Westbury Layers Quaker Settlement, Black Church History, Post Avenue, and Rail

Westbury has a Long Island village story that sits right on ordinary streets. Henry Willis named the area Westbury in 1675, and a Society of Friends meeting house was built in 1700. For a long stretch, the village’s early history and its Quaker history were almost the same story.

There is also a hard, important turn in that story. In 1775, Westbury Quakers freed all 154 African Americans they had enslaved. Many of those freed men and women built homesteads near the sheep-grazing pastures. Farms and dairies grew there, and a Black community became part of the village map.

That memory still has a corner. In 1834, with Quaker help, the community built New Light Baptist Church at Union Avenue and Cross Street. The building is now known as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. It is the kind of place detail that keeps history from turning into a vague sentence about “early settlement.”

Westbury’s story did not stop with the meetinghouse and church. The Long Island Rail Road came through in 1840, making it easier for immigrant workers to reach local farms. The village history also says more African American families came through the Underground Railroad. For some, Westbury was a stop on the way to Canada; several stayed after being hidden in Quaker homes.

By the late 1800s, wealthy estate life was rising around what became Old Westbury, and Post Avenue grew into a commerce center for those estates and workers. Westbury incorporated in 1932. So the village is not one tidy origin story. It is Quaker meetinghouse, Black homesteads, church corner, rail line, Post Avenue, and estate-edge commerce all layered into one walkable place.