Art collector, philanthropist, and suffragist, Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer (1855 -1929) and her husband, sugar tycoon H.O. Havemeyer, owned several homes in New York City, Newport, Islip and a farm in East Northport off Burr Road. Louisine invested their money in then up-and-coming artists such as Degas, Manet, Monet Cezanne and Cassatt. After her husband’s death in 1907, she became very active in politics, women’s rights and the Suffrage Movement. Havemeyer joined Alice Paul in founding the National Women’s Party and often gave showings of her art collection to raise money for the cause.
In January of 1917 as a Silent Sentinel, Havemeyer and Paul stood with hundreds of other women in front of the White House with banners and signs directed at Woodrow Wilson. The protesters were attacked by angry mobs and arrested by police, but continued their silent protest for two years. Havemeyer herself was arrested in March of 1919 at the age of 64, for making a speech as members of her party burned an effigy of President Wilson.

Soon after her release, she and 26 other members of the National Women’s Party traveled cross country on a train, which they called Democracy Limited, later dubbed the Prison Special. The idea was to bring attention to the harsh treatment of women in the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where 150 suffragists were held.
It was later that same year that the Nineteenth Amendment was finally passed by Congress. Louisine Havemeyer died ten years later and her vast art collection was left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.