Appendix
Sources
Captions throughout the article indicate a number of specific sources. Given the years of Mr. Heitz's life, online images of old newspapers provided less information than I had desired; only the Brooklyn Daily Eagle proved useful. I had expected the Huntington Long-Islander to be a rich source, but I have yet to discover any online issues earlier than the late 1880s.
As always, the impressive digital images available through the New York Public Library were helpful, as were the collections at Ancestry.com.
My most useful source was the 1882 Munsell History of Queens County, N.Y. Online, I found a digitized version of a print copy in one of the University of Toronto 's libraries - ironic; were it not for the pandemic, I could have hopped on the subway and in twenty minutes been in the library, holding the old tome in my hands. The book's section about Hicksville, which includes brief biographies of Frederick Herzog and John F. Heitz, was written by... John F. Heitz! He died some months before the book was published; what he had written was then edited to reflect his passing. Incidentally, the portrait used at the start of this article comes from that source.
I feel obligated to note a shortcoming of the Munsell History: it had many contributors, who worked on different topics, each using different sources as they saw fit. The result is some inconsistency and inaccuracy, things which are especially relevant if one reads about the founding of Hicksville.
My belief is that the combination of the disastrous early fire, and the subsequent (but not immediate) resettlement by people from outside Long Island, created a vacuum of accurate local historical knowledge. By the late 19th century, there was a consensus, handed on from one person to the next, about what had happened in the village before the Germans arrived - and in detail, it was at odds with certain facts. Thus, the History talks about Jericho-based preacher Elias Hicks as the leader of the original Hicksville settlement, and it somewhat rearranges dates and events so that they fit that premise.
Elsewhere in the same History is a fact-based profile of Elias Hicks. The famous Quaker could not have participated in the settlement of Hicksville, which occurred (per the book) c.1836 - he had died some years earlier, in February 1830.
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That's that!
