Charles Z. Gillette Family of Sayville

I went over to the beautiful St. Anne's Cemetery today in Sayville to fulfill a gravestone request and found so many beautiful and ornate headstones for the Gillette family. As I was leaving the cemetery, I crossed over Gillette Street and started thinking, who was this family?

A Captain during the Civil War, Charles Z. Gillette was born in 1827 in New York and he lived with his wife Phebe Edwards and their three children, Ida, Charles and Lulu (Lucilla) in Sayville by 1863, though he removed to the town of islip for a time. In fact (shown to the left), he owned property in the town of East Islip (then Washington County) in 1866 on North Main Street with Joseph Wood. He was a successful merchant and store keeper and even appointed as the Sayville Post Master in the summer of 1869. He was successful enough to be afforded the opportunity to travel to England and France in 1876.

On Gillette Street still stands the house (on Right) Charles built for his wife and his family on what was then Edwards Street at the end of the Civil War and used today by the Bay Area Friends of the Fine Arts (BAFFA) as well as other societies. Charles was instrumental to his community, revolutionized his street with electric lighting and he was loved by all who knew him.

Pictured on left is posted, compliments of the Connetquot Library.

Nikola Tesla

In 1901, when you could still find acres to purchase on Long Island, Nikola Tesla, a native of Like, Austria (now Croatia) born on June 15, 1856 to Milutin and Djuka Mandic Tesla,  did just that. Although he was living in New York City at the time on Houston St., Tesla purchased 200 acres in Shoreham. Upon those acres he built a laboratory on a former potato farm with a plan to deliver free electricity to people through the air. Today, the remains of his complex are being saved by Joseph Skorski, according to the @Long Island Pulse Magazine.

Nikola Tesla immigrated in 1884 and became a US citizen in the summer of 1891, where at the time he was living at Hotel Gerlach (now the Radio Wave Building) in New York City as a Civil Engineer. It seems he had a preference for hotel living, as in 1918 he was living in the beautiful Waldorf Astoria. He died in 1943 at the age of 87. He never married or had children.