12/20/2025
Timothy Carll — the family that shaped the map of Long Island
The final 6.9 acres of the original Carll tract has been sold, quietly closing a 324-year chapter of Long Island history.
Long Island remembers its past in subtle ways — not with monuments, but in road signs, waterways, and the names we speak every day without realizing who we’re speaking of.
Carlls River. Carlls Straight Path Avenue. Carll Homestead.
These names feel permanent, woven into the landscape. But recently, the last piece of land directly tied to the family that shaped much of central Suffolk County quietly changed hands. With that sale, a centuries-long thread of living history passed into its next life.
The property at 380 Dix Hills Road was the final remaining parcel of a roughly 6,000-acre tract purchased in 1701 by Timothy Carll, an early settler whose name endures even as the man himself has faded from written record. Early Long Island left few diaries and sparse documentation. Men like Carll shaped the region with their hands, not their pen. Some families left legacies in books. The Carlls left theirs in the land.
That is why this sale matters — not because a property changed owners, but because the last physical link to one of Long Island’s earliest colonial landholdings has now passed into new stewardship.
Carll’s original purchase stretched across what would become Dix Hills, Commack, and Half Hollow Hills, running south to the Babylon shores where Carlls River met the Great South Bay. The river still traces the natural line carved by early Carll farms that once spanned the heart of central Long Island.
The land was acquired through blended transactions common to the era — sterling paired with goods or promises to cultivate and improve the land. Generations of Carll descendants honored that commitment. They farmed, built, subdivided, and adapted as the region evolved. Roads followed their fence lines. Neighborhoods rose where wheat once grew. Through it all, one parcel endured the longest: 380 Dix Hills Road.
The 6.9-acre estate is anchored by a circa-1710 three-story colonial manor, standing through wars, storms, and the complete transformation of Long Island. Its eight bedrooms, five bathrooms, and four fireplaces rest on wide pine floorboards cut from trees that predate the settlement itself.
The property includes two historic lakes, a guest cottage, an eight-car garage/workshop, two barns (one with caretaker’s quarters), and a small family cemetery — quiet proof that generations lived, worked, and were laid to rest here.
The sale combined historic parcels at 380, 370, and O Deer Park Road, reflecting layers of agricultural past from Knoll Farm to Havemeyer ownership.
In 2002, Louis J. Modica, Bay Shore real estate entrepreneur and founding member of LIBOR, acquired the property from the Havemeyers (Domino Sugar Family). With care and foresight, he preserved the Carll House, its outbuildings, and cemetery while allowing surrounding land to evolve responsibly.
That chapter now continues under Dr. Khalid Noori, the new owner, who has expressed a commitment to restoring and preserving the property for future generations.
“This sale marks more than a real estate transaction,” said Compass agent David P. Sanders. “It closes the last physical link to one of Long Island’s earliest and largest colonial landholdings.”
On a rapidly developing Long Island, history often disappears quietly. But the names remain — Carll, Dix, Gardner, Doxsee — families whose work shaped the region long before it was a destination.
Their legacy isn’t a statue. It’s the land beneath our feet.
And maybe the next time we pass Carlls River or drive Straight Path, we should pause and imagine a man named Timothy Carll — not a tycoon or politician — but a farmer who bought land, worked it, and unknowingly shaped the map we still live by today.
The David P. Sanders Team
631-335-1914
[email protected]
