Middle Island, NY real estate market

Middle Island sits in the Town of Brookhaven, in Suffolk County. The name is plain geography, not marketing talk. It sits roughly halfway between Montauk Point and the East River, and roughly halfway between the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. That halfway point gave the place its name and it has stuck ever since.

The written history here goes back to 1766, when the first Presbyterian church was built, along with a cemetery across from it that opened the same year. A new church went up in 1837 just behind the old one, and it served the community for 200 years until a Christian Education building was added at the Longwood Estate in 1966. Around that same colonial era, a veteran named Jonathan Edwards planted white pine seedlings along what is now Middle Island-Miller Place Road, and a farmer named William Dayton carried pine cones from that stock to his own farm in 1812. That planting history is why Prosser Pines Nature Preserve and Cathedral Pines County Park exist today, both still holding stands of those pines. Pfeiffer's Store anchored the community for over a hundred years before it burned down in 1971, and Corwin's Pond was renamed Artist Lake after painter Alonzo Chappel settled there in 1869.

Geographically the hamlet covers 8.3 square miles, almost all of it land, with several lakes including Artist Lake, Pine Lake, and Spring Lake. Middle Island also holds the headwaters of the Carmans River, which now rise inside Cathedral Pines County Park. For recreation there is Cathedral Pines County Park itself, once a Boy Scout camp, plus two public golf courses within the hamlet, Middle Island Country Club and Spring Lake Golf Club, with a third, Mill Pond Golf Course, just south in Yaphank. If you are weighing a purchase here, know that the parkland and preserve acreage around Cathedral Pines and Prosser Pines is protected county land, not future building lots, so that green buffer near Middle Island-Miller Place Road is not going anywhere.