TRAVIS is about as far west as you can get in Staten Island, at the west end of Victory Boulevard. Just as Proctor and Gamble made Mariners Harbor a company town for many years, so did the American Linoleum Company in Travis between 1873 and 1931; the industry became so identified with the region that the town became known as Linoleumville during that time. After the company moved to Philadelphia, residents voted to rename the town for early settler Captain Jacob Travis.
Linoleumville was originally called Long Neck, but after Joseph Wild, the founder of the American Linoleum Manufacturing Company, acquired a 300-acre tract and constructed a large factory, docking facilities and a workers’ village. Linoleum is a floor covering produced mainly with pulverized or ground cork and oxidized linseed oil. The process was perfected by Englishman Philip Walton, who supervised Staten Island’s Linoleumville along with Wild in the early days. Walton was succeeded by David Melvin, a Scottish-born inventor and engineer who developed several new varieties of linoleum products including colored linoleum and “battleship” linoleum, originally used by the US Navy but later installed in office buildings and department stores.
At the intersection of Victory Blvd. and Cannon Avenue, named for a prominent local French Huguenot family, is a World War I memorial consisting of a small cannon and a stone marker depicting a gun-toting doughboy. A doughboy goes “over the top” on the memorial face. The names of nine area residents who perished in WWI are on the back.
The gun was unearthed on the north side of the Sylvan Grove Cemetery’s Ye’ Old Burial Ground, entered from Victory Boulevard, when homes where being constructed nearby. The gun barrel is actually a Civil War era 6 pounder. After the Civil War it was quite common for barrels to be donated to towns and they were often displayed in cemeteries. This gun may have been displayed on the Cannon family grave, or as part of a memorial for the Grand Army of the Republic Veterans entombed in the Sylvan Grove Cemetery.
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6/16/23