Historic Tavern House In Mill Neck's Humes Preserve Gets Second Life

MILL NECK, NY — A historic tavern in Mill Neck is getting a restoration, and a new purpose: The Tavern House in the 28-acre Humes Preserve will become the headquarters for a Nassau County preservation group, thanks in part to a new grant.

The 18th-century structure on Oyster Bay Road is one of the oldest still standing in Mill Neck, The North Shore Land Alliance said. The nonprofit focuses on conserving natural and historic areas on the North Shore in North Hempstead, Oyster Bay and Huntington.

In December, the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation award the group a $250,000 to help adapt the house to become their new headquarters in 2023.

Debra Wiener, director of development at the Land Alliance, told Patch that the renovations should be finished this winter.

The North Shore Land Alliance has worked out of rented and borrowed spaces for 19 years, they said, and their new headquarters will sit on the Humes Preserve, which it bought in 2015 for $5.3 million.

The group then connected the Humes property to two adjacent parcels, preserving 42 acres in "in the heart of the most biodiverse area of Nassau County." The North Shore Land Alliance's properties abut a Nassau County-owned preserve and a wildlife sanctuary, creating a 150-acre "open space corridor" with five miles of trails open the public.

The group began restoration of the Tavern House in June 2022. The facade of the house will stay historically intact, and the original footprint of the early 1700s-built tavern will remain the same.

The group commissioned a “Cultural Resource Inventory” report in 2018 to learn the history of the house and property, Wiener said, which led to the site earning a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020.

They learned that the tavern house was a prominent stop for travelers on the way to Oyster Bay, and that the nearby Cook's Cottage was a general store in the 19th century.