Running through Jericho is the main-traveled road from the eastern part of Long Island to New York, called Jericho Pike. In our time it is a famous thoroughfare for automobiles, is thoroughly modern, and as smooth and hard as a barn floor. In former days it was a toll-road, and over it Elias Hicks often traveled. A cross-country road runs through Jericho nearly north and south, leading to Oyster Bay. On this road, a few rods to the north from the turn in the Jericho Pike stands the house which was originally the Seaman homestead, where Elias Hicks lived from soon after his marriage till his death.
The house was large and commodious for its time, but has been remodeled, so that only part of the building now standing is as it was eighty years ago. The house ends to the road, with entrance from the south side. It was of the popular Long Island and New England construction, shingled from cellar wall to ridge-pole. Four rooms on the east end of the house, two upstairs and two down, are practically as they were in the days of Elias Hicks. In one of these he had his paralytic stroke, and in another he passed away. The comparatively wide hall which runs across the house, with the exception of the stairway, is as it was in the time of its distinguished occupant. A new stairway of modern construction now occupies the opposite side of the hall from the one of the older time. This hall-way, it is said, Elias Hicks loved to promenade, sometimes with his visitors, and here with characteristic warmth of feeling he sped his parting guests, when the time for their departure came.
Like the most of his neighbors, Elias Hicks was a farmer. The home place probably contained about seventy-five acres, but he possessed detached pieces of land, part of it in timber. Several years before his death he sold forty acres of the farm to his son-in-law, Valentine Hicks, thus considerably reducing the care which advancing years and increased religious labor made advisable.
Jericho still retains its agricultural character more than some of the other sections of neighboring Long Island. The multi-millionaire and the real estate exploiter have absorbed many of the old Friendly homes toward the Westbury neighborhood, and are pushing their ambitious intent at land-grabbing down the Jericho road.
If Elias were to return and make a visit from Jericho to the meeting at Westbury, as he often did in his time, three or four miles away, he would pass more whizzing automobiles en route than he would teams, and would see the landscape beautifully adorned with lawns and walks, with parks and drives on the hillsides, not to mention the costly Roman garden of one of Pittsburg's captains of industry. Should he so elect, he could be whirled in a gasoline car in a few minutes over a distance which it probably took him the better part of an hour to make in his day. As he went along he could muse over snatches of Goldsmiths' "Deserted Village," like the following, which would be approximately, if not literally, true:
"Hoards, e'en beyond the miser's wish abound,
And rich men flock from all the world around.
Yet count our gains: this wealth is but a name
That leaves our useful products just the same.
And so the loss: the man of wealth and pride