Westbury was founded by Edmond Titus. He was later joined by Henry Willis, one of the first English settlers, who named the area after a town in his home county of Wiltshire, England. Westbury had been a Quaker community of isolated farms until the railroad came in 1836. After the Civil War, the New York elite discovered that the rich, well-wooded flat countryside of the Hempstead Plains was a pefect place to raise horses, hunt foxes and play polo at the Meadowbrook Polo Club. The Village of Old Westbury was incorporated in 1924, separating itself from Westbury, the adjacent area that housed many of the families of the construction and building staffs for the Old Westbury mansions.
