A sea captain's son willed his Manhattan farm to retired sailors, a Loyalist's son sued as heir to the Supreme Court, and the ground rents housed 1,000 sailors

Captain Thomas Randall made a fortune seizing prizes at sea; some historians call him a privateer. His son Robert Richard Randall held a farm of about 21 acres in what is now Greenwich Village. Robert signed his will on 1 June 1801 and died on 5 June. He left the farm and the rest of his estate to build a home for "aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors", governed by New York officials including the mayor, the state chancellor and officers of the Marine Society. The will was fought for years. John Inglis, son of the Loyalist clergyman Charles Inglis, sued for the land as Randall's heir through his mother. In 1830 the US Supreme Court upheld the gift; it also held that Inglis, whose father had left for England before 1783, was an alien who could not inherit. The trustees leased the land in lots as the streets around Washington Square became fashionable. Rent rose from about $4,000 a year at Randall's death to more than $400,000 a year by the 1920s. In 1831 the trustees bought a farm on Staten Island; the first dormitories opened in 1833 with 37 seamen, and by the early 1900s about 1,000 lived there. In 1976 the home moved to Sea Level, North Carolina. The trust sold its last Manhattan land between 1974 and the mid-1980s. A 1975 court decree fixed the Randall endowment at $24,520,531, to be kept in perpetuity. The trust now pays living costs for retired mariners.