The Highest Type of Manhood
While Hicksville still was young, John Heitz had begun planning for its future, much as he planned for his own. The village would need a real school - thus he donated land on Nicholai Street, and in 1853 the village's first true schoolhouse was built on it. Around the same time, he donated a site on Broadway for the construction of Hicksville's small Union Chapel. After so many Germans had settled in the area that a Lutheran church was warranted, he donated land for one - the village's first denominational church building.
Early in his retirement from watchmaking, Heitz was disappointed to find that he did not care for raising and tending crops, even as a gentleman farmer. Nonetheless, he loved the countryside and its flora. Like E. H. de Languillette, he was both a founder of Oyster Bay's agricultural society, and frequently one of its ongoing elected officers. So that Hicksville would grow into a lovely village, he laid out a number of its secondary streets (sadly, from early on, many buildings on Broadway had been built too close to the narrow, centuries-old route). Streets like Cherry or Mary - today's Marie Street - were built wider than had been the norm, and they were lined by trees and sidewalks. Many decades later, when towns all over western Long Island vied to attract commuters, the mature shade trees that lined Hicksville's downtown streets were praised by real estate brokers.
Marie Street, c.1911
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 3, 1911
John Heitz was the first person in Hicksville to respond to the need for a community burial ground. He donated land for what people liked to call the Heitz Resting Place. It later was incorporated, and eventually was renamed Plain Lawn Cemetery.
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As long as he lived, Heitz continued to turn his wealth into real estate. When he died in 1881, it was said that no one owned more of the village's land than he had.
Although he had been wealthy, he had not had an extravagant or elegant lifestyle. The townspeople remembered him as a friendly storekeeper, and they appreciated him as a good man, who had done all he could to better Hicksville. Someone wrote that his "life and precepts" had brightened the lives of all who knew him. His peers at the Town of Oyster Bay Agricultural Society wrote that he had been a man "quiet and modest in his bearing, [who] fully exemplified the highest type of manhood in his truthfulness, his integrity, his practical charity to all."
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