Slade-Hallett House

214 Griffing Avenue

Narrator: Mary [Wells] Hudson, 1846-1915, wife of S. Terry Hudson (1844-1913). Voiced by Ellen Talmage.

Hello. I am Mrs. S. Terry Hudson. I was born Mary Wells in Aquebogue, but I met this nice farm boy up on Sound Avenue and married him when I was 19, right after the Civil War ended. His fully name was Samuel Terry Hudson, but everyone called him “Terry”. We lived for a while with his parents. That house is now the administration building at the Hallockville Museum Farm.

My Terry didn’t much like farm work or farming. But he really loved to tinker with machinery. So it seemed perfectly natural tdhat he would leavet the farm and Terry went into business here in Riverhead manufacturing farm equipment.

His Riverhead Agricultural Works was a leading manufacturer and dealer of farm equipment in the area. He invented a bunch of improved machines, but he was most famous nation-wide for his “Bicycle” cultivator. They called it that because you could sit on a seat and steer it with pedals, you know, like a bicycle’s. That tool revolutionized the cultivation of potatoes and other row crops, turning an arduous job into one so easy that some local farmers claimed it was immoral to pay people to do something so easy as to ride on the machine.

We bought this old house at 214 Griffing Avenue to be near the business. Griffing Avenue was one of Riverhead’s nicest residential streets back in the day. .

The famous Griffin House Hotel was just up the street.

And across the street was the 1855 Suffolk County Courthouse. That was pretty nice too.

Our house was already over 50 years old when we bought it, but it was pretty nice. It was built by James B. Slade. You may have met his son already over on Roanoke Avenue. Slade founded the Riverhead News and also owned the "boneyard" whereold animal bones were converted to fertilizer. He had some other crazy ideas too. The word around tdown was that he was even a Swedenborgian and helped build Riverhead’s Swedenborgian church in 1855.

Well enough about that. Did you know that Terry owned the first steam-powered automobile in Riverhead, which he demonstrated in 1902. I think it was a Stanley Steamer like this. Some say our next-door neighbor Charles Hallett had a Locomobile even earlier – but I never saw any evidence of that!

Terry’s steam car was so quiet you could hardly hear it run. The Brooklyn Eagle even had an article that year about my Terry driving around with a box of oats on the tail of the car to train horses not to be frightened by these new-fangled automobiles. Can you imagine that? Soon after that he became the first automobile dealer in Riverhead.

After Terry died, I sold the house to Archibald Hallett, the son of Charles Hallett who lived next door at 218 Griffing Avenue. So nice when you keen can live next door. Now you can understand why it is called the Slade-Hallett House. Hallett and his brothers succeeded their father with the planning mill and electrical company businesses.