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Rockaway Peninsula MosquitO' Extermination Corporation, a 

 voluntary association of property owners on the South Shore, 

 of which I am the President, it may be interesting to begin by 

 briefly tracing the history of mosquito work on Long Island. 

 It was back in 1900 when Mr. Henry Clay Weeks carried on his 

 extermination experiments at Bay Shore and Lloyds Neck that 

 the work began. The following year the now historic survey 

 made for the North Shore Improvement Association by Mr. 

 Weeks, Profs. Davenport, Shaler and others was begun. It 

 covered the territory between Manhasset and Huntington Bays 

 and was one of the most complete mosquito surveys ever made, 

 but for two reasons little immediate work resulted from it. In 

 the first place, mosquito work was such a new thing that there 

 was little popular interest in it, and a degree of skepticism far 

 in excess of anything met with even now. Furthermore, it was 

 before the origin of ditching methods now so universal on salt 

 marshes, consequently the engineers had to base their recom- 

 mendations on various schemes for flooding or complete recla- 

 mation, which made the cost prohibitive. Consequently, except 

 where individual property owners did work on their own estates, 

 nothing further on a large scale was attempted on the North 

 Shore till 19 10, when the Matinoecock Neighborhood Associa- 

 tion took up the work and expended some $6,000 for fresh and 

 salt-water drainage work. The next work other than mainte- 

 nance was at Port Washington and Glen Cove in 19 14, where 

 $2,000 or more was spent on work of various kinds. The fol- 

 lowing year this work was continued and the Great Neck Asso- 

 ciation expended some $1,100, mostly on malarial work. In 

 191 6 all the North Shore work in Nassau County was merged 

 and placed under charge of Mr. Howard C. Bennett, formerly 

 of Union County, N. J., and was later taken over by the Nassau 

 County Commission, when Mr. Bennett became its first chief 

 inspector. 



On the South Shore, work was first taken up in 1902 and 

 1903 by Frederick D. Philips and Edward M. Bently, of the 

 Board of Health of Lawrence, on the Rockaway Peninsula. In 

 this work some thousands of feet of hand-dug ditches were in- 



