by Mac Griswold
Alice Fiske, who has never thought about Mary in quite this way, loves both portraits; they are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Dering family gift in 1916. Handsome Mary’s portrait in particular is a mainstay of Alice’s costume drama of upper-class island life in the eighteenth century. That slender, finely wrought shepherdess’s crook still leans against a door next to the slave staircase. Or does it? Like so much else at the manor, its history is more complex and must be disassembled, then pieced back together slowly.
In the case of the crook, this process begins only when Richard Barons, then the director of the Southampton Historical Society, pays a call. Alice and I gasp in horror when he grabs the shaft and twists off the finial—a metal screw top painted to look like wood! Not the carved wooden crook in the portrait, but a replica. When we check its appearance against a print of the painting, the finial design is clearly different. Among the hundreds of still-unsorted family snapshots in the vault, I now remember a two-inch-square early-twentieth-century black-and-white photo of a young girl standing in the manor driveway decked out in an eighteenth-century costume. She is one of Andy Fiske’s many great-aunts or second cousins, dressed for a fantasy ball in her version of Walpole’s nightie—Mary Sylvester, soon to be Mrs. Dering, come back to life during the Colonial Revival. A magnifying glass reveals that the crook she holds in her hand is the one with the metal finial.
In 1757, black-browed daughter Mary married merchant Thomas Dering (1720–1785). The Reverend Ezra Stiles, soon to be president of Yale, officiated at their Newport wedding. (Thirty-one years old when she married, Mary was old enough to have begun to worry whether she would ever find a husband.) At first the Derings lived fashionably in Boston, where Thomas and his brother Henry were merchant partners. A combination of bad luck, bad management, the failure of some creditors to pay them, and the loss of a family court case caused the Dering brothers’ firm to fail; they dissolved their partnership in 1762. Thomas, Mary, and their three children moved to the bolthole of the thousand-acre family estate, taking up farming as their financial salvation.
Common Sense
If Alice and I could look into Thomas Dering’s elegant looking glass and see his reflection as well as our own, we would be looking into the steady eyes of a mild-mannered, extremely devout, often sickly man who was the foremost American patriot of Shelter Island. Dering collaborated closely in the struggle for freedom with Ezra L’Hommedieu, who, like Dering’s wife, Mary, was also a great-grandchild of Nathaniel and Grizzell. (L’Hommedieu is the man with Andy Fiske’s nose in the portrait in the paneled parlor.) In the vault, a first-edition copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet, published in January 1776 and inscribed boldly on the cover by L’Hommedieu, tells us about the political beliefs of both Dering and L’Hommedieu. No longer “loyal subjects,” they had become activists, revolutionary Americans who affirmed that the inherent natural rights of Englishmen belonged to them too. They called themselves Englishmen when they used the phrase “the rights of Englishmen,” but their home country called them colonists. Without hesitation, both refused to take the British oath of allegiance to King George III. Working together, they played important roles in the war and took part in the formation of the new American government.
How did these two men come to challenge the power of the institutions and the laws they prominently supported and lived by? (It sometimes seems striking that there is less evidence of Americans being oppressed by the British than of Americans feeling oppressed—certainly the British thought the American colonists were doing very well—as indeed they were, by comparison with the Irish, for example.) In the 1750s and ’60s, the colonies were reaching the breakpoint of what historian Jon Butler calls the “colonial dark ages,” the seventy-five years before the Revolution, which have so often been skipped over in telling an American story that runs directly from the Pilgrims who challenged English religious discrimination to Sam Adams and the Boston Tea Party—the challenge to Great Britain.
Ezra L’Hommedieu, the son of Brinley’s cousin, the well-to-do sea captain Benjamin L’Hommedieu, grew up in Southold, graduated from Yale in 1754, and established a successful law practice in Southold and New York City. As a lawyer, he was radicalized, like so many others, by what he perceived as repressive and illegal British tax legislation, and he was among the first on Long Island to jump into the fray. In 1765, at thirty-one, he had married Charity Floyd, sister of William Floyd, who held his first political office as a trustee of his home town, Mastic, Long Island, and went on to become a member of the second Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Like Floyd, L’Hommedieu became a political figure and also served in the Continental Congress (1779–83). When the British occupied Long Island in 1776, L’Hommedieu exiled himself to Middletown, Connecticut, where he worked on the Committee of Safety to oversee the flight of Long Island’s refugees across the Sound. From Middletown, he handled the loans Congress allocated to help the refugees. (George Washington had authorized repayment of expenses and living costs for the exiles.) But when funds failed to materialize, L’Hommedieu spent his own money. The man he worked most closely with from his perch in Connecticut was his friend, ally, and relative Thomas Dering.
Thomas Dering was prepared for the separation of the colonies from the mother country by his religious experiences. Across New England, conservative and radical ministers inspired by the Great Awakening struggled for control of their congregations. As the laity began to overturn established church governments and found scores of breakaway churches, they “developed novel arguments defending the rights of minorities, and they increasingly characterized the authority against which they were rebelling as illegitimate, even tyrannical.” The colonial historian Patricia Bonomi writes, “The institutional disruptions and church separations of the Great Awakening thus provided a kind of ‘practice model’ which enabled the provincials to ‘rehearse’—though unwittingly—a number … of the arguments … that would reappear with the political crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.”
The Reverend William Adams, who had left Shelter Island after Brinley’s death, returned with the Derings to his old position as family chaplain. Adams was not the only cleric to enjoy the comforts of the manor. Thomas Dering, struck by the revival movement, was a man who thirsted after God and enjoyed uplifting sermons—“I am almost starved for want of a preached Gospel,” he complained to a young missionary friend in 1767. Preacher James Davenport’s inspiration, the evangelical Englishman George Whitefield—the eloquent driving force behind the Great Awakening in 1740—visited Dering twice during his many tours of the colonies. Even if Thomas hadn’t belonged to the political and intellectual Boston circles that rumbled against the British in the 1760s, Whitefield’s convictions would have gone a long way toward strengthening those of his friend and disciple as New England’s political temper rose. In 1764, as Whitefield was about to visit Shelter Island, he exclaimed in Boston, “O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against both your civil and religious liberties”; a couple of years later he rejoiced in the repeal of the Stamp Act (“Gloria Deo,” he wrote in 1766), and just before setting out on his seventh and last American tour in 1770, he inveighed from his London pulpit against “the great mischiefs the poor pious [Boston] people suffered lately through the town’s being disturbed by the [British] soldiers,” a reference to the Boston Massacre in March of that year.
Refugees
We can chart how fast the revolutionary fever reached Shelter Island from a letter a breathless young man wrote from New London, Connecticut, to his islander cousin, Nicoll Havens, only a week after the battles of Lexington and Concord. “Deliver with all Dispach,” he scribbled on the envelope. The words of the letter still leap off the page. Twenty-one-year-old Thomas Fosdick wrote: “I Send you Inclosed the News Papers Containing the Most alarming News of the King’s Soldiers Striking a Blow on the Americans. I’ve Recd. the News Last Night, & we are Fixing to go Immediately for Boston, So I hav
e only Time to Let You know that I am one that is Going.” Young Fosdick returned home to marry in the middle of the war, and he died on Shelter Island in 1811. It’s a good bet he never forgot his own “famous day and year” when, already an American, he rushed to defend what was not yet a nation.
Only a few weeks after Fosdick wrote, almost all the island’s freeholders, forty-three of them, “shocked by the bloody Scene, now acting in the Massachusetts Bay,” signed their support for “whatever Measures may be recommended by the Continental Congress” and resolved “in the most solemn Manner … never to become slaves,” using language that would eventually raise a national debate about the rights of all men. Thomas Dering’s name heads the list.
After the Battle of Long Island was lost in August 1775, Shelter Island, like the rest of Long Island, was occupied by the British. Throughout the winter and into the next spring, more than five thousand Long Island refugees who had refused to take the British oath of allegiance fled across the Sound, crowding into the small towns of Connecticut. (Connecticut was held by the Americans, and the shoreline was fairly well fortified against British invasion.) With them they took what household effects they could carry aboard and what grain, hay, turnips, and potatoes they could get together, both to feed themselves and their animals and to keep supplies out of British hands. The Derings took with them twenty-one cartloads of goods, forty-nine “Large horne Cattle,” and 204 sheep, along with twenty-six hogs and “powdering tubs” to salt the hams. It took Captain James Jones four days to clean out his schooner, the Elizabeth. Two servants or slaves also made the trip; it’s not known who they were. Like a large number of Shelter Islanders, the Derings ended up in Middletown, far enough up the navigable Connecticut River to be considered out of danger.
Like all refugees everywhere, the Long Islanders imagined their exile would be short. In fact, for the Derings, as for most, it lasted seven years—until 1783, the end of the war. As refugees, farmers lost the means of subsistence and their livelihood. Merchants and shopkeepers lost their shipping and markets. The West Indies trade was embargoed. Shelter Islanders left houses and farms to be watched over by a few tenants and by slaves, the slaves they themselves swore they would never become.
By February 1779, more than three thousand British troops were quartered in Southampton, Sag Harbor, and Southold. Reluctantly, American sympathizers who were unable or unwilling to leave swore fealty to the British crown. British adherents assisted the occupying troops while American intelligence and resistance efforts were organized behind the lines. Long Island militants returned across the Sound by night in their whaleboats to raid British encampments, taking arms and prisoners—and sometimes plundering the houses of their fellow refugees as well. Like the British, they fired without warning: Ebenezer Miller lost his only son, who was shot through the glass and curtains of an upstairs window by a Connecticut plunderer who saw a movement and thought it was a sniper. In the usual way of occupiers, the British looted and burned; abused and terrified helpless locals; ate whatever they could find; and commandeered transport. Fields were left untilled. Newport’s proximity became a liability: the large British army quartered there regularly came to Long Island to fell timber and forage for supplies. As many as twenty-one British men-of-war anchored in Gardiners Bay.
Dering, by July 1776 already well in his fifties and always a frail man, did his utmost in the battle for liberty. He was a delegate from Suffolk County to the Fourth Provincial Convention of New York (1775–77), which unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence. One of three men appointed as auditors for the refugee relief effort, Dering put his merchant training to good use, scrutinizing the mountains of accounting to present to the financially shaky American government for the refugees’ stay in Connecticut. He spent laborious hours checking every invoice and receipt in hopes of ensuring fair repayment from the state to every request.
The double front doors that Brinley Sylvester had made for his c.1737 new dwelling tell us (and told his community) that he was setting himself up as the incoming “lord of the manor.” Double doors usually appeared on a church, courthouse, or statehouse.
In 1783 the family returned to the manor. Thomas’s eldest son, Sylvester (1758–1820), aged twenty-five, took on the management of the place from his ailing father, who suffered a stroke soon after his return. Sylvester wrote to a relative, “We … are returned again to our farm on this Island, which has been very much damaged in Wood, Fences & Buildings during the late war … I make this War a very unfortunate one for us, we are now beginning the world as it were anew & with a common blessing we shall put ourselves in as happy a situation as we was before the War.” In the same year, Sylvester applied to Sir Guy Carleton, Commander of British Forces, North America, after the surrender at Yorktown for restitution for wood cut on the property, but the £1,400 for which young Dering petitioned was never paid. (Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, touring through Shelter Island in 1804, noted particularly that “three thousand cords of wood were taken from the estate of Thomas Dering, Esq., a man of such excellence of character as would, if anything could, have disarmed the spirit of plunder.”) The list of debts on the estate of Thomas Dering in 1797, twelve years after his death, stood at £2,602.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Robert Hefner, a historic preservation consultant with more than thirty years of experience working on the East End and coauthor with me of a historic structure report on the manor, has found fragments of Brinley’s original structure in the attic. These people never threw anything away if they could help it. A stately pair of heavy paneled doors have been hacked down from their nearly seven-foot original height. As a final indignity, somebody hinged them together backward and hung them upside down to act as a five-foot windbreak between two parts of the attic. Bob calculates the original height of the doors by assuming that the sawed-off bottom panels were mirrors of the unmutilated top ones (now upside down at the bottom of the windbreak), just as the center panels mirror each other. The combined width of the two door leaves is fifty inches, so there is plenty of room for them and a doorframe in the space between the nearest front windows of the two parlors. He concludes that the windbreak is indeed what remains of Brinley’s double front doors.
In early-eighteenth-century New England, imposing double doors spoke the language of public buildings such as meetinghouses and town halls. They proclaimed Brinley’s standing on Shelter Island as both the grandson of the founder of its English community and its prime public figure. (Indeed, at the time when the house was built, the only public building on the Island was Jonathan Havens’s general store.) Up the Connecticut River Valley across the Sound, the grandees known as the River Gods also commanded double doors for their houses in the 1750s and ’60s. But on the entire East End the manor’s majestic portal was then apparently unique.
When the house was renovated in 1839 by Samuel Smith Gardiner, who had married into the family, he removed the old front doors and reused them in the attic. On one leaf, someone scratched the date and an X, apparently meaning “remove but retain.”
Even before a later manor owner removed these doors to remodel the entrance, they had seen hard use and neglect. The pine panels, stylishly grain-painted to look like mahogany, are heavily scuffed and scratched. As built, they were Brinley’s statement of style as the lord of the manor. If we put the marks of wear on the same page with their later history, we can read the lifeless state of the house and the property when the Derings came home.
Bob keeps coming downstairs to the workroom with more discoveries. He has found the door of the delicate glass-fronted china cupboard that once fit into a corner of the paneled parlor. Cornelia’s architect, Henry Bacon, opened a passage to the library in 1908. Juxtapose the contents of that china cupboard with the “Tea Table,” and the “6 Teaspoons and Tongs” listed in Brinley’s inventory: a party is taking place in this paneled room. The cupboard door’s faint blue paint matches the parlor’s fashionable hue.
Next, Bob arrives from the attic with a baluster from the original staircase—he found the full set in a cardboard box placed on top of the boards laid across the attic joists, where Andy Fiske said the slaves used to sleep. From the angled cut at the bottom of each baluster he can tell the height of the risers on the old stair.
Museums do this kind of reconnaissance work all the time, when objects or sets of room paneling come into their collections. House museums also conduct forensic inquiries, but this is a family house, which is different. This house is so lived-in. I feel that its many inhabitants have not only left their marks but are still here. It was their home, for better or worse, and it is now their abode.