Daniel Carter Beard Mall
658 Acres
A boy is like a tree. If his head is to reach the sky he must
first plant his feet in the dirt.—Daniel Carter Beard Daniel Carter Beard (1850-1941), known to millions of Boy Scouts
as "Uncle Dan," was a prominent Progressive-era reformer, outdoorsman, illustrator,
and author. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 21, 1850, Daniel was a gifted artist
and a bookworm as a child. He loved the great outdoors and formed a club called
the "Boone Scouts" with his friends. Beard graduated from Worrall’s Academy
in Covington, Kentucky in 1869 with a degree in engineering and worked as a
surveyor and engineer. In the early 1870s Beard and his family moved to Flushing,
Queens. After working for a few years at the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company,
he made his living as an illustrator. Beard’s drawings graced the pages of dozens
of newspapers and popular magazines, from the New York Herald to Harper’s
Weekly, and from St. Nicholas to Godey’s Magazine . His work
attracted the attention of Mark Twain, who hired Beard to illustrate The
Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court (1889). Beard became interested in the plight of urban youth while
touring tenements in the Lower East Side in 1878. Upon reading a sign with the
words "No dogs or children wanted," he wrote: "I thought to myself that the
fools have built an immense city without any place for the young at all." He
actively campaigned to create new urban parks and playgrounds for healthy outdoor
recreation. As editor of Recreation and later of Woman’s Home Companion magazine,
Beard founded a nationwide scouting program for boys, known as "The Boy Pioneers"
or the "Sons of Daniel Boone," in 1905. Beard’s group merged with the Boy Scouts
of America in 1910. More than one million boys joined the Scouts while he served
as National Commissioner for thirty years until his death in 1941. Beard’s other
accomplishments included teaching at the Art Students’ League of New York, serving
on the Board of Education, establishing an outdoor school for boys, and writing
dozens of books. He loved to explore the Queens countryside, and he first met
the woman he married, Beatrice Alice Jackson, while hiking through Newtown.
This property was acquired by the independent Town of Flushing
in 1875 and named Flushing Park. In 1898 jurisdiction passed to New York City
when Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens were incorporated into Greater New
York. From the 1870s to the 1940s, the park was home to the beloved cast-iron
and zinc Neptune Fountain depicting the Roman god of the sea and a bevy of mermaids.
According to the 1913 Annual Report of the Department of Parks, this was the
site of the first public Christmas tree erected in a Queens park. On Christmas
Eve in 1913, Flushing residents gathered to light the tree and hear a concert
by a 26-piece Parks Department band. In 1942 the western portion of Flushing Park was named for
Beard by local law. Four monuments stand in the two parks: (from west to east)
a Spanish-American War Memorial Flagpole (1950), a Civil War memorial obelisk
(1865), an ASPCA horse trough (1909), and a World War I memorial by Queens sculptor
Hermon A. MacNeil (1925). Volunteers from the North Flushing Neighborhood Association
and the Flushing Local Development Corporation install holiday displays throughout
the year and work with Boy Scout Troop #461 and students from the Daniel Carter
Beard Junior High School to plant, maintain, and clean the park. Their efforts
keep one of the oldest parks in Queens festive, green, and clean.
Saturday, Dec 12, 1998