He was already mayor of Long Island City, in part, when he was raised a Master Mason in 1893. Getting the city to agree took longer.
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Horatio S. Sanford was raised a Master Mason in 1893, in the very year he became mayor of Long Island City, or at least became mayor in part. The aldermen had declared him elected, the courts were leaning his way, and a rival still sat in the other chair. The lodge he entered, Advance No. 635, kept its rolls in ink and its standing settled. His city did neither that winter, and the contrast gives his story its shape: a man whose title was fought over line by line, joining an institution that records a name once and keeps it.
A Name Spelled Wrong
The trouble began with spelling. Sanford ran in November 1892 as the Jeffersonian Democrat against Patrick Jerome Gleason, the “Battle Ax” mayor who had dominated the city for years. The papers described a businessman and property owner from the East River shore at Ravenswood, the son of Dr. Samuel T. W. Sanford, whose patent medicines had made the family prosperous. A year earlier he had been serving without pay on the commission improving Jackson and Vernon avenues, an appointment that came because he owned land along the route.
On election night the count favored him. Then City Clerk Thomas P. Burke, a Gleason appointee, went through the inspectors’ returns and found Sanford written as “H. Sanford,” “H. S. Sandford,” “Horatio N. Sanford,” and in other variations. Burke declined to credit these to the man everyone knew they meant, treated each spelling as a separate candidate, and issued Gleason a certificate. The numbers kept moving as the fight went on: Sanford’s lead was reported at 136, 171, 184 and 185 votes, depending on the day and the paper, while Burke’s tally gave Gleason a margin above 700.
The Clerk Who Vanished
Judge Bartlett of the Supreme Court ordered the returns sent back to the inspectors for correction. Burke made himself hard to find, and the order could not be served. Detectives watched his house in Greenpoint. Gleason had himself sworn in anyway, and when the new year came Long Island City had a mayor by the clerk’s certificate and a mayor-elect by the court’s reading of the votes.
On the night of January 16, 1893, the aldermen acted. They removed Burke, declared Sanford elected on the corrected returns, and confirmed ex-Sheriff Matthew J. Goldner as clerk. Sanford issued a proclamation and began naming his officers. For several days the city ran two governments, each with its own claim to the seal. On January 21, Chief of Police Anthony Woods walked into City Hall in full uniform, asked Gleason to leave, and took hold of him by the coat when he refused. Sanford sat down at the mayor’s desk.
A Lodge Room After a City Hall
At some point in 1893, Sanford took his degrees. The record consulted for this feature gives the year, not the night, and the year is enough to say something. The same man who had lately been at the center of a fight over whose name counted, and where it was written, was now raised in a lodge that does that work every time it admits a member. It would be easy to make too much of the pairing. It is enough to put the two facts side by side and let them sit.
The Reform Years
For 1894 and 1895 Sanford was the city’s sole mayor, and he governed like a man who had just spent a winter proving that paper matters. Just before he took office, Gleason’s Board of Health had leased the Centennial Hotel on Thompson Avenue as a quarantine house at $3,000 a year. Sanford refused to pay the rent. When the owner sued, the city answered that the lease was a scheme, and years afterward Justice Gaynor read the evidence and called it a barefaced fraud on Long Island City.
His school board found that 28 of the city’s 127 teachers lacked licenses and suspended them pending examination. His treasury discovered that the outgoing officials had left the tax rolls unsigned, so the city could not collect, and he told employees and creditors that there was no money to pay them. When the Legislature raised the mayor’s salary from $2,000 to $2,500, he declined the extra $500 and said he had been elected at the smaller figure. In 1894 he asked a school commissioner to resign over an attempt to install the commissioner’s brother as engineer of a new schoolhouse, and he challenged the number of inspectors on a $500,000 sewer contract after union bricklayers told him some of them did not know the work. That same summer, at his direction, Long Island Rail Road firemen were arrested over the smoke from the yards.
Reformers who had voted for him later called his administration a disappointment. The record shows a mayor who spent much of his strength cleaning up after the man he had replaced.
Books on Jackson Avenue
Not all of the work was repair. In 1895 a few readers, among them Dr. Walter G. Frey, George E. Clay, and William Nelson, wanted a public library for the city and took the idea to the mayor. Two gifts made it possible. Nelson supplied the books, and Sanford committed $3,000 from the city treasury to carry the library through its first year. On December 28, 1895, he named the first trustees, and the Regents chartered the institution in March 1896.
The doors opened at 26 and 28 Jackson Avenue in August 1896. By then his term was over and Gleason was back in City Hall. Sanford attended the opening anyway, as one of the men who had helped carry the idea through its long delays.
Gold, and Another Shore
His life after office was a long departure. He sat on the Municipal Union committee for William J. Gaynor in 1897 and on the committee planning the 1898 Charter Day celebration, and he took a part alongside his wife in a Twelfth Night Club comedy. Then he went west to Ashland, Oregon, to manage a gold mine in which he and Goldner held an interest, and in March 1899 his wife and four children left the family mansion at Ravenswood to join him. Years later, the city would acquire the old Sanford homestead beside Rainey Park, with a museum in mind. He kept a summer cottage on Assembly Point at Lake George.
His son Horatio Jr. died of pneumonia in October 1918 while serving with the Army Repair Detachment at Ashland, and his name is on Jackson County’s honor roll. Sanford himself died in Oregon in 1933 and is buried in Ashland’s Mountain View Cemetery.
What the Roll Kept
Sanford was born on July 9, 1853, and spent the early part of his career with his title in question. A clerk who could not be found had once been the only man able to make the books say what the voters meant, and the court had to send the returns back to be written correctly. In the lodge, the arrangement was simpler. His name was entered in 1893, and it has stayed there since.
Endnotes
Lodge Records
- Advance Lodge No. 635, records as examined by Brete Murphy (year of raising, 1893).
Newspapers
- Brooklyn Eagle: August 17, 1891; November 19, 1892; January 31, 1893; October 4, 1894; November 24, 1895; March 23, 1899; June 15, 1905.
- Brooklyn Daily Times: December 30, 1892; January 17, 1893; January 27, 1893; August 18, 1894.
- The New York Times: November 20 and 29, 1892; December 4 and 31, 1892; January 17 and 22, 1893; June 2, 1893; December 23, 1894.
- The Sun: January 17, 1893; March 1, 1893; August 18, 1894.
- Times Union: January 19 and July 25, 1893.
- Brooklyn Citizen: December 3, 1892.
- Newsday: November 11, 1990 (library appropriation).
Organizational and Local History
- J. S. Kelsey, History of Long Island City, New York (1896).
- Vincent F. Seyfried, The Story of Long Island City (1984).
- Joseph Brunelle, “The Last Mayor of Long Island City: Patrick Jerome Gleason,” New York Irish History Roundtable, vol. 1 (1986).
- Queens Public Library anniversary coverage.
Genealogical and Public Records
- Carlton E. Sanford, Thomas Sanford, the Emigrant to New England, vol. 1.
- Mountain View Cemetery records, Ashland, Oregon; Medford, Oregon newspapers.
- Jackson County, Oregon, World War I casualty list.
- Horatio S. Sanford Papers, MS 539, New-York Historical Society.
- Assembly Point Association, Lake George history.
Continue Reading
- Advance Lodge No. 635: Lodge History — Explore the lodge Sanford entered in 1893.
- James Prowse Jr. and the Cornerstone of Advance Lodge No. 635 — A stoneworker’s gift and another Advance Lodge member’s path through Masonic service.
- John I. Lovell of Advance Lodge No. 635 — Continue exploring the people connected to Advance Lodge.
- A Cornerstone, a Dinner, and a Borough in a Hurry
- The Lodges That Built Queens: Start Here — Return to the series overview.
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