning, no existing reason for anyone to want a house there. Stewart’s argument was that rail access to Manhattan would be enough, that people who couldn’t afford the city’s prices would pay to live 40 minutes outside it if the community was worth living in.
He didn’t live to see it finished. Stewart died in 1876, and the project continued under his estate. But the bones of what he built are still there. Garden City in 2026 is a functioning, high-value community on land that sold for $55 an acre because nobody else wanted it.
That’s not a bad return on a $400,000 gamble.