The New York City Farm Colony was a poorhouse on the New York City borough of Staten Island, one of the city's five boroughs. It was located across Brielle Avenue from Seaview Hospital, on the edge of the Staten Island Greenbelt. History Part of the town of Castleton from the 1680s onward, the land was previously a 96-acre farm owned by Stephen Martineau (also "Martino") of Staten Island. The earliest known history of the Martineau farm goes back to April 24, 1676, when the land was laid out for François Martineau, a French Huguenot immigrant to New Amsterdam from Île de Ré and La Rochelle, France. King Louis XIV of France sought to impose total Catholic religious uniformity in France, repealing the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed religious freedom for Huguenots, in 1685. It is estimated that anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Protestants fled France during the wave of persecution that followed the repeal; François was one such refugee who had previously lived in the Dutch farming village of Harlem with his family. Stephen Martineau, the great-great-grandson of François Martineau, was born in 1761 on what was called the Old Dorp (Old Town) Farm, near the northeastern shore of Staten Island. Stephen and his wife, Eleanor Haughwout, had 11 children. It was reportedly his daughter, Maria Martineau, who sold the farm in 1829 to the government of Richmond County for $3,000; the Richmond County Poor Farm was established on the land. When Staten Island became a borough of New York City in 1898, the city assumed responsibility for the property and redesignated it the New York City Farm Colony, although it was sometimes also referred to as the Staten Island Farm Colony. In 1915, its administration was merged with that of Seaview Hospital, which had been set up with the expressed purpose of treating tuberculosis (it is now a city-run nursing home, under the new name of Sea View Farms). Jurisdiction over the site was transferred in 1924 to the city's Homes for Dependents agency, which lifted the requirement that all residents of the colony had to work — with most of the work involving the cultivation of many varieties of fruits and vegetables, and at various times even grains such as wheat and corn; these crops fed not only the colony's residents but met the needs of other city institutions as well. For several years, the bank robber