Remembering Marconiville, Long Island
By George Wallace


One of the more colorful, if obscure, bits of ethnic history on Long Island, is the story of how a small section of north Copiague came to be known as Marconiville, in honor of the man acknowledged to be the inventor of radio.

It seems that a schoolmate of the famed Italian inventor Gugiliemo Marconi owned some property in the area, and encouraged celebration of his friendship with Marconi, and an Italian heritage that went back to their native land near Bologna.

So much so, in fact, that he named streets after famous Italians, invited Marconi to visit, and even had a hand in the creation of the “American Venice” section of Copiague with its canals and ornamental bridges.

Of course the name Copiague is an interesting enough on in its own right. According to some local historians, it refers to the native words describing a body of land shut in by salt meadows, and in fact early English settlers made good use of the salt hay growing in the brackish meadows of the area for many years, feeding cattle on it, harvesting the bay waters, and even producing straw paper from the meadow grass.

But by the turn of the 20th Century, Copiague had become home to a large population of Italian immigrants, including John Campagnoli, an Italian-American engineer who had gone to school with Marconi back in Emilia-Romagna, an area in northern Italy which has as its capital the city of Bologna.

Campagnoli was not the first Italian to move to the area – fighting ethnic closed-mindedness, pioneers like Nicholas Cimino helped open up real estate to his nation9 9s fellows as early as 1906. But it was the job of Campagnoli to turn Cimino’s pioneer work into overt civic pride.

And when he did, he picked Nobel Prize winning Gugliemo Marconi as a symbol of it.
It seems Campagnoli was close enough friends with Marconi — born near Bologna to a prominent landowner and his wife, Annie Jameson, granddaughter of the founder of the Jameson Distillery – and proud enough of his ethnic heritage during a time when some Americans looked down on Italians, which he decided to take action to celebrate both. He accordingly purchased a tract of land north of the railroad tracks in Copiague, named it Marconiville in 1913, and started naming streets after Popes, explorers and political figures with origins in his native land.

There is no record as to whether Marconi was appreciative of the honor, but he did feel close enough to Campagnoli, it seems to visit him for several years in the area each summer.

Meanwhile, the Italian population solidified in the area. By the 1920s, Marconiville was firmly situated in Copiague community, with many of its members coming from the Bologna area originally. An area on the south side of the town, where boat canals were located, came to be known as the American Venice, containing canals and arched bridges, and even a fleet of gondolas.

Today most of that which was Marconiville is gone. The Marconiville Hotel was destroyed by fire. Most of the area has been taken over by new ethnic in-migrants. But Our Lady of the Assumption Church, built in part because Campagnoli wanted a Roman Catholic Church closer to his community than Amityville, remains. The American Venice canals and bridge s are there. Streets remain named for Pope Pius XI, Verrazano and others. Until recently a piece of an iron fence existed on Great Neck Road that bore the name Marconiville, about one block south of the railroad on the west side of the street.

And poignantly, just near the train station and the Veterans Memorial Park, there is a monument to the Marconiville residents who served in World War I.