Daniel Noble was a police justice, a district attorney, and, for thirty-one years, the surrogate who settled the wills of Queens. Advance Lodge raised him in 1888, and three newspaper accounts, spread over forty-one years, remembered to add that he belonged.
← Queens History Blog · The Lodges That Built Queens: Series Overview · Advance Lodge No. 635: Lodge History
Three times in forty-one years, a Brooklyn newspaper stopped to say who Daniel Noble was, and three times it found room for Advance Lodge.
The Brooklyn Daily Times of October 1896, when he was running for reelection as district attorney of Queens County, described him as a Mason belonging to the Advance Lodge of Astoria. The Times again, in a sketch of the Democratic nominee for surrogate in November 1898, put the lodge on a list that also held two yacht clubs, an athletic club, and a bicycling society.
And on May 31, 1937, the day after he died, the Eagle closed its long obituary of the “stormy petrel of Queens politics” by noting that he was a member of Advance Lodge, F. & A. M., of Astoria.
Between the first of those notices and the last lay the career that took him from a police court in Long Island City to the surrogate’s bench in Jamaica. The lodge turns up in accounts of that career and again at the end of it.
The lodge’s own records say when the connection began: Daniel Noble was raised in Advance Lodge No. 635 on November 12, 1888, listed as a lawyer, born in Brooklyn and living in Far Rockaway, four years before he was first elected to anything.
A Pilgrim Name on the Ravenswood Shore
The Noble family, the Times told its readers in 1898, was descended from Plymouth Puritans, and a good many of them had gone into law. Daniel’s great-grandfather and grandfather both sat on the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
His father, Solomon B. Noble, practiced in New York and Brooklyn for the better part of a generation and then, in 1868, moved the family to a mansion in Ravenswood.
Daniel was born in Brooklyn on Christmas Day, 1859. At ten he was sent to Germany with his brothers Paton and Walcott, and he stayed until 1876, returning as what the Times called an accomplished German scholar.
Columbia College followed, then Columbia Law School, where he took his degree in 1881. He went straight into practice with his father as S. B. & D. Noble, at 103 Third Street, Long Island City. The partnership lasted until Solomon died in 1895, at his son’s home.
The Handsome House on Woolsey Street
Politics found him early. In 1892 he was elected a police justice in Long Island City, running well ahead of his ticket. The next year he was nominated for district attorney by one wing of the Democratic Party and endorsed by the Republicans, a combination that would not have worked for many men.
In 1896, the McKinley year, a Republican tide put William J. Youngs in the office, but Noble still ran about four thousand votes ahead of his own ticket, which the Times took as proof that tidal waves had little effect on his popularity.
By then he lived in Astoria. The 1898 sketch gives him a handsome home on Woolsey Street and a wife, Annie Moran, daughter of Alexander Moran, for many years a prominent Democrat in Long Island City.
It also says he was fond of social life as well as politics, and the list of where he spent it reads like a map of the waterfront: the Knickerbocker and Williamsburgh Yacht Clubs, the Astoria Athletic Club, the Long Island City Wheelmen, and the Ravenswood Boat Club. He kept a yacht from his youth and was still taking it south for vacations the year before he died.
Astoria had one Masonic lodge in those years, and it was Advance. It met on the top floor of a building at Main Street and Fulton Avenue, over a tavern, and it would stay there until 1916.
The newspapers do not describe Noble climbing those stairs, only that the lodge was his. The lodge’s records supply the date, November 12, 1888, and list him then as a lawyer living in Far Rockaway, so he came to Advance before he lived in Astoria.
Why a Far Rockaway man with a Long Island City practice chose it is not recorded. The newspapers name no office or committee, and no minute book is in hand to say whether he held one.
A Calendar Full of Other People’s Dinners
What the papers do show is a man who was always being asked to something.
At the United Democrats’ outing at Ridgewood Park in 1899, he sat on the reception committee for a crowd of three or four thousand that was fed in two pavilions at half past seven and talked to until ten.
At the Jefferson Democratic Club’s ball in Jamaica in 1913, he led the grand march with his wife and drew applause of his own, in a hall that had just given Borough President Connolly an ovation.
In December 1908 his friends gave him a dinner of his own, with more than a hundred guests and the usual toasts, and the Eagle reported that everybody had a most enjoyable time.
In September 1900 he was hosting guests at a cottage called The Larches in Brentwood, out on Long Island, and by 1905 the Times was reaching him at his home in Jamaica. The county seat had pulled him east. Astoria still claimed him, at least on paper, in the lodge list.
The Unreversed Judge and the Tinderbox
In 1898 he was elected surrogate of Queens County, the judge who handles wills, estates, and the affairs of orphans, and he held the office until the age limit retired him at the end of 1929.
The Eagle called him the unreversed judge. In more than three decades he was reversed only twice.
The cases that reached the newspapers were small human matters. In 1919 he revoked the adoption of ten-year-old Mabel Gelson by her uncle and aunt in College Point when her father turned up from Wilmington to say he had never abandoned her, and he gave the child back to him.
The same year the Appellate Division upheld his ruling that Mrs. Sarah Thomas of Elmhurst, who in her last years amused herself with children’s toys, had been fit to leave her $100,000 estate as she chose.
In 1910 his decree let the public administrator pay out the $25,000 left by Daniel Creedon, a Woodside recluse who had lived in a windmill tower, to relatives in County Cork who thought him long dead.
In 1915 he put a lawyer to work finding some eighteen hundred guardians who had never accounted for the children’s money in their hands, and the Eagle noted that some of the children had never been told the money existed.
He worried about paper as well as people. In March 1911 he wrote to the Board of Estimate that the surrogate’s records were crammed into rooms with wooden floors and wooden cases, that even the space under the high desk was in use, and that the building was a regular tinderbox.
If it burned, he said, the confusion over land titles would be endless. He asked for a fireproof building.
The lodge he belonged to had begun its own life in rooms damaged by fire. Over the next five years it raised the money and built a house it could call its own, a later chapter explored in A Cornerstone, a Dinner, and a Borough in a Hurry.
Stormy Weather
The Eagle’s word for him was petrel, and the record bears it out. He teamed up with Patrick Gleason, the storm center of Long Island City politics, and later opposed him. He also drew critics willing to swear affidavits.
In November 1898, days after his election as surrogate, a Jamaica editor named Henry Haviland, facing a criminal libel complaint that Noble himself had sworn out, filed papers alleging that Noble, as district attorney, had held a forfeited $1,000 bail bond for more than a year before turning it over to the county treasurer. The treasurer certified receiving the money on October 12, 1897.
The Eagle printed the defense’s affidavits, not a verdict, and the clippings do not say how the case ended.
That same fall Townsend Scudder, then the Democratic candidate for Congress, was drawn into another quarrel when a lawyer’s letter blamed Noble for a missed filing and Scudder called part of the same letter false. Noble went on to the bench anyway.
In 1905 he dismissed George L. Glaser, the clerk of his court, a veteran fireman who held that he could be removed only on charges. Noble gave no reasons. When a reporter asked whether Borough President Cassidy had requested it, he asked in reply whether Daniel Noble were not the Surrogate of Queens.
In November 1911 he was the first witness at a hearing in the Long Island City courthouse, where Supreme Court Justice Townsend Scudder sat as a committing magistrate to look into whether a rival had bought the Democratic nomination for the Supreme Court.
Noble had hoped for it himself, on the strength of his long service to the party. The Times thought him ill at ease at first and then composed. Asked whether the county leader had ever offered him the nomination for money, he answered “No, sir,” with vehemence.
Scudder keeps turning up. He shared a page with Noble in the Times in November 1898, a pair of campaign sketches side by side. He was at the Ridgewood outing the following year. And five years after the courthouse hearing he dedicated Advance Lodge’s new temple on Grand Avenue.
The Queens of those years was a small place, and a man could cross the same few faces in a courtroom, at a party outing, and at a lodge.
Last Entries
In 1928 he was reelected to a fourteen-year term at a salary of $22,500, though he was already near the age limit, and the Times Union noted that lawyers had been jockeying for his seat for a year.
He stepped down on the last day of 1929, after thirty-one consecutive years, and went on as an official referee. In 1918 he had asked for a raise from $10,000 to $12,500 after two earlier refusals. By the end the office paid more than double that earlier figure.
He died at his country home in Brentwood on May 30, 1937, of a heart ailment, aged seventy-seven. The funeral was held there, with the Rev. John Tilly of Christ Episcopal Church officiating, and burial followed at noon on Wednesday at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth.
His widow, Annie Moran Noble, and a sister, Mrs. Jessie Barrie of Montclair, survived him.
The Eagle’s obituary placed him among the pioneers of Queens politics beside Gleason, Youngs, and John Sutphin, and ended with the yacht clubs and the lodge.
The Lodge in Every Account
Advance Lodge appears in Daniel Noble’s story the way a keel appears in a boat, below the line of sight and present in every account that cares to look.
The lodge’s records say when he was raised, and the newspapers say he stayed. What he did there in between has not turned up. The newspapers supply something else: a pattern.
Whenever someone had to say who he was, in 1896, in 1898, and at the end, Advance Lodge came with the answer. When his membership began, the lodge met in rooms over an Astoria tavern. By the end of his public career, it had a temple of its own, and he was on its list for both.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
Advance Lodge records supplied by the lodge give Daniel Noble’s raising on November 12, 1888, his occupation as lawyer, his birthplace of Brooklyn, and his residence in Far Rockaway at the time.
No minute book or officer list naming him was available.
Context on Advance Lodge No. 635—its rooms at 165 Fulton Avenue from 1876 to 1916, its status as Astoria’s only lodge for its first fifty years, and the 1916 dedication by Townsend Scudder—comes from Henry Martin, “Historical Data of Advance Lodge No. 635,” read November 20, 1915, and The History of Advance Lodge No. 635 (date to be confirmed).
Newspapers
- Brooklyn Daily Times, October 15, 1896, p. 7, sketch of Daniel Noble.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, November 1, 1898, p. 7, Noble and Townsend Scudder sketches.
- Brooklyn Citizen, October 31, 1898, p. 9, Scudder and the Norton certificate.
- Brooklyn Eagle, November 13, 1898, p. 10, Haviland affidavits.
- Brooklyn Citizen, August 29, 1899, p. 9, United Democrats outing.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, September 15, 1900, p. 20, Holbrook column and The Larches.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, October 11, 1905, p. 8, Glaser removal and Noble’s home in Jamaica.
- Brooklyn Eagle, December 26, 1908, p. 7, dinner in his honor.
- Brooklyn Eagle, August 21, 1910, p. 32, Creedon estate.
- Daily Long Island Democrat, April 1, 1911, p. 1, letter on the records.
- Daily Long Island Democrat, September 20, 1911, p. 16, biographical notice.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, November 2, 1911, p. 1, Willett inquiry before Justice Scudder.
- Brooklyn Eagle, April 13, 1913, p. 39, Jefferson Democratic Club ball.
- Brooklyn Eagle, April 1, 1915, p. 12, guardian accountings.
- The Chat, September 7, 1918, p. 53, salary request.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, April 18, 1919, p. 9, Thomas will.
- Brooklyn Daily Times, May 1, 1919, p. 8, Gelson adoption.
- Times Union, May 31, 1929, p. 96, retirement and the fourteen-year term.
- Brooklyn Eagle, May 31, 1937, p. 11, obituary.
Public and Genealogical Records
Public and genealogical records were not independently examined for this draft.
A research summary compiled for the project cites The New York Times obituary of May 31, 1937, a Find a Grave entry for Solomon Belden Noble that places Daniel at 73 Remsen Street, Astoria, in 1895, and a Wikipedia article. These should be checked directly.
The summary’s marriage year of 1888 and its statement that Noble was an Episcopalian are unconfirmed here, though the 1937 funeral conducted by the rector of Christ Episcopal Church is consistent with the latter.
Census, city directory, and cemetery records remain sources for further research.
A Note on the Record
The clippings give the length of Noble’s surrogate service as thirty years in the Eagle obituary of 1937 and thirty-one in the Times Union account of 1929. The dates, January 1899 to December 1929, support thirty-one.
His brothers appear as Paton and Walcott in 1937, while a 1904 item uses the spelling Payton.
The clippings say “Advance Lodge of Astoria” and do not give the number. The lodge confirms that it was Advance Lodge No. 635.
The lodge’s own history lists a surrogate among members found in Joel Kelsey’s 1898 history of Long Island City, but does not name him. This article does not identify that unnamed member as Noble.
The 1911 biographical notice says he was educated in France as well as Germany, which the other sources do not mention.
Several clippings in the packet are incomplete or badly transcribed. An item about a 1904 shooting in his family was left out as outside the lodge story.
Continue Reading
- Advance Lodge No. 635: Lodge History — Explore the lodge Noble joined in 1888 and the temple it later built on Grand Avenue.
- Horatio S. Sanford: Two City Halls, One Mayor — Another Advance Lodge member whose career ran through the contested politics of Long Island City.
- A Cornerstone, a Dinner, and a Borough in a Hurry — Continue into the lodge’s building era.
- Ravenswood: The Estates and Industrial Shoreline of Western Queens — Explore the neighborhood where the Noble family settled.
- The Lodges That Built Queens: Start Here — Return to the full series.
← Advance Lodge No. 635: Lodge History · Series Overview · Queens History Blog →
