Frank Bailey was born in Chatham, New York, in 1865.  His father was a well-respected physician and amateur naturalist who collected rare minerals and fresh water shells, but often neglected to collect from his patients.  His mother, a graduate of Mt. Holyoke focused her worldly ambitions on her son.

After graduating from Union College on a scholarship, Frank Bailey rapidly accumulated a substantial fortune, becoming a senior officer of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company.  For all his success, however, he felt “something was missing from his life.” He looked back on excursions with his father, keeping “a sharp lookout for unusual trees and plants” as some of the happiest moments in his childhood.  In 1911 Bailey bought a house and 45 acres in Locust Valley.

He was not interested in building a “French chateau or an English castle, like so many other houses in the vicinity,” and mocked the pretensions of his neighbors by naming his property “Munnysunk.” What distinguished “his place from all others is the enormous number and variety of trees.”  His hope was to influence the practice of horticulture so that “tree gardens may some day become as common as flower gardens.”

All  words in quotes are from Frank Bailey’s autobiography, It Can’t Happen Here Again: The Life Story of a Self-Made Man, Alfred A. Knopf, 1944.