Sylvestor Manor

Shelter Island, New York

I’ve been especially eager to visit Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor since I began writing my current novel, which has a focus on the slave trade in the northeast. The lands of Sylvester Manor were home for millennia to indigenous Manhansett People, then owned by an Anglo Dutch sugar consortium to run a “provisioning plantation” for the Barbadian sugar trade. It was worked by enslaved Africans as well as indentured or paid Native American and European laborers. The estate’s grounds are estimated to contain the unmarked graves of up to 200 enslaved servants and laborers. Since the 1600s it’s been owned by eleven generations of Sylvester descendants, at one time a food industrialist’s summer estate. Then, in 2014, it was gifted to a nonprofit organization for a completely different purpose.

Currently the site includes a 1737 Manor House, a restored 19th-century windmill, an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground, and a working farm. It offers educational, history & heritage, and cultural arts programs.

As I walked the grounds of the estate on a day when there were only a handful of other people, I tried to imagine the place alive with work and workers. Provisioning plantations were the means by which plantation owners ensured a steady supply of goods for their highly profitable sugar plantations in Barbados. These filled the gaps in the supply chain, providing resources that were not produced on the sugar islands.

At 236 acres, Sylvester Manor was one of the largest such provisioning plantations in the north, and it is the largest that is still intact. It’s remarkable that the young man who inherited this property in 2013, instead of keeping it for private use or selling to a developer, had a different vision for what it could be. You can read more about this very happy turn of affairs here: [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/garden/sylvester-manor-on-shelter-island-returns-to-its-roots.html]

It’s now a historical, educational, and archaeological treasure that in 2015 was designated a Historic District of national significance on the National Register of Historic Places.

It often has shows of nature based sculptures like the ones shown below.