The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  * * *

  Bob Hefner is now in the attic in a white overall suit and a mask: he has vacuumed out the insulation lining the cavity between the paneling in the bedroom below and the framing of the outer wall. Wielding a mirror exactly like an angled dentist’s mirror, he peers down into the hole with a long flashlight. No nails. A good sign. The paneling in the bedroom below hasn’t been removed and replaced, contrary to what the local historian Ralph G. Duvall wrote in 1932: “Much of the interior work such as the cornices, panels, wainscoting and the like was executed in England.” No, it’s American pine paneling on an American white-oak frame.

  In the afternoon, master carpenter Nathan Tuttle examines the slave staircase. The contrasts between the airy front hall, where Brinley’s stairway climbed grandly up (Samuel Smith Gardiner replaced it with the even grander flight that remains today), and the coiling darkness of this hidden one underline the increasing disparity between black and white, slave and free, as society grew more racialized and stratified.

  Tuttle uses a midget handsaw to cut small sections of the finish boards off the corner posts to either side of the outer door so he can confirm the oak frame as original. It is. He moves to the dining room, where he performs the same operation on the cornice, looking at the staircase from the dining room side. He finds a wad of modern newspaper with a barcode lying in the cavity inside the wall next to the dining room chimney. Hmmmm. No apparent explanation for this one.

  Alice has come home. It’s late, she wants a restorative glass, wants to put her feet up, doesn’t want to come admire the fine finish board Nathan has found that frames the top of the slave staircase door entry. Placed overhead and in darkness, it’s invisible unless you climb up a few steps, turn around, and shine the flashlight on it. But Alice does come to peer at it, and is delighted. “Very smooth,” she says, caressing it. Nobody would plane, chamfer, and sand a board like this for it to be seen only by the slaves and servants who used the staircase every day. It must be a piece of wood reused from Nathaniel and Grizzell’s house, probably part of a casing for a ceiling beam in an important room.

  As an aside, Alice tells us that the newspaper in the cavity near the dining room fireplace is there because quantities of newspaper have been rammed up both big chimneys, which are no longer used. There are no chimney caps, she says, “so the paper is scrunched up and rammed up from the fireplace with a rolled carpet. Keeps the birds out.”

  What is more significant is Bob’s identification of four framing studs in the roof that are clearly reused exterior wall studs from the first manor house. They are pit-sawn in traditional English fashion, in the way that the first houses here were constructed in the seventeenth century, he says. Holes clearly indicate where the sheathing, whatever it was, was nailed onto them. “There are carpenter’s marks on one which show these studs were pit-sawn,” he says. (Pit-sawing is done in a deep hole, a sawpit: a big timber is laid across the hole so that two men, one standing in the pit and the other on top of the timber, can push and pull the saw vertically to produce a long cut.) “This means there was someone here, or perhaps a crew, who was familiar with traditional English house framing techniques,” Bob adds. (Later housewrights dispensed with the niceties of sawing square studs and used saplings with the bark still on; bark still covers many of the other studs.)

  So this is good news, that the reuse of timbers from Nathaniel and Grizzell’s house is somewhat substantiated. Duvall had also written, “That which was serviceable of the prior homestead [was] worked into the new building.” Sifting the documentary and material evidence, Bob has got to the bottom of a few of the stories that people have told themselves to remember, or resolve, or ignore the contradictions and gaps they faced every day.

  Some weeks later, Bob finished the first stage of his technical examination of the structure. Now he has prepared a preliminary report, which he hands to me as we stand outside the front door in the sun. He has scrutinized the building inside and out. Besides lifting floorboards, prying out panels, and sawing through sections of corner-post casings, he has also calculated how many Atlantic white cedar shingles it would take to cover the outer walls—and then discovered an entry for exactly that many shingles in an account book in the vault. The first sentence of his report is a shocker: “An initial investigation of all exterior and interior building fabric of Sylvester Manor and the historic research accomplished to date have revealed that most of the exterior and interior building fabric dates from an 1835–1844 renovation [of the original circa 1737 structure] in the Greek Revival Style and a 1908 renovation in the Colonial Revival Style.”

  Bob is a man who fell in love with American history in the third grade. When he read about Daniel Morgan, the larger-than-life Revolutionary War hero, Bob’s life course was set. Morgan, a rough-and-ready frontiersman, recruited a company of riflemen and marched them to Boston in August 1775, making sure his men’s rifles were the latest models, lighter and more accurate than those of the enemy. Once on the battlefield, Morgan, a superb military tactician, ordered his men to pick off the Indians who guided the British troops through the rough terrain, and the British officers. The British, used to more polite warfare, complained. George Washington promoted Morgan to the rank of colonel, then brigadier general. Morgan topped his Revolutionary career with the battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, in 1781, considered the tactical masterpiece of the entire war.

  Bob is Sylvester Manor’s Daniel Morgan: he deploys his weapons to devastating effect. Sylvester Manor is a trophy, a precious hostage—“the earliest Georgian house on Long Island”—and as its ally he wants to cut to the ground the untruths and misapprehensions that have been marshaled around it. But in fact what we see—what Bob is talking about—is not all we have. He is correct in writing that “most of the exterior and interior fabric” is not original to 1737. Nonetheless, the most important structural elements are still here to tell the story of the 1737 house: the original oak frame, the old pine paneling upstairs and down, the slave staircase, and all the reused or saved fragments Bob has discovered that illuminate the house as Brinley built it.

  The report also shocks Beverlea Walz, curator of the Shelter Island Historical Society, who is inputting papers on the workroom computer today. She has come outside to join us. Beverlea dresses up in a corset, fichu, and mobcap to take part in Revolutionary War reenactments up and down the East Coast. (A lover of textiles, she has let me finger an eighteenth-century embroidered cream silk waistcoat in the society’s collections; the marks of the shoulder blades and back muscles of the man who first wore it, probably one of Thomas Dering’s sons, are outlined in sweat and dirt on the back of the garment.)

  For Bev, as for me—as for every visitor—Sylvester Manor is a treasure chest that still manages to encompass a fully intact history. “It’s pre-Revolutionary,” we say. “It’s colonial,” everyone says. “It’s been standing since before our nation began.” But the manor was also constructed from the inhabitants’ ideas and dreams for the future. A widening gulf between Brinley and those who labored and suffered to realize his vision begins with the transformation of his hardheaded grandfather’s mercantile outpost into a genteel country seat, ever more profitable and now newly elegant. The doors tell a version of the full story of Brinley’s house from 1737 through the generation that inherited after the Revolution. By the time they landed in the attic in 1839, they had served the manor for a hundred years. But the previous century’s promise of the Enlightenment had failed to materialize, either for the Sylvesters or for a republic sliding toward civil war. The portal to a rational, divinely ordained future no longer opened.

  As we walk inside, I tell Bob and Bev about tragic, troubled Mary Burroughs Sylvester. “Are you going to tell us something terrible about Brinley too?” asks Bev, who has had enough revelations for one day. Like all who enter this house, Bev deeply wants the place to take her as straight as an arrow to its past, where comprehensible stories will unfold before her. I say no; Brinley’s efforts to
find treatment for his wife stand as a testimony to him. I step back into the paneled parlor they all knew. Behind the glass-paned doors of the mahogany secretary bookcase rests a jumble of choice antique pottery and porcelain—lusterware, salt-glaze, blue-and-white creamware—alongside valueless souvenirs made of papier-mâché and plastic. I open a cabinet door for a better look, puzzling over why some of these knickknacks have been granted such a place of honor. It’s beyond me. They remind me of the figures of the century I have just traveled through—coarse or fine, cruel or kind, thoughtful or fatuous, sad, heroic, grotesque, beautiful, sometimes all at once. I close the door softly, without touching a thing.

  18

  FAMILY AND SLAVERY

  “Commos Will Be a Plage to You”

  It’s summertime, already hot. I’m in the cool workroom when Steve Mrozowski walks in waving a thick bunch of papers, another document from the vault’s innumerable and seemingly inexhaustible drawers, trunks, and crannies. Since I glimpse a court recorder’s neat script and headings that list plaintiff and defendant, I can guess it’s a transcript of a court proceeding. It’s the story of a bitter loss: the pleasant, honorable, and much respected General Sylvester Dering (as he became), his wife, Esther Sarah, and their five children had not in fact “begun the world anew,” as he had written on his return to the manor after the Revolutionary War. Even as they tried to repair the losses and move forward, the burden of inherited debt pressed on them. By 1827 the family had come on hard times.

  After Thomas Dering’s death, the 1,312-acre farm had been divided between his two sons, Sylvester and Henry. In 1827, seven years after Sylvester Dering’s death, his share of that division, the manor house and its 578 acres, were sold at a public auction to Ezra L’Hommedieu’s young daughter, the heiress Mary Catherine, and her lawyer husband, Samuel Smith Gardiner, a descendant of Lion Gardiner. The entire place, the property of Dering’s children, went for $10,400 on the steps of an inn in Sag Harbor. Dering and her children considered Samuel Gardiner and his mother-in-law, the formidable Mrs. L’Hommedieu—a woman who watchfully managed her own (and her daughter’s) investments and who was also Mrs. Dering’s sister—to be responsible for this bitter family scandal. It is true that Sylvester Dering’s children owed the L’Hommedieu estate nearly $6,000 (the rest of the auction profits may have gone to the government in taxes). Like other Shelter Islanders such as the Nicoll family, whose extensive property was auctioned by the heir Richard Nicoll and purchased by his brother Samuel, the Derings perhaps couldn’t find other means to satisfy their debts among themselves.

  After the sale, the Dering children scattered to points as close to the island as Sag Harbor and as distant as Rome, in upstate New York, making off with the portraits, furniture, silver, and many of the family papers. They left behind Thomas Dering’s handsome glazed secretary-bookcase and a Queen Anne side chair in solid black walnut, which still stands on the landing at the top of the stairs. The Derings had lost their abiding treasures, the land and the house. And although the property remained “in the family”—Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu Gardiner being a descendant of Nathaniel and Grizzell through her great-grandmother, Patience Sylvester, a daughter of Nathaniel and Grizzell—the family rift never entirely healed. As I discovered in an innocent phone call to one descendant who told me he was still prepared to sue … and he wasn’t joking.

  For us, trying to understand life at the manor, the precious residue of the battle is the map included in the Gardiner family copy of the court proceeding to eject Sylvester Dering’s widow from the “widow’s third” of the land and house that she insisted she still owned according to her husband’s will, despite the auction. She won, but she eventually moved to Sag Harbor anyway. Flipping through the document with Steve, I understand why he’s transfixed by page four. I am too. It’s a sketch plan of the house we stand in and its grounds in 1828. This single sheet of paper momentarily forces the limitations and difficulties of marrying documents and archaeology (where words say one thing and trowels another) to vanish. It all but says “Dig Here!”

  Soon after this discovery, Steve and his team began excavating for the vanished structures indicated on Esther Dering’s imperfectly scaled but tantalizing sketch plan. They tested the drawing by pocking the manor lawns with their usual sixteen-inch-square holes at the various locations that seemed to be indicated on the map. They found the vegetable cellar southwest of the house. And on the north lawn near the Upper Inlet, just where the sketch plan indicated that a dairy once stood, remnants of a dairy lay on top of one another, or mixed in together, from the nineteenth century back to a seventeenth-century stone floor. An undated early photograph taken looking toward the Upper Inlet from the front drive shows the top of the last dairy’s roof. The rest of the building is hidden below a slight rise in the lawn. The layout of the farm buildings probably resembled what Brinley had created in 1737, when he hid workaday areas from the front entry used by Sylvester guests. (Steve’s eighteenth-century archaeological findings lie almost entirely behind the house along the Upper Inlet, where an 1867 map shows a line of small structures—an area still occupied by a tractor shed today.)

  A Plan of the Dwelling House, Dooryard and Outhouses Late the Property of Sylvester Dering Deceased, detail. The scribbled legends on a hand-drawn plan, the most striking part of the drawing, show where Comus, Cato, Judith, London, Matilda, Hagar, and anonymous others worked their long hours. Comus was enslaved at Sylvester Manor from 1762 until his death in 1820, at which time slavery was still legal in New York.

  The “chaise house” described on the map, an elegant little shingled building for a single light carriage with racy lines—the Porsche of horse-drawn transport—still exists, although it has been moved away from the house. A single P, for “privy,” presumably indicates the Georgian-style outhouse that still stands on the same spot in the garden. Long since torn down or reworked into other structures are the corncrib, the combination dairy-granary-washhouse, and the “smoak house,” where pigs that rooted in the large pens and snored in the two “hog houses” were transformed into hams and bacon. The jog in a retaining wall where those hog houses impinged on the garden survives, as does the deep cavity of the hog pen, now filled with Alice’s excellent compost. On the map, appendages to Brinley’s beauteous box of a house stretch northward, not as large as Cornelia Horsford would later make them, but definitely there. The dates of these accretions aren’t yet known, but Thomas Dering’s 1786 probate inventory mentions a “Great Kitchen” and a “Little Kitchen.” Dering’s inventory listing of a dozen chairs in the Great Kitchen, six with leather bottoms, reveal it was more than just a place to cook.

  Most gripping for me as a landscape historian are the scribbles showing where people walked every day doing their chores, following in the tracks of earlier generations. A man named Comus was purchased as a farm laborer by Thomas Dering in 1762 and died, still enslaved, seven years before slavery ended in New York in 1827. For fifty-eight years, or for as many of them as he was able, Comus would have carried slops and rotten apples on the “way to hog pen”; walked with his hoe and other tools along the “way to garden”; and used the “way to barn” for daily chores as well as the annual threshing that heaped the granary for winter, and for sale. The “way to woodlands”—the cart track that led past the site of the “negro garden and the Indian graveyard” located by Eben Horsford on the North Peninsula—and the vast “space for wood” bear witness to the imperative daily need for chopping and splitting fuel.

  One of Thomas Dering’s Massachusetts cousins, Hepzibah Edwards, may have advised him to purchase Comus in Massachusetts in 1762, in the months after the Derings’ forced move from Boston to Shelter Island. Once Comus had made the long trip, Hepzibah remarked in her characteristically pithy way, “as you say nothing of Comas [sic] I hope he behaves well.” It wouldn’t have taken Comus long to sense that his master’s situation was at best shaky. A town-bred merchant short on funds for improvements to the property,
Thomas was ill prepared for hands-on farming. His sister-in-law, Molly Chesebrough, had warned, “Dear Brother I must tel you that Except a farm is not manneged to advantage it is … a cirse [curse]: you must be Sence abel that it will take a Grat deel to Purchas Sarvants & Stock.”

  Things went badly between Thomas and Comus. Hepzibah Edwards wrote: “Dear Coz, I se by your Last that Commos [sic] will be a plage [plague] to you & suppose you intend to Sell him there or keep him as you dont say anything about him only of his rogry [roguery].” But despite her reference to his possible resale, Comus appears in a 1765 “Inventory of Personal effects now in possession of Thomas Dering at Shelter Island” along with Cato, Judith, a man and a boy both named London, and Matilda.

  In the manor vault, a brief garden diary kept during some of Comus’s years of servitude chronicles abundant harvests, a fruitfulness that demanded plenty of skilled laborers. The season began with currants and gooseberries flowering in early May and went on through entire fields of strawberries in June and July. (A drive today on the East End from Orient Point to Greenport on a blistering June afternoon passes strawberry fields dotted with Latino migrant labor stooped beneath that first cousin of slavery, debt peonage, under which a debtor must work for a creditor, usually his or her employer, until a continually mounting loan is paid off—or never paid off.) Later, the yield of dark “English cherries” was so great that off-island workers were hired, arriving by sloop with their ladders and baskets, making a party of the day of work. They were paid with half of what they gathered. It sounds like old-fashioned harvest festival fun, but beneath the bucolic pleasure lay the urgency of ripeness—cherries about to rot, or wheat and flax standing ready, demanding to be reaped before they fell. When Timothy Dwight traveled through Shelter Island in 1804, he remarked on a field of Sylvester Dering’s that “yielded under a skillful husbandry between thirty-nine and forty bushels of wheat an acre.” The “skillful husbandry” was directed by Dering, an Enlightenment farmer using the latest agricultural techniques, but the toil was almost entirely performed by chattel slaves.